Here’s an article at RealClearInvestigations that purports to explain the history. An excerpt:

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Democrats’ U.S. Senate primary in Michigan last Tuesday was the latest sign of an emerging kingmaker in U.S. politics – a little-known super PAC that has tapped the wealth of a new cadre of Muslim-American mega-donors to support far-left candidates.

Since it was launched just six months ago, American Priorities has channeled millions of dollars, primarily from donors with Arab, Muslim, and/or Middle Eastern backgrounds, to a string of winning candidates in high-profile races.

Most of the entity-supported candidates are running on various democratic-socialist policies, such as single-payer health care, abolishing ICE, and slashing the military. But one area in which all candidates are aligned, consistent with the PAC’s mission, is in their antagonism towards Israel.

Because so much of the Democrat voter base is anti-Israel, this is now a requirement for most races. It’s not new, either. It began to be visible in politics with Barack Obama, although it was more subtle. The four members of Congress known as “The Squad” – two of whom, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, were openly Muslim and Israel-hating – were elected in 2018. Seems like longer ago, doesn’t it?

The Muslim population of the US has been growing in recent years, and it may have reached a critical mass to take more political power – especially if the group votes as a bloc, and especially in areas where the Muslim population is highest (that would be NY, NJ, Illinois, Maryland, and Michigan, by percentage of population; note that only Michigan is not a deep blue state already).

This isn’t much different from other immigrant groups who have come to this country. It’s a natural progression to get more involved in politics and to run for political office. But a larger proportion of this group isn’t interested in the values and principles on which this country was founded, and in this it’s a natural fit for the far left which has the same desire to “transform” the US into something quite different:

A recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing convened by Sen. Ted Cruz raised a more chilling issue. The Texas Republican alleged, and witnesses concurred that – in a parallel to what has transpired in countries like France, Germany, and the United Kingdom – the Muslim Brotherhood, a subversive transnational Islamist organization, has cultivated an “entrenched institutional network” in America of NGOs, advocacy groups, and political organizations to advance its leaders’ recorded mission to “destroy … Western civilization from within.” That network, terrorism expert Kyle Shideler found, has actively partnered with the Democratic Socialists of America, as part of what Cruz called a “Red-Green Alliance,” that Shideler said is “united around a revolutionary objective advocating for the overthrow of the U.S. Constitution.” Democrats on the panel boycotted the hearing in protest, claiming in a statement the Texas senator was “[s]capegoating Muslims.”

Of course; “Islamaphobia,” that all-purpose term to attempt to quell any criticism of this group.

More about the funding that is enabling this:

American Priorities was founded in February as a self-styled “countervailing force” to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Though the largest such group, it is just one of several relatively new PACs with overlapping donors centered on opposition to Israel (see sidebar). The super PAC is led by Hannah Fertig, a strategist self-identifying as Jewish who figured prominently in the 2020 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, who is also Jewish and a backer of staunch anti-Zionist candidates. The group’s treasurer is Mark Hanna, an assembly district leader in New York who began his political career as an organizer focusing on Muslim-related issues, including through forming Yalla Brooklyn, an NGO dedicated to mobilizing Arab and Muslim voters. American Priorities has pledged to put up $10 million this cycle to elect Democratic candidates who believe the party establishment is too pro-Israel. AIPAC and its affiliates have also poured tens of millions of dollars into recent election cycles as support for the Jewish state generally has declined – a long-term trend among Democrats correlating with the rise of the anti-Israel progressive left. To support its political claims, American Priorities cites polls showing a majority of Democratic voters oppose U.S. military aid to Israel, are more sympathetic to Palestinian Arabs than Israelis, and shun candidates who accept AIPAC support.

Many of the super PAC’s top donors are first-generation Muslim immigrants who have made their fortunes in the U.S. They include …

The article then goes on to list some of them, with descriptions.

I will also point out that their anti-Israel message appeals to the Tucker wing of the ex-right (I don’t call them “right” anymore, because they have come to resemble the left so much that the differences have become more and more minor). But the attitudes are rife among Democrat politicians and Democrat voters. In 2024, Kamala Harris was well aware of this and did not choose Governor Shapiro of Pennsylvania because she knew many Democrat voters would turn away from her if she chose a Jew who wasn’t of the Bernie Sanders variety: secular, virtue-signaling, Israel-hating. There are just a few Democrats who have spoken out against these attitudes (for example Fetterman, Goldman who lost his primary, and NJ’s Josh Gottheimer). In contrast, despite Tucker and company, the vast majority of Republican office-holders are on the pro-Israel side.

Here’s one interesting Democrat who has offered an opinion:

Joel Rubin, the Jewish outreach leader on Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, has likewise said that “I think what Sanders and the Sanders operation have done is shove into our system the most categorically anti-Israel, antisemitic candidates that we’ve seen in a generation – if ever, certainly within the Democratic Party” – a reference to the Vermont socialist’s leadership on the left.

