Mark Steyn & Co.

We pray a speedy recovery for Mark Steyn, apparently another victim of the Fauci Jab.

"All the great conceptual discoveries of the intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they have been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. The Jew has this gift. To them we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of the human person; of the individual conscience and so of personal redemption; of the collective conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal and love as the foundation of justice, and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind. Without the Jews, it might have been a much emptier place."--Historian Paul Johnson

Section 13 Rises from the Dead :: SteynOnline

Or that time Mark Steyn pissed off Hamas in Canada for writing this:

The future belongs to Islam - Macleans.ca

"In June 2006, a 54-year-old Flemish train conductor called Guido Demoor got on the Number 23 bus in Antwerp to go to work. Six — what’s that word again? — “youths” boarded the bus and commenced intimidating the other riders. There were some 40 passengers aboard. But the “youths” were youthful and the other passengers less so. Nonetheless, Mr. Demoor asked the lads to cut it out and so they turned on him, thumping and kicking him. Of those 40 other passengers, none intervened to help the man under attack. Instead, at the next stop, 30 of the 40 scrammed, leaving Mr. Demoor to be beaten to death. Three “youths” were arrested, and proved to be — quelle surprise! — of Moroccan origin. The ringleader escaped and, despite police assurances of complete confidentiality, of those 40 passengers only four came forward to speak to investigators. “You see what happens if you intervene,” a fellow rail worker told the Belgian newspaper De Morgen. “If Guido had not opened his mouth he would still be alive.”

No, he wouldn’t. He would be as dead as those 40 passengers are, as the Belgian state is, keeping his head down, trying not to make eye contact, cowering behind his newspaper in the corner seat and hoping just to be left alone." .......

Free Speech! (Does Not Include Legal Bills and Career Ruin) :: SteynOnline:

"[Australia's]Section 18C is a disgusting law that over time incentivizes grievance and identity-group segregation, and beyond that corrodes a free society's commitment to honest and vigorous debate. It deserves to go the way of Canada's now repealed Section 13.

On the other hand, back in the senior Dominion, Iman Sheikh complains that since Section 13 was repealed, it's become way too hard to silence people you disagree with:

Under the Criminal Code, the threshold for hate speech is so high that virtually no one can be shut down

And we can't have that, can we? Because in the 21st century the definition of a "tolerant" "diverse" society is how easy it is to shut down dissenting views. Iman Sheikh continues:

The significant hate speech case prior to the axing of Section 13 was a series of complaints lodged against Maclean's magazine in December 2007 over their publication of 18 allegedly Islamophobic articles between January 2005 and July 2007, including one by conservative New Hampshire-based columnist Mark Steyn titled, "The Future belongs to Islam." The complaints were filed by a group of law students in Ontario and by the Canadian Islamic Congress in B.C., after the magazine, when approached by the former, refused to publish a response or rebuttal.

Actually, we published many letters both pro and con on my piece. The "group of law students" never saw any of these because they don't read Maclean's. Some months later, when it was brought to their attention, they demanded a meeting with Ken Whyte, the editor and publisher, and other senior executives, at which they demanded not just "a response or rebuttal", but the right to, in effect, take over the magazine for an issue - by writing a cover story and other material that no Maclean's staff would be permitted to edit, including the plaintiffs' choice of cover art." .......

Remembrance and Appropriation :: SteynOnline (2005):

"According to a poll by the University of Bielefeld, 62 per cent of Germans are "sick of all the harping on about German crimes against the Jews" - which is an unusually robust formulation for a multiple-choice questionnaire, but at least has the advantage of leaving us in no confusion as to how things stand in this week of pan-European Holocaust "harping on". The old joke - that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz - gets truer every week.

I have some sympathy for that 62 per cent. Killing six million people is a moral stain on one's nation that surely ought to endure more than a couple of generations. But, on the other hand, almost everything else about the Germany of sixty years ago is gone - its great power status, its military machine, its aggressive nationalism, its need for Lebensraum. The past is another country, but rarely as foreign as the Third Reich. Why should Holocaust guilt be the only enforced link with an otherwise discarded heritage?

