Hijra in Reverse: The Duty to Emigrate

Our guest essayist VaeVictis wrote a historical account of Las Navas de Tolosa in this space last July. He returns with an examination of the Koranic obligation imposed on Muslims which requires them to emigrate to Dar al-Islam if they find themselves ruled by infidels, living in a “position of inferiority”.

Why is it, then, that so many devout Muslims have chosen to live in the lands of the infidel West, and do not return to the Islamic world as soon as they have the opportunity?

VaeVictis presents us with a surprising answer: Muslims in the West do not in fact live in a position of inferiority.

Hijra in Reverse: The Duty to Emigrate
by VaeVictis

Modern day Muslim immigration to Western nations is a well-known and easily-observed phenomenon. However, most Westerners are ignorant of one of Islam’s oldest tenets, known as “the obligation to emigrate”, which mandates quite the opposite behavior. Stated plainly, the obligation to emigrate is simply an extension of the prohibition against living under infidel rule. If Muslims find themselves living under such circumstances it is their duty to emigrate to Muslim lands as soon as they are physically and fiscally capable of doing so.

Obviously there appears to be a blatant contradiction in the behavior of millions of Muslims regarding this injunction. Are we to believe that all Muslims today residing in non-Muslim countries have simply forsaken an important aspect of Islamic law for personal convenience or economic gain? If so, where is the condemnation? Are there fatwas, or even the hint of debate one would expect from Muslim scholars and the rest of the Muslim world?

To answer these questions requires a closer examination of the practice within Islamic jurisprudence. The concept’s origins are rooted in the belief that Islam, as the one true religion, must never be subject to another religion or put in a position of inferiority.^[1] At the same time it is considered not only lawful, but theologically proper for Islam to assume a position of dominance over other faiths.

The Quranic prohibitions against living under non-Muslim rule are remarkably strongly worded and unambiguous. Because these ayat (verses) are essential to this discussion, they are listed here.^[2]

Sura 4:97-100:

As for those whose souls are taken by the angels (at death) while in a state of unbelief, they will be asked by the angels: “What (state) were you in?” They will answer: “We were oppressed in the land.” And the angels will say: “Was not God’s earth large enough for you to migrate?” Their abode will be Hell, and what an evil destination!(97) But those who are helpless, men, women and children, who can neither contrive a plan nor do they know the way, (98) May well hope for the mercy of God; and God is full of mercy and grace. (99) Whosoever leaves his country in duty to God will find many places of refuge, and abundance on the earth. And he who leaves his home and becomes an emigre in the way of God and His Messenger, and death overtake him, is sure to receive his reward from God; for God is forgiving and kind. (100)

Sura 8:72b:

You are not responsible for protecting those who embraced the faith but did not leave their homes, until they do so. In case they ask for your help in the name of faith, you are duty bound to help them, except against a people with whom you have a treaty; for God sees all that you do. (72)

Sura 16:110:

A Rosetta Stone for Bill Warner, Part 9: Czech

This is the ninth in a series of subtitled versions of the 45-minute seminar given by Dr. Bill Warner this past summer in Tennessee.

Dr. Warner’s lucid report on the rapacious history of Islam has sparked a lot of comment on both sides of the Atlantic, generating enough interest to inspire these translations. We owe a great debt of thanks to all those volunteers who stepped forward.

The Czech version of Dr. Warner’s talk is below, and Arabic, Russian, and Turkish are in the pipeline.

Many thanks to MK for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

Arabic *	Hungarian	Spanish
Czech	Polish	Swedish
English	Portuguese	Turkish *
French	Russian *
German	Slovak

(* = assigned but not yet received; † = received but not yet posted)

The English transcript is available here.

Czech transcript:

When a Judge Defends the First Amendment

Last month the attempt by Pamela Geller to display her anti-jihad posters in the Washington Metro resulted in a legal battle, with the Metro Authorities attempting to avoid putting up material they considered incendiary. Ms. Geller eventually prevailed in court, and WMATA was ordered to allow the posters to be displayed.