In 2020, Sanders had a softer line on Israel that mostly centered on criticizing Netanyahu. That’s probably why Joel Rubin felt it was fine to work for him, but no longer holds that view as Sanders has moved into the “Israel is committing genocide” camp. These days Sanders not only sees which way the Democrats’ wind blows, he wants to be part of the push.

On Mamdani, whose election has been a high point of the movement:

These candidates are following in the footsteps of, and in some cases with the blessing of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani – whose rise captured the attention and support of several of American Priorities’ donors prior to its launch, including its two biggest backers, Mohamed Waqas Javed and Omer Hasan. Both have contributed over $1 million to the super PAC to date. While little is publicly known about them, they and a third donor, Tariq Afaq Ahmed, who has contributed $500,000, were pre- and post-IPO employees at AppLovin, today one of the world’s most valuable ad tech companies, from which they likely made a fortune. AppLovin has come under scrutiny for, among other things, its funding from Chinese Communist Party-linked individuals and entities. …

American Priorities’ treasurer, Hanna, previously served alongside Mamdani in the 2017 campaign of Palestinian-American Rev. Khader El-Yateem. Mamdani said that El-Yateem “transformed” his life, in part by connecting him with “a political movement that understood Palestine as being a central part of the struggle, which is something that I had often struggled with…all of these politicians I had admired…found every way to not address Palestinians when it came to their seemingly universal struggles.”

The Mamdani campaign, which emerged from the city’s Muslim Democrat establishment and made Israel and the Palestinian Arabs a major focus, appears to have catalyzed Muslim donors nationally, while demonstrating a proof of concept for how targeted contributions could dramatically increase their political clout going forward.

Mamdani has been both an inspiration and a catalyst for more donations.

The article cites polls of American Muslims that indicate support among them for the Muslim Brotherhood is especially high, and support for Hamas is quite high too. Also:

The Pew poll also showed that Muslims have a more favorable view of Palestinian Arabs than any other religious cohort at 78%, and a less favorable view of Israelis than any other religious cohort at 26% support. Following the October 7 attack, nearly 58% of American Muslims surveyed found that Hamas was at least somewhat justified in carrying out the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust “as part of their struggle for a Palestinian state.”

The following may be the most important part of the article:

Manhattan Institute President Reihan Salam, the son of Muslim immigrants, has identified what he sees as two problematic “ideological tendencies” among American Muslims that are of increasing relevance as Islam is set to surpass Judaism as America’s second largest religion within the next generation, and as Muslims’ political power grows. The first is “Islamism” and its violent manifestation in jihad. The second that he hypothesizes persists among upwardly mobile, educated, and often relatively secular Muslims is their rejection of “the quiet gratitude that one associates with immigrants and their children of earlier eras.” This, he says, is not so much due to the dictates of their faith as they understand it, but due to “‘anti-West westernization’ or ‘adversarial assimilation’: a process by which incorporation into American institutions produces not attachment to patriotic narratives of American freedom, individualism, and benevolence but hostility toward them.” He says that this cohort is in thrall to “Third Worldism,” which Salam defines as “a fusion of anti-Zionism, anti-Westernism, and anti-capitalism that places the sacralized victimhood of Palestinian Arabs at the center of a larger struggle against American imperialism.”

Of the two tendencies, “in important respects,” he argued recently in Sapir Journal, Third Worldism “presents the more consequential long-term ideological challenge.”

“Where jihadism targets American civilians as part of a larger struggle to overthrow ‘apostate’ regimes in the Muslim world, Third Worldism endeavors to transform the nation’s ideological-intellectual milieu, shaping how Americans – well beyond the Muslim minority – understand their country and its place in the world.”

I have heard the term “third worldism” more and more lately. I plan to write a post on the subject soon. It’s one of the main ideas that binds Islamists and the left, an alliance that some find strange but that makes perfect sense in many ways. They share the goal of destroying the west as we know it, and although each wants to be the one ultimately in charge of the Brave New World that follows, only one will succeed. But that’s for later. Right now destruction is the proximate goal.

The post What’s behind the sudden emergence of a host of Muslim DSA-backed candidates? appeared first on The New Neo.

From Matt Taibbi, as quoted at PJ Media:

In sum, a Berlin-born man of Lebanese descent [the attacker] left Germany last year to join the ISIS militia, failed to reach Mauritania, failed to reach Syria, got arrested and sentenced in his family’s home country of Lebanon for ‘incitement to religious and sectarian conflict,’ then successfully returned to Germany to be arrested again,” Taibbi writes.

“He was convicted for planning a serious act of terrorist violence, but released despite a Prosecutor’s request for a ‘longer, non-probationary sentence for the juvenile’ — the 21-year-old juvenile — and put into ‘deradicalization counseling,’ which was about to report him for being ‘inscrutable,’ evasive, and a threat,” Taibbi continued. …

“Instead of examining border control policies that welcome back terrorist offenders so they can immediately be put into a criminal justice system that bars long sentences for 21-year-old ‘juveniles,’ or a probation policy that thinks it can counsel people out of religious fanaticism, the [New York] Times points the finger at a chancellor who refused to fly a Pride flag over parliament,” writes Taibbi.

