The Alliance between Socialism and Islam

Posted on December 28, 2023 by theartfuldilettante

The West shares an old problem with the rest of the world: the constant menace of totalitarian zealots determined to interfere in the lives of others, however they brand themselves ideologically, citing religious or political dogma.

What sets the West apart is that it has actually been the home of free thought since the Enlightenment. However, the pressure on freedom worldwide has been growing; there is no such thing as eternal peace. Civilization depends on solidly founded institutions for its lasting protection against barbarism—and as always, the Jews are the canary in the coalmine. Totalitarianism, whether it marches under the banners of fascism, socialism, or Islamism, has the Jews and free society as its enemies.

Increasing its vulnerability to totalitarianism, the West has a tendency to melancholic self-torment that has weakened morality and social cohesion, and without warning, it reached a peak three years ago, prompted by controversial police business. On the tarmac of a Minneapolis intersection and under the knee of an officer, a career criminal died, as upset bystanders filmed the incident. Both the main officer and his colleagues were convicted in court, and it would seem that justice had thereby been served. Even before the legal proceedings were over however, things unraveled.

Leftist news outlets and social media unanimously canonized the deceased. Straight away, his death became the symbol of an alleged social phenomenon called “structural racism.” Posthumously, the 46-year-old man, a rapper wannabe, but without any real success in life, rose to fame, presented as the very epitome of a victim in the equally destructive and mendacious oppressor-oppressed narrative of our time.

Subsequently, riots broke out across the country. For a start, the street protests may have evoked nostalgic memories of the 1960s civil rights battles—however, the agenda was completely different this time. Marches led by political activists, who instantly scented the morning air of untapped opportunities, though typically characterized as “mostly peaceful,” deteriorated into random vandalism and Haitian-style mass lootings. Not humility, but vengeance, characterized the attitude of the ravaging crowd.

As the protests spread, it became clear that they were set on crushing the institutional framework of the Western world. That was the true scope of the conflict. In short, the protests challenged a social order resting on freedoms and the rule of law. Under the guise of moral outrage, implacably anti-democratic forces in the midst of our society, “anti-racist,” “anti-colonialist,” or plainly “socialist” by name, succeeded in seducing public opinion.

Held back by indecision, authorities allowed a general atmosphere of anarchy to paralyze large parts of society, notably in cities like Portland, Los Angeles, and Seattle. At the time, slogans such as “defund the police” echoed in the streets. Revolution was in the air. A motley crew of self-styled “leaders,” who all had issues with the present society, mingled with the crowd and called for a fight against “capitalism,” “colonialism” (past and present), “Zionism,” and “moral traditionalism,” which included “sexual conventionalism.” The perception that the most savage attacks on social order were somehow legitimate, combined with the absence of law enforcement, emboldened every resentful maladaptee. Now was the chance to take revenge on the world.

Like socialist agitators of the past, the leaders of Black Lives Matter (BLM) knew how to play the game—they were “trained” Marxists after all. Impatient to exploit the momentum and rally the protesters around a common cause, they leaned towards conspiratorial rhetoric. It represents a strategy well-known from the recruitment of the street mob: Blame everybody but yourself for the misfortunes of your life (e.g. “white bigots,” “capitalists,” or “Jews”—depending on the political season). Rather than having to account for anything, the terrifying brigades of covetous, envious, and maladapted souls could now, inspired by BLM, plead their victimhood.

Obvious distortions of historical realities (the 1619 Project), set the ideological agenda. Being rewritten from the revisionist perspective of identity politics, history turned into a single indictment against people of European descent for racism—and, implicitly, a colonialist view of the rest of the world. At universities, a witch-hunt for academics unwilling to sacrifice truth for political orthodoxy cost unknown numbers of employees their livelihoods. Undocumented, grotesque claims of such a nature that they ought to embarrass the scientific community, conflicting with common sense, principles of civilized reasonability, and the spirit of the constitution, gained access to the classrooms, creating distrust and division between population groups.

Alienated from the spirit of the founding fathers, by the looks of it, the nation that heroically saved the world from totalitarian rule during World War II and the Soviet era now approached a state of perplexity. The absence of organized, assertive resistance from a great nation, whose freedom-loving constitution and democratic institutions have been ideals for the rest of the world, was at least as disheartening as the pure savagery of the protesters.

Not least the vulnerability of honored academic institutions, like the universities of Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford, to the wildest whims of wokeism (e.g. the toe-curling “teachings” of philosophical impostors such as Ibram Xolani Kendi) and anti-Semitic activism is deeply shameful; it shows a disturbing degree of intellectual cowardice.

The universities, if any, should stand together in these times of crisis and issue a call to arms, protecting the nation from the enemies of civilization. However, it is as if the academia of the West, in the absence of Christianity, has no real resilience to show for it, but falters before a determined enemy; hoping to appease the totalitarian beast it is willing to submit to irrationality and barbarism. It has allowed the uncivilized, violent street fighters to storm the gates and conquer the campus and auditoriums with intolerance, hate speech, and cancellation.

The development in our society is reminiscent of the ravaging behavior of Nazi thugs in the streets of the Weimar Republic, culminating in Kristallnacht, and at German and Austrian universities in the late 1930s. Millennia-old nations of culture then fell without any appreciable resistance in the fight against barbarism. Neither as individuals nor as a group, unprotected by the rest of society (which barely recognizes the existential threat to free thought), do the present-day academics have the courage to go against the violent activists rampaging the streets. To survive as private persons, they can choose to go along with it, feigning sympathy for the subversive agenda, or withdraw from public life altogether.

Who, then, might come to our rescue and resist the toxic propaganda of wokeism (and socialism)? Who will safeguard our way of life? To whom can we ultimately entrust the responsibility of protecting our precious institutions from degradation by totalitarian forces in society?

