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[Pre-order a copy of David Horowitz’s next book, America Betrayed, by clicking here. Orders will begin shipping on May 7th.]
Last week, Joe Biden issued a schoolmarmish warning to Israel, which he has been browbeating for months to placate his party’s anti-Israel left and Muslim American voters in Michigan, a critical swing state. Speaking to the press, he threatened, “There’s got to be a ceasefire because Ramadan – if we get into circumstances where this continues to Ramadan, Israel and Jerusalem could be very, very dangerous.”
This solicitude for Muslims’ sensitivity about their faith bespeaks the West’s long bad habit of caring more about Islam––the faith that conquered and occupied, and to this day still occupies, much of the Christian Roman and Byzantine empires––than they do about their own civilization’s foundational religion, whose adherents today are being persecuted and massacred in Islamic lands.
This cultural tic does not demonstrate, as many “citizen of the world” globalists believe, a superior morality based on both an uncritical tolerance for the exotic “other,” and a haughty disdain for alleged parochial American nationalism and jingoist patriotism. Rather, it signals to the world a civilizational failure of nerve so widespread and intense that it has become a form of geopolitical masochism, manifested in conspicuous displays of cringing apologetics and shameful guilt for the West’s alleged historical sins.
For example, Biden’s foreign policy crew, products of this ruling class sensibility, seem to think that Muslims view Ramadan the way Christians do Easter, and so will be deeply offended by Israel besmirching this sacred time by continuing to fight. Actually, as Bassam Tawil writes, “‘In the holy month of Ramadan,’ according to fatwa 1566/10013/L=1431, ‘the reward of virtues is increased.’” And martyrdom while waging jihad against infidels is a theological virtue par excellence.
Moreover, jihadists have only contempt for Christian and Jewish holy days, rituals, churches, and temples, even as they demand universal obeisance to every jot and tittle of Islamic doctrine. Tawil continues, “Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups have never hesitated to use Jewish holidays to wage war, carry out terrorist attacks and murder Jews, including October 7, 2023, which was the Jewish Sabbath and the Simchat Torah holiday––not to mention the launch of the Yom Kippur War by Egypt and Syria” in 1973.
This is just one example of the shameless double standard the self-loathing West has adopted in regard to Islam and Muslims. Christianity and Judaism, in contrast, are regularly disrespected, dismissed, blasphemed, and mocked by our cognitive elites, but few are offended or troubled about the feelings of those faiths’ adherents. Such insults are the cost of living in the secular Western world where religion has been banished from the town square, and free speech is privileged––unless, of course, Muslims, including sadistic butchers and brutal rapists like Hamas, are the targets.
Indeed, this blatantly appeasing double standard has increasingly characterized Western sensibilities since the Iranian revolution of 1978-79. A key consequence of that foreign policy disaster was the global empowerment of modern jihadist assaults on the West. One early example of the aggression against the West’s defining rights and principles such as free speech, was the fatwa that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued against Indian novelist Salman Rushdie for his “blasphemous” 1989 novel The Satanic Verses.
Across the world violent protests and riots erupted, while “cosmopolitan” Westerners sided with the Ayatollah. Celebrated British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper sniffed that he “would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring Mr. Rushdie’s manners, were to waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them.”
The Rushdie fatwa, however, is just one of many Muslim assaults on the postwar West and its principles. In 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death on the street by a Moroccan immigrant angered over van Gogh’s film Submission and its criticism of sharia laws that subordinate women. His collaborator Ayaan Hirsi Ali had to go into hiding to escape threats to her life for that offense, and for writing Infidel, which also criticized Muslim misogyny.
Much of the European response to these murderous reactions to Westerners practicing the foundation human right to free speech blamed the victims rather than supporting free speech. In England, for example, the Index on Censorship, supposedly a champion of free speech, called van Gogh a “free speech fundamentalist” who deserved death because he “roared his Muslim critics into silence with obscenities.”
Similarly, in 2005 after a Dutch newspaper published cartoons depicting Mohammed, 139 people died in subsequent rioting. The reaction of Europe likewise blamed the newspaper’s free speech rights for provoking the violence. A Dutch justice minister proposed to strengthen illiberal blasphemy laws to facilitate “integration” of Muslim immigrants, and to censor “possible explosive material in society to avoid reactions,” a euphemism for murder and mayhem.
More shameful, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, leaders of the “free world,” condemned the cartoons, and the EU proposed a “media code” to censor speech about religion. Of course, offenses against Christians or Jews and their faiths were not included. The EU justice minister further proclaimed that “we can and are ready to self-regulate that right” of free speech, and admitted that fear of violence justified censorship.