So apparently it’s the right’s fault, of course.

Germany is in big trouble if it continues down this path. But Germany is hardly alone.

How was the suspect killed? Here’s the story:

“According to current findings, he is said to have rushed toward our emergency forces with a stabbing weapon, after which police firearms were used,” the Berlin Police said in a post on X, confirming that the confrontation occurred at approximately 6 p.m. local time Sunday. It went on to say that resuscitation efforts at the scene proved unsuccessful.

Is “a stabbing weapon” some sort of circumlocution to avoid naming the forbidden thing?

German authorities seem to think that their locating the suspect in such a timely fashion is something to brag about. But I would think that preventing him from being able to do this in the first place would have been much better. And in this case, this man already had fully demonstrated his dangerousness and should and could have been either deported or imprisoned. But it didn’t happen.

The post The jihadi attack on the German gay pride festival appeared first on The New Neo.

Investigators were probing whether the suspect Raul Morales, 51, was motivated by hate, though Tisch also said “the initial investigation suggests that mental health may have been a factor.”

I don’t doubt both were possibly true: that the perp was indeed motivated by “hate” and that “mental health may have been a factor.” The questions are really legal ones: will this be charged as a hate crime and is there enough craziness to have caused diminished responsibility under the relevant laws? One especially strange element of the stabbings is that the perp yelled the Arabic phrase but does not seem to be either an Arab or a Muslim.

Ah, but not so fast:

[In the shared apartment of Raul Morales] … writings of Marx were found. New York Post reported New York Post reported that two Qurans, a Jehovah’s Witness Bible and a book on Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara were also found.

I suppose he had roommates who might be able to shed some light on things. That article also indicates that he was charged with this: “two counts of second-degree attempted murder as a hate crime and one count each of first-degree assault as a hate crime, second-degree assault as a hate crime, and attempted first-degree assault as a hate crime.” So apparently they’ve decided that yes, “hate” was a motivation.

I’m not keen on “hate crime” as a separate category, by the way – in general, not just for this particular crime. But as I said, I have little doubt that hatred was part of it. There’s an atmosphere of hatred towards Jews in New York, although for this particular perp, who also targeted an Asian person, it doesn’t seem to have just been towards Jews. I’ve noticed that some of these random killings have targeted Asians as well, and that’s been going on for quite some time.

More:

Language in the criminal complaint says that a witness saw Morales near a synagogue West 83rd Street saying “justice for Islam” …

He also has a criminal record for drugs in the 1990s.

Mamdani had a few perfunctory words to say after the crime, but it’s pretty obvious where his own heart is. And it’s not with the victims. His entire stint as mayor so far has featured a subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle fanning the flames of Jew-hatred, and for those inclined in that direction (and/or having mental problems) it acts as a releasor for aggression. See this:

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a “no room for hate” hypocrite: His obsessive Israel-bashing — and the ravings of his rabid pro-Palestinian besties — encourages antisemitic violence.

Tuesday night, he released an incendiary video repeating (again) a litany of lies about Israeli’s war of self-defense against the Hamas terrorists and urging mass demonstrations when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu next comes to town.

Thursday, an attacker shouting “Allahu Akbar” stabbed two men — a Jew in a yarmulke and an Asian — on the Upper West Side; the mayor responded with noises about hate and mental illness.

But it’s not generic hate that encourages such targeted bloodshed, however unstable the perp might be: It’s very specific incitement that points the violent at a chosen class of victims.

And in the comments to that article I see something I very often see when such topics are discussed: “Maybe they shouldn’t have voted for him. Crazy, huh?” But the Jews of New York voted overwhelmingly for Cuomo in the primary and in the election as well.

The post Mamdani and violence against Jews in New York appeared first on The New Neo.

First of all, Islam hasn’t even been around for “thousands of years.” It has a very specific origin date and a founder: the date is 610 CE. So it’s 1,416 years old.

Yes, there are certainly passages in the Koran that show hatred of Jews. But no, there wasn’t any “war” – and one very basic reason is that for almost all of those years Islam has been in existence, right up till 1948, Jews had no army and couldn’t fight wars. They certainly were the victims of violence, but that violence was not mainly at the hands of Muslims; more of it occurred in Christian lands, and it was more in the nature of sporadic massacres than formal wars. The Holocaust was a very special case in which there was an attempt by Nazis (with the cooperation of many others) to eradicate the Jews of Europe and it was during a war, but that was not a Muslim endeavor.

But to go back to the origins of Islam – Islam is a religion that claims to spring from Judaism and Christianity in that it incorporates some elements of each, but in a different way, and it believes it superceded and ought to replace both worldwide. Mohammed (like some Christians before and after him) thought he could convert the Jews, and he got mad at them when they didn’t support him or accept his new religion (Luther had a similar reactoin – he thought he could convert the Jews and when they said no he turned on them with vicious hatred). There are definitely some hadiths that are anti-Jewish.

