Hamas-linked CAIR and other US Islamic Groups have a #MeToo Problem

First, Ahmad Saleem, a community organizer for CAIR in Florida, was busted after showing up to molest what he thought was a 12-year-old girl he had met over the internet. When Ahmad showed up in a car with a plate, “Invest in Children”, the cops were waiting for him instead.

The son of Pakistani immigrants had headed up the local Muslim Students Association at the University of Central Florida before moving up the ranks at CAIR. Then it was off to prison.

Now it’s Hassan Shibly’s turn. The Syrian immigrant who headed up CAIR Florida was accused of assaulting his wife, threatening to kill her, and sexually harassing CAIR employees. Shibly was also accused of threatening some of his accusers, and trying to pay them off.

An NPR article noted that CAIR leaders had been aware of the accusations as far back as 2016 and that no action was taken. “CAIR National has a history of turning a blind eye to many incidents over the years, and the information is coming out. No NDA will save them from what’s to come,” a former CAIR employee tweeted.

forum for CAIR victims on Instagram quickly filled up with stories of a CAIR chapter head who “was found to be sexually harassing a member of staff and other women also complained about his behavior” only to be protected by the local CAIR governing board, a CAIR leader grooming an employee into a sexual relationship, a CAIR leader using “his religious belief that men can have 4 wives to manipulate women into having affairs with him behind his legal wife’s back”, and a “lawsuit with an imam and a little girl.”

This kind of thing happens a lot.

When the various Islamist groups set up by the Muslim Brotherhood and similar networks operate in this country, they use the laws of Sharia that they intend to impose on Americans.

Two years ago, Zia ul-Haque Sheikh, a former ISNA board member, and the Imam at the Islamic Center of Irving, was accused of sexually exploiting a 13-year-old girl. He allegedly tried to marry the girl, when she came of age, even though he already had two wives at the time.

Also at the Islamic Center of Irving, a security guard was accused of molesting a third-grader, and there was an incident of a foreign man kissing minors at the mosque.

Sheikh’s accuser claimed that she had reported this to the president of the Islamic Center of Irving board, Nouman Ali Khan, who “discouraged her from sharing what she experienced because it would harm Sheikh’s reputation.”

Khan, an Islamic preacher and a Pakistani immigrant, had headed up the Bayyinah Academy before being accused of latching on to troubled women at Islamic events and then exploiting them. The Islamist cleric had frequently appeared at ISNA and other Islamist events, and had previously defended the Sharia practice of lashing those accused of immoral behavior.

Sheikh Usama Canon, the Islamic cleric who founded the Ta’leef Collective, had been a frequent speaker at CAIR and ISNA events, an instructor at the Islamist Zaytuna Institute, and an advisor to the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN).

Canon, a black convert to Islam turned preacher, was ousted after allegations of sexually inappropriate behavior that included grooming women. He still remains involved in various Islamic institutions and organizations including the Downtown Islamic Center of Chicago.

Muslim feminist activists insist that the answer is more female leadership, but Linda Sarsour, probably the most prominent female Muslim activist in America, was herself accused of enabling sexual harassment back when she was working at the Arab American Association.

“She oversaw an environment unsafe and abusive to women,” a former employee, who claimed to have been repeatedly groped, alleged.

The Islamist apples rarely fall far from the tree.

Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and probably the leading Islamist figure in the West, has been accused of raping a series of women.

Ramadan’s alleged assaults took place in Washington D.C., in Paris, London, and major cities around the world. The victims who have come forward included a disabled convert to Islam and former teenage students: including one as young as 14 years old.

The disabled woman described meeting Ramadan after a conference on Islamophobia and Palestine before he beat her, raped her, and then urinated on her.

Abuses happen in all religions and among secular intellectuals, but Islam is unique in that its theology provides a license for sexual abuse. A number of the Muslim leaders caught in the #MeToo moment employed the toolbox of Sharia law to perpetrate their abuses. They used the legal fiction of “temporary marriages” to force women into illicit affairs and the codes of a religion whose founder married a 7-year-old girl and where children are married off well before they hit puberty to justify abusing underage girls. And the Islamist infrastructure around them, tapping into the Sharia demand for multiple witnesses to a rape charge, ignored their accusers.

Rape and sexual abuses can happen in a variety of settings, but Islam is uniquely built to justify and protect behaviors that are crimes in the United States, but normative in the Muslim world.

The #MeToo scandals of Islamism are just symptoms of the fundamental divide between two civilizations and their accompanying value systems. The Islamists had always intended to build a state within a state. And within their organizations and communities, the state within a state operates under Sharia law, with legal, but no moral accountability, to the United States.

After 9/11, America’s Islamists increasingly came to align with the Left. The unspoken conflict between Sharia and feminism has yet to explode out into the open because there is too much at stake for both sides. But the #MeToo scandals at CAIR and other Islamist groups are a fracture point between two ideologies that are hostile to America, but also to each other’s values.

The miniature clash of civilizations within the political infrastructure of multiculturalism is coming.

Islamists have injected their policy priorities, support for the Muslim Brotherhood, hostility to Israel, hijabization, and opposition to fighting terrorism, into the Left. But the Left has also injected its own values, including feminism, into the Islamist political infrastructure.

Leftists and Islamists allied in Egypt, Algeria and Iran, among many other places, to overthrow establishment governments, only to have those alliances come apart in blood and tyranny.

The American alliance between Islam and the Left may meet the same end.

COLUMN BY

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

German Intelligence: Iran, Syria, and Pakistan are Producing Weapons of Mass Destruction

This should be well known among all Western leaders and citizens alike, but it’s good to see it backed up by an intelligence report. The threat of states such as Iran and Pakistan, and Syria also to a lesser degree, is based in large part on Islamic doctrines of warfare against unbelievers. The chief threat is, of course, Iran: “The German intelligence agency for the state of Bavaria said last week in its new report that the Islamic Republic of Iran has not ceased its drive to obtain weapons of mass destruction during 2020.” Iran has never slowed down, and no deal will stop it. Its violation of the nuclear deal by its own admission is long established. The whole deal was based on lies.

Iran’s proxy Hizballah also expands Iran’s global reach. The German report specifically lists “additional threats to Bavaria’s democracy” via Hizballah, noting that Hizballah, “the Iranian regime’s chief strategic ally in the Middle East, has 30 members in Bavaria.”

Continuing to clamp down on the activities of Iran and Hizballah globally requires a prioritized follow-up from democratic countries, which isn’t happening, particularly now with a weakened United States and Canada and a predominantly globalist EU.

Going beyond Bavaria, although “the US, Canada, the Arab League, Israel, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and many other European and Latin American countries classify Hezbollah as a terrorist organization,” Hizballah is still disturbingly active in these countries. For example, while Canada focuses on “Islamophobia,” Hizballah expands its elite operations in the country, and millions of dollars are wired into the country. Similarly, Hizballah has ongoing operations in the UK, in the US, Germany, and in the Netherlands. Being outlawed is merely a start.

Iran still seeks mass destruction weapons – German intelligence report

by Benjamin Weinthal, Jerusalem Post, April 28, 2021:

The German intelligence agency for the state of Bavaria said last week in its new report that the Islamic Republic of Iran has not ceased its drive to obtain weapons of mass destruction during 2020.

“Proliferation-relevant states like Iran, North Korea, Syria and Pakistan are making efforts to expand their conventional arsenal of weapons through the production or constant modernization of weapons of mass destruction,” wrote the Bavarian Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the formal name for the domestic intelligence agency.

“In order to obtain the necessary know-how and corresponding components, these states are trying to establish business contacts to companies in high-technology countries like Germany,” said the Bavarian intelligence report in its section on weapons of mass destruction.

The German agency is the rough equivalent of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency).

The intelligence report defines proliferation as “the unauthorized spread of atomic, biological, chemical weapons of mass destruction or the products used for their manufacture as well as the corresponding weapon carrier systems, including the necessary know-how.”

With respect to the section of the report on the Islamic Republic’s espionage activities, the intelligence document stated that “Germany remains in the focus of intelligence activities. This includes information from foreign and security policy as well as business and science. An additional focus [of Iran’s intelligence services] is the observation of, and fight against, opposition groups domestically and abroad.”

The Jerusalem Post reviewed the 380-page intelligence document which contains 28 references to the Islamic Republic. The report lists additional threats to Bavaria’s democracy.

Hezbollah, the Iranian regime’s chief strategic ally in the Middle East, has 30 members in Bavaria….

COLUMN BY

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Biden’s Team of Israel-Haters

Just days after Joe Biden was inaugurated, pro-Erdogan Turkish journalist Hakkı Öcal, according to Ahval News, “highlighted a report on the strong presence of Jews in the cabinet of U.S. President Joe Biden.” The report claimed that there was an “over 50 percent Jewish presence in the new U.S. cabinet,” and pointed Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CIA Deputy Director David Cohen, among others. But Öcal was off base: among Biden’s handlers, Jewish and non-Jewish, there are few, if any, staunch friends of Israel. After just a few months in office, it was clear that Joe Biden’s handlers’ administration was shaping up to be the most anti-Israel presidency since the founding of the modern State of Israel.

Robert Malley, Special Envoy to Iran, has become notorious over the years for his support for Iran’s Islamic regime and pronounced distaste for Israel. The Washington Times revealed in February 2021 that back in July 2019, “Iran’s smooth, English-speaking foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, met with Robert Malley, who was President Obama’s Middle East adviser, in an apparent bid to undermine the Trump team and lay the groundwork for post-Trump relations.”

Malley (pictured above left) was a good choice for such an assignment. An Israeli security official noted in February 2008 that Malley “has expressed sympathy to Hamas and Hizbullah and offered accounts of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that don’t jibe with the facts.” Obama dropped Malley in May 2008 after it came to light that he had met with representatives of Hamas, but six months later sent him as an envoy to Egypt and Syria.

Meanwhile, Reema Dodin is a deputy director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. According to the Jerusalem Post, “during the Second Intifada, in 2002, Dodin spoke about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with residents of Lodi, California, saying that ‘suicide bombers were the last resort of a desperate people.’” Also, “in 2001, Dodin took part in a demonstration at UC Berkeley calling for the university to divest from Israel….The demonstrators compared Israel to apartheid South Africa.”

In a similar vein, Biden’s handlers appointed Maher Bitar the Senior Director for Intelligence on the National Security Council. In 2006, while a student at Georgetown University, Bitar was a member of the executive board of the viciously pro-jihad, anti-Israel Students for Justice in Palestine, and was seen dancing in front of a banner that said “Divest from Israel Apartheid.”

The Deputy Secretary of State is Wendy Sherman, who was the lead negotiator of Barack Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal with Iran. The State Department’s undersecretary for civilian security, democracy and human rights is Uzra Zeya. According to the Jewish News Service, Zeya “worked for the magazine Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and its publishing group, American Educational Trust. The Washington Report has questioned the loyalty American Jews have to the United States; published accusations against the ‘Jewish lobby’; claimed American Jews control the media; and accused the Mossad of perpetrating the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy and the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.”

The Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israel-Palestine is Hady Amr. In an unhinged 2002 rant, Amr repeated Palestinian jihad propaganda, declaring: “I have news for every Israeli: a very large proportion of the more than 150 million children and youth in the Arab World now have televisions, and they will never, never forget what the Israeli people, the Israeli military and Israeli democracy have done to Palestinian children.”

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy is Colin Kahl. According to Israel Hayom, “Kahl has quite the anti-Israel record. He thinks the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Iraq was 1981 was a mistake. In 2012, he acted to remove recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital from the Democratic party’s platform. In 2015, he was among those to formulate the Iran nuclear deal. In 2016, at the end of his term, then-US President Barack Obama tasked him with enlisting support for the anti-Israel UN Security Council Resolution 2334 that determined Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria were a violation of international law.”

Have Biden’s handlers appointed a balancing group of strong supporters of Israel, who will move to prevent this unsavory group (which is larger than just those named here) from disrupting America’s relationship with its strongest, most reliable ally in the West? Is there any brake to the ability of the anti-Israel group in Biden’s administration to force Israel to make potentially life-threatening concessions to the Palestinian jihad force. The answer to both questions is no.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

STUDY: Religious Scriptures that Legitimize Violence Cause More Believers to Support Terrorism

“Study authors suspect the reason for this dramatic difference between the faiths is because a large number of Muslims adhere to a ‘fundamentalist interpretation’ of their faith.”