English professor emeritus Mark Weightman Bauerlein has been a relentless critic of his contemporaries. In books and lectures, he has chronicled the intellectual decline at American universities, warning against the effects of undue politicization, like anti-meritocratic initiatives under the heading of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). Making a mockery of academic excellence, it is a disturbing tendency that has the potential to undermine our civilization.

Originally, Bauerlein portrayed the generation named “millennials.” With unwavering faith in the future, sociologists and others from the progressive elite had self-assuredly predicted these people to become the best educated of all generations in history. However, Bauerlein argues that the millennials, which should take over the world and make it at better place to live, have disappointed terribly. The same, for that matter, generally applies to their successors, the so-called “zoomers,” who occupy campus in 2023. Too self-absorbed, complacent, and lazy to make the necessary sacrifices of scientific commitment, they follow the whims of political fashion, susceptible to sentimental, dramatized evidence and the machinations of pseudoscience, e.g. sociological and environmental.

Strangers to history, classical literature, and natural sciences, the young students evade the comprehensive reading (and disciplined, meticulous learning) of previous generations, and are largely ignorant. Accordingly, they are incapable of the critical, independent, and balanced assessment of facts that should characterize an academic. They are helpless kids swayed by propaganda based on distorted notions of victimhood, the intrinsic evil of the West, and the unlimited right to reparation of the oppressed.

BLM took advantage of an unfortunate death to step up its fight against Western society. The movement exploited the sympathy that rightfully belonged to the civil rights movement, took the fight a step further, crossed the line, and ultimately joined the enemies of freedom; the policy makers did so because they are socialists at heart. In the wake of the “10/7” atrocities, the organization of BLM showed its true colors by siding with Islamists in the Middle East.

A black man expired under the knee of a white man, and his death was a gift to leftwing political activists—the extremists. To the enemies of freedom, death does not mark tragedy, but opportunity; death serves as the fuel of political zealotism.

Many keep wondering about the alliance between socialists and Islamists. What could they possibly have in common? Well, a common enemy, stupid! And that enemy is the West, the open society, enlightenment, and freedom. America, ultimately.

Lars Møller holds the position of chief physician at a psychotherapeutic clinic for patients with severe personality disorders, PTSD etc.

Image generated by AI.

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Israel in the Shadow of American Decline

Posted on December 27, 2023 by theartfuldilettante

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Skip to comments.Israel in the Shadow of American Decline-The real existential danger to Israel.
Frontpagemagazine ^ | December 27, 2023 | David Goldman

Posted on 12/27/2023, 9:04:10 AM by SJackson

And the word of the Lord came unto me the second time, saying, What seest thou? And I said, I see a seething pot; and the face thereof is toward the north.

Then the Lord said unto me, Out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land. – Jeremiah 1:13-14

Strictly speaking, Israel’s Gaza war is not a tragedy, but rather a hideous accident. Many wars wait for years to happen until they can’t be stopped. Those are the tragedies. This one never should have happened. Israeli intelligence had the plans for the October 7 Hamas attack a year in advance, as well as urgent warnings from lower-echelon officers just before the event. But the top military and political leadership brushed them off.

This fits a venerable pattern. Stalin had the plans for Operation Barbarossa from his spy Victor Sorge; U.S. Naval Intelligence had warnings about the attack on Pearl Harbor; and the FBI had the jigsaw-puzzle pieces of 9/11, but failed to fit them together. Intelligence services are not rewarded for timely warnings, but for serving their masters’ political agendas, and Israel’s fabled spies turned out to be no different than their counterparts in other countries. Believing that $40 million a month in subsidies from Qatar and other economic concessions would keep Hamas quiet, the Israeli government refused to consider anything else.

There simply is no contest between 300,000 regular troops from the Israel Defense Forces and 30,000 to 40,000 lightly armed Hamas irregulars, any more than there was a contest between ISIS and the American army and its proxies. Whether Hamas is entirely or largely extirpated from Gaza depends on the extent to which Israel can resist American pressure to vitiate its operations. The outcome will not be much different in any case. Whatever happens, most of Gaza’s two million residents will spend the next couple of years in tent camps while the rest of the world dickers about what to do with them. Their living conditions will be similar to those of the more than 200,000 Jewish refugees who lived in tent cities for up to two years after they were expelled from Arab countries following the 1948 war.

For all the horrors of the October 7 attacks, they did not constitute an existential crisis for a country with the region’s most powerful military and an extraordinary capacity for national solidarity in the face of external threat.

The existential danger to Israel comes not from its southern border, but rather—as in Jeremiah 1:13-14—from the distant north, specifically Ukraine. The Biden Administration previously imagined that it could force regime change in Russia through crippling sanctions. Instead, a large part of world trade and financial currents skirted American sanctions, leaving Russia with barely-diminished oil revenues and a steady supply of high-tech components from China, directly and through such intermediaries as Turkey, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Armenia. Rather than collapsing by 50 percent as President Biden predicted, Russia’s economy grew by 3 percent in 2023 after contracting by just 2.1 percent in 2022. Putin had an 80 percent approval rating as of October 2023. The Biden team is responsible for the grossest blunder in the checkered history of American foreign policy.

America’s strategic position is about to suffer a blow on par with, and perhaps more devastating than, the 1975 collapse of Vietnam. With a resident population of less than 30 million against Russia’s population of 147 million, Ukraine cannot put enough men in the field to hold the line against a Russian army with comparable technology and much greater firepower. The West can’t produce enough artillery shells, so Ukraine is firing hundreds of howitzer shells daily while Russia fires thousands. Both sides have lost 70,000 to 100,000 and three or four times that number wounded, but Russia has several times more people. None of the West’s Wunderwaffen have made a difference, and the Russians have some nasty weapons of their own, as well as clear air superiority.