This masochistic support for violations of core Western principles even as they were under attacked, created what Daniel Pipes called the “Rushdie Rules,” the imperative that Westerners grovel before violent, illiberal theocrats, and even support their terror, as the current administration and its “red line” is doing in the case of Israel’s management of the defensive war against Hamas. Meanwhile, Christians and Jews remain fair game for insult and ridicule by the West’s sophisticated “brights”–– on the cheap, since they know that Christians and Jews aren’t going to murder them for exercising their right to speak freely in the town square.
Given such a record of sacrificing core Western values to gratify traditionalist Muslims, 20 years later we shouldn’t be surprised that our prestigious universities, media, and progressive politicians have supported Hamas’ sadistic, genocidal crimes against Israeli civilians; or that the U.S. president is actively undercutting Israel’s efforts to end decades of terrorist murder and bombardments; or that the Senate Majority Leader has interfered in Israel’s politics by calling for new elections, explicitly in order to remove Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Lame duck Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell got it right: “‘It is grotesque and hypocritical for Americans who hyperventilate about foreign interference in our own democracy to call for the removal of a democratically elected leader of Israel,’ he said. ‘This is unprecedented. We should not treat fellow democracies this way at all.’”
Finally, betraying a liberal-democratic ally to gratify brutal terrorists and their American fellow-travelers, is also a sign of a civilization in decline. As the 1st B.C. Roman historian Sallust wrote about the decaying Republic, “decadence and hubris—the natural dividends of prosperity” have come to dominate Western civilization. Even as we speak, ruthless enemies like Russia, China, and Iran are watching and waiting to try conclusions, as we indulge ourselves with dangerous distractions like DEI, anthropogenic global warming, “net-zero carbon” schemes, “systemic racism curricula,” and limitless fabricated “genders.”
Worse, while those rivals spend big bucks on their militaries, ours is dwindling both in men and materiel, caught in a state of “managed decline,” as the Wall Street Journal put it. Butter, not guns is the highest bipartisan priority: “The federal government gives more cash to state and local governments (e.g., Medicaid money) than it spends on its own defense. These are the priorities of a peacetime welfare state, not a nation serious about defending itself in a world of determined enemies and new technology that will put the U.S. at increasing risk.” We’re a few years away from spending more on entitlements than we do on defense. Such bad choices are another sign of a civilization in decline.
Our current malaise and dysfunctions are not just about our appeasement of modern jihadism. We are closing out a century of relentlessly sawing the civilizational branches we are sitting on, by discarding our Constitutional foundations, common sense, tradition, and the authority of nature and nature’s God in order to pursue impossible utopias.
We are swiftly approaching the consequences of such suicidal blindness––and, as George Orwell put it, we’re heading for a fall not into “a bed of roses, but a cesspit filled with barbed wire.”
Thank you, Bruce, for this compelling piece.
It used to be said that “Those who ignore History are doomed to repeat it.”
We are now replaying A.D. 476–the final Fall of Rome and the looting of The City by the barbarians on that dark night, when the Salian Gate was opened to them–and for many of the same reasons, although it took the Romans several centuries to decline and, finally, Fall, while it’s taken us, and Western Civilization itself, just a few decades.
We’ve allowed our young to be taught in their schools, from their earliest years, to despise and be ashamed of us and our country and Civilization. To reject and ridicule even the secular ones of the Ten Commandments, like not to Steal, “Bear False Witness” (like lying against a U.S. President, or a Supreme Court nominee); not to Murder (even “for reparations” for slavery); and not to Covet one’s neighbor’s wife, concubine, goat, cock, ass, or Trump Tower).
I worry that we’re either at The Edge, or, more realistically, are already going over it into the Abyss. Because we certainly are, right now.
I never expected this national suicide and collapse of America, my Home for 4 generations of my family, to happen within my own lifetime (I was born in 1952, so I’m now 72); but, clearly, it is, to my helpless and darkest despair.
Falling into despair is what the globalist elites want you to do. Use your time to demonstrate how our values, and only our values created civilisation.
What values are you referring to? The values and virtues that keep an individual alive and flourishing here on earth? Those are rational values that are gained and kept through rational virtues.
Self-preservation is the first virtue a man must practice if he wants to remain alive and pursue the rational values that will achieve his flourishing on earth. Self-preservation is the very opposite of self-sacrifice.
The following Christian verse is not exactly conducive to self-preservation or the personal pursuit of happiness:
Luke 6:27: “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.”
Of course. Let’s all be like the atheists and the Muslims, because you guys are accomplishing so much.
Has it occurred to you that the atheist philosophy is simply getting Jew and Christians killed.
