53percenter's Blog

Yep, PETA has latched on to white supremacists’ lactose tolerance gauge for racial purity in their latest publicity push.

According to PETA, “Cow’s milk really is the perfect drink of choice for all (even unwitting) supremacists, since the dairy industry inflicts extreme violence on other living beings.” Because of that, the infamous animal rights organization wants to “wake people up to the implications of choosing this white beverage.”

PETA writer Zachary Tolliver’s article is typically quite graphic, comparing factory farming practices to human sexual violence. “Rape is perhaps the single most heinous crime involving both power and violence,” Tolliver wrote, “but it’s standard procedure in the dairy industry.”

Later, Tolliver calls out the dairy industry for misleading consumers with pro-milk ad campaigns, citing unsourced “medical studies” which purportedly show that “dairy products are a health hazard.” And while excessive dairy — like excessive anything — can become a health concern, milk is largely recognized as an important element of a healthy diet.

Unlike soy or almond milk, for instance, cow’s milk contains no fiber or complex carbohydrates and is full of saturated animal fat and cholesterol. Consuming dairy products is also linked to developing heart disease as well as prostate, breast, and ovarian cancer.

The article ends with another assertion that switching to non-dairy “milks” is a good way to prove you are not a racist. “With so many different types of cruelty-free, delicious milks on the market,” Tolliver asserts, “opposing supremacists has never been easier.”

One topic has resonated more than any other at the Vatican’s synod on youth, a report stated Sunday, that of anti-Christian persecution.

“The two most sustained ovations so far have been for an Iraqi youth and an Indian archbishop,” recounts veteran Vatican analyst John L. Allen Jr., “both of whom recounted direct stories of suffering and persecution on account of the faith in the 21st century.”

In his address to synod members, Safa Al Alqoshy, a Chaldean Catholic from Baghdad, narrated the suffering of Iraqi Christians at the hands of Islamist militants and received what was described as the “most sustained applause” of any speaker so far.

A number of priests and other Christians have “shed their blood in church to witness to Jesus,” Al Alqoshy told the National Catholic Register. “They refused to leave in spite of a lot of threats. We’ve had a lot of priests kidnapped. Father Basel Yaldo is now a bishop, he was kidnapped for a long time but he was steadfast in his faith, he did not fear, because God knows what he’s doing.”

“We just have to be faithful, strong, stay in our place, to reflect on the image of Jesus,” he said. “In Iraq, they always say that Christian people don’t lie, are good people and this is something important: when reflecting on the image of Jesus, we are a faithful group, peaceful group, faithful group.”

Al Alqoshy later elaborated that the physical violence is terrible, but it is not the only form of persecution at play.

“It’s very important to pay attention that there is not only persecution by killing, there is a persecution by psychology, by feelings,” Al Alqoshy told the online Catholic news outlet Crux. “You feel that you are alone, that you are not supported.”

The second chronicle of anti-Christian persecution was related by Indian Archbishop John Barwa of Cuttack-Bhubaneswa, who described a brutal anti-Christian massacre carried out in the district of Kandhamal in 2008, leaving more than 100 people dead.

Barwa recounted the story of Rajesh Digal, a young catechist who was executed by a mob of Hindu fundamentalists on August 26, 2008. The throng buried Digal in mud up to his neck, urging him to convert, Barwa said.

One man held a stone over his head, demanding that he renounce Jesus Christ.

“He closed his eyes, looked up at him and said ‘No!’ And the man dumped the stone on his head,” Barwa said. “He silently gave witness of the God of life. And this is only one story. There are so many powerful stories of faith.”

Barwa told Crux that his own niece, a Catholic nun, had been gang-raped during the same 2008 outbreak of anti-Christian violence.

Worldwide, over 200 million Christians face severe persecution and Christians make up some 75 percent of all those targeted for harassment and persecution because of their faith.

According to Open Doors, a Christian watchdog group, in 2017 as many as “215 million Christians experience high levels of persecution in the [50] countries on the World Watch List,” with the majority of them in North Korea, considered “the worst place for Christians” for 16 consecutive years.

“In terms of the number of people involved, the gravity of the crimes committed and their impact, it is clear that the persecution of Christians is today worse than at any time in history,” said John Pontifex, editor of a 2018 report on Christian persecution.

Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome

On Monday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” Knowles called out the “hypocrisy in the sanctimony of Democrats,” particularly as demonstrated by Senator Elizabeth Warren, who the media does its best to present as a moral leader.

The Democrat lawmaker has been the subject of controversy after taking a much-maligned DNA test to try to prove a Cherokee connection. Amid the backlash from both sides of the ideological spectrum, Warren tried to claim at a recent debate that she released the results because of her commitment to transparency.

“Ultimately, I took a DNA test because I am an open book,” she declared. She cited her mother’s past work as a custodian while saying that she wanted to be a school teacher before running for office.

But Knowles wasn’t buying it and called out the senator for trying to misdirect the voters.

“Okay, blah blah blah, my mother washed more floors for less money than your mother, blah blah blah. That’s what she’s doing,” he said. “This is a classic. Both parties do it, but this is especially a classic Democrat strategy. John Kasich famously did it in 2016. Do you remember his father’s a mailman.”