Here’s a report with the details on the judge’s decision, courtesy of The Legal Project:

When a Judge Defends the First Amendment
by Adam Turner

On October 4, 2012, a First Amendment free speech case was argued before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Pamela Geller, a prominent blogger and activist, had — through her organization called the American Freedom Defense Initiative — paid for ads to run on billboards in the Washington DC metro that said: “In any war between the savage and the civilized man, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”

These ads, Ms. Geller said, were in response to an earlier group of posters that were put up in DC that called for an end to all U.S. aid to Israel. On September 6, 2012, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), contracted with Geller to put up her ads for one month. Then, on Sept. 18, the WMATA informed Geller that “due to the situations happening around the world at this time,” i.e., the demonstrations and attacks supposedly caused by an American film deemed to be “anti-Muslim,” the ads would be postponed until “a future date to be determined.” (Case 1:12-cv-01564-RMC, Pg.5) More specifically, the WMATA claimed that it had received intelligence from government agencies that these ads would prompt Islamist violence against the subway, as well as a threatening email, and, so as to not endanger the public, the WMATA decided to delay them until some time when the threat of violence would subside. Ms. Geller naturally objected and asked the court for an injunction to force the billboards to go up, leading to the court appearance.

The case, American Freedom Defense Initiative, et al. v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, was argued before Judge Rosemary Collyer by the lawyer for the WMATA, Philip Staub, and the lawyer for Ms. Geller, Robert Muise, of the American Freedom Law Center. After a short two hours (plus), Judge Collyer announced she had heard enough. She also said she would recess to consider the arguments and the court debate before announcing her decision. Just a day later, Judge Collyer issued an order for the billboards to go up no later than 5pm, Monday, October 8. Her full written decision was released on October 12.

The WMATA made two arguments in favor of exempting this speech from the protections of the First Amendment. They also argued that, assuming the judge found that the speech was indeed the type of speech protected under the Constitution, that prior U.S. cases nevertheless allowed them to restrict it by delaying the placement of the billboards. None of these arguments, however, was particularly convincing.

What’s the Real Story? Part 4

This is the fourth essay in a series about the maneuvering and intrigue crouching behind the arras of the current crisis in the Middle East. Previously: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

The Mohammed Movie: Blasphemy, Defamation, and Insult

The Long Hot Arab Summer began in Cairo on September 11, 2012, with a demonstration in front of the American embassy. Over the next few days numerous other cities across the world — not just in Islamic countries, but in Europe, Canada, Australia, and even Japan — followed suit.

The OIC and the media would have us believe that those Islamic days of rage were a spontaneous outburst of Muslim indignation over a blasphemous movie about Mohammed. Yet this battlefield had actually been prepared well in advance.

The current form of the conflict began to take shape in late 2005 (that crucial year!) and early 2006, during the Mohammed cartoon crisis. The Muslim world did not spontaneously combust the moment the “Turban Bomb” was first published in Jyllands-Posten, but waited four months before taking to the streets to loot, burn, bomb, and murder. The mayhem was carefully instigated by a pair of Danish imams, who added three fake cartoons — more incendiary than the real ones — to the original twelve, and went on a tour of the Middle East with their portfolio to stir up the righteous indignation of faithful Muslims. The results are well-known.

The Danish cartoon affair was a great success from a Muslim standpoint. Western leaders fell all over themselves to deplore the cartoons. Most of them condemned the artists and the newspaper for their “abuse” of free speech. Although the cartoons spread virally on the internet, only a few major media outlets were willing to display the drawings that caused all the commotion. Newspapers and TV networks in the United States — which is supposedly a model for the world’s free press — were particularly craven in this regard. Thus, the Muslim Brotherhood got its wish: “defamation” of Islam was effectively suppressed.

But Islam needed more. To ensure that “disrespect” for Islam and its prophet is driven completely out of the public square, the OIC insisted that Western governments must pass laws criminalizing the “defamation of religions”. Since — as Maj. Stephen Coughlin has irrefutably demonstrated — Muslims recognize only one religion, and consider all religions earlier than Islam abrogated, these laws are obviously aimed at smothering any critical discussion about Islam, and Islam only.

The Mohammed cartoon crisis serves as a useful model for bringing pressure to bear. On one flank is the appeal to the politically correct Western conscience, using freedom of religion, respect for minorities, tolerance, etc. as cattle prods to induce compliance with shariah-based strictures against “insulting” Islam and its prophet. On the other flank is the constant, unremitting subliminal threat of intense violence, which everyone now realizes may be expected whenever non-Muslims approach the boundary walls that confine discussions about Islam. These two inducements — carrot and stick, if you will — have served to shut down nearly all shariah-proscribed speech in any prominent Western media.

After the Motoon affair, there remained only the formalization of the new arrangements under statutory law. The greatest obstacle to the full submission of the West is the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which clearly protects speech that criticizes Islam, no matter how much it might offend Muslims.