If you don’t look after yourself who will?
If you ONLY look after yourself then what are you?
Jewish bible.
You’re evading the Bible quote I provided,
Luke 6:27: “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.”
The Bible quote is self-destructive, self-sacrificing, and altruistically suicidal.
Rational self-interest includes helping those DESERVING others who are your friends or family. Rational self-interest includes helping DESERVING strangers who are NOT your enemies.
“My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue….
Concern for the welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one’s selfish interests. If a man who is passionately in love with his wife spends a fortune to cure her of a dangerous illness, it would be absurd to claim that he does it as a “sacrifice” for her sake, not his own, and that it makes no difference to him, personally and selfishly, whether she lives or dies.
Any action that a man undertakes for the benefit of those he loves is not a sacrifice if, in the hierarchy of his values, in the total context of the choices open to him, it achieves that which is of greatest personal (and rational) importance to him. In the above example, his wife’s survival is of greater value to the husband than anything else that his money could buy, it is of greatest importance to his own happiness and, therefore, his action is not a sacrifice.
But suppose he let her die in order to spend his money on saving the lives of ten other women, none of whom meant anything to him—as the ethics of altruism would require. That would be a sacrifice. Here the difference between Objectivism and altruism can be seen most clearly: if sacrifice is the moral principle of action, then that husband should sacrifice his wife for the sake of ten other women. What distinguishes the wife from the ten others? Nothing but her value to the husband who has to make the choice—nothing but the fact that his happiness requires her survival.
The Objectivist ethics would tell him: your highest moral purpose is the achievement of your own happiness, your money is yours, use it to save your wife, that is your moral right and your rational, moral choice.” – Ayn Rand
That is impossible advice for the victims of October 7th. In fact, in most scenes, such advice is tantamount to suicide. Of course, we need to be aware of the limits of language interpretation, especially a language so old. And then, we need to be aware of the environment of advice to avoid taking something out of context. Nevertheless, it appears clear that such advice is to place the value of one’s life below that of an enemy, especially a psychotic enemy that delights in butchery.
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I can’t stop laughing every time I see Moo — Slums prostrating themselves on the ground,
banging their foreheads into the ground,
and elevating their arse-holes up in the air to Allah.
Depraved psychopathic murderous Islam has been a scourge on humanity for 1400 years.
Enough already.
That’s their first act when they walk across our border at Lukeville, Arizona and Jacumba, California, thousands every day.
And invited in, even rewarded handsomely for coming in.
The American Apocalypse is well underway …. managed and promoted and encouraged and
implemented by the US government bureaucracy itself and the American woke leftist democrat party and
the elite leftist oligarchic ruling class.
We were fortunate to win wwii. We may not win next time. The problem is that our leaders are weak and fools.
I have the solution to the situation in the middle east.
1) Decapitate the depraved psychopathic murderous Islamic Iranian regime.
2) Decapitate the depraved psychopathic murderous Islamic blackmailing Saudi Royal Family.
3) Decapitate the depraved psychopathic murderous Islamic blackmailing two faced Qatar Royal Family.
4) Decapitate the depraved psychopathic murderous Islamic blackmailing Emirates Royal Family.
5) Etc.Etc,Etc.Etc. …….
6) Anything less is a farce and a losing strategy that will continue to harm Israel, America and US citizens.
Depraved psychopathic murderous Islam is the enemy of Israel, America and US citizens, and the West.
Islam has been the depraved psychopathic murderous scourge of humanity for 1400 years.
Enough already.
Mr. Larry, your accurate comment cannot be more accurate.
What is scary is that so many voters literally do not know what they do when they cast their vote for Dems/rinos.
Attacks/vandalism is visited on Christian churches or shrines twice a day in France & Germany (England is catching up).
The only question is if the damage is inflicted by islam or leftist morons.
Notre Dame was burned down by islamists. As usual, leftist idiots rushed in to assure us it wasn’t islam . . . which helped prove that it was.
(A woman with a hijab parked a car-bomb in front the day before the fire, but it failed to detonate, so they went with Plan B.)
Thank you.
I wonder how bad it will have to get for enough more people to be alarmed to fix just SOME of the problems we have created.
I’m sorry my eyrs were crossed, i thought i read
“…How bad does it have to get for enough more people to be ARMED…”
That’s the real answer isn’t it. We’ve got unknown invaders crossing our border you know hell is coming. Forwarned is forearmed!
Great point.
