The bollardization of everything is all we get.

Mark Steyn on the most recent London Bridge terrorism: "We are tiptoeing very close to conscious child sacrifice in the cause of "diversity". Mark on the upcoming election in the United Kingdom:

In the early hours of December 13th, one of two men will become the United Kingdom's Prime Minister: on the one hand, Jeremy Corbyn, a man whose sympathies his entire adult life have lain with terrorists, whether Irish Republican or Islamic, and who is all for early release for persons he doesn't think should be banged up in the first place; and on the other, Boris Johnson, whose party talks tough on crime, immigration, terrorism and everything else, but under whose showboating butchness nothing ever changes.

Read more here.

Have we become too stupid to survive?

Mark Steyn writes,

I can no longer remember when I first used the line, but, as I've said many times before, sometimes a society becomes too stupid to survive.

Back when President Trump was Candidate Trump, he famously proposed a soi-disant "Muslim ban" on entry to the United States "until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on".

Which was a rationale to which I was rather partial - because a failure to "figure out what the hell is going on" is a big part of why we're where we are a generation after 9/11. Mohammed is now in the Top Ten boys' names in America, which means it will sooner than you think be, as it is in Europe, among the Top Five boys' names, and eventually the Number One. [UPDATE: See Michelle Stone's comment below.]

Well, the "Muslim ban" never happened, after being struck down by judges and filleted into meaninglessness by the lawyers of the permanent bureaucracy. But you would think, given the mountain of corpses piled up on 9/11, that at the very minimum Saudi nationals would no longer be being given pilot training in Florida. After all, fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, and half of those who flew the planes received their lessons in the Sunshine State.

Yet today Americans pick up their papers to read:

PENSACOLA, Fla. — A Saudi Arabian military pilot training in the United States opened fire Friday morning at Naval Air Station Pensacola, leaving three people dead and several others wounded before Florida sheriff's deputies shot and killed him.

Or as The New York Times headlined it:

Florida Shooting Updates: Authorities Say It's Too Early to Know if It's Terrorism

We know it's a Saudi national gunning down Americans, but it's "too early to know" if it's terrorism. Could be just "mental health issues" or "workplace violence" or "pre-traumatic stress disorder" or "involuntary self-radicalization" or whatever. Nothing to worry about and always remember (to reprise another old line of mine) that "Allahu Akbar" is Arabic for "Nothing to see here".

On "the day that everything changed" nothing changed - except the rate of Muslim immigration to the west, which doubled. A US immigration bureaucracy both cruel and stupid enough to ban a World War Two RAF pilot for life for staying with his wife until her death when she was stricken ill in the US and taken to a New Jersey hospital cannot stop itself admitting Saudi trainee pilots to kill Americans.

Recently, I marked (under the headline "Diversity unto Death") the tenth anniversary of the Fort Hood slaughter - the first mass murder in American history in which the perpetrator gave a PowerPoint presentation on what he intended to do, and to a roomful of military and mental-health professionals to boot. Some of whom felt a little queasy about what they heard, but not enough to prevent him going ahead and murdering everyone. And, in the course of our anniversary observances, I quoted Steyn Club member Kate Smyth's observation that "we'd rather die than be thought of as 'Islamophobic'". Which is, increasingly, literally true. And so it is that we go round in circles, so that this year's atrocities all seem like faded Xeroxes of last year's atrocities - an attack by Saudi pilots trained in Florida, an attack on a US military base, an attack on London Bridge, another attack on London Bridge, another Saudi pilot in Florida, another US military base...

A few days ago Kate Smyth identified another difference between the carbon copies and the originals. On the telly yakfests round about now, there'll be earnest conversations about whether this latest member of Local 347 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves has any "links to Isis". As Kate put it re even "conservative" media outlets:

There's been a very obvious shift - no doubt a confirmation of Islamisation itself. No 'I' and no 'M', with discussions limited to terrorism... What's noticeable is that there's both censorship and self-censorship as part of this shift.

From the aforementioned link: 'As Ayaan Hirsi Ali explained, because of the West's obsession with terror, we have become blind to the broader threat of the dawa (Islamic proselytizing), the ideology behind the terror attacks — and what drives Muslims to Islamize us.'

It follows that, as long as terrorism is contained to an 'Acceptable Level of Violence', we won't hear about Islamic terrorism (let alone Islam).

