In short, the level of public trust has sunk so low that we all feel ourselves to be under the continuous, wary scrutiny not only of those with whom we share the public square (“if you see something, say something!”), but also of of a vast, amorphous security apparatus that wields increasingly arbitrary power. We may grumble at the inconvenience, but that’s about as far as it goes; generally, it seems, we just comply, reminding ourselves that it’s all for our own good.

Less often do we reflect on the many uses to which such pervasive “security” arrangements can be put. In the name of safety and security we have been asked to disarm ourselves, to abandon various presumptions of privacy, and to grant the state worrisome discretionary powers. We yield, in little increments, our dignity and our personal sovereignty, while strengthening at every turn of the wheel the supervisory and coercive power of the State. This can’t end well.

Why is this happening? It is because we know we harbor among us malignant foreign bodies, who would do us harm — but, having crippled our organism’s ability to make vital discriminations, we are unable proactively to categorically identify or reject them. Instead, our only remaining defense is to suppress the free activity of every cell in the body.

We are in the grip of a lethal disease. In 2009 I described it thus:

Of all the maladies that can afflict a living organism, among the direst, for obvious reasons, are disorders of the immune system, and I don’t think it fatigues our metaphor to say that this is exactly what’s happening to us here in the West. There has arisen in our culture a memetic mutation, built upon previous philosophical evolution having to do with admirable principles of liberty and tolerance, that has led us to imagine not only that our culture is entirely invulnerable to pathogenic memetic infection in the form of alien cultural influences, but also that it is actually strengthened and enriched by them in all cases, without any regard to their cultural dissonance, infectious virulence, or even explicit malevolence. What makes this particular auto-immune disorder even more — indeed, far more — dangerous is that our society’s natural immune response has been not weakened, but re-directed: to attack precisely the very influences that might suppress the mutation and restore the health and safety of the organism. Criticism of multiculturalism, then, becomes “xenophobia”, and defensive wariness toward the possibly pernicious influence of excessive diversity, or of alien cultures, upon our own, becomes “racism”.

In other words, we’re dying of AIDS.

How do you die from diseases of the immune system? There are two ways. First, as noted above, a misdirected immune response can attack the body itself. Second, the suppression of the body’s natural defenses makes the organism easy prey for opportunistic invaders.

We are in the late stages of both. We stand in the presence of an organism — Islam — that has for 1,400 years presented a pathogenic threat to the West, and which in recent decades has, for whatever reason, taken on an acutely virulent and infectious form. To make matters much worse, we have at the same time infected ourselves with a very nasty bug indeed, leading to a severe case of acquired immunodeficiency.

Were our culture’s immune system functioning normally, we would consider the following, in the light of rational self-interest:

1) That Islam itself, as understood by hundreds of millions of its adherents, is inherently alien, antagonistic, and anathematic to the ideological foundations of modern Western civilization;

2) That the 1,400-year history of Islam has been a continuous struggle for supremacy over its neighbors, and for expansion of its sphere of control;

3) That the ideological structure of Islam itself is, by virtue of its history, the nature and content of its revelation, and its comparative freedom from internal contradiction, extremely durable and resistant to change, and has always exerted among its faithful a powerful gravitational pull toward its fundamentalist core;

4) That in any large enough population of Muslims, some percentage of them will inevitably gravitate toward that ideological center — which includes not only a detailed guide to nearly all aspects of the believer’s life, but also an urgent call to action regarding the conversion or subjugation of unbelievers;

5) That some percentage of these, in turn, will interpret this merely as a call to subvert and influence from within any non-Muslim nation they happen to be living in, while some smaller percentage will take it as a call to warlike action;

6) That, given 1)-5) above, mass immigration of Muslims to the West will necessarily result in an growing subpopulation of Muslims who are our ideological adversaries, and are prepared to act on that in various ways;

7) That, given 6), and given the difficulty of reversing demographic changes brought about by immigration, we owe it to ourselves — and more importantly, to those future generations for whom we hold our civilization in stewardship — to weigh very carefully any imagined benefits to the West of mass Muslim immigration against the certainty of creating within our own borders a growing population of unassimilable cultural and ideological enemies. (And as for those imagined benefits — can anyone seriously believe that the English, the Swedes, the Danes, the Norwegians, the Belgians, the French, the Dutch, are happier, or the life of their homelands more harmonious, since they allowed tens of millions of Muslims to settle among them?)