This is exactly the point comedian Dennis Miller made on the radio several years ago. Iow, he thought things would have to get really, really bad before enough people start to wake up. We see this now in Chicago and a small few other places. The real problem is there is a probability the left has too much momentum to overcome at this late date. The left has our DOJ, schools. military, police, banks, corporate media, entertainment, big tech, social media. Couple that with our Congress. Shinguentes, far most are not the best and brightest among us. In fact, too many are simple grifters out for themselves. A couple years ago a top China educator boasted, yes, BOASTED, that they have people in the highest reaches of our Fed Gov. At that time we may have wondered how could they reach that high. Sadly, sadly now we know. Joe Biden, the dude who Obama described as some who will mess up whatever he touches. and O’s Sec of Def Robert Gates who said the dude has been on the wrong side of just about every major issue for over four decades. Voters paid no attention.
Now we see clear evidence that Joe Biden is the most corrupt and the WORSE Prez the Nation has suffered. We are looking at a modern Dark Age approaching fast unless enough voters wake up.
How would Liberals react id someone smeared Red Paint/Blood on the Quetzalcoatl Idol to a false God?
You’re too kind, Mr. Thornton.
I think the prevailing self righteous, self congratulatory leaders of western powers claiming to be civilized, i.e. morally tamed, but who are in reality the exact opposite, i.e. immorally indulgent, are sadistic, rather than masochistic. The United Nations is an abusive collective of sadists. The Biden administration continues the sadistic Obama policies in its treatment of Israel. Obama famously said, “I’m the president; I can do anything.”
There’s a joy and thrill for the sadist as he uses his power to taunt his victim.
And the sadist believes he, an abusive human, is invincible.
The left doesn’t attack islamic dictators because they are terrified of them.
Depraved, psychopathic, murderous, enslaving, and berserk best describe Islam and anti-Semitism.
The best and only way to deal with it is to literally crush it,
just as German Nazism and Japanese militarism were
crushed during and after WW2.
Sigmund Freud postulated a death instinct– “Thanatos”– bound up in the psyche of Western man, which he contrasted with “Eros,” the life drive. Among other things, trendy trans-sexual mania (he/she-ism) proves Freud’s death-wish prognostication. Ominously, grinning barbarians from the East are poised to take Western man out of his sodomite misery.
In America the large media and banks are owned or dominated by Jews.
Why aren’t they defending their own race and holy land?
Jews in name only. That is, people who don’t practice their religion but claim to be members of it.
JESUS, Christians, Jews, Whites are openly trashed every day and are even blamed for today’s problems and who should be eliminated, but dare to trash Mohammad, Muslims, or Blacks, and blame them, OPENLY, and see the outrage against the accuser!
Media Hosts, even movies, want the elimination of Whites.
“MILLIONS are still watching Black and White TV’s so they only see the World as Black and White. Those same millions are constantly playing with the Knobs trying to take the White Part Out!” SC
MILLIONS have taken the Oath of Office… but will they honor that Oath WHEN we are attacked by Jihadists, Terrorists, and Illegals or will they side with them? How many in Congress, city/state leaders, would side with them?
You can’t tell me Talib and Omar would defend that Oath! Would Obama? Brennan? So many TRAITORS!
None of this would have happened without the ascendancy of women in power in government, the corporate world, academia, and even the clergy.
I don’t buy this “suicide” garbage any more and frankly I’m tired of hearing it from conservatives who should know better. The source of our “”malaise and dysfunctions” isn’t the American people. The majority of the people have been resisting this so called “suicide” with the only weapons we currently have; corrupt elections and corrupt, tyrannical courts. All this comes not from the west at all but from Islam and Communist China. That’s who the ruling class takes its directions from.
Our country isn’t committing suicide. She is being murdered by the left.
Communism, socialism, fascism, and Nazism originated in the West, not in Saudi Arabia or China. If anything China committed suicide by importing communism from the West. But China was already culturally ripe for dictatorship. It’s just a hop, jump, and a skip away from a Divine Emperor to an Almighty Stalin.
Moreover, the serious push for social justice and an American welfare state began in the 1890s with the Protestant social gospel movement. The welfare state is simply a half-way house to full blown socialism. Christianity does not lead to capitalism but to self-sacrifice for others and theocracy.
You are right in one respect socialism and altruism do not originate with the American people but with the intellectuals in the universities. But in a battle between the American people and the intellectuals it is only a matter of time before the intellectuals win that battle.
“Socialism is not a movement of the people. It is a movement of the intellectuals, originated, led and controlled by the intellectuals, carried by them out of their stuffy ivory towers into those bloody fields of practice where they unite with their allies and executors: the thugs.” – Ayn Rand
“Holy Scripture and the Welfare State” – Richard M. Salsman
https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardsalsman/2011/04/28/holy-scripture-and-the-welfare-state/?sh=350de2ef24f2
Just because Marx lived in the west does not mean that communism came from the west.