Attempting to move NATO’s boundaries to the Russian-Ukraine border may have been the stupidest act in the sorry drama of American foreign policy, and President Biden’s declaration on March 26, 2022 that Putin cannot be allowed to remain in power may be the emptiest boast ever by an American leader. With few exceptions, the American foreign policy establishment has wagered its credibility on the outcome of this war. Although a few establishment stalwarts like Richard Haass talk of “redefining success in Ukraine,” i.e., declaring victory and going home, most of the Establishment has closed ranks. The professional penalties for doing otherwise are severe.

Making Enemies

The atmosphere in Washington resembles Vienna in the Spring of 1914 as depicted by Robert Musil in The Man Without Qualities (1930): The reader, but none of the protagonists, knows that their world of illusions is about to come to a horrible end. The American Establishment refuses to know this, but Russia knows it, as do China, the Gulf States, and everyone else. The change in the world balance of power after the collapse of Ukraine will be so dramatic that all the players in this global game are cautious about their next step. But Russia and China are probing American weaknesses in ways that remain well below the threshold of a casus belli, testing American responses.

Israel will suffer collateral damage. It needs American weapons, ammunition, and spare parts, especially with ammunition stockpiles depleted by the Ukraine war. It also depends on America’s veto at the U.N. Security Council. It does not help that the Biden Administration, with a view toward the pro-Palestinian sympathy of its progressive base, is doing whatever it can to hold Israel back from the military actions required to mop up Hamas. Although the American alliance is indispensable for Israel in the short term, the decline of American power will contribute to the strategic encirclement of Israel over time.

The late Henry Kissinger was asked on October 20, in his last published interview: “Is there the possibility for Russia to show greater involvement in the Middle East?” He answered: “Before the Ukrainian war, Russia was generally in favor of Israel in the confrontation with Arabs. If Russia now would intervene, it has two options: to engage on the side of the Arabs or to appear as a mediator in the crisis—which would be strange in light of the Ukrainian war.”

Since Russia intervened in the Syrian civil war in 2015 to prevent the Sunni jihad against the Assad government from creeping into the Russian Caucasus, Israel and Russia have maintained correct if not cordial relations in the Syrian theater. The Russians stood by while the Israeli Air Force flew thousands of sorties against Iranian-backed militias in Syria. That is critical for Israel’s security on its northern flank, where it faces a Hezbollah force three times as large as Hamas, armed with perhaps 150,000 missiles, including many modern models that may be able to evade Israeli defenses.

Now Russia’s turn toward Iran is cause for serious concern. At the end of November, Iran announced that it had “finalized” a deal to buy Russian SU-35 fighters from Russia, an airframe roughly comparable to the F-15s flown by the Israelis. It is not known whether the Russians will sell fully-loaded warplanes with advanced avionics and air-to-air missiles, or a less potent export version. Presumably, that is a matter for negotiation.

The Russians play chess while Americans play Monopoly, and the obvious Russian move in response to an American attempt to control the center of the board in Ukraine is to open a fianchetto with Iran.

I warned in 2008:

If Washington chooses to demonize Russia, the likelihood is that Russia will become a spoiler with respect to American strategic interests in general, and use the Iranian problem to twist America’s tail. That is a serious risk indeed, for nuclear proliferation is the one means by which outlaw regimes can pose a serious threat to great powers. Russia confronts questions not of expediency, but of existence, and it will do whatever it can to gain maneuvering room should the West seek to “punish” it for its actions in Georgia.

One irony of the present crisis is that Washington’s neo-conservatives, by demanding a tough stance against Russia, may have harmed Israel’s security interests more profoundly than any of Israel’s detractors in American politics. The neo-conservatives are not as a rule Jewish, but many of them are Jews who have a deep concern for Israel’s security—as does this writer. If America turns Russia into a strategic adversary, the probability of Israel’s survival will drop by a big notch.

Putin’s state visit to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, complete with military aircraft streaming the Russian colors, was “nothing less than Putin’s return to the world stage,” Germany’s Die Welt wrote Dec. 12. Later that week Putin received senior Iranian officials in Moscow.

Knives Out

Iran evidently decided to sit out the present Gaza conflict, rather than (as many feared) opening a second front against Israel in the north. But it is probing through its cat’s paw militias, testing Western responses. Hezbollah fired about 50 rockets at Israeli positions in November, compared to 4,000 rockets during the 2006 Lebanon war. The Houthi militia of Yemen has fired anti-ship missiles and drones at civilian ships, effectively diverting freight traffic out of the Red Sea. On December 18, the Pentagon announced a ten-country coalition (with the glaring absence of the Gulf States) to protect shipping.

In Asia, meanwhile, China’s navy Dec. 10 staged a minor standoff with Japanese vessels near the disputed Senkaku Islands. Chinese ships have harassed Philippine vessels with water cannons as they attempted to resupply Philippine forces in the South China Sea.

These are probes rather than preparations for war. The reading that China drew from Xi Jinping’s mid-November summit with President Biden is that America is frightened by the prospect of military engagement with China. The main American ask in San Francisco was the restoration of the hotline between the two militaries, which China suspended after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. China also extracted an unambiguous statement from the White House that “we obviously don’t support independence for Taiwan.”