The late Lawrence Auster put this very starkly in a piece he wrote in August of 2006, recently cited at VDare:

This is the unchangeable reality I pointed to in my 2004 article, “How to Defeat Jihad in America.” We will have terrorist attacks and threats of terrorist attacks and inconvenient and humiliating security measures and the disruption of ordinary activities FOREVER, as long as Muslims are in the West in any significant numbers. The Muslim terrorists are part and parcel of the Muslim community. According to a survey reported in the Scotsman, 24 percent of Muslims in Britain (I never describe them as “British Muslims”) believe the July 2005 London bombings were justified. Imagine that. Not only do these Muslims in Britain support terrorism against Britain, they’re not afraid to say so openly to a pollster! The unchangeable fact is that wherever there is a sizable Muslim community there will be a very large number of terror supporters and therefore—inevitably—actual terrorists as well.

This is our future, FOREVER, unless we stop Muslim immigration and initiate a steady out-migration of Muslims from the West until their remaining numbers are a small fraction of what they are now and there are no true believers among the ones that remain. Travelers from Muslim countries must be tightly restricted as well. Muslims must be essentially locked up inside the Muslim lands, with only carefully screened individuals allowed into the non-Muslim world.

The enemy are among us, in America, in Britain, in the West, and will remain so until we remove them from the West and indeed from the entire non-Muslim world. As extreme as this sounds, it is a no-brainer. There is no other solution. All other responses to this problem add up to meaningless hand-wringing. The hand-wringing will go on FOREVER, along with the terrorist attacks and the threat of terrorist attacks, until we take the ONLY STEPS that can actually and permanently end the threat.

Was Auster wrong? Here we are, seven years later: wringing our hands, stubbornly refusing to name the threat, while the “inconvenient and humiliating security measures and the disruption of ordinary activities” grow steadily worse and worse.

Fortunately, at long last the ground seems to be shifting; after the latest atrocity it suddenly seems to be possible to express these ideas in the media, and various public figures are gingerly doing so, accompanied by suitable pieties and disclaimers. The idea of such discrimination is still generally regarded as a dangerous, soul-destroying heresy, but that anyone in politics or the media would dare to express such thoughts at all is a promising sign.

John Derbyshire commented on this in his most recent podcast:

The other day — Monday, to be exact — Laura Ingraham, on her radio show, said she has long believed the United States should shut down all immigration from central Asia and any nation with a majority Muslim population. Atta-girl!

Quote from Laura: “I would submit that people shouldn’t be coming here as tourists from Chechnya after 9/11. Dagestan, Chechnya, Kyrgystan, uh-uh. As George Bush would say, ‘None of them stans.’”

This is very heartening. Then, when I had just got over swooning about that, Democrat Bob Beckel — he was the campaign director for Walter Mondale’s presidential bid — told Rush Limbaugh that, quote:

I think we really have to consider, that given the fact that so many people hate us, that we’re gonna have to cut off Muslim students from coming to this country for some period of time so that we can at least absorb what we’ve got, look at what we’ve got and decide whether some of the people here should be sent back home or sent to prison.

So it’s bipartisan! We’ve got one bigfoot conservative commentator and one old Democrat warhorse both saying we should keep Muslims out.

To the lefties, of course, this is “hate.” I must “hate” Muslims, and so must Laura Ingraham and Bob Beckel.

How childish! You don’t have to “hate” people to want them to stay happily in their own countries and out of yours. It’s actually how most of the world feels. Chinese people don’t “hate” Indonesians, but they’re no way going to let ten million of them settle in China.

Western liberalism is strange, sick, abnormal, and anti-human. They are the haters. They hate their own countries, their own ancestors, their own culture, their own race. It’s a sickness, a pathology.

So it is; a pathology of the most dangerous sort. But people do sometimes recover from autoimmune diseases; perhaps there is still a chance that we as a nation and culture can do so as well.

A synopsis:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

An ongoing Congressional investigation across five House Committees concerning the events surrounding the September 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya has made several determinations to date, including:

– Reductions of security levels prior to the attacks in Benghazi were approved at the highest levels of the State Department, up to and including Secretary Clinton. This fact contradicts her testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on January 23, 2013.

–
In the days following the attacks, White House and senior State Department officials altered accurate talking points drafted by the Intelligence Community in order to protect the State Department.

– Contrary to Administration rhetoric, the talking points were not edited to protect classified information. Concern for classified information is never mentioned in email traffic among senior Administration officials.

These preliminary findings illustrate the need for continued examination and oversight by the five House Committees. The Committees will continue to review who exactly was responsible for the failure to respond to the repeated requests for more security and for the effort to cover up the nature of the attacks, so that appropriate officials will be held accountable.