Knowles criticized Warren for her attacks on President Donald Trump and his personal life, despite her own mistakes in the past. “

“But I want to direct your attention to one little phrase in her soliloquy,” he said. “Here she says: Oh you know, I wanted to be a schoolteacher. I just wanted to do this and, you know, college, there were a lot of twists and turns in my life and then I succeeded. So those twists and turns? When she is talking about twists and turns, she’s saying that she got married. And then her husband paid for her law school. And then she cheated on her husband while she was in law school. And then she left her husband and six months later, married her law professor. And then she had her career.”

He continued: “I don’t point that out to cast stones at Elizabeth Warren. Politicians are often rotten, dirty people and they do rotten, dirty things. Everybody’s got a past and everybody makes mistakes. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m doing it to point out the hypocrisy in the sanctimony of Democrats, critics of the President, critics of other Republicans and the news media, who focus on every one of president Trump’s sexual misdeeds, of which there are many. They focus on all of the president’s failed marriages, but they don’t point this out. They let her get away with twists and turns. Twists and turns. She leaves her husband. Cheats on her husband. Leaves her husband. Marries her law professor. Leaves the guy who paid for her law school.”

Video and transcript below:

Okay blah blah blah my mother washed more floors for less money than your mother blah blah blah. That’s what she’s doing. This is a classic. Both parties do it, but this is especially a classic Democrat strategy. John Kasich famously did it in 2016. Do you remember his father’s a mailman? Did you know that John Kasich’s father was a mailman?

Liz Warren, I think, almost mentioned it. (Laughs)

But I want to direct your attention to one little phrase in her soliloquy. Here she says: Oh you know, I wanted to be a schoolteacher. I just wanted to do this and, you know, college, there were a lot of twists and turns in my life and then I succeeded. So those twists and turns? When she is talking about twists and turns, she’s saying that she got married.

And then her husband paid for her law school. And then she cheated on her husband while she was in law school. And then she left her husband and six months later, married her law professor. And then she had her career. Those are the twists and turns and I don’t point that out to cast stones at Elizabeth Warren. Politicians are often rotten, dirty people and they do rotten, dirty things. Everybody’s got a past and everybody makes mistakes. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m doing it to point out the hypocrisy in the sanctimony of Democrats, critics of the President, critics of other Republicans and the news media, who focus on every one of president Trump’s sexual misdeeds, of which there are many. They focus on all of the president’s failed marriages, but they don’t point this out. They let her get away with twists and turns. Twists and turns. She leaves her husband. Cheats on her husband. Leaves her husband. Marries her law professor. Leaves the guy who paid for her law school.

And so it’s just twists and turns.

How brave. How powerful. There was an article that came out praising Elizabeth Warren in the mainstream media and they said Elizabeth Warren’s biggest mistake.

So I figured this would be an article about how she left her husband and, you know, but look people make big mistakes in life. Okay. No no no. The big mistake was marrying her husband in the first place. Her first husband, that was the mistake because if not for that she would be St. Elizabeth, the great the Great Spirit Lie-a-watha.

But, she has that and they bury it. They don’t focus on it at all.

As television screens fill up with images of the 7,000- to 10,000-strong Honduran migrant army snaking its way up through the belly of Mexico, and President Trump issues warnings that they not cross into the U.S., one group of people, well-known for otherwise enjoying grandstanding, have been weirdly silent: Democrats. Fox News has certainly noticed:

Democrats appear to be remaining silent on the issue of the caravan of thousands of immigrants on the march from Central America and unwilling to get into a public debate with President Trump since the midterms are just weeks away.

Where’s Sen. Chuck Schumer to weep some blubbery tears for the migrants? Where’s House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to fill us in on the state of their souls? Where’s the phony rhetoric from ex-President Obama about unskilled, illiterate and non-English-speaking immigrants being an “asset” to our country instead of a drain on its finances? Where’s Sen. Bernie Sanders advising us they’ll be great socialist voters? Where’s Hillary Clinton to tell us they “are citizens” or something of that sort? Where’s Rep. Luis Gutierrez to blame America for the whole thing? Where’s Kamala Harris with her love for the cameras?

Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

Which draws me to think they might just be running scared. The non-stop coverage of the migrant march, run by a Chavista socialist group called Pueblo Sin Fronteras, (which features lots of links to the Venezuelan-financed Chavista press), and which has drawn huge panoramic camera shots across the nation’s television sets of an army of migrants marching to the U.S. and its vast benefit packages, simply cannot be a good thing for them ahead of midterms. It’s already well-known that migrant visuals of the Middle East’s vast hordes overtaking Europe strongly affected 2014’s midterms, flipping both the House and Senate to the Republicans.

It seems to be a rare case of where the press’s interests and the Democrats’ interests don’t coincide. The migrant march photos, such as this screengrab from Fox News:

are great for television ratings, and Fox News in particular seems to be scarfing them up.

