There are different laws for Trump than for Clinton or Obama
One of the most disturbing things about the war on Donald Trump is the differential application of the law and the political nature of decisions to prosecute.
Andrew C. McCarthy describes the situation thusly:
The major takeaway from the 40-page sentencing memorandum filed by federal prosecutors Friday for Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal attorney, is this: The president is very likely to be indicted on a charge of violating federal campaign finance laws.
It has been obvious for some time that President Trump is the principal subject of the investigation still being conducted by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York…
when Cohen pleaded guilty in August, prosecutors induced him to make an extraordinary statement in open court: the payments to the women were made “in coordination with and at the direction of” the candidate for federal office – Donald Trump.
Prosecutors would not have done this if the president was not on their radar screen. Indeed, if the president was not implicated, I suspect they would not have prosecuted Cohen for campaign finance violations at all. Those charges had a negligible impact on the jail time Cohen faces, which is driven by the more serious offenses of tax and financial institution fraud, involving millions of dollars.
Moreover, campaign finance infractions are often settled by payment of an administrative fine, not turned into felony prosecutions. To be sure, federal prosecutors in New York City have charged them as felonies before – most notably in 2014 against Dinesh D’Souza, whom Trump later pardoned.
In marked contrast, though, when it was discovered that Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was guilty of violations involving nearly $2 million – an amount that dwarfs the $280,000 in Cohen’s case – the Obama Justice Department decided not to prosecute. Instead, the matter was quietly disposed of by a $375,000 fine by the Federal Election Commission.
Please read the whole thing. Among other points McCarthy makes, there is very real question as to whether the NY prosecutors are able to indict a sitting president. Ordinarily the answer is “no.” As I said, please read the whole thing for the finer points of relevant law.
My focus here, however, is the law’s differential application, and the clear political goal in charging Trump (or D’Souza before him) versus the mild wrist-slap for Obama. This is extremely disturbing and has become standard operating procedure. Most Democrats applaud it, with the exception of Alan Dershowitz, because it’s in the service of the great and wonderful goal of bringing down Trump and conservatives. In these cases it’s not even necessary to “cut a great road through the law to get after the devil.” It’s merely necessary to apply the law (the letter of the law) to the person you hate and give a pass to the person you like.
And it’s also not necessary to actually convict, although with the right (that is, left) judge it’s possible to do so. What’s more important is to try to set the stage for impeachment.
There’s a great deal more on the subject of what’s been going on with the war against Trump, which began long before he was elected. I may discuss the following in more depth later on if I have time, but for now I’ll just list the following recommended articles: this one from Victor Davis Hanson, and this.
At this point, nothing new or out of the ordinary here.
I pledge allegiance to the Flag, of the U S of A
and to the banana republic, for which it stands.
If you go to the document in question, you will see this:
I haven’t looked into the details yet, but this indicates they would’ve prosecuting him. IIRC, they tried to prosecute John Edwards for the same thing…albeit unsuccessfully.
Worth looking into is whether or not “the applicable campaign finance regulations” in this case pertained to paying off a mistress. If Cohen (and apparently Trump) were warned in advance that this is a prosecutable offense, that would change the equation.
Somewhere or other, I’ve used the following parable:
Let’s say there’s a street in a city patrolled by a cop. On one afternoon, the cop sees three motorists doing 10 mph over the speed limit. The car that has a bumper sticker referencing a Democrat politician or belief is ignored; the car with no bumper sticker is pulled over, and the driver given a warning; and the car with a bumper sticker referencing a Republican politician or belief is pulled over and then searched for hour, with the driver eventually getting the most severe possible ticket for the original infraction, along with the most severe possible tickets for any other violation the cop can find after a lengthy search of the vehicle and its contents.