And just because Christianity came to dominate the West does not mean Christianity came from the West. In fact Christianity comes from the Middle East, it is eastern not western.
Christianity is as much an invader of the west as Islam.
Communism is in fact a pseudo-secularization of Judeo-Christianity. The communist jettisons Almighty God from the supernatural equation and replaces him with Almighty Society.
Then how do the politicians causing the destruction stay in power? We still have elections. Many people who should not be able to vote keep voting for free stuff and for policies that make them feel superior. Practically none of that was happening before the 17th and 19 amendments were passed.
Two words: suicidal altruism.
Altruism, self-sacrifice for God, neighbor, stranger, and even enemy (Luke 6:27: “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.”), is the moral code at the heart of Christianity.
The only way to practice altruism perfectly and consistently is to commit suicide by delivering yourself to a tribe of cannibals as a meal and gaining absolutely nothing in return. That’s precisely what the West is doing by delivering itself to the Muslims.
Ayn Rand – Why Altruism is Evil
Oh God not another homework assignment from our rezidentura atheist, who never lifts a finger to help anyone.
You will always be a loser.
This video portrays to me that Ayn Rand just babbled nonsense and the elites believe she is so enlightened and educated. I didn’t find that about her in this video.
What are you talking about?
The elites on the Left and the elites on the Right despise, ridicule, disparage, and misrepresent Ayn Rand every chance they get.
If you believe Rand is babbling nonsense then you should provide a cogent counter-argument for your assertion. Please enlighten me.
The Jewish bible says:
If you don’t look after yourself then who will?
If you only look after yourself then what are you?
Rand did nothing original.
Objectivism is historical, it represents a paradigm shift.
Depraved psychopathic murderous Islam is still at war with, not only Israel and Jews, but humanity itself.
The Royal Families of Saudi Arabia and Qatar and all the other depraved psychopathic Islamic world could end their anti-Semitism and endless wars against Israel overnight if they chose to do that.
They do not do that because their true goal is to destroy Israel and Jews.
America and the West must recognize that Islam itself is their enemy, just as German Nazism and militaristic Japan was their implacable enemy prior to and during WW2.
The only way to end the 1400 year ongoing aggression and depravity and lunacy of the Islamic world is through military confrontation and their crushing military defeat, and the elimination of all Islamic Royal Families, particularly the Saudi and Qatar and Emirates Royal Families.
The Islamic ideological brainwashing from infancy and childhood through adulthood is so insidious and evil that after 1400 years there is only one way to change or eliminate it.
And the action of America and its Western European allies in WW2 is the example that should be followed today in regards to depraved psychopathic murderous Islam.
Just state the problem bluntly. Our so called “leaders” evaluate EVERY social situation and policy under one prism – fear of riots.
If a minority is willing to riot and burn things down, these “leaders” look at their options: (1) appease them; (2) massacre them by littering the streets with their corpses and their blood; (3) hope they go away.
Most “leaders” rule out option 2 and thus the choice is between (1) appeasement and (3) hoping they voluntarily leave. True leaders would rule out option 1 and give the rioters a choice between 2 or 3.
Too many “leaders” look at appeasement as a price worth paying to avoid bloodshed. That’s what happens when you are paralyzed by majority guilt and worship the god of tolerance.
The malcontents bank on 1 and 3. They know our current crop of Western leaders are cowards. Instead of following in the footsteps of Churchill they hold up Chamberlain as their hero. The Middle Eastern brownshirts are, and will continue to face little opposition.
You are correct. The mayor of Baltimore told their chief of police to give the rioters room to destroy. It was “Do the Right Thing” on a huge scale.
Survival of the fittest…and at this point in human civilization, Islamic jihadism and Chinese Communism are strong and the West is weak.
Some Eastern European countries appear to be preserving civilization. Other than that, it seems some Asian countries, such as China, will also preserve civilization. The West is just allowing themselves to fall.
Possibly, modern humans will not evolve sufficiently to advance beyond their current state of despair. It may take another species, a more advanced species, to evolve beyond our current state of lust for power, distaste for values of others, and envy. So many civilizations have died in the history of modern humans. Technologically, we have advanced a bit, we are approx 130 years or so of being able of flying across the globe like some birds. However, we are plagued by multiple illnesses that may weaken our chance of advancing let along even surviving. This society seems to have no moral compass.
When a society is stripped of its morals, top to bottom, the only destination left is nihilism. Only the strong will survive to subjugate those not murdered in the process. The only chance civilization will survive is if the masses re-claim the moral compass.