Democrats, by contrast, and some of their more sycophantic stations, are attempting to change the money-topic to the Saudi killing of Saudi citizen and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi, a topic that doesn’t really concern America, as well as their “Medicare-for-all” campaign promise. Sorry, doesn’t quite grab attention the way a visual of a vast invading army of military-aged young men heading to our homeland in what the president calls a “national security” issue does.

They’ve got to be running scared.

I’ve seen this pattern in all the ads being run by Democrats in California for the local races here. Democrats are refusing to talk about the topic here, despite this being the elephant in the room regarding California’s financial footing, and despite their flood of ads addressing everything else, particularly global warming and saving the planet. The visuals remind voters of just what they are promising to midwife more of.

Investor’s Business Daily has another take on the topic, and it’s a very well-written editorial, suggesting that Democrats are silent because they actually like this sort of thing:

What’s truly sad is that the increasingly far-left Democratic Party can’t bring itself to say anything meaningful about or even to criticize the illegal horde approaching our border. Why say anything? A border clash, they feel, will be bad for the GOP.

But it’s also bad for America. Democrats, in the heat of their election campaigns, often insist “we’re not for open borders,” or words to that effect. Yet, everything they do, from sanctuary cities to demonizing ICE to likening those who oppose illegal immigration to Nazis, suggests they want open borders.

And why shouldn’t they? The people in the caravan, once in the U.S., will mostly occupy the fringes of society. If past immigration is any guide, they’ll be poor and overwhelmingly dependent on welfare. A study based on 2012 Census data found that 51% of all immigrants, legal and illegal, relied on one or more welfare programs. That compares to 30% for the native-born population.

As the the architects of our welfare system, Democrats have the most to gain from open borders and the new Democratic votes that would bring. As such, their repeated insistence they don’t support open borders rings hollow.

Maybe so.

But I smell fear, too, the fear of dozens and dozens of visuals of invading hordes and nothing being done about it, with the full knowledge that it scares voters and keeps Democrats from being able to get the message across that they are really just moderates, as they have been trying to convince us.

Either way, they’re being silent and should be forced to let us know what they really think. No matter which way it is, it won’t be good for their electoral prospects at this midterm.

As television screens fill up with images of the 7,000- to 10,000-strong Honduran migrant army snaking its way up through the belly of Mexico, and President Trump issues warnings that they not cross into the U.S., one group of people, well-known for otherwise enjoying grandstanding, have been weirdly silent: Democrats. Fox News has certainly noticed:

Democrats appear to be remaining silent on the issue of the caravan of thousands of immigrants on the march from Central America and unwilling to get into a public debate with President Trump since the midterms are just weeks away.

Where’s Sen. Chuck Schumer to weep some blubbery tears for the migrants? Where’s House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to fill us in on the state of their souls? Where’s the phony rhetoric from ex-President Obama about unskilled, illiterate and non-English-speaking immigrants being an “asset” to our country instead of a drain on its finances? Where’s Sen. Bernie Sanders advising us they’ll be great socialist voters? Where’s Hillary Clinton to tell us they “are citizens” or something of that sort? Where’s Rep. Luis Gutierrez to blame America for the whole thing? Where’s Kamala Harris with her love for the cameras?

Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

Which draws me to think they might just be running scared. The non-stop coverage of the migrant march, run by a Chavista socialist group called Pueblo Sin Fronteras, (which features lots of links to the Venezuelan-financed Chavista press), and which has drawn huge panoramic camera shots across the nation’s television sets of an army of migrants marching to the U.S. and its vast benefit packages, simply cannot be a good thing for them ahead of midterms. It’s already well-known that migrant visuals of the Middle East’s vast hordes overtaking Europe strongly affected 2014’s midterms, flipping both the House and Senate to the Republicans.

It seems to be a rare case of where the press’s interests and the Democrats’ interests don’t coincide. The migrant march photos, such as this screengrab from Fox News:

are great for television ratings, and Fox News in particular seems to be scarfing them up.

Democrats, by contrast, and some of their more sycophantic stations, are attempting to change the money-topic to the Saudi killing of Saudi citizen and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi, a topic that doesn’t really concern America, as well as their “Medicare-for-all” campaign promise. Sorry, doesn’t quite grab attention the way a visual of a vast invading army of military-aged young men heading to our homeland in what the president calls a “national security” issue does.

They’ve got to be running scared.

I’ve seen this pattern in all the ads being run by Democrats in California for the local races here. Democrats are refusing to talk about the topic here, despite this being the elephant in the room regarding California’s financial footing, and despite their flood of ads addressing everything else, particularly global warming and saving the planet. The visuals remind voters of just what they are promising to midwife more of.

Investor’s Business Daily has another take on the topic, and it’s a very well-written editorial, suggesting that Democrats are silent because they actually like this sort of thing:

What’s truly sad is that the increasingly far-left Democratic Party can’t bring itself to say anything meaningful about or even to criticize the illegal horde approaching our border. Why say anything? A border clash, they feel, will be bad for the GOP.

But it’s also bad for America. Democrats, in the heat of their election campaigns, often insist “we’re not for open borders,” or words to that effect. Yet, everything they do, from sanctuary cities to demonizing ICE to likening those who oppose illegal immigration to Nazis, suggests they want open borders.