"Enforced" is the operative word. If most Germans don't feel guilty about the Holocaust, there's no point pretending they do. And that's the problem with all this week's Shoah business: it's largely a charade. The European establishment that has scheduled such lavish anniversary observances for this Thursday presides over a citizenry that, even if one discounts the synagogue-arsonists and cemetery-desecrators multiplying across the Continent, is either antipathetic to Jews, or "sick of all the harping on", or regards solemn Holocaust remembrance as a useful card to have in the hand of the slyer, suppler forms of anti-Semitism to which Europe is now prone.

From time to time, the late Diana Mosley used to tell me how "clever" she thought the Jews were. If you pressed her to expand on the remark, it usually meant how clever they were in always keeping "the thing" - the Holocaust, as she could never quite bring herself to say - in the public eye, unlike the millions killed in the name of Communism. This is a fair point, though not one most people are willing to entertain from a pal of Hitler. But "the thing" seems most useful these days to non-Jews as a means of demonstrating that the Israelis are the new Nazis and the Palestinians their Jews. Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, has told the Home Secretary that his crowd will be boycotting Thursday's commemorations because it is racist and excludes any commemoration of the "holocaust" and "ongoing genocide" in Palestine.

Ah, well. He's just some canny Muslim opportunist, can't blame the chap for trying it on. But look at how my colleagues at The Spectator chose to mark the anniversary. They ran a reminiscence by Anthony Lipmann, the Anglican son of an Auschwitz survivor, which contained the following sentence: "When on 27 January I take my mother's arm - tattoo number A-25466 - I will think not just of the crematoria and the cattle trucks but of Darfur, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Jenin, Fallujah."

Jenin? Would that be the notorious 2002 "Jenin massacre"? There was no such thing, as I pointed out in this space at the time, when Robert Fisk and the rest of Fleet Street's gullible sob-sisters were going around weepin' an' a-wailin' about Palestinian mass graves and Israeli war crimes. Twenty-three Israelis were killed in fighting at the Jenin camp. Fifty-two Palestinians died, according to the Israelis; according to Arafat's official investigators, it was 56 Palestinians. Even if one accepts the higher figure, that means every single deceased Palestinian could have his own mass grave and there'd still be room to inter the collected works of Robert Fisk. Yet, despite the fact that the Jenin massacre is an obvious hallucination of Fleet Street's Palestine groupies, its rise to historical fact is unstoppable. To Lipmann, those 52-56 dead Palestinians weigh in the scales of history as heavy as six million Jews. And what's Fallujah doing bringing up the rear in his catalogue of horrors? In rounding up a few hundred head-hackers, did the Yanks perpetrate another Auschwitz? These comparisons are so absurd as barely to qualify as "moral equivalence".

I'm not one for philosophical meditations on Zionism. Had I been British foreign secretary ninety years ago, I doubt I would have issued the Balfour Declaration. Nor am I much interested in whose land was whose hundreds or thousands of years back. The reality is that the nation states of the region all date back to the 1930s and 1940s: the only difference is that Israel, unlike Syria and Iraq, has made a go of it. As for the notion that this or that people "deserve" a state, that's a dangerous post-modern concept of nationality and sovereignty. The United States doesn't exist because the colonists "deserved" a state, but because they went out and fought for one. Were the Palestinians to do that, they might succeed in pushing every last Jew into the sea, or they might win a less total victory, or they might be routed and have to flee to Damascus or Wolverhampton.

But, whatever the outcome, it's hard to see that they would be any less comprehensively wrecked a people than they are after spending three generations in "refugee" "camps" while their "cause" is managed by a malign coalition of UN bureaucrats, cynical Arab dictators, celebrity terrorists and meddling Europeans whose Palestinian fetishisation seems most explicable as the perverse by-product of the suppression of their traditional anti-Semitism.

Americans and Europeans will never agree on this, and the demographic reality - the Islamisation of Europe - will only widen the chasm in the years ahead. But, if I were a European Jew, I would feel this week's observances bordered on cultural appropriation. The old defence against charges of anti-Semitism was: "But some of my best friends are Jewish." As the ancient hatreds rise again across the Continent, the political establishment's defence is: "But some of our best photo opportunities are Jewish."" .......

