The Seven Stages of Muslim Brotherhood Denial

In the past day on on Facebook I have seen various old friends go through the stages of what I am going to call "Muslim Brotherhood Denial", the refusal to acknowledge the truth that there is a worldwide conspiratorial fraternal organization, active, wealthy, and well-organized in the United States, devoted to bringing the world (including the United States) to Islamic rule.

So, diagnose your friends and relatives with this handy MBD chart

Stage 1:  It is paranoid to think that such an organization exists.

Stage 2:  It is paranoid to think that such an organization is active in the United States.

Stage 3:  With 1% of the US population, it is paranoid to think that Islam will take over in the United States.

Stage 4:  Anyone who opposes large-scale immigration of Muslims supremacists is paranoid.

Stage 5:  If the Muslims take over I will be long dead,

Stage 6:  "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam."

Stage 7:  Ash-hadu anla ilaha illal-Lahu Wahdahu la Sharika Lahu wa-ash-hadu anna Muhammadan abduhu wa rasuluhu.

In 24 hours some people have gone from Stage 1 to Stage 5.  Insufficient data yet on how long it takes to go all the way to stage 7, but research grants for a long-term study are gratefully accepted.

{I should add:  The Muslim Brotherhood is a complex organization, and my views of it are complex.  At one time I shared the general neocon view that the Brotherhood and its affiliates were progressive democratic forces that should be encouraged in the Middle East.  But the Brotherhood in Egypt, and its Palestinian affiliate Hamas, turned out to be weaker and perhaps less democratic than we had believed.

As regards the United States, I believe with George Washington that "reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle"; and with John Adams that "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."   Which religion?  As recently as 2008, I was a cheerleader for the old time Americanism of, say, Bill Clinton.  But while that political religion is not quite dead, it much weaker than it was a decade ago, and younger people are mostly unaware of it or disaffected from it.  There are certainly worse possible futures for most Americans than political Islam.}

The Muslim Brotherhood and the 2016 Election (updated)

"The U.S. Brotherhood had a plan for achieving Islamic rule in America: It would convert Americans to Islam and elect like-minded Muslims to political office." So reported the Chicago Tribune in 2004. But plans change, and the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational movement that aims at Muslim supremacy everywhere, is nothing if not tactically flexible.  Its long term goal, however, is fixed, achieving Muslim rule in the United States and everywhere else on the globe -- by peaceful means, if possible, but by violence, as undertaken by the Brotherhood's Palestinian affiliate Hamas, if necessary.
     Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's right-hand woman, is the daughter of the deceased Muslim Brotherhood activist Syed Zainul Abedin, and served as assistant editor until 2008 on the journal he founded, The Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs.  Huma's mother runs the Journal and its affiliated institute to this day.

     At least two of the speakers at the Democratic National Convention have close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood or affiliated groups.  Sherman Jackson , a Muslim cleric and African-American "has also been a board member of the North American Islamic Trust, which owns and funds most Sunni mosques in the United States. Both ISNA [the Islamic Society of North America] and NAIT were identified as un-indicted conspirators in the Holy Land terror-funding operation."  Khizr