The U.S. Navy is outgunned within 1,000 miles or so of China’s coast. “The [People’s Liberation Army Air Force’s] ground-based missile forces complement the air and sea-based precision strike capabilities of the PLAAF and PLAN,” reported the Pentagon’s on November 29, 2022. “The PLARF continues to grow its inventory of DF-26 IRBMs, which are designed to rapidly swap conventional and nuclear warheads. They are also capable of precision land-attack and anti-ship strikes in the Western Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and the South China Sea from mainland China.” Like the Battleship Lobby of the 1930s, the Pentagon built the wrong kind of fleet: Too many aircraft carriers, now as vulnerable as battleships in 1940, and not enough submarines. To call attention to this fact is career suicide, which explains why the public debate focuses on cheap, quick fixes—more 155mm shells and HIMARS rockets for Taiwan, for example.

A Ukrainian defeat in the form of a significant loss of territory and a long-term ceasefire would remind the rest of the world of Kissinger’s quip that it is dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, but fatal to be our friend.

Israel will have to deal with a less cooperative Russia that dallies with Iran, a China that seeks to exploit anti-colonial resentment in the Global South against Israel, a more assertive and better-armed Iran, and a vitiated American commitment to Western Asia. Its immediate problems are less dire than they appear: Except for Qatar and possibly some parts of the Turkish political spectrum, the rest of the world is happy to see Israel destroy Hamas. The Sunni jihad to which Hamas declares its allegiance is a persistent security problem for both Russia and China. Iran has armed and funded Hamas, but it does not want a Sunni entity to emerge as the main opposition to Israel. Israel’s long-term problems, though, are worse than they appear, and will come to the surface when the dust settles in Ukraine.

The event most likely to mitigate Israel’s strategic predicament would be the election of Donald Trump to a second term in 2024. Unlike the neoconservatives and global liberals presently in charge, Trump has no interest in regime change in Russia, and has no reason to perpetuate the blunders of others. He has pledged to end the war in Ukraine, which means cutting America’s losses. He is likely to maintain strong American support for Israel while limiting damage to America’s position abroad by conflict avoidance with Russia and China. Unlike the Biden foreign policy team, Trump has little interest in how other countries manage their affairs: his concern is the best deal for the United States.

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1 posted on 12/27/2023, 9:04:10 AM by SJackson

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To: SJackson

He’s got my vote! However, let’s remember that an alliance of Russia and Iran against Israel has been prophesied. And it will come to pass.

2 posted on 12/27/2023, 9:08:52 AM by Former Fetus (Saved by grace through faith)

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To: dennisw; Cachelot; Nix 2; veronica; Catspaw; knighthawk; Alouette; Optimist; weikel; Lent; GregB; ..

Middle East and terrorism, occasional political and Jewish issues Ping List. High Volume If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.

3 posted on 12/27/2023, 9:09:50 AM by SJackson (In a war of ideas it is people who get killed.)

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To: SJackson

BEGALA==SLIME ON MOVING FEET

4 posted on 12/27/2023, 12:08:15 PM by ridesthemiles

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A Conspiracy of Trolls

Posted on December 27, 2023 by theartfuldilettante

Ah, the grand old art of making people hate one another. It’s as easy as telling Group A that Group B think they’re a bunch of lowbrows who wouldn’t know culture if it came up and bit them on their mass-market jeans. Then you flip the script and inform Group B that Group A look down on them with the kind of disdain usually reserved for unflushed toilets. Don’t even try to use logic; we’re dealing in the commodity of raw, unrefined emotions here. Groups C, D, and E may also get involved, depending on the size of the conspiracy theory you’re spinning. You can stir the pot or set the whole kitchen on fire.

Why make people hate one another? Well, it’s either because you’re the type of person who believes that “divide and conquer” is a great strategy for a Tuesday afternoon, or you’re nursing a grudge against society so big that it needs its own ZIP code. Sure, real conspiracies are out there, playing hide and seek. But why not toss a few faux conspiracies into the mix? It’s like adding a little glitter to the dust — distracts the eye while the real dirt gets swept under the rug.

Now let’s take Marxist ideology for a spin. This is a conspiracy theory on steroids, jazzed up with academic jargon. It’s a long and winding tale of how, since Adam and Eve decided to binge on a fruit diet, the rich have been conspiring against the poor, inventing such devious instruments of oppression as gods and religion, private property, family, the rule of law, and that pesky thing called morality. Modern remixes include gender, race, ethnicity, and even flipping the bird at different species, climate, and the environment.

What’s the endgame? You chop up society into neat little groups — A, B, C, and so on. Feed them a steady diet of bile to turn them against one another, with each faction glaring suspiciously at their neighbors, as if everyone’s scheming to pilfer the biggest slice of the communal pie. And then, with a flourish, you step in as the hero, promising to turn off this horror show if — and only if — they hand you the keys to the kingdom. Classic.

The good old USSR wielded a playbook of divisive tactics so cunning, it could’ve made Machiavelli blush. They weren’t just the masters of the “us vs. them” narrative; they were the grand puppeteers, pulling strings from the IRA to FARC to the PLO. Every terrorist mob and communist outfit — the original “hate groups” — was their marionette. When hate and violence around the world reached the boiling point, they’d point the finger at capitalist societies and say, “Look, they started it!”

Putin’s Russia not only inherited this delightful bag of tricks from the USSR, but also gave it a tech-savvy makeover. Behold the infamous “troll factory“ in St. Petersburg, a veritable hive of digital discord, with subsidiaries in Venezuela and other client states in various geographical regions. Picture hundreds of thousands of inflammatory social media posts, in every language under the sun, all crafted to whip up a frenzy of hate. To land a gig at that illustrious establishment, you must be able to pretend you’re someone you’re not and cook up the juiciest, most divisive tales you can think of.