I have serious doubts that “appropriate officials” will ever be held accountable, but I’m glad to see that this shameful episode hasn’t been swept under the rug just yet.

Now the Israeli intelligence newsletter DEBKAfile is reporting a tangled web indeed, alleging that the Tsarnaev brothers and al-Harbi were wrapped up in a joint U.S-Saudi effort to infiltrate violent Muslim groups in the northern Caucasus. According to Debka, the bombers acted as double agents, their real sympathies lying with the jihadis they were sent to spy on.

From Debka:

The conclusion reached by DEBKAfile’s counterterrorism and intelligence sources is that the brothers were double agents, hired by US and Saudi intelligence to penetrate the Wahhabi jihadist networks which, helped by Saudi financial institutions, had spread across the restive Russian Caucasian. Instead, the two former Chechens betrayed their mission and went secretly over to the radical Islamist networks.

By this tortuous path, the brothers earned the dubious distinction of being the first terrorist operatives to import al Qaeda terror to the United States through a winding route outside the Middle East – the Caucasus. This broad region encompasses the autonomous or semi-autonomous Muslim republics of Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Chechnya, North Ossetia and Karachyevo-Cherkesiya, most of which the West has never heard of. [Well, most people in the West, at least. -MP]

Moscow however keeps these republics on a tight military and intelligence leash, constantly putting down violent resistance by the Wahhabist cells, which draw support from certain Saudi sources and funds from the Riyadh government for building Wahhabist mosques and schools to disseminate the state religion of Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis feared that their convoluted involvement in the Caucasus would come embarrassingly to light when a Saudi student was questioned about his involvement in the bombing attacks while in a Boston hospital with badly burned hands. They were concerned to enough to send Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saudi al-Faisal to Washington Wednesday, April 17, in the middle of the Boston Marathon bombing crisis, for a private conversation with President Barack Obama and his national security adviser Tom Donilon on how to handle the Saudi angle of the bombing attack.

That day too, official Saudi domestic media launched an extraordinary three-day campaign. National and religious figures stood up and maintained that authentic Saudi Wahhabism does not espouse any form of terrorism or suicide jihadism and the national Saudi religion had nothing to do with the violence in Boston. “No matter what the nationality and religious of the perpetrators, they are terrorists and deviants who represent no one but themselves.”

Prince Saud was on a mission to clear the 30,000 Saudi students in America of suspicion of engaging in terrorism for their country or religion, a taint which still lingers twelve years after 9/11. He was concerned that exposure of the Tsarnaev brothers’ connections with Wahhabist groups in the Caucasus would revive the stigma.

The Tsarnaevs’ recruitment by US intelligence as penetration agents against terrorist networks in southern Russia explains some otherwise baffling features of the event:

1. An elite American college in Cambridge admitted younger brother Dzhokhar and granted him a $2,500 scholarship, without subjecting him to the exceptionally stiff standard conditions of admission. This may be explained by his older brother Tamerlan demanding this privilege for his kid brother in part payment for recruitment.

2. When in 2011, a “foreign government” (Russian intelligence) asked the FBI to screen Tamerlan for suspected ties to Caucasian Wahhabist cells during a period in which they had begun pledging allegiance to al Qaeda, the agency, it was officially revealed, found nothing incriminating against him and let him go after a short interview. He was not placed under surveillance. Neither was there any attempt to hide the fact that he paid a long visit to Russia last year and on his return began promoting radical Islam on social media. Yet even after the Boston marathon bombings, when law enforcement agencies, heavily reinforced by federal and state personnel, desperately hunted the perpetrators, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was never mentioned as a possible suspect.

3. Friday, four days after the twin explosions at the marathon finishing line, the FBI released footage of Suspect No. 1 in a black hat and Suspect No. 2 in a white hat walking briskly away from the crime scene, and appealed to the public to help the authorities identify the pair.

We now know this was a charade. The authorities knew exactly who they were. Suddenly, during the police pursuit of their getaway car from the MIT campus on Friday, they were fully identified. The brother who was killed in the chase was named Tamerlan, aged 26, and the one who escaped, only to be hunted down Saturday night hiding in a boat, was 19-year old Dzhokhar.

Our intelligence sources say that we may never know more than we do today about the Boston terrorist outrage which shook America – and most strikingly, Washington – this week. We may not have the full story of when and how the Chechen brothers were recruited by US intelligence as penetration agents – any more than we have got to the bottom of tales of other American double agents who turned coat and bit their recruiters.

I have nothing to corroborate any of this, so caveat lector. Read the rest here.