However, over the centuries, Islamic countries actually “tolerated” their Jews – and they had many many Jews within their borders. Attitudes varied over the years, but as long as the Jews as a group had a subservient status in Muslim lands and paid the jizya (which is a tax Muslim countries levied on non-Muslims living under them) it was mostly okay for them although there were some massacres. But the massacres of Jews in Muslim lands tended to kill fewer than the ones in Christian lands for many years during ancient and medieval times. And as far as I can tell, Muslim countries did not expel their Jews, unlike many European Christian countries who periodically did so over the centuries. Therefore, Muslim countries often had stable Jewish communities that had lasted for well over a thousand years.

Of course, Jews didn’t have a country until 1948. However, starting a couple of decades before that, the Nazis began to influence Arab leaders in particular to hate Jews in the Nazi-esque way. That’s when the more serious trouble began to rev up for Jews in those lands. Google AI has a nice summary of what happened:

Prior to the 1930s, antisemitism in the Arab world was primarily social and religious, but the rise of Nazism and the intensification of the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine fueled a toxic cultural fusion of European conspiracy theories and radicalized local prejudices.

Ideological Penetration: European antisemitic literature, notably The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Arabic translations of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, began circulating in the Arab world in the 1920s and 1930s.

Strategic Alliance: Following the 1937 British Peel Commission’s proposal to partition Palestine, Nazi Germany reversed its earlier policy and began actively supporting Arab opposition forces. Germany supplied money and arms to radical Arab leaders to undermine British colonial control and check Jewish influence in the Middle East.

Anti-Zionist Mobilization: The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, received ideological and financial assistance from Nazi Germany, shifting from a primarily religious group to a heavily mobilized, anti-Zionist, and vehemently anti-Jewish political force.

Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was the most prominent Arab leader to collaborate with the Axis powers.

Al-Husayni utilized his overarching religious authority to fuse traditional Islamic anti-Jewish sentiments with modern European totalitarianism.

He sought to secure Axis approval to eliminate the proposed Jewish homeland in Palestine, eventually broadcasting Nazi-sponsored, anti-Allied, and anti-Jewish propaganda from Berlin to the Middle East during World War II.

The Nazis circumvented the non-Aryan prejudices in their ideology by framing the conflict strictly against “International Jewry,” characterizing it as the shared enemy of both the German state and the Arab peoples.

Propagandists often invoked selective readings of the Qur’an and linked them to Nazi ideology to frame Zionism as an existential threat to Islam and Arabs.

The 1917 Balfour Declaration by Britain, prior to that, also fanned the flames of Arab anger because it promised the Jews a homeland. There were several massacres as a result of these forces, years before Israel became a country (see this, for example).

These days, half of Israel consists either of Jewish refugees from Arab and North African Muslim countries or their descendants. Many fled during the 1940s and 1950s till the 1970s. Some came to this country as well. As far as I know they never received any compensation. Until that period, they had lived in Muslim lands with some problems, but nothing like what was happening in the 20th century.

Also from Google AI:

Approximately 600,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa to settle in the State of Israel, primarily between 1948 and the early 1970s.

In total, an estimated 850,000 to 900,000 Jews left the Islamic world during this period, with the remaining refugees migrating to France, the United States, and other Western countries. This mass displacement was largely the result of escalating persecution, state-sponsored expropriation, and anti-Jewish violence following the establishment of Israel.

I often wonder how widely any of these facts are known. My sense is: not widely at all. And so the “cycle of war for thousands of years” myth goes on.

The post Have Muslims and Jews been “at war” for “thousands of years”? appeared first on The New Neo.

From commenter “Gregory Harper”:

Do the mullahs really seek martyrdom? Probably not. They’ve had their chances and have always declined. They like wealth and power and martyrdom is for the gullible little people. Do I want them to obtain a nuclear weapon to test the theory that they wouldn’t actually use it? Nope.

I agree that they don’t seek martyrdom. They could do that easily enough, by becoming suicide bombers or standing in the middle of the street holding a sign saying, “Great Satan and Small Satan, here I am!” What they do seek is the destruction of the Jews and the West, and the spread of Islam – particularly their own brand of Shia Islam – all over the world, with them in charge.

But despite this, they’re willing to become martyrs if along the way they happen to meet that fate. It’s a win/win situation for them. They try to avoid martyrdom because they like power, plus they think they will be able, while alive, to steer the world towards the glorious goal of Islamic supremacy and takeover for which they aim. So they try to stay alive if they can. But not at the expense of wreaking havoc and seeking to wreak more.

And they’re fine with martyring their own people, even children. Those supposed keys to paradise they gave the mine-clearing children during the war with Iraq, for example – I don’t think that was just a cynical ploy. They were fine with the children dying because their belief is that those children would become blessed martyrs, too. The children’s lives are cheap; their deaths would be in order to effect the same victory for which the mullahs yearn, and their deaths are of no real consequence to the mullahs. And of course killing infidels, or apostates, or Iranian women whose hair in insufficiently covered – that’s okay too, to the mullahs.