When you try to point out the unfairness of the scenario, the lefty in the conversation says, “But I thought you hypocritical Republican types are all about law enforcement! Why wouldn’t want the driver to get pulled over and given a ticket?” Then when you point out that the other two cars were doing the same thing, you’re accused of “What-aboutism.” But the underlying unfairness remains untouchable. Leftists do not think that leftists are capable of doing wrong, unless there’s another reason to throw them under the bus.
What leftists are completely unable to understand is that ideal of the rule of law is to have a set of reasonable laws that are enforced equally – which means that the hypothetical cop should have treated all three of the drivers the same (which is probably to pull each one over and give a warning, unless the driver has a recent history of speeding) – that anything else is on the short road to the banana republic, if not the totalitarian dictatorship.
? Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West
Today is the day, Dec 10 1970 a Banquet Speech was given:
As the Laureate was unable to be present at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, December 10, 1970, the speech was read by Karl Ragnar Gierow, Permanent Secretary of The Swedish Academy
oh AND Dec 10 1974 too
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1974
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1970/solzhenitsyn/25612-alexandr-solzhenitsyn-banquet-speech-1970-3/
tomorrow… is the 100th anniversary of his birth…
On December 11, the President [Putin] will attend the unveiling ceremony for a monument to Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Jordan Peterson Reads New Foreword to The Gulag Archipelago: 50th Anniversary Edition / https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/10/31/jordan_peterson_reads_foreward_to_the_gulag_archipelago_50th_anniversary.html
The fact you are free is not your achievement, but rather a failure on our side. Felix Dzerzhinsky
? Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West
John Edwards was correct in saying there are two Americas, one rule of law for the leftists and lawlessness for the rest of us. Overturning an election with corrupt, duplicitous theatrics will not end well.
A huge travesty of justice is taking place, and I find it enormously distressing. I mean ENORMOUSLY distressing! The Mueller investigative group, backed by an exceptionally biased press, is trying to tighten the noose on Trump for doing things previous Presidents have done with total impunity. Not that I am excusing him, or them. I am, rather, just outraged that they are mounting a political witch hunt under the guise of the discharging the law, while they ignored previous presidential transgressions because they were on the same side
Where are we headed as a nation when a political witch hunt can be mounted by the DOJ, bolstered by intelligence gathered by the Intelligence Community, funded by the USG, supported by a biased media, and recognized by half the population as some kind of legitimate investigation?
It feels to me as if we are powerless to even get a fair hearing in the press or on Capitol Hill about the dishonesty we are living with. The deck is stacked against us, but we have no way of balancing the situation.
I am by nature an optimistic person, but I am not optimistic about where we are headed in this case. The forces arrayed against us are too strong and far-reaching for me to believe the situation can reach any kind of fair equilibrium.
Alas Babylon.
I am by nature an optimistic person, but I am not optimistic about where we are headed in this case.
I agree. There has been an interesting level of discussion about a collapse of civilization recently.
David Goldman and Richard Fernandez, both of whom I read every day, have been pointing this out. Kids have been watching and reading dystopic series like “The Hunger Games.” and “Game of Thrones.”
Both are about the future or, at least, a fantasy world.
Kurt Schlicter’s novels about a post red/blue secession and the war on freedom in the blue states is popular.
I have read all three and hope they remain fiction but he has the jargon of the left down very well. He lives in Los Angeles, the setting of the first book, and hears it every day.
“are popular” No edit function.
Could someone please explain to me how a married man paying off a blackmailing bimbo to keep quiet about a surreptitious shtup constitutes a campaign finance violation? Considering it probably happens 100 times a day in this country. Are all the other men making payoffs guilty of campaign finance violations? If not, why is Trump guilty of one?
Furthermore, isn’t blackmail still a crime? What happened to Mueller’s mandate to prosecute crimes involving Russian collusion and “anything discovered in the course of the investigation?” How could they discover Cohen and/or Trump making the payoff, but not the shtupees demanding it? Isn’t Trump the victim of the crime here?
Edit function down.
I get absolutely nutty when I contrast the latest Trump outrage du jour with Hillary’s email server, which I continue to consider obvious treason.