Remember the 2016 presidential elections? Those trolls were like party-crashers on all social media platforms, posing alternatively as Trump- and as Hillary-supporters, with a mission to paint each side as so utterly ridiculous, so thoroughly despicable, that hate seemed like the only logical response. And let’s not forget the cherry on top — the largest and most active BLM page on Facebook, also a Russian troll production. If you thought they called it a day after the election, guess again. These guys are the Energizer bunnies of social strife.null

The internet and social media once seemed like places where everyone would hold hands in digital harmony. But that utopian dream machine quickly devolved into a creepy masquerade, where everyone is invited, but nobody knows who’s behind the mask. Take Quora.com, for instance. It used to be this cozy global campfire where anyone could toss in a question, and the rest of the world huddled around to offer answers. — a digital kumbaya moment, providing hours of delightful, informative banter. Ah, the good old days.

Enter Russian trolls, the ever-enthusiastic interlopers in our global conversation. They are paid to turn even the most innocuous platforms into battlegrounds by planting fake stories and allegations that could start a bar fight in a monastery. They pit whites against blacks, women against men, Europeans against Americans, Christians against atheists, Hispanics against English-speakers, homo against hetero, and everyone against the Jews. It’s like a twisted game of societal Jenga, where the aim is to pull out the right block and watch everything collapse.

For example, there is one user named “Siayox,” with a profile picture right out of Central Casting for “Hipster You’d Least Like to Have a Beer With.” This supposedly English-speaking dude describes himself — using his original spelling and grammar — as “Writer, and proud white-man who care about science and logic. With out white-men you wont able enjoy around fancy and save places.”

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The grammatical horror show aside, he poses alternatively as a black boy, a white woman, or a Germanic neo-Nazi, with questions meant to incite anger and contempt. These queries also serve as a place for fellow trolls to spew fake tales of oppression and hurl insults while masquerading as members of various ethnic and religious groups.

What’s the telltale sign of the Russian connection? Amid the posts meant to demoralize Western societies, there’s a recurring theme, a narrative that is as subtle as a sledgehammer and about as nuanced. Of all the world conflicts, and out of the 195 recognized countries in the world, these supposed “Americans” and “Europeans” chose to focus on Ukraine, praising the Russian invasion and branding the dispossessed Ukrainian refugees as “racist Nazis.”null

Below is a shortened list of Siayox’s greatest hits. The full roster is here — a reminder that in the world of online manipulation, nothing is as it seems, and the person behind the keyboard could be anyone, anywhere — churning out discord like it’s going out of style.

I’m a black kid. Do white people hate me?
I’m white and I definitely believe that Cleopatra was African American. Why do we get angry about this?
Why don’t women just go back to the kitchen?
I’m a black man. I believe that Richard III was an African American. Why are white people denying this?
I’m white and I dont like Jewish people. Am I racist?
I’m black and I wonder when will we get our reparations from white people?
I’m a black girl and I believe that Richard III was African American. Why do British people deny this if they have evidence supporting this claim?
Why do people say that there’s no Nazi and racism in Ukraine while my self as a black person living in Ukraine faced the most disgusting treatments you can ever imagine as a human?
Why are many anti-Nazi and non-white countries siding with Russia against “racists” in Ukraine? Why is that? Is it true that Ukrainians are Nazis?
As a white Ukrainian refugee, I don’t want to live with blacks. Do you think that the British government should deport them into their countries?
I’m a Ukrainian refugee but I don’t want to be around blacks and other inferior ones. Does that make me racist?
I’m a white supremacist and support Ukraine. What is wrong with that?
Is it appropriate to leave my fourteen-year-old daughter alone with her black stepfather when I go out?
I’m a white woman and I’m so sorry, but why do I feel so disgusted when I see someone of another race?
I’m a white boy and I feel some kind of superiority over my black mates in school. Where is this coming from?
Why do people still deny white superiority with all actual scientific evidences around them?
I’m proud being Germanic, man, gentle, and white. Does that offend other races?

This is just one troll. There are many more in this circus, where the clowns change masks faster than a chameleon on a kaleidoscope. Some have a better command of English than others, but all of them tend to switch their race, sex, age, or political views depending on the topic. Now he’s a conservative grandpa lamenting women in the military, and moments later he’s a woke college feminist blaming all historical atrocities on white males.

The same spectacle unfolds on Facebook, X-Twitter, and other platforms. Some trolls pose as “crazy liberals,” others as “angry conservatives.” Spotting these shape-shifters isn’t always easy, especially when they occasionally echo your own thoughts. A surge of blinding anger upon reading a post is usually a red flag. These posts are crafted to dehumanize, to stir the pot of hatred with a big, invisible spoon. It helps to check their profiles before sharing their musings. Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet for trolls — even if there were, they’d change their pattern, and we’d be left guessing again.

Reading this article may not turn you into a troll-resistant superhero, but it should at least boost your immunity. The next time you see trolls singing your tune, remember that they’re not in your fan club. Their mission is to weaken and split us apart as a nation. If they can’t be as good as us, they’d settle for dragging us down to their level. And yes, this is a real conspiracy — not to be confused with the fake ones, often spread by the same trolls.

For an ultimate piece of advice, let’s time-travel to pre-internet Tibet and consult Milarepa, a 12th-century yogi who lived without a smartphone or social media. He warned not to be like the dog that chases every stick thrown its way. Instead, be more like a lion, who goes after the thrower. In the world of trolls, being a lion means seeing through the charade and refusing to play the game. Don’t get caught up in every provocation, but focus on the source and understand the intent. Nobody throws a stick at a lion twice.

Image: David King via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

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Michelle Obama Is Absolutely Political

Posted on December 26, 2023 by theartfuldilettante

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December 26, 2023

Michelle Obama Absolutely Is Political

By Joel Gilbert

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Upon hearing the notion that Michelle Obama may be the presidential candidate for Democrats in 2024, many Republicans reflexively recite the mantra that she is enjoying her life and is not political. Let me make one thing clear: Michelle Obama is a political animal. Republicans must quickly begin to prepare for her candidacy.