The post Do the mullahs seek martyrdom? appeared first on The New Neo.

No one will come away unmoved by the book, and no one will be able to put it down. … There is no way of reading Alive without a heightened sense of one’s own life and its value.

The book is not only an extraordinary survival saga, but it has tremendously moving stories involving family, friendship, love, and sacrifice. It is a sort of reverse Lord of the Flies, where the cooperation among the survivors was extremely impressive, and it also contained deeply spiritual and religious elements despite its horrors.

Over the years I’ve read other books on the subject, including several written by the survivors. I’ve watched several documentaries as well. In 1993 an American movie came out on the subject, and although I was looking forward to it immensely I was sharply disappointed. It just didn’t ring true, plus it left out or truncated very important parts of the story, in particular involving the astounding trek by two of the young men who survived the initial crash.

So when I heard recently that there was a newer movie, made in 2023 in the Spanish language, and using previously-unknown Uruguayan and Argentinian actors, I was extremely eager to see it. I had to wait till I was in a certain mood, because the story is a grueling one even to watch, and from the trailer I could see it was very realistically as well as poetically done:

And so I watched the film, and I have mixed feelings about it. I would recommend it, although you need to be prepared for a harrowing journey. Compared to the previous movie it’s better. But compared to the book it simply doesn’t work for me. That surprised me, and I’ve been pondering why I found it ultimately very inferior to the book that some of the survivors thought was already inadequate.

For one thing, I think a book has the ability to give so much more background on the entire situation and the people in it, which deepens the story and its significance. Just to take one example, in the book you learn a great deal about a woman who was one of the initial survivors, Liliana Methol. But in the film she’s almost an afterthought and somewhat of a cipher. There just isn’t enough time to render each person in his or her fullness.

Plus, there are an enormous number of characters, and the actors (who look a great deal like the real life people they are representing) somewhat resemble each other, especially as the movie goes on and many become bearded and all become thinner (the actors were forced to lose weight as the film went on, for the sake of realism). It wasn’t that easy to tell them apart, and I knew a great deal about the characters already.

Films with big casts need to pay particular attention to this potential problem. I think that, for example, The Great Escape (a film favorite of mine although of a very different type), which also had a very big cast, dealt with the numbers more successfully because the protagonists were from different countries, and there were many stars in the cast and that helped the viewers remember who’s who. That movie was also about a half hour longer than Society of the Snow, and although both movies are long they both move along quite quickly because there’s so much to tell. But The Great Escape has more time in which to tell it.

In the book Alive, there’s a great deal of emphasis also on the stories of the families searching for their lost relatives; many did not give up hope, and their tales are especially moving and make the eventual reunions even more poignant and deeply felt. There was virtually none of that in the movie; you merely see reunions with parents and girlfriends which are generic because we don’t have much of the backstory.

There are many exchanges and scenes in the book that seem naturally cinematic, and some are left out of the movie. I don’t know why; it wouldn’t take much to have included them. Instead, there are repetitive scenes of the suffering endured by the survivors and their decline – as well as a tremendous emphasis on the most sensationalistic part of their story, the fact that in order to survive they very reluctantly decided they must eat the bodies of those who had died (and the living made a pact to allow the others to eat them if they died before rescue came), Any movie about this incident must deal with that fact, but I think that after a while this particular movie could have left out some of the redundancy and gone for some more of the background stories.

Most of all, I was surprised that the movie seemed to leave out or gloss over one of the most salient characteristics of the group, which is that they were Catholics and mostly believers, and that their specifically Catholic beliefs helped them endure. That is, many of them explicitly likened their eating the flesh of their dead companions to the Eucharist, although they were well aware of the differences. Instead, in the movie there was a vaguer spirituality that was emphasized. Even the part where, after the survivors returned to civilization and priests told them they would not be condemned by the Church for what they did in extremis – that entire aspect was left out. Instead, there was an almost-throwaway scene in a church at the beginning of the film, with a priest talking about the Host while some of the young men pass notes among them. Unless you already know the plot, you could easily miss its significance.

This omission and de-emphasis seems to me to be a deliberate lessening of the religious message and slant of the entire event, a trend toward the universal rather than the specific. But the specific can have a universal message, and I felt the omission keenly although I’m neither Catholic nor Christian.

The movie caused me to get out my old copy of Alive and start re-reading it. In the introduction, the author writes:

When I returned in October 1973 to show [the survivors] the manuscript of this book, some of them were disappointed by my presentation of their story. They felt that the faith and friendship which inspired them in the cordillera do not emerge from these pages. It was never my intention to underestimate these qualities, but perhaps it would be beyond the skill of any writer to express their own appreciation of what they lived through.

I think that’s an honest assessment; it’s an impossible task. Nevertheless I think that Piers Paul Read came as close to accomplishing it as anyone could. For me, he certainly came closer than any movie could.

The post I watched the movie “Society of the Snow,” about the 1972 Andes plane crash and survival appeared first on The New Neo.

The attacking Ottoman Army, significantly outnumbered Constantinople’s defenders …

The fall of Constantinople and of the Byzantine Empire was a watershed moment of the Late Middle Ages, marking the effective end of the Roman Empire, a state which began in roughly 27 BC and had lasted nearly 1,500 years. For many modern historians, the fall of Constantinople marks the end of the medieval period and the beginning of the early modern period. The city’s fall also stood as a turning point in military history. Since ancient times, cities and castles had depended upon ramparts and walls to repel invaders. The walls of Constantinople, especially the Theodosian walls, protected Constantinople from attack for 800 years and were noted as some of the most advanced defensive systems in the world at the time. However, these fortifications were overcome by Ottoman infantry with the support of gunpowder, specifically from cannons and bombards, heralding a change in siege warfare.

But I first learned about this as a child through a rather silly song, popular in 1953. I was exceedingly young, but popular music nevertheless still seeped down to me, and the song was very catchy:

“Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” is a 1953 novelty song, with lyrics by Jimmy Kennedy and music by Nat Simon. It was written on the 500th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans. The lyrics humorously refer to the official renaming of the city of Constantinople to Istanbul. The song’s original release, performed by The Four Lads, was certified as a gold record.

The lyrics can be found here, and they treat the whole thing like a light joke. Back in 1953 it must have seemed that way to most of the Western world. But who’s laughing now? An excerpt:

Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Now it’s Turkish delight on a moonlit night
(Oh) every gal in Constantinople
(Oh) lives in Istanbul, not Constantinople
(Oh) so if you’ve a date in Constantinople
(Oh) she’ll be waiting in Istanbul …

So take me back to Constantinople
No, you can’t go back to Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks’

Actually, it’s everybody’s business these days – and by “it” we’re not talking about Constantinople/Istanbul per se. We’re talking about the Muslim world versus the Christian world (and the Jews, of course). We’re talking about various kinds of conquest and not just the military kind – perhaps not even primarily the military kind. The siege involves the human mind, and it’s been going on far longer than two months. The main fronts are academia, the press, and politics.

NOTE: Here’s the original song:

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The day of the killings, one of the first statements of authorities was that the perps had written “Hate crime” on the weapons they used, and that they were teenagers who had committed suicide afterward in their car. This immediately made me think “Columbine.”

Now, for those who only vaguely remember Columbine – did it have to do with school bullying, as the early reporting (erroneously, it turns out) said? – the connection may seem obscure. But for those who have delved into it more deeply, the connection is obvious. Harris and Kelbold were extremely hate-filled and nihilistic, their hatred went in many directions, they meant to kill a great many more people than they ended up killing, and they were also suicidal. They shot themselves in the school library.

I’ve written a great deal about the Columbine killers; you can find a list of posts here. I have also written about what I call “dark duos,” which is the synergistic effect that sometimes occurs when two people (usually young men) with psychopathic and depressive tendencies get together. Here is a relevant post about dark duos.

The Islamic Center killers seem to have been another dark duo. That was my sense from the start, and nothing I’ve seen so far has convinced me otherwise.

But there are some elements of this crime that make it an updated version of an old story. The two met online in some sort of chatroom or discussion board; that’s a relatively new phenomenon for such killers, as far as I know, but quite appropriate for the current young generation, many of whom seem to live their emotional lives online and get their viewpoints there.

Another thing I noticed immediately – and which is very unusual – is that one of the perpetrators was given the first name “Cain.” That particular spelling of the name, which is the name of the first murderer in the Bible, is very uncommon and to me it would tend to indicate something unusual or tone deaf in a parent. Even if it’s a family surname, it’s very odd to spell it that way as a first name. Names can help shape a person’s identity, and although I think it would be ridiculous to put too much emphasis on this element, it still strikes me as highly negative.

When I read a bit more about the killers, I wrote in my draft notes: “I bet online radicalization of a groyper type.” And that also turns out to have been correct.

For example:

Investigators said they recovered a manifesto, as well as writings outlining religious and racial beliefs “of how the world they envision should look,” according to FBI Special Agent in Charge Mark Remily.

“These subjects did not discriminate in who they hated, and let me be very clear to anyone who thinks they can end the world through violence: They’re sorely mistaken,” Remily said. “The FBI, our law enforcement partners and our community are much stronger than you think.”

Mark Remily of the FBI said during a news conference that authorities have uncovered writings by the suspects. Authorities declined to specify what ideologies or views were expressed by the shooters, only that they met online and shared a “broad hatred” toward different religions and races.

There was no specific threat against the Islamic center, which is the largest mosque in San Diego, but authorities found that the suspects engaged in “generalized hate rhetoric,” [San Diego Police Department Chief Scott] Wahl said.

That’s the way it’s been covered. But it’s not exactly the case. I will get to that in a moment. First, about the suicides, which they apparently livestreamed:

San Diego mosque killer Caleb Vasquez urged his accomplice to shoot him in the head in a twisted exchange captured on a livestream broadcast after the pair murdered three people.

Vasquez, 18, is seen in the passenger seat of the white BMW he and 17-year-old Cain Clark used to flee the Islamic Center of San Diego, in footage captured by a camera the pair placed on the car’s dashcam while the vehicle was stopped.

Vasquez grabs the barrel of Clark’s rifle and brings it to his own forehead at multiple points in the livestream clip. The video, circulating on social media, did not have audio.

Finally, the camera turns to include only Clark — sitting in the driver’s seat — who uses his pistol to shoot Vasquez in the head twice and then turn the gun on himself.

About their manifesto:

The teenage San Diego mosque gunmen appear to have left behind a shocking, hate-filled manifesto, which praised Adolf Hitler and a slew of mass murderers, before the attack, The California Post has learned.

Authorities are investigating whether 17-year-old Cain Clark and 19-year-old Caleb Vasquez wrote the nihilistic missive before killing three people and then each other, according to law enforcement sources.

The document espouses a desire to spark a race war and bring about the end of civilization.

That is very much the Columbine impulse; they wanted a huge conflagration to follow. Also, it is somewhat similar to the Manson “Helter Skelter” motive, which was to spark a race war in a convoluted fantasy of what would follow the Tate and LaBianca murders.

I said that the San Diego Islamic Center killers seemed to hate just about everyone, and this is true. But there was one hatred they placed about all others: Jews. That fact is not being widely reported, as far as I can see. One would think that, because their targets were Muslims, hatred of Muslims would be their paramount motive. But no; it was Jew-hatred.

There’s coverage of that fact in some Jewish publications [emphasis mine]:

The shooters’ deepest resentment seemed reserved for Jewish people.

The manifesto listed previous antisemitic shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue and Chabad of Poway among the teens’ many sources of inspiration, calling the assailant in the latter incident a “saint.” It called the Jews “the children of Satan.” It denied the Holocaust as a “complete fabrication.” Vazquez called Adolf Hitler his hero; in his section, Clark wrote out the Fourteen Words, a neo-Nazi declaration.

“Everyone has their own idea of who is to blame for all the wrong in the world” Vazquez wrote in a section titled “The Universal Enemy.”

He printed his answer to the question four times in a row in all capital letters: “It’s the Jews.” …

Atomwaffen members are part of a network of mostly online extremist groups that subscribe to “accelerationism,” the idea that forcing societal collapse through an all-out race war is the only way to restore white supremacy and save civilization. The idea is propounded by a white nationalist named James Mason, author of a book called Siege that both shooters cited.

“Though officially I was not a part of any groups or organizations there are many I support, I would even go so far as to say I did it for Atomwaffen Division, Terrorgram, The Base, and North Korea,” Vazquez wrote….

Whereas the shooters were unsparing toward Jews in the manifesto, with Vazquez calling them the “most evil creature in the world,” they espoused mixed feelings about Muslims in the document before they killed three. “I don’t hate Muslims, at least not really,” Vazquez wrote. “What I hate is the religion of Islam itself and them invading my country.”

He added that Islam “is completely contradictory to both Western morals and values and Christianity.”

But he wrote only three paragraphs about Islam and Muslims — about one page — before the section ends with the word “unfinished” in brackets.

Clark appeared more committed to the eradication of Islam in his writing. Muslims and Jews, he said, “must be isolated and exterminated.” Yet he, like Vazquez, wrote several pages denigrating Jewish people.

The shooters did not state why they ultimately targeted a mosque. Vazquez wrote their plan was to “cause as much death and destruction” as fast as possible with a “diverse” selection of targets.

Here’s more, from the Times of Israel; they also hated women [my emphasis]:

The writings, some of which were circulating online in the days after the attack, glorified other terrorists and included hateful rhetoric toward Jews, Muslims, LGBT people, African-Americans, and both the political left and right.

They were also vitriolically sexist, asserting that “after the Jew the most evil creature in this world is the woman.” At least one of the shooters identified as an “incel,” a term used by men online to refer to their failure to have sex with women.

In a lengthy manifesto, which police said they believed to be authentic, the shooter declared Jews “the universal enemy,” responsible for war, famine, child abuse and various social ills, and wrote that the only solution is “to just kill them all.”

The document heaped praise on Adolf Hitler, yet denied the Holocaust.

It also bore the trademarks of more recent antisemitic conspiracy theories, claiming that Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes were religiously motivated, and fixating on supposed Jewish hatred for “goyim,” or non-Jews. ...

The shooters expressed beliefs that white people are being eliminated, explicitly citing the “Great Replacement” theory that Jews are facilitating mass migration to the West in order to wipe out white people.

Muslims were described as one such “invading” force, who must be “exterminated.”