For several years prominent Muslim leaders have been discussing the “test of consequences” as a subterfuge to enforce shariah-compliant speech codes in Western societies. Liberal democracies generally recognize incitement to violence as an exception that is not a constitutionally protected form of speech. Our traditions define “incitement” to mean any direct exhortation to commit violence in the immediate future, but the Islamic “test of consequences” would turn that definition on its head. If someone engages in a non-violent form of communication — say, drawing a cartoon or writing a book — and that act is so insulting that it serves to stimulate such great anger in a group of people that they commit violence, then, using the “test of consequences”, the non-violent expression may be said to have indirectly caused the violence, and thus may be proscribed.

Most Western politicians and media commentators have already adopted the new shariah-based restrictions on (formerly) free speech, ritually condemning those who draw Mohammed cartoons or burn Korans or do anything else which makes Muslims angry enough to burn, rape, murder, and loot. It requires only a modest additional push — an incident involving such vile and despicable behavior that even First Amendment enthusiasts will fall silent in the face of updated speech codes — to bring the necessary legislative change.

Fast-forward to July, 2011. Two incidents, coincidentally occurring exactly one week apart, demonstrated the direction in which the new shariah-compliant wind was blowing. The first one was the summit meeting on July 15 between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu in Istanbul, which launched the “Istanbul Process”. The intention of the two principals was to implement the legislative results required by UN Resolution 16/18 within the Western democracies. In a historic speech, Mrs. Clinton laid out some of the means by which the new tolerant, respectful, and non-defamatory behaviors could be inculcated in Western cultures:

In the United States, I will admit, there are people who still feel vulnerable or marginalized as a result of their religious beliefs. And we have seen how the incendiary actions of just a very few people, a handful in a country of nearly 300 million, can create wide ripples of intolerance. We also understand that, for 235 years, freedom of expression has been a universal right at the core of our democracy. So we are focused on promoting interfaith education and collaboration, enforcing antidiscrimination laws, protecting the rights of all people to worship as they choose, and to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.

This was a clear call to realize the “test of consequences”: to identify certain peaceful expressions of a free people as “incendiary”. The next step would be to identify and “shame” those who engage in such “incendiary” activities, thus putting their expressions beyond the pale of acceptable behavior.

Exactly a week later, Anders Behring Breivik donned his police uniform, picked up his rifle, and murdered 77 people in Oslo and on the island of Utøya. For several months afterwards it seemed that Mr. Breivik’s actions might provide the necessary “test of consequences” that would usher in a new era of Western compliance with Resolution 16/18.

But it turned out not to be enough, not in the United States, anyway — which is where the major tectonic shift is required. The European Union already has sufficient administrative justification for the necessary legislation in the “Framework Decision”, which has had the force of law since it went into effect two years ago.

This background information sets the scene for the events of September 11, 2012. The fulfillment of the Istanbul Process required an example of such egregious abuse of the First Amendment that the “test of consequences” exception could be successfully inserted into the free speech clause of the First Amendment. The movie Innocence of Muslims seemed to be exactly what was needed.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 11/2/2012

An mob of angry Muslims in Lahore, Pakistan torched a girls’ high school because of a rumor that one the teachers there had insulted the prophet Mohammed. The principal of the school has been arrested on a blasphemy charge — which carries the death penalty — and the teacher is said to be in hiding.

In other news, a patient in Abu Dhabi who was being treated by a urologist — a native of India — became so angry at the slowness of his treatment that he hunted the doctor down in his office and stabbed him to death.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to Caroline Glick, DS, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, Kitman, Mary Abdelmassih, Nick, Nilk, Vlad Tepes, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

The Ballad of Wandsworth Gaol

I never saw a man who looked
   With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
   Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
   With sails of silver by.

— From “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” by Oscar Wilde

Word has just come in from the EDL with the latest about their recently arrested leader, Tommy Robinson. He is still a guest of Her Majesty’s correctional officials in Wandsworth Prison.

Tommy is on remand, and has not been convicted. However, because he has to be kept in the segregated unit away from the (largely Muslim) general prison population, he has been housed in the dungeon (basement) of the prison. He gets no daylight at all, and is locked up 23 hours a day.

He also only has a blue plastic mattress, a rock-hard pillow, and one blanket, even though it is freezing cold all the time. His wife wasn’t allowed to bring him a duvet — he was told he could buy one at the prison shop for £25, but at that time he had no money because it had gone missing.

Despite his being held in an icy dungeon, I’m told that he’s keeping his spirits up. He just received his first batch of mail yesterday, because they only have three staff members who read the mail for the whole of the prison, so there is a backlog of two to three weeks.