It was more important to Hillary to prevent American citizens from FOIA access to her emails than to secure her communications as SecState from the Russians and Chinese.
huxley: Agree entirely. Absolutely nutty is a good way to describe my reaction too. I worked with classified documents for 30 years, and would have been cashiered (and perhaps jailed) for what she did. Right on!
Not to mention — she was allowing the Russians, Chinese, Iranians and Norks to read what she and her underlings were reporting, thinking and planning. And she walks free, and plans to run for President in 2 years. OMG, as the youngsters say.
I am seeing a lot of anger in the comments. And to my mind very justifiable anger. I know that I, my wife and immediate friends feel the same way. As another blogger says “It’s not going to end well”. But for whom?
The Solzhenitsyn quote in Artless’ comment above–
“Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art—and by art I mean the search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, oversimplified explanations. One of these riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body; while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly appear to lose the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery.
Or again: why is it that societies which have been benumbed for half a century by lies they have been forced to swallow find within themselves a certain lucidity of heart and soul which enables them to see things in their true perspective and to perceive the real meaning of events; whereas societies with access to every kind of information suddenly plunge into lethargy, into a kind of mass blindness, a kind of voluntary self deception.”
presciently and perfectly sums up the situation in much of the West today.
I note that it is those very countries in Eastern Europe that have thrown off the yoke of Communism which have refused to let the EU force them to allow the Muslim invaders to invade, and ruin their countries, as they are in the process of doing in the countries of Western Europe, Scandinavia, and the UK.
Of course, it is also these Christian Eastern European countries which have also had the experience of suffering under hundreds of years of Islamic violence, domination, and slavery when they were part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, the last Caliphate, that collapsed in 1922.
They know what is in store for the nations who have foolishly and suicidally welcomed their Muslim invaders in with open arms, and they want no part of it.
The last article Neo linked (American Thinker: Comey Lied!) recites mostly the things we already know, but another piece it quoted and linked contained something that was news to me — don’t know how I missed it. His points about the need to remove security clearances from people when they leave their jobs was bruited about for awhile, but I didn’t see any specifics about Comey getting contracts via his connections to Mueller.
It’s always about the money, isn’t it?
https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2018/08/21/robert-mueller-seamus-bruner-contracts-flowed-fbi-james-comey-lockheed-martin/
“Seamus Bruner, Government Accountability Institute (GAI) researcher and author of Compromised: How Money and Politics Drive FBI Corruption, explained how former FBI Directors James Comey and Robert Mueller leveraged their government contacts to enrich themselves.”
To those who have been paying attention, it’s clear that the Washington establishment (The D.C. denizens who have become accustomed to corporatism and progressive control of things because it pays & salves their consciences.) saw a danger in a Donald Trump presidency. It was clear that he could not be bought off. And it was uncertain whether he would be wiling to join the insiders club. As the campaign wore on, the rallies of “deplorables” frightened them. Populism was the last thing the establishment wanted to deal with. And those deplorables! Who wanted to represent them and their uncouth ideas?
IMO, this thing goes much higher than Comey and Loretta Lynch. The intel community was pressed into service and that had to come from the White House. Dirty tricks and sabotage have been a hallmark of Obama’s campaigns. I’m sure his finger prints will be hard to find, because he’s a slippery fellow. Besides he never knew anything. His rejoinder when asked about important events was that he read about it in the newspaper, just like all we plebes. Yeah!
It’s one thing to do dirty tricks during a campaign. It’s an entirely different ballgame to continue to use the FBI, Justice, and the intel community to sabotage a sitting President. What is needed right now is a strong Attorney General Someone with the cajones to start kicking ass and taking names. They must rush Bill Barr through confirmation. A strong AG could blow this case wide open.