There is a lot of truth to that. Indeed, it is one of the striking differences between atrocity coverage circa 2019 and atrocity coverage circa 2002. So we will admit more Saudi would-be pilots (for no district judge would countenance an end to the program) but also order up more bollards for US military bases, and longer security lines and more sophisticated latex gloves. And, whatever happens, it won't ever be anything to do with Islam, and not even anything to do with terrorism unless you're going to a dead-drop in the park to collect your orders from Isis High Command.

Oh, and even the "Muslim ban" guy is back to the usual "the Saudis are our friends" bollocks:

The King said that the Saudi people are greatly angered by the barbaric actions of the shooter, and that this person in no way shape or form represents the feelings of the Saudi people who love the American people.

Yeah, sure. Aside from the three other Saudis who filmed the attack as it was in progress.

The flaw in Trump's "Muslim ban" was its conditionality on us "figuring out what the hell is going on". Actually, what the hell's going on isn't so difficult to figure out. But, as events at Fishmongers' Hall and the Pensacola Naval Air Station both underline, most of the western world would rather do anything than confront honestly "what the hell is going on".

And so the hell will go on, and the faded Xeroxes of faded Xeroxes will go on.

As I wrote all those years ago in America Alone, this is an opportunist infection: The likes of today's perp and last Friday's perp are able to do this to us because we're willing to have it done to us. We have not the will to resist even the most absurd provocations.

A long list of collaborators

Daniel Greefield writes at Front Page,

...Saipov had listed an address in Paterson, NJ. Paterson, known to the locals as ‘Paterstine’ for its sizable Islamic community, is where the PLO terror flag flies over City Hall and where Islamic terrorist sympathizers celebrated after their compatriots murdered thousands on 9/11.

Paterson is also where 6 of the 9/11 hijackers lived.

...Sayfullo Saipov moved his being and the truck it was in over the bodies of New Yorkers leaving tire tracks over corpses. The Manhattan attack, like every Islamic attack before it, could have been stopped. But the NYPD’s hands had been tied. And the left had done the tying. It defended every Islamic terrorist that the NYPD had arrested. And prevented the NYPD from investigating mosques and radicalization.

...Dem leaders in New York are already rolling out the standard messages urging everyone to go back to life as usual. Mayor Bill de Blasio called the attack “cowardly”. But the attack wasn’t cowardly. It was vicious and murderous. It’s Bill de Blasio and the other politicians who crippled the NYPD because they were afraid of political pressure from Linda Sarsour and CAIR who are the real cowards.

...Islamic terrorists like Sayfullo Saipov are able to do what they do because they have a long list of collaborators like the ACLU, Democrat politicians, Federal judges and the mainstream media.

While law enforcement fights a desperate battle to stop the next Saipov, the men and women tracking the terrorists know that if they get their man, the media will make them the villains. Just ask the good people who brought down Ahmed Ferhani, James Cromitie, Shahawar Matin Siraj and so many others.

Sane societies celebrate those who risk their lives to keep them safe. The leftist culture machine does everything it can to destroy them and to aid the Islamic butchers who run over pedestrians for Allah.

The way to stop the next Saipov is to untie the NYPD’s hands.

After every shooting, the left insists that anyone who opposes gun control wants people to die. But guns don’t hop off the shelf and shoot people. And trucks don’t run over pedestrians on their own.

Islamic terrorists drive them into crowds, over pedestrians and cyclists, in London, Nice, in Berlin, in Jerusalem and in New York City. And leftists who refuse to stop them might as well be behind the wheel.

Read more here.

Needed: real courage

Remember Ted Cruz? Here is an excerpt of what he had to say Sunday after the Orlando massacre:

The next few days will be sadly predictable. Democrats will try to use this attack to change the subject. As a matter of rigid ideology, far too many Democrats – from Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton – will refuse to utter the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism.’ They will claim this attack, like they claimed every previous attack, was isolated and had nothing to do with the vicious Islamist theology that is daily waging war on us across the globe. And they will try to exploit this terror attack to undermine the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms of law-abiding Americans.

Enough is enough. What we need is for every American – Democrat and Republican – to come together, abandon political correctness, and unite in defeating radical Islamic terrorism.

For all the Democrats who are loud champions of the gay and lesbian community whenever there is a culture battle waging, now is the opportunity to speak out against an ideology that calls for the murder of gays and lesbians. ISIS and the theocracy in Iran (supported with American taxpayer dollars) regularly murder homosexuals, throwing them from buildings and burying them under rocks. This is wrong, it is evil, and we must all stand against it. Every human being has a right to live according to his or her faith and conscience, and nobody has a right to murder someone who doesn’t share their faith or sexual orientation. If you’re a Democratic politician and you really want to stand for LGBT, show real courage and stand up against the vicious ideology that has targeted our fellow Americans for murder.