Mark Steyn: The ‘Oldest Hatred’ | History News Network (2009):

"... Forget, for the moment, Gaza. Forget that the Palestinian people are the most comprehensively wrecked people on the face of the earth. For the past sixty years they have been entrusted to the care of the United Nations, the Arab League, the PLO, Hamas and the “global community” — and the results are pretty much what you’d expect. You would have to be very hardhearted not to weep at the sight of dead Palestinian children, but you would also have to accord a measure of blame to the Hamas officials who choose to use grade schools as launch pads for Israeli-bound rockets, and to the UN refugee agency that turns a blind eye to it. And, even if you don’t deplore Fatah and Hamas for marinating their infants in a sick death cult in which martyrdom in the course of Jew-killing is the greatest goal to which a citizen can aspire, any fair-minded visitor to the West Bank or Gaza in the decade and a half in which the “Palestinian Authority” has exercised sovereign powers roughly equivalent to those of the nascent Irish Free State in 1922 would have to concede that the Palestinian “nationalist movement” has a profound shortage of nationalists interested in running a nation, or indeed capable of doing so. There is fault on both sides, of course, and Israel has few good long-term options. But, if this was a conventional ethno-nationalist dispute, it would have been over long ago.

So, as I said, forget Gaza. And instead ponder the reaction to Gaza in Scandinavia, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, and golly, even Florida. As the delegitimization of Israel has metastasized, we are assured that criticism of the Jewish state is not the same as anti-Semitism. We are further assured that anti-Zionism is not the same as anti-Semitism, which is a wee bit more of a stretch. Only Israel attracts an intellectually respectable movement querying its very existence. For the purposes of comparison, let’s take a state that came into existence at the exact same time as the Zionist Entity, and involved far bloodier population displacements. I happen to think the creation of Pakistan was the greatest failure of post-war British imperial policy. But the fact is that Pakistan exists, and if I were to launch a movement of anti-Pakism it would get pretty short shrift.

But, even allowing for that, what has a schoolgirl in Villiers-le-Bel to do with Israeli government policy? Just last month terrorists attacked Bombay, seized hostages, tortured them, killed them, and mutilated their bodies. The police intercepts of the phone conversations between the terrorists and their controllers make for lively reading:

“Pakistan caller 1: ‘Kill all hostages, except the two Muslims. Keep your phone switched on so that we can hear the gunfire.’

“Mumbai terrorist 2: ‘We have three foreigners, including women. From Singapore and China.’

“Pakistan caller 1: ‘Kill them.’

“(Voices of gunmen can be heard directing hostages to stand in a line, and telling two Muslims to stand aside. Sound of gunfire. Sound of cheering voices.)”

“Kill all hostages, except the two Muslims.” Tough for those Singaporean women. Yet no mosques in Singapore have been attacked. The large Hindu populations in London, Toronto, and Fort Lauderdale have not shouted “Muslims must die!” or firebombed Halal butchers or attacked hijab-clad schoolgirls. CAIR and other Muslim lobby groups’ eternal bleating about “Islamophobia” is in inverse proportion to any examples of it. Meanwhile, “moderate Muslims” in London warn the government: “I’m a peaceful fellow myself, but I can’t speak for my excitable friends. Nice little G7 advanced western democracy you got here. Shame if anything were to happen to it.”

But why worry about European Muslims? The European political and media class essentially shares the same view of the situation — to the point where state TV stations are broadcasting fake Israeli “war crimes.” As I always say, the “oldest hatred” didn’t get that way without an ability to adapt: Once upon a time on the Continent, Jews were hated as rootless cosmopolitan figures who owed no national allegiance. So they became a conventional nation state, and now they’re hated for that. And, if Hamas get their way and destroy the Jewish state, the few who survive will be hated for something else. So it goes...."

Ezra Levant of Rebel News finds yet another Perfect Regime Metaphor: 

Fly the (Hamas) Flag! :: SteynOnline:

"My old comrade Ezra Levant has a great nose for these kinds of stories, but even by his standards this one's a doozy. Meet Air Canada pilot Mostafa Ezzo:

Air Canada has decided to go a little further than that:

The suddenly sheepish Mr Ezzo has taken his social media offline, including the Instagram post where he says "F**k you, Israel. Burn in hell."