If the progs begin impeachment proceedings in the House, I’m old and decrepit, but I’ll hit the bricks in protest with anyone else who’s of a like mind. In addition, we must organize mass call ins to Representatives and Senators. They do keep track of phone calls that register for or against some issue. If our representatives won’t seek justice, then we have to demand that they step up to the plate. It’s time for all good men and women to come to the defense of equal justice.
ARTless on December 10, 2018 at 7:19 pm at 7:19 pm said:
“At the present time it is widely accepted among lawyers that law is higher than morality—law is something which is shaped and developed, whereas morality is something inchoate and amorphous.
This is not the case.
The opposite is true: morality is higher than law!
Law is our human attempt to embody in rules a part of that moral sphere which is above us. We try to understand this morality, bring it down to earth, and present it in the form of law. Sometimes we are more successful, sometimes less. Sometimes we have a mere caricature of morality, but morality is always higher than law. This view must never be abandoned.”
? Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West
* * *
Just finished a good piece at City Journal on Solzhenitsyn.
https://www.city-journal.org/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn
He was a great man whose advice is being roundly ignored.
In this case, though, semantics is creating some problems. Although in general Solzhenitsyn is correct — that morality supersedes law — that belief depends entirely on a morality that is itself objective, non-partisan, and liberal in the classic sense of the founding of the American Republic.
When morality, for one faction, becomes “whatever advances our interest and you are hatey hate haters for thinking anything else,” then the only point of safety for the other factions is the scrupulous application of legal justice and the fairness of the laws themselves (see “hate crimes” and “Title IX guidance” and EPA “waters of the United States” for examples of unjust, unfair laws).
See the parable above for another instance.
(KyndyllG on December 10, 2018 at 6:59 pm at 6:59 pm said:)
Traffic laws have no inherent morality (as opposed to laws against murder, theft, etc.), but their mode of enforcement can be immoral in the extreme.
While we are on the topic of what a great person Mueller is, see this update on one of his victims.
https://www.breitbart.com/crime/2018/12/10/gangster-james-whitey-bulgers-family-plans-wrongful-death-lawsuit/
On the Mueller-Bulger connection, see here (perhaps a bit more sensational than some others, but the basic facts are fairly laid out), although I think most of Neo’s readers are familiar with the story.
https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/30517-was-whitey-bulger-s-prison-murder-a-deep-state-hit-to-protect-mueller
MooSnow, when was Poland ruled by Islam (if anything, the Medieval Poles were the bullies, dealing several large defeats to the Turks). Lithuania under Moslem rule? Latvia? Czech?
Meanwhile Bulgaria, which was Turkish for longer than almost all of them, is quite relaxed about Islam. They simply don’t behave the way you think they do.
The Albanian response to the apparently crushing Turkish rule was to become Muslim themselves.
You have this theory, and you’re determined to run with it. That it doesn’t fit the facts appears to be irrelevant to you. Please stop. It’s embarrassing to anyone who isn’t determined to follow your black/white world view with One True Evil ™.
AesopFan:
Traffic laws do have a base in morality; discourage actions or consequences that endanger the health and safety of other persons and other person’s property.
Chester:
Christians in southern Europe and the Balkans under the Turks had these options; becoming Muslin or face the consequences: slavery, taxes, or death. Your rosy gloss is ahistorical. It also seems to ignore current events: blasphemy apps enabled by Google for Indonesia, death to blasphemers in Pakistan, and the persecution of Copts in Egypt.
Christians in southern Europe and the Balkans under the Turks had these options;
Muslims have been common in Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia / Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Bulgaria. Pretty modest minority in Bulgaria (12% of the population is Turkish Muslim or Pomak)
Worth looking into is whether or not “the applicable campaign finance regulations” in this case pertained to paying off a mistress. If Cohen (and apparently Trump) were warned in advance that this is a prosecutable offense, that would change the equation.
Why do those on the left assume Trump did have affairs with these two whores ? I have seen no evidence except a photo at a golf tournament. Blackmail is illegal, I thought. Paying blackmail is not a campaign contribution.