Read more here.

Doing the math

Chateau Heartiste has a few words about the San Bernardino massacre:

Shitlibs think they’re being clever contrasting number of (post-9/11) Muslim terror deaths to all other American mass shooting deaths. Unfortunately for them, shitlibs suffer from a bad case of Dunning-Clueless: so smug they don’t realize how callow they are. Proportional to their population share of the total US population, Muslims are bombing and shooting FAR above their weight. As another Sailer commenter spelled out,

Note the ridiculous supposition that Islamic terrorism is only responsible for 44% of domestic terrorist victims so its wrong to associate terrorism with Islam.

Muslims make up 1% of the US population and at 44% that’s an over-representation of 4,400%! Whether Islamic terrorism claims an absolute majority or not is besides the point.

Also non-Islamic terrorists are natives who we are stuck with. Muslim terrorists are immigrants or children of immigrants. We chose to bring these terrorists into our country.

And don’t forget all the foiled Muslim terror plots that, if left to execute unhindered, would further boost the kill rate of Muslim terror on US soil.

Bottom line: This is what happens when a nation is an amorphous “proposition” run by an adversarial, traitorous globocorp elite instead of a binding contract and divine expression of blood and soil native stock ruling the country for the benefit of their posterity.

Read more here.

Not a clue

The new normal

Victor Davis Hanson writes at National Review,

For a time, reset, concessions, and appeasement work to delay wars. But finally, nations wake up, grasp their blunders, rearm, and face down enemies.

...Hitler figured that for a decade America had been unarmed and isolationist. Britain repeatedly had appeased the Third Reich. The Soviets initially collaborated with Hitler.

...Hitler met no opposition after militarizing the Rhineland. He annexed Austria with impunity. He gobbled up Czechoslovakia without opposition. Why shouldn’t Hitler have been stunned in 1939 when exasperated Britain and France finally declared war over his invasion of distant Poland? Six years of war and some 60 million dead followed, re-establishing what should have been the obvious fact that democracies would not quite commit suicide.

By 1979, the Jimmy Carter administration had drastically cut the defense budget. Carter promised that he would make human rights govern American foreign policy. It sounded great to Americans after Vietnam — and even greater to America’s enemies. Then Iran imploded. The American embassy in Tehran was stormed. Diplomats were taken hostage. Radical Islamic terrorism spread throughout the Middle East. Communist insurrection followed throughout Central America. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. China went into Vietnam. Dictators such as the Soviet Union’s Leonid Brezhnev and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini assumed that Carter no longer was willing to protect the U.S. postwar order. Or perhaps they figured that the inexperienced American president was too weak to respond even had he wished to do so.

Then, Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in 1980 on the promise of restoring U.S. power. At first, both America’s friends and enemies were aghast at Reagan’s simplistic worldview that free markets were better than Communism, that democracy was superior to dictatorship, and that in the ensuring struggle, the West would win and the rest would lose.

Barack Obama, like Carter, came into office promising a sharp break from past U.S foreign policy. The public was receptive after the costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the recent financial meltdown on Wall Street.

Troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan on pre-announced deadlines. The post-surge quiet in Iraq fooled Obama into eagerly yanking out all U.S. peacekeepers. A new outreach to radical Islam went to ridiculous lengths. The Muslim Brotherhood was invited to Obama’s speech in Cairo that claimed the West owed cultural debts to Islam for everything from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.

Terms like radical Islam, jihad, and Islamic terror were excised from the official American vocabulary and replaced by a host of silly euphemisms. In symbolic tours, Obama offered apologies for past American behavior in the Middle East and Asia. He bowed to both theocratic sheiks and the Asian monarchs. The defense budget was cut. Reset with Vladimir Putin’s Russia assumed that the Bush administration, not Putin’s prior aggression in Georgia and threats to Crimea, had caused the estrangement between Moscow and Washington.

Predictable chaos followed as the U.S. became an observer abroad. The Islamic State appeared to fill the vacuum in Iraq. Syria imploded. So did most of North Africa. Iran sent agents, surrogates, and special forces into Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, even as it pressed on to get a bomb.