It’s actually because of the contents of the Islamic scriptures, which contain direct exhortations to do violence against unbelievers. Jewish and Christian scriptures contain some violent passages, but no open-ended, universal command for believers to make war against unbelievers.

Religious scriptures that legitimize violence cause more believers to support deadly extremist acts

by Chris Melore, Study Finds, April 23, 2021 (thanks to R):

BERLIN, Germany — Religious texts provide the faithful with the guiding principles to live, what their cultures consider, the best lives. Some of these ancient texts, however, come from times when violence against non-believers was an accepted practice. Although these spiritual scriptures are typically a motivating force for good, a new study finds verses which legitimize violence do cause people to support deadly extremism in today’s society.

From America, to Europe, to regions throughout the world, violent extremist incidents have been a modern plague in recent years. Researchers from the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) note many of these perpetrators quote verses from their religion’s holy scriptures during their deadly crimes.

Abdullah H., a Syrian standing trial for allegedly stabbing a homosexual couple and killing another man in Dresden, Germany last year, reportedly testified that he was inspired to commit the crime by a Quranic sura. Despite incidents like this, study authors say experts continue to doubt that religion can truly motivate people to do violence.

Dangerous influences in scripture?

Researchers Ruud Koopmans and Eylem Kanol gathered 8,000 Christians, Muslims, and Jews to determine whether or not certain scriptures can lead believers to support killing enemies of the faith. Study authors included participants from the U.S., Germany, Cyprus, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and Kenya in this experiment.

For half of the group, researchers asked if they thought lethal force against their faith’s non-believers was justified without any introduction or setup to the question. For the other half however, the team first presented them with a quote from the Bible, Koran, or Torah. These quotes endorse violence against those who allegedly do not believe in those religions.

Results reveal that referencing scriptural passages which legitimize violence noticeably increases support for deadly acts among all three faiths. The impact also remained constant across all seven countries as well. However, researchers find support of deadly extremism was weaker among Jews and Christians than among Muslims.

Specifically, nine percent of the Christians supported violence without reading any scriptures beforehand. That number rose to 12 percent among Christians seeing such a quote before hearing the question. For Jews, three percent supported violence without reading quotes and seven percent supported it after seeing such a passage.

Among Muslims, the study finds 29 percent supported violence against non-believers without any extra influence. For those referencing a Quranic quote first, 47 percent said they supported violence against religious enemies.

Fundamentalism can lead to rationalizing violence

Study authors suspect the reason for this dramatic difference between the faiths is because a large number of Muslims adhere to a “fundamentalist interpretation” of their faith. Fundamentalists typically view the holy scriptures of their religion literally. They consider the teachings and principles of their faith to still be completely valid in present day society….

The study appears in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

NEW YORK CITY: Muslim migrant gets life in prison for jihad bombing on subway in 2017

“Akayed Ullah, 31, of Brooklyn, New York, and a lawful permanent resident of Bangladesh…”

Why was he here at all? Why did vetting procedures, if any, fail? What is being done to make sure this doesn’t happen again? Why, nothing, of course. Just the opposite.

Man Sentenced to Life in Prison for ISIS-inspired Bombing in New York City Subway Station in 2017

Department of Justice, April 22, 2021:

WASHINGTON – A New York man was sentenced today to life in prison for detonating a bomb in a New York City subway station. He admitted that he conducted the terrorist attack on behalf of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a designated foreign terrorist organization.

Akayed Ullah, 31, of Brooklyn, New York, and a lawful permanent resident of Bangladesh, was convicted by a federal jury of offenses related to the detonation and attempted detonation of a bomb in a subway station near the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City on Dec. 11, 2017. According to court documents, on Dec. 11, 2017, at approximately 7:20 a.m., Ullah detonated a pipe bomb strapped to his chest in a subway station near the Port Authority Bus Terminal in midtown Manhattan. Shortly after the blast, first responders located Ullah lying on the ground in the station where he had detonated the improvised explosive device, and he was taken into custody. Surveillance footage captured Ullah walking through the station immediately prior to the explosion and then detonating the bomb.

“Ullah constructed a pipe bomb and detonated it in a mass transit hub in the heart of New York City to harm and terrorize as many people as possible – and he admitted that he did it on behalf of ISIS,” said Assistant Attorney General John C. Demers for the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “This case reminds us that the threat of ISIS-inspired terrorism remains real. This sentence holds Ullah accountable, as he will spend the rest of his life in federal prison for his crimes. I want to thank all of the agents, analysts, and prosecutors whose outstanding work made this result possible.”

“Akayed Ullah, previously convicted in a New York federal court of carrying out a lone-wolf bombing attack on behalf of ISIS at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a bustling transit artery in New York City, admittedly intended to murder as many innocent Americans as possible,” said U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss for the Southern District of New York. “Ullah’s motive was clear and unambiguous: a deeply held ideological hatred for America. Ironically, Ullah’s actions resulted only in reaffirming the greatness of America by displaying the fairness and impartiality for which our justice system stands. Ullah received a speedy, fair, public trial, and was convicted by a jury of his peers. Akayed Ullah’s message of hatred clearly backfired; his just sentence of life in prison only exemplifies that cowardly acts of terrorism will be met with law enforcement’s unwavering resolve to protect our core values of freedom and democracy.”

“The defendant sought to attack innocent Americans who were going about their daily lives,” said Acting Assistant Director Patrick Reddan for Counterterrorism at the FBI. “He will now spend the rest of his life in prison, where he will not be in a position to attempt another attack. While the terrorism threat continues to evolve in this country, groups like ISIS remain committed to attacking America, and the FBI will continue to work with our JTTF partners across the country in our commitment to track down and disrupt terrorists who seek to harm our homeland.”

According to court documents and the evidence presented at trial, Ullah began radicalizing in approximately 2014. Ullah disagreed with U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and began seeking out online materials promoting radical Islamic terrorist ideology. In particular, Ullah was inspired by ISIS propaganda, including a video in which ISIS instructed supporters to carry out attacks in their homelands if they were unable to travel overseas to join ISIS. Ullah began researching how to build a bomb about a year prior to his attack. He built his pipe bomb in the weeks leading up to the attack at his Brooklyn apartment.

Following the attack on Dec. 11, 2017, law enforcement located remnants of the pipe bomb on Ullah’s person and strewn across the attack site in the subway station. Law enforcement found, among other things: (i) a nine-volt battery inside Ullah’s pants pocket, which he used as the power source for triggering the bomb; (ii) wires connected to the battery and running underneath Ullah’s jacket; (iii) plastic zip ties underneath Ullah’s jacket, which he used to strap the bomb to his body; (iv) several fragments of a metal pipe, which Ullah had filled with an explosive substance that he made using sugar and match heads; (v) fragments of Christmas tree lightbulbs attached to wires, which Ullah used to ignite the explosion; and (vi) numerous metal screws. Ullah filled his pipe bomb with dozens of metal screws to function as shrapnel, for the purpose of causing maximum damage.

On the morning of the attack, shortly before detonating his bomb, Ullah posted a statement on Facebook referring to the then-President of the United States, stating: “Trump you failed to protect your nation.” Ullah also posted an ISIS slogan so that ISIS would know that he had carried out the attack on behalf of the foreign terrorist organization.

After Ullah was taken into custody following the attack, he waived his Miranda rights and spoke to law enforcement. Ullah was inspired by ISIS to carry out the Dec. 11 attack, and stated, among other things, “I did it for the Islamic State.” He also said that he chose a busy weekday morning for the attack in order to “terrorize as many people as possible.” One commuter who was inside the station when Ullah detonated the pipe bomb suffered a shrapnel wound to his leg, and two other victims partly lost their hearing as a result of the blast. Ullah’s attack caused the Port Authority subway station and bus terminal to shut down temporarily, disrupting the lives of commuters across the New York City area.

After the attack, law enforcement searched Ullah’s apartment pursuant to a search warrant. Agents recovered, among other things, Ullah’s passport, which contained the handwritten statement, “O AMERICA, DIE IN YOUR RAGE.” Less than two weeks before carrying out the attack, Ullah had watched and drawn inspiration from a particular ISIS propaganda video that proclaimed, “die in your rage, America,” with an image of the U.S. Capitol in the background.

Later in December 2017, while in custody at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on the charges in this case, Ullah began chanting “more is coming” at a correctional officer, and then told the officer: “You started this war, we will finish it. More is coming, you’ll see.”…

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Towards a New, and Quite Different, Tocqueville

Joseph R. Wood: We need shepherds to lead us from godless illusions about equality to the lost truths of dogma.


In the early 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville traveled the United States while the country was still spiritually and philosophically close to the founding, but changing and expanding rapidly. The Frenchman compiled his observations in Democracy in America, still perhaps the most trenchant commentary on the American republic.

Tocqueville offered a vast array of perceptive insights about America. His question to an American sailor, as to why American ships were not built to last many years (as were European ships) pointed to a powerful faith in progress. The sailor, with a hint of disdain, claimed that “the art of navigation makes such rapid progress daily” that even the best ships would soon be useless. Planned obsolescence came early to America.

Tocqueville noted that, in that period, Catholic priests in America “keep their distance from public affairs.” They “show less taste for small, individual observances. . .[and] cling more to the spirit of the law and less to its letter.”

That tendency might have been one source of what later came to be called “Americanism” in the Church. But Tocqueville saw Catholicism as advancing in America, where many people had a “hidden instinct” that gave them a “secret admiration” for the unity of the Church.

Beyond seeking to understand America, Democracy in America had a larger purpose: to explore the implications of a grand historical change in the West from an age of aristocracy to one of equality. America was at the forefront of the new era, a case study of the new “democratic revolution.”

Tocqueville admired equality and its potential. But he saw perils as well.

He accepted the importance of dogmatic or fundamental beliefs both to individuals and to the political community, “for without common ideas there is no common action.” The most important of such beliefs are those of religious faith.

There will be religious authorities in any country, acknowledged or not. We will always have our gods. But Tocqueville worried that as equality accelerated, mass opinion would replace religious precepts – and become dogma. The power of mass beliefs “makes them penetrate souls by a sort of immense pressure of the minds of all on the intellect of each.”

Mass opinion, however ephemeral and even volatile, becomes a kind of democratic faith. This is dangerous because when “religion is destroyed in a people, doubt takes hold of the highest portions of the intellect and half paralyzes all the others.” This condition “cannot fail to enervate souls; it slackens the springs of the will and prepares citizens for servitude.”

Other dangers lurk in the era of equality. Equality gives people a taste for free institutions even as it intensifies individualism and exclusive concern for private interests.

Tocqueville saw two ways that this combination could play out in the loss of freedom. One was anarchy, but that was unlikely as most people simply don’t want a chaotic life.

The more subtle and more likely path to losing freedom lay through a paradox: as people demanded more and more individual autonomy, they would also demand a powerful central government to ensure that their neighbors could not interfere with their cherished rights.

The despotism that Tocqueville famously foresaw for free nations in times of equality was not the tyranny of absolute monarchs. It ruled “an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.” Such people are strangers “to the destiny of all the others.”

This despotic government is not openly cruel. It is more like a schoolmaster: “absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing and mild. It would resemble paternal power. . .except that it seeks only to keep [men] fixed irrevocably in childhood. . . .It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the sole agent and arbiter of that.”

Its effects on citizens are devastating:

It does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.

Its subjects show their human nature as rational and political or social animals only occasionally; they vote for representatives. Those brief moments of exertion will “not prevent them from losing little by little the faculty of thinking, feeling, and acting by themselves, and thus from gradually falling below the level of humanity.”

A wretched condition, which predominates in broad swaths of western societies including academia, media, the corporate world, the arts, and for many in our political class.

We are now at a point characterized by what Pope Benedict XVI has referred to as a new paganism, hardened against the possibility of any dogma that limits our autonomy – which is to say against any moral order that we do not ourselves create, and a God who loves us and demands that we accept Him on faith for our salvation.

Today, we reject reason and destroy the language that expresses it. We blindly cancel that which we don’t like. We are not merely shepherded into our condition. We seek it eagerly.