I will say this — there are two major branches of systematic jihad. Both want the same thing, the global triumph of Islam. One espouses jihad through war and martyrdom; the other considers these tactics to be counterproductive, preferring jihad through quieter channels: immigration, demographic change, legal action, pressure by transnational organizations, etc. This is the source of the rift between groups like al-Qaeda, on the one hand, and the Muslim Brotherhood, the Saudi royal family, and CAIR (to name a few) on the other. By renouncing violence, the latter groups can position themselves as “moderates”, whom the West has no reason to fear; good-cop/bad-cop. In this light, DEBKA’s account of the Saudis’ concerns makes sense: for groups calling themselves “Wahabbist” to be aligned with terrorist forms of jihad blows the whole game.

Anyway, I just thought I’d pass this report along for you to mull over. Make of it what you will.

Well, let not your hearts be troubled, readers! Things may be really, really bad, but all is not lost. Sure, meat inspections may be a thing of the past, and criminals will now be asked to arrest themselves — but I’ve learned that Mr. John Kerry will manage, nevertheless, to send hundreds of millions of dollars to the Muslim Brotherhood.

What’s that? You say that the Ikhwan is our mortal enemy, committed, in its own words, to destroying Western civilization, sabotaging our “miserable house”, and making “God’s religion” victorious over all others?

Come on. Seriously? What do you think we are, a bunch of chumps? Well, let me clue you in: if you want to know who’s really getting the short end of this deal, it’s Mohammed Morsi and the rest of those jihadist bozos.

That’s right: we’re giving the Brotherhood your money in exchange for future reforms.

Are those guys suckers, or what?

Given that we are, and have been for years, at war with Islamic jihadists in theaters around the world, and given also that Mr. Hasan represented himself as a “Soldier of Allah”, and made perfectly clear at the time of the shooting that he was attacking in the name of holy jihad (he shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he killed our soldiers, just as the 9/11 attackers did as they flew the planes into the towers), this is absolutely indefensible.

We read:

“These guys play stupid every time they’re asked a question about it, they pretend like they have no clue,” said Shawn Manning, who was shot six times that day at Fort Hood. Two of the bullets remain in his leg and spine, he said.

“It was no different than an insurgent in Iraq or Afghanistan trying to kill us,” said Manning, who was twice deployed to Iraq and had to retire from the military because of his injuries.

An Army review board initially classified Manning’s injuries as “combat related,” but that finding was later overruled by higher-ups in the Army.

Manning says the “workplace violence” designation has cost him almost $70,000 in benefits that would have been available if his injuries were classified as “combat related.”

“Basically, they’re treating us like I was downtown and I got hit by a car,” he told ABC News.

And:

[Secretary of the Army John] McHugh says awarding Purple Hearts could adversely affect the trial of Major Hasan.

“To award a Purple Heart, it has to be done by a foreign terrorist element,” said McHugh. “So to declare that soldier a foreign terrorist, we are told, I’m not an attorney and I don’t run the Justice Department, but we’re told would have a profound effect on the ability to conduct the trial.”

If you should have any doubt that this was an act of lethal aggression specifically directed against U.S. military personnel by the enemy (if you have a better definition of “combat”, I’m all ears), note that Major Hasan deliberately spared civilians, and fired only at soldiers.

Finally, as part of our “national conversation” about gun control, I’ll remind readers also that the area that Nidal Hasan selected for his rampage was a “gun-free zone”, so nobody was able to stop him until the police arrived. (This gave the Soldier of Allah time to shoot forty-three people.) Furthermore, the weapon Hasan used was not a so-called “assault rifle”, but a single low-caliber handgun. He carried multiple magazines.

Read the article here.

The answer should not be that “we signed an agreement that we are now honoring”. We signed that agreement with Hosni Mubarak, a man we could rely on to maintain a stable peace with our principal ally in the region, Israel.

Since then, we have assisted in Mr. Mubarak’s overthrow and subsequent replacement by an Islamist regime whose leader has made very clear that his sentiments are entirely different. Any weapons that we provide to the new Egypt will be used to oppose U.S. interests in the region, not to advance them.

So can somebody explain to me, then, why on earth we’d want to do this? I’m sorry to be so dense.

I excerpt two notable quotes from this post. The first is by its author:

Benghazi illustrates the problem of the President having the authority for everything and the responsibility for nothing.

The second is from the great war historian B.H. Lidell Hart:

In peace we concentrate so much on tactics that we are apt to forget that it is merely the handmaiden of strategy.

As disturbing as this new tactic is, frankly I think we will need to get used to it. Even under historical, traditional conditions of war, where antagonistic nations pit uniformed armies against each other on the battlefield, and navies upon the sea, the transparency and diffusion of power inherent to representative democracy has always been a hindrance to the cohesion of strategic and tactical will, as well as to stealth and surprise. But in this not-so-brave new world, where the enemy arrayed against us is a shape-shifting army of shadows, and in which we good people of the compassionate West bind our military’s hands with rules of engagement better suited to a suburban paintball club than to mortal combat against implacable, pitiless foes, this sort of thing is about all we’ve got. I expect it will continue, no matter who wins the election.

Hat tip: VFR.

An excerpt (emphasis added):

The security situation in Benghazi was “a struggle and remained a struggle throughout my time there,” (.pdf) said Lt. Col. Andrew Wood, the State Department’s Site Security Team commander in Libya from February to August 2012. Wood, who is to testify to the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, added that “targeted attacks against westerners were on the increase.”

By July, the three diplomatic security teams on the ground in Libya were whittled down to one team “restricted from performing security work and limited to only training local guard force members,” according to Wood. That team was eventually withdrawn too. [State Department security officer Eric]Nordstrom asked for an extension of the SST teams, but said he was turned down because there “would be too much political cost.”

“There was a complete and total lack of planning for what was going to happen next,” he added. “There was no plan, there was just hope that everything would get better.”

As Danger Room first reported, security was then largely left in the hands of British security firm Blue Mountain, which employed unarmed Libyan guards and paid them $4 per hour.

Our enlightened Mideast policy: hope for change, but mind the “political cost”. Our ambassador and three others murdered on American soil in an act of war  –  and our President, who had ample warning of their peril but chose to do nothing about it, swans off to Vegas and the Letterman show, meanwhile deploying his sock-puppets to lie to the American press about what he knew and when. Just a “bump in the road”, after all, and there’s an election to win.

Are you angry yet, readers?

If you are informed enough, and wise enough, not to be taken in by the steady diet of lies and self-serving propaganda this administration feeds us about our Mideast adventures (the latest being the transparent fairy tale we were told about Benghazi), you’ll find it refreshing to see a mainstream journalist like Ms. Logan (who was stripped naked and sexually assaulted in Tahrir Square by the “Facebook revolutionaries” our useful idiots were cheering for at home) pushing back.

But hey, look  –  Big Bird!

Many of us wondered: why would this administration lie so blatantly about this, and continue to do so even as the truth began to be exposed? Obviously Mr. Obama’s  inept Mideast policy is now a political liability, and we shouldn’t be surprised to see as much “spin” as the administration thinks it can get away with  –   but it’s hard to imagine that they really thought they could get away with this.

The purpose of a lie is to hide the truth. What truth was it that the Administration considered so damaging that it was willing to risk lying so publicly for days, even as it became plain to all that its account of events was false?

The House Oversight Committee would like to know, and has sent a letter to the Secretary of State demanding some answers. I’ve excerpted (and highlighted) a key passage below:

Based on information provided to the Committee by individuals with direct knowledge of events in Libya, the attack that claimed the ambassador’s life was the latest in a long line of attacks on Western diplomats and officials in Libya in the months leading up to September 11, 2012. It was clearly never, as Administration officials once insisted, the result of a popular protest. In addition, multiple U.S. federal government officials have confirmed to the Committee that, prior to the September 11 attack, the U.S. mission in Libya made repeated requests for increased security in Benghazi. The mission in Libya, however, was denied these resources by officials in Washington.

Obviously, with the election looming, there are a lot of ulterior motives in play. Democrats will pooh-pooh the whole thing as a political stunt (indeed, long-time readers will not be surprised should that happen in our own comment-thread). Nevertheless, there appears to be serious malfeasance here, at the highest levels of government, and you can be sure this story isn’t going to go away.

You can read the letter here.

Update: As is this.

Early James Cameron, I think.

Here.

Anyone out there old enough to remember the Candid Camera theme?

♪ ♫ “It’s fun to laugh at yourself,
It’s a tonic tried and true;
It’s fun to look at yourself,
As other people do!”

Maybe instead of another Charles Martel, what we need these days is another Allen Funt.

Dom commented earlier that “Yahoo news is now reporting that the movie was not made by an evangelical Christian, but by a Coptic Christian. Coming up next … an Egyptian Imam made it, to stir up trouble.”

A clever move: false-flag blasphemy to rile the base. Look at the results!

That raises an interesting theological question: could a devout Muslim do that, for the sake of jihad? Might taqiyya, for example, be stretched to permit such a thing?