With respect to Muslims in the Balkans, Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” is still the best discussion of that I know of.
If it weren’t for double standards, Leftists wouldn’t have any
🙂
RE: “My focus here, however, is the law’s differential application, and the clear political goal in charging Trump. … This is extremely disturbing and has become standard operating procedure.”
Indeed.
Put yourself in the shoes of the Federal judge who had to sentence the US sailor convicted of taking six selfies in a secure area. In doing so, the sailor created six documents classified “confidential”, the lowest classification level. Still, they were improperly stored, and that’s a felony. The US Attorney’s Office recommended that he get five years in prison. That was their determination of a fair sentence based on the Law, the nature of the crime, and similar cases. The judge knew that what Hillary did was orders of magnitude worse, but she was expected to be elected President in less than two months. Still, you can’t let the sailor go free: national security demands that classified information be protected. [Saucier got one year.]
I’ve noticed a disturbing trend. Members of the Ruling Class rail about how Trump is destroying institutions and norms, and they list the Western values that they will defend to the death. One that doesn’t get mentioned very often anymore: equal justice before the law.
“There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.”
—Susan B. Anthony
All your noticing Neo is the end result of 60 odd years of feminisms change to law…
and as i wrote a long time ago, you have to make enough change to be percieved
otherwise, incrementalism can “normalize” anything…
Especially to the more suggestable…
I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them. Robin Morgan, Ms. Magazine Editor
I guess people dont get what these things MEAN when translated to ACTION
after all, they bs all the time and nothing for them translates to action, so….
Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometimes gain from the experience. Catherine Comins
Yes,
Catherine, what are we learning?
oh, and this double standard stuff? well, its a special thing women have:
I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He’s just incapable of it. Barbara Jordan, former Congresswoman
[only REAL women are capable of understanding whats going on with Trump but is it trump only? no, see below]
AesopFan — You missed Artfl’s point — he was saying that lawyers believe — which many do — that law is superior to morality, rather than what is or should be.
Art has points to make, you just have to search through the haystack to find them while he shouts at you. To each his own.
“If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”—Abigail Adams
“If women’s liberation is unthinkable without communism, then communism is unthinkable without women’s liberation.”
—Russian revolutionary Inessa Armand
“The more I have spoken about feminism, the more I have realized that fighting for women’s rights has too often become synonymous with man-hating. If there is one thing I know for certain, it is that this has to stop.”—Emma Watson
“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”—Irina Dunn
“I think the key is for women not to set any limits.” — Martina Navratilova
“As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” —Virginia Woolf
Marx and Engels located the root of women’s oppression in their role within the nuclear family in class societies. They understood that women’s role as biological “reproducers” results in their subordinate status inside the nuclear family, and consequently throughout society. In capitalist societies, women in property-holding families reproduce heirs; women in working-class families reproduce generations of labor power for the system. [so you stop them from reproducing… ie. the population collapses, and when they die out, you start over]
Replacement Migration: Is It a Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations?
http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/ageing/replacement-migration.shtml
[they used the women to repeat what happened in russia, now they use the outcome of that, pretending they didnt know, to justify replacing the intransigent and freedom loving branch of human kind… think on that… cause the chinese and india, africa, and russ… etc.. only ONE sub group of humans created a sustainable freedom out of a world of rulers, despots, kings, family dynasties and more… ]
………….and this will give us the right to participate as the equals of men in the new life of a victorious Russia.”
THE WOMEN WANT COMMUNISM AND STATE SLAVERY, AND WHAT WOMEN WANT, WOMEN GET
OR SOMEONE ELSE MOVES IN AND WE SEE WHAT HAPPENS…
note if you deny that this is what it is..
and your wrong..
what is the outcome?
[200 years of effort isnt going to just walk away cause most think its the past 30 years]
I agree that there is considerable interest in Marxism among the younger generation these days, especially if they have gone to college. Colleges seem to be a hotbed of Marxist ideas and I wonder how much is related to student debt ?