Tocqueville could discuss the age of equality clearly because in his time it had a coherence, and aimed at a good of its own. Our day seems devoted to nothing, to lack coherence and substance, which makes it difficult to penetrate or rationally address.

Many observers have tried to diagnose this condition, some drawing on Tocqueville, but none so far with his uncanny prescience. Our age needs a new Tocqueville. And shepherds strong enough to lead us from the godless illusions of equality to the lost truths of dogma.

COLUMN BY

Joseph R. Wood

Dr. Joseph Wood teaches at the Institute of World Politics in Washington D.C. and is a Fellow at Cana Academy.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2021 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

The Marks of Respect in the UK for the Duke of Edinburgh and Loss of Respect for Good Friday

These are my views as a woman living in England, on how the culture and spirit of my country has changed over 50 years.  Why the country does not feel protected or strong any more, how it has lost, and is losing it values and decency, and how we are daily losing our free speech.


I am really not quite sure what I thought about the ‘covid-secure’ funeral of Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh, who passed away, aged 99 on the 9th April.   I watched it, but briefly, with a strange inner conflict, for the respect which I felt I should have had, to the nothingness I witnessed, which I know some of my fellow countrymen must have also sensed and felt.

I am aware of the military history of the Duke of Edinburgh, which should obviously be honored, but from the strategically placed guardsmen and the military personnel, who were all socially distanced under the perfect blue sky in the grounds of Windsor Castle, to the images of the queen sat all alone in a darkened chapel, and the black masked attendees; 30 in total, including the estranged Prince Harry, there was definitely something missing from the usual sadness or empathy you might feel for another.

Of course, the death of someone who is 99 years old, is much different from the death of someone younger, and the grief felt by close family members, to an onlooking public is not comparable, but I can report that there is definitely a large shift in our respect towards royalty these days in comparison to the respect which I have witnessed from the British public towards our monarchy in the past.

It is interesting to note that it was reported that the BBC received over 110,000 complaints in the week before his funeral, citing that there was too much coverage of his life. However, many of those complaints were also in relation to how his death was announced on the airwaves which was un-professional and confusing.

In relation to the media, almost every newspaper also appeared to herald a headline which championed him as the ‘Grandfather to the Nation’ which people could neither recognize or acknowledge.    This stemmed from the confusion in relation to some of his insensitive actions and some of the comments the prince was well known and reported for, in comparison to the image now being portrayed.   His person has been somewhat remote and usually in the background, in comparison to the presence of his wife, the Queen.

In fairness, I believe his comments have sometimes been very humorous and honest rather than reportedly racist.  They are the blunt remarks we sometimes think ourselves but would never outwardly have the courage to say.  However, a comment that he is well known for and which has resurfaced and been remembered for in past year is from 1988.

On Death

In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation (1988)

Therefore, apart from his unfortunate comment and aside from Prince Phillips obvious military history and his position in the monarchy, could it be that the media coverage had over-played their hand in thinking they knew how people feel and what people wanted or needed during this time, or are they being socially manipulative?

There is a massive divide in the UK between people who trust establishments and those who don’t.  There are those who want to hang on to the image of ‘royalty’ and some sense of superiority, but there is a now also a population who know about elite globalists, their agenda’s, their coldness and their incessant lies.   They have lived under massive propaganda and a very evident form of psychological abuse for the past twelve months.  There is a suspicion about who is who.   There has been an ‘awakening’ that those who are meant to serve us are not respecting us.    They are aware that the mainstream media does not report the truth and are the mouthpieces for a corrupt system.   Something is wrong.

They see a government who considers itself unanswerable and unaccountable, regardless of what they say; and it is this that has killed the last vestiges of respect.   ‘Enough is enough’ is the lament.   There have been but a handful of men and women who have publicly spoken up.  There have been demonstrations across the cities in the UK.   Under-reported by the media, the last demonstration in London against lockdowns reported as a few hundred people, was estimated at 80,000 people.     The country has really been run on the integrity and goodness of people, and not by the leadership of any governmental system.

The ‘covid-sutward show of a covid-secure funeral for the Duke of Edinburgh, I believe there is now instead a bitter-sweet detachment of loyalty.

It didn’t have to be this way.

The lone figecure’ life which has showed no respect towards their family life, their loved ones, their freedoms, including their right to worship has been abused.   Their ‘non-essential’ needs and their own personal identity dismissed.  Isolation and division have been their motive.

Was the service meant to create some unity between a us and a them?  I don’t know.

It is unfortunate that the monarchy and the heads of the Church of England appeared to abandon their ‘subjects’ during 2020, at a time when it could have bought people together.   Therefore, despite the oure of a woman sat all alone at her husband’s funeral was a reflection of the feminizing of our country.      Where have the men gone?   The scene was a replicate of funerals which happened up and down the country last year where people could not be consoled at a funeral.   Surely, it should be a choice in those circumstances.       Surely, the men who were at Prince Phillips funeral, and who were weighted down with medals could have sat near to the queen.

The infamous interview with Prince Harry and Megan Markle with TV Host Oprah Winfrey was also a reflection of how the feminine aspect of political correctness is being used, except in this instance it failed.    Or did it?    What we have to remember is whilst the media is attracting your attention towards this, it is directing your attention away from something/someone else.   In this instance, we have to remember that it may be the alleged friendship and involvement of Prince Andrew, the queen’s son, with Jeffrey Epstein.  A story which will not go away.     Prince Harry is not the only concern to the queen.  Andrew has been permanently banned from royal duties.   It was reported he wanted to wear full military attire for the funeral and be recognized as an Admiral!

The media are also now pushing a narrative that Kate Middleton is the family’s new peace-maker, based solely on the fact that they saw her walking with the two brothers away from the funeral.   They have no idea whatsoever what was being said or done, but now it is not unusual to hear the public repeating the same ‘parrot-fashioned’ sentence.

Dismantling the Patriarch and The Importance of the Father and Son.

The infiltration of a Good Friday church service by Covid police in London is indicative of the dis-respect which has slowly and purposefully dismantled the respect we should have for our Creator and all life.   A belief and a faith in God and the moral values and love which Truth promotes have been slowly dismantled over a period of many years.   It is claimed it is the end of the church age.

Targeting churches and worshippers who had chosen to attend church on a very special day, Good Friday, the day which remembers the crucifixion of Jesus, the son of God, was weak.   It was a false premise to have claimed the actions were for the safety of others.  We know it has nothing to do with safety.

Under ‘covid-secure’ regulations many laws have been passed in government which the public have not noticed.  This is how it works.

  • On the 30th March, last year, Matt Hancock who is the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, republished the biggest change to abortion law since 1967 by allowing a woman’s home to legally be a place where an abortion can be carried out – without medical supervision. The government are now deciding whether to make this permanent, despite ‘promising’ it was only a temporary response to the pandemic.

Safeguarding is not high on this government’s agenda.

  • On the 20th May, last year, a new system came into effect which meant people over the age of 18 had to ‘opt out’ of being an organ doner from a register they had never signed up to. The Organ Donation (Deemed Consent) Bill received Royal Assent on 15th March 2019.
  • There is currently a Private Members Bill, The Assisted Dying bill which is at its second reading in the House of Lords to enable competent adults who are terminally ill to be provided assistance at their request to end their own life (suicide). The sponsor is Lord Falconor of Thoroton.

These are just a few of the laws which get passed. when you are looking the other way.

The death of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh will leave a great void in the lives of the Queen and his family.  They knew him better than anyone else.  Pray for his family.

However, The Death and the Crucifixion of Gods son and Christian values is what we should all really mourn for today.

One Solitary Life

One Solitary Life – YouTube

He was born in an obscure village The child of a peasant woman He grew up in another obscure village Where he worked in a carpenter shop Until he was thirty He never wrote a book He never held an office He never went to college He never visited a big city He never travelled more than two hundred miles From the place where he was born He did none of the things Usually associated with greatness He had no credentials but himself He was only thirty three His friends ran away One of them denied him He was turned over to his enemies And went through the mockery of a trial He was nailed to a cross between two thieves While dying, his executioners gambled for his clothing The only property he had on earth When he was dead He was laid in a borrowed grave Through the pity of a friend Nineteen centuries have come and gone And today Jesus is the central figure of the human race And the leader of mankind’s progress All the armies that have ever marched All the navies that have ever sailed All the parliaments that have ever sat All the kings that ever reigned put together Have not affected the life of mankind on earth As powerfully as that one solitary life. Dr James Allan © 1926

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Legislation.gov.uk

Archbishop Welby defends right to free speech in Batley school row (churchtimes.co.uk)

https://www.westernjournal.com/police-break-unlawful-good-friday-service-worshippers-intimidated-hit-threats/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=newsletter-WJ&utm_campaign=dailyam&utm_content=western-journal

BBC sets up complaints page for ‘too much coverage’ of Philip’s death | Evening Standard

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/jun/21/quotes-by-prince-philip

Covid: Police ‘regret’ over halting church Good Friday service – BBC News

©Shirley Edwards. All rights reserved.

Leftists Try to Cancel Zionist Leader for Criticizing Tlaib and Omar and Noting that BLM Is Anti-Semitic

The Boston Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), a coalition of Jewish organizations, is set to meet on April 27 to decide whether or not to expel the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) over charges that it is “white supremacist.” Of course, everyone to the right of Pol Pot is a white supremacist these days, as far as the left is concerned. The real sin of ZOA’s national president Mort Klein is that he dared to criticize leftist powerbrokers and to point out that Black Lives Matter (BLM) is not the saintly organization of establishment media myth, but a viciously hateful and anti-Semitic group. Simply telling unwelcome truths about people and causes the left idolizes gets you lumped in with the KKK in this insane age.

It all started last year with a petition from leftist Jewish groups J Street, the Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action, Women of Reform Judaism and others, calling for the ZOA to be expelled from the Boston JCRC because Klein had made statements that supposedly ventured into “xenophobic and racist territory,” and thus ZOA’s membership was “not compatible with and is in conflict with the mission of JCRC.”

The petition stated: “So long as ZOA enjoys a seat at the American Jewish communal table, we are collectively signaling that their views are a welcome and tolerable part of our communal life. American Jewish institutions must make clear that Klein’s pattern of abuse and bigotry can have no place in our Jewish communal life.”

Among Klein’s “xenophobic and racist statements” were critical remarks about revered, untouchable figures on the left, including George Soros, Barack Obama, and Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Ramallah) and Ilhan Omar (D-Mogadishu). Why, only a racist could have any remotely negative word to say about them!

The petition also claims that Klein’s criticism of Black Lives Matter “extended well beyond acceptable discourse on race.” This was because Klein tweeted: “BlackLivesMatter is an antisemitic, Israel hating Soros funded racist extremist Israelophobic hate group.” And: “I urge the SPLC to immediately put BlackLivesMatter on their list of hate groups. BLM is a Jew hating, White hating, Israel hating, conservative Black hating, violence promoting, dangerous Soros funded extremist group of haters.”

Klein was right, and he wasn’t the only person who noticed. Haaretz reported in 2018 that “a new platform associated with the Black Lives Matter movement that describes Israel as an ‘apartheid state’ committing ‘genocide’ against the Palestinian people has triggered critical responses from Jewish organizations — even its allies.” And in August 2020, journalist Daniel Greenfield noted that “a Black Lives Matter rioter was caught on video spray painting Free Palestine on the driveway of the Beth Hillel Temple in Kenosha,” and “during the Los Angeles Black Lives Matter riots which targeted the Fairfax community and its large Orthodox Jewish population, Congregation Beth El on Beverly Blvd was spray painted with the hateful message, ‘F___ Israel’, and ‘Free Palestine.’”

Back in 2015, Black Lives Matter operatives visited “Palestine” and linked the jihad against Israel to race war in the United States.

As far as the left is concerned, however, these are facts that only “racists” dare to notice. ZOA shot back with a statement that challenged the lynch mob on its hypocrisy: “Instead of trying to censor ZOA, these Jewish group should join with Mort Klein, Alan Dershowitz, Caroline Glick and Melanie Phillips in condemning the anti-Semitic Israel-hating platform of the Black Lives Matter/M4BL organization, which promotes anti-Semitic BDS and falsely accuses Israel of perpetrating genocide and apartheid.”

Klein added: “Inappropriate concern was raised due to our legitimately [sic] criticism of the anti-Israel actions and policies of the organization called Black Lives Matter. This was especially hurtful to ZOA since it fully, publicly and unequivocally supports equality and fairness to all races, including, of course, all black lives.”