Michelle grew up as the daughter of a Chicago Democrat party precinct captain. She has written about making the rounds with her father from age 4, visiting homes in her area to get out the black vote for the white liberal Chicago Democrat party machine. Michelle has also noted that people came to her house seeking money from her father, Fraser Robinson. In high school, Michelle was elected repeatedly to the student council and was class treasurer. Michelle befriended Santita Jackson, the daughter of Jesse Jackson, and has said, “I grew up in that man’s house.” Yes, Michelle spent much time at Jesse Jackson’s house while he was preparing to run for president. “I’ve seen it all,” Michelle said of the experience.

At Princeton University, Michelle was elected to the board of the Third World Center, a radical black activist fraternity. Michelle and Barack had a mutual professor at Harvard, though in different years, named Charles Ogletree. When Barack was elected president, Ogletree told TMZ that between Barack and Michelle, he would have thought Michelle more likely to run for president.

In Chicago, Michelle befriended another political animal, the former head of the Weather Underground domestic terrorist group and accused cop-killer Bernardine Dohrn. Michelle worked with her for two years at the Sidley Austin law firm and had dinners at her home with Bill Ayers for years, right up until the time Barack ran for U.S. Senate in 2004. Dohrn was Michelle’s first guest speaker at Public Allies, the community organizing group she ran. Yes, like Barack, Michelle was also a community organizer for three years. In marrying a politician, she married her father.

On the 2008 campaign trail, Michelle spoke to huge adoring crowds across the country, trumpeting word for word the anti-American rhetoric she’d learned from Dohrn. The media largely ignored the nastiness until Michelle proclaimed, upon Barack winning a primary, “For the first time in my life, I’m proud of my country.” This earned Michelle a Republican and media backlash. The next day, she hired a speechwriter and declared, “I hate politics. I just want to be the mom in chief.” This earned Michelle an immediate respite and reshaped Michelle’s public persona from a highly political anti-American radical into a mom who hates politics.

To a degree, Michelle was being truthful. All politicians hate politics — it’s grueling and annoying — but they put up with it because they love power.

With this context, you can understand why I researched Michelle Obama’s true life history and published the film and book of the same name, Michelle Obama 2024: Her Real Life Story and Plan for Power. Seeing Joe Biden’s advanced age, immense unpopularity, and terrible polls, Democrat party leaders such as Barack Obama and David Axelrod have observed that Biden is likely going to lose to Trump. In the wings, however, waits the very political Michelle Obama. Lucky for us, she let it all hang out when she tweeted a two-part statement on January 7, 2021, one day after “January 6.” Interestingly, on the day following this statement, the tech companies did what Michelle asked them to do: ban Donald Trump from social media. null

Michelle’s January 7 Twitter manifesto deserves to be read in full. Can there be any doubt that Michelle Obama is a political animal who has her sights on the White House in 2024?

Michelle Obama, January 7, 2021:

I woke up yesterday elated by the news of Reverend Raphael Warnock’s election victory. He’ll be Georgia’s first Black senator, and I was heartened by the idea that the Senior Pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church—the home parish of Dr. King and a spiritual and organizational hub during the Civil Rights Movement—would be representing his state in the United States Senate.

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In just a few hours, though, my heart had fallen harder and faster than I can remember. Like all of you, I watched as a gang—organized, violent, and mad they’d lost an election—laid siege to the United States Capitol. They set up gallows. They proudly waved the traitorous flag of the Confederacy through the halls. They desecrated the center of American government. And once authorities finally gained control of the situation, these rioters and gang members were led out of the building not in handcuffs, but free to carry on with their days. The day was a fulfillment of the wishes of an infantile and unpatriotic president who can’t handle the truth of his own failures. And the wreckage lays at the feet of a party and media apparatus that gleefully cheered him on, knowing full well the possibility of consequences like these.

It all left me with so many questions—questions about the future, questions about security, extremism, propaganda, and more. But there’s one question I just can’t shake: What if these rioters had looked like the folks who go to Ebenezer Baptist Church every Sunday? What would have been different?null

I think we all know the answer. This summer’s Black Lives Matter protests were an overwhelmingly peaceful movement—our nation’s largest demonstrations ever, bringing together people of every race and class and encouraging millions to re-examine their own assumptions and behavior. And yet, in city after city, day after day, we saw peaceful protestors met with brute force. We saw cracked skulls and mass arrests, law enforcement pepper spraying its way through a peaceful demonstration for a presidential photo op.

And for those who call others unpatriotic for simply taking a knee in silent protest, for those who wonder why we need to be reminded that Black Lives Matter at all, yesterday made it painfully clear that certain Americans are, in fact, allowed to denigrate the flag and symbols of our nation. They’ve just got to look the right way. What do all those folks have to say now?

Seeing the gulf between the responses to yesterday’s riot and this summer’s peaceful protests and the larger movement for racial justice is so painful. It hurts. And I cannot think about moving on or turning the page until we reckon with the reality of what we saw yesterday. True progress will be possible only once we acknowledge that this disconnect exists and take steps to repair it. And that also means coming to grips with the reality that millions voted for a man so obviously willing to burn our democracy down for his own ego.

I hurt for our country. And I wish I had all the solutions to make things better. I wish I had the confidence that people who know better will act like it for more than a news cycle or two. All I know is that now is a time for true patriotism. Now is the time for those who voted for this president to see the reality of what they’ve supported—and publicly and forcefully rebuke him and the actions of that mob. Now is the time for Silicon Valley companies to stop enabling this monstrous behavior—and go even further than they have already by permanently banning this man from their platforms and putting in place policies to prevent their technology from being used by the nation’s leaders to fuel insurrection.