So they blame the influx of Muslims on – the Jew.

Why have I gone into this in such detail? It’s simple: I see all of that online at many sites, and have for many years. It’s easy to find, not difficult at all, and almost mainstream these days. Fuentes didn’t invent it, nor did Carlson or Owens, but it’s the stuff they and others spew every single day. Of course some people saying this sort of thing are bots, and some are people in countries such as Pakistan. But I am convinced, and have been for quite some time, that many are Americans – especially young ones. There are more men than women, but there are women too (without the incel part).

Jew-hatred is like an entry drug to a whole world of nihilistic hatred. Which comes first, the philosophy or the rage? I don’t know the answer, and maybe it’s a meaningless question. But I think it’s far more widespread in this generation in the West than in previous ones in my lifetime. And that is very very dangerous to all of us.

[NOTE: RIP to the victims.]

The post The San Diego Islamic Center shooters: another dark duo appeared first on The New Neo.

Katy Tur: What about this passage from Mike Johnson declaring that our rights do not derive from government? They come from you, our creator and heavenly father. Is this him putting God over the Declaration of Independence?

McKay Coppins: I actually think that that idea is not wholly uncommon. I mean, the idea that we have certain inalienable rights that come from god can be read in a fairly benign way, which is basically that we have innate human rights, that our constitution and our government, our democratic government are meant to codify. Right. That idea is not totally abnormal.

Good to know it’s not “totally abnormal” (Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic). Tur is 42 years old and Coppins is 39. Do they know anything about the text of the Declaration of Independence? Back in the ancient times of my own youthful education, we were required to memorize a couple of paragraphs, including the relevant passage “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

It reminds me that it was often Obama;s habit to leave out the “Creator” part (from 2010):

At a Democratic fundraiser on Monday night, President Obama once again misquoted the Declaration of Independence’s most famous sentence and once again omitted its reference to our “Creator.” According to the text of his remarks published on the official White House website, he said: “[W]hat makes this place [America] special is not something physical. It has to do with this idea that was started by 13 colonies that decided to throw off the yoke of an empire, and said, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that each of us are endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’”

The first time that something happens and is met with publicity and criticism, it could well be an accident or part of the learning curve — like the first time one bows down to foreign royalty when other U.S. presidents haven’t; or the first time one issues a public apology abroad for past (real or imagined) American sins in a way that other presidents haven’t. But the second time, the assumption must be that it’s probably deliberate — and that makes it all the more appalling. Other presidents didn’t deliberately misquote the Declaration, and they didn’t leave out (or rewrite) the words about our rights being endowed by our Creator.

NOTE Some of what is going on with Tur et al. is that she suffers from a lack of cultural literacy (see this).

NOTE II: I know I’ve already written a lot about the abominable Kristof article, but here’s a link to a good essay about it, by Judge Roy K. Altman.

The post Our brilliant and knowledgeable journalists appeared first on The New Neo.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) presents itself as an innocuous Muslim civil rights group—a reputation it reinforces with litigation and claims of anti-Muslim bigotry. But the group finds itself under increasing scrutiny for alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoot, Hamas. Last November, Texas Governor Greg Abbott designated CAIR a terrorist organization. The following month, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis followed suit, citing CAIR’s being listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in a major terrorism financing case.

But as other states move to sideline CAIR, California is embracing this alleged terror front. CAIR-CA, the organization’s largest statewide affiliate, is flush with taxpayer cash. In the last five years, the California Department of Social Services (CDSS) has rubberstamped at least $41 million in funding to the group. The vast majority of that money, it turns out, comes from the federal government. These federal dollars are flowing into CAIR-CA’s coffers even after it was the target of a recent Department of Justice investigation.

The article goes on to describe the evidence that CAIR is a Muslim Brotherhood front. I’ve read about it before and find the argument quite compelling. I remember first hearing about CAIR after 9/11, raising the “Islamophobia” charge in order to somehow turn the whole thing into a defense of Muslims in the US.

More:

“You can’t look at what CAIR is doing today in isolation,” Burns said. “The government established the fact [during the trial] that a conspiracy existed among these organizations, including CAIR, to support Hamas, and that acts were taken in furtherance of that conspiracy. . . . CAIR’s role was to operate an entity out of Washington, D.C. that would serve to defend the interests of the rest of the network—against scrutiny from the media, against scrutiny from law enforcement. . . . In my opinion, the executive director, Nihad Awad, and other components of CAIR that were a part of this original infrastructure, are still operating CAIR in furtherance of an agenda to support Hamas.” …

One would think that CAIR’s ties to an Islamist terror group would make government agencies pause before providing it with public funds. But under Governor Gavin Newsom, California’s state government has seemingly never met a “marginalized group” it did not want to shower with other people’s money. CAIR-CA is rolling in tax dollars.

NOTE: I seem to be writing a lot about California today.

The post Gavin Newsom gave taxpayer money to CAIR appeared first on The New Neo.