And why shouldn’t they? The people in the caravan, once in the U.S., will mostly occupy the fringes of society. If past immigration is any guide, they’ll be poor and overwhelmingly dependent on welfare. A study based on 2012 Census data found that 51% of all immigrants, legal and illegal, relied on one or more welfare programs. That compares to 30% for the native-born population.

As the the architects of our welfare system, Democrats have the most to gain from open borders and the new Democratic votes that would bring. As such, their repeated insistence they don’t support open borders rings hollow.

Maybe so.

But I smell fear, too, the fear of dozens and dozens of visuals of invading hordes and nothing being done about it, with the full knowledge that it scares voters and keeps Democrats from being able to get the message across that they are really just moderates, as they have been trying to convince us.

Either way, they’re being silent and should be forced to let us know what they really think. No matter which way it is, it won’t be good for their electoral prospects at this midterm.

The “West and Islam have been mortal enemies since the latter’s birth some fourteen centuries ago,” warns Islam scholar Raymond Ibrahim in his recent book Sword and Scimitar:  Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West.  His extensive analysis bears out the apt title of this volume, whose documented history is equally ill remembered and yet vital for modern Westerners.

Ibrahim begins by elucidating the disturbing conceptual core of Islam and its seventh-century Arab prophet, Muhammad.  ”The appeal of Muhammad’s message lay in its compatibility with the tribal mores of his society,” Ibrahim notes.  

For seventh-century Arabs – and later tribal peoples, chiefly Turks and Tatars, who also found natural appeal in Islam – the tribe was what humanity is to modern people:  to be part of it was to be treated humanely; to be outside of it was to be treated inhumanely.

Accordingly, Islam “deified tribalism, causing it to outlive its setting and spill into the modern era.”  Islamic doctrines like al-wala’ wa al-bara’ (“loyalty and enmity”) created an umma faith community or “‘Super Tribe’ that transcends racial, national, and linguistic barriers.”  Not surprisingly, the Arabic umma “is etymologically related to ‘mother’ (umm) – to one’s closest kin.”

Ibrahim “records a variety of Muslims across time and space behaving exactly like the Islamic State and for the same reasons” – namely, Islam’s promotion of warfare against non-Muslims.  Islam’s deity “incites his followers to war on the promise of booty, both animate and inanimate – so much so that an entire sura, or chapter of the Koran, ‘al-Anfal,’ is named after and dedicated to the spoils of war.”  Jihadists following Islamic canons thus “‘use’ or ‘loan’ their lives as part of a ‘bargain’ or ‘transaction’ – whereby Allah forgives all sins and showers them with celestial delights.”

Ibrahim examines how Islamic afterlife doctrines beckon the faith’s battlefield martyrs.  Islam’s celestial pleasures include houris or “supernatural, celestial women … created by Allah for the express purpose of gratifying his favorites in perpetuity.”  ”That Islamic scriptures portray paradise in decidedly carnal terms” reflects the “primitivism of Muhammad’s society.”

As Ibrahim notes, being on jihad’s receiving end was hardly divine.  Khalid bin al-Walid, the “Sword of Allah” from Islam’s founding seventh-century epoch, “looms large in the Arab histories of the early Muslim conquests and is still seen today as the jihadi par excellence.”  Yet Islamic histories record that jihadists like him “were little more than mass-killing psychotics and rapists.”

Similarly, Ibrahim observes that Ottoman sultan Bayezid I (reigned 1389-1402), “like many other Muslim leaders before and after him, was at once pious and depraved, with no apparent conflict between the twain.”  This devout depravity includes the various forms of slavery that have existed throughout Islamic history like the Ottoman devshirme.  Ibrahim quotes one modern historian to the effect that “jihad looks uncomfortably like a giant slave trade.'”

Non-Muslims will find baffling Ibrahim’s observation that Islamic doctrines claimed to sanctify imperialistic horror as holy:

In Arabic and other Muslim languages, the historic Islamic conquests are never referred to as ‘conquests’ but rather as futuh – ‘openings’ for the light of Islam to enter[.] … [E]very land ever invaded and/or seized by Muslims was done ‘altruistically’ to bring Islam to wayward infidels.

Such “altruism” devastated historic Christendom, Ibrahim notes.  What people today call the “West” in Europe “is actually the westernmost remnant of what was a much more extensive civilizational block that Islam permanently severed.”  Due to Islamic conquests spreading out from the Arabian Peninsula following Muhammad’s death in 632, by 700:

… all ancient Christian lands between Greater Syria to the east and Mauretania (Morocco) to the west – approximately 3,700 miles – were forever conquered by Islam.  Put differently, two-thirds (or 65 percent) of Christendom’s original territory – including three of the five most important centers of Christianity – Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria – were permanently swallowed up by Islam and thoroughly Arabized.