China stepped up its violations of the waters and airspace of America’s traditional Asian allies. Putin did the same in Eastern and Northern Europe.

By 2015, America’s enemies had created chaos and defined it as the new normal.

The next president will face a terrible dilemma. To restore order, he or she will have to convince our allies that we are recommitted to their security.

Any red lines issued will have to be enforced. Aggressors such as Russia, China, Iran, and the Islamic State will have to be warned to cease and desist or face pushback from far stronger U.S.-led coalitions. Just as Reagan’s return to normal U.S. foreign policy was considered radical after the Carter years, so too the next administration will be smeared as dangerously provocative after Obama’s recession from the world stage.

The Obama foreign policy cannot continue much longer without provoking even more chaos or a large war. Yet correcting it will be nearly as dangerous. Jumping off the global tiger is dangerous, but climbing back on will seem riskier.

Read more here.

Black lives matter!

I am upset about something. Two thousand Nigerians get slaughtered by Islamic terrorists Boko Haram in one day, and less than 20 are killed by Islamic terrorists in France; the media coverage is all about France, and very little about Nigeria! Something is very wrong with this picture!

Islamic terrorists, the Left, and what must be done

Today at Ace of Spades Open Blogger writes:

Islam is at war with the west, and we're doomed to lose if we can't even recognize that it's happening.

This week saw another terrorist atrocity (several, actually) committed in the name of Allah. As usual, our betters in the media fell all over themselves rushing to the nearest microphone to declare that there is no possible way that terrorists who identified as Muslim, who triumphantly shouted that they were avenging the prophet, could have anything whatsoever to do with Islam.

Why do our betters in the media do this? The blogger gives three reasons:

#1 It's a distraction. The left in this country frankly could care less what happens in the rest of the world. They are hell bent or turning this country into a collectivist Utopia, anything that distracts from that goal must be shut down. If the people are clamoring for protection from an external threat, they won't be clamoring for more "free" stuff, binding themselves ever more tightly to the grindstone of centralized government.

#2 Islam and the left share many of the same goals. Both want to destroy western civilization and replace it with a totalitarian oligarchy. The left thinks that Islam is doing their work for them, so they are content to tolerate it. Where they are deluded is that they believe that after western civilization is laid in it's grave, THEN they'll be able to defeat militant Islam. They're absolutely insane, they'll fold like the dhimmi bastards that they are. An Islam triumphant over Europe will simply say BOO to a leftist secular US and they'll jizyah in their pants.

#3 They're cowards. They are. It takes courage to face down an enemy that has point blank stated that its goal is your submission or death, and it doesn't care which. Facing something like that down requires acknowledging that many, many people will die in the effort, not the least of whom will be some of their unique, special, invaluable selves. Dying for what you believe in? That's soooo red state, nothing for the enlightened to contemplate.

So what do we do? First, we have to call out the lie for what it is.

Second, we MUST, absolutely MUST, support those voices in the Muslim world that dare to speak out against the violence. Egypt's al-Sisi took an extremely courageous stand against violence recently. Everybody from the President to the Pope should be singing his praises and offering whatever support they can, but they're not, see #1 and #2 above. Israel is the lone Western nation that is bucking this trend.

Finally, we have to realize that we are going to have to kill a large number of militants.

Read more here.

Update: Well this is strange. After posting this I decided to go back and read the comments. The post no longer exists! I wanted to see if commenters would contrast the media coverage of France and Nigeria.

Very, very concerned

The page one news today is that there is "unrest" in Iraq, which means that Islamists are killing other Islamists. Don't worry, though, because John Kerry says his government is not just concerned, not just very concerned, but very, very concerned. Yes, it is true that his government left Iraq before the Iraqi army could be sufficiently trained to protect Iraq's citizens from terrorism, but nevertheless, Washington is very, very concerned.

Allen West writes in the Washington Times,

Imagine how painful it must be for those of us who served in Iraq, were wounded, and lost brothers and sisters there to see how those hard-won accomplishments are being lost. The missions we accomplished and the relationships we built are being decimated, unlike al-Qaida.

And, what about the effects of media bias? West again:

Consider this fact: 70 percent of all casualties in Afghanistan have occurred under President Obama, but we do not hear about that count like we did with President Bush and Iraq. Let me be clear, there are only two ways to end a combat operation: win or lose. Packing up and saying you are leaving only serves to embolden the enemy, regardless of how you try to spin it as “mission accomplished” or a political talking point.