Tommy sends the following message to his well-wishers:

Big thanks to everyone for all the letters/postal orders I’ve been receiving, thanks also to everyone that is writing to MPs about me being locked up. I’ve had some very positive letters and it is raising my spirits. I’ve also put in a request to transfer to Bedford Prison.

For those who would like to write to Tommy while he is in durance vile, this is his current address:

Stephen Lennon
A2084CG
HMP Wandsworth
Heathfield Road
Wandsworth
London
SW18 3HS
England

Tommy's birthday is on the 27th of this month. He will be turning 30 — old man! — so I’m sure cards will be welcomed.

Just think — he’s going to spend his birthday AND Christmas in the slammer. The rest of us should count our blessings.

A Drug Enforcement Exchange Program in Switzerland

Swiss narcotics officers have adopted an unusual technique for dealing with African drug-dealers in their cities: they are partnering on the job with their colleagues from Nigeria.

This serves a double purpose: it allows the Swiss police to benefit from their exchange officers’ familiarity with the ways of Nigerian dope-dealers, and it insulates them from charges of “racism” if an African is the one putting the cuffs on the dealer.

Many thanks to Hermes for translating this article from Neue Zürcher Zeitung:

The experience of Nigerian police agents: “This is a paradise for dealers”

Nigerian narcotics officers have been looking over the shoulders of their colleagues in Zurich for the past two weeks. The hosts profit more from this than the guests.

They pose with chests swelling with pride in front of the cameras of the press photographers. A passerby smugly remarks that “This is probably an integration project”. But this is not the case. “We profit more from them that they from us”, says Bruno Gentilesca, a member of the city police in Zürich, who goes to patrol together with Benneth Uche and Kabiru Ibrahim. Controls are relaxed.

Uche and Ibrahim work in Nigeria for the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), an organization comprising 6000 members which fights drug trafficking. They are two out of nineteen agents who have been on practical training in recent months in some Swiss cities in which drug trafficking is mainly in the hands of Nigerians. The project of the national office for immigration arranges the exchange of experiences between colleagues of both lands. These men from Lagos have been accompanying the patrols and investigators of Zürich for three weeks.

It soon became evident how useful the Nigerian agents could be when dealing with suspects from their own land. Thanks to Uche and Ibrahim, the detained subjects acted in a cooperative way, Gentilesca said. In this way, the situations became more relaxed. And in addition to this, it has a de-escalating effect when black people are present among the agents. If not, then passers-by often tell the police agents off as racists when they check Africans.

And it also happens that Nigerian offenders hope to be protected by those with the beige uniform from those with the blue one. But if they are handcuffed, Uche and Ibrahim would be told off by them as traitors.

And there is something more: Uche, whose uniform consists of trousers and a short-sleeve shirt, stressed that it is incredibly cold in Zürich. This is a mere side issue, but it symbolizes rather well a recognition from this cooperative work: The conditions in Nigeria are so different from those in Switzerland, that the skills of one of the corps can hardly be passed on to the other. The Swiss understanding of the rule of law demands irrefutable proofs from the law enforcement authorities for the conviction. Till that point nobody is a culprit, but at worst a suspect who has the right to a lawyer.

What’s the Real Story? Part 3

This is the third essay in a series about the maneuvering and intrigue behind the scrim of the current crisis in the Middle East. Previously: Part 1, Part 2.

The Muslim Brotherhood Comes of Age

For those who follow national security issues in the United States, it is well-known that there is substantial enthusiasm within the Pentagon and the intelligence community for the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates are our natural allies against Iran, and against “terrorism” in general.

A policy of quietly supporting and coordinating with the Ikhwan began in the mid-1990s, after the first attack on the World Trade Center, when the Brothers were seen as a force for stability and order within the Sunni Muslim world, an alternative to Al Qaeda and other violent terrorist organizations (which the USA had helped nurture during the final phase of the Cold War, but that’s another story). The policy concerning the Muslim Brotherhood was, in effect: “These are people we can work with.”

If an Islamic awakening — now known as the “Arab Spring” — was to be the wave of the future, then recruiting a fundamentalist Islamic faction as an ally seemed a prudent and effective strategy. The Muslim Brotherhood was regarded as clean alternative to the corrupt despotisms that had up until then been the norm in the Middle East. Belligerent leaders like Muammar Qaddafi thwarted American designs in the region, and corrupt dictators like Hosni Mubarak sucked up billions of dollars in foreign aid.

The United States gave discreet assistance to the Brotherhood, both at home and abroad. It allowed agents of the Ikhwan access to our own governmental structures at all levels, laying the groundwork for the neutering of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local law enforcement. In due course it helped the Brotherhood to overthrow those “un-Islamic” regimes in the Middle East that it so despised.