And if we have any hope of improving this nation, now is the time for swift and serious consequences for the failure of leadership that led to yesterday’s shame.

Thankfully, even in the darkness, there are glimmers of hope. It’s something I imagine Reverend Warnock has preached about before—and I’m still heartened beyond belief that he’s headed to Washington. I’m glad his fellow Georgian, Jon Ossoff is, too, and that together they’ll help give control of Congress back to the only party that’s shown that it can put our democracy above its own short-term political fortunes. I pray that every American, especially those who disagree with them, will give our new Congress, President-Elect Biden, and Vice-President-Elect Harris the chance to lead us in a better direction.

But make no mistake: The work of putting America back together, of truly repairing what is broken, isn’t the work of any individual politician or political party. It’s up to each of us to do our part. To reach out. To listen. And to hold tight to the truth and values that have always led this country forward. It will be an uncomfortable, sometimes painful process. But if we enter into it with an honest and unwavering love of our country, then maybe we can finally start to heal.

Hollywood film director Joel Gilbert is president of Highway 61 Entertainment. Among his many films are political documentaries including The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America; Trump: The Art of the Insult; There’s No Place Like Utopia; Dreams from My Real Father; Atomic Jihad; and Farewell Israel: Bush, Iran and the Revolt of Islam and the new film and book Michelle Obama 2024: Her Real Life Story and Plan for Power.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

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Hamas Supporters Declare War on Christmas

Posted on December 25, 2023 by theartfuldilettante

“Inside Every Progressive Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out”—David Horowitz

Hamas Supporters Declare War on Christmas

“How many of y’all would come out on Christmas Day and ruin their Christmas?”

December 25, 2023 by Daniel Greenfield 24 Comments

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[Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]

“Joy is canceled,” read the signs wielded by Hamas supporters protesting a Christmas tree lighting at Columbia University. While a student group tried to sing, the terror backers shrieked, “there’s no room for celebration.” And no room for anything except terrorism and hate.

Supporters of the Islamic terrorist group took a special pleasure in attacking Christianity.

Carolers singing “Gloria in excelsis deo” or “Glory to God in the highest” at the Washington Square Park Christmas tree near New York University were shouted down by Muslim and leftist allies shrieking, “Shut it down! Shut it down!”

People have been killed for merely drawing cartoons of Mohammed, but Muslims feel empowered to shout down Christian hymns before Christmas a few miles from Ground Zero.

On the Boston Common, Hamas supporters defaced a nativity scene to read, “Jesus was Palestinian.”

Pro-Hamas rioters attacked the Rockefeller Christmas tree lighting in Manhattan. The Muslim American Society, a Muslim Brotherhood organization (the parent group of Hamas) whose mission is to promote “Islam as a total way of life” and Samidoun, a terrorist front group banned in Israel and Germany, announced plans to “Flood the Tree Lightning for Gaza”.

The ‘Flood’ name was a reference to Al-Aqsa Flood: the Hamas name for the atrocities of Oct 7.

Families were blocked from getting to the annual Christmas tradition as Hamas supporters rioted, assaulted police officers and chanted calls for the destruction of Israel and America.

“I had planned my holiday around this event, being a big fan of Christmas. Now I’m walled in by a bunch of terrorist-loving a–holes calling for intifada,” a British tourist complained.

“How many of y’all would come out on Christmas Day and ruin their Christmas?” Nerdeen Kiswani, the chair of Within Our Lifetime, an organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel, shouted at another New York City hate rally.

“Christmas is canceled,” Fatima Mohammed, a fellow former CUNY law student, yelled.

“No Christmas as usual,” terrorist supporters chanted outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral near Central Park while downtown stores were vandalized with graffiti, “Long live the intifada.”

Hamas supporters went on to rampage against “joy” at Christmas tree lightings around the country. In San Francisco’s Union Square, they threw down Christmas ornaments and planted their terrorist flag atop a Christmas tree. In Ypsilanti, Michigan, terror supporters showed up near a Christmas tree to proclaim that, “America is a terrorist state”.

At Seattle’s annual Christmas tree lighting, they brought a megaphone and chanted calls for the destruction of Israel. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds condemned the “protest in support of Hamas terrorists” during her celebration and Sacramento’s Christmas tree lighting in California’s state capital had to be canceled because of the anticipated pro-terror rallies.

And that is what the terrorists wanted.

“Christmas is canceled,” the Philly Palestine Coalition, which had previously been condemned for targeting a Jewish business, threatened. Two police officers were assaulted during pro-terrorist violence during one of its rallies in Rittenhouse Square.

“No Christmas in a Genocide” a San Francisco terrorist rally declared. The SFPD described how the rioters then “began to commit crimes ranging from assault to felony vandalism.”

A “Shut Christmas Down For Palestine” rally targeted shoppers in London and partially succeeded in shutting down local businesses. A terrorist supporter brandished a genocidal sign reading, “Death to settler colonialism everywhere. Viva Palestina.”

The Hamas supporters seemed to take a special delight in ruining Christmas for kids.

In Bradford, England, they berated children who were taking in a Coca Cola Christmas truck. In an Ottawa mall, terrorist supporters frightened children waiting in line for Santa while in a Toronto mall, the rampaging masked mob draped with keffiyahs threatened to kill shoppers.

And before Christmas Eve, terrorist supporters set out plans for blocking and flooding highways and roads near airports and commuter travel points to make sure people would be separated from their families. This was the closest thing to a victory for Muslim terrorist supporters.

When they say Christmas is canceled, they mean it. And they always have.

Before Hamas supporters began trying to shut down Christmas in New York City, San Francisco, London, Philly and at any of the hundreds of other pro-terrorist rallies around America and the world, they were shutting down Christmas in Gaza.

In 2011, it was reported that, “there hasn’t been a Christmas tree in Gaza City’s main square since Hamas pushed the Palestinian Authority out of Gaza in 2007 and Christmas is no longer a public holiday.”

In 2020, Hamas’ Director-General of the General Authority of Preaching had issued a directive to “Limit Interaction with Christmas”. That same year, Ahmad Kulab, the head of Hamas’ Department for Training of Preachers, warned that, “Christians must [keep] the celebration of their holidays to their homes, their houses of worship, and their churches.” And, quoting Islamic teachings, he denounced “the dwellers of Hellfire, the Jews and the Christians.”

After a backlash, Hamas appeared to allow small Christmas tree lightings to go forward.

Instead, Hamas supporters began shutting down Christmas in America. They shout about “occupation”, but they’re the ones doing the occupying. They’re occupying Christmas tree lightings and public celebrations, shouting down prayerful songs with hate, and using the season to call for death and destruction to be visited upon the enemies of Islam.

They’re serious about canceling joy and replacing it with hate and murder. And they’re serious about ending Christmas and intimidating, assaulting and killing those who defy them.

Hamas supporters shout Gaza has been invaded, when Gaza has actually invaded America.

When Christians can’t celebrate Christmas in peace, not only in Gaza, but in America, in Canada, in Australia and across Europe, who exactly has invaded whom?

And when does the invasion end?

The Gift of Christmas and Christian Nationalism

Posted on December 25, 2023 by theartfuldilettante

One of the many pathological critiques offered by our corrupt intellectual culture is an urgent warning about impending Christian Nationalism. This is the latest expression of a decades-long tradition that demonizes Republicans as coming to implement The Handmaid’s Tale and a fierce violation of a treasured canard of secularism: the separation of church and state. Christmas is more and more the cultural centering of Christianity as a cultural and political message. Now is an ideal time to arm ourselves against the serpents of false knowledge to better understand Jesus’ political message.

Of course, there is nothing more political than what has happened in human history than the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus. This is an important premise in responding to those who wish for Christianity to ‘not be politicized.’ Of course, it is wrong to subordinate Jesus to some ideological idol such as Naziism or the vicissitudes of the KKK. That is rather, however, the necessary point — a point that is profoundly political. Jesus embodies truth that will set us free. The eighth chapter of John contains Jesus’ teaching on the matter that “the truth will set us free” — veritas liberabit vos. This became a motto of many great universities, including Harvard. This great teaching is the cornerstone of 2000 years of critiquing the radical supremacies of human ideologies from Africa to the Asian continent. Humanity’s primary political argument is: we will kill those you love in public unless you agree with Us. No culture or human society has failed to observe this political rule that makes a mockery of truth and requires all of us to live in fear of present political orders. The intellectual commitment of “eternal life” in the manner Jesus described to fellow teacher Nicodemus, changes the entire human calculus grounded in brutal authoritarianism. Death loses its sting with this conviction and resurrects human idealism at the most pivotal moments of human history.

The Christmas accounts of Jesus’ birth in Matthew and Luke give us great insight into the politics of fear that dominate the historical and, yes, secular political imagination. The classic point elucidated by Linus in the Charlie Brown Christmas special describes the terror of the shepherd at first sight of angels:

“And an angel of the Lord suddenly stood near them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them; and they were terribly frightened. 10 And so the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people; 11 for today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”

Matthew’s gospel is more draconian and provides an elaborate plot of King Herod, who deceives in order to kill the baby Jesus before public hope can galvanize behind a possible messiah and savior in the region:

When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the magi, he became very enraged and sent men and killed all the boys who were in Bethlehem and all its vicinity who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had determined from the magi. 17 Then what had been spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled:

A voice was heard in Ramahnull

Weeping and great mourning,

Rachel weeping for her children;

And she refused to be comforted,

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Because they were no more.

Fear of political power is an unbroken thread of Matthew’s account, running from Joseph’s fear for Mary to their flight to Egypt trying to escape Herod’s plan. Christmas continues to illuminate the 21st century because political tyranny extrapolated by false ideologies continues to threaten humanity around the world. Agnosticism’s best hope of snuffing out the intellectual light of Christmas depends upon rooting out the public killing of the innocent as an argument. If the 20th century has any political message to communicate to us here in the impending 2024, it is that secularism has not only failed to deliver on such a promise of social justice, it has added itself as a rhetorical accelerant to the human bonfires of mass killing. Contrarians will observe that “religion has killed,” but again, that misses the rather profound and evident dialectic between Jesus the Teacher and the powerfully religious intellects of his day. Christianity is not anti-intellectual, but it does recognize intrinsically how dangerous intellectuals can be — especially when they choose to join in on the ‘big lie.’null

The recent three queens of America’s finest universities testifying to their ethical flexibility about rhetorical calls for “genocide of the Jews” are a crystal-clear reminder of how dangerous false knowledge is and how it grounds the deadly genocides of any age we care to look at. Christianity’s unusual care for individuals such as Jesus’ mother, Mary, the woman at the well, the furtive and frightened Nicodemus, and the associates of Lazarus devastated by the death of a close friend point to an intellectual critique of false knowledge. The wise men who deceive Herod are certainly from outside of town, but they know how knowledge can work to deadly ends that do everything but free us.

Ultimately, the Romans attached over Jesus’ head in Latin a rhetorical signature of mockery: “King of the Jews.” They were making the first and fierce rhetorical deconstruction of nascent Christian nationalism. Theirs was not the last word. But the Word that predates the world of human cruelty continues to give light to our lives today and hope for a future free of death as a text.

Dr. Ben Voth is a professor of rhetoric and director of debate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He has published six books on rhetoric, argumentation, and public policy.

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