After reviewing the matter for six months, the JCRC’s Membership Committee voted unanimously that ZOA should not be removed. However, in a nod to the mob, it directed ZOA to make clear that it rejected white supremacism, intoning piously that “no Member Organization of JCRC, through its programs, activities or practices—or through the public leadership platforms of its executive officers—should legitimize or normalize organizations or individuals who embrace white supremacy, white nationalism or the conspiracy theories which underlie these ideologies.”

When the full JCRC Council meets on April 27, its vote on whether to retain or expel the ZOA will be largely based on how well council members believe the organization has complied with this warning. The premise of the petition – that any criticism of Tlaib, Omar, and BLM constitutes racism and white supremacism – is left unchallenged, which does not bode well for the ZOA. But if the JCRC does vote to expel the ZOA, it will only reveal its corruption and betrayal of its own mission, and demonstrate once again the increasing intransigence and fascism of the left. The more leftists move to silence legitimate voices, the more they show their own totalitarian colors, and the more they strip away their own legitimacy.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

NYC: YouTube Prankster Tells Restaurant Patrons He Has Bomb, Will Kill Them for Allah

It was all a big joke, you see, and really, what’s funnier than a jihad bombing? Back in February, a young man named Malik Sanchez, who refers to himself by the spectacular misnomer of “Smooth Sanchez,” published a nearly three-and-a-half-hour-long video on his YouTube channel, which has 5,400 subscribers, featuring himself walking along the streets of New York City and yelling abuse at passersby, mostly young women. In the course of things, he shouted at diners in a restaurant that he was going to blow them up for Allah. The NYPD wasn’t laughing: Sanchez has just been arrested. According to the Daily Beast, Sanchez “was charged Wednesday with conveying false and misleading information and hoaxes. The teen allegedly livestreamed himself pretending to detonate a bomb near the Flatiron restaurant’s outdoor seating area while shouting, ‘I take you with me and I kill you all!’ and ‘Allahu Akbar!’”Sanchez liked pretending to be a jihadi. “Days later, Sanchez posted a video in which he approached an enclosed outdoor eating area in front of a Flatiron restaurant, and then boasted to his followers that he was going to ‘enhance their meal.’ Walking up to two women seated at a table, Sanchez began to loudly shout ‘bomb detonation in two, in two minutes.’” Then he screamed: “I take you with me and I kill all you. I kill all you right now. And I kill all you for Allah. F**k, f**k that s**t. I’m gonna Allah. I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna f***ing do it for Allah. I’m gonna do it, for, Allah, Allah, Allahu Akbar, Come on. I do it, bomb now, bomb now.”

This eloquent display caused six people to flee from the enclosed outdoor dining area, which the Cary-Grantlike Sanchez took as a victory, crowing: “Yo, all of them scattered….Holy s**t. Holy s**t, boys. That was f***ing five stars. That was five stars. Holy s**t, huh?”

In another video on March 20, Sanchez is seen “making hand gestures ‘mimicking pointing a gun,’” and he wasn’t entirely just fooling around to get YouTube views. A court filing states: “After multiple individuals attempted to get Sanchez to stop, Sanchez sprayed pepper spray in the face of one of those individuals. Sanchez was arrested by responding NYPD officers and charged with state offenses and was thereafter released on bail.”

Not only that, but once Sanchez had been arrested, police discovered that he had pepper-sprayed another woman previously, when she took exception to his videoing her.

So would Malik Sanchez, for all his Allahu-akbaring and claims to have a bomb, ever really have committed a jihad massacre? Probably not. His interminable and determinedly offensive videos display a supremely angry and arrogant young man, but not one with enough zeal for jihad to actually make good on his threats.

However, by screaming “Allahu akbar” in the context of making bomb threats, Sanchez did his part to undo painstaking public relations work the media has done to make people complacent in the face of the advancing jihad. The establishment media made a full-court press a few years ago to convince Americans that “Allahu akbar” was a benign phrase that only greasy Islamophobes could possibly be concerned about. In the New York Daily News, Zainab Chaudry of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) argued that non-Muslims shouldn’t “believe the worst” about “Allahu akbar” because Muslims don’t just scream it while murdering non-Muslims, but use it in a variety of contexts. She even offered this chilling advice, certain to get people killed were it ever heeded: “So the next time you hear Allahu Akbar — whether it’s in a media report, on an airplane, or in a shopping mall, remember that the phrase used by millions of Muslims and Christians daily to praise God regardless of their circumstances, can never be justified for use when harming His creation.” So stay put, evidently; fleeing would be “Islamophobic.”

On CNN, Omar Suleiman — the imam who prevailed upon Google to alter their search results so as to bury any negative information about Islam — also argued that Muslims say “Allahu akbar” in a variety of contexts, many of them positive. And the New York Times actually tweeted that the phrase “Allahu akbar” had “somehow” become “intertwined with terrorism.”

Somehow! How could this have possibly happened? Could it have anything to do with the thousands of Muslims who have screamed “Allahu akbar” while in the process of murdering or trying to murder infidels? “Somehow” this young lout Malik Sanchez also got the idea that it had to do with violence. His threats were just a prank for his video channel, but how was anyone in the restaurant going to know that for sure? Of course, by scattering in terror, they were reinforcing “Islamophobic” stereotypes involving the possibility that Muslims screaming “Allahu akbar” and saying they have a bomb might be intending to commit an act of violence. Expect CAIR to jump on the case.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

When did Palestine become Palestine?

The Palestinian-Arabs’ claim for sovereignty over what they now insist is their long yearned-for homeland arose only after 1967—i.e. when it came under Jewish administration.


The Arabs didn’t provoke war with Israel in 1967 to achieve Palestinian independence…Arab rulers could have established a Palestinian state in those territories whenever they chose to do so. But Palestinian statehood was of no interest to them.- Jeff Jacoby, The Boston Globe, June 7, 2017.

Not since the time of Dr. Goebels [Head of the Nazi Propaganda Machine] has there ever been a case in which continual repetition of a lie has born such great fruits…Of all the Palestinian lies, there is no lie greater or more crushing than that which calls for the establishment of a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank…From “Palestinian Lies” [Hebrew], Ha’aretz, July 30, 1976, by former Education Minister, Prof. Amnon Rubinstein of the far-Left Meretz faction.

With Joe Biden in the White House, the question of Palestinian statehood is now back on the international agenda, after being largely sidelined under the Trump administration.

For decades, the discourse on the “Palestinian issue” has been dominated by the Palestinian-Arabs contention that Judea and Samaria (a.k.a. “The West Bank”) has long been their ancient homeland.

Preaching Genocide

However, many would probably be interested—and certainly very surprised—to learn just when realization dawned on the Palestinian-Arabs that this territory supposedly comprised their yearned-for motherland.

Indeed, long before Israel held a square inch of “the West Bank”—before there was any “occupation” or “settlements”—the Arabs claimed all the territory of pre-1967 Israel i.e. within the Green Line—as “Palestinian” territory and threatened to reclaim it by force of arms, and annihilate all its Jewish inhabitants.

Thus, in March 1965, over two years prior to the 1967 Six-Day War—after which the “West Bank” came under Israeli administration—Egyptian President, Gamal Abdul Nasser threatened, with chilling genocidal malevolence: “We shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand, we shall enter it with its soil saturated in blood“.

No less blood-curdling were the words of Yassir Arafat’s predecessor as head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Ahmed Shukeiry, who on the very eve of the Six-Day War—in a somewhat premature flush of triumph—crowed:

D Day is approaching. The Arabs have waited 19 years for this and will not flinch from the war of liberation…This is a fight for the homeland – it is either us or the Israelis. There is no middle road. The Jews of Palestine will have to leave.[but] is my impression that none of them will survive…We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants and as for the survivors — if there are any — the boats are ready to deport them.”

“…Jordanians & Palestinians are considered … one people.”

Significantly, the first version of the Palestinian National Covenant was formulated three years before the Six-Day War—in May 1964—in East Jerusalem  (then under Jordanian control).

In it, the Palestinian-Arabs explicitly foreswear any sovereign claim to the “West Bank” (or to Gaza):

Thus, while in Article 16 it reads: “…the people of Palestine [look] forward [to] restoring the legitimate situation to Palestine, establishing peace and security in its territory, and…enabling its people to exercise national sovereignty and freedom”, in Article 24 the “West Bank” (and Gaza) are explicitly excluded from the scope of Palestinian sovereign aspirations.

Indeed, in Article 24, the Covenant unequivocally stipulates that the “Palestinian people” do NOT aspire to “any… sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip [then under Egyptian control] or the Himmah Area [then under Syrian control]”.

Moreover, when the original National Covenant was drafted, all the Arab residents in the “West Bank” were, in fact, Jordanian citizens—without that causing any great discordance between their national identity and the citizenship they held.

Accordingly, as late as 1977, Farouk Kaddoumi, then one of the most senior members of the PLO, told Newsweek: “…Jordanians and Palestinians are considered by the PLO as one people.”

Moreover, it was Jordan who demanded sovereignty over the “West Bank” until July 1988, when King Hussein relinquished his claim to the territory and stripped all his erst-while subjects of their Jordanian citizenship. On this, Anis F. Kassim, a prominent Palestinian international lawyer, commented: “… more than 1.5 million Palestinians went to bed on 31 July 1988 as Jordanian citizens, and woke up on 1 August 1988 as stateless persons.”

Palestine is where the Jews are.

Accordingly, it is clear that Palestinian Arabs’ claim to sovereignty over what they now insist is their long yearned-for homeland arose only after 1967—i.e. when it came under Jewish administration.

Indeed the Palestinian homeland seems to be a very fluid concept. After all, prior to 1967, it excluded all the territory it now purports to include. The common thread between the pre-1967 demands and the post-1967 ones, is that the Palestinian Arabs appear to focus their “national aspirations” on land only to deprive the Jews of it.

Imagine that!

©Martin Sherman. All rights reserved.

Turkey blasts Geert Wilders ‘anti-Islam’ tweet to start Ramadan

To highlight the jihad during Ramadan, Geert Wilders released a tweet which drew stinging attack from Turkey — illustrating yet again the validity of Geert Wilder’s warnings about Islam.

Listen to clip HERE.

For many, Ramadan is the month of jihad:

month of holy war and death for Allah. It is a month for fighting the enemies of Allah and God’s messenger, the Jews and their American facilitators.” — Qaedat al-Jihad

Quiet prayer during Ramadan, needless to say, isn’t the issue, but alerting people about the heightened threat of jihad during Ramadan is a big issue. And beyond Ramadan, the global jihad against infidels is a critical issue, far too often avoided. That includes the stealth invasion of the West, which includes the “Islamophobia” subterfuge, which is intended to beat down critics of Islam.

Turkish officials reacted angrily, accusing Wilders of being “racist.” What race is Islam again? Wilders’ critics keep on proving him correct, from their reaction to his criticisms, to the widespread reaction by Muslims to the Muhammad cartoon that was shown in the classroom by French teacher Samuel Paty (who was beheaded for it). Such a mentality (which is pervasive) isn’t compatible to the values of the Netherlands, and not only the Netherlands, but the entire Western world, in which freedom of thought and speech have been protected, at least up to now.

Turkey condemns Dutch lawmaker’s anti-Islam tweet

Al Jazeera, April 14, 2021:

Turkish officials reacted angrily to far-right Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders after he made disparaging remarks about Islam at the start of Ramadan.

On Monday, Wilders, chairman of the Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands, shared a short video clip on Twitter attacking Islam and the Muslim holy month.

Turkey’s ruling AK Party spokesman Omer Celik on Wednesday accused Wilders of having “a racist and fascist mind”.

“Enemies of Islam also hate migrants, poor people, needy people and foreigners,” he said on Twitter.

Ali Erbas, the head of the Presidency of Religious Affairs, condemned Wilders’ remarks as “unacceptable”.

“I invite the international community to a conscious struggle against the racist mentality that incites Islamophobia and targets social peace,” Erbas said.

Turkey’s Communications Director Fahrettin Altun also condemned Wilder’s remarks.

“Heartless @geertwilderspvv is racist, fascist and extremist. Islam condemns all. Stop racism,” Altun said on Twitter, tagging the Dutch lawmaker….