Ibrahim highlights Islamic depredation of the Mediterranean, which “for centuries had been the world’s greatest economic highway uniting East and West, first in the classical civilization of Rome, and then in Christendom.”  Subsequently this “Muslim Lake” became the “hunting ground for pirates and slavers.”  Particularly “[a]fter the “conquest of Egypt, the importation of papyrus into Europe terminated almost overnight, causing literacy rates to drop back to their levels in pre-Roman times.”

Contrary to “widespread and entrenched myths concerning the purported tolerance and enlightenment” in places like Islamic Spain, Ibrahim documents longstanding Christian resistance to Islamic aggression.  He dispenses with the “distorted and demonized version of” the Crusades, which responded to Islamic conquest of, and oppression in, the Holy Land.  ”Despite popular depictions of crusaders as prototypical European imperialists cynically exploiting faith, recent scholarship has proven the opposite,” he notes. 

“Great lords of vast estates,” Ibrahim observes, “parted with their wealth and possessions upon taking the cross” as Crusaders.  This sacrifice reflects an inconvenient truth for politically correct pieties:

Shocking as it may seem, love – not of the modern, sentimental variety, but a medieval, muscular one, characterized by Christian altruism, agape – was the primary driving force behind the crusades.

Ibrahim is not shy about sacrificing progressive sacred cows about Islam.  He particularly notes that violent and vice-filled Islamic biographies of Muhammad have “especially scandalized Christians” historically.  ”Indeed, for people who find any criticism of Islam ‘Islamophobic,’ the sheer amount and vitriolic content of more than a millennium of Western writings on Muhammad may beggar belief.”

Ibrahim warns that his research presents no mere academic discussion or ancient history.  Modern Muslim men assaulting Western women in Europe and elsewhere often “are drawing on a long tradition of seeing pale infidels as the epitome of promiscuity.”  In sum:

Muslims still venerate their heritage and religion – which commands jihad against infidels – whereas the West has learned to despise its heritage and religion, causing it to become an unwitting ally of the jihad.

Against such induced historical amnesia Ibrahim performs a valuable service.  Contrary to postmodern trends in Western society, Muslim behavior shows that not all believe that God is dead, history has ended, and everything is relative.  Christians, with their long histories of fighting against, and suffering under, Islam should be at the forefront of offering critical, loving truths about this faith.

See also: How War with Islam Shaped and Defined Us

The “West and Islam have been mortal enemies since the latter’s birth some fourteen centuries ago,” warns Islam scholar Raymond Ibrahim in his recent book Sword and Scimitar:  Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West.  His extensive analysis bears out the apt title of this volume, whose documented history is equally ill remembered and yet vital for modern Westerners.

Ibrahim begins by elucidating the disturbing conceptual core of Islam and its seventh-century Arab prophet, Muhammad.  ”The appeal of Muhammad’s message lay in its compatibility with the tribal mores of his society,” Ibrahim notes.  

For seventh-century Arabs – and later tribal peoples, chiefly Turks and Tatars, who also found natural appeal in Islam – the tribe was what humanity is to modern people:  to be part of it was to be treated humanely; to be outside of it was to be treated inhumanely.

Accordingly, Islam “deified tribalism, causing it to outlive its setting and spill into the modern era.”  Islamic doctrines like al-wala’ wa al-bara’ (“loyalty and enmity”) created an umma faith community or “‘Super Tribe’ that transcends racial, national, and linguistic barriers.”  Not surprisingly, the Arabic umma “is etymologically related to ‘mother’ (umm) – to one’s closest kin.”

Ibrahim “records a variety of Muslims across time and space behaving exactly like the Islamic State and for the same reasons” – namely, Islam’s promotion of warfare against non-Muslims.  Islam’s deity “incites his followers to war on the promise of booty, both animate and inanimate – so much so that an entire sura, or chapter of the Koran, ‘al-Anfal,’ is named after and dedicated to the spoils of war.”  Jihadists following Islamic canons thus “‘use’ or ‘loan’ their lives as part of a ‘bargain’ or ‘transaction’ – whereby Allah forgives all sins and showers them with celestial delights.”

Ibrahim examines how Islamic afterlife doctrines beckon the faith’s battlefield martyrs.  Islam’s celestial pleasures include houris or “supernatural, celestial women … created by Allah for the express purpose of gratifying his favorites in perpetuity.”  ”That Islamic scriptures portray paradise in decidedly carnal terms” reflects the “primitivism of Muhammad’s society.”

As Ibrahim notes, being on jihad’s receiving end was hardly divine.  Khalid bin al-Walid, the “Sword of Allah” from Islam’s founding seventh-century epoch, “looms large in the Arab histories of the early Muslim conquests and is still seen today as the jihadi par excellence.”  Yet Islamic histories record that jihadists like him “were little more than mass-killing psychotics and rapists.”

Similarly, Ibrahim observes that Ottoman sultan Bayezid I (reigned 1389-1402), “like many other Muslim leaders before and after him, was at once pious and depraved, with no apparent conflict between the twain.”  This devout depravity includes the various forms of slavery that have existed throughout Islamic history like the Ottoman devshirme.  Ibrahim quotes one modern historian to the effect that “jihad looks uncomfortably like a giant slave trade.'”