(The exception, of course, was Saudi Arabia. The Saudis cut a deal with the Salafists decades ago, agreeing to supply substantial funding for their overseas da’wa, provided that they refrained from violent attacks on Saudi territory or direct attempts to overthrow the House of Saud. This may change once all the other regimes in the region are deposed, but for now it remains the case.)

It was no accident that such luminaries as Sami al-Arian or Salam al-Marayati became cozy with successive Presidents of the United States. They were considered representatives of the “good” fundamentalist Muslims, willing to cut deals and forego terrorism in return for generous slices of the pie that American foreign policy wonks, in their infinite wisdom, were perennially cutting up for various factions in the Middle East. In return for working to contain violent Salafists, these ostensibly non-violent Salafists were to be handed the keys to political power as soon as the existing regimes could be conveniently overthrown.

What happened in 2011 was presented by the Western media as a spontaneous uprising by ordinary citizens yearning for democracy, but in fact it was nothing of the sort. The Muslim Brotherhood and its allies in the Western military and intelligence services had simply been waiting for the right moment. They needed a precipitating incident that would catalyze domestic discontent all across the Middle East and North Africa. When it eventually came, it provided them the opportunity to overthrow the despots and install the Salafists in power.

The larger strategic vision — if you can call it that — was to use the Muslim Brotherhood to provide cover and protection for an eventual military operation to take out Iran’s nuclear program, whose removal has been seen for more than a decade as an absolute necessity for the security of the United States and Western Europe. In return for our helping it into power, the Ikhwan has allegedly agreed to guard our Middle Eastern flank and restrain the “Arab Street” when the fireworks in Iran finally begin.

The ongoing economic crisis — which has had at least as much effect on the Islamic world as it has on the West — provided the fuel for the Islamic fire. The self-immolation of the Tunisian pushcart operator was a spark to the tinder, and the fundamentalist parties were ready with their gasoline cans as soon as the flames appeared. Western governments were quick to provide financial and logistical assistance to the “rebels”, along with advanced weaponry — frequently laundered through surrogates — when required.

Some analysts reckon that the CIA and the Pentagon are split roughly 50-50 between those who see the Muslim Brotherhood as a valuable strategic ally for the United States, and those who consider it a grave danger to our security. Perhaps the accession of Barack Hussein Obama to the Oval Office throne tipped the balance, giving the Ikhwanists the final push they needed to gain ascendancy within the labyrinths of the national security bureaucracy. In any case, the United States and its Western Allies have uniformly supported the Brotherhood since the uprisings began, even to the point of coordinating the inclusion of Al Qaeda elements as part of the rebel alliances in Libya and Syria.

From an Islamic point of view, the various operations to install Salafist governments throughout the Middle East comprise just one theater in a much wider war, the 1400-year war between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. The Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) — acting in its capacity as the provisional government of the future World Caliphate — is coordinating operations across all the theaters of this war.

The “Arab Spring” is the necessary first step in the achievement of worldwide shariah governance. This is the beginning of the reawakening of Islam, as envisioned eight decades ago by Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Islamic law cannot be established across the globe until the Islamic heartland is cleansed of its blasphemous and un-Islamic rulers. From a Brotherhood point of view, the despots who rule most Islamic countries have usurped the offices of “rightly-guided” leaders, the legitimate heirs of the first four Caliphs. The process of unseating and replacing Arab tyrants with those who govern according to the word of Allah, one of al-Banna’s primary goals, is now nearing its completion.

When the heart of the Ummah has been restored to its rightly-guided path, the new Caliphate will turn its attention to the infidel world, the House of War.

The Demographic Collapse of Pagan Rome

One of the side-effects of the famed decadence of the late Roman Empire was population decline, which was brought about not just by economic problems but by moral failings as well.

Emmet Scott, whose magnum opus Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited was discussed here at length several months ago, was written a fascinating article on the topic entitled “The Role of Infanticide and Abortion in Pagan Rome’s Decline” for The New English Review.