In its way, this is the perfect summation of the post-9/11 world:

You have to get to the airport hours in advance, shuffle through "security", semi-disrobe, have your medicines and toiletries examined, unpack all your electronic devices ...so you can be delivered onto a plane flown by a Hamas supporter.

The whole rigmarole of post-9/11 security theatre is endured by the citizenry because they assume that, if they're doing this to gran'ma, imagine what the background checks for the toilet cleaners and gate operators must be like.

Oh, and Mr Ezzo is also a flight instructor - which is where we came in, just twenty-two years ago, with a bunch of young Saudis telling their own instructor in Florida to skip the bit about how to land the jet as they didn't need to know that...

The entire miserable failed "war on terror" has been a war on you while terrorist supporters have the run of the planet. " .......

BREAKING... HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? 

MNN is reporting that the FBI is seeking this shifty-eyed Hamas leader, known as the World’s Biggest Funder of Terrorism.

 

I am a Jew :: SteynOnline by Laura Rosen Cohen:

"I am a Jew, born of a Jewish mother, going back to our Matriarchs: Sarah, Rivkah, Rachel and Leah.

I am a Jew, born of a Jewish father, going back to our Patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

I am a Jew, married to a Jew of the priestly class, the holy Kohanim, going back to Aaron the first Priest, brother of Moses.

I am a Jew with Jewish children.

I am a Jew who was a slave in Egypt, who walked through the desert and received the Torah from G-d in the wilderness. I am a Jew who walked from slavery to freedom through the desert, guided by a pillar of fire, of G-d's light, to the Promised Land, led by Moses himself.

I am a Jew who survived the pogroms of early Christianity, the merciless jihad of the early Muslims, the pogroms and blood libels of Europe, the Inquisition, the Holocaust and the demonic current incarnation of antisemitism found within the Islamic world and supported by progressive Nazis in the Western world and beyond.

I am a Jew whose family was murdered in Europe because they were Jews. I am a Jew whose family friends were slaughtered on a yacht in Cyprus, orphaning their children because they were Jews. I am a Jew whose brother in law was murdered by Muslim Jew-haters because he was a Jew.

I am a Jew who is witnessing in real time, the largest slaughter of Jewish people since the Holocaust. The Jews who have been slaughtered are my sisters, brothers, children, aunts, uncles and cousins. They are my mother and father. My grandparents. Precious limbs, each one upon the body of the Jewish people, fragile human branches on the Jewish Tree of Life. Gone, murdered in cold blood because they were Jews.

I am a Jew watching bloodthirsty, demonic ghouls – children of Amalek of all colours, religions and nationalities all over the world – cheer for the murder, and rape of Jews, the beheading of Jewish babies, the kidnapping of Jewish women, children and grandparents, the incineration of humans and the caging of frightened children. Yes they are in cages if they are even still alive, in the territory of the savage barbarians of Gaza. Because they are Jews.

The hostages – I cannot think of them without my heart aching and my breath quickening. It's too much to bear.

I am a Jew who realizes that unlike the original, more initially subtle, Nazis of old, the new wicked, bone-chilling Muslim Nazi savages of Hamas and Gaza and their sympathizers and friends are openly flaunting their bloodlust for Jews, putting it up loudly and proudly on social media in allegedly civilized countries. Not just in faraway lands, but right in all of our front lawns, city centers and downtowns.

I am a Jew who sees you. I see you Jew-haters and your plans and feel the winds of your unquenchable murderous appetite in full view. You're so proud and so confidently transparent that it makes my soul feel momentarily cold. I see you baying, more primitive than animals in full view of the world with no secret Wannsee conference for you neo-Nazis.

I won't call you animals because not even animals behave in this manner. And all over the internet, I see you wretched souls daring to compare Jews to Nazis, taking a side by claiming to not take a side. In doing so, you side with terror. For you, it's satisfying that the Jews got what you feel was coming to them in your poisoned soul. But guess what? What starts with the Jews never ends with us. What starts in Israel never ends there. It's just the laboratory for terrorists. Read the writing on the wall. You are next.

I am a Jew who is watching you, friends and foes.

I see you. I hear you.

I am a Jew and we will survive. When the ashes of the evil souls who perpetrated these acts, and those who celebrated them, are scattered upon the Earth and their souls descend to hell, the Jews – the eternal Jew – will still be here for time immemorial." ~

... And if you think you don't have the words, as another Rabbi suggested, you do. Words of prayer and Psalms are the words. Lastly, my personal and heartfelt thanks as always to Mark Steyn for the incredible essays and insights (here, here, here, here and here), and his unfailing moral clarity and fortitude. Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem. ~ " .................

Another flight instructor. 

"The third time is enemy action, Mr. Bond".

"I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. If I were an atheist of the other sect, who believe, or pretend to believe that all is ordered by chance, I should believe that chance had ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization."--Actual President John Adams, in a letter to F. A. Vanderkemp,  (February 16, 1809), as quoted in The Roots of American Order (1974) by Russell Kirk.

                                              Accounting the Gospel Story in the ConstellationStars

"Have you been looking for your destiny in the stars and astrology? The truth is that God placed stars in the sky to tell a story of certain victory. In this message, learn what He showed Abraham as they spoke beneath the night sky. See the zodiac in a new light as Joseph Prince recounts the story God told Abraham that fateful night. In it, God mapped out an awesome plan that begins with a virgin with child, and ends with a victorious Lion of Judah that crushes and defeats the devil. You will also see how victorious your own destiny actually is."

                                                            Genesis 15

15 After all these things, this word of God came to Abram in a vision: “Don’t be afraid, Abram. I’m your shield. Your reward will be grand!”

2-3 Abram said, “God, Master, what use are your gifts as long as I’m childless and Eliezer of Damascus is going to inherit everything?” Abram continued, “See, you’ve given me no children, and now a mere house servant is going to get it all.”

4 Then God’s Message came: “Don’t worry, he won’t be your heir; a son from your body will be your heir.”

5 Then he took him outside and said, “Look at the sky. Count the stars. Can you do it? Count your descendants! You’re going to have a big family, Abram!”

6 And he believed! Believed God! God declared him “Set-Right-with-God.”

7 God continued, “I’m the same God who brought you from Ur of the Chaldees and gave you this land to own.”

8 Abram said, “Master God, how am I to know this, that it will all be mine?”

9 God said, “Bring me a heifer, a goat, and a ram, each three years old, and a dove and a young pigeon.”

10-12 He brought all these animals to him, split them down the middle, and laid the halves opposite each other. But he didn’t split the birds. Vultures swooped down on the carcasses, but Abram scared them off. As the sun went down a deep sleep overcame Abram and then a sense of dread, dark and heavy.

13-16 God said to Abram, “Know this: your descendants will live as outsiders in a land not theirs; they’ll be enslaved and beaten down for 400 years. Then I’ll punish their slave masters; your offspring will march out of there loaded with plunder. But not you; you’ll have a long and full life and die a good and peaceful death. Not until the fourth generation will your descendants return here; sin is still a thriving business among the Amorites.”

17-21 When the sun was down and it was dark, a smoking firepot and a flaming torch moved between the split carcasses. That’s when God made a covenant with Abram: “I’m giving this land to your children, from the Nile River in Egypt to the River Euphrates in Assyria—the country of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaim, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusites.”

                                                                        * * *

“Nevertheless, she persisted."


Psalm 17

7 Show me your strong love in wonderful ways, O Savior of all those seeking your help against their foes. 8 Protect me as you would the pupil of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings as you hover over me.

9 My enemies encircle me with murder in their eyes. 10 They are pitiless and arrogant. Listen to their boasting. 11 They close in upon me and are ready to throw me to the ground. 12 They are like lions eager to tear me apart, like young lions hiding and waiting their chance.

13-14 Lord, arise and stand against them. Push them back! Come and save me from these men of the world whose only concern is earthly gain—these men whom you have filled with your treasures so that their children and grandchildren are rich and prosperous.

15 But as for me, my contentment is not in wealth but in seeing you and knowing all is well between us. And when I awake in heaven, I will be fully satisfied, for I will see you face-to-face.