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Arizona community college must pay $155,000 to professor it forced to apologize for criticizing Islam

A slight pause on American academia’s out-of-control-freight-train rush to submit to Sharia. But the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is still flogging this case in court, hoping to use it to destroy the freedom of speech and criminalize criticism of Islam.

Arizona community college to pay $155K settlement for directing professor to apologize for Islamic terrorism quiz question

by Katlyn Patton, FIRE, April 13, 2021:

Maricopa County Community College District will pay professor Nicholas Damask $155,000 in exchange for his agreement not to sue district personnel, who last year violated his expressive rights in an attempt to quell criticism of his quiz questions on social media. The district also pledged to strengthen its commitment to academic freedom.

Damask, who teaches political science at Scottsdale Community College, came under fire on social media last May after a student complained that quiz questions in Damask’s world politics course were offensive to the student’s religious beliefs. Damask said the college suggested it would require him to meet with an Islamic religious leader to review the content of his course because a student complained that three of Damask’s quiz questions about Islamic terrorism were “in distaste of Islam.”

In response, the college directed Damask to issue an apology — pre-written for him by a communications staff member — and implied that he would be investigated. The college ultimately backed down after an urgent letter from FIRE.

Now, the district is finally paying for SCC’s unconstitutional knee-jerk reaction to online criticism….

lawsuit brought by the Council on American-Islamic Relations remains pending in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. (A district court judge dismissed the lawsuit in August for failure to state a claim, and CAIR appealed.)…

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

NPR: Hamas-linked CAIR covered up Florida chapter top dog Hassan Shibly’s serial abuse of women

When even NPR notices what is going on at Hamas-linked CAIR, you know it must be very bad. Of course, NPR’s Leila Fadel portrays this sinister organization has pure as the driven snow and fighting valiantly for civil rights against racist, redneck “Islamophobes”; there’s just this little problem of multiple claims of sexual harassment by its former Florida chapter director, Hassan Shibly. Fadel doesn’t bother to inform her hapless readers that CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department. CAIR officials have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements about how Islamic law should be imposed in the U.S. (Ahmad denies this, but the original reporter stands by her story.) CAIR chapters frequently distribute pamphlets telling Muslims not to cooperate with law enforcement. CAIR has opposed virtually every anti-terror measure that has been proposed or implemented and has been declared a terror organization by the United Arab Emirates. CAIR’s Hussam Ayloush in 2017 called for the overthrow of the U.S. government. CAIR’s national outreach manager is an open supporter of Hamas.

Nor does Fadel even come close to touching upon what may have led Shibly to behave this way:

The Qur’an teaches that men are superior to women and should beat those from whom they “fear disobedience”: “Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because Allah has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them.” — Qur’an 4:34

Muhammad’s child bride, Aisha, says in a hadith that Muhammad “struck me on the chest which caused me pain, and then said: ‘Did you think that Allah and His Apostle would deal unjustly with you?’” — Sahih Muslim 2127

The Qur’an likens a woman to a field (tilth), to be used by a man as he wills: “Your women are a tilth for you, so go to your tilth as you will” — Qur’an 2:223

It declares that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man: “Get two witnesses, out of your own men, and if there are not two men, then a man and two women, such as you choose, for witnesses, so that if one of them errs, the other can remind her” — Qur’an 2:282

It allows men to marry up to four wives, and have sex with slave girls also: “If you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, marry women of your choice, two or three or four; but if you fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly, then only one, or one that your right hands possess, that will be more suitable, to prevent you from doing injustice” — Qur’an 4:3

It rules that a son’s inheritance should be twice the size of that of a daughter: “Allah directs you as regards your children’s inheritance: to the male, a portion equal to that of two females” — Qur’an 4:11

It allows for marriage to pre-pubescent girls, stipulating that Islamic divorce procedures “shall apply to those who have not yet menstruated” — Qur’an 65:4

Islamic law stipulates that a man’s prayer is annulled if a dog or a woman passes in front of him as he is praying. “Narrated ‘Aisha: The things which annul the prayers were mentioned before me. They said, “Prayer is annulled by a dog, a donkey and a woman (if they pass in front of the praying people).” I said, ‘You have made us (i.e. women) dogs.’ I saw the Prophet praying while I used to lie in my bed between him and the Qibla. Whenever I was in need of something, I would slip away. for I disliked to face him.” — Sahih Bukhari 1.9.490

Another hadith depicts Muhammad saying that the majority of the inhabitants of hell are women:

“I looked into Paradise and I saw that the majority of its people were the poor. And I looked into Hell and I saw that the majority of its people are women.” — Sahih Bukhari 3241; Sahih Muslim 2737

When asked about this, he explained:

“I was shown Hell and I have never seen anything more terrifying than it. And I saw that the majority of its people are women.” They said, “Why, O Messenger of Allah?” He said, “Because of their ingratitude (kufr).” It was said, “Are they ungrateful to Allah?” He said, “They are ungrateful to their companions (husbands) and ungrateful for good treatment. If you are kind to one of them for a lifetime then she sees one (undesirable) thing in you, she will say, ‘I have never had anything good from you.’” — Sahih Bukhari 1052

And in another hadith:

The Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) went out to the musalla (prayer place) on the day of Eid al-Adha or Eid al-Fitr. He passed by the women and said, ‘O women! Give charity, for I have seen that you form the majority of the people of Hell.’ They asked, ‘Why is that, O Messenger of Allah?’ He replied, ‘You curse frequently and are ungrateful to your husbands. I have not seen anyone more deficient in intelligence and religious commitment than you. A cautious sensible man could be led astray by some of you.’ The women asked, ‘O Messenger of Allah, what is deficient in our intelligence and religious commitment?’ He said, ‘Is not the testimony of two women equal to the testimony of one man?’ They said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘This is the deficiency in her intelligence. Is it not true that a woman can neither pray nor fast during her menses?’ The women said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘This is the deficiency in her religious commitment.’” — Sahih Bukhari 304

Another statement attributed to Muhammad: “If a husband calls his wife to his bed [i.e. to have sexual relation] and she refuses and causes him to sleep in anger, the angels will curse her till morning.” — Sahih Bukhari 4.54.460

“Muslim Civil Rights Leader Accused Of Harassment, Misconduct,”

by Leila Fadel, NPR, April 15, 2021:

Hassan Shibly, once the prominent head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Florida chapter, resigned after allegations of domestic abuse were made against him. Since then, other women have come forward with accusations of their own. Shibly has denied the allegations.

For months, stories swirled around a prominent Muslim civil rights leader, alleging secret marriages, bullying, sexual harassment.

Then, late last year, some of the allegations against 34-year-old Hassan Shibly burst into public view. In a video posted on GoFundMe, Shibly’s estranged wife, mother of their three children, looked directly into the camera and begged for help. She said her abusive husband had cut her off financially.

“For years, I’ve been in an abusive relationship, and the situation at home has become unbearable,” Imane Sadrati said. “I finally decided to build the courage to start over for my children and I.”

The accusations were shocking not only in their content but in the public airing of a nationally recognized Muslim leader’s personal drama. For a decade, Shibly led the prominent Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR. It’s a nonprofit rights watchdog known for defending Muslim civil liberties in the post-Sept. 11 era.

Within 15 days of his estranged wife’s video going live, Shibly resigned from his high-profile job at CAIR’s Florida chapter. In an interview with NPR, Shibly denied abuse allegations, including that he twisted Sadrati’s arm, slapped her and shoved her against a wall during one incident last summer that Sadrati detailed in court documents. Shibly also denied all other allegations of misconduct.

His resignation, though, didn’t put the matter to rest. Shibly’s departure emboldened a slew of women to come forward with their own accusations of emotional abuse and sexual misconduct by him and of workplace discrimination at CAIR’s national office and several prominent chapters.

NPR interviewed a half-dozen Shibly accusers and reviewed internal CAIR documents, social media posts and email exchanges. Together, the accounts portray Shibly as a man who used his position to seduce women and bully critics with impunity.

Shibly’s critics say his alleged actions were shrouded by a culture of silence, rooted partly in Muslim taboos about discussing personal scandals and partly out of fear that the fallout would fuel vicious anti-Muslim hostility.

When concerned parties brought allegations to senior CAIR officials in Washington, D.C., and Florida, former employees said, there was little, if any, follow-up action. They said leaders were aware of some of the allegations as early as 2016.

Laila Abdelaziz, who worked under Shibly at the CAIR Florida chapter, said she resigned in 2016 in part because Shibly sexually harassed her. She said she believes CAIR leaders have failed to adequately address the situation,partly because Muslim communities already face such a barrage of discriminatory and sometimes violent anti-Muslim hate.

“When your community is being attacked and diminished and demeaned every single day,” Abdelaziz said, “it’s difficult to invite even more of that.”

“Muslims do turn to them in crisis”

In 1994, a handful of young Muslim activists in Washington, D.C., decided to push back against what they saw as the growing demonization of Islam in politics and pop culture.

The result of their organizing was CAIR.

Nearly 30 years later, CAIR has grown into the largest and most recognized Muslim civil rights group in the U.S., with some 33 independently operated chapters nationwide. CAIR leaders show up on TV to defend Muslim civil liberties, and they speak out against anti-Muslim hate and authorities targeting Muslim communities.

“There is a certain brand recognizability,” said Zareena Grewal, a historical anthropologist at Yale University who has written extensively on U.S. Muslim communities. She said many CAIR chapters do excellent grassroots work that’s seen as vital. “Muslims do turn to them in crisis.”

Still, Grewal said, there have been growing pains and an apparent lack of accountability. Externally, CAIR has had to fend off vicious and unfair Islamophobic political attacks. Internally, it has faced turmoil too, including thwarting employees’ efforts to unionize in the national office in 2016.

“They’ve been very resistant to growing and letting a new generation of leaders come in who may have a much deeper commitment to things like reckoning with sexual harassment or gender bias, corruption and things like unions,” Grewal said.

Parvez Ahmed, a former chairman of the CAIR national board, left over a decade ago and has since been critical of CAIR leadership over issues like inclusion and gender equity. He said the Shibly case offers CAIR an opportunity to show the people it serves that “they are doing everything within their power to take these allegations seriously.”

“The leadership of CAIR owes the community an explanation as to who knew what and when and how those complaints were handled,” Ahmed said.

Shibly agreed to a more than two-hour interview with NPR on the condition that it not be recorded. He denied that he ever hurt his wife, Sadrati, or cut her off financially.

He provided a photo of himself with a black eye, saying he was injured by Sadrati during a fight. (The incident was not reported to police, and NPR has no way to independently verify it.) Sadrati denies it.

“Her accusations are absolutely and blatantly false,” he said. “She’s using my position and the legal system to gain advantage in our ongoing legal divorce process.”

He noted that the temporary restraining order Sadrati requested was not granted and instead a hearing was set. According to court documents, Sadrati has since withdrawn the request for a restraining order on the condition that a no-contact order be included in their divorce proceedings. Shibly also shared a letter from the Florida Department of Children and Families. It said the agency found no indication of “intimate partner violence” that threatens the children.

Shibly said the couple separated more than two years ago. He said they divorced in Islamic tradition about eight months ago. They filed for legal divorce after Sadrati’s public allegation of domestic abuse.

As for the other allegations of misconduct against him — including workplace sexual harassment and bullying — Shibly said they are part of a campaign to “humiliate me and hurt me” and to smear CAIR and his work with the organization.

“I’m speechless,” Shibly said. He contends that many of the allegations “are verifiably false,” adding he has “faith that the way I was misrepresented online doesn’t reflect who I am.”

Shibly said that he did enter into religious marriage contracts with women outside his legal marriage when he and his wife were separated and prior to that — with her permission and when he felt their marriage was essentially over. He denies that any of the relationships were secret or abusive and described them as courtships.

Most religious scholars do not see a conventional Islamic marriage as legitimate unless it is publicly declared, and having more than one wife is generally frowned upon in jurisdictions where that’s not allowed under local law.

Sadrati declined to be interviewed by NPR beyond denying Shibly’s counteraccusations. She said her desperate online plea for help speaks for itself.

“The GoFundMe is there for a reason, an honest reason,” she said. “I’m standing by my statement.”

In response to NPR queries about the claims involving Shibly and others, CAIR’s national office sent a written statement saying that leaders “take any allegations of misconduct against our staff or volunteers seriously.” It also noted that chapters operate independently….

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The American Church: Going, Going . . .

Russell Shaw: Mass attendance is one area of Catholic decline. Another is that two out of five “cradle Catholics” no longer identify with the Church. Time to do something.


As Holy Week got underway this year, many people were surprised to learn of a new Gallup survey showing fewer than half of all Americans now identify with any particular church, synagogue, or mosque. But for those who’ve followed the rise of America’s “Nones,” and the corresponding decline in religious identity, this was old news.

Actually, self-identified Catholics didn’t come out – relatively – all that badly in the Gallup numbers, with 58 percent still identifying with a church while the overall figure for Americans was 47 percent. But any comfort Catholics might find in that vanishes when one realizes that the new figure is a drop of 18 percent from the 76 percent that Gallup reported for Catholics two decades ago.

In any event, these numbers need to be seen in their larger context. Here it seems fair to say that, while American Catholics have lately been looking down their noses at German Catholics, they’d do well to look at themselves in the mirror. For as the Germans have paraded noisily down their “synodal path” toward schism, we Americans have been slipping quietly into something approaching remnant status.

Take Sunday Mass attendance. Back in 1970, reports the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, 54.9 percent of American Catholics went to Mass every Sunday. A half-century later, on the eve of the pandemic, that had fallen to 21.1 percent. And now, the Center for Church Management at Villanova University projects an attendance rate in the neighborhood of 12 percent by next year or the year after.

Who can say where this decline will bottom out? Working from pre-pandemic numbers, Stephen Bullivant in his illuminating study of Catholic “disaffiliation” in the United States and Great Britain finds Mass attendance rates in both countries declining for the last fifty years “with no sign of abating.” Self-described Catholics who seldom go to church may be kind to animals and scrupulous in paying their taxes, but it’s a stretch to rank them with the “regular practisers,” as Bullivant oddly does.

Mass attendance is only one area of decline. Hardly less disturbing is the fact that roughly two out of five U.S. “cradle Catholics” no longer identify with the Church. And in key sectors, such as Catholic marriages and infant baptisms, the numbers are way, way down. Several years ago I congratulated a tribunal official on the sharp drop in annulments in his diocese. That’s no cause for celebration, he told me grimly. Upon splitting up, many Catholic couples these days simply get a divorce, go their own ways, and – in many cases – remarry outside the Church.

In light of all that, one surprise of the present moment is how little attention the shrinkage of American Catholicism appears to be getting from those to whom one might reasonably have looked for leadership.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has had nothing to say about it up to this time. Individual bishops in their dioceses have scrambled to close and consolidate parishes and deploy a diminishing number of overworked priests for pastoral duties, but it’s a well-kept secret how they see the future.

Catholic universities, which boast a formidable array of institutes and think tanks, aren’t addressing the situation.

And, except for occasional reports about school closings and parish consolidations, the Catholic media have been silent.

Might it at least be a good idea to explore our options for the future together instead of simply sitting back and watching the great collapse go on?

We do have the prophetic voice of Rod Dreher calling our attention to the unfolding crisis in The Benedict Option and in last year’s Live Not by Lies, and offering suggestions for action. In his recent book, Dreher counsels “Christian dissidents” to organize themselves in small groups (“cells”) in order to withstand onslaughts from the woke culture’s “social justice warriors” bent on overt persecution to enforce conformity and punish resisters.

And here and there one sees signs that the wake-up message is getting through. A more than ordinarily thoughtful Catholic friend, reacting to something I’d written, says this: “You are right that the laity can’t sit around and wait for ‘the Church’ – i.e., the clergy – to do something. I think the faith will be preserved by families joining together to form their children. That task will certainly involve the clergy – supportive and unsupportive alike – but it can’t wait for them.”

On the brink of what may strike many as a gloomy future, it’s helpful to recall a prescient utterance by Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI), back in 1969.

Though he has been frequently quoted as predicting that “the Church will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning,” and adding that the process of shrinkage would be “hard going” and involve “tremendous upheavals,” he nonetheless also said this:

When the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. [People who had lost sight of God] will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.

The more – and sooner – that we accept that as an achievable proposition, the better prospects will be for the future of the American Church. The hard times are just beginning. But the Church, so faith obliges us to believe, isn’t finished yet.

After all, as a threadbare mantra of post-Vatican II Catholicism puts it, we are an Easter people. And doesn’t dying have to come before rising, for the American Church as much as for any of us?

Russell Shaw

Russell Shaw is former Secretary for Public Affairs of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Eight Popes and the Crisis of Modernity (forthcoming from Ignatius Press).

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EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing article is republished with permission. © 2021 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

VIDEO: The Vortex — Thank You, Mr. Trump. You did us all a great service.

TRANSCRIPT

Church Militant (a 501(c)4 corporation) is responsible for the content of this commentary. 

It’s extraordinarily clear that the planet is breaking into two distinct camps — two different worlds. And before we pursue this any further, let’s be clear: We have Donald Trump to thank for this. During his presidency, sides were chosen by practically everyone, and what was accomplished was that everyone knew where everyone else stood. All the facades came down. All the cover-ups and phony “kumbaya garbage” all came to a screeching halt.

Of course, the Marxists hate this outcome because they have now been exposed. But so have the lukewarm Christianity types, the ones who actually let the world descend into its current hellish state. Good! And thanks again, Mr. President. It took a stolen election to finally wake up a sufficient number of people.

Moving on from songs of praise for the “new normal,” let’s turn our attention precisely to the new normal. The new normal is the revelation that the two worlds are comprised of one that believes in Christ and one that has Christ as its sworn enemy.

The separation is like a fertilized egg undergoing its first division, except, in this case, one of those new cells is seeking to destroy the other. The anti-God forces, having come to major prominence under the reign of the phony-Catholic, unelected Biden, are now on the ascent and dictating the narrative. In truth, they have been doing so for many decades, but not like this. The entire landscape has changed.

Prior to the election theft, they were operating in fits and starts, sometimes organized, other times not as much. But now they are all coalescing, and while they are still finding their footing, they will find it soon enough. For faithful Catholics, the truly disturbing part is that the large part of the Church, institutionally speaking, is cooperating with the anti-God side.

When it comes to the Church, America, freedom, tolerance, equality, morality, virtue, family, education, commerce, law, health, medicine, religion, politics, dignity and even life, each side’s view of all of these is 100% diametrically opposed to the other. The human race is spiraling toward either one of two ends: total devastation or a massive showdown between these two forces — and only one will be left standing.

Indeed, we are already in the throes of this happening. The anti-God forces have been gathering and collectivizing for decades, infiltrating every facet of life and culture and achieving near-total dominance. Meanwhile, the forces of those who hold traditional beliefs have been asleep at the switch, snoring their way through the Marxist takeover. And now as these people slowly rouse themselves from their slumber, they are finding they are being demonized, attacked and maligned in every one of the institutions.

It began most forcefully in the academy as hippie Socialists were churned out of the nations’ universities back in the 1960s and beyond. Within a generation, the hippies put on tweed jackets, pony-tailed their long hair, and proceeded to brainwash future students. Generation by generation, students graduated and moved into the workplace and up the corporate ladder or the political world, cementing one victory after another, giving us the world we have today.

Until Trump came on the scene, their activities were largely unnoticed. Even today, too few so-called conservatives seem to understand the urgency of the hour. Yet, with or without their knowledge, the storm clouds are gathering quickly as the media combine with government to launch the first attacks, beginning with accusations of “domestic extremism.”

But it’s not just an accusation of domestic extremism that’s the concern, but who the media are lambasting as extremists and a threat to the “American way of life.” The New York Times summed it up perfectly with the headline last week: “White Evangelical Resistance Is Obstacle in Vaccination Effort.” But what’s most telling is the subtitle: “Millions of white evangelical adults in the U.S. do not intend to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Tenets of faith and mistrust of science play a role; so does politics.”

While the Times focuses on evangelicals because a larger percentage of them (compared with Catholics) refuses to get the jab, there are millions of faithful Catholics who also will not be getting the experimental gene therapy injected into their bodies.

It is not a vaccine — remember that. In fact, we don’t even really know what it is. What we do know is that the whole COVID scare has been weaponized to shut down an economy, steal an election and propel the forces of world communism into the driver’s seat. It has also whipped up a quotient of fear that is easily manipulated by these malevolent forces. And now, if you refuse to get jabbed on either moral or scientific grounds, or both, you are a threat, a terrorist, a hillbilly clinging to your Bible and guns, as Obama would put it.

No one is saying COVID does not take a human toll. But to start forcing people to get a shot to engage in commerce, fly on a plane, walk into a store, and, for Catholics, to receive the sacraments, is insane — and the COVID crowd is absolutely on the side of anti-Christ and anti-God.

Mask up, stay apart, isolate, get a shot — and then even after the shot — mask up, stay apart, isolate, and get another shot. Something’s just not adding up. The very same forces that have lied through their teeth to us for decades — the ones successfully unmasked by Trump — are the very same ones pushing this fear narrative.

Trust is fundamental to any and every relationship, and it doesn’t matter what the nature of the relationship is. This is true in the media world, like here at Church Militant. You trust us to bring you truth and accuracy, and we take that trust as a foundational and serious obligation. You give us money through a variety of ways to sustain the effort here, and we guard that trust zealously.

Every relationship is built on a certain degree of trust, whether you’re buying groceries or getting married and everything in between. So when a trust is broken, depending on the intensity of the relationship, it can be devastating. And oftentimes that trust is never capable of being restored.

Such is the case now between the two temporarily coexisting worlds revealed by Trump in the White House. For example, the violation of trust that the U.S. hierarchy has exhibited these last many decades has probably reached the point of not being able to be restored. The same is true of cultural institutions and believers. What, precisely, have Catholic bishops or cultural leaders done to earn one modicum of your trust in the past half-century?

When it comes to living all this out, we need not pretend that this won’t get worse for authentic believers. It will — in fact, it has to. “Comfortable Catholicism” has come to an end. Thanks to Donald Trump, that is now abundantly obvious. So thanks again, Donald. You did the forces of faith a great service. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

EDITORS NOTE: This Church Militant video is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

Exacerbating Racism in America

While America has unquestionably had deep racial problems and an agonizing history of oppressing Black people through slavery, Jim Crow, and other outrages, it seems that there are some among us who do not ever want to see the problems solved—or to admit progress in any form. There are those who make enormous profits, both monetarily and socially, by perpetuating the friction caused by America’s racist past, in contrast to Martin Luther King Jr.’s hope of a color-blind society.

Now comes word of a new “devotional” by a professor at a once-Baptist college. This “devotional,” a book geared toward helping its readers walk with God, is sold at a major retailer. Source: “Not the Bee,” 4/7/21.

It includes a “Prayer of a Weary Black Woman,” supplicating, “Dear God, please help me to hate White people. Or at least to want to hate them….I want to stop caring about their misguided, racist souls, to stop believing that they can be better, that they can stop being racist.” She also prays that she won’t just hate the Trump-supporters and Fox News-viewers.

This is wokeness on steroids—promoting hatred instead of love—in the name of God, no less, as long as it’s hatred promoting the right kind of racism. Is there a right kind of racism? Of course not.

Jesus said that we should love those who hate us and pray for those who persecute us. To whom is this “theologian” praying? It is certainly not the God of the Bible.

The sad thing about this example of horrible theology is that it exacerbates America’s racist problems, but worse, it pollutes the solution. The very solution to racism can be found in the Bible—but this book perverts it, as the KKK has perverted it.

I remember once interviewing a former killer for the Ku Klux Klan, Tommy Tarrants, Jr. The FBI agent trailing him called him a “mad dog killer.” When he was captured, he was sentenced to 30 years.

While in prison, he came across a Bible. He told me that formerly, he used to skim through the Bible—but just in a cherry-picking way, to find things that supposedly supported his racist views. But later when he actually read the Scriptures, he was convicted of his sin, including his sin of racism. Through the power of Jesus Christ, Tommy was thoroughly transformed. Tarrants even went on to pastor a biracial church and to co-write a book with a black evangelical minister, John Perkins. The book was entitled, He’s My Brother.

Evangelist Alveda King, MLK’s niece, once told me that we have stop thinking in racist terms: “You go to Acts 17:26, ‘Of one blood God created all people to live together on the earth.’ Now, if we are separate races, we cannot possibly be brothers and sisters. So, we have to see ourselves as one race, one human race, created by God, and we’re supposed to live together in this world as brothers and sisters. So, that’s a fundamental truth that America has not yet embraced. I believe in America in the twenty-first century, we still see ourselves as separate races. But we are one human race, and we are one blood.”

Indeed, we are all creatures of God, created in His image. And those who know the Lord through Jesus Christ are all children of God.

Many of America’s founders recognized how important private, voluntary religion was—how it shaped character. For example, Virginia’s first governor, Patrick Henry, observed: “The general diffusion of Christian knowledge hath a natural tendency to correct the morals of men, restrain their vices, and preserve the peace of society.”

Though primarily a Deist, Ben Franklin once noted (in a letter to the president of Yale): “the most acceptable service we render to Him is in doing good to His other Children.”

We tend to forget that this slice of time is between Christ’s first coming and His second coming.

What will things be like under Christ’s reign? In the book of Revelation, the Apostle John got a taste of life in heaven: “After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands.”

In heaven, there is no distinction between the races, so why should be there such distinctions here on earth among those created in the image of God? And why should anyone pray to God to put in their hearts a hatred for people with different skin color? May God grant us the grace to replace hate with love.

©Jerry Newcombe. All rights reserved.

Deborah Lipstadt’s Distorted Antisemitism Definition

“Many Jews involved with progressive causes are increasingly feeling this tug, if not outright war, between their Jewish and political identities,” wrote antisemitism historian Deborah E. Lipstadt in her 2019 book Antisemitism: Here and Now. President Joe Biden’s decision to resume American aid to the terrorist-sponsoring Palestinian Authority (PA) on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day only highlighted this ongoing conflict for Jewish Biden supporters such as Lipstadt.

Lipstadt in her book strove to give an impartial review of modern antisemitism across the ideological spectrum, but her evident political biases marred otherwise insightful analysis. Particularly her antipathy towards Donald Trump stood out, as she equated this uniquely pro-Israel president with the notoriously anti-Semitic British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. “I don’t know if either of these men is an anti-Semite,” she wrote, but “both have facilitated the spread of antisemitism.”

This Trump-Corbyn “comparison is so flawed as to be absurd,” correctly countered conservative Jewish writer Ben Cohen wrote in a 2019 review of Lipstadt’s book. As he explained:

Trump may be guilty of occasionally encouraging or even enabling anti-Semites in small ways, but Corbyn is an anti-Semite, and one with a public and considered fondness for the world’s most vicious and bloodthirsty haters of Jews.

As Lipstadt’s own book documents for quizzical readers, Corbyn’s scandalous record includes defending viciously anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists and calling Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists “friends.” By contrast, she discussed certain truly troubling Trump statements, including his 2015 comments during the Republican presidential primaries to the Republican Jewish Coalition. “None of this, however,” Cohen accurately assessed of Trump, “places him remotely in the same corner as Corbyn, who is blatantly guilty not only of enabling but of fomenting anti-Semitism as an integral element of his ideological worldview.”

Lipstadt in her book offered a leftist apologia for Corbyn’s antisemitism. “Fundamental to Corbyn’s political weltanschauung is an automatic—critics might call it knee-jerk—sympathy for anyone who is or appears to be oppressed or an underdog.” Thus she concluded:

It is doubtful that Corbyn deliberately seeks out anti-Semites to associate with and to support. But it seems that when he encounters them, their Jew-hatred is irrelevant as long as their other positions—on class, race, capitalism, the role of the state, and Israel/Palestine-are to his liking.

By contrast, Lipstadt demonized Trump as a bigot, even though President Trump actually denounced white supremacists, anti-Semites, and other extremists on numerous occasions. “Trump was, and still seems to be, unwilling to castigate, much less mildly criticize, actions by the white supremacists, racists, and anti-Semites who voted for him and who continue to support him,” she wrote without substantiation. In this context rang hollow her qualification that “I’m not suggesting, of course, that they represent all of Trump’s supporters.”

Bizarrely, Lipstadt in her anti-Trump screeds overlooked the history of openly racist Democratic presidents such as Woodrow Wilson. “In the United States, for the first time in many decades—perhaps for the first time ever—these haters believe that they have sympathetic allies in the White House.” Trump “has not disabused them of that notion,” she wrote, even though anti-Semites such as the perpetrator of the 2018 mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue repeatedly denounced Trump for being too pro-Jewish.

A vaguely defined “alt-right” loomed large in Lipstadt’s book. She defined Milo Yiannopoulos, a pro-Israel, ex-gay man who once “married” a black man, as among this hateful “movement’s ideologues.” His former employer, the conservative Breitbart News (where this author has written), and its former editor, the Trump adviser Steve Bannon, also drew Lipstadt’s scorn. Without any particular examples, she criticized:

There is no credible evidence that Bannon is himself an anti-Semite, but it is extremely distressing that right-wing Jewish groups that trumpet his support for Israel ignored the racism, anti-immigrant, and white nationalist views promulgated by Breitbart News when he ran it.

Again without citing evidence, Lipstadt fretted that under Trump “alt-right” members “have managed in recent years to establish direct links to people with influence, including those in high-level government positions.” In addition to his pro-Israel record, Trump strengthened federal government efforts against college antisemitism, won increased black support with his economic growth policies, and appointed the first openly gay man to cabinet rank. Yet she counterfactually wrote:

Trump’s anti-Semitic followers believe that his dog whistles give them free rein to openly acknowledge their contempt for racial minorities, Muslims, homosexuals, and Jews. They are convinced, not without reason, that they have had a direct impact on government policy.

Any anti-Trump rant would be incomplete without myths about the violent 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, protests. Trump had rightfully condemned “many sides” here among battling white supremacists and leftist extremists such as Antifa, whose destructiveness has only become clearer in subsequent years. Yet Lipstadt whitewashed the latter by condemning Trump for “moral equivalency between racists and the counterdemonstrators.”

Lipstadt also promoted in her book and subsequently the ubiquitous Charlottesville hoax that Trump had praised racist demonstrators there as “very fine people.” While condemning these racists, he had used these words in general reference to people debating and protesting on both sides in Charlottesville over a Robert E. Lee Confederate war memorial. But Lipstadt scolded Trump for praising “‘very fine people’ marching with the white supremacist protesters.”

Concerning Islamic antisemitism, Lipstadt stood on firmer ground. She recognized that “within sectors of the Muslim community, particularly in Europe, there is endemic antisemitism” and some Muslims “have been raised to hate Jews.” She observed:

Various studies, including one conducted in 2017 by the University of Oslo, have shown that attacks on European Jews, particularly physical assaults, come in the main from radicalized Muslims. Interviews with German Muslims, including well-educated professionals, feature comments about Jews that sound as though they have come directly from the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Brief hints of this antisemitism’s historical basis in Islamic doctrines, which define the subjugated dhimmi status of Jews and other non-Muslims under Islamic rule, appear in Lipstadt’s book. Under various European and Islamic religious discriminations, “Jews were hated because they refused to accept Christianity and, later, Islam.” Jews had “centuries-long second-class treatment in Islamic lands” and even today Muslim-majority states are rife with discrimination against Jews and other religious minorities. In Israel, Islamic rages arise when Jews “return to their ancient homeland, which was for centuries part of the Islamic empire.”

Rather than critically analyze this history, Lipstadt offered more politically correct explanations for Islamic antisemitism. She suggested that European Muslim antisemitism “is part of a larger problem of integration” and referenced not Islamic, but “leftist antisemitism,” when analyzing the notorious Palestinian-American political activist Linda Sarsour. Meanwhile Lipstadt invoked the totalitarian neologism “Islamophobia” amidst her warnings against “demonization of Muslims.”

Lipstadt also insightfully examines economic warfare against Israel in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, a “direct descendant of Marxist antisemitism and anti-Zionism.” A key BDS demand is a “right of return” to Israel of millions of descendants of some 600,000 Arabs who fled what became Israel in its 1948 independence war. This demographic destruction of Israel’s Jewish state, she wrote, or “negation of Jewish nationhood is a form of antisemitism, if not in intent, then certainly in effect.”

Irrespective of practical political effects, Lipstadt noted, BDS aims “to toxify Israel” by presenting it as uniquely evil among the world’s nations. In American academia, this “impact of BDS on Jewish students is quite real. Jewish students running for office in student government have also been uniquely targeted by Israel-bashers.” This demonstrates that a “myopic focus on Israel is anti-Semitic in consequence, if not in intent.”

Lipstadt’s anti-BDS stance makes ironic her acclamation of Biden’s victory days after the November 2020 presidential elections. In Biden she saw a “leader of the country who will unequivocally condemn antisemitism and extremism.” Yet his numerous anti-Israel administration appointees have included BDS supporters.

Such matters must appear secondary to Lipstadt, whose apocalyptic denunciations of Trump during and after the 2020 elections angered many Jews with what they condemned as Holocaust-trivializations. She helped launch on September 29, 2020, a Jewish Democratic Council of America campaign advertisement that compared Trump’s presidency to the 1930s rise of Nazi Germany. She later coauthored a Washington Post editorial that analogized Trump’s “democracy denial” challenges to the election results to “Holocaust denial.” Jewish legal scholar Nathan Lewin castigated this “shameful Holocaust denial” in a “rant with a blatant political bias,

Israeli Jews, 70 percent of whom supported Trump’s reelection in surveys, have greater fear of Biden resuming the Middle East policies of President Barack Obama, whom Lipstadt supported in both the 2008 and 2012 elections. Biden, for example, has already lifted sanctions imposed by Trump on the dangerous, nuclear-proliferating Islamic Republic of Iran. Biden also seems to agree with Lipstadt’s hackneyed analysis in her book that the “current situation in the West Bank is untenable” and the “most reasonable solution would be two states,” Israel and Palestine, with secure borders. By contrast, Israeli Jews have personally experienced how Islam’s “endemic antisemitism” precisely in the Muslim-majority Middle East has only turned Israeli “land for peace” territorial withdrawals into jihadist bases for attacks on Israel.

“Fight the good fight,” Lipstadt penned in autographed book copies she distributed to a November 19, 2019, audience at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, including this author. Yet many would agree with the book reviewer Cohen that her analysis is unfortunately “deeply unsatisfactory” in places, such as her book endnotes, where she uncritically relies upon Southern Poverty Law Center leftist smear merchants. “Although she is by no means blind to left-wing anti-Semitism, her eyesight must be adjudged impaired—as indeed it also is on the subject of Islamist anti-Semitism,” Cohen wrote in 2019 in words only more valid today.

COLUMN BY

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Anti-Free Speech Muslim Group Sues Facebook for Not Removing Sites Opposing Jihad Violence

The tech site Engadget reported Thursday that the far-left legal group Muslim Advocates has filed a consumer protection lawsuit against Facebook for allowing “anti-Muslim hate to spread on the platform, leading to real-world harm.” The organization provided a list of what it claimed were 26 “anti-Muslim hate groups,” including organizations that are dedicated simply to opposing jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others, including my own news site Jihad Watch, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the Center for Security Policy, and other groups whose main crime is opposing leftist Islamopandering and the left’s tendency to turn a blind eye to the human rights abuses sanctioned by Islamic law.

Engadget quoted a Facebook spokesperson in full defense mode: “We do not allow hate speech on Facebook and regularly work with experts, nonprofits, and stakeholders to help make sure Facebook is a safe place for everyone, recognizing anti-Muslim rhetoric can take different forms. We have invested in AI technologies to take down hate speech, and we proactively detect 97 percent of what we remove.”

Anyone who has been paying attention can see what is coming. Jihad Watch and the others targeted will disappear from Facebook and ultimately from the Internet altogether, whether as a result of this suit or some other. This suit itself has a very good chance of succeeding, as Muslim Advocates is extremely powerful and influential.

Back in October, Old Joe Biden gave an address filled with cringeworthy pandering to Muslim Advocates, the group that has brought this suit. Nor is Muslim Advocates’ clout something new: back on October 19, 2011, Farhana Khera of Muslim Advocates sent a letter to John Brennan, who was then the assistant to the president on national security for Homeland Security and Counter Terrorism, denouncing what it characterized as U.S. government agencies’ “use of biased, false and highly offensive training materials about Muslims and Islam.” It criticized “the FBI’s use of biased experts and training materials.”

Khera complained that my books could be found in “the FBI’s library at the FBI training academy in Quantico, Virginia”; that a reading list accompanying a PowerPoint presentation by the FBI’s Law Enforcement Communications Unit recommended my book The Truth About Muhammad; and that in July 2010 I “presented a two-hour seminar on ‘the belief system of Islamic jihadists’ to the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in Tidewater, Virginia,” and “presented a similar lecture to the U.S. Attorney’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council, which is co-hosted by the FBI’s Norfolk Field Office.”

These were supposed to be terrible things because I was bigoted and hateful. But many of the examples Khera adduced of “bigoted and distorted materials” involved statements that were not actually bigoted and distorted at all, but simply accurate. Nonetheless, Brennan immediately complied. In a November 3, 2011, letter to Khera that — significantly — was written on White House stationery, Brennan promised that the government would “ensure that federal officials and state, local and tribal partners receive accurate, evidence-based information in these crucial areas.” That led to the erasure of all mention of Islam and jihad from government counterterror materials, and the birth of the Countering Violent Extremism program, which ignores jihad violence and focuses on a largely imaginary “right-wing extremism.”

So Muslim Advocates has connections that go up to the very top, and likely knows where to find a compliant judge who will rule in its favor in this suit.

Also note how the group, with help from the establishment media, has already moved the conversation away from where it should be. Engadget takes for granted that the 26 groups Muslim Advocates is targeting really are “anti-Muslim hate groups.” Engadget never even for a moment considers the possibility that some or all of these groups have been unfairly characterized, and neither does any other media story I have seen on this suit. Neither Engadget nor any other “news site” reached out to me for comment, or, apparently, to anyone else involved with the targeted groups, as none of the stories about this suit contain a single quote from anyone except Muslim Advocates and Facebook.

Yet that is really the point that should be at issue here. Is my work and that of the others targeted in this suit going to be banned as “hate speech” without any opportunity for discussion, explanation, or appeal, but simply on the word of far-left hate groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has a long record of smearing legitimate groups that dissent from the far-left agenda by lumping them in with the KKK and neo-Nazis? The answer to that question appears to be yes. Is the American court system going to take for granted and validate with legal precedent the claim that opposing jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women, gays and others constitutes “anti-Muslim hate”? The answer to that question appears to be yes as well.

So any day now could be the last day for Jihad Watch and other sites that oppose jihad terror. The U.S. will, possibly even before the end of this year, enter a marvelous new world free of “anti-Muslim hate,” that is, free of any criticism of Islam, jihad, or Sharia. Will that bring an end to jihad violence and the human rights abuses sanctioned by Sharia? Unfortunately, no.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Once Upon a Time, in America

Anthony Esolen: Sin makes the sinner a cripple. The principles of sin do more: they cripple a whole people. They cramp the spirit.


Pictures come to mind when I think of the Lonely Revolution – that deterioration of the principles governing sexual behavior in the ruins of the Christian West.

One is of my father and my mother, before they were married, and of my father’s brother and his fiancée, at a lake near home. It is difficult to explain to young people how varied and energetic our social life once was in America; outdoors whenever it could be, indoors otherwise – at dance halls, playhouses, bowling alleys, schoolhouses, diners, and churches. The lake I have in mind was still a public business when I was a boy, with a large concession stand and an arcade with games. That’s all gone now, and nothing has come to take its place.

But there they are, four young people in bathing suits, on a summer day with probably a hundred other young couples on that same small beach, either high school sweethearts, or couples courting or just married. People did not assume, seeing them, that they were in bed with one another, because unless they were married, it was very likely not true.  The assumption of moral behavior made the scene possible.  

I will hear the objection, “Go to the ocean and you’ll see couples.” But we aren’t at the seashore. We are nowhere that requires a special trip. We are wherever you may go in public on a pleasant day. You find boys and girls, young men and women, in pairs.  The pairing implies no sexual consummation. They like each other.

The moral law that cleared the space for innocent flirtation, however, did imply more, because it had an aim, taken for granted. The coupling is directed toward marriage. Most people in those days were married before age twenty-six, even though the men had to do stints in the armed services, and though people had far fewer material comforts than we have.

In our time, very few people marry that young; many will not marry at all; divorce, which in my parents’ generation was rare and scandalous, is common; children grow up without their fathers; and it is hard to name a single custom, in our raising of children and in our brittle social life, that is aimed toward getting people married and helping them stay that way.

We are rapidly saying farewell to the last generation in America that can remember what it was like to have musicians playing live, every weekend at a dance hall within walking distance or a short drive; or what it was like to be young, in love, doing all the fun things that your schoolmates were doing, plenty of them involving a lot of physical delight, but not requiring that you take off a stitch of clothing.

Sin makes the sinner a cripple. The principles of sin do more: they cripple a whole people. They cramp the spirit. The Lonely Revolution has left a trail of mistrust, regret, recrimination, and despair – and many people who marry do so only after a series of sexual wrecks and betrayals.

That is not to mention the many millions of children who have been born out of wedlock, or who were cut to pieces in the womb. Where is the joy the revolution promised? Where are the marriages, stronger than ever, and rich with children? Where is the sweetness, the love and gratitude, that should bind the sexes?

Another picture, forty years later. I am teaching at a still somewhat Catholic college, though the Lonely Revolution has run through it also, like a scorching fire. I am walking to class, when I catch sight of a boy and a girl doing something stunning, in public.

They’re holding hands.

It strikes me with shock that I have not seen such a thing for a very long time. My readers may say, “But wait, I still see that!” Every day, every week? The point is that you should no more have to try to remember such a thing, than you should have to try to remember when you last saw a group of boys playing baseball in an open field, just for the fun of it, or many another good and beautiful thing that should be ordinary, but that in our time is rare to unknown.

If you do not see these things all the time, something is wrong. In my parents’ time, and this was still so when I was in high school, though it would come to a quick end, there was more love-making (in the old sense of flirting, kissing, dancing, talking, kissing some more, and so forth, without fornication) than now, and more marrying and having children.

Someone will say that people hid their misery back then. This is to argue from lack of evidence. You posit a magical cause, the hiding that by definition you cannot see, and you limit its operation to the time you depreciate.

No doubt, there will always be unhappiness in human life. But imagine that business people all decided that sharp dealing and other cheats would be permitted, even celebrated. It isn’t that you never had cheats before, or only that you would have more cheating now. It’s that ordinary features of business life would cease to be, for lack of trust. We would soon be unable to imagine that they could exist – as now we can hardly imagine that picture of chastity and passion at the lake.

One more scene. I’m at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts, and I see a young man and woman, holding hands, as they walk to the chapel. Here, where the moral law is not just respected but loved, the boys and girls – pardon the youthful phrase – genuinely like each other, before they have chosen one as special.

The mirth, the ease, the trust, the beauty and the goodness of it, are like blossoms returning to a land when the poisons that had left it barren have been leached away.

COLUMN BY

Anthony Esolen

Anthony Esolen is a lecturer, translator, and writer. Among his books are Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, and Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World, and most recently The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord. He is a professor and writer in residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts, in Warner, New Hampshire.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2021 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

Jordan’s ‘House of Cards’–The implications for Israel

Israel could face a situation, where along its lengthiest border, there would no longer be a conservative, pro-Western monarchy, but an extreme Muslim regime, with incandescent hostility towards the Jewish state


There is nothing certain, but the uncertain. ~ Traditional Proverb.

Incoming media reports from Jordan indicate that the clash within the royal family earlier this week has now been resolved…or quashed.

Swirling shrouds of suspicion & uncertainty

However, much uncertainty still shrouds the recent events in the Hashemite monarchy as to whether there was a genuine attempt at a coup, led by King Abdallah’s half-brother and former crown prince, Hamzah bin Hussein; or a pre-emptive power play by the king himself against his recalcitrant sibling.

Prince Hamzah was Jordan’s heir apparent for five years after his father, King Hussein, died in 1999. But in 2004, King Abdullah stripped him of his title, later appointing his then-teenage son, Prince Hussein bin Abdullah, as crown prince.

Amid conflicting reports that Hamzah had been placed under house arrest—and following a number of high-level arrests allegedly linked to a coup attempt– he accused the Jordanian leadership of corruption, incompetence and harassment in a video conveyed to the BBC.

Hamzah denied that he was part of any initiative to undermine the regime, and although the military had claimed that he was not under house arrest, it did disclose that he had been ordered to stop actions that could be used to harm Jordan’s “security and stability“.

Lingering tensions in the palace & in the streets

Jordan’s deputy prime minister, Ayman Safadi, accused the prince of liaising with foreign parties regarding the destabilization of the country, claiming that he had been under surveillance for some time.

Significantly, whatever truly transpired, it was serious enough for other regional states such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as well as the United States, to pledge their support for the king.

Although it seems that for the moment matters have been smoothed over, with Hamzah signing a letter, stating: “I place myself in the hands of his majesty the king… I will remain committed to the constitution of the dear Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan“, tensions —designated by some as “unprecedented”—still remain.

Indeed, the affair is considered so sensitive that a ban, imposed on all news outlets and social media platforms, has been placed on any public discussion of it, as well as on all images and video clips related to the inquiry.

With few natural resources, Jordan is a country beset by a myriad of domestic problems, crumbling infrastructure, a hopelessly overloaded welfare system, inundated by refugees fleeing war-torn neighbors, widespread civil discontent and frequent protests, all exacerbated by a raging COVID-19 pandemic.

According to CNN, poverty and unemployment are at record levels and have driven Jordanians to the streets. However, “tolerance for protests has diminished significantly”—increasing the likelihood of further instability and disaffection with the leadership.

Topographical barriers and security

All of this throws—or at least should throw—into sharp relief one factor, often overlooked in the press reports covering the developments there—with far-reaching security implications for Israel and the feasibility of a prospective Palestinian state.

This is the crucial importance for Israel of the possibility—the more austere some might say, the probability—of a regime change in its eastern neighbor, and the attendant significance of the territory usually allotted for a future Palestinian state—namely, the highlands of Judea and Samaria (aka the “West Bank”).

This territory towers above Israel’s heavily populated coastal plain, controls the approaches to Greater Tel Aviv, dominates crucial infrastructure installations and systems—including Israel’s only international airport, Ben Gurion, sits atop vital water resources, and abuts the Trans-Israel Highway, the major thoroughfare connecting the North of the country with the South.

These highlands are the sole topographical barrier between Jordan and Israel’s crowded coastal megalopolis. Any forces—regular or renegade—deployed on them will have complete topographical command and control over all of central Israel, with the ability to disrupt daily life at will—making it impossible to maintain any semblance of social and commercial routine.

Topography & security (cont.)

Accordingly, as any prospective Palestinian state will be sandwiched between Israel in the West and Jordan in the East, it matters greatly whether Jordan is ruled by a government that strives to rein in forces hostile to Israel or one that is indifferent to their aggressive intent—or worse, is willingly complicit with it.

If the monarchy falls, or is even sufficiently weakened, so as to become a mere puppet regime of more powerful radical forces, Israel could find itself in a dire situation.

For along its Eastern border, there may no longer be a conservative, relatively moderate pro-Western monarchy but in all likelihood, an extreme Muslim regime with an incandescent hostility towards the Jewish state. This will make the highlands of Judea & Samaria (“West Bank”) even more crucial for Israel’s security.

Avoiding the nightmare

The underlying lesson for Israeli policymakers is that the country’s working assumption must be that the Hashemite Kingdom has a limited shelf-life and it would be wildly imprudent to base any long-term strategic planning on its long-term durability.

Consequently, Israeli strategic planners must prepare blueprints for the country to contend with a daunting situation in which—along its longest frontier and narrowest dimension—it is confronted with a huge expanse of hostile territory, stretching from the fringes of Greater Tel Aviv to the border of Iraq—and perhaps beyond.

As Israel has little to no ability to determine who will—and who will not—rule Jordan, the only way it can avoid this potential nightmare scenario is to ensure continued its own control of these highlands—which ipso facto—precludes the establishment of a future Palestinian state on them.

©Martin Sherman. All rights reserved.