Mr. Scott makes the case that it was the Christianization of the Empire — which brought with it a new moral and ethical code — that arrested the demographic disappearance of the Romans:

The crisis of the third century naturally became the subject of intense debate amongst historians. Nowadays it is often regarded as having an economic origin, and scholars talk of inflationary pressures and such like. This may be partly true; but what seems undeniable is that the real problem lay deeper. There is now little dissention on the belief that by the year 100 the population of the Empire had ceased to grow and had begun to contract. The inability to hold the most outlying of the provinces, in Dacia and Germany, is viewed as an infallible sign of a general shrinkage, and archaeology has provided solid evidence: by around 400 the great majority of the empire’s towns and cities occupied less than half the space they did in 150. There are also clear signs of a marked decline in rural populations: excavations in southern Etruria and elsewhere in Italy have shown a fairly dramatic fall in rural populations from the end of the second century through to the fifth. (See eg. Richard Hodges and William Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Birth of Europe (London, 1982), pp. 40-42)

From the same period archaeologists have noted not only the cessation of major new building but also the demolition and recycling of existing monuments. (See eg Peter Wells, Barbarians to Angels (New York, 2008), pp. 109-10) There appears also in the urban settlements of temperate Europe a layer of dark humic soil, sometimes more than a meter thick, containing cultural debris – pottery, bones of butchered animals, glass fragments, etc – mixed into it, covering occupational remains of earlier centuries. “The dark earth,” says one historian, “has been found to contain remains of timber-framed, wattle-and-daub huts, along with sherds of pottery and metal ornaments datable to the late Roman period. These observations demonstrate that people who were living on the site were building their houses in the traditional British [and north European] style rather than in the stone and cement fashion of elite and public Roman architecture.” (Ibid., pp. 111-12) “What are we to make of these two major changes reflected in the archaeology?” the same writer asks. He concludes that, “After a rapid growth in the latter part of the first century… [there was] a stoppage in major public architecture and a reverse of that process, the dismantling of major stone monuments, at the same time that much of the formerly urban area seems to have reverted to a non-urban character.” (Ibid., p. 112)

What could have caused such a dramatic and sustained demographic collapse? As might be expected, writers of various hues have not been slow to propose answers. These range from the plausible to the bizarre. The best explanations however have kept an eye both on archaeology and on the written sources, and what has emerged over the past fifty years is a picture of a Roman Empire unfamiliar to most students of classical civilization. It is picture of a world immersed in decadence, squalor and brutality.

Life in a Roman city, it seems, was anything but comfortable. The image of the good life of centrally-heated villas with mosaic floors and marble pillars – the image generally presented to the public in guidebooks and documentaries – was of course far from typical. Much new research has been done on the living conditions of ordinary Romans in the last fifty years, and what has emerged is the picture of a life of almost unimaginable squalor. The cities, by modern standards, were packed: people lived in appallingly confined spaces. In Rome, the great majority of the poor inhabited multi-story apartment blocks named insulae (“islands”), which were little more that multi-story slums. They were also death-traps. Several Roman writers noted that the most frequently heard sound in the city was the roar of collapsing insulae. They were constructed of the cheapest materials, and their occupiers rarely had any warning of their impending disintegration.

What’s the Real Story? Part 2

This is the second essay in a series about the maneuvering and intrigue behind the scrim of the current crisis in the Middle East. Part 1 is here.

Barack Hussein Obama: Cracks in the Façade

Weeks before the crisis took shape in Benghazi and Cairo, stories had begun to appear in the mainstream media that criticized President Obama or cast him in an unflattering light. Given the fawning and sycophancy towards Mr. Obama exhibited by the MSM (with the partial exception of Fox News) for more than four years, these cracks in the wall of media adulation were startling.

Most media articles and presentations are still wildly in favor of the Messiah of Hope and Change. But why the exceptions, and why now? Don’t they want to help re-elect the President?

The short answer is: No. Not all of them, anyway.

The first obvious sign was the cover story for Newsweek bearing the words of the historian Niall Ferguson: “Hit the Road, Barack”. Newsweek has promoted Barack Obama more slavishly than almost any other media outlet. It is, in effect, one of the principal house organs of the Democrat Party in America. No Newsweek cover dissing the president could pass editorial scrutiny without gaining the approval of the upper echelons of the DNC, especially not this late in a sitting Democrat’s re-election campaign. Someone among the Powers That Be has obviously decided that Mr. Obama has outlived his usefulness.

More recently came the New Yorker cover with the empty chair. Echoing Clint Eastwood! Egad! How could they?

Then there was the abandonment of Mr. Obama by Goldman Sachs.

Other signs include mockery of the president by Jon Stewart, who normally carries water for the administration. Yes, it’s true that President Obama and his minions have become so embarrassing that mocking them has become almost unavoidable. Yet Mr. Stewart managed to avoid making fun of him until recently. Have there been signals from above that it’s now OK to poke fun at the Savior of the Nation?

