Unsatisfied with having a president on the disabled list, Pennsylvania Democrats decided to pick a radical leftist in the hospital as their Senate candidate.


	Now basic questions are being asked. And <a href="https://www.inquirer.com/politics/election/john-fetterman-stroke-health-pacemaker-defibrillator-afib-20220526.html?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4">not being answered</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		It’s been more than a week since Lt. Gov. John Fetterman celebrated his win in Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senate primary from a Lancaster hospital, where he was recovering from a stroke and the implantation of a combination defibrillator-pacemaker. But the campaign’s explanation of his medical treatment doesn’t entirely make sense, according to cardiologists.

	
		Fetterman’s campaign has said he’s on his way to a full recovery. Yet as that recovery continues at his home in Braddock, Fetterman hasn’t publicly answered questions himself about his health. And his campaign has refused multiple requests to interview his doctors, without giving any reason for that refusal.
</blockquote>


	What does&nbsp;Fetterman have to hide?

<blockquote>
	
		The uncertainty stems from how Fetterman’s campaign and his wife Gisele have characterized his heart condition: a common, irregular rhythm called atrial fibrillation (A-fib). They said the A-fib led to his May 13 stroke, and that is indeed a common cause of stroke. But when he got the defibrillator four days later, they said the device was implanted to treat the A-fib.

	
		But that’s not what defibrillators are for, leading cardiologists not involved in his care to suggest that Fetterman, 52, has another heart condition the campaign hasn’t disclosed.
</blockquote>


	That's coming from the Philly Inquirer, hardly a conservative media outlet. And even respected cardiologists are going on the record to say that Team Fetterman are lying.

<blockquote>
	
		An implantable defibrillator, a device roughly the size of a tape measure, is placed in the chest of someone deemed to be at risk of sudden cardiac arrest.
</blockquote>


	Are Fetterman's people trying to minimize his medical condition? It sounds like they are.&nbsp;

<blockquote>
	
		While stressing that they have no direct knowledge of Fetterman’s medical situation, Cooper and Pearson said a defibrillator would never be implanted unless a patient had another condition besides A-fib.

	
		That could mean some underlying heart condition was resulting in both A-fib and an increased risk of sudden cardiac arrest. Or it could mean the A-fib had been going on for a long time, leading to a weakened heart muscle that would necessitate the use of a defibrillator.
</blockquote>


	Instead of admitting that, the Fetterman campaign keeps doubling down.

<blockquote>
	
		Gisele Fetterman said she had seen news reports with cardiologists questioning if her husband had a second heart condition, but that she knew of none other than A-fib.

	
		“I saw... speculations around his health by the doctors who didn’t treat him,” she said. “But the doctors who treated him, who are doctors, did not say that, no.”
</blockquote>


	There's the issue and there's the cover-up.


	Either the outside cardiologists are wrong or Fetterman's people are lying. 
	&nbsp;

What's Leftist Senate Candidate Fetterman Hiding About His Health?

Unsatisfied with having a president on the disabled list, Pennsylvania Democrats decided to pick a radical leftist in the hospital as their Senate candidate

What's Leftist Senate Candidate Fetterman Hiding About His Health?

Criminal, but inevitable.


	The Democrats have a sizable demographic of upper-class people with MAs and PhDs&nbsp;who account for both a disproportionate amount of student loan debt and primary activism. Call it the Elizabeth Warren demographic. Those people want a very big government handout that they're calling "student loan forgiveness".


	Even Biden's people realize that just having the government cover $1.75 trillion to its voter base might be a bit much, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/05/27/biden-student-debt-borrower/">so they're starting</a> with $230 billion.

<blockquote>
	
		White House officials are currently planning to cancel $10,000 in student debt per borrower, after months of internal deliberations over how to structure loan forgiveness for tens of millions of Americans, three people with knowledge of the matter said.

	
		President Biden had hoped to make the announcement as soon as this weekend at the University of Delaware commencement, the people said, but that timing has changed after the massacre Tuesday in Texas.

	
		The White House’s latest plans called for limiting debt forgiveness to Americans who earned less than $150,000 in the previous year, or less than $300,000 for married couples filing jointly, two of the people said. It was unclear whether the administration will simultaneously require interest and payments to resume at the end of August, when the current pause is scheduled to lapse.
</blockquote>


	Quite a high-class problem.&nbsp;


	A $10,000 check to the upper class while using a means test of $300,000 in a time when people are struggling to gas up their cars and buy food is really something.


	Pouring in $230 billion into an economy that already suffers from out-of-control inflation means throwing oil on the fire. But Biden has clearly decided that the majority of Americans hate him, so all he can do is service his base. That means racial dog whistles for the lower part of it and subsidies for the upper portion of it.

<blockquote>
	
		Wiping out $10,000 of debt per borrower could cost roughly $230 billion, according to estimates by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan think tank. However, restarting payments for borrowers, which have been on hold since March 2020, would bring additional money into federal coffers. The think tank said in March that pausing payments had cost the federal government $100 billion and would run around $50 billion per year&nbsp;
</blockquote>


	This isn't "forgiveness", it's stealing from social security, which is heading toward running out of money, to subsidize Elizabeth Warren's base. It's a giant middle finger to most of the country. Especially the working class.&nbsp;


	<a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/countdown-national-bankruptcy-daniel-greenfield/">And America</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		On Feb 1, the&nbsp;New York Times&nbsp;ran an article warning that the national debt had topped $30 trillion for the first time, leaving us in so much debt that “the government would need to spend an amount larger than America’s entire annual economy in order to pay it off."

	
		The Social Security Trust Fund, sold to a generation that survived the Depression and witnessed the early stages of the disintegration of the family as a hedge against growing old in poverty, became just another flow of tax revenues that can’t and won’t be paid back once the unfunded bill fully comes due.

	
		The doomsday clock for the Trust Fund moved up one year. The news that Old-Age and Survivors Insurance will now run out in 12 years was largely ignored in 2021. It'll go on being ignored until the mandatory 20% cuts start kicking in. And then it’ll get even worse.

	
		Medicaid's hospital insurance will be out much sooner by 2026. That's only four years away.
</blockquote>


	But sure, kill seniors and then write a $10K check to the grad students who took out loans they don't want to pay back.

Biden Wants Taxpayers to Write a $10,000 Check to Every College Grad Making $300,000

Criminal, but inevitable.


	The Democrats have a sizable demographic of upper-class people with MAs and PhDs&nbsp;who account for both a disproportionate

Biden Wants Taxpayers to Write a $10,000 Check to Every College Grad Making $300,000

Generations worth of TV and movies have created a distorted expectation of what the police can be expected to do.&nbsp;


	1. The police are a deterrent, preventing crimes before they happen through foot patrols and such that convince criminals that there are eyes on them.


	2. They're the clean-up crew after the fact, taking reports, conducting investigations, making arrests.


	Very little of what law enforcement actually does involves direct intervention during a crime.&nbsp;


	Mostly what the police do in their interventions involves disorderly conduct, calls to homes about one of the people living there, and that sort of thing. In a crisis, you can expect them to "secure the scene" and wait for a tactical team.


	That's what happened at Uvalde. People are angry and they should be.&nbsp;


	But paradoxically, all the LEOs at the scene made things worse. An individual or a few of them might have done something more directly. As a group, everyone was following procedures. And that's what procedures look like.&nbsp;


	Law enforcement, like everything else, has been heavily bureaucratized. Initiative is discouraged. And yet it's initiative that was desperately needed here.&nbsp;


	&nbsp;

The Police Aren't Coming to Save You

Generations worth of TV and movies have created a distorted expectation of what the police can be expected to do.&nbsp;


	1. The police are a deterrent,

The Police Aren't Coming to Save You

The situation at Uvalde is "evolving". That's a polite way of saying that everyone involved is rushing to get their stories straight and blaming everyone else.


	That said, the local cops keep looking worse and worse.

<blockquote>
	
		When specially equipped federal immigration agents arrived at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday, the local police at the scene would not allow them to go after the gunman who had opened fire on students inside the school, according to two officials briefed on the situation.

	
		The agents from Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrived at some point between 12 p.m. and 12:10 p.m., according to the officials — far earlier than previously known. But they did not breach the adjoining classrooms of the school where the gunman had locked himself in until a little before 1 p.m. Members of the federal tactical team killed the gunman.
</blockquote>


	That's according to the New York Times. The story may keep changing, but the accounts that we're hearing now remain quite damning.

<blockquote>
	
		A girl who was inside one of the classrooms where the gunman opened fire called 911 several times during the siege, Director McCraw said. “Please send the police now,” she said at one point.

	
		The authorities now say that local officers first entered the school at 11:35, two minutes after the gunman, and that there were 19 officers in the hallway by 12:03 p.m., but that they did not breach the door and kill the gunman until 12:50, even as they continued to hear him firing.
</blockquote>


	We've <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/uvalde-residents-voice-frustration-over-shooting-response-11653588161?mod=djemalertNEWS">all heard accounts</a> from parents and bystanders. Some police were conducting rescues and clearing the school, but leaving the gunman alone with students for this period of time is shocking, but as discussed previously, not surprising. This has happened a number of times and not just in the United States.


	Law enforcement has become heavily bureaucratized and the one thing movies and TV shows do get rights are the pointless turf wars, the amount of effort put into controlling the scenes versus directly intervening.&nbsp;


	But it increasingly sounds like Uvalde cops were obsessed with controlling the scene, but had no plan for bringing the attack to an end.

Uvalde Cops Accused of Blocking Border Patrol Tactic Team From School

The situation at Uvalde is "evolving". That's a polite way of saying that everyone involved is rushing to get their stories straight and blaming everyone else

Uvalde Cops Accused of Blocking Border Patrol Tactic Team From School

The media is <a href="https://www.axios.com/2022/05/26/gun-deaths-children-america">pushing</a> this misleading CDC press release because it fits the gun control agenda after the latest school shooting.

<blockquote>
	
		Firearms were the&nbsp;leading cause of death&nbsp;for kids one and older for the first time in 2020, the most recent year for which&nbsp;CDC data&nbsp;is available.

	
		Why it matters:&nbsp;The firearm death rate among children is steadily rising, as more kids are involved in gun-related homicides like Tuesday's&nbsp;mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas,&nbsp;as well as suicides and accidents.
</blockquote>


	Yeah, no.


	The CDC <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761">release</a> to the New England Journal of Medicine, which normally loves to talk up racial demographics in the name of equity, buries them in its appendix. Here's what those look like.


	<img height="519" width="571" class="media-element file-default" data-delta="1" src="https://cms.frontpagemag.com/sites/default/files/uploads/2022/05/cdc_appendix_1.png" alt="" />


	Those aren't school shootings, they're the black nationalists of Black Lives Matter at work.&nbsp;


	Crime shot up due to pro-crime measures, like police defunding and bail elimination, as well as the massive BLM riots. But the impact among most groups, including white people, was limited.


	There was however a massive increase in the already staggeringly high death rate among black kids.


	But this just means that the CDC's numbers for black kids are in line with <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/black-lives-matter-killed-2000-black-people-daniel-greenfield/">black men in general</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		Homicide doesn't even make the CDC's&nbsp;top 10 causes&nbsp;of death for men in America, but it's number four for black men. In 2017, it caused 5% of the deaths of black men, more than strokes, diabetes, or most diseases. The only things more likely to kill black men than black-on-black crime are heart disease, cancer, and accidents.

	
		Among black men under the age of 20, homicide is the leading cause of death at 35.3%.

	
		It's also the leading cause of death for black men from 20-44 years old at 27.6%.

	
		Only at the age of 65 does homicide drop out of the top 10 causes of death for black men.
</blockquote>


	Since we can't blame "white supremacy" for this, we also can't talk about it.&nbsp;


	And the CDC buries this data inside the overall numbers for kids and then tries to act like school shootings, a rare event, have suddenly made guns a leading cause of death for kids.


	Look for the media to keep pushing this same lie, blaming guns, instead of crime and its BLM enablers.

CDC Releases Numbers Showing BLM is Killing Black Kids

The media is pushing this misleading CDC press release because it fits the gun control agenda after the latest school shooting.


	
		Firearms were the

CDC Releases Numbers Showing BLM is Killing Black Kids

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the author of many books.


	Of all the far-left radicals in our time who’ve smoothly parlayed revolutionary rhetoric into comfy establishment sinecures, Urvashi Vaid, who died on May 14 at age 63, was one of the smoothest. A daughter of privilege - her father was a writer and professor, her mother a poet and painter - she attended Vassar and Northeastern Law before diving headfirst into the world of progressive activism, first working for the ACLU’s National Prison Project and then, in the 1980s, landing powerful positions - first as Public Information Director, then as Executive Director - at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, at the time America’s most influential gay-rights group.


	In those days the gay-rights movement, as led from above by Vaid and likeminded leftist souls, might just as well have been run directly from Moscow. In Vaid’s New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/us/urvashi-vaid-dead.html">obituary</a>, Clay Risen puts it this way: “Ms. Vaid was at the center of a wide array of progressive issues…insisting that freedom for gay men and lesbians required fighting for gender, racial and economic equality as well,” her overarching and unapologetic goal being not to win acceptance for gays but to “build…a progressive movement.” In other words, well-off gay guys who donated money to the NGLTF thinking they were fighting antigay bigotry were actually funding a range of far-left causes that were, more likely than not, utterly at odds with their own interests.


	Recognizing that Vaid’s shrill rants against capitalism, Christianity, and the patriarchy only served to reinforce the public perception of gay people as social misfits and political extremists, a number of gay writers (among them myself, Jonathan Rauch, Walter Olsen, Andrew Sullivan, and the late Paul Varnell) threw ourselves into the fray, getting out the message, in countless articles as well as in such books as my own A Place at the Table (1993), that most gay Americans weren’t really all that different, in most ways, from most straight Americans.


	Since most of us happened to be white males, the first response to our arguments by Vaid and her fellow self-styled “queers” was to smear us as a bunch of straight-acting, politically reactionary white boys - gay Uncle Toms, as it were - who hated sissy types, people of color, you name it. But over the course of the 1990s, as gays came out of the closet in record numbers, our basic message was confirmed: the issues that resonated most with gay America were precisely those that we supported and that Vaid and her ilk reviled as “assimilationist” - namely, same-sex marriage and the right to serve openly in the military.


	In an effort to reverse the anti-leftist winds of change, Vaid wrote a book, Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation (1995), in which, ceasing for the moment to malign non-lefty gays, she tried to sell them - us - on her “liberationist” line. In my <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/05/books/radically-different.html">review</a> of Virtual Equality for the New York Times (yes, back then the Times would actually invite somebody like me to review a book like hers), I noted that, in some passages, Vaid told us non-lefty gays exactly what we wanted to hear - for instance, that the gay-rights movement “should seek to educate straight people instead of ignoring or demonizing them.” Yet on the whole, I added, Virtual Equality was “vintage Urvashi Vaid, proffering a vision of a ‘common, progressive movement’ for social, economic and political revolution led by gay people, who, in her view (though not, it seems to me, in the view of most gay people themselves), embody a radical differentness that makes them the natural vanguard for revolution.”&nbsp;


	Alas for Vaid, although Virtual Equality received glowing reviews from her cronies on the left, sales were pitiful: precious few gay readers were interested in a stultifying 400-page-long chunk of agitprop about the need for mass liberation from the white overclass. Yet Vaid was nobody’s fool. If she approached gay politics with a stubborn Marxist utopianism, she was eminently pragmatic when it came to running her own career. Failing to connect with the rapidly emerging gay mainstream, she made a point of bonding with Bill Clinton, staying tight with him (her purported principles to the contrary) even after he signed the Defense of Marriage Act, reneged on his promise to lift the gay military ban, and was credibly accused of multiple sexual assaults.


	And in the succeeding years, even as she continued to preach radical liberation, Vaid led a highly successful life as a jewel of the left-wing cultural elite, cruising through a series of big-ticket jobs at the Ford Foundation, the Arcus Foundation, and the Gill Foundation, founding a lesbian PAC, starting her own consulting group, sitting on various boards (including that of Planned Parenthood), writing another book (Irresistible Revolution, 2012), hanging with Tony Kushner, Rachel Maddow, and Hannah Gadsby, and living in Manhattan and Provincetown with her partner, the “political humorist” (i.e., unfunny stand-up comic) Kate Clinton.&nbsp;&nbsp;


	In a manifest attempt to sidestep the fact that Vaid wasn’t a reformer but a full-throated fount of revolutionary rhetoric, several of her obituaries have proffered a grotesque amount of revisionism. Just one example: at the website of the Boston public-radio station WGBH, the <a href="https://www.wgbh.org/news/national-news/2022/05/19/remembering-urvashi-vaid-the-lgbtq-activist-who-spent-decades-fighting-for-equality">headline</a> called her “the LGBTQ activist who spent decades fighting for equality,” and the article itself quoted another activist as saying that Vaid “wanted full justice and equality for all people.” No. No. No. First of all, during the period when she was primarily an out-loud-and-proud activist, there was no such thing as “LGBTQ” - a term that several obits have retrofitted onto her career. But far more important, Vaid was no more about justice or equality than Mao or Lenin. She wanted to use gays to spearhead a socialist rebellion -&nbsp; period.


	Well, there was no socialist rebellion. In the short term, then, she failed. But in the long term? Well, the sobering fact is that if we hadn’t had people like her in key institutional positions a quarter-century ago, preaching political revolt, social upheaval, and cultural transformation as a day-to-day way of life and quietly furthering the careers of those who shared her convictions, we wouldn’t have, in the year 2022, an America whose fundamental liberties are being shredded and whose kids are being perniciously and permanently damaged by such toxic dogmas as transgender ideology and Critical Race Theory.


	So for the time being, at least, it looks as if Urvashi Vaid won after all. And for those of us who care about the future of a free and strong America, nothing matters more than doing everything we can to undo her victory.

Provincetown Progressive

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the author of many books.


	Of all the far-left radicals in our time who’ve

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	October 1974 was the month I turned 18. It was also the date on the issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction containing Philip K. Dick’s unforgettable short story “The Pre-Persons.” An avid subscriber to F&amp;SF, I’d spent much of my teens devouring science fiction, including such classics as Arthur C.Clarke’s “The Star,” and the moment I finished reading “The Pre-Persons” I knew that this powerful story, with its deeply disturbing message, would also would become a classic.&nbsp;


	In 1973, the Supreme Court had ruled, in Roe v. Wade, that women possessed a fundamental right to an abortion. During the preceding years, many states had rolled back restrictions on the procedure, giving America some of the most liberal laws in the world in regard to the termination of pregnancy. In the wake of Roe v. Wade, which took things to a new level, “The Pre-Persons” imagined an America of the not-so-distant future in which, the Supreme Court’s logic having been taken just a bit further, children under twelve are considered “pre-persons” and can therefore, upon their parents’ request, be picked up by the “abortion truck” and euthanized.


	At the beginning of the story, a twelve-year-old boy named Walter sees the “abortion truck” in his neighborhood and freaks out - only to be mocked by his mother, Cynthia, who reminds him that he’s too old to be aborted. Later, we learn that she longs to get pregnant so that she can get an abortion. "Wouldn't that be neat?” she asks her husband, Ian. “Doesn't that turn you on?...it's the in thing now, to have an abortion." Suddenly, Ian realizes what he’s married to. And when Walter comes to him for the comfort he didn’t get from Cynthia, Ian explains to him: “It's a certain kind of woman advocating this all. They used to call them 'castrating females.' Maybe that was once the right term, except that these women, these hard cold women, didn't just want to - well, they want to do in the whole boy or man, make all of them dead, not just the part that makes him a man. Do you see?"


	At the time I read the story, I was pro-life. During his years as a hospital physician, my father had been obliged to perform abortions involving deformed fetuses and mothers at risk, but he hated abortion, and when I was young he described the procedure to me in all its graphic horror to ensure that I wouldn’t have any pretty liberal illusions about it. At the time I read “The Pre-Persons” I’d just started college, and not long afterwards, at a dormitory meeting that drew about a hundred students, the topic of abortion came up. When somebody asked for opponents of abortion to identify themselves, mine was the only hand to go up.


	In the ensuing decade or so, I developed close friendships with several women and was surprised to learn that every last one of them had her own abortion story. They told me the details, which were uniformly harrowing. For each of these women, having an abortion had been an unforgettable trauma. I couldn’t blame any of them for the decisions they’d made. For a while, then, I was pro-choice. At the time, the pro-choice line was that abortion is always a solution of last resort that takes a devastating psychological toll on a woman. Bill Clinton, every woman’s friend, famously said in 1992 that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” For a long time, pro-choice advocates parroted him religiously.


	But some more years went by, and the stigma of abortion disappeared almost entirely. I saw women having serial abortions, taking them very lightly indeed, and using them as birth control. Abortions began to be described routinely as “health care” - a reprehensible whitewash. Again, my views shifted. And as even more years went by, pro-choice rhetoric - already a patchwork of euphemism and equivocation, not to mention an utter denial of basic biology - moved ever further from reality and responsibility. The very term “pro-choice,” of course, is a dodge; a few days ago, amusingly, the House Pro-Choice Caucus made headlines (and won jeers) by suggesting that it’s time to retire the word “choice” - not because it’s a dodge, but because it’s not enough of a dodge. (As Planned Parenthood explained, some women just don’t have a choice.)


	As for “safe, legal, and rare,” it disappeared some time ago into the mists of history. To say that abortion should be rare, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/the-brilliance-of-safe-legal-and-rare/603151/">noted</a> Atlantic staffer Caitlin Flanagan in a 2019 article, implies that there’s something wrong with it - and these days the mere suggestion that there’s anything at all wrong with abortion is deeply offensive to, well, a certain kind of woman. “Today’s young feminists,” wrote Flanagan, “are determined to rid abortion of any lingering stigma, including the stigmatizing notion that it should be rare. They share their stories publicly and take part in a culture in which abortion is recognized and celebrated in stand-up comedy, television shows, movies.”&nbsp;


	Case in point: actress Lena Dunham, star of the HBO series Girls, who was asked on a 2016 podcast to recount “her own abortion story.” She didn’t have one, poor thing. And she later <a href="https://time.com/4608364/lena-dunham-wish-abortion-comments/">explained</a> that when the question came up, she perceived that she “was carrying within myself stigma around this issue….I had internalized some of what society was throwing at us….Now I can say that I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had.” In the same year, comedienne Natasha Leggero, who’d recently converted from Catholicism to Judaism, told Conan O’Brien in an interview that one of the pluses of being a Jew is that “abortions are cool.” She added: “I’m not saying I’m going to get an abortion, but it’s like AAA [The American Automobile Association]. You’re not going to use all those tows, but no, it’s just nice to know.”


	The dictionary tells us that a woman is “an adult female person” and that a female, in turn, is “an individual that bears young.” Most women used to embrace their natural biological role. Whatever else a woman might do with her life, being a mother - for those who chose to become mothers - was viewed as the very essence of womanhood. It was the one thing women could do that men couldn’t. (This was before the era of “birthing persons.”) Even women who believed in a right to abortion under certain circumstances didn’t try to sidestep the fact that it amounted to the killing of a baby - an act that, they knew very well, should never be trivialized. Today’s woke mentality is utterly different. Woke women identify womanhood less with giving birth than with its exact opposite - with the absolute, inalienable right to have a baby vacuumed out of your womb, on command, at any point whatsoever during a pregnancy. The pride in one’s ability to bear a child has been widely replaced by a pride in one’s ability to kill it.&nbsp;


	When it comes to the nuts and bolts details of abortion - the inconvenient truths, as it were -&nbsp; woke women manage to embrace the most extraordinary fictions. Feminist columnist Katha Pollitt doesn’t just deny that a fetus being killed is a human being; she considers such a contention intolerably offensive: “fetal personhood,” she <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/abortion-csection-birth/">says</a>, “is maternal punishment.” (True enough, I guess, if a woman has pangs of conscience over having murdered her child.) Ethics professor Rebecca Gordon (who <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/tom-dispatch-rebecca-gordon-abortion-unselfish/">says</a> that “choosing not to bring another resource-devouring, fossil-fuel-burning, carbon-dioxide-emitting American into the world might actually have been the most unselfish thing I’ve ever done”) dismisses “fetal heartbeat” - a thoroughly real phenomenon - as a term disingenuously applied by fanatical pro-lifers to “the throbbing of a millimeters-long collection of cells.” (Perhaps the silver lining to the cloud of Gordon’s abortion is that she’d obviously have been a horrible mother.)&nbsp;&nbsp;


	A recent Facebook comment by a doctor named Rochelle Pudlowski Eissenstat provides an interesting contrast to the likes of Pollitt and Gordon. Eissenstat recalls that when she was a medical student she assisted at abortions. “Do you know what it feels like,” she asks, “to examine the little fragments of recognizable though tiny human beings[?] Hmmm, I see one femur here; but where’s the other one? These were first trimester abortions only back then. We had to make sure that no remnant was left in the uterus! AH, here’s the other part of the head! This was absolutely nightmarish.” In response, another woman on that Facebook threat told Eissenstat to “[s]top peddling this nonsense.” Alas, “deny, deny, deny” is the pro-choice mantra: if pro-choicers didn’t reflexively dismiss as “nonsense” the gruesome, candid testimony of people like Eissenstat, they probably wouldn’t be able to live with themselves.


	Back in the days when more people went to church and took its rituals seriously, the baptism of one’s newborn child was a special moment. For many woke women today, the sacred aura that once surrounded baptism envelops abortion, and preserving one’s absolute right to an abortion - at any time, in any place - is as important, as precious, as having access to the sacraments is for a devout Christian. People used to tell anxious expectant mothers that having a baby was “the most natural thing in the world”; now, in the <a href="https://www.thenation.com/authors/shout-your-abortion/">words</a> of the “Shout Your Abortion” network, posted recently at the Nation website, “Abortion is normal. Our stories are ours to tell. This is not a debate.” (No, none of the left’s pet prevarications - whether about racism, say, or about gender identity - is ever up for debate, because if you confront these fantasies with facts, instead of assenting to them meekly, they’ll evaporate.)&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	Before Roe v. Wade, even states that permitted abortion restricted it after the second trimester. Ever since Roe v. Wade, it’s been a fundamental tenet of American leftist orthodoxy that perfect justice would require nothing short of universal, unlimited abortion rights on demand. By this logic, every restriction placed on abortion - however minimal by historical or international standards, and however reasonable and just when the fetus’s natural rights are taken into account - is perceived as sheer evil. What pro-choicers rarely acknowledge is that American abortion laws are, on average, considerably more liberal than those almost everywhere else on earth - a fact that won’t change appreciably after the Supreme Court decision takes effect.


	Leftists love to compare America unfavorably with Europe. But In most of Europe, abortion is legal on request only during the first trimester. In Britain, it’s only permitted if necessary to save the mother’s life, prevent injury to her - or her children’s - health, or prevent the birth of a child with serious birth defects. (On May 10, the U.S.-based Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/10/overturning-roe-v-wade-will-destroy-our-civil-rights-so-dont-ask-us-to-be-civil">ranted</a> that American women’s civil rights were being wiped out - even though abortion laws in the U.S. will still be far more liberal than those in the U.K.) Seventeen European countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy, require waiting periods for women seeking abortions; in those three countries and several others, such women must undergo counseling. And in Andorra, Malta, and San Marino, abortion is illegal, period.


	By contrast, in 19 U.S. states abortion is permitted up to the point of viability, while in Oregon, Vermont, New Jersey, Colorado, New Mexico, and Alaska, an abortion may be performed right up to the moment when a baby is about to be born. (The only European countries with comparable laws are Sweden and the Netherlands.) It’s been pointed out that some of these American laws would presumably allow a doctor to deliver a live baby and then let it die. Recall Virginia governor Ralph Northam’s enthusiastic promotion of a 2019 bill that would’ve permitted just that: “If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”


	Why all the rage, then, over the incipient and effectively all but meaningless overturning of Roe v. Wade? Because that Supreme Court decision has become a symbolic landmark in the history of the women’s rights movement, and a litmus test for leftism. Since half a century of euphemism and evasion has obscured the harsh reality of baby-killing, the issue can sometimes seem to have nothing at all to do with speculums and dilators and suction machines; like many other first-order left-wing dogmas - for example, the claims that whites are all oppressive racists and that a man becomes woman the moment he says he’s one - the sanctity of abortion rights seems oddly abstract, untethered from everyday reality. Which explains, I guess, how “reproductive justice advocate” Renee Bracey Sherman can <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/tom-dispatch-rebecca-gordon-abortion-unselfish/">say</a> with a straight face that a “commitment to women’s abortion rights” is “profoundly life affirming.” Could anything be further from the truth, or from simple morality?

Abortion and Wokeness

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	October 1974 was the month I turned 18. It was also the date on the issue of The

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	It doesn’t happen too often anymore, but every now and then we’re reminded that that wretched left-wing propaganda sheet, the New York Times, is still capable of publishing objective works of investigative journalism. Witness its bombshell May 7 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/07/world/americas/un-loan-project-services.html">report</a> on corruption at the United Nations. Yes, the reporters bylined on the story are David A. Fahrenthold, who won a Pulitzer for smearing Donald Trump,&nbsp; and Farnaz Fassihi, who’s been accused of shilling for Iran. But this time around their work looks legit.


	Over the decades, of course, there’s been a lot of shameless, bald-faced corruption at the U.N. But the story served up by Fahrenthold and Fassihi is particularly ludicrous. It involves an obscure U.N. agency called the Office for Project Services (UNOPS), which, until May 8, was headed by Grete Faremo, formerly Norway’s Minister of Defense. The agency, as the Times reporters noted, serves as “a kind of general contractor,” hired by other U.N. agencies “to build schools and roads, deliver medical equipment or perform other logistical tasks.”


	In short, UNOPS is low-profile and unsexy. But Faremo, after taking over in 2014, sought to change that. UNOPS “had stockpiled tens of millions of dollars in excess fees paid to it by other U.N. agencies,” and Faremo’s idea was “to lend out the money, like a bank, to fund profit-making projects in the developing world,” thereby converting UNOPS into “a revolutionary in-house investment firm.”


	But how to find people to lend money to? Any responsibly run foundation would solicit applications and put together a committee of experienced advisors to select deserving applicants. Faremo’s answer was to throw a cocktail party - where she met British businessman David Kendrick and his daughter Daisy.


	First Faremo awarded a $3 million grant to Daisy, a recent college graduate whose nonprofit hadn’t been registered with the IRS and listed people as directors without their knowledge. In exchange for the $3 million from UNOPS she “produced events, a website, ocean-themed games…and a pop song about the ocean that was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OBsagVe268&amp;ab_channel=JossStoneVEVO">recorded</a> by the British singer Joss Stone.” Stone performed this ditty for free because she’d been told she was helping raise money for the U.N.


	Jonas Svensson, who left UNOPS after realizing it was a hotbed of “[a]mbition and stupidity,” told the Times that during all this activity “his bosses were focused on arranging a performance of the song by Ms. Faremo,” which ended up taking place during a 2017 environmental conference. Yes, long before you heard Biden’s disinformation czar, Nina Jankowitz, sing her own version of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” the head of UNOPS was belting one out in the General Assembly chamber. To wit:


	Can't you hear the ocean crying


	Calling out to be revived?...


	Just a drop of rain, that's all I am


	And we're all the same


	We have the power to make a wave


	If we move together as one…


	We are the ocean


	We are the ocean


	We are the ocean


	In addition to the $3 million handout to Daisy Kendrick, Faremo loaned $22 million to several firms that were controlled, directly or indirectly, by Daisy’s dad. The money was supposedly intended to go to construction projects, but in the end nothing was built, and the firms used much of the UNOPS cash to pay off debts.


	Immediately after the Times article was posted online, Faremo resigned. Apparently there’s already been an internal investigation into this matter, but, given the lack of transparency at the U.N., it’s unclear whether the results will ever be made public.


	At the Times website, the reader comments on all these hijinks divide into two categories. Some are by self-deluding lefties who insist on seeing the U.N. as idealistic and incorruptible. Others are by people who know better. A veteran of UNHCR and UNICEF operations around the world recalls that “incompetence and dithering were the order of the day.” A former UN intern states that “the experience left me very disgruntled. My boss, a high ranking official, often did not show up to work and when he did, did not complete his responsibilities….It was a running joke that the unpaid interns were the hardest working people in the office.” Another reader opines that the UN should “cease to exist,” since it’s “no more than a source of well-paying jobs for incompetents, charlatans, work-averse socialites, con artists and white-collar criminals.”&nbsp;


	In Norway, it was widely noted that Faremo is only the latest of several Norwegians-turned-U.N.-luminaries who ended in disgrace. In 2018, Erik Solheim quit his post as head of the United Nations Environmental Programme amid questions about his nepotism, grotesquely high travel expenses, and eager promotion of Chinese development projects. Two years ago, Terje Rød-Larsen resigned from the presidency of the U.N.-linked International Peace Institute when it emerged that he’d borrowed a large sum from Jeffrey Epstein and then tried to pay it back with IPI funds.


	U.N. corruption is an old, old story, and prominent Norwegians have made a sad joke of their country’s relentless promotion of U.N. worship. And yet that promotion continues non-stop. Every October 24 - United Nations Day - Norwegian schoolchildren are put through North Korea-like celebrations of the saintly souls at the U.N. They hold parades in which they wave U.N. flags. They’re shown short films claiming that the U.N. is the only thing standing between them and war, oppression, poverty, and climate crisis.


	As I wrote ten years ago in a piece about the first-rate documentary exposé UN Me, the U.N.’s real priorities are clear: it exists to “perpetuat[e] its own existence,” to “enhanc[e] its own image,” to “squelch the truth about its fecklessness, incompetence, and absolute lack of a moral compass,” and (last but not least) to “provid[e] hack politicians from around the world with yet another career steppingstone, once they’ve risen to the top of the ladder in their own crummy little countries and finished emptying their own citizens’ pockets.”


	Well, that final item on the list certainly sums up the U.N. career of Grete Faremo - who, after lying low for a few months, will, I’m all but certain, re-emerge as the head of some EU body or NGO. In the same way, can anyone doubt that another U.N. scandal isn’t that far down the pike? The lessons of all this being that (a) you can’t keep a corrupt, power-hungry European politician down and (b) the U.N., no matter how much it’s been proven, especially during the current war in Ukraine, to be a Ship of Fools - a luxury yacht for mediocre international elites rather than a lifeboat for the world’s poor - will somehow manage to stay afloat.

Another Year, Another U.N. Scandal

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	It doesn’t happen too often anymore, but every now and then we’re reminded that

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	It began on Easter weekend. In <a href="https://www.euronews.com/2022/04/18/dozens-arrested-after-days-of-far-right-clashes-across-sweden?fbclid=IwAR1PT6ESRhwzNdgIMApfuK5WTUUm70lcoRwuFz6FHK-NeSVzM6GvIiUH0J8">response</a> to a rally in Örebro, Sweden, by Stram Kurs, a Danish party that opposes Islamic immigration and whose members threatened to burn copies of the Koran, mass violence broke out in Stockholm and several other Swedish cities, with scores of Muslims - mostly young men, both also women and children - throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at cops and setting cars, buses, dumpsters, and buildings on fire. Injuries resulting from these disturbances - widely dubbed the “Koran riots” - were in the mid two figures, with police officers the hardest hit. Further Stram Kurs events had been planned, but the party’s appropriately named leader, Rasmus Paludan, paladin of Denmark’s anti-Islamization movement, canceled them on the grounds that Swedish police had shown themselves to be “completely incapable of protecting themselves and me.” By the end of the month Swedish police had <a href="https://www.document.no/2022/04/28/paludan-far-ikke-holde-nye-markeringer-i-sverige/?fbclid=IwAR0WMmIT6Fmw0E2fZ2OAbbP91HvqMD3evOOx87bCFU8bYdLElsPCUkK4SF0">forbidden</a> any further public gatherings by Stram Kurs.


	Of course, the tumult didn’t spring from out of nowhere. Among young Muslims in Sweden, car-burning is old hat. But the scale of these events was new - and, to Swedes who still have their heads in the sand about this issue, alarming. Still, for many observers in Scandinavia, the real affront wasn’t the physical brutality but the very notion of harming a Koran. Hanan Abdelrahman, a college teacher in Norway, wrote a teary <a href="https://vartoslo.no/hanan-abdelrahman-islam-islamofobi/til-deg-som-brenner-koranen-det-som-er-i-hjertet-mitt-kan-du-ikke-ta-ifra-meg/371653?fbclid=IwAR3IAtWymKb8td7oUfNWLVimHzbPnK0EHayhPJ6qJPqtRICjSuLW7yMHYkQ">op-ed</a> on the topic in which she asserted that Paludan and his ilk made her “feel a bit scared and unsafe.” She asked: “How many camels is one really supposed to swallow? To what degree and for how long should a group of people have to tolerate feeling unsafe and unwanted?” Yes, the danger to human safety that weekend wasn’t the savagery that sent people to the hospital - it was a peaceful rally. Abdelrahman charged that if Paludan and his friends had been “braver” and “smarter,” they’d have invited somebody like her to engage in a discussion of their differing views. A pretty weird proposal, given that if she’d actually read her beloved Koran, Abdelrahman would know that it tells her not to consort with infidels but to kill them - especially if they seek to talk her out of her beliefs.


	In another <a href="https://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kronikk/i/9K4yJ5/opptoeyene-i-sverige-har-synliggjort-det-antimuslimske-samfunn?fbclid=IwAR1iOQ-p-u4ozydEGIAzz9mSW7jJ8XimpRgV37ZaRUbnK9KV2uS73Xg_5bQ">op-ed</a>, Bilan Osman, who apparently makes a career of giving lectures about “Islamophobia” all over Sweden, sounded an alarm about how “anti-Muslims attitudes have gained ground” in that country. Views that were once marginal, he warned, are now mainstream; the curtain has been pulled back on “our anti-Muslim society,” where “even people close to me expres[s] the most disgusting ideas about Muslims.” Such as? Such as the absurd assertion that they’re “a threat to the West,” that “they want to bring down liberal democracy,” that “Islam is fundamentally misogynistic, hostile to gays, and anti-Semitic,” that it’s “hostile to everyone who isn’t a Muslim,” and that Muslims seek “to ‘Islamize’ the Western world.” As someone who’s just spent a lot of time absorbed in Robert Spencer’s monumental new <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/robert-spencers-koran-bruce-bawer/">edition</a> of the Koran, I’d call this a top-notch summary of the Koran’s main points. But Osman insisted that these are lies that must be resisted. “It can’t keep going on like this,” he contended. “How did we end up here? When did Sweden become so radicalized that flagrant, ideologically motivated Muslim-hate has been a totally ordinary point of view?” Interestingly put. What’s “radical” to Osman aren’t the murderous canons of Islam but the reaction thereto by civilized Westerners. As for “Muslim-hate”: yes, many people in Sweden are indeed hostile (not necessarily to Muslims, but to Islam), and that hostility is indeed motivated by an ideology - namely, the ideology that’s spelled out in the Koran and that, quite understandably, strikes fear into their hearts.&nbsp;

<blockquote>
	
		Another person who <a href="https://www.gp.se/debatt/vi-m%C3%A5ste-b%C3%B6rja-prata-om-att-riva-upp-medborgarskap-f%C3%B6r-v%C3%A5ldsverkare-1.71034086">wrote</a> an op-ed in the wake of the Easter-weekend fracas was Richard Jomshof of the Sweden Democrats, the party that for a long time was a marginalized voice of truth about Islam, and that has steadily gained power over the years. Observing that “Sweden has literally been on fire” and that the kind of conduct displayed by the Muslim rioters was not Swedish by nature but rooted in another culture, Jomshof submitted that it was high time that responsible Swedes began to talk about stripping such people - and their families - of their citizenship, taking them off the welfare rolls, and expelling them from the country. They’re creating havoc, after all, not just in the lives of native Swedes but in the lives of other immigrants who also have backgrounds in the Muslim world - but who came to Sweden not to be warriors for Islam but to escape its tyranny.
</blockquote>


	Jomshof’s proposition was sheer common sense - and, consequently, had Swedish elites sputtering with outrage. Needless to say, what they should've been outraged over was the rampage itself, which had taken the expression of Swedish Muslim hubris to a new level and portended even greater aggression in the not-too-distant future. But for the Swedish establishment, to speak of denying Muslims anything at all, for any reason whatsoever, is tantamount to tossing a crying infant into the street and letting it starve.


	The weekend after Easter, it was Norway’s turn. The scenario was strikingly similar. In the central square of the city of Sandefjord (pop. 45,000), members of the group Stop the Islamization of Norway (SIAN) threatened to burn a Koran. Muslims - including women and children - rioted. And in response, Progress Party leader Sylvi Listhaug <a href="https://www.facebook.com/listhaugfrp/posts/546803020134450">echoed</a> Jomshof’s suggestion that such troublemakers be sent back to where they came from. Listhaug noted that a not inconsiderable percentage of Muslims in Norway - around seven percent - are willing to admit to pollsters their belief that “blasphemy should be punished with death,” in Europe as well as in the Muslim world. “If you don’t appreciate the hospitality of the Norwegian society and respect our values,” wrote Listhaug on her Facebook page, “it’s just a matter of moving back to your Muslim land of origin. I those countries, freedom of speech and of belief are foreign words, and the death penalty for blasphemy is widespread.”


	“My city is destroyed. My country is in danger,” a tearful Sandefjord septuagenarian told Helge Lurås of the Resett website as they both coughed up tear gas. Lurås, who’d reported on earlier displays of rage by Norwegian Muslims, <a href="https://resett.no/2022/04/23/innvandreropptoyer-i-sandefjord-byen-min-er-odelagt-landet-mitt-er-i-fare/?fbclid=IwAR2nukHb-ZQ-I4dh3Gqa2FI2IvGRg7HW2ZoiZAUc8FFmVFMvcRsEcxKDwAQ">declared</a> that this latest dustup in Sandefjord - at which participants shouted “Allahu akbar” while throwing rocks, shoes, and eggs at gas-masked cops with ballistic shields - outdid them all. This time around, moreover, the most aggressive participants weren’t the gang-aged youths but older men, ranging in age from their mid-thirties to their mid-fifties, some of whom had brought along small children whom they encouraged to imitate their barbarity. “Also present,” added Lurås,

<blockquote>
	
		were a dozen ethnic Norwegians from the Red [Communist] Party…But in fact you could see in their eyes that they felt uneasy standing together with the aggressive Muslims. For they were aggressive. There was no dignity at all, no attempt to stand still and turn their backs [on the members of SIAN]...And they had no respect for the police.
</blockquote>


	Then again, as is usual in Norway, the cops behaved in such a way - offering repeated assurances, for example, that they disagreed with SIAN - as to guarantee that they’d never earn the Muslims’ respect. Perhaps, Lurås proposed, it was time for Norwegian police to start acting like police. As for SIAN, Lurås noted that he himself doesn’t share their views, although the conduct of the Muslims in Sandefjord confirmed absolutely every ugly thing that the speakers from SIAN said about them.


	This past Sunday, May Day, without forewarning, and in defiance of a police order, Paludan <a href="https://www.document.no/2022/05/01/rasmus-paludan-brente-koranen-i-stockholm/?fbclid=IwAR2r-slC8vEG61QOtw0qS4bcES0yLcaXvXvnsVML532bEPUGei_X_8Mmiq8">burned</a> a Koran on a small square in Stockholm. He did it without hoopla, and with no crowd of supporters present. Before doing so, he made a statement in which he drew a distinction between his own action and Nazi-style book-burning: far from wanting to see all copies of the Koran destroyed, he emphasized, he wants everyone in Sweden to read it and discover for themselves how evil it is. Later in the day, planning to burn a Koran outside a mosque in Uppsala, he was<a href="https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/tumult-vid-mosken-i-uppsala/"> forced</a> to flee when a mob of Muslims chased him back to his car, where some of them climbed on it and tried to break his windshield and had to be dealt with by police with batons.


	In Sweden and Norway, and for that matter pretty much everywhere else in the West, fewer and fewer ordinary citizens find themselves able to keep telling themselves comforting lies about the Religion of Peace. Yet the left’s leading lights keep selling those lies. The other day, an <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2022/04/rasmus-paludan-protest-riot-muslim-neighborhoods-stram-kurs">article</a> entitled “No, Burning Qurans in the Street Isn’t ‘Part of Our Democracy’” by one Ryan Switzer - identified as a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Stockholm University - appeared at the socialist website Jacobin. In the left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Jotam Confino, a journalist for Denmark’s TV2, <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium.HIGHLIGHT-far-right-provocateur-rasmus-paludan-burning-koran-setting-sweden-on-fire-denmark-1.10766679">deplored</a> the fact that Scandinavia’s “liberal values” were under assault and that it had just experienced violent riots - but in his view those values had been attacked, and those riots caused by, none other than Paludan. And the Norwegian newspaper Bergensavisen ran an opinion <a href="https://www.ba.no/nar-ytringsfriheten-blir-redskap-for-fascismen/o/5-8-1888376">piece</a> headlined “When Freedom of Speech Becomes a Tool of Fascism” - the point being that Paludan, not Islam, is fascist. All of which served as a handy reminder that we’re not just up against Islam, but up against a left-wing establishment whose members are perversely committed to defending our most monstrous enemies and destroying our most valiant heroes.

They Call Them the 'Koran Riots'

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	It began on Easter weekend. In response to a rally in Örebro, Sweden, by Stram

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 
	 
	Robert Spencer's The Critical Qur’an is coming out May 3. It has zoomed to the <a href="https://robertspencer.org/2022/04/the-critical-quran-zooms-to-the-top-1-bestselling-quran-in-the-u-s">top: #1 bestselling Qur’an in the U.S.</a> Pre-order: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Quran-Commentaries-Contemporary-Historical/dp/1642939498/ref=sr_1_1?crid=21I2VAWW3EJKA&amp;dchild=1&amp;keywords=the+critical+quran&amp;qid=1624648703&amp;sprefix=the+critical+qu%2Caps%2C283&amp;sr=8-1">HERE</a>.


	The fate of the Western world has been bound up with Islam ever since that religion was founded - but its impact has been especially dire during the last few decades of mass immigration and large-scale terrorism. It’s obviously important, then, for people in the West to know as much as possible about Islamic values and beliefs. But where to find the facts, and how to know that they really are the facts? The Islamic Studies departments of universities, which are staffed almost entirely with devout believers and other apologists, won’t give you the real dope. Neither will most online resources or the overwhelming majority of the books on the subject issued by the large corporate publishers. One might assume that the solution lies in reading the&nbsp;Qur’an - but the English-language editions aimed primarily at non-Muslim readers are notoriously unreliable: the most problematic passages are routinely translated in such a way as to minimize the problems, and the editors, in their introductions, footnotes, and other apparatus, systematically put the most benign interpretations on everything.


	Which is why the brilliant, prolific Robert Spencer’s newest <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Quran-Commentaries-Contemporary-Historical/dp/1642939498/">book,</a> The Critical Qu’ran: Explained from Key Islamic Commentaries and Contemporary Historical Research, is so immensely valuable. As Spencer himself writes in his introduction: “The Critical Qur’an is designed to equip the English-speaking reader with a knowledge of the Qur’an and how it is interpreted in Islam, and to see how mainstream Islamic commentators understand the text, particularly its passages that are most problematic for non-Muslim readers: the exhortations to jihad warfare, the Sharia provisions that call for the denial of various rights to women, and the like. In numerous other editions of the Qur’an, these are obscured with apologetic intent. Here, they are explained in full.”


	Indeed they are - and hurrah for that. About time! Spencer, the single most nearly indispensable student of Islam in our time, provides an introduction to each of the&nbsp;Qur’an's 114 suras (chapters), explaining its title, clarifying its theological significance, expounding upon its role in Islamic tradition, and discussing any textual issues. He also states whether it is one of the earlier suras, purportedly revealed to Muhammed when he lived in Mecca (the limited number of suras that sound relatively benign date to this period), or one of the later (and not at all benign) suras, which were supposedly revealed during Muhammed’s later years in Medina, and which are viewed by Muslim believers as “abrogating,” or superseding, the gentler Meccan ones.


	In addition, Spencer provides a dizzying array of footnotes, some of them veritable essays on key topics in Islam. In them he points out any Biblical borrowings, influences, or parallels (“This passage is loosely based on Genesis 2:19”) and any contradictions between the footnoted verse and other passages of the Qur’an: “The identification of Iblis as an angel here contradicts 18:50, which states that Iblis is a jinn”; “Allah here creates the universe in eight days, but at 7:54, 10:3, 11:7, 25:59, 32:4, and 50:38, he does it in six days.” (For any believing Muslim, it is impossible to acknowledge that the&nbsp;Qur’an contains any internal contradictions at all.) Spencer draws reader attention to&nbsp;Qur’anic statements of objective physical reality - for instance, about the sky and stars (“the sky would fall upon the earth were it not for the fact that Allah holds it up”) and the male and female reproductive systems - that are wildly at odds with actual cosmological and biological fact, and that are thus, for Muslims, causes for concern as well as sources of embarrassment, given the unassailable claim, to which all Muslims are obliged to subscribe, that the&nbsp;Qur’an was dictated to Muhammed directly by Allah and is thus entirely without error.


	Spencer’s annotations also draw the reader’s attention to passages that have played a significant role in shaping Muslim views on various topics. The sentences beginning at verse 4:34, for instance, have influenced Islamic attitudes toward women in a major way. The passage itself reads in part as follows: “Men are in charge of women, because Allah has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend of their property. So good women are obedient, guarding in secret what Allah has guarded. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, give them a warning and banish them to separate beds, and beat them.” Spencer’s gloss, also in part: “Wife-beating exists in all cultures, but only in Islam does it enjoy divine sanction.”


	And here’s Spencer on verse 4:24: “Allah forbids Muslims to marry women who are already married, except slave girls….According to Islamic law, once a woman is captured and enslaved, her marriage is immediately annulled. This verse is the basis for the practice of seizing infidel women and making them sex slaves, practiced in the modern age by the Islamic State (ISIS), Boko Haram, and other jihad groups.” At 65:4, in the sura entitled “Divorce,” Spencer makes sure that readers don’t miss a passing reference to wives “who do not yet menstruate” - which, as he puts it, “assumes that the believers will be marrying, and divorcing, prepubescent girls.” An assumption that, alas, is still valid in the twenty-first century.


	Many of Spencer’s footnotes comment on passages that reflect telling contrasts between Islam and Christianity. For example, he underscores that “there is nothing akin to Jesus’s ‘turn the other cheek’ (Matthew 5:39) in the Qur’an.” And he observes that “Islam considers Muhammad as just a human being, yet he cannot be depicted and insults to him must be avenged, while Christianity considers Christ divine and yet has no problem with visual depictions of him, and bears insults of him with patience, or at the very least without responding violently.”&nbsp;


	Furthermore, Spencer highlights the fact that “there has been no development in Islam of the historical and textual criticism that has transformed the ways Jews and Christians understand their scriptures today. This is in large part because there is no doubt about the Qur’an and no questioning of it; to study it in a historical-critical way would be impious in itself.” Then there’s this: “In a notable departure from the Christian concept of martyrdom, Allah allows Muslims to deny their faith when forced to do so” - a highly useful and oft-employed dodge known as taqiyya, which the&nbsp;Qur’an slickly distinguishes from lying, even though there’s no real distinction at all.


	For anyone familiar with the Bible, the experience of reading this unexpurgated, candidly footnoted&nbsp;Qur’an can’t help but provide powerful insight into the stark contrast between Christianity and Islam. Anyone searching in the Qur'an for gospel-like passages about love, kindness, and forgiveness (or parables about virtuous non-believers, such as the good Samaritan) is wasting his time. In fact, the&nbsp;Qur’anic passages about non-believers - which have had a profound impact on Muslim attitudes toward non-Muslims - could hardly be less congenial. Indeed, to examine just a few of the passages that Spencer flags for having influenced those attitudes is to acquire a vivid sense of just how students of the Qur'an have been taught to view the infidel. A few samples of Spencer’s commentaries on those passages:

<ul>
	<li>
		In a footnote to verse 2:8, Spencer notes that the Jews’ rejection of Islam is the reason “why most Muslims don’t accept the idea that the Jews have any right to the land of Israel.”&nbsp; 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		Commenting on verse 2:18, Spencer notes that “[t]he charge that those who do not believe in Islam are ‘deaf, dumb, and blind’ (cf. 2:171) is an indication of the Islamic assumption that those who reject Islam are not operating in good faith, but are suffering from a moral defect.” 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		The passage beginning at verse 2:63, Spencer notes, is one of the scriptural foundations “for the common tendency among Islamic jihadis today to refer to Jews as apes…or as both apes and pigs.” 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		At verse 4:76 (“Those who believe fight for the sake of Allah, and those who disbelieve fight for the cause of taghut [idols]”), Spencer notes: “there is no moral gray area in jihad warfare; the believers fight for Allah, while the unbelievers fight for Satan. Osama bin Laden began his October 6, 2002, letter to the American people with two Qur’an quotations, this verse and 22:39.81.” 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		The “equation of unbelievers with animals” in verse 8:55, notes Spencer, “is another indication that unbelievers are worthy of no respect or consideration.” 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		Verse 8:60, notes Spencer, “is the Qur’an’s third mention of the imperative to strike terror in the unbelievers.” 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		Verse 9:111, he notes, “has become in the modern age the rationale for suicide bombing.” 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		Verse 9:29, Spencer notes, “is the one place where Muslims are explicitly directed to make war against and subjugate Jews and Christians, the ‘People of the Book’...” 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		By way of illuminating a rather murky statement at 39:9, Spencer sums up the Qur'anic view of Muslims and infidels: “The unbelievers are not equal to the believers, for the believers are the ‘best of people’ (3:110) while the unbelievers are ‘the most vile of created beings.”’ (98:6). There is no compatibility of this with the idea of the equality of dignity of all people as created by the same God.” 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		Spencer underscores the thrust of verse 40:10 by noting that “Allah hates the unbelievers even more than they hate themselves.” 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		Commenting on verse 56:79, Spencer notes that “[n]on-Muslims, because they are unclean (see 9:28), are not to touch the Qur’an. This was why American guards at the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where many jihad terrorists were held, would only touch the Qur’an while wearing gloves.” 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		And finally, there’s Spencer’s annotation of verse 98:6-7. The Qur'anic text reads: “Indeed, the unbelievers among the people of the book and the idolaters will remain in the fire of Gehenna. They are the most vile of created beings. Indeed, those who believe and do good works are the best of created beings.” Spencer’s comment: “This verse is one of the most striking examples of the Qur’an’s dehumanization of unbelievers.”</li>
</ul>


	One of the most striking examples, but far from the only one.


	Indeed, the Qur'an is packed with passages that point up - incessantly, repeatedly, obsessively - the utter contrast between Muslims and non-Muslims , with the former always being described as virtuous and the latter as evil, repulsive, indeed just short of subhuman, invariably deserving of abuse and murder, and without question marked for eternal punishment. It’s impossible for a Jew, Christian, or secular Western reader to peruse this book and not recognize that people who were raised on the Qur'an and who’ve heard it preached from in mosques every weeks of their lives can’t very easily be reconciled to the idea of viewing non-Muslims as fellow humans, to say nothing of friends.


	Indeed, to read this book is to be struck time and again by its feverish preoccupation with the infidel, with the evil of apostasy, with the mischievous attempts by miscellaneous miscreants to turn believers away from Allah, with the coldblooded way in which believers should relate to infidels, with the obligation of believers to make war on infidels, with the nature of the punishments that should be meted out to infidels, and with the nature of the eternal suffering that awaits infidels in the hereafter.


	Simply put, it’s a book rich in hatred and drenched in death, again and again calling for the faithful to murder, exhorting non-believers to kill themselves, and reminding the reader that believers await an afterlife in paradise and non-believers an afterlife in hell. To read this holy book is to understand the malice toward the infidel that countless Muslims have demonstrated, in one way or another, in our time.


	Given this malice, why have so many Muslims relocated to the West? At least part of the answer can be found in verse 4:100, in which, as Spencer explains, “the Qur’an states the cardinal importance of ‘emigration for the cause of Allah,’ that is, moving to a new land with the intention of bringing Islam to it” - and, one might add, bringing it to Islam. Food for thought for Europeans and North Americans whose countries have become increasingly Islamized in recent decades, and whose inhabitants, to an alarming extent, are still in the dark about the motives of their new fellow countrymen.


	Have I made it clear what a remarkable accomplishment The Critical Qu’ran is? Breathtaking in its ambition and achievement, it’s a monumental contribution to the effort to educate Western readers about the bellicose ideology that masquerades as a Religion of Peace. Line by footnoted line, it brings a desperately needed level of clarity and candor to a field of study that’s awash in deceit, deception, and duplicity. The only question now is how many readers will avail themselves of the wisdom that this book holds out to them - and that may well mean, for them, the difference between submission and survival.

Robert Spencer’s Qur’an

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 
	
	Robert Spencer's The Critical Qur’an is coming out May 3. It has zoomed to the top

[Order David Horowitz's Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hating-Whitey-Other-Progressive-Causes/dp/189062621X/">HERE</a>.] 


	Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	For a couple of years toward the end of the last century, David Horowitz contributed a regular column to the online magazine Salon. In 1999 he gathered those columns in a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hating-Whitey-Other-Progressive-Causes/dp/189062621X/">book</a> entitled Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes. To return to this book today is to recognize that it could’ve been published yesterday, for the issues it addresses are now even more urgent, and the bizarre ideological tendencies now even more extreme, than they were then. To revisit in this book the subjects discussed in these columns - from Camille Cosby’s claim that her son’s murder was motivated by a racism that is endemic in American society to the self-professed anti-white rage of feminist scholar bell hooks (sic); from the black leftist celebration of Bill Clinton as “our first black president” to the black leftist contempt for black conservative thinkers like Larry Elder; from the entrenched leftism of the American academy to the leftist elite’s shunning of one of its own, Christopher Hitchens, for “betraying” his friend, Clinton bagman Sidney Blumenthal - is like looking at an old photograph of the tree in one’s front yard and exclaiming, “Wow! We thought it was big then, but look how much it’s grown since!”


	Given that Horowitz, in these columns, looks back time again to the days of the New Left in which the Clinton-era events he’s discussing had their beginnings, what we have here is a text that, revisited today, operates on several temporal levels, taking us to the Sixties, as it were, by way of the Nineties, and thereby shedding light on the process by which many of the intellectuals, rabble-rousers, and outright gangsters of six decades ago, all of them determined to tear down the American establishment in the name of Black Power or Women’s Liberation or explicit Leninist or Maoist revolution, became themselves, by the 1990s, firmly entrenched members of the cultural, political, and academic elite, and are at present, to an alarming extent, our éminences grises, in all but absolute control of the legacy media, Ivy League, Democratic Party, movie business, Silicon Valley, an increasing number of major corporations, and even the military, FBI, CIA, and mainline Protestantism.


	As for Horowitz, in the 1960s he was one of the left’s leading figures. But while other, lesser lights of the left rode the wave of anti-establishment rebellion to entrenched establishment power, Horowitz, recognizing the toxicity of the movement he’d helped lead and the value of the American institutions he and his cronies had sought to dismantle, switched sides, and by the 1990s, in one of recent history’s supreme ironies, had ridden his pro-American stance to a position as an outsider in an America rapidly being taken over by its (former?) enemies; and while writers whom he’d once edited at Ramparts contributed to the reshaping of American culture from their corner offices at the New York Times, L.A. Times, and elsewhere, Horowitz, by far a finer writer (and thinker) than any of them, was grateful for a perch at Salon. And today - when Salon is perhaps most famous for celebating pedophilia, and the very idea of conservatives getting a toe in the door even there is a quaint memory - Horowitz continues to shout through newer (and thankfully proliferating) cracks in the wall, such as the Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin podcasts, about his ex-comrades’ enduring perfidy, while they wield microphones so large that they can afford to ignore him entirely - or, if they do choose to pay him attention, to dismiss him as a crank.


	But, dammit, he was there, back when the New Left was new. And he remembers. He remembered in 1999, and he remembers now. And he’s more aware than anybody in America of the guileful ways in which his old comrades have rewritten their histories, and that of the New Left generally, to make themselves and their former movement look sympathetic and heroic. Take a 1998 PBS documentary entitled 1968: The Year that Shaped a Generation, in which the old lefties Steve Talbot, Todd Gitlin, and Tom Hayden presented themselves as having been liberal followers of the peace-loving Martin Luther King at a time when they had, in fact, been aligned with the violent and murderous Black Power movement. Also dropped down the memory hole in the PBS film was their Vietnam-era support not just for U.S. withdrawal from southeast Asia, as they’d have you believe, but for Vietnam’s “liberation” - a “liberation” that, precisely as many onlookers had warned, resulted in Communist genocide. As Horowitz declares with a thoroughly warranted bluntness, “The mass slaughter in Cambodia and South Vietnam from 1975 and 1978 was the real achievement of the New Left.”


	Repeatedly in Hating Whitey, Horowitz dismantles his ex-comrades’ Clinton-era résumé rewrites and corrects the record with surgical precision. He notes that even the Marxist journalist (and Soviet spy) I.F. Stone’s own “adoring biographer” acknowledged Stone’s ineradicable belief that “in spite of the brutal collectivization campaign, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the latest quashing of the Czech democracy and the Stalinist takeover of Eastern Europe…communism was a progressive force, lined up on the correct side of historical events.” Horowitz also quite properly derides the audacious claim by many old leftists that they’d celebrated and even contributed to the end of the Cold War - when in reality they’d “aided and abetted” the Soviet system “throughout its career” and mourned its passing. “Even in its best moments,” Horowitz recalls, “the western left disparaged the threat from the communist enemy as a paranoid fantasy of the Cold War right.” To be sure, even as he calls the dissemblers to account, Horowitz is capable of giving credit even to a murderous thug like Eldridge Cleaver for having finally admitted on 60 Minutes, not long before his death in 1998, that “[i]f people had listened to Huey Newton and me in the 1960s, there would have been a holocaust in this country.”&nbsp;&nbsp;


	To read Hating Whitey is to be reminded that in the 1990s there still seemed reason to hope that the cultural war might yet be won by the partisans of truth so long as they presented their arguments cogently and respectfully. The only thing that’s astonishing about Horowitz’s account of a presentation he gave at Bates College is that he was treated with a degree of tolerance by almost everyone (except for the student who called him a fascist and raised a Nazi salute); these days, such a relatively civilized reception would be unimaginable. Similarly, the only surprise about Horowitz being the sole conservative at a book festival is that he was invited at all (however curtly) and that the host was actually “embarrassed” when Horowitz was heckled.&nbsp;&nbsp;


	How to describe David Horowitz? By turns, in these pages, he’s Daniel in the lion’s den, Diogenes looking for an honest man, Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Throughout, he’s an American (and non-socialist) Orwell, bringing moral clarity to topics that have been twisted beyond recognition by odious ideology and duplicitous rhetoric. One reason why this 23-year-old book remains required reading is that it reminds one again and again that the left, over the decades, has kept proffering the same cynical lies and perpetrating the same destructive slanders - and thereby seducing ever new generations of naive, idealistic young people.


	Not only is Horowitz one of the few sometime New Left members who, as of 1999, was telling the truth about that movement and his role in it; he’s also one of the few commentators anywhere who, also as of 1999, was already calling out phenomena - such as Whiteness Studies and Critical Race Theory - that were then marginal but that currently occupy center stage. Likewise, if you’d read Hating Whitey when it first came out, you wouldn’t have been blindsided by the recent transformation of the Democratic Party into a veritable Communist Party - the culmination of a process that, as outlined by Horowitz in this book, began way back in 1968.


	On top of everything else, Horowitz is a wellspring of abiding truths about the left. For many progressives, he writes, it would be more offensive to support their own country’s democratic government in a struggle against a palpable communist threat than to “serv[e] a totalitarian state and ai[d] an enemy power.” The “acceptance of conservative truths while avoiding conservative conclusions,” he observes, apropos of the philosopher Richard Rorty, “marks the intellectual cul de sac in which the left finds itself in the post-communist era.” Pondering the left’s shunning of Hitchens over the Blumenthal matter, Horowitz declares: “This tainting and ostracism of sinners is, in fact, the secret power of the leftist faith.”


	Faith, you ask? Yes, faith - for “the community of the left is…bound by ties that are fundamentally religious,” with “messianism [as] its political essence.” Moreover, the left isn’t just a “faith” but a “romance” - and, as such, will never perish, because every day new romantics are born while old romantics die still clinging to the dream, unwilling to abandon the role of bold crusader and own up to the “unheroic, ordinary, and unredeemed” nature of their own existence.


	Yes, some, like Horowitz himself, do snap out of the leftist illusion. “But,” he laments, in the closing words of this still-powerful book, he realized long ago that “there would always be others, and in far greater number,” who would keep the faith. “A century of broken dreams and the slaughters they spawned would, in the end, teach nothing to those who had no reason to hear. Least of all would it cure them of their hunger for a romance that is really a desire not to know who and what we are.”

Revisiting David Horowitz's Hating Whitey

[Order David Horowitz's Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes: HERE.] 


	Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

Revisiting David Horowitz's Hating Whitey 

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	On Sunday evening, as the minutes ticked by until 8 P.M., when the French polls would close and the results of the presidential election would be announced, a correspondent for the English-language service of France 24 stood outside Emmanuel Macron’s campaign headquarters and said that the 1300-odd international journalists who were gathered there exuded an “optimism” that the incumbent “has this in the bag.” Well, at least they were honest about the fact that Macron was very much the candidate of the establishment to which they belong. Back in the France 24 studio, to be sure, one of the panelists present expressed concern that the reportedly high turnout was “maybe not good for French democracy,” meaning not good for Macron - for in France, as in the Anglosphere, when journalists use the word “democracy” nowadays, they mean keeping the left in power and erecting a cordon sanitaire around the “populists.” In the end, they need not have worried: although there were hopes that Marine Le Pen might pull an upset, Macron won, as expected, this time by a vote of 58.2% to 41.8%. Yes, the margin between the two was half as wide as when they faced each other in 2017. But a win is a win.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	For those whose chief concern is the advance of Islam in the West, the significance of that victory is manifest. During the latter part of Macron’s term, they heard, on the one hand, the cringing statements by Emmanuel Macron’s appointees: the ambassador to Sweden who in 2020 called France “a Muslim country” and the Foreign Minister who, shortly therafter, on a visit to Egypt, assured Muslims of his “deep respect” for Islam. On the other side, there were the defiant members of the French military - more than a thousand of them, including no fewer than twenty generals - who, last year, sending a message that was consistent with Le Pen’s own, declared in an open letter that France is endangered by Muslim enemies within who “despise our country, its traditions, its culture, and who want to see it dissolved by removing its past and its history.” And there was also Pierre Brochand, former director of the DGSE (France’s CIA), who <a href="https://rmx.news/france/frances-former-intelligence-chief-warns-against-possible-civil-war-due-to-mass-immigration/">told</a> Le Figaro just a few weeks ago that “the type of immigration we have been experiencing for half a century” is “without precedent in our history,” bringing to the shores of France armies of immigrants who are filled with a “spirit of post-colonial revenge” and, loath to mix with native Frenchmen, produce children who are “even less integrated…than their parents.”


	This drama has been going on - and intensifying - for years, amid much hand-wringing, speechifying, and dissembling, but little in the way of productive action. Over and over again, polls have shown that a large majority of the French people believe that their country will, before too long, find itself under a sharia government; and yet those same people, In election after election, have rejected presidential candidates who might conceivably have prevented that fate in favor of empty suits who they know will do nothing. So it was that on April 10, in the first round of this year’s presidential balloting, voters rejected the bid of Éric Zemmour, who spoke eloquently and passionately about the need to rescue France, turning the second round of voting into a rematch between Macron and Le Pen.


	Last Thursday, the two faced each other in debate. One need not have been a French citizen, or to know very much about the specific conditions in France today, to make sense of their two-and-a-half-hour exchange. Any American, observing their demeanor and listening to their arguments, would have figured out soon enough that Macron, like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, was the voice of the professional, globalist urban establishment, which favors mass immigration, and that Le Pen, like Donald Trump, was the voice of the “deplorables” - the workers, farmers, and others who’d been burned by globalism as well as by their country’s steady Islamization. Brits, for their part, would’ve recognized a vote for Macron as a rough equivalent of a vote for Remain, and Le Pen as the Gallic counterpart to Brexit.&nbsp;


	As with the Democrats in the U.S. and the Remain cause in Britain, it was, as noted, Macron who enjoyed the support of the media. The panel of journalists and commentators who took part in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKtZprAHJwM&amp;ab_channel=FRANCE24English">France 24’s</a> English-language panel discussion prior to the debate were at pains to remind viewers, who’d heard it all a thousand times before, that while Macron is “centrist,” Le Pen is “xenophobic” and “far-right” (in fact, leaving aside her stand on immigration, she’s very much a woman of the left) and that, as one pundit put it, she’s guilty of “disinforming” (sic) her supporters on the issues. There was no suggestion, needless to say, that the endlessly slippery Macron had ever misled anybody about anything, and no mention of the tyrannical manner in which he’d enforced lockdown rules. Also supporting Macron - quelle surprise! - were French Muslim leaders. The head of Paris’s Grand Mosque urged fellow believers to vote for the incumbent, as did the Organization of Muslims of France. Yes, Macron has given stirring speeches in which he’s promised to fight Islamization - notably an October 2020 address in which he vowed to defend French secularism from “Islamist separatism” - but Muslim leaders knew that it was all talk.


	The first couple of hours of the debate were less than electrifying. The candidates traded barbs on taxes, welfare, housing, retirement arrangements, and the like. In a brief flash of amity, Le Pen praised Macron’s efforts to help Ukraine. Accused by him of being in thrall to Russia, she professed: “I am a patriot. I have been a patriot my whole life.” He was testy, irritable, arrogant, imperious, smug, as if he resented even having to talk to her or defend himself before a national audience; at times he even seemed rattled (or perhaps this is just how he behaves when in the presence of a vibrant, self-assured older woman). Le Pen, for her part, came off throughout as relaxed, by turns amused and ardent, consistently in command of the facts and unafraid of telling voters exactly where she stood. What mattered less than the details was her fundamental charge, to which he could offer no cogent reply: namely, that he lacks concern for the ordinary French citizen. Indeed, even as she made the charge, he stood there radiating an imperial indifference, as if to prove her right.&nbsp;


	On the subject of the EU she was fervent. As a member of the European Parliament, said Le Pen, she’d observed that Germans in Brussels defend their own interests, but the French never do. Why not? “How come France doesn’t defend its farmers, its businesses, its industry?”&nbsp; She denied wanting to take France out of the EU, but insisted: “I want to overhaul the European Union from the inside.” When he said something implying that the EU is a superstate, she shot back at him impressively: “There is no European sovereignty, because there is no such thing as a European people. France is a sovereign country because France has a people….You replaced the French flag with the EU flag at the Arc de Triomphe!” And she pushed further: “Your vision of things stunts France…We are a global power.”


	But all this was mere prelude. In the game’s last quarter, the candidates took on Islam. Well, Le Pen did. “Our country is in dire straits,” she pronounced.” And I’m mincing my words….We are faced with barbaric behavior. Things are getting wilder and wilder. Everywhere I travel, even deep into the countryside, I have people telling me, ‘We can’t keep doing this anymore.’” Stating that “unbridled, mass-scale immigration is a problem that we must resolve,” she called for an immigration referendum, insisted on the need to deport illegal aliens and immigrant criminals (“you have deported absolutely nobody!”), the need for firmer and more visible policing, the need for tougher sentencing and fewer probations and more prison cells. The more dauntless she sounded, the more Macron seemed to fade into the background.


	France, she maintained, is at risk from “Islamist ideology,” which “seeks to impose sharia law,” and which therefore needs to be “fought by a republic that is proud of itself.” Radical Muslims must be deported; radical mosques must be closed. Furthermore, she called for “banning hijab in public areas,” quite rightly describing it as “a uniform that is imposed on women by Islamists.” Such a state of affairs, she stated, “is unacceptable in our country. We need to free those women. We need to push back against islamism.” There are, she pointed out, Islamic countries that have stronger hijab laws than France does. All this was too much for Macron, who finally pushed back, although at first not very coherently. “What I find concerning with your train of thought,” he said, “is where it leads.” That “train of thought,” he continued, “doesn’t really hold up….If you go down your avenue, you will ban all forms of religious signs.” Yes, he conceded, it’s appropriate under the French constitution to ban veils in schools. But in streets? In suburbs? If you go that route, he warned, “then you are just going to create civil war.”


	And there it was. The key sentence of the whole debate - indeed, of the whole election.


	For years, critics of Islam, myself included, have warned that unless major policy changes were made on the Islamic front tout de suite - that is, if Western Europe continued to experience a high level of Islamic immigration, and if current demographic trends prevailed, and if official efforts at integration persisted in being utterly disastrous - then Western European societies and cultures would become increasingly Islamized, in ways big and small (a process that is already well underway), and these countries’ systems of laws would steadily come under the influence of sharia. Eventually, either the natives would simply give way fully to a new Islamic order (as chillingly depicted in Michel Houllebecq’s brilliant novel Submission) or there would be urban and suburban pockets of Islam inside otherwise secular national entities and/or armed conflicts over control of different areas. Such predictions - which are nothing more than commonsensical extrapolations - have been routinely mocked by legacy media, academics, and establishment politicians as “conspiracy theories.” Yet there was Macron, the president of France, live on national television, saying that a mere ban on women wearing hijab in public would cause a civil war.&nbsp;


	It was striking. Stunning. He didn’t even pretend to make a principled argument, one way or another, on the subject of hijab. He simply made the colossal admission that in France, in the year 2022, it’s too late in the day for his government to prohibit the wearing in public of an item of clothing that symbolizes not just a religion but an authoritarian ideology - because that ideology already wields too much power. Macron’s implication, then, was that in the struggle to resist Islamization, France has already lost. Surely Macron didn’t go into the debate intending to&nbsp; admit this; he may not even have grasped quite what he was saying even as he was saying it.


	But he said it.


	Le Pen challenged him: did he really think that so many people would refuse to accept such a law? Macron replied that France would be the first country in the world to enact such legislation. Le Pen agreed, adding that France has been the first country in the world to enact many kinds of legislation. Yes, he said, but those laws were made in the name of freedom. And there she had him. On previous occasions, he’d acknowledged that being forced to wear hijab was a matter of being denied one’s freedom. She asked whether he still believed that, given that it now sounded as if a hijab ban would amount to a restriction on individual freedoms. “Or have you changed your mind again?” she asked. In reply, he had nothing but feeble nonsense to offer: “We mustn’t mix up Islam and Islamism….We have French citiizens who wouldn’t be able to go into the public arena under your proposal.”&nbsp;


	So it went. For one brief shining moment, the mask slipped. Macron, who in the last couple of years had made pretty little shows of boldness on this issue in the name of political expediency, had shown his true colors, presenting the French electorate with a clear choice between two distinct alternatives. No, she’s definitely no gift from heaven. And he’s far from the worst European leader to come down the pike in recent years. (She opposes NATO; he supports it.) But still, on the things that matter most, the difference was stark. In their closing remarks, Macron lamented that they hadn’t had a chance to discuss “gender equality” (maybe when the Muslims take over), while Le Pen admirably summed up her platform: “France is the only country we have….We are seeking to protect our identity, our landscape, our language, our culture and to do it without any inhibition.” She even quoted Lincoln: “I believe in government for the people, of the people, by the people.” How could the contrast have been more obvious? Voters could opt for acquiescence - for persisting in the gradual surrender to Islam that has been the unspoken French policy for years - or they could choose patriotic defiance.&nbsp;


	Well, they chose surrender. Why? Can so many French voters be so unaware of what their country’s ongoing Islamization portends? Are they in denial about it? Are they scared even to admit the facts to themselves? Could it be that they actually believe their legacy media? Granted, if you take a quick look around the Western world, the French electorate’s myopia - if that’s le mot juste - is scarcely unique. Why, one might just as well ask, isn’t Geert Wilders the prime minister of the Netherlands? Why do the Swedes keep electing Social Democrats, even as their country burns down around them? How can the Canadians have returned the vile yet ridiculous Justin Trudeau to power? Yes, Californians are crazy, but even so - with their economy going down the tubes, their cities turning into homeless encampments, and their middle class fleeing en masse to Texas and Arizona - how could they have failed to recall the avatar of disaster that is Gavin Newsom?


	Eh bien. In her concession speech, Le Pen looked forward to the National Assembly elections on June 12, after which she and her supporters sang a patently heartfelt Marseillaise. Shortly thereafter, to the strains of the European Union anthem, the Ode to Joy, Macron made his way to a stage erected outside the Eiffel Tower, where, delivering a platitudinous address to an audience of his voters, he promised to make France “a great green nation.” I don’t think he was alluding to the key role of the color green in Islam, but you never know. His speech was followed by a lovely performance of the Marseillaise by a professional singer. Some of Macron’s fans sang along, although it felt, shall we say, rote.

Macron Stays in Power

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	On Sunday evening, as the minutes ticked by until 8 P.M., when the French polls

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	I’ve just discovered a compelling new essayist - who, as it happens, is a 74-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (Glengarry Glen Ross, American Buffalo) and screenwriter (The Verdict, Hannibal). To be sure, I was already aware that David Mamet, a red-diaper baby and erstwhile showbiz lefty, had made a right turn some years ago, but I hadn’t encountered the fruits of his second thoughts until I read his just-published collection of essays, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Recessional-Death-Free-Speech-Lunch/dp/006315899X">Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch</a>. It’s a gratifying, bracing, and electrifying, read.&nbsp;


	What, you ask, does he write about? Answer: What doesn’t he write about? In one essay after another, he seeks to make a big point about life, or America, or human nature, or art, and in doing so he leaps from one image or story or idea to another, drawing connections across time and space in an energetic stream-of-consciousness manner. In one essay, for example, he links Sigmund Freud to the movie King Kong to the friendship between Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr. In another, he strings together a childhood anecdote, a historical tidbit, a joke, a couple of lines from Kipling, and a passage from a humor book. Impatient to stay in one place for long or to overstay his welcome, he begins and ends his essays abruptly, and in between the beginning and ending may well veer from social and literary criticism to historical commentary to biblical exegesis and back.


	Mamet has the same gripes about the world today that many of us have, but he serves them up in a thoroughly original way, with a spin all his own, and with a wit that should hardly be unexpected given that this is the man who wrote Wag the Dog. A tummler, kibitzer, kvetch, and rabbi all in one, he’s as book smart as he is street smart, gifted both with common sense and with a wisdom about the present rooted in a deep knowledge and understanding of the past, not to mention in the Jewish and Christian faiths. And - remarkably enough in the year 2022 - he’s a conservative, and a Trump fan to boot, who has yet to be dragged down by the mob from his position as a leading figure of mainstream American culture.


	Reading through Recessional, I kept looking for something to disagree with strongly. I never found it. Literature? While Mamet confesses that he “can’t read the sea novels of Conrad” or most of Dickens and is cool on George Eliot, he loves Trollope. Right there with you. He considers The Spy Who Came in from the Cold a masterpiece. Ditto. And he thinks Yeats is “the greatest English poet since Shakespeare.” Agreed. (Of course he means “English-language poet.”) “The talentless,” he posits in one of many thought-provoking apothegms, “seem to feel a ‘sense of wonder at the beauty of the world.’ Such may give us, at its uttermost best, the anodyne of Robert Frost but not the poetry of Yeats.” I wouldn’t second “anodyne,” but otherwise, nice point.


	Granted, I was surprised to see Mamet name Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page (1928) as the greatest of American plays - I always found it corny and creaky - but his enthusiasm is so convincing that I’m tempted to revisit it. (Elsewhere in the book he calls Our Town America’s finest play, but I don’t plan to reopen that question.) I’m not at all familiar with Virginia Faulkner (1913-80), a writer whom he calls “more droll than Dorothy Parker,” but on his say-so I’ll definitely be checking her out. And while I don’t share his view of Whitman’s poetry as “heartfelt drivel,” I couldn’t agree more that, as he maintains, Walt’s barbaric yawp has spawned mountains of “poetic trash.”


	As suggested by its title, the theme of Mamet’s book is decline - in poetry, in art, in pretty much everything. Broadway is dead. The movies are dead. But he was there when they still had life in them. In one essay, a memoir of the Broadway subculture during his early years as a playwright, he amusingly describes Lee Strasberg, who taught “method acting” to Brando, Clift, et al. (and who played Hyman Roth in Godfather II), as “the King of the Hucksters” and persuasively slams Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich’s 1955 stage version of The Diary of Anne Frank as “a sitcom.”


	It’s when he turns to politics, in the broadest sense, that Mamet is at his best - and bravest. An unashamed patriot, he refers to America as “our magnificent country” and as “the freest and most prosperous [nation] in history.” Looking back at some of the individuals and organizations whose cockeyed ideas helped shape the contemporary scene, he puts Margaret Sanger and John Dewey in their place and deplores the ACLU as “the most absurd bunch of Jews since the Three Stooges.” He recalls that his initial reaction to the coinage “Department of Homeland Security” was to find it (as I did) not just “loathsome, clunky, and offensive” but “un-American” and, indeed, rather unpleasantly “Teutonic.” Moving on to the present, he’s splendidly dismissive of all the claptrap du jour - from Critical Race Theory and man-made global warming to covid hysteria, gender insanity, and Trump Derangement Syndrome.


	Indeed, it’s wonderfully gratifying to see an author with Mamet’s record and reputation who, far from reflexively despising Donald Trump (like virtually everyone else in the Dramatists Guild, Directors Guild, and Writers Guild of America West), repeatedly praises and defends him. “Part of the Left’s outrage at Trump,” Mamet writes, “was his refusal to speak in hieratic language….He speaks American, and those of us who also love the language are awed and delighted to hear it from an elected official.” And: “Trump was vilified with greater vehemence than anyone in Western memory. He was hated because he was feared - because he held that prosperity was to be enjoyed as the legitimate reward of sacrifice, struggle, patriotism, and the American culture that was their conjunction.”


	And again: “Trump was vilified by the Left because ‘he lied’; in fact, he was at a disadvantage because he did not lie. He was, by inclination and experience, a superb director - that is, one who achieves a goal through inspiring employees - but he had neither the inclination or the experience to rule, which is to control disparate groups through false promises, stealth, deception, propaganda, and lies.” Alas, Trump was brought down by the same forces that are bringing down America as a whole. And when it comes to that falling-off, Mamet doesn’t mince words. Raising the specter of “national death,” he asks: “How can a country survive, whose electorate has never seen a man, except their gardener, with dirty hands?” How indeed?

Mamet’s Wisdom

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	I’ve just discovered a compelling new essayist - who, as it happens, is a 74-year-

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	Even before he announced for president, the French media were out there, along with prominent academics and sundry bien pensant observers, <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/frances-trump-bruce-bawer/">warning</a> potential voters that he was a “populist,” a “polemicist,” and a “provocateur” who was “obsessed with Islam” - and not, mind you, in an an affectionate, Obama-like way - and hence patently “dangerous,” “divisive,” and “discriminatory.” Worst of all, as you could tell from reading his books, including the huge 2004 bestseller Le Suicide français, Éric Zemmour subscribed - as do the majority of his countrymen - to the “Great Replacement” theory, which posits that the people of France are in the process of being supplanted by Muslims and their society, culture, and laws are gradually giving way to their Islamic counterparts.


	On November 30, Zemmour released a seven-minute video in which he officially <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/bawer-zemmour-bruce-bawer/">declared</a> his candidacy. In powerful words matched with equally powerful images that contrasted present-day France with the France of history, he stated: “You walk the streets of your city and you don't recognize it. You look at your screens and you are spoken to in a language that is strange and, quite frankly, foreign….you have the impression that you are no longer in the country you know.” He cited the threats posed by mass Muslim immigration to French liberty, French civilization, French film and food and fashion and “the charm of our art of living.” It was, I commented at the time, “an oration for the ages.” And of course the elites sneered: in the New Yorker, the execrable Adam Gopnick compared Zemmour to Hitler and Stalin.


	In fact Zemmour seemed to be the only candidate for president of France who was truly serious about - and remotely capable of - saving it from an Islamic future. But despite that stirring kick-off video, and despite what should have been a sensational endorsement by Marion Maréchal, the niece of perennial “far-right” presidential also-ran, Marine Le Pen, his campaign went nowhere. Yes, even before his announcement he’d drained support from Le Pen; but she recovered. Then Valérie Pécresse entered the race, echoing many of Zemmour’s talking points, and not only briefly captured the attention of the media but also briefly stole the #2 spot in the public-opinion polls from Le Pen.


	But Zemmour? Two weeks ago, Le Monde columnist Gilles Paris was already writing his <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/le-monde-in-english/article/2022/03/29/the-slow-fall-of-eric-zemmour_6119635_5026681.html">epitaph</a>, saying that Zemmour had been his own worst enemy. “When voters are asked about his image and character traits,” explained Paris, “he comes out on top for everything negative and dead last for almost everything positive.” In overwhelming numbers, voters said Zemmour “didn’t give a good image of France abroad.” His only solid constituency is that “radical faction” - as Paris put it - “for whom immigration…is the main issue of concern.”


	Now, it seems to me that any French patriot with at least one foot in reality should have immigration as his or her “main issue of concern.” Similarly, I consider it obvious that Geert Wilders should be the prime minister of the Netherlands. But in last year’s election Wilders’s Freedom Party got only 11% of the vote. In Sunday’s first round of the French presidential balloting, Zemmour received a lamentable 7%, coming in a distant fourth behind the incumbent, Emmanuel Macron (28%), Le Pen, (23%), and Socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon (22%). In the second round, then, as in 2017, Macron will face Le Pen.


	Why did Zemmour have such a poor showing? Commentators deride him for his “hubris,” his touches of vulgarity, his sometimes inappropriate humor. Women, one reads, are turned off by him. It all brings to mind the American voters whose delicate distaste for Trump’s tweets - for his “rudeness” and “meanness” and so on - blinded them, when voting in the 2020 election, to his administration’s remarkable achievements. On Sunday, Liberation <a href="https://www.liberation.fr/politique/elections/eric-zemmour-le-grand-degage-20220410_HFXYUAF6GBECTJQRWL34565AJA/">sneered</a> that Zemmour’s campaign had been “exclusively based on media noise.” Sound familiar?


	In fact, Zemmour, like Trump, was a non-politician who went into politics only because he saw his country being failed - potentially to disastrous effect - by its professional politicians, and whose campaign platform was a carefully designed plan for a heroic act of rescue. No president before him had ever kept as many of his campaign pledges as Trump did; we will never know now how faithful Zemmour would have been to his own promises. But it is clear from his years of books and columns and speeches that Zemmour, like Trump, is a man of solid convictions who had no motive for seeking power other than a sincere determination to save his country. By contrast, Le Pen, long identified with the immigration issue, felt no hesitation during this campaign about shifting to economic issues when she felt it served her interests.&nbsp;


	In any event, France now faces a choice, on April 24, between Macron and Le Pen. The good news is that Le Pen’s chances now look considerably better than they did five years ago. Zemmour, who criticized her lustily during the campaign, has already urged his supporters to unite behind her. Indeed, notwithstanding her wishy-washiness, there’s no other reasonable choice for serious voters. During the last couple of years, to be sure, in a response to the challenge posed by Zemmour, Le Pen, and others, Macron has parroted some of their tough rhetoric about Islam, immigration, and integration - delivering big speeches and making big promises - only to walk it all back. To vote for Macron is to vote for more of the same; it’s to vote for a France that continues its long, fatalistic march into the arms of the ummah. 


	For the left, needless to say, there’s no choice but Macron: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/11/emmanuel-macron-far-right-le-pen-zemmour">writing</a> in the Guardian on Monday, a French journalist named Pauline Bock, after smearing Zemmour as a “racist,” expressed alarm over the surveys that show Le Pen doing well: “these polls bring the Brexit result to mind. A victory for Le Pen should terrify anyone who cares about democracy and peace.” In other words, Marine Le Pen embodies an existential threat to All Good Things just as horrifying as - gasp - Brexit. For those of us who recognized Brexit as a boon for democracy, what more needs to be said?

'France’s Trump' Out of the Running for President

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	Even before he announced for president, the French media were out there, along

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	Mea culpa. Last Friday I predicted here that the Sunday night Oscar ceremony would be wall-to-wall political rants, virtue signaling, celebrations of diversity, and lame, politically correct comedy.


	For the first couple of hours of the show, that was true. The attempts at humor by the hosts - Amy Schumer, Wanda Sykes, and Regina Hall - might well have been scripted by Amy’s cousin Chuck. Amy’s first joke was about the (fictitious) gender pay gap: “This year the academy hired three women to host, because it’s cheaper than hiring one man.” Then she took a gratuitous jab at an aging straight white male: “Look at Timothee Chalamet,” she said as the camera focused on 67-year-old J.K. Simmons. “What happened?”


	Sykes proffered a jest about Mitch McConnell that went right by me, then promised: “We’re gonna have a great night. And for you people in Florida, we’re gonna have a gay night!” - a reference, of course, to the new law (signed Monday by Governor DiSantis, and dishonestly dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law by its detractors) against grooming schoolchildren. Schumer cracked that at a time when we’re supposed to be celebrating women, the movie King Richard, about the father of tennis players Venus and Serena Williams, celebrates a man. And in another aging-white-man dig, she jibed that Leonardo DiCaprio is working hard to heal the environment and thereby “leave behind a cleaner, greener planet for his girlfriends.”&nbsp;


	And oh, the diversity! The number of blacks on camera must have broken records. (The show began with Venus and Serena introducing Beyonce and a bevy of black backup singers, live from Compton.) Much was made of the fact that this year’s Best Supporting Actor, Tony Kotsur, is deaf. Accepting Best Supporting Actress, Ariana DeBose, who played Anita in Spielberg’s disastrous West Side Story remake, announced that she’s an “openly queer woman of color, an Afro-Latina.” The winner of an animation award gushed: “I am proud to be part of a film that puts beautiful, diverse characters front and center.” Presenting the costume prize, two black women spoke of “Afro-futuristic looks” and “express[ing] diversity in storytelling.” Then diversity itself stepped onstage in the form of a tiny little man whom it took me a moment to recognize as Elliot - formerly Ellen - Page.


	And then it happened. Chris Rock, who’d been tapped to present the award for Best Documentary Feature, started off with a couple of jokes - the first real humor of the evening. Taking in the sight of Jada Pinkett Smith’s shaved head - she was seated down front, next to her husband, Will - Rock quipped that he looked forward to seeing her in G.I. Jane 2. (It will be recalled that Demi Moore went bald in the 1997 movie G.I. Jane.) Whereupon Will Smith stepped onstage and slapped him in the face. Returning to his seat, he twice shouted at Rock: “Keep my wife’s name out your f--king mouth!”


	At first, I thought it was a stunt. Some people are still saying it was. I doubt it. Both Smith and Rock have striven to be seen as good role models for young blacks: why would either of them have wanted to plan a fake confrontation that made them look like gang members in tuxedos? Also, if it had been planned, Rock, one of the funniest men alive, would’ve contrived a witty reaction to the slap. He didn’t; in fact, he struggled to get back on script. Finally, would Smith have used the F-word - twice - on live network TV if he hadn’t really been out of control?


	As far as I’m concerned, Smith acted abominably, whereas Rock was a class act. Although visibly stunned, he kept his cool and kept at his job. Some observers, noting that Pinkett Smith shaves her pate because she suffers from a skin disorder called alopecia, have actually praised Smith for “standing up for her.” But as Hadley Freeman <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/mar/28/dont-mention-that-slap-why-no-one-was-talking-about-will-smith-and-chris-rock-at-the-oscars-after-party">pointed</a> out in the Guardian, “It’s quite weird that Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith were fine with the host Regina Hall joking about their open marriage early in the evening, but not with Rock joking about Pinkett Smith’s hair, no?”


	What compounds the weirdness is that Smith laughed at Rock’s joke - until he saw that Jada wasn’t laughing. Could it be that he was really stewed at Hall - and still burned, deep down, by the recent revelation that Jada had two-timed him with a guy half her age - but, unable to slap either Hall or Jada, took it out on Rock? Or did the slap have more to do with the fact that he was on tenterhooks, desperate to know if he’d won Best Actor - an accolade that he’s long considered long overdue?


	One big question: why did they let him get away with it? A lesser member of the audience who’d struck someone on camera and hurled F-bombs would’ve been hauled out of there prontissimo and handed over to the L.A. cops. Instead, Smith was allowed to stay, collect his award, and bask in applause - a standing ovation, even. On Monday’s The Five, Jesse Watters suggested that if, say, a white hothead like Mel Gibson had slapped Rock, he’d have been booed roundly by the audience and dragged out by security, superstar or not. Was there indeed an element of racism - an unarticulated feeling that the assault, being black-on-black, wasn’t quite as horrible or shocking as it might otherwise have been - in ABC execs’ decision to leave Smith alone?&nbsp;


	In any case, that slap wasn’t just the evening’s headline event; to me, it felt like a defining moment for Hollywood in our time, and even for the American left. Because it pulled back the curtain on Tinseltown’s, and the left’s, pious virtue-signaling, its phony embrace of diversity, to reveal at least a hint of the ugliness, the narcissism, and the potential for violence that lie beneath. And who better to pull that curtain back than Will Smith? He’s always been one of the phoniest of showbiz phonies, constantly turning up on talk shows to polish his image as the most evolved person in the room. “I don’t want to be an icon,” he’s said. “I want to be an idea.” He’s declared that his life’s goal is to “advance and elevate humanity.” (He’s also expressed the desire to see the U.S. “cleansed” of Trump voters.)


	Shortly after the big slap came the Academy’s “In Memoriam” tribute, which reminded us that Sidney Poitier died in January. Poitier was always aware of being viewed, fairly or not, as a representative of black people, and he did black people - and America - a profound service by always comporting himself with dignity. So did Hattie McDaniel, the first-ever black Oscar winner, who in her 1940 acceptance speech tearfully expressed the hope that she would always be “a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry.” These days, of course, you’re not supposed to talk about being “a credit to my race.” I don’t see why. Any excuse to behave properly is a good one. Jews used to talk about fellow Jews who were a “shanda for the goyim” - i.e., they gave Jews a bad name. Years ago, at Gay Pride parades, there were always the handful of participants who insisted on acting and dressing like freaks, and who made the rest of us bite our tongues, knowing they’d be the ones shown on the news that evening. Chris Rock himself, in a hilariously brilliant 1996<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3PJF0YE-x4&amp;ab_channel=SatiricalGameReviews"> routine</a>, acknowledged that, yes, there are some blacks who are a credit to their race and others who aren’t.&nbsp;


	In the year 2022, maybe we’ve heard enough about white supremacy and black victimhood, about the patriarchy, about transphobia. Maybe we need to talk more about individual decency, responsibility, and what it means to be civilized - whatever your skin color.


	Later in the evening Will Smith won the Best Actor award for King Richard. In his acceptance speech he apologized to the audience - but not to Chris Rock - for the slap. He actually tried to put a noble spin on his thuggish conduct: “Love will make you do crazy things.” He compared himself to Richard Williams, his character in King Richard, who “was a fierce defender of his family.” And he played the victim card, saying that in show business “you’ve got to be able to take abuse” and accept “people disrespecting you.” But he displayed not the slightest hint of humility. Instead, he fell back smoothly into his habitual grandiosity, saying that he wants to be “a vessel for love” and “an ambassador for love.” “In this time in my life, in this moment,” he stated,

<blockquote>
	
		I am overwhelmed by what God is calling on me to do and be in this world….I’m being called on in my life to love people and to protect people and to be a river to my people….It’s not about winning an award for me, it’s about being able to shine a lot on all the people.
</blockquote>


	According to the Guardian’s Freeman, who dropped in on the hottest post-Oscar parties in L.A., the big stars were all silent on the big slap. Of course they were. They realized that Will Smith hadn’t just smacked Chris Rock - he’d dealt a blow to all the reigning left-wing myths, Hollywood myths, Oscar myths. Namely, the myth that being left of center is a mark of virtue; the myth that anybody in the film industry has a right to lecture the rest of America about character and ethics and morality (let alone to posture pretentiously as, heaven help us, “an ambassador for love”); and the myth that everything, everywhere, is all about, and can be explained by, the oppression of blacks by whites. Those pieties have been too potent for too long now. Thanks to Will Smith, they’re at least a little bit shakier today than they were last week.

Slaps and Double Standards

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	Mea culpa. Last Friday I predicted here that the Sunday night Oscar ceremony

<a href="https://brucebawer.com/">Bruce Bawer</a> is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the author of multiple books. 


	It all goes back to the 1970s, as do so many of the worst features of contemporary American society and culture. At the 1974 Oscar ceremony, Roger Moore and Liv Ullmann <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QUacU0I4yU&amp;ab_channel=Oscars">stepped</a> onstage to present the Best Actor award. For some reason, Ullmann decided to quote her frequent collaborator Ingmar Bergman: “Often to be most eloquent is to be silent.” This aperçu didn’t seem particularly relevant at the moment, but about five minutes later it would seem the very deepest wisdom.


	Anyway, Moore and Ullmann broke out the envelope. The winner: Marlon Brando for The Godfather. But the person who walked down the aisle to accept the award wasn’t Brando. It was a young woman in an American Indian getup straight out of Central Casting. When Moore held the statuette out to her, she held up her palm to refuse it. And then she spoke.


	“Hello. My name is Sacheen Littlefeather. I'm Apache and I am president of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee. I'm representing Marlon Brando this evening.” Brando, she explained, was turning down his Oscar in protest against “the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry…and on television in movie re-runs.” He was, she added, also displeased by the government’s aggressive response to the recent occupation of the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, by members of the Oglala Lakota tribe.


	Then she went on to explain what Brando thought about Hollywood’s depiction of Italian Americans. Just kidding.


	As we approach this year’s Oscar telecast (Sunday&nbsp;night, ABC - you remember ABC, don’t you?), an event now identified primarily with inane political self-indulgence, let it be remembered that in 1974 a statement like Sacheen Littlefeather’s (real name: Marie Louise Cruz) was unheard of. It was a time when people actually looked forward to this now-moribund annual celebration of the movies. But Brando’s stratagem would mark the beginning of the end of all that. To be sure, Littlefeather’s brief turn didn’t take place in a vacuum: during the half dozen or so years leading up to The Godfather’s big night, Hollywood had been churning out product with considerably more aggressive social and political content than had been common in earlier decades. And the Motion Picture Academy had recognized some of these movies, with Best Picture nominations or victories to In the Heat of the Night and Bonnie and Clyde (both 1967), Z and Midnight Cowboy (both 1969), Patton and M*A*S*H (both 1970), and A Clockwork Orange (1971).


	But the social and political commentary had stayed in the movies themselves. Now, that was about to change. Politics had begun to seep into every corner of American culture. And that included the Oscars.


	Cut to April 3, 1978, and the 50th-anniversary Oscar ceremony. One of the most nominated films that year was Julia, based on a memoir by Lillian Hellman that had appeared in her 1973 book Pentimento. The story told in the film is as follows: after Hitler’s rise to power but before the outbreak of World War II, Hellman (played by Jane Fonda), at the request of her close childhood friend Julia (Vanessa Redgrave), risks her life by smuggling money from the Soviet Union to Berlin to help the anti-Nazi cause.


	Years later the whole story would be proven to be total hogwash, although any sensible reader of Hellman’s story in 1973 would’ve raised an eyebrow at it. (It was Hellman, an inveterate Stalinist, about whose memoirs the writer Mary McCarthy famously said, on a 1979 Dick Cavett Show, “every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'") In any event, Julia won Oscars not only for its screenplay and for Jason Robards (playing Hellmann’s longtime beau Dashiell Hammett), but for Vanessa Redgrave, who portrayed the title character - and who, when she was called up to the stage to accept the award, she <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QUacU0I4yU&amp;ab_channel=Oscars">said</a> that she believed she and Fonda had “done the best work of our lives,” in part “because we believed and we believe in what we were expressing. Two, out of millions, who gave their lives and were prepared to sacrifice everything in the fight against fascist and racist Nazi Germany.”


	Yes, millions had made sacrifices to defeat the Nazis. But one of the two warriors to whom Redgrave paid tribute had never existed (in fact, her exploits had been based on those of a woman, Muriel Gardiner, whom Hellman had never known), and the other (in what would become perhaps the most famous case ever of stolen valor) had invented her own heroism. Redgrave, a notorious Communist and Palestinian partisan, then went on to denounce “Zionist hoodlums,” to imply parallels between Israel and the Palestinians, on the one hand, and Nazi Germany and the wartime Jews, on the other, and to congratulate Academy voters for having, through their vote for her, “dealt a final blow against that period when Nixon and McCarthy launched a worldwide witch hunt against those who tried to express in their lives and their work the truth that they believed in.”


	That “truth,” of course, was the “truth” of Communism.


	Redgrave’s speech was enough of a curve ball to elicit boos and, later in the same ceremony, an onstage takedown by screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky. But in later years such moves would become routine. Leonardo di Caprio (a high-school dropout) would warn of climate change; Patricia Arquette (who left school at fourteen) would champion wage equality for women. Eventually the awards themselves would become politicized. After all forty acting nominations for 2014 and 2015 went to white performers, the #OscarsSoWhite movement was formed, and in 2016, amid much industry self-congratulation, Denzel Washington, Ruth Negga, Dev Patel, Mahershala Ali, Viola Davis, Naomie Harris, and Octavia Spencer all made the short list. Four years later, the Academy unveiled a complex new set of rules dictating just how diverse the casts and crews of movies have to be in order to merit an Oscar nod.


	These latest woke moves, of course, took place in the long shadow of Donald Trump, during whose presidency the political hysteria at the Oscars grew even more intense, so that it can now seem almost inappropriate not to mistake the stage of the Dolby Theater for Speakers’ Corner in London. Presenting the Oscar for animated feature film in 2017, Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal decried Trump’s call for a border wall; on the same night, Anousheh Ansari, accepting the Best Foreign Film award on behalf of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, read to the audience Farhadi’s explanation that he was boycotting the ceremony “out of respect for people of my country and those of other six nations whom have been disrespected by the inhumane law that bans entry of immigrants to the U.S. Dividing the world into the us and the enemy categories creates fear, a deceitful justification for regression and war.”


	Yes, an Iranian criticized the American president for dividing the human race “into us and the enemy.” Why, you’d almost think that America was as evil as…Israel.


	Sometimes these days it can seem as if the search for a fresh cause to front at the Oscars has driven an actor around the bend. Accepting his trophy for Joker (2019), high-school dropout Joaquin Phoenix held forth about the fact that “[w]e artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable. Then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal.” Also evident is a widespread eagerness to present one’s woke bona fides ASAP: last year, the Oscar ceremony was only seconds old when Regina King, in her opening monologue, referenced the verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial six days earlier. “If things had gone differently this past week in Minneapolis,” she said,” I might have traded in my heels for marching boots.” The name of George Floyd rang out so often during that show that you might’ve been excused for thinking he was some Hollywood legend.


	Sorry, slight correction: you’d never have been excused for that.


	As an obvious result of all this politics - as well as of the increasing woke-ness of the Academy-anointed movies themselves - the ratings for ABC’s Oscar telecast have dropped from 43.7 million in 2014 - the last year before everything in American pop culture was about Trump - to 10.4 million in 2021. Although network TV is on life support anyway, this massive decline terrified ABC executives, who decided that the Oscars, in order to be rescued, need a big change. And so they demanded that twelve award categories be removed from this year’s telecast; after negotiation, the Academy agreed to omit eight awards from the show, including editing, score, make-up, and sound.


	Yes, that’s the change. That’s it - as if the problem with the Oscars were the running time and not the content. Ironically, the categories cut from the show are those whose winners are least likely to inject their woke politics into the evening. Meanwhile, this year’s orgy of Tinseltown self-congratulation will be co-hosted by the black actress Regina Hall (who, appearing on The View in 2020, described Trump as causing a “crisis” in America and said she’d vote for anybody with a “D” after his or her name), black lesbian comedienne Wanda Sykes (a fanatical partisan who even defended Biden’s “you ain’t black” stump line), and the once-funny standup Amy Schumer (cousin of Chuck), whose political radicalization has utterly vaporized her funny bone. In 2016, as CBS News <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amy-schumer-gets-political-some-fans-walk-out-tampa/">reported</a> at the time, “[a]round 200 people walked out of her Tampa show when Schumer launched into a withering takedown of Donald Trump,” whom she called an “orange, sexual-assaulting, fake-college-starting monster.”


	Take it from me, she’s gotten worse since.


	And these are the people whom the geniuses at ABC and the Motion Picture Academy are putting front and center this year in hopes of re-engaging the interest of American viewers in their now utterly discredited golden booty.


	There’s one bright spot - or so I thought - to what will, remarkably, be the 94th annual Academy Awards. Earlier this week I <a href="https://www.nettavisen.no/livsstil/liv-ullmann-mottar-ares-oscar-egentlig-veldig-forbausende/s/12-95-3424258783">read</a> that Liv Ullmann, now 83 and a two-time Oscar nominee, will receive an honorary Oscar this year. Ah! I thought. At least there’ll be a touch of class and a reminder of the heyday of cinema. But nope: it turned out that, as part of the network’s brilliant time-shaving scheme, Ullmann’s prize, along with honorary accolades to Samuel L. Jackson, Elaine May, and Danny Glover, will be handed out on Saturday, at a private dinner that won’t be on TV.


	In short, if you don’t tune in to ABC on Sunday&nbsp;night, the only thing you’ll be missing is tirades by twits.&nbsp;

Tirades by Twits

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the author of multiple books. 


	It all goes back to the 1970s, as do so many of

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	Question: What’s scarier for Ukrainians at present than being in Ukraine? Answer: Being in Sweden.


	Because of an incident that took place early last week, <a href="https://samnytt.se/ukrainska-kvinnornas-skracknatt-somalier-tog-sig-in-pa-boendet-jag-ar-sa-radd-att-jag-vill-aka-hem/">according</a> to the alternative Swedish website Samnytt, some of the Ukrainian women and children who’ve been housed at a hostel in the city of Örebro want to go back home. It began when two tall, slim black men, apparently Somalis, came knocking at the hostel’s front door at 3 A.M. and claimed to want to see a friend who was living there - but the person they named, if he or she exists at all, was not, in fact, a resident. After a third Somali man appeared, one or more of them managed to enter the hostel, by which time the women had retreated to their rooms and locked their doors. One of the Somalis knocked on one of the doors and addressed the woman inside, presumably in Somali, causing her two-year-old child to scream in fear. Then, at five A.M., some Arab men showed up and tried to force their way in.


	In standard Swedish fashion, the hostel’s managers played down the episode and didn’t report it to police. But several of the women, according to Samnytt, “are so shaken by the events of the night…that they regret that they fled to Sweden.” One of them said, “I’m so scared that I want to go home. When there are bombs, I know at least that I can go down to the basement and hide there.”


	None of this should be terribly surprising. As has been widely reported, many of the Muslims who came to Western Europe as refugees are resentful of the new wave of refugees now coming from Ukraine. As I <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/finally-real-refugees-bruce-bawer/">wrote </a>earlier this month, many of them have charged native Europeans with racism because, they claim, the Ukrainians are getting a warmer welcome than they did. (This is like complaining that your dad gave your brother a Lamborghini but only gave you a Ferrari.) It’s probably closer to the truth that Western Europeans are responding to the fact that the new arrivals are virtually all women and children, whereas the tsunami of Syrians that swept over Europe several years ago consisted almost entirely of aggressive-looking young men of military age.


	Surely the sex of the refugees in that hostel was what brought those Muslims out in the dead of night. How do you say “sitting ducks” in Arabic? One imagines that for those late-night callers, the hostel full of unaccompanied European women looked like an unattended candy store.


	These are, after all, people with a well-nigh unbounded sense of entitlement to whatever might cross their paths in the land of the infidels. Their common view of their relationship to Sweden has been succinctly articulated by Basem Mahmoud, a Jordanian-born imam in Malmö. “Sweden is ours,” Mahmoud proclaimed in a recent sermon. “It's ours, whether they like it or not. In ten to fifteen years, it will be ours.” Mahmoud has also called Jews the “offspring of pigs and monkeys,” and two years ago he defended the decapitation and butchering of the French teacher Samuel Paty - who’d used the Danish Muhammed cartoons in class to illustrate the principle of free speech - on the grounds that he was “unclean” and had “sinned by insulting the Prophet.” Like many a Muslim paterfamilias, and in accordance with his holy book, Mahmoud is something of a domestic bully: his ex-wife has unsuccessfully sought restraining orders against him, and his teenage daughter claims to have been “mentally and physically abused” by him “for a long time.” But Mahmoud has paid no price for any of it.


	Needless to say, Mahmoud’s number is legion. Western Europeans are accustomed to Muslim immigrants who, having supposedly fled chaos in their homelands, have for decades accepted Swedish government largesse with one hand while punching Jews, gays, and their own wives and children with the other. Quite a difference from the thousands of Ukrainian men who, until last month, were working in Western Europe - and making real economic contributions to the societies in which they were living - but who, when Russia invaded Ukraine, packed their bags at once and valiantly went home to fight. Anton Zheleznov, who had been employed by a building management company in Södertälje, <a href="https://www.thelocal.se/20220301/you-protect-your-country-the-ukrainians-leaving-sweden-to-help-those-at-home/">told</a> The Local, “What do you do if your country is invaded? You fight. You protect your country. For me, this is not a question.”


	The contrasts between the Muslims and Ukrainians in Sweden, then, could hardly be starker. The Ukrainians are fleeing an invasion of their country; the Muslims have been prosecuting&nbsp;their own invasion of Sweden for nearly half a century. Here’s another contrast. For years, as Hege Storhaug <a href="https://www.rights.no/2022/03/hykleriet-forst-na-kan-vi-snakke-om-kostnader-ved-flyktninger/">noted</a> the other day, Swedish government and media pretended that Muslim immigration was an economic boon for Sweden. That was a lie: it was, in reality, a massive burden, and many of the new arrivals were serious criminals. The Ukrainians who’ve come in recent years to Sweden and elsewhere in Western Europe to work, however, have been a boon. They fit in and they kept their noses clean. And yet now that Ukrainian women and children are pouring into Western Europe, guess what? The media, politicians, and academics, which considered it sheer racism to talk about the costs of taking in refugees, have decided, Sweden Democrats politician Johan Nissinen complained last week, that “it is suddenly OK to talk about how much it costs.”


	Thus it wasn’t too surprising when Swedish Labor Minister Eva Nordmark <a href="https://www.friatider.se/regeringen-ukrainska-flyktingar-ska-forsorja-sig-sjalva">announced</a> on Monday that the new Ukrainian refugees, unlike the Muslim refugees who preceded them, will be expected to support themselves financially. Got that? Women who’ve just arrived, probably with children in tow and perhaps with bad cases of PTSD, will have to register as job-seekers and go out on interviews if they want to put food on the table. So it turns out that, yes, Sweden is discriminating among refugees, apparently on the basis of race: to Ukrainian women, it’s saying: “Get a job, you bum,” while to Muslims who’ve lived in Sweden for decades on public assistance and never worked a day, it’s saying: “Don’t worry, boys. Soon enough these Ukrainian women’s tax payments will be helping to cover our welfare disbursements to you.” As they say in Somalia, Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Sweden’s Unequal Hospitality

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	Question: What’s scarier for Ukrainians at present than being in Ukraine? Answer

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	If the New York Times poses as America’s newspaper of record, presenting every day’s news through the lens of woke ideology and the Democratic Party narrative, the New Yorker is our flagship “serious” weekly magazine. So when the New Yorker runs a sober 5700-word article about what is arguably, in the minds of our woke brethren, the major issue of the day - namely, trans athletes - it merits notice. The <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/how-one-swimmer-became-the-focus-of-a-debate-about-trans-athletes">text</a> in question, dated March 17, was written by sports journalist Louisa Thomas (hereafter “Louisa”) and focused primarily on University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas (hereafter “Lia”), who at a meet in Atlanta last Thursday became, as ESPN <a href="https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/33529775/amid-protests-pennsylvania-swimmer-lia-thomas-becomes-first-known-transgender-athlete-win-division-national-championship">reported</a>, “the first known transgender athlete to win a Division I national championship in any sport.”


	Lia was born Will Thomas in 1998 or 1999 and, according to Louisa, “realized she was transgender in the summer of 2018.” But you won’t find the name Will Thomas in Louisa’s article, which begins as follows:

<blockquote>
	
		Lia Thomas has been swimming since she was five years old. As a high schooler, she was one of the top swimmers in Texas, an All-American. She followed her older brother onto the men’s team at the University of Pennsylvania, and established herself as a strong competitor in distance races; in her sophomore season, at the Ivy League championships, she finished second in three events.
</blockquote>


	In fact, during all that time, Lia was Will. And Will was a “he.” Lia is a “he,” too, of course. But in the year 2022, under the rules set down by our woke overlords, we are expected to pretend that Will’s decision four years ago to start calling himself Lia, and to identify as a “she,” had the magical effect of retroactively rewriting his entire life, turning Will Thomas into a girl from the moment of his birth.


	Although Louisa’s article starts by introducing us to Lia, it isn’t an athlete profile. Rather, it’s an account of the controversy surrounding the question of whether male-to-female transgender athletes should be allowed to compete as women, and the shifting rules on the subject that have been laid down by the International Olympic Committee, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, U.S.A. Swimming, and other bodies. Louisa is emphatically on the side of inclusion - as she makes clear, any other position seems to her to be “transphobic” - and she knows that in order to win sympathy for a cause you need to focus on a single individual. So it is that she repeatedly returns to Lia, whose emotional travails we’re invited to empathize with.


	Of course, for every transsexual athlete who’s allowed to participate in women’s sports, there are hundreds if not thousands of biological females whose athletic careers are being affected by that decision. But Louisa doesn’t invite us to empathize with those athletes, let alone with their parents or supporters. On the contrary, the very title of Louisa’s article, “The Trans Swimmer who Won Too Much,” implies that the reason why female swimmers and their supporters have criticized Lea isn’t that he’s beating them unfairly but, quite simply, that he’s beating them. As Louisa puts it: “Lia Thomas would have attracted little attention if she always lost.”


	In batting away at Lia’s critics, Louisa also plays the conservative card. “There was something absurd,” she writes, “in the spectacle of conservative politicians who have never shown any interest in supporting women’s sports, which are chronically underfunded and underexposed, moralizing about the sanctity of collegiate women’s swimming.” No, what’s “absurd” is the total redefinition of man and woman that began to be foisted upon us in the last five or ten years and that we’re now expected to parrot without hesitation. True enough, many of the conservatives who have weighed in on the trans issue may not be particularly interested in women’s sports - but that doesn’t keep them from recognizing an outrage and an injustice when they see it. In these woke times, when the left has gone all in on the radical redefinition of sexual identity, it is, yes, pretty much only on the right that you can find people willing to assert traditional sex distinctions.


	Mentioning a group called the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, which seeks a “middle way” on trans athletes, Louisa notes that “its most famous member” is Martina Navratilova. Here’s the totality of what Louisa has to say about Martina: she’s “angered many trans athletes and advocates with comments she has made in the past.” So much for one of the world’s great tennis players and early champions of gay rights. As it happens, the same gutsy devotion to the truth that decades ago made Navratilova a pioneering gay-rights activist led her, in a 2018 tweet, to state the plain facts about transgenderism and sports: “You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women. There must be some standards, and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard.”


	A few years ago, virtually everyone on earth would have agreed. But by 2018, such a sentiment made Martina “transphobic” in the eyes of the bien pensant. Facing an onslaught of criticism, she promised to explore the subject further. “Well, I’ve now done that,” she wrote in a February 2019 <a href="https://archive.ph/20190217022611/https:/www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-rules-on-trans-athletes-reward-cheats-and-punish-the-innocent-klsrq6h3x">article</a> for the London Times, 

<blockquote>
	
		and, if anything, my views have strengthened. To put the argument at its most basic: a man can decide to be female, take hormones if required by whatever sporting organization is concerned, win everything in sight and perhaps earn a small fortune, and then reverse his decision and go back to making babies if he so desires. It’s insane and it’s cheating. I am happy to address a transgender woman in whatever form she prefers, but I would not be happy to compete against her. It would not be fair.
</blockquote>


	Straight talk from a gay icon (who, on Thursday, said that Lia’s Division I victory should be marked in the records book with “an asterisk” because the rules allowing his participation “are not correct”). Although Louisa doesn’t address Martina’s comments directly, it’s obvious that her own views are as far removed as possible from Martina’s. “The International Olympic Committee,” Louisa writes, “began allowing trans athletes to compete in 2004. At first, the I.O.C. required athletes to legally change their gender and undergo genital surgery, as if a mislabelled passport and the presence of a penis gave them a leg up on the competition.” (My emphasis.) For Louisa, apparently, nothing should be required of a trans athlete other than that athlete’s assertion that what appears to be a “he” is, and has always been, a “she.”


	Since the only thing that matters in woke world anywhere near as much as transgenderism is race, Louisa drags that into her story, too. “Female athletes have bodies of different sizes, colors, shapes, and sexualities,” she writes. “Those bodies, especially those that differ from a feminine - and, often, white - ideal, have, for a long time, been castigated as too muscular, too masculine, too threatening.” (Again, my emphasis.) What does race have to do with it? When you talk about female bodies looking “too muscular, too masculine, too threatening,” the case that leaps to mind for me is that of the hulking East German woman swimmers who were suspected of doping at the 1976 (and other) Olympics. Those suspicions were later confirmed by Stasi records; but at the time the American swimmers who dared to speak up about a manifestly shady situation were demonized in the media - the U.S. media included - as sore losers and disruptors of international harmony.


	Again bringing up race, Louisa writes, apropos of the I.O.C.’s changing rules on transgender women, that “a number of observers remained troubled by the idea of a traditionally white, patriarchal institution defining, and policing, the supposed boundaries of womanhood.” Again, what does whiteness have to do with it? As for “patriarchy” and “the supposed boundaries of womanhood,” one of the ironies of the new trans dispensation is that this purported new frontier in women’s rights is, in fact, the most audacious patriarchal move ever, enabling middling male athletes to destroy the careers of the very best female athletes - while getting applauded by the PC crowd not just for their athletic prowess but for their personal courage.


	What about Louisa’s point that female athletes have “bodies of different sizes,” etc.? Sure. But they’re all female bodies. Whatever Lia may assert about her “inner identity,” her “authentic self,” her body remains that of a man. And swimming meets are not contests between “authentic selves” - they’re contests between bodies. This is a point that Louisa, like most of those who argue for trans inclusion in sports, is at pains to avoid. The photograph accompanying her article shows Lia in the water -&nbsp; but it’s a pretty innocuous image that fails to capture Lia’s looming size and broad, manly build. A more honest article would have included a photo showing Lia alongside his smaller female teammates. But then such a photo would have made it obvious from the git-go just how much of a joke Louisa’s argument is.


	At one point Louisa reports on a discussion she had with lawyer Nancy Hogshead-Makar, who founded the above-mentioned Women’s Sports Policy Working Group. It’s a curious exchange. In response to Hogshead-Makar’s matter-of-fact observation that the sole justification for sex segregation in sports is biology, Louisa maintains that “the biology of sex differences between athletes [is] murky.” Murky? What’s murky about the differences between male and female? Are they murkier than the question of whether a person with a male body should be believed when he says he’s really a woman? Louisa adds that “the legacy effects of testosterone-driven puberty [are] not totally established or understood.” By “testosterone-driven puberty,” of course, she means “male puberty.” Exactly what about male puberty is a mystery? What balderdash.


	Louisa proceeds to tsk-tsk at Hogshead-Makar because the latter, she complains, “insists on referring to ‘biological’ genders” - an inappropriate practice, apparently, that puts her “deeply at odds with those in favor of broader trans inclusion.” Well, yes, if you’re trying to make a case for trans inclusion in sports, the straightforward facts of biology do tend to get in the way. But to take biology off the table when you’re talking about sports is ridiculous, because - again - sports is a matter of pitting body against body, not “authentic self” against “authentic self.” It’s fascinating how woke folk who parrot the mantra “follow the science” when they think it bolsters their own case in other matters have tried to rule the very mention of the science of biology out of line when it comes to the trans issue.


	Louisa isn’t the only female sportswriter to have weighed in on Lia’s Division I victory. At the Washington Post, Sally Jenkins took the angle that “everyone is trans” - yes, you read that right - because we’re all

<blockquote>
	
		on the way to becoming someone profoundly different than we were, and keeping score is just a way to track the arc of a person from youth to prime to past it. If you subtract the aim of becomingness from competition just because you’re afraid of a Lia Thomas and make it strictly about the chance to win a prize, then you might as well go to an amusement park and shoot a squirt gun at a clown face because it will have about as much meaning.
</blockquote>


	Jenkins urges us to look past the science - whatever it may be - and recognize that “the real aim and value of NCAA competition” isn’t to “vault… small subset of young talents on to a podium” but “to grow people,” to help them “explor[e] who [they] are.” Which, Jenkins says, means that the real question is, or should be, this: “Is Thomas’s presence preventing other swimmers from finding out who they are?” I’d have to say no: on the contrary, Lia’s presence is shaping their fate. After having spent much of their lives striving, with immense discipline and determination, to improve as swimmers in hopes that they might one day end up on that podium that Jenkins dismisses so blithely, these biological females have turned out to be losers in a game whose rules have been rewritten overnight so as to deny&nbsp; them a fair competition and bestow undeserved laurels on the likes of Lea Thomas - all so that privileged people like Sally Jenkins and Louisa Thomas, who will never be obliged to give up their own dreams for such a reason, can bask in their own superior virtue.&nbsp;


	But back to Louisa. Toward the end of her article, she serves up some of the usual rot: reading arguments for excluding trans athletes from women’s sports, she says, you might think “that trans women are a conquering horde, swarming the leaderboards,” when in fact “trans women are grossly underrepresented at high levels of all sports.” Nonsense: they’re only “grossly underrepresented” if you accept as legitimate the grotesquely high numbers of young people who, in the last few years, obviously in response to a calamitous generation trend, have begun identifying as trans. Naturally, Louisa also plays the suicide card: “Transgender youth are more likely to be homeless and live in poverty. They are more likely to experience violence, bullying, rejection, depression, and suicidal ideation.” None of which amounts to an argument for anything. In addition, Louisa quotes an academic who accuses opponents of trans inclusion in sports of “trying to erase trans kids from existence.” On the contrary, the campaign to let men who identify as women compete against biological women will, if taken to its natural conclusion, effectively erase biologically female athletes.


	Louisa concludes her piece with a truly cockamamie flourish: “It may be that [Lia] Thomas retains a significant metabolic and physiological advantage over cisgender women. It may be that she is an outlier. It may also be that she is swimming faster relative to her competitors than before in part because she is in a better place now - no longer battling gender dysphoria, able to swim, as she put it, as her authentic self, comfortable pulling on a swimsuit and feeling her body for what it is, slipping through the water.” Read that last part again: “feeling her body for what it is.” And what exactly is Lia’s body? It’s a male body, the product of a process of male puberty, each cell of it containing an XY chromosome. It’s exactly the same body that it was before Lia purportedly found her “authentic self.” And while her discovery of that “authentic self” - assuming it really happened at all - may have transformed Lia psychologically, it didn’t effect the slightest change in that tall, strong male body that keeps “slipping through the water” past one shorter, weaker female body after another, winning women’s awards and breaking women’s records.

Lia Thomas and the 'Authentic Self'

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	If the New York Times poses as America’s newspaper of record, presenting every

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	From one end of Western Europe to the other, the mass migrations of the last generation or two have turned the words “immigrant” and “refugee” into veritable synonyms for “Muslim.” Thanks to government generosity on a Herculean scale, Muslims by the million have been provided, at taxpayer expense (but without taxpayers ever being consulted), with incomes, homes, furnishings, cars. They’ve been allowed to bring over their family members, who in turn have been allowed to bring over their family members. Some have been grateful; some have even gone on to pursue estimable careers and contribute to the general welfare. Many, however, have responded to all this largesse with a contempt for their hosts - a contempt rooted largely in the Koran’s teachings about infidels - and a staggering sense of entitlement.


	And now that Western Europeans are suddenly extending all their hospitality toward fellow Europeans and Christians - that is, of course, toward Ukrainians who are fleeing for their lives from Putin’s bloody war of conquest - a great many Muslims and their allies are up in arms. And in one country after another, their cri de coeur is the same: how dare you be so much more generous to Ukrainians than you ever were to Muslims! The charge is ludicrous: it would take a very long time, and a lot of handouts indeed, for the Ukrainians, either per capita or en masse, to get anywhere near as much out of Europeans’ pocketbooks as Muslims have received in the last half century or so.


	Yet the absurdity of the charge hasn’t kept a lot of highly placed people from making it. In the Netherlands, for instance, a number of prominent leftists - including historian Tayfun Balçik, politician Thijme Hoffmann, and professor Leo Lucassen - have <a href="https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/waarom-gaan-grenzen-nu-wel-open-vluchtelingen-die-op-ons-lijken-zien-we-als-echte-vluchtelingen~b54c5b4c/">griped</a> that Europeans are being more munificent toward Ukrainian refugees than toward Muslim migrants, and that’s it’s because of xenophobia, Islamophobia, racism. And in Denmark, three journalists - Line Rønn Tofte, Line Jenvall, and Theodora Amalie Høgsted Renard - growled in a joint <a href="https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/politik/hvorfor-er-der-forskel-paa-ukrainere-og-andre-flygtninge">op-ed</a> that while native Danes, in 2015, “spit on” Syrian refugees, Danes in 2022 are driving to Poland “to transport Ukrainian refugees to Denmark.”


	What, the three journalists demanded to know, “is the difference between the Ukrainians and the Syrians?” Well one not insignificant difference is that whereas today’s Ukrainian refugees are almost all women and children, the folks flooding into Europe from Syria in 2015 were mostly military-aged men. Why, one wondered at the time, hadn’t all these fit young men stayed home to fight? Why were they here, and not their parents, grandparents, sisters, wives, children? What kind of refugee crisis was this? Even so, the fact remains that thousands of Western Europeans did open their arms to those Syrians. They greeted them at airports and railway stations. They handed them truckloads of free stuff. They took them into their homes.


	And then what happened? On New Year’s Eve 2015-6, the central squares of Cologne and dozens of other German cities were the sites of horrific gang rapes by hundreds of these recent Syrian arrivals. I suspect that for the many Germans who experienced those chilling, eye-opening violations of trust, the question of the difference between those criminal Syrian freeloaders of 2015 and the Ukrainian women and children of today could hardly be more dramatic. As former Swedish parliamentarian Kent Ekeroth <a href="https://samnytt.se/ekeroth-riktiga-flyktingar-ger-riktigt-engagemang/">wrote</a> on March 7 in response to such grumbling in his own country, “This is probably the first time in human memory that Sweden, or for that matter Western Europe, has gotten to see real refugees.” (Including real refugee children, as opposed to bearded thirty-somethings claiming to be minors.)


	The same perverse complaint about preferential treatment for Europeans has also been voiced in Norway. After the Progress Party (FrP) called for the nation’s refugee quota to be reserved for Ukrainians, Katrine Nødtvedt, a Green Party member of the Bergen City Council, <a href="https://klassekampen.no/utgave/2022-03-01/kan-ta-mange-raskt">worried</a> that Ukrainians would squeeze out other potential refugees.


	Abid Raja, perhaps Norway’s most famous Muslim, agreed. Two decades ago, Raja was spokesman for an Oslo mosque, championing arranged marriages and savaging the West. Today, he’s a Parliament member for the Liberal Party (and recent Minister of Culture) who presents himself as a benign Norwegian patriot. But now, in the midst of the Ukraine crisis, a glimpse of the old Raja - the soft jihadist - came out. “FrP’s use of the [Ukrainian] crisis as a way to harm other refugees is immoral,” he <a href="https://klassekampen.no/utgave/2022-03-03/opprort-over-frp">told</a> Klassekampen. By seeming to prefer Ukrainians to Muslims, he said, FrP is causing people like him to “die inside.” Such is the voice of entrenched privilege - of a man accustomed to a recognized victim status that has made him a media darling and given him a lucrative career. Note that Raja isn’t “dying inside” out of grief and sympathy for Ukrainian women and children: he’s “dying inside” because, as he sees it, they’re stealing attention - and may soon be stealing money, food, clothing and shelter - that should, by all rights, be given to his fellow Muslims.


	In the U.S., the notion that Ukrainians have been the beneficiaries of anti-Islam bigotry was <a href="https://www.investigativeproject.org/9148/anti-israel-voices-push-all-the-wrong-lessons-on?fbclid=IwAR2KojQAT2uFpdNCWOIf5WSNZJYz4tuUC38qFt3wkfcSgvnDhyUXMfaLU80">served</a> up at a livestreamed conference featuring, among others, several officials of the Council on American Muslim Relations (CAIR). During the conference, UC Berkeley’s Hatem Bazian maintained that Ukrainians enjoy favor in the West because they’re “European people with blue eyes and blonde hair.” Bazian professed that Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s invasion is comparable to the Palestinians’ war with Israel - but that Westerners don’t support Palestinians because they’re dark-skinned. Of course the comparison of Ukrainian resistance to Palestinian terrorism is absurd. So is the suggestion that Westerners don’t support Palestinians. On the contrary, naive do-gooders have pumped a fortune into the Palestinian terroritories - cash that could’ve made Palestinian life better but that has instead been used to rain death upon Israelis.


	Who better to close with than Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times propagandist who created the perfidious 1619 Project, and whose concern about Ukrainians, unsurprisingly, isn’t that they’re upstaging Muslims but, rather, upstaging blacks? In a couple of February 27 tweets, she <a href="https://nypost.com/2022/02/28/nikole-hannah-jones-blasts-racialized-coverage-of-ukraine-war/">charged</a> that if Western media have been covering Ukraine so much, it’s because of “[white] supremacy”: “we should care [about Ukrainians] because they are like us.” Just as many Muslims can’t help attributing the attention currently being lavished on Ukrainians to Islamophobia, then, for Hannah-Jones, this - like everything else on earth - is all about race. (MSNBC’s Joy Reid and Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah pontificated along similar lines.)


	On the contrary. The Ukrainian crisis is about real women and children - not grown men posing as kids - who have real refugee status and who have fled from a country whose ongoing destruction, right before our eyes, is quite terrifyingly real. Race? Islam? A word to the left: for once, keep your noxious group-identity obsession to yourselves while Europeans, for once, open their arms and their hearts to suffering women and children who really need - and really deserve - their help.

Finally, Real Refugees

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	From one end of Western Europe to the other, the mass migrations of the last

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	In America and around the world, freedom-loving people have been astonished at the dark turn of events in Canada. Canadians, they’ve been saying with puzzlement, are so nice. How could a country made up of such nice people turn so quickly into a brutal dictatorship?&nbsp;&nbsp;


	But the question is the wrong way round. If Canadians - as the old joke would have it - are so polite that they’ll apologize to you if you step on their foot, then how do you expect them to respond to government tyranny?


	Beyond that, how would you expect them to respond when a relatively small group of their fellow Canadians actually stood up to the tyranny?


	When, now we’re seeing the answer. And we should’ve seen it coming. We should’ve realized all along that agreeableness - this trait universally associated with Canadians - isn’t exactly the most useful attribute in a people subjected to tyranny.&nbsp;


	To be sure, Canadian commentator Spencer Fernando maintains that some of his countrymen are undergoing a sea change. Until recently, he wrote on February 9, “many Canadians believed that we were supposed to be deferential to authority, and that pushing back against the government was too ‘harsh’ or ‘aggressive.’” Hence, “as our rights and freedoms were stripped away one by one, with our leaders treating our rights as nothing more than privileges they could dole out at their whim,” most Canadians “put up with it, over and over and over again.”


	But now, claimed Fernando, Canadians have reached their limit. They’re “throwing off the shackles of our weak and submissive mentality, and becoming a nation of people who stand up and push back against government overreach.” Fernando even spoke of a “brewing revolt within the Liberal Party, with two Liberal MPs in Quebec publicly rejecting Trudeau’s divisive approach.”


	Fernando’s article appeared, as noted, on February 9. But on February 21, the Canadian Parliament voted to affirm Trudeau’s use of the Emergencies Act to restrict freedoms. Not one member of Trudeau’s Liberal Party voted against.


	Some “brewing revolt.”


	No, not all Canadians are agreeable. Far from it. Some - including dear friends of mine - are fighters, as gutsy as anyone you’ve ever known. But they’re on the outside, in the wilderness. Almost all of those - including Fernando - who’ve spoken up for freedom and against Trudeau’s tyranny have had to do so outside of the mainstream Canadian media. Fernando’s article was posted on his own website. Other articles in the same vein have appeared in Canadian alternative media, on conservative American websites, and in the Epoch Times.


	Meanwhile, what have the mainstream Canadian media been publishing? Well, the Vancouver Sun ran an <a href="https://vancouversun.com/opinion/gurski-canadas-spies-were-right-about-the-freedom-convoy/wcm/48fa6ed6-8db7-40d7-a9d0-d10ada0672ed">article</a> in which veteran intelligence officer Phil Gurski sneered at the Freedom Convoy’s “dog’s breakfast of hangers-on” - “dog’s breakfast,” of course, being a Canadian (and British) way of saying “deplorables.”


	But perhaps the most striking document to come out of this chapter in Canadian history, in my view, is a February 22 op-ed by Beverley McLachlin, a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.


	<a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-ottawa-truck-convoy-has-revealed-the-ugly-side-of-freedom/">Characterizing</a> the truckers as demanding “the right not to wear masks in public places; the right not to be vaccinated; the right to hold Ottawa’s downtown residents and businesses hostage; the right to malign public officials and call for the Prime Minister’s death; [and] the right to shout epithets at people of colour,” McLachlin contented that such “rights” are “the ugly side of freedom.”


	Of course, McLachlin’s list is a mishmash of actual convoy concerns (forced masking, vaccination) and dishonest smears. Nobody held anybody hostage. And if any individual called for Trudeau’s death or shouted “epithets at people of color,” these actions certainly weren’t endorsed by the overwhelming majority of protesters.


	As for “the right to malign public officials” - isn’t that a freedom that any judge should defend?


	Not McLachlin. “Freedom,” she lectured, “is not absolute. We live in a social matrix, where one person’s exercise of freedom may conflict with another person’s exercise of freedom.” Governments therefore have the responsibility to “draw the difficult lines that mark the limits of freedom in a particular situation. When you must wear a mask. Whether you can cross a border without a vaccine certificate. How many people can attend a party and who gets to go to school.”


	People who don’t like where their government draws the line on freedom, she explained, have options. They can take their leaders to court. They can vote them out. But they can’t “take matters into their own hands, threatening the welfare of people around them and, more broadly, the constitutional framework that allows us to continue to live together.”


	In any case, she concluded, you shouldn’t have “the freedom to say and do what you want about people who don’t look like you or talk like you.” Such freedom “is dangerous.” And it’s not “true freedom,” anyway. “True freedom – freedom subject to reasonable limits that allow us to live together – is essential to a peaceful and prosperous future for us all.”


	There you have it: “true freedom” is curated freedom, restricted by our betters. Americans speak of individual freedom, but for McLachlin, freedom is a matter of community - a way of regulating society in such a way that people don’t hurt each other’s feelings.


	Alarming, no? But many of the readers who commented on McLachlin’s op-ed couldn’t have agreed more. A number of them expressed the view that those whose battle cry is “freedom” are uneducated louts - or, as one commenter put it, “village idiots.” Several identified this curious preoccupation with freedom as an American fetish, unworthy of Canadians, who, one gathered, are too sophisticated for such silliness.


	And some accused the truckers - and their defenders - of “whining” and “complaining,” the implication being that Canadian citizens, however disgruntled they might be, are obliged to be meek and polite in their dealings with the government as well as with one another.


	One of the comments on McLachlin’s article that received the most “likes” described the trucker demonstration as a “shameful, violent, tantrum that was an affront to bedrock Canadian values that do not let liberty run roughshod over community.”


	Savor that last bit. “Canadian values…do not let liberty run roughshod over community.” 


	Last October I <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/pronoun-coercion-canada-bruce-bawer/">wrote</a> about a new rule in the courts of the Canadian province of British Columbia. Henceforth, lawyers would be required to announce their pronouns and those of their clients when introducing themselves in court. When a relative handful of lawyers dared to publicly criticize the rule, Margot Young, a law professor and gender activist, balked at their arrogance, insisting that the new policy was a simple matter of being “inclusive” and “respectful” - of trying not to cause offense. In other words, it was about being nice.


	In April of last year I <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/canadian-father-jailed-for-speaking-out-about-trans-identifying-child">wrote</a> about Rob Hoogland, a father in British Columbia whose daughter, over his protests, was put on track for “sex-change therapy” at age twelve. Informed that it would be considered “family violence” if he referred to her as “she” or addressed her by her birth name, he did so anyway, and ended up in prison.


	I remember at the time thinking that this story felt oddly Canadian. Everyone else involved - the girl’s mother, friends, teachers, and school psychologist, as well as a host of doctors, lawyers, and school officials - was willing to go along with the girl’s claim that, deep down, she felt like a boy. Why couldn’t her father go along, too? Why, then, couldn’t he just be nice, instead of making such a fuss and causing such a ruckus? Didn’t he understand that his behavior was “threatening the welfare of people around [him]” and making it difficult for them to live together in peace and harmony?


	But back to Beverley McLachlin. I wasn’t surprised to discover that she’s now a member of the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong, and has been criticized for remaining on the court even after the Communist Party of China crushed human rights in that formerly independent jurisdiction.


	But why shouldn’t McLaughlin remain on the court? Her definition of freedom, after all, is malleable enough to allow for a CCP-friendly interpretation. If she can support without hesitation the denial of Canadian truckers’ right to protest, how difficult could it be for her to support the crushing of Hong Kong freedom protesters? Why should a call for freedom, as they see it, by a handful of Hong Kong residents trump the right of over a billion Chinese to live in harmony with one another?


	After reading McLachlin’s op-ed, I felt compelled to take another look at Ezra Levant’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlLN1TMQHiA">video</a> of his 2008 appearance before a representative of the Alberta Human Rights Commission. A Muslim group had filed a complaint against Levant, a lawyer and journalist who now runs Rebel News, for reprinting the Danish Muhammed cartoons in his magazine Western Standard, and he was compelled under Canadian law to explain himself.


	Fourteen years later, in the age of the tyrant Trudeau, Levant’s remarks, made to a gray little bureaucrat in a gray little room, sound almost quaint. Levant referred to his “ancient rights,” to Magna Carta, to “800 years of English common law,” to the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and to the 1960 Canadian Bill of Rights. Asked about limits on freedom of speech, Levant acknowledged that limits on speech were appropriate in cases of fraud, impersonation, slander, defamation, copyright, confidentiality agreements, or the Official Secrets Acts. But aside from those categories? No.


	Recalling the suffragettes, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the gay-rights movement, Levant told the apparatchik that “no liberal progressive cause has ever advanced except through offending the order….Unbridled political speech is not just allowed; it is the antidote, the prophylactic against violence. Only a fool would think that by passing a law you could change hearts and minds.”


	Levant cited with outrage an earlier Human Rights Commission ruling that subordinated one party’s freedom of speech to the right of another party not to be offended. When his interlocutor informed him that his verdict could ride on the question of whether his publication of the Muhammed cartoons had been motivated by “contempt and hatred,” Levant admitted that he did indeed feel contempt - for the Human Rights Commission.


	In the end, Levant was acquitted, but, thanks to legal bills, he walked away $100,000 poorer. Meanwhile the Muslim group’s legal costs were covered by taxpayers. As Levant put it, “the process has become the punishment.”


	Some people would say: well, Levant could have avoided it all just by being nice. Nice! Canada nice. What’s wrong with Canada nice?


	No names, but I’ve had some exceedingly nice people in my life. I’m thinking of one in particular whom I knew for most of my life. Everyone loved her. She could socialize one day with a far-right Pentecostalist neighbor and the next day with an old friend who was a Communist - and leave both of them thinking she was their ideological twin.


	She thought that was the way to go through life. Don’t offend. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t make waves. She had a problem with my work as a critic - first a literary critic, then a movie critic, cultural critic, social critic. She rejected the very premise of criticism. “You can’t change people,’” she’d say. It was an excuse for inaction, for passivity. For indifference.


	She thought niceness was virtue. No. Niceness in the face of aggression is gutlessness. Niceness in the face of tyranny is cowardice. And niceness in the face of evil…is evil.&nbsp;

Canada Nice

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	In America and around the world, freedom-loving people have been astonished at the

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	His mother was a white girl who’d been abandoned by her black baby daddy before the infant’s birth. She gave the child up for adoption, and he found a home with a white couple who’d lost two sons because of heart defects. By all accounts they were loving parents. Yet six years ago, during a pre-game performance of the national anthem, their adopted son, who’d become a NFL quarterback, introduced the toxic business of “taking a knee” as a protest against the purported oppression of black people by white Americans. With that one action, Colin Kaepernick unleashed a whirlwind of mischief that inflicted very real and substantial damage upon his country’s precious, hard-won social cohesion, thereby ensuring that he would go down in history not as an athlete but as an activist with a thoroughly destructive legacy.


	If the impact of Kaepernick’s actions extended to every corner of American society, their first impact was on his own sport. As “taking the knee” became popular in the world of football - professional, college, and high-school alike - boys and men who’d learned to regard one another as teammates, as brothers, now saw themselves as irremediably divided by skin color. This sense of racial division was exacerbated just this past February 1, when Brian Flores, a former coach who is both black and Hispanic and who was fired last month by the Miami Dolphins after two successful seasons on the job, filed a class-action <a href="https://www.wigdorlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Complaint-against-National-Football-League-et-al-Filed.pdf">lawsuit</a> against the NFL alleging racism in the “hiring and retention of Black Head Coaches, Coordinators and General Managers.”


	Given all this racial strife, you might have expected the fifty-sixth Super Bowl, which took place last Sunday at the spectacular new SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, to be a less than harmonious spectacle. For better or worse, and for reasons that are impossible to explain to foreigners, this annual event has long been not just a football game but the year’s most conspicuous patriotic ritual, the athletic competition itself swathed in symbols of American freedom, might, and unity: a giant Stars and Stripes covering a large portion of the playing field, a military color guard in full regalia, a cutaway to a contingent of U.S. armed forces standing in solemn attention while stationed at some faraway installation (in this instance, a base in Kuwait), and a flyover by multiple Air Force fighter planes in tight formation.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	Then, above all, there’s the singing of the National Anthem. I’d never heard of Mickey Guyton before, but after hearing her put over “The Star-Spangled Banner” on Sunday, I’ll never forget her. A 38-year-old black country/R&amp;B performer from Texas who, according to a Wall Street Journal <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/guyton-to-release-debut-single-monday-1421026617">profile,</a> “grew up listening to gospel music and said she was inspired to become a singer when she was around eight years old and saw LeAnn Rimes perform The Star-Spangled Banner at a Texas Rangers game,” Guyton released her debut single in 2015 and her first studio album last year. I’ll look into her own music later; all I know is that on Sunday, she <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucr-OJo0Iig&amp;ab_channel=NFL">knocked</a> the National Anthem out of the park, doing something thrillingly original with it while at the same time treating it with a full measure of respect.


	During her performance, thankfully, there was no sign of anybody taking the knee. On the contrary, at least one black player could be seen mouthing the lyrics. Perhaps one reason for this apparent moment of patriotic harmony was that the game’s organizers, in a bow to the current racial pressures, also included on the schedule - and not for the first time - a rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” otherwise known as the “Black National Anthem.” Last year it was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i30SdcfEpSE&amp;ab_channel=NFL">sung</a> at the Super Bowl by Alicia Keys; this year, the honor went to a four-time Grammy-winning gospel <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvqWtWTUNMA&amp;ab_channel=NFL">duo</a> called Mary Mary. Both performances used the exact same words:


	Lift every voice and sing 
	Till earth and heaven ring, 
	Ring with the harmonies of Liberty; 
	Let our rejoicing rise 
	High as the listening skies, 
	Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.


	Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, 
	Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us. 
	Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, 
	Let us march on till victory is won.


	Because it’s been dubbed the “Black National Anthem” - a label that was first given it by the NAACP in 1917, but that, in today’s climate, inevitably implies the splitting of America into a Disunited States with one anthem for whites and another for blacks - “Lift Every Voice and Sing” has been the center of controversy during the racial insanity of the last few years. But its lyrics don’t bear a trace of the madness of, say, Ibram X. Kendy or Robin DiAngelo - or, for that matter, of Colin Kaepernick. On the contrary, in the form presented by Keys and by Mary Mary, it’s a solid civil-rights anthem in the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., with vaguely religious references to “faith” and “the listening skies,” a worldview shaped not by Marxist power dynamics but by a hope for equal rights in a land of liberty, and a recognition that that “new day” of freedom and equality is already beginning to dawn.


	As it happens, the version of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” performed both by Keys and by Mary Mary is limited to only one verse of the <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46549/lift-every-voice-and-sing">three</a> that were written in 1900 by James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) and that, five years later, were set to music by his younger brother, J. Rosamond Johnson (1873-1954). Both Johnsons, let it be said, were remarkable men: the elder wrote poems and novels and musical comedies, edited newspapers, served as consul to Venezuela and Nicaragua under President Theodore Roosevelt, and served as the first black executive secretary of the NAACP and the first black professor at NYU; the younger, for his part, studied music in London and at the New England Conservatory, created, produced, and performed in a number of Broadway shows, and for several years was the director of a music school for black children in New York. Not bad for two black guys living in Jim Crow America.


	Yet despite all their respective achievements, the most memorable was the song they wrote together, which has had an extraordinary history. I used to know every word of all three verses by heart, because it’s hymn #599 in the current (1984) hymnal of the Episcopal Church and was on heavy rotation in one of the churches I used to attend in New York. I was always happy to see it listed in the weekly service sheet, because it’s a gorgeous piece of musical writing that’s fun to sing and deeply moving to listen to. Note, in its second verse, which admits to moments of anguish, fatigue, and lost hope, the echo of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” with its stirring spirit of martial determination and resilience in the face of all that human frailty - as well as of evil:


	Stony the road we trod, 
	Bitter the chastening rod, 
	Felt in the days when hope unborn had died; 
	Yet with a steady beat, 
	Have not our weary feet 
	Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?


	We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, 
	We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered, 
	Out from the gloomy past, 
	Till now we stand at last 
	Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.


	Exhilarating stuff. But it’s not until the third and last verse that the song, which after this point cannot properly be called anything other than a hymn, explicitly spells out the message that the strength to overcome one’s own frailties and to confront the wickedness of racial injustice is a divine gift. In addition to acknowledging this, the hymn, recognizing the perennial possibility of being led astray in this righteous struggle, appeals to the Almighty to keep his faithful warriors on the true path:


	God of our weary years, 
	God of our silent tears, 
	Thou who has brought us thus far on the way; 
	Thou who has by Thy might 
	Led us into the light, 
	Keep us forever in the path, we pray


	Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee, 
	Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee; 
	Shadowed beneath Thy hand, 
	May we forever stand. 
	True to our God, 
	True to our native land.


	There you have it: the true path for the fighters for racial equality is the path of Christian love, of perseverance in faith and humility in the face of worldly temptations, and, as the hymn’s very last line proclaims, of an American patriotism that - precisely because America was, uniquely, founded on a belief in a divinely ordained freedom and equality for every child of God - is inextricably bound up with Christian devotion.


	Far, then, from being a suitable anthem of racial hatred, division, and revolt, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is, especially when sung in its entirety, an eloquent call to common humanity and shared patriotism (that is, those values that are celebrated every year in the opening moments, however kitschy you may consider them to be, of the Super Bowl) and an expression of joint opposition to all those mischievous and, yes, ungodly forces - such as Kenzi, DiAngelo, and, of course, Colin Kaepernick - that would lead all of us who prize freedom and equality, whatever the color of our skins, into unnecessary discord.


	Some people would like to strip “Lift Every Voice and Sing” from the Super Bowl. I can understand why: one nation, after all, should have one national anthem. But if the Johnson brothers’ hymn is going to continue to be featured at the Super Bowl in the years to come, shouldn’t three or four more minutes be allocated to its performance so that the singer can include all three verses? For when you listen to the whole work, it’s absolutely clear that this distinctly American piece of music is the furthest thing from a “Black National Anthem.” It’s a hymn that can be sung with conviction and brio by every American who believes profoundly in America’s founding creed of individual liberty and equality - and who, for that very reason, rejects the demonic new dogmas whose pernicious prophets seek to tear us apart.

One Super Bowl, Two National Anthems?

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	His mother was a white girl who’d been abandoned by her black baby daddy before

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	On May 25, 2018, Tommy Robinson was standing outside the courthouse in Leeds, England, microphone in hand, reporting live on the trial of several Muslims for child rape, when, without prior warning, he was arrested for breach of peace, hustled into a van, and, within the space of four hours, tried, convicted, and sentenced to thirteen months’ incarceration - not, curiously enough, for breach of peace but for contempt of court. Conveyed tout de suite to the prison in Kingston upon Hull, he spent much of the next year and a half in and out of lockup, undergoing physical and psychological torment while behind bars and the rankest of forensic malpractice while at the so-called bar of justice.


	And why did all this happen? Here’s why. Islam teaches its adherents that (1) they’re in a state of constant war with the infidel and (2) sex with minors (as demonstrated by the fact the prophet Muhammed took his wife Aisha’s virginity when she was nine) is permissible; consequently, Muslim men have every right to molest the children of the infidel at will. As Islamic communities established themselves in major English cities, Muslim rape gangs, known as “grooming gangs,” took root. Eventually, thousands upon thousands of non-Muslim girls, almost all of them members of the working class, would be victimized by these gangs, not just once apiece but repeatedly, in most case over a period of years.


	British police, social workers, and journalists are known to have been aware of this phenomenon for decades. But instead of addressing it fully and responsibly - which, they know, would have required mass arrests and prosecutions of prominent Muslims, and frank media coverage of these transgressions as well as of their roots in Islamic doctrine, all of which in turn would almost certainly have led to social tumult on a dangerous scale - these parties chose to do and say nothing. And when confronted with a single individual who refused to play along - a working-class bloke who insisted on shouting from the rooftops both about these offenses and the official policy of silence and subterfuge - they knew what they had to do: vilify him, smear him, find crimes to charge him with, lock him up and hope that Muslim fellow inmates would do the rest. Or, failing that, hope that after he’d endured a certain amount of persecution, he’d break down, or give up, and crawl away into a hole and keep his mouth shut.


	But they didn’t count on Tommy Robinson’s strength and courage and resilience. When Tommy finally walked out of prison, he looked greatly diminished: weak, shaken, all but broken. There would have been every reason to expect him to step out of the limelight, go home to his family, and leave it to someone else to save the girls of Britain. Instead he went on to make an eye-opening documentary, <a href="https://gettr.com/hashtag/%23panodrama">Panodrama</a> (2019), which blew the lid off an outrageously dishonest attempt by Panorama, a revered BBC news series, to frame him. Since then, Tommy has spent much of his time in Telford - a town of 142,000 in Shropshire, northwest of Birmingham -where, along with a team of investigators, he’s been documenting four decades of Muslim rape in that city. Last Sunday, he posted online some of the results of his research in the form of a documentary, <a href="https://gettr.com/streaming/pra8hy1aa0">The Rape of Britain</a>. It’s a bombshell.&nbsp;


	Although based on interviews with many victims of Muslim rapists in Telford - which have resulted in a master list of some two hundred suspsects - the documentary focuses its attention on one of them, Nicole, whom we see at length in conversation with Tommy. Now in her twenties, she was eleven years old and working the evening shift at an Indian restaurant - answering the phone, preparing delivery orders - when she was molested for the first time by one of the men who ran the establishment. Soon she was also being raped by others who worked there, some of whom violated her frequently, others of whom did so just once. In addition, her employers began pimping her out to their friends, a process that continued for the next two or three years. When they weren’t either raping her or pimping her out - constantly addressing her as gurrah, “white bitch” - these men were selling illegal drugs and laundering money. Nicole, then, was only one small part - one source of profit - in a large criminal operation that is, by all indications, still going strong.


	As it turned out, the “white bitch” was smarter than her abusers recognized. During the years when she was their sex slave and prostitute, Nicole kept detailed records of every time she was raped - the time and place, and the rapist’s full name and address. Talking with Tommy, she rattles these names off. Barber. “Bugsy.” “Charlie.” Aqeel. Aqeeb. Rizwan. Tariq. Mutashabir. Kam. Sham. Waqas. Balraj. Each of them a grown man who not only molested Nicole but, in most cases, did so on multiple occasions - and did the same thing to a number of other girls, as well. Two of these men - the ones who ran the whole operation - turn out to be, as Tommy puts it, “pillars” of Telford’s Muslim community: one is the chairman of the Telford Muslim Forum; the other is a local lawyer who has delivered sermons against grooming gangs at a Telford mosque. No surprise there.


	And what happened when Nicole’s parents finally found out what was being done to her and took her to the police? She handed over the records of her abuse that she’d been keeping since age eleven. The police spent hours interviewing her and her parents. Eventually, sixteen men were charged - fifteen of them Muslims, one of them Sikh. But only the Sikh was prosecuted. Why? Nicole was never given a real answer. But not long before the charges were dropped against those fifteen men, Nicole saw one of her pimps hand an envelope stuffed with cash to a Telford police officer, whom she also names. It seems more than likely that the purpose of the payment was to secure the dropping of the charges against those fifteen suspects.


	Tommy’s investigation into Telford’s grooming gangs isn’t the first. An earlier probe - the “flagship” investigation, as he calls it - led to only eleven convictions. During the last two years, moreover, a law firm called Eversheds Sutherland has been carrying out what it calls an “inquiry” into the gangs. Its stated aim is to “raise public awareness” of the problem - not to bring justice to the victims. Tommy tells us that while Telford cops have supplied the inquiry with forty years’ worth of evidence and the names of over 300 suspects, at least twelve former employees of the town council and seventeen former employees of the police department have, for whatever reason, “chosen not to assist” the inquiry. Whatever it may conclude, Tommy is right in his summation of the big picture: Nicole and other girls in Telford were the victims not just of rape by Muslim gang members but also, as he puts it, of a “deliberate attempt” by public officials “to cover up these crimes against little girls for fear of being called racist, or in the interest of ‘community cohesion,’ or…because of corruption.”


	Indeed, by the end of The Rape of Britain, the Telford police look every bit as morally reprehensible as the pimps and rapists themselves - as far as possible on the ethical scale from the conscientious constables and incorruptible inspectors portrayed in the old movies some of us grew up on. To be sure, we have yet to learn the details of what went on between Telford police and the pedophile Pakistani predators. How much money, for instance, changed hands? Did any cops protest when asked to ignore child rape? Tommy does share one clue to the nature of the relationship: it’s a photo showing one of Nicole’s rapists with several members of the Telford police. He’s standing; they circle him, kneeling, like courtiers surrounding a prince. On the social-media website where Tommy found it, the photo is accompanied by a note by the Telford Muslim who posted it, celebrating it as evidence that the grooming gang has the local cops under control. “DOGS ON THEIR LEAD,” commented one of his brethren. (Islam, of course, views dogs as unclean.)&nbsp;&nbsp;


	Toward the end of The Rape of Britain, we see Tommy on the streets of Telford, confronting the three key Muslim perpetrators in Nicole’s case, as well as the police officer whom she saw accepting an apparent bribe. When Tommy identifies himself to one of the Muslims as a journalist, the man spits back: “You’re not a journalist. You’re a racist!” Editors and reporters across Britain, from the Guardian to the Telegraph, from ITV to Channel 4, would doubtless agree. But the truth is that Tommy is one of the few real journalists left in Britain. While he was raising bloody hell about grooming gangs, the mainstream media were staying mum about them - and smearing him. Yes, the Times finally stepped up to the plate, whereupon other major media felt obliged to provide dutiful reports on arrests, prosecutions, and convictions in child-rape cases. But few of them have gone beyond that. And none, so far as I know, has carried out an investigation anywhere near as extensive and serious and responsible as the one that Tommy has pursued in Telford.


	How terribly alone Tommy can seem in his campaign to uncover the facts about grooming gangs and to secure justice for their victims! As he noted in his 2015 book, Enemy of the State, there’s just one non-working-class Brit who’s as blunt as he is about the depredations of Islam. That person is Douglas Murray, the gifted and gutsy author of The Strange Death of Europe (2017) and The Madness of Crowds (2019). As Tommy pointed out, “[i]t makes a world of difference,” given the nature of the British class system, when someone like Murray - a high-profile graduate of Eton and Oxford - says pretty much the same things that Tommy, a lad from Luton, gets pilloried for saying. “Lads like me march and we’re thugs,” wrote Tommy. “Middle class tweedies march and the nation is speaking.”


	As it happens, on the day after Tommy posted The Rape of Britain online, Murray was a guest on Greg Gutfeld’s show, Gutfeld, the flagship program of Fox News and the late-night program with the highest ratings in the U.S. Every night, Gutfeld and four guests discuss four topics in the news. How terrific it would have been if Gutfeld had shown a clip or two from Tommy’s documentary and allowed Douglas to discuss the grooming gangs - a subject about which most Americans, I suspect, know nothing. Instead, Gutfeld’s topics that night were (1) emojis of “pregnant men”; (2) Joni Mitchell and Nils Lofgren pulling their songs from Spotify; (3) Colorado State University’s efforts to protect students traumatized by the First Amendment; and (4) Justin Trudeau’s condemnation of the trans-Canada trucker convoy.&nbsp;


	Ah, well. Given that Tommy Robinson is as universally savaged by mainstream American journalists as he is by their British counterparts, it would have been salutary to hear a few positive words on Gutfeld about his heroic efforts to do for tens of thousands of cruelly abused British girls what tens of thousands of credentialed British journalists have refused to do. No, I don’t expect Gutfeld to invite Tommy on his show (I’m sure that the honchos at Fox News would flatly forbid such a thing), but perhaps the next time the far more posh, and therefore far less toxic, Douglas Murray is a guest on the program, a moment or two might be set aside to inform Americans about this crisis of incomprehensible proportions - and about the man who, in spite of every attempt to shut him down, has reminded us of the power of one individual to make a difference.

The Rape of Britain

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	On May 25, 2018, Tommy Robinson was standing outside the courthouse in Leeds,

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	Her name is Soumaya Sahla. Born in The Hague in 1983 to Moroccan immigrants (her father was the founder of a mosque in that city), she joined a jihadist terror organization, the Hofstad group, at a young age, and along with another member of the group, Noureddine el Fahtni, to whom she’d been married in an Islamic ceremony, acquired an Agram 2000 submachine gun, which they were reportedly planning to use, at the direction of the leaders of the Hofstad group, to kill various politicians. Among their intended victims were Geert Wilders, then a relatively new member of the Dutch lower house, the Tweede Kamer, who’d made a name for himself as a critic of the Islamization of the Netherlands, and the Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who’d rejected her Muslim faith after 9/11 and been elected to the Tweede Kamer in 2002.


	The year was 2005. The previous few years had been a busy time for assassination and assassination plots. On May 6, 2002, nine days before a general election from which he was expected to emerge as prime minister of the Netherlands, Pim Fortuyn had been murdered by an activist named Volkert van der Graaf who was appalled by his criticisms of Islam. In the summer of 2004, Sahla’s husband, Fahtni, had been arrested in Portugal on suspicion of planning to kill that country’s then prime minister, José Manuel Durão Barroso, but there had not been sufficient evidence to hold him. A few months later, on the morning of November 2, 2004, a fellow member of the Hofstad group, Mohammed Bouyeri, had slaughtered the celebrated writer and filmmaker Theo van Gogh - perhaps the Netherlands’ most prominent critic of Islam - on a busy street in Amsterdam.


	Sahla and Fahtni’s plans, however, did not prove as successful as Bouyeri’s. On June 22, 2005, they were both arrested by Amsterdam police.


	Fahtni ended up serving six months. Sahla spent nine years in and out of court. First, she was convicted by a Rotterdam court of illegally possessing weapons and of membership in a terrorist organization with the intent to commit murder. Later, the Court of Appeal in The Hague found her guilty, in addition, of planning to murder Wilders and others. In 2011, however, the Supreme Court annulled that ruling and transferred the case to the Amsterdam Court of Appeal, which in 2014 found Sahla guilty of membership in a terrorist organization and possession of firearms but not of intention to kill anybody. Although sentenced to three years, she didn’t have to spend any time in prison because of the time she’d already served in detention.


	During that long trial period, Sahla had studied political science, African Studies, and Islamic theology. She’d also, curiously enough, become the protegée of Frits Bolkestein, a legendary figure in the center-right VVD (People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy). As the newspaper Het Parool <a href="https://www.parool.nl/nederland/soumaya-sahla-legt-functie-bij-vvd-neer-ik-blijf-lid-van-de-vvd-maar-commotie-zit-in-de-weg~bdf9d2a1/">put it</a> the other day, Bolkestein “led her into the party” in 2011 - that is, while her case was still under adjudication - “unseen and without causing a fuss.” It’s been established that Bolkestein knew about her history. So did other VVD leaders. Not one of them, apparently, considered it a reason not to give her a responsible party position. Sahla began her career in the VVD as head of its deradicalization and terror group; as of the beginning of this year, she’d risen in the party ranks to become - simultaneously - head of the VVD’s security and justice division, chair of a party advisory committee on deradicalization and terror, and “right-hand” woman to Bolkestein.


	It’s worth noting that the current head of the VVD, Mark Rutte, is also prime minister of the Netherlands, a position he has held since 2010.


	Not until January 18 of this year did Sahla’s past become a problem. On that day, during a discussion in the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of the Dutch parliament, Wilders, who since 2006 has been head of the PVV (Freedom Party) and who since 2004 has had to live with round-the-clock security owing to jihadist death threats, raised the subject of Sahla, saying that someone who’d been issued a gun with which to kill him and Ayaan Hirsi Ali had no business in a&nbsp; leading position in the country’s ruling party. Wilders also mentioned Sahla’s sister Fonda, who, as it happens, is a politician for the centrist D66 and a colleague of Wilders’s in the Tweede Kamer, where she routinely wears a hijab.


	Did representatives from other parties join Wilders in expressing outrage over the VVD’s employment of a woman who’d actively sought his death? No. They protested his bad manners. Rutte, obviously a man of exquisite sensitivity, said Wilders’s behavior had been uncivilized.


	Still, the VVD knew this didn’t look good for them. On January 23, Claudia Kammer wrote in NRC Handelsblad that in the wake of Wilders’s criticism, VVD felt “ongemak” - discomfort - about her role in the party. (Not profound shame or self-disgust or a sense of mortification - discomfort.) On January 25, VVD was described as “embarrassed.” Part of the problem for the VVD was that Sahla had never really disavowed her terrorist history. On the contrary, in a 2019 interview with the newsmagazine Elsevier she’d called the long years of legal actions against her a “show trial.” It’s also relevant to note that in the last few years, when not seeing to her VVD duties, Sahla has been engaged in Ph.D. research, her objective being to determine whether “liberal Western thinking” is preferable to the “orthodox world view” of Islam. In other words, Sahla still doesn’t seem to have figured out whether she’s put the ideology of jihad behind her.


	Well, she’ll have more time hereafter to ponder that question. On January 26, after a few days of intense intraparty debates, Sahla <a href="https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/01/26/soumaya-sahla-legt-voorzitterschap-vvd-netwerk-neer-na-kritiek-a4083262">quit</a> her position at the VVD - but not her party membership - and, for the first time, explicitly professed to regret her terrorist background. In an op-ed for NRC Handelsblad, Gerard Spong, a lawyer in Amsterdam, <a href="https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/01/28/de-opoffering-van-sahla-is-een-treurige-vertoning-a4083592">lamented</a> her resignation, saying that Wilders had “overdramatized” the situation and criticizing both Wilders and VVD leaders for failing to recognize that “in a constitutional state, a convict who has served his/her sentence and who has been rehabilitated cannot be punished twice for a wrong step in the past.” Spong compared Sahla to Nelson Mandela: “He was also convicted of participating in a terrorist organization (the ANC). After 27 years in prison, he was released and for many years held South Africa's highest office.”


	NRC Handelsblad cartoonist Siegfried Woldhek, too, considered Sahla a victim of injustice. <a href="https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/01/29/vrouw-van-de-week-soumaya-sahla-a4083630">Naming</a> her his “woman of the week,” he complained that “three years in prison and a public expression of regret were apparently insufficient for the VVD to want to keep her on.” In an angry op-ed, Andreas Kinneging, a professor of legal philosophy and Sahla’s Ph.D. supervisor, <a href="https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/politiek/artikel/5284152/woede-over-heksenjacht-op-soumaya-sahla-vvd-toont-wat-ze-waard">described</a> her as the victim of “a witch hunt” of a kind that is unworthy of “a civilized country.” The editors of the daily newspaper Trouw <a href="https://www.trouw.nl/opinie/vvd-geef-ook-soumaya-sahla-een-tweede-kans~b14be277/">stood</a> up for her, too, insisting that in a country like the Netherlands people like Sahla deserved to get “a second chance.”


	This coming May 6 will be the twentieth anniversary of the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, who promised to save the Netherlands from a process of Islamization that he viewed, quite rightly, as an existential threat to the individual liberty of which the Netherlands had been a beacon for centuries. Three years after Fortuyn’s death came the butchering of Theo van Gogh. Not long afterward, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose criticism of Islam was seen as particularly potent since she herself had been raised in the religion - was driven out of parliament and obliged to emigrate to the U.S. Since then, the struggle to preserve Dutch liberty in the face of the increasingly powerful Islamic enemy within has been led by Wilders, abetted, since 2017, by Thierry Baudet of the FvD (Forum for Democracy). But the progress made by Fortuyn two decades ago, and instantly lost by his murder, has never been recovered.


	On the contrary, this beautiful little country which, two decades ago, seemed to be on the verge of a remarkable rescue from a nightmarish fate, has become steadily more Islamized - which has meant, among much else, violent crime (especially against Jews, gays, and women). It’s meant increased self-censorship and cultural appeasement. And it’s meant that Dutch citizens who have the same understanding of Islam that Fortuyn did twenty years ago are even more reviled by their nation’s elites than he was, and - as evinced by Wilders’s multiple prosecutions for hate speech - are subject to judicial punishment for voicing objective truths about the Religion of Peace.


	Meanwhile, a former terrorist like Sahla has been able to walk the corridors of power for over a decade - and even now is, almost certainly, viewed by most Dutch journalists, academics, and politicians as the virtuous victim of this recent episode, while Geert Wilders, the man she planned to kill, is the villain of the piece. Given the current atmosphere in the Netherlands, it seems safe to say a couple of things: first, that Wilders hasn’t seen his last “hate speech” trial; and second, that Sahla will soon enough find an even better job than the one she had with VVD. Because in a “civilized” country like the Netherlands, you see, involvement in Islamic terrorism is the act of a misguided soul who’s eminently deserving of forgiveness and rehabilitation (including employment on the highest level), whereas criticism of Islam is the act of an unrepentant boor whom enlightened citizens should do everything possible to marginalize, silence, and crush.&nbsp;&nbsp;

In the Netherlands, it’s 'Civilized' to Empower Terrorists

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	Her name is Soumaya Sahla. Born in The Hague in 1983 to Moroccan immigrants (her

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	Last month, as we reported <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/bawer-zemmour-bruce-bawer/">here</a> at the time, the valiant French writer Éric Zemmour gave a powerfully patriotic speech announcing his candidacy for president. Adducing some of the proudest achievements of French culture, science, and statecraft, he declared that his country’s people “will not allow ourselves to be dominated, vassalized, conquered, colonized. We will not be replaced.” It was a stirring call to arms in the face of headlong Islamization, and it articulated the deeply but often privately held views of many - and likely most - French citizens. For a few weeks, the erudite, eloquent Zemmour, 63, seemed poised to succeed Marine Le Pen, 53, as the leading anti-establishment hope for France. Since then, however, he’s dropped slightly behind her in the polls. About 13% of voters now <a href="https://www-lefigaro-fr.translate.goog/fig-data/sondages-programmes-candidats-discours-dates-deplacements-scrutin-20210906/?_x_tr_sl=fr&amp;_x_tr_tl=en&amp;_x_tr_hl=no&amp;_x_tr_pto=op,sc">say</a> they’ll pull the lever for Zemmour in April, compared to 16% for Le Pen and 25% for the incumbent, Emmanuel Macron.


	One problem facing Zemmour’s candidacy is that if you want to make it onto the ballot for the French presidency, you need to submit formal endorsements from no fewer than 500 elected officials (French ones, of course). Then there’s this. In September 2020, a 25-year-old Pakistani jihadist who was incensed by the publication of Muhammed cartoons in the humor weekly Charlie Hebdo made his way to its former offices (he didn’t realize it had moved) and slashed two people with a meat cleaver. Zemmour reacted by publicly deploring the well-documented criminality of many young Muslims. He was promptly charged with hate speech, and on January 17 of this year was found guilty by a court that described him as having crossed “the limits of freedom of expression.” It’s Zemmour’s third hate-speech conviction, and carries a fine of €10,000. Some observers think this verdict will harm his candidacy. On the contrary, the whole sorry episode only confirms everything Zemmour has said in condemnation of the way in which the rise of Islam in France has diminished liberté, égalité, et fraternitẻ.&nbsp;


	But there’s a more serious challenge to Zemmour’s odds of winning the presidency. Her name is Valérie Pécresse. In December, in a major upset, Pécresse, 54, who currently governs the Île-de-France region (i.e., Paris and environs), won the presidential nomination of Les Republicains, the conservative Gaullist party, and she’s been out on the stump ever since trying to drain votes from Zemmour’s core constituency. She <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCgjsgSGYx8&amp;ab_channel=Europe1">asserted</a> the other day, with a self-assurance that’s typical of her, that neither Le Pen nor Zemmour can beat Macron, but that she, Pécresse, has a real shot at it, because, unlike them, she speaks to the concerns of all Frenchmen. Polls taken shortly after her nomination suggested that Pécresse indeed stood the best chance to defeat Macron; in recent days, however, Le Pen has caught up with her, and they’re now running neck in neck.


	What to make of Pécresse? While Zemmour, a prominent media commentator, is a genuine political outsider with a long track record of j’accuse-ing the political establishment, Pécresse is something else again. The daughter of a Gaullist economics professor turned big-time CEO, the poised, attractive Pécresse has been walking since her school days down the narrow path that, in France, leads to high-level government positions: after studying law at two of the republic’s so-called grandes écoles and spending several years teaching at Sciences Po, the grande école for political science, she served as an adviser to Jacques Chirac and a cabinet member under Nicolas Sarkozy. (Both have been described as her mentors.) Like all the haughty hommes in snappy suits who’ve inhabited the Gallic corridors of power in the past few decades, she’s a classic technocrat - a card-carrying member of the political class.


	And yet she’s somehow managing to sell herself to a good chunk of the French electorate as a rebel. She likens herself to Margaret Thatcher (but also - ugh - to Angela Merkel). She resolves to retake control of violent, lawless Muslim enclaves. (So did Sarkozy. And so has Macron.) She promises to reduce immigration, fight crime, and toughen sentencing. She says she’ll bring down the national debt and deny welfare benefits to new legal residents for a period of five years after their arrival. And she proposes that EU countries bordering on non-EU countries cooperate closely on a common migrant policy that would ensure tight border controls. Indeed, on the topic of borders she can sound strikingly like Donald Trump: “There is no great power without borders,” she has proclaimed. She’s even spoken positively about border walls and fences.


	Sounds good. But on many of these issues she’s a Jeanne-come-lately. And when she holds forth about French culture and national identity, she just doesn’t have Zemmour’s palpable passion.&nbsp;


	Catching up on these latest developments in the French presidential race, I realized that the situation sounded oddly familiar. Why? Then it came to me: the face-off between Pécresse and Zemmour brought to mind the recent mayoral contest in my hometown of New York, a city that in the last couple of years, under the poisonous reign of the vile socialist Bill de Blasio, has gone to hell in a handbasket faster than anyone could ever have imagined. The Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa, seemed the perfect choice to clean things up: he’s spent his adult life as the outspoken, often obstreperous, but undeniably brave and dedicated leader of the Guardian Angels, a non-profit volunteer organization whose members walk the streets and ride the subways to protect innocent citizens from violent thugs. But whom did New Yorkers elect? Eric Adams, a Democratic hack whose promises to restore law and order never rang true and who began to break them the day he was sworn in.


	I hope I’m wrong, but Pécresse appears to me to have every sign of being a French version of Eric Adams - cynically campaigning on positions she doesn’t really believe in and making promises she has no intention of keeping. Why do voters - in France, New York, or anywhere else - keep getting bamboozled by such people, especially in a time when so much is dependent upon their decisions? A victory for either Macron or Pécresse - like Adams’s win in New York, or, for that matter, California governor Gavin Newsom’s survival of that recall election last September - could spell disaster for a crumbling polity that’s barreling down the road to utter chaos and that (depending on whom you listen to) may or may not already be past the point of no return.

Enter Valérie

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	Last month, as we reported here at the time, the valiant French writer Éric

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	On April 9, 2002, the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet <a href="https://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/nektet-adgang/65799765">reported</a> that a man named Ingmar Tveitt, who was a friend of a member of the Norwegian Parliament named Jan Simonsen, had been dining in the Parliament cafeteria on the previous day when security guards asked him to remove his jacket. Why? Because Tveitt, a supporter of Israel, had an Israeli flag pin on his lapel. Some Parliament members found this offensive - even though, as Tveitt pointed out, people were always walking around the premises in Palestinian scarces. Yes, it was a minor incident, quickly forgotten by almost everybody. But that little story stuck in my mind, and I’ve had occasion to recall it now and then, because it told a big truth about the sympathies of Norwegian officialdom vis-à-vis the Middle East


	That was twenty years ago. Since then, as the Islamic presence in Norway has steadily increased, Norwegian anti-Semitism, Israel-hatred, and support for Palestine have grown. In recent years, Norway has given Palestinian government bodies about $100 million annually - over $20 per Norwegian taxpayer. Earlier this month, when Norway took charge of the U.N. Security Council, its ambassador to the UN, Mona Juul, <a href="https://www.document.no/2022/01/05/norge-leder-sikkerhetsradet-vil-legge-vekt-pa-klima-palestinere-og-kvinnesak/">said</a> that the Israel-Palestine conflict deserves “more attention” - as if the five million Palestinians hadn’t been getting far more than their share of attention (and Western largesse) for the last half century. Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfeldt, for her part, chided Israel as “inhuman” for listing six Palestinian organizations - all of which Norway helps fund, in addition to the money it transfers to government bodies - as terrorist groups. Even though, by any objective definition, they are terrorist groups.


	I was reminded of the Tveitt story this weekend after being apprised of the latest development in the saga of Norwegian involvement in Middle Eastern affairs. The story <a href="https://www.vg.no/nyheter/utenriks/i/y4yGAE/taliban-kommer-til-norge-for-aa-forhandle">broke</a> last Friday in the country’s biggest newspaper, VG. “The Taliban,” trumpeted the headline, “is coming to Norway to negotiate.” Norway, I read, had grabbed the brass ring: of all Western countries, it would be the first since the fall of Kabul to welcome a delegation of Taliban leaders to its shores. Reportedly, the distinguished visitors would meet not just with their Norwegian counterparts but also with representatives of the U.S., the EU, the U.K., France, Germany, and Italy, as well as with Afghans living outside Afghanistan, with officials of the Church of Norway and the Norwegian Red Cross, and with sundry journalists and human-rights activists. The meetings, which the Norwegian government had hoped to keep secret, began yesterday and will conclude tomorrow.&nbsp;


	In a sense, needless to say, the present conclave is nothing new. Norwegian officials have been <a href="https://www.vg.no/nyheter/utenriks/i/JxvJrm/norges-ukjente-rolle-i-taliban-forhandlingene">meeting</a> secretly with Taliban leaders for years. Since 2010, these encounters have taken place mostly in Doha, Qatar, the principal goal of the Norwegians being to persuade the Taliban to sit down with the Afghan government. Additional meetings were held in Oslo in 2015 and succeeding years, with Norway seeking to broker encounters between Taliban and the U.S. Representatives of the Trump administration did indeed engage with Taliban leaders to discuss the future of Afghanistan. And after President Biden let the Taliban retake Kabul, wiping out in record time all the advances scored by the U.S. military in the last twenty years, American and Norwegian officials <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-58866161">met</a> with Taliban leaders in Qatar to discuss “humanitarian aid” and (no joke) the Taliban’s plans for containment of “extremist groups.”


	Even so, this Oslo hajj is special. Sometimes it’s necessary to meet enemies on neutral ground; playing host to them and rolling out the red carpet is another matter. Before the fall of Kabul, moreover, the Taliban was a terrorist group on the outs; now it’s back in power, and the Norwegian officials who’ve invited them to Oslo are in a position not entirely unlike that of Neville Chamberlain when he went to Munich in 1938, hat in hand, to ask Hitler politely, after his takeovers of Austria and the Sudetenland, to refrain from any further land grabs. Asked by VG about this week’s meetings with the Taliban, Huitfeldt noted that there’s “a full-scale humanitarian catastrophe” underway in Afghanistan, and contended that if “the international community” wants to help, it has to “have dialogue with the Taliban.” High up on her wish list are “girls’ education” and “women’s participation in society.” Because of course the way to get savage despots to end 1400 years of draconian oppression of women, every bit of it rooted in inalterable and incontrovertible scripture, is to invite them to Oslo for a long weekend to be hectored by a bunch of blondes.


	In reporting the Taliban trip, VG noted that last fall Afghan human-rights activists told then-Prime Minister Erna Solberg that “you can’t trust the Taliban.” You’d think a seasoned politician aware of the Taliban’s track record wouldn’t have to be told this. On Friday, informed of the impending Taliban summit, Mina A. Rafiq, head of an association for Afghans in Norway, fiercely opposed it, accusing Norway, in a text message to VG, of being “the first [country] to legitimize terror…under a false cover of discussing the humanitarian situation.”


	But hey: fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly - and Norwegians gotta dialogue with gangsters.


	It is curious, to be sure, how impermeable naivete can be. A couple of generations ago, the forerunners of today’s Norwegian officials began permitting mass immigration from the Islamic world. They fully believed that their “new countrymen,” recognizing the merits of Norway’s culture and values, would rapidly assimilate. That assumption was proven devastatingly wrong - demonstrating that nobody in the Norwegian government had the slightest understanding of Islam. The consequences for Norway - as for most of the other countries of Western Europe, which made the same mistakes - have been disastrous.


	And yet today’s Norwegian officials are approaching the Taliban with equal gullibility - and with the same eagerness to shovel out taxpayer money that they’ve demonstrated in their decades of massive handouts to Muslim immigrants. “Humanitarian aid is entirely necessary,” maintained Huitfeldt, “but it’s not enough. We need to keep basic services like health and education from collapsing. We have to support the welfare of families and local communities.” As it happens, such services in Norway itself have been slashed in recent years for budgetary reasons. But the leaders of Norway, with a population of six million, consider themselves obligated to help fund such services for Afghanistan, a country of 39 million.


	In Denmark, a saner country than Norway, the Liberal Party’s foreign-affairs spokesman, Michael Aastrup Jensen, <a href="https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/politik/dansk-politiker-kalder-norsk-taliban-besoeg-et-granatchok-en-haan-mod-de-faldne">called</a> news of the Taliban visit a “grenade shock,” “a huge PR victory for the Taliban,” and “a mockery of the fallen soldiers” of the NATO alliance, while Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod rejected any direct contact between Denmark and the Taliban. In Norway, Progress Party’s foreign-affairs guy, Christian Tybring-Gjedde, accused the government of “whitewashing” the Taliban; Vebjørn Selbekk of the Christian newspaper Dagen <a href="https://www.vg.no/nyheter/utenriks/i/ALWW8q/selbekk-om-taliban-til-norge-i-privatfly-smakloest">called</a> the invitation to the Taliban “tasteless.” Helge Lurås of the news website Resett <a href="https://resett.no/2022/01/21/norges-kurtise-til-taliban/">noted </a>savvily that what’s really important about this summit, in the minds of Norwegian diplomats, is that it confirms their “image of Norway and themselves as creative peace brokers.” Bingo.&nbsp;&nbsp;


	Anyway, the Taliban’s 15-man delegation, led by Foreign Minister Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi and including Anas Haqqani (who is on the U.S. terrorist list and whose brother, Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani, is one of most wanted terrorists on earth), flew to Oslo on Saturday. The Norwegian media covered the flight as closely as the British media covered Chamberlain’s journey to Munich and back. On Saturday afternoon VG posted a <a href="https://direkte.vg.no/nyhetsdognet/news/her-er-taliban-paa-vei-til-norge-i-et-privatfly.y78mOAz_-">photo</a> of the Taliban boys on a luxurious private jet that had been leased from a Finnish company, Jetlife, at the expense of Norwegian taxpayers. Nice work if you can get it! That evening came the <a href="https://www.vg.no/nyheter/i/qWEErE/taliban-landet-paa-oslo-lufthavn-i-privatfly">news</a> that the gentlemen had landed in Oslo; later, the media reported on their arrival at their hotel, which is being heavily guarded by police. (Finally, some real security on the streets of Oslo.) On Sunday, Aftenposten <a href="https://www.aftenposten.no/verden/i/k61xxk/taliban-vi-har-rett-til-aa-arrestere-motstandere">disclosed</a> that the weekend guests, on the previous evening, had already asserted their right to arrest political opponents.


	Closely following these breathless updates, I again thought back twenty years - not to the Tveitt incident, but to the invasion of Afghanistan, the collapse of Taliban rule, and President Bush’s call for a massive national reconstruction project that he compared to the Marshall Plan. Imagine thinking that that primitive dominion, that graveyard of empires, could reasonably be likened to postwar Western Europe! In the months and years after the installation of Hamid Karzai as Afghan president, the money (to quote an Evita lyric) kept pouring in, and the NATO blood kept flowing. So many wounded, so many killed, all in the service of a thoroughly misguided cause, driven by a total failure - or refusal - on the part of political and military officials to grasp the dark and inflexible reality of Islam. And so here we are now, back in a place very much like where were just before the Taliban’s Al-Qaeda chums took down the World Trade Center,: treating representatives of what is once again the Emirate of Afghanistan as if they were civilized, and acting as if nothing that happened on or after 9/11 has taught us anything at all about their vile excuse for a religion.

Norway’s Government Welcomes the Taliban to Oslo

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	On April 9, 2002, the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet reported that a man named Ingmar

Frontpage Mag

bruce bawer

Provincetown Progressive

Abortion and Wokeness

Another Year, Another U.N. Scandal

They Call Them the 'Koran Riots'

Robert Spencer’s Qur’an

Revisiting David Horowitz's Hating Whitey

Macron Stays in Power

Mamet’s Wisdom

'France’s Trump' Out of the Running for President

Slaps and Double Standards

Tirades by Twits

Sweden’s Unequal Hospitality

Lia Thomas and the 'Authentic Self'

Finally, Real Refugees

Canada Nice

One Super Bowl, Two National Anthems?

The Rape of Britain

In the Netherlands, it’s 'Civilized' to Empower Terrorists

Enter Valérie

Norway’s Government Welcomes the Taliban to Oslo

FPM Series

Disloyal Military

Progressive Fascists

Racist Mayors

The Point

What's Leftist Senate Candidate Fetterman Hiding About His Health?

Biden Wants Taxpayers to Write a $10,000 Check to Every College Grad Making $300,000

The Police Aren't Coming to Save You

Uvalde Cops Accused of Blocking Border Patrol Tactic Team From School

CDC Releases Numbers Showing BLM is Killing Black Kids

Events