Non-Muslims will find baffling Ibrahim’s observation that Islamic doctrines claimed to sanctify imperialistic horror as holy:

In Arabic and other Muslim languages, the historic Islamic conquests are never referred to as ‘conquests’ but rather as futuh – ‘openings’ for the light of Islam to enter[.] … [E]very land ever invaded and/or seized by Muslims was done ‘altruistically’ to bring Islam to wayward infidels.

Such “altruism” devastated historic Christendom, Ibrahim notes.  What people today call the “West” in Europe “is actually the westernmost remnant of what was a much more extensive civilizational block that Islam permanently severed.”  Due to Islamic conquests spreading out from the Arabian Peninsula following Muhammad’s death in 632, by 700:

… all ancient Christian lands between Greater Syria to the east and Mauretania (Morocco) to the west – approximately 3,700 miles – were forever conquered by Islam.  Put differently, two-thirds (or 65 percent) of Christendom’s original territory – including three of the five most important centers of Christianity – Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria – were permanently swallowed up by Islam and thoroughly Arabized.

Ibrahim highlights Islamic depredation of the Mediterranean, which “for centuries had been the world’s greatest economic highway uniting East and West, first in the classical civilization of Rome, and then in Christendom.”  Subsequently this “Muslim Lake” became the “hunting ground for pirates and slavers.”  Particularly “[a]fter the “conquest of Egypt, the importation of papyrus into Europe terminated almost overnight, causing literacy rates to drop back to their levels in pre-Roman times.”

Contrary to “widespread and entrenched myths concerning the purported tolerance and enlightenment” in places like Islamic Spain, Ibrahim documents longstanding Christian resistance to Islamic aggression.  He dispenses with the “distorted and demonized version of” the Crusades, which responded to Islamic conquest of, and oppression in, the Holy Land.  ”Despite popular depictions of crusaders as prototypical European imperialists cynically exploiting faith, recent scholarship has proven the opposite,” he notes. 

“Great lords of vast estates,” Ibrahim observes, “parted with their wealth and possessions upon taking the cross” as Crusaders.  This sacrifice reflects an inconvenient truth for politically correct pieties:

Shocking as it may seem, love – not of the modern, sentimental variety, but a medieval, muscular one, characterized by Christian altruism, agape – was the primary driving force behind the crusades.

Ibrahim is not shy about sacrificing progressive sacred cows about Islam.  He particularly notes that violent and vice-filled Islamic biographies of Muhammad have “especially scandalized Christians” historically.  ”Indeed, for people who find any criticism of Islam ‘Islamophobic,’ the sheer amount and vitriolic content of more than a millennium of Western writings on Muhammad may beggar belief.”

Ibrahim warns that his research presents no mere academic discussion or ancient history.  Modern Muslim men assaulting Western women in Europe and elsewhere often “are drawing on a long tradition of seeing pale infidels as the epitome of promiscuity.”  In sum:

Muslims still venerate their heritage and religion – which commands jihad against infidels – whereas the West has learned to despise its heritage and religion, causing it to become an unwitting ally of the jihad.

Against such induced historical amnesia Ibrahim performs a valuable service.  Contrary to postmodern trends in Western society, Muslim behavior shows that not all believe that God is dead, history has ended, and everything is relative.  Christians, with their long histories of fighting against, and suffering under, Islam should be at the forefront of offering critical, loving truths about this faith.

See also: How War with Islam Shaped and Defined Us

If we learned anything from the Kavanaugh smear and the endless Russia collusion investigation, it’s that just as Islam is a political system masquerading as a religion, Democratic Party ideals are a religion masquerading as a political system.

What they tried to do to Kavanaugh in declaring him a rapist with an absolute lack of evidence, has shown Americans that they do not care who gets hurt in their pursuit of power.  How many male voters thought, “That could be me.”  How many women voters thought, “That could be my husband; that could be my son.” 

Yet Kavanaugh is merely the most egregious of their missteps.  Almost everything the Democrats have done since January 20, 2017, has only served to hurt their chances for the “blue wave.”  They took what up until recently seemed to be a sure-thing election sweeping Democrats into control of the House and the Senate and threw it away.

With Kavanaugh, the unhinged protests, and now, all the violence the left perpetrates on a daily basis — the only thing they have accomplished with their bad behavior is to take Robert Mueller and his “witch hunt” off the front pages and make it impossible for him to release any report or announce more indictments of foreigners or tertiary Trump associates before election day.  The people will see that for what it would be, a purely political stunt to hurt the president and Republicans.

Announcing that their plans, should they win control of the House, would be to impeach Trump and Kavanaugh is another faux pas.  Americans like fair play.  The investigation of Trump has been going on for two years and they have nothing.  It’s kind of like Al Gore’s strategy in 2000: “We count until I win!”

They want to investigate Trump until they find any crime they can use to impeach him or better yet, jail him.  And like Kavanaugh, it doesn’t even have to be true, as long as it works. 

I think most Americans realize that had they been the subject of a prosecutor with an unlimited budget, they would have long ago been on the nightly news in cuffs with their coat over their head being led into the police station.

Now we have the 5,000-person “caravan” quickly approaching our border.  It may be just me, but the ploy seems to have Democratic fingerprints all over it.  There is broad support in America for secure borders.

Just for good measure, throw in Elizabeth “Damn it, I am an Indian” Warren’s idiocy and a question comes to mind.  Have the Democrats accomplished anything in the runup to the midterms that have helped their chances?  Of course, Trump baited her when he called her “Pocahontas.”  But that was some time ago; she didn’t have to bite so hard on the hook and she could have waited until after the midterm elections.

Not since Gary Hart took a picture with a young woman, not his wife, sitting on his lap on a yacht ironically named Monkey Business has a leading Democrat hurt the chances of winning the nomination as Elizabeth Warren did with the release of her DNA test proving she was between 1/64 and 1/1024 likely to have an ancestor of South American or Mexican Indian heritage.  Yet, it’s not just her that will suffer.  Citizens may look at her claim and think, “If this is all the Democrats have, why should I vote for them?”

“It’s better to remain silent and have people think you are an idiot than to speak and remove all doubt.”  Elizabeth Warren removed all doubt while co-opting the entire Democrat/media propaganda machine for precious days before November 6, making it about herself and her lies.

It has been said that President Donald Trump is a buffoon, that he is a loudmouth from Queens with little impulse control. But everything Trump does can be seen in a different light if one only bothers to look.  Much of what the president says on Twitter and during political rallies can be interpreted as deliberate and designed to control the conversation.

The problem with Republicans has always been they have no fight in them and make no attempt to control what people are discussing in the media — and by media, I do not just mean the mainstream media — I mean all media including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.  Republicans have always been reactive, not proactive.

President Trump has sure changed that, hasn’t he?  For the first time in my memory it is a Republican dictating the national discussion.  He says something on Twitter or at a rally, then he steps back and watches as the mainstream media, FB, Twitter, Instagram, strangers on line at Whole Foods (“Thank you, come again”) lose their collective minds in horror about the insensitivity.

Trump is a fighter and he’s shown Republicans that while losing with honor may make you feel good for a day, winning ugly will make you feel good for a lifetime.

Trump has Democrats playing his game and it’s not a good look for them.  David Gelernter wrote in the Wall Street Journal that all the Democrats have is their hatred of Trump and many people may see that as a hatred of the country as well.

“Not that every leftist hates America. But the leftists I know do hate Mr. Trump’s vulgarity, his unwillingness to walk away from a fight, his bluntness, his certainty that America is exceptional, his mistrust of intellectuals, his love of simple ideas that work, and his refusal to believe that men and women are interchangeable. Worst of all, he has no ideology except getting the job done. His goals are to do the task before him, not be pushed around, and otherwise to enjoy life. In short, he is a typical American — except exaggerated, because he has no constraints to cramp his style except the ones he himself invents.”

These are all unforced errors on the Democrats’ part, and let’s face it, it’s hard to get illegal aliens and the dead eager to vote Democratic when Democrats act like at best, a bunch of bumbling idiots or at worst, traitors.

If we learned anything from the Kavanaugh smear and the endless Russia collusion investigation, it’s that just as Islam is a political system masquerading as a religion, Democratic Party ideals are a religion masquerading as a political system.

What they tried to do to Kavanaugh in declaring him a rapist with an absolute lack of evidence, has shown Americans that they do not care who gets hurt in their pursuit of power.  How many male voters thought, “That could be me.”  How many women voters thought, “That could be my husband; that could be my son.” 

Yet Kavanaugh is merely the most egregious of their missteps.  Almost everything the Democrats have done since January 20, 2017, has only served to hurt their chances for the “blue wave.”  They took what up until recently seemed to be a sure-thing election sweeping Democrats into control of the House and the Senate and threw it away.

With Kavanaugh, the unhinged protests, and now, all the violence the left perpetrates on a daily basis — the only thing they have accomplished with their bad behavior is to take Robert Mueller and his “witch hunt” off the front pages and make it impossible for him to release any report or announce more indictments of foreigners or tertiary Trump associates before election day.  The people will see that for what it would be, a purely political stunt to hurt the president and Republicans.

Announcing that their plans, should they win control of the House, would be to impeach Trump and Kavanaugh is another faux pas.  Americans like fair play.  The investigation of Trump has been going on for two years and they have nothing.  It’s kind of like Al Gore’s strategy in 2000: “We count until I win!”

They want to investigate Trump until they find any crime they can use to impeach him or better yet, jail him.  And like Kavanaugh, it doesn’t even have to be true, as long as it works. 

I think most Americans realize that had they been the subject of a prosecutor with an unlimited budget, they would have long ago been on the nightly news in cuffs with their coat over their head being led into the police station.

Now we have the 5,000-person “caravan” quickly approaching our border.  It may be just me, but the ploy seems to have Democratic fingerprints all over it.  There is broad support in America for secure borders.

Just for good measure, throw in Elizabeth “Damn it, I am an Indian” Warren’s idiocy and a question comes to mind.  Have the Democrats accomplished anything in the runup to the midterms that have helped their chances?  Of course, Trump baited her when he called her “Pocahontas.”  But that was some time ago; she didn’t have to bite so hard on the hook and she could have waited until after the midterm elections.

Not since Gary Hart took a picture with a young woman, not his wife, sitting on his lap on a yacht ironically named Monkey Business has a leading Democrat hurt the chances of winning the nomination as Elizabeth Warren did with the release of her DNA test proving she was between 1/64 and 1/1024 likely to have an ancestor of South American or Mexican Indian heritage.  Yet, it’s not just her that will suffer.  Citizens may look at her claim and think, “If this is all the Democrats have, why should I vote for them?”

“It’s better to remain silent and have people think you are an idiot than to speak and remove all doubt.”  Elizabeth Warren removed all doubt while co-opting the entire Democrat/media propaganda machine for precious days before November 6, making it about herself and her lies.

It has been said that President Donald Trump is a buffoon, that he is a loudmouth from Queens with little impulse control. But everything Trump does can be seen in a different light if one only bothers to look.  Much of what the president says on Twitter and during political rallies can be interpreted as deliberate and designed to control the conversation.

The problem with Republicans has always been they have no fight in them and make no attempt to control what people are discussing in the media — and by media, I do not just mean the mainstream media — I mean all media including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.  Republicans have always been reactive, not proactive.

President Trump has sure changed that, hasn’t he?  For the first time in my memory it is a Republican dictating the national discussion.  He says something on Twitter or at a rally, then he steps back and watches as the mainstream media, FB, Twitter, Instagram, strangers on line at Whole Foods (“Thank you, come again”) lose their collective minds in horror about the insensitivity.

Trump is a fighter and he’s shown Republicans that while losing with honor may make you feel good for a day, winning ugly will make you feel good for a lifetime.

Trump has Democrats playing his game and it’s not a good look for them.  David Gelernter wrote in the Wall Street Journal that all the Democrats have is their hatred of Trump and many people may see that as a hatred of the country as well.

“Not that every leftist hates America. But the leftists I know do hate Mr. Trump’s vulgarity, his unwillingness to walk away from a fight, his bluntness, his certainty that America is exceptional, his mistrust of intellectuals, his love of simple ideas that work, and his refusal to believe that men and women are interchangeable. Worst of all, he has no ideology except getting the job done. His goals are to do the task before him, not be pushed around, and otherwise to enjoy life. In short, he is a typical American — except exaggerated, because he has no constraints to cramp his style except the ones he himself invents.”

These are all unforced errors on the Democrats’ part, and let’s face it, it’s hard to get illegal aliens and the dead eager to vote Democratic when Democrats act like at best, a bunch of bumbling idiots or at worst, traitors.

A photo emerged on Monday night that showed Stacey Abrams, Georgia’s Democratic candidate for governor, burning the state’s flag during a protest at Georgia’s Capitol in 1992 while she was a freshman at Spelman College in Atlanta.

“Ms. Abrams’s role in the protest, which took place around the end of her freshman year at Spelman College in Atlanta, has begun to emerge on social media on the eve of her first debate Tuesday with her Republican opponent, Secretary of State Brian Kemp,” The New York Times reported. “Mr. Kemp and his allies have sought to portray her as ‘too extreme for Georgia.'”

The photo of Abrams burning Georgia’s state flag “appeared in an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in June 1992” and showed Abrams “standing with students burning the Georgia state flag at the state Capitol.”

Abrams’ campaign released a statement on Monday addressing her flag burning, noting that Georgia’s flag at the time partially incorporated the Confederate battle flag.

“During Stacey Abrams’ college years, Georgia was at a crossroads, struggling with how to overcome racially divisive issues, including symbols of the Confederacy, the sharpest of which was the inclusion of the Confederate emblem in the Georgia state flag,” Abrams’ statement said, according to The Times. “This conversation was sweeping across Georgia as numerous organizations, prominent leaders, and students engaged in the ultimately successful effort to change the flag.”

“Abrams’ time in public service as deputy city attorney and as a state legislative leader have all been focused on bringing people together to solve problems,” the statement concluded.

The Times added that the state’s flag was “changed in 2001 in such a way that the battle flag’s size was minimized” and that “the battle flag was completely removed from the design with a second change in 2003.”

“The change to the flag is believed to have cost Georgia’s last Democratic governor, Roy Barnes, his re-election bid in 2002, as he faced criticism from a vocal group of ‘flaggers’ who argued that the symbol was not about racism, but the valor and sacrifice of the South’s Civil War troops,” The Times concluded.

Abrams has stirred controversy recently after she said last week that illegal aliens were going to be a part of the Democrat’s blue wave in November.

“The thing of it is, the blue wave is African American. It is white. It is Latino. It is Asian-Pacific Islander,” Abrams said. “It is made up of those who’ve been told that they are not worthy of being here. It is comprised of those who are documented and undocumented.”

Abrams previously defended taking out-of-state campaign donations by arguing that Georgia is a “national state.”

The Washington Free Beacon also noted that Abrams came under fire recently “over a decision to loan her campaign $50,000 while owing over $54,000 to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).”