During the 2008 campaign, almost all allegations about Barack Obama’s purported homosexual past were successfully squelched. Now there are a number of witnesses from the Chicago bathhouse scene willing to talk to the press about the future president’s predilections and activities. Admittedly, these accounts remain anonymous and have yet to make it into the mainstream. But the lid is no longer screwed down tight, which is not what one would expect if power brokers still intend for their favorite to be sitting at the Oval Office desk on January 21, 2013.

These are perplexing anomalies. Why would the Progressives turn against the man they worked so hard to install as President of the United States?

The answer may lie in the current financial crisis, which Mr. Obama has helped accelerate and turn in the direction desired by his most wealthy and powerful supporters. The trans-nationalists among them who promote “global governance” make no secret of their desire to dethrone the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, intending to replace it with a new currency that better suits their purposes. Before being replaced, the value of dollar must be destroyed.

The policies of the current administration are effecting that goal, intentionally or otherwise. In the meantime, much of the wealth that is still denominated by the dollar has been channeled to recipients championed by the Progressives: unions, “community action” groups, immigrants’ rights organizations, and various other Socialist organs.

The crash of the dollar cannot be postponed indefinitely. We may presume that the time limit on its viability falls within the period of the next four-year presidential administration. When the crash comes and price inflation ignites, the result will be destitution, disorder, and widespread suffering.

Whichever party holds the levers of power when that happens will be blamed for the catastrophe. The last time such an event occurred — 1929-1932 — the Republican Party was in power. It got the blame for what happened, was crippled as a result, and remained vestigial for an entire generation, through five successive Democrat administrations. The next crash is shaping up to be much worse, and if the Republican Party is in power when it happens — especially if it is in control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency — it may well be destroyed for good.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 11/1/2012

The Washington Post is concerned about the overwhelming support shown for Mitt Romney by white men and whites without college degrees. An analyst for the paper has concluded that racism is responsible for Mr. Romney’s support among whites in the latest polls.

In other news, the election commission in Afghanistan has issued a ruling that will permit Taliban candidates to run in the 2014 presidential election.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to Diana West, Fjordman, JD, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

What’s the Real Story? Part 1

I began this post a couple of weeks after the events of September 11, 2012, and have continued to peck away at it in bits and pieces in the weeks since, whenever I could find a little spare time.

It gradually morphed into a lengthy treatise, much longer than I originally expected. At Dymphna’s suggestion, I will be publishing it in several parts, beginning with this introductory post.

Introduction

There’s an old joke that Garrison Keillor used to tell (and probably still does) about a Swede who decided to take off early from work one day.

He came home, walked into the bedroom, and found his wife sitting on the edge of the bed. He was astonished to see that she was naked, and crying bitterly.

“Ingrid, my darling!” he exclaimed. “Why are you sitting there with no clothes on, crying?”

“I’m in despair because I have nothing to wear,” she replied.

“Nonsense! You have plenty of clothes in your closet.” The Swede opened her closet door and proceeded to flip through the dresses on their hangers. “See, you’ve got a red dress… and a blue dress… and a green dress… and a polka-dot dress… and Sven…”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

I dusted off that old chestnut to remind our readers that things aren’t always what they seem.

This is especially true when the apparent circumstances are bizarre and anomalous. When current events don’t make sense, there is probably more going on than meets the eye. Discovering the underlying pattern may not be easy. It may be impossible to draw definitive conclusions. Nevertheless, a bit of intelligent investigation accompanied by the judicious application of Occam’s razor can sometimes generate useful theories that fit all the observed facts.

The recent Middle East crisis (and the domestic political blowback in the USA) is a case in point. There are so many aspects of it that don’t make any obvious sense. Just to list a few:

• How to explain the sudden appearance of “spontaneous” demonstrations protesting the Mohammed movie in Cairo, followed almost immediately by similar eruptions in other parts of the Muslim world?
  
• The demo in Cairo began as a demand that the Blind Sheikh be released, and then morphed into an attack on the American embassy within the space of a couple of hours ostensibly over the movie. What’s going on here?
  
• The “demonstration” in Libya never actually happened — there was only a well-planned Salafist terrorist attack on the consulate, which was in part made possible by collaborators within the local gunsels employed to protect an almost undefended consulate. What’s going on here?
  
• Why were there such confused, incoherent, and contradictory responses and explanations by the American government, from the highest levels of the Obama administration?
  
• Why was the movie, Innocence of Muslims, unnoticed and unremarked before the day of the incidents in Egypt and Libya?
  