F said….” The deck is stacked against us, but we have no way of balancing the situation.” Oh Yes we do…..OH YES WE DO!!
At the risk of shameless self-promotion, have you considered that this double standard and the stench thereof is intentional; redpilljew.blogspot.com/2018/04/socialisms-gateway-drug.html:
Quote:
Today we see the corruption – ethical, moral, spiritual, and financial – in the fetid swamp of Washington, DC (the irony of that city being named after one of the absolute best of us is physically painful to me), but also in most state capitals (and even further down – I was just listening to a local talk show discussing the state police milking the public)… and it feels like a lot of people are starting to think WHY BOTHER? Another case is this one; on a purely local level, but so utterly incompetent that it boggles the mind: ILLEGAL ALIEN UBER DRIVER RAPED HIS PASSENGER, FLED BACK TO AFRICA. Ask yourself if the just-above example doesn’t represent a huge attack on the credibility of the entire court system; whether deliberate or just stupid, would you really trust this judge again? On anything? And if nothing happens to this judge, just how high and wide would that distrust propagate?
“It’s called transparency Nancy,” Trump shot back.
this is the list they are thinking is right and real
Obstruction of justice
Emoluments
Money laundering
Campaign fraud
Failure to execute the law
Suborning perjury
Bribery of foreign officials
Logan Act
Income Tax violations
Perjury
Extreme Carelessness with classified information
Caging Babies
icing on the cake: collusion (synergy) with foreign antagonists to subvert the election
Good list, Artfl. All except the last. The only collusion with Russia was committed by the DNC and Hillary.
The various charges are figments of progressive fevered dreams. The exact same list of charges could be made about most Presidents.
Most of them apply to Hillary and Bill for sure. Barack as well.
Let them prove them in an impeachment trial. That will turn Donald Trump into a martyr of the people.
Chester Draws– It looks like you (and a whole hell of a lot of other people, too, missed out on this history in school).
Let’s take a little ride through just one section of Andrew G. Bostom’s very well documented book, “The Legacy of Jihad, ” which is mostly based on the accounts of Muslims themselves, the occasional victim, or outside observer.
HIs Appendix B, starting on page 679, is titled,
“Jihad Slave Raids (Razzias) by the Tartars, Mid-Fifteenth Through Late Seventeenth Centuries.” **
I’m just going to pull out those raids listed as having taken place in Poland from this two page compilation of 61 total raids that Bostom was able to find some totals for.
Note: I am leaving out the many hundreds of thousands of additional slaves taken by Muslim raiders during this same time period in Galicia, Kiev, Lvov, South Russia, Moscow, Volynia, the Ukraine, and Kharkov.
Year PLACE NUMBER OF CAPTIVES TAKEN
1463 Poland 18,000
1533 Poland Thousands
1612 Poland 50,000
1616 Poland Thousands
1621 Poland 36
1623 Poland 10,000
1624 Poland 900
1624 Poland 600
1626 Poland 60
1626 Poland 250
1632 Poland 2,260
1633 Poland 57
1637 Poland 2,280
1644 Poland 10,000
1648 Poland 100,000
1648 Poland 40,000
1651 Poland 2,000
1655 Poland 34,000
1659 Poland 11,060
1694 Poland Thousands
**Constructed from Alan Fisher, “Moscovy and the Black Sea Slave Trade,” Canadian American Slavic Studies, (1972), p. 580-=582.
From a commentary by Fisher,
A Polish proverb, “O how much better to lie on one’s bier, than to be a captive on the way to Tartary.”
To quote from p.23-24 of the Introduction of another interesting work, Paul Fregosi’s “Jihad in the West” :
“…A large part of Europe was taken, occupied for centuries, sometimes devastated, and some of it was Islamized. Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Sicily, Austria, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Rumania, Wallachia, Albania, Moldavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Armenia, Georgia, Poland, Ukraine and eastern and southern Russia were all Jihad battlefields where Islam conquered or was conquered. Many of these lands were occupied by the Muslims, in some cases by Arabs and Moors, in others by Ottoman Turks, usually for hundreds of years. Spain 800 years, Portugal 600 years, Greece 500 years, Sicily 300 years, Serbia 400 years, Bulgaria 500 years, Rumania 400 years, Hungary 150 years. Hungary particularly was ruined, plundered, and ravaged and took 200 years to recover from Muslim occupation. …”
“Muslims invaded and occupied a huge part of Europe, but sometimes Muslims raiders only came and went. The Turks besieged Vienna twice, in 1529 and 1683. Their cavalry raided central Europe, riding into Bavaria almost as far as Nuremberg. They fought in Poland and the Ukraine, crushed Hungary, occupied Belgrade and Budapest for hundreds of years. The Moors and Arabs took Spain and Portugal, invaded France through the Pyrenees, turned Sicily into an Islamic island, raided Rome, sacked St. Peter’s and obliged the Pope to pay them tribute. From their base near St. Tropez on the French Riviera they raided Switzerland as far as Lake Constance on the German border. The pirates of the Barbary Coast raided England, Denmark, Ireland, and Iceland and brought back thousands of slaves to be sold in the markets of Constantinople (after they conquered it and turned it into Istanbul) and North Africa. *** The Mongols threatened Moscow, occupied the Crimea and became Tartars. The Persians marched into Georgia; so did the Turks, who also occupied Armenia.”
***For a look at this aspect of Jihad raids and slavery take a look at Giles Milton’s 2005 book, “White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam’s One Million White Slaves.”
All of the above should have been a very cautionary History that we all should have been taught. However, I certainly don’t remember being assigned reading about, or being taught any of the substance of this History, and I was a History major.
I suspect that–at such a far remove–this information was considered irrelevant in our supposed “modern” and “civilized” day and age, and anyway, why dwell on all that old “unpleasantness,” when we can all Ooh and Ah over pictures of the Alhambra, the Taj Mahal, Islamic calligraphy and metalwork (not caring who it might have been who was doing the actual work, and if they were slave or free), and marvel at what we have been told by today’s writers was the Muslim’s enlightened and peaceful rule, the coexistence; that joy and light that supposedly existed for Christians and Jews alike in Andalusia under the long Muslim rule there.
Chester Draw,
It’s funny how a single word can reveal so much:
“…when was Poland ruled by Islam (if anything, the Medieval Poles were the bullies, dealing several large defeats to the Turks).”
“Bullies”.
Would you classify the defeat of Ottoman forces at the second Siege of Vienna as bullying?
om on December 11, 2018 at 9:45 am at 9:45 am said:
AesopFan:
Traffic laws do have a base in morality; discourage actions or consequences that endanger the health and safety of other persons and other person’s property.
* * *
True; I was thinking of the mundane “which side to drive on” or “can you make a right on red here?” variety as contrasted to “don’t kill” and “don’t steal”.
* *
Richard Saunders on December 11, 2018 at 11:49 am at 11:49 am said:
AesopFan — You missed Artfl’s point — he was saying that lawyers believe — which many do — that law is superior to morality, rather than what is or should be.
* *
Many lawyers do believe this, and I think it is a natural development of the profession.
I was trying to point out (inartfully, apparently), that since laws are of necessity an instantiation of morality (and thus are subordinate to it; leaving aside the question of WHOSE moral viewpoints are being instantiated), the fair and impartial application of these supposedly just laws can become a moral act in and of itself.
That reality falls short of the ideal on any number of accounts is too bad.
kevino on December 11, 2018 at 11:33 am at 11:33 am said:
…
I’ve noticed a disturbing trend. Members of the Ruling Class rail about how Trump is destroying institutions and norms, and they list the Western values that they will defend to the death. One that doesn’t get mentioned very often anymore: equal justice before the law.
* * *
There are Western values they are willing to defend?
Who knew?