• Why would a habitual criminal and fraudster decide to expose himself to death fatwas by making a cheesy movie?
  
• Why was there an initial attempt to pin the making of the movie on an Israeli-American Jew?
  
• Many commentators in the Counterjihad believe that President Obama has been doing the bidding of the Muslim Brotherhood and is in collusion with them. Why, then, did the current crisis seem to catch the administration completely off guard?

Those are just a few of the questions that could be asked about puzzling aspects of the Long Hot Arab Summer. But one more needs to be appended, on a seemingly unrelated topic:

• With the exception of Fox News, all major American news media have given fawning coverage to Barack Hussein Obama. For more than four years they have been his obsequious cheerleaders. What, then, explains the recent incidents — during the home stretch of Mr. Obama’s campaign for re-election — of disrespect, negativity, and outright opposition shown by the MSM to the erstwhile Messiah?

It’s time for us to open the closet door and see what may be crouching there amongst all the pinafores and the frocks.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

The following conjectures about the overlapping scenarios behind the current crisis are entirely speculative. Under the circumstances, an amateur can do no more than speculate.

However, fictitious scenarios may still serve as a useful tool. When the observed facts seem incongruous, inexplicable, and contradictory, even an amateur will want to assemble the available background data and subject his hypotheses to the test of common sense.

As with the Breivik case last year, the end product must remain conjectural — a fiction about what might have happened.

The preferred result will be a tale that fits as many facts as possible without multiplying entities needlessly.

As far as the Days of Islamic Rage are concerned, the surface of events — the version that is retailed on the nightly TV news or printed on the front pages of newspapers — is inadequate as an explanation.

Danish Public Schools Facing Collapse

Denmark is one of the world’s most socialist countries, so it isn’t surprising that it’s also the most heavily taxed. But it seems that the Danes are now running up against the limits of what a socialist government can do — there simply isn’t enough money to be taxed. Socialist business as usual can no longer continue.

In an article at Dispatch International, Lars Hedegaard discusses the current impasse as it is reflected in the dysfunctional public school system. Some excerpts from his analysis are below:

Danish public schools facing collapse
by Lars Hedegaard

With a tax burden of almost 49 percent (all taxes and fees divided by GDP, according to the government’s own calculations as of August 2012), Denmark is the world’s most heavily taxed country. In recent years, Denmark has competed with Sweden for the top position but has now emerged as the clear winner.

Danes among all the peoples of the world retain the lowest share of their income after being visited by the taxman. And surprisingly, they seem to like the system. In one election after another they have delivered massive votes for Social Democratic and Socialist parties that have advocated even higher taxes, whereas center-right politicians that have urged tax restraint have been exposed to heavy criticism for giving “un-financed tax breaks” for “the rich”.

This ideological consensus is based on the Social Democratic state myth that the objective of all politics is to create the largest possible public sector because the state is our wise friend with our best interests at heart, and surely better placed to spend our money for deserving causes.

For decades, the swelling Danish welfare state has been the pride of the political class and almost all political parties have done their best to expand it.

Now there are indications that this welfare state is in danger of imminent collapse because there is not enough money to pay for it, and because the problems facing it are of a kind that cannot be ameliorated by more money or more public employees.

The writing on the wall became clear to many when the center-left government led by the Social Democratic Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt came into power after last year’s election. It was won on a wave of promises of new and expensive government initiatives intended to reverse the welfare cuts, which the former center-right government was accused of having made. But hardly had the new ministers occupied their offices before it became clear that it was financially impossible to keep the promises. The new government was accused of a breach of trust, two of its constituent parties — the Social Democrats and the Socialist People’s Party — have nose-dived in the polls, and Danish politics is now in deep crisis. If elections were held today, the current government would be swept away.

The situation in the Socialist People’s Party is so serious that a rebellion among its members has forced Party Chairman Villy Søvndal to resign while two of the party’s government ministers have just been replaced.

Europe’s Takeover by Islam, Part 3

This is the third part of a four-part Israeli documentary by Zvi Yehezkeli and David Deryi about the Islamization of Europe. It has been translated from the Hebrew and subtitled in English.

The filmmaker is an Arabic-speaking Israeli whose appearance and flawless Arabic accent were sufficient to allow him to mingle freely with the Muslims in several “no-go zones” in Britain, Belgium, Sweden, and France, and to get an inside look at the Islamic mindset within the greater European community.

Many thanks to DarLink for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

Previous videos in this series:

2012		Oct		18		Europe’s Takeover by Islam, Part 1
				23		Europe’s Takeover by Islam, Part 2

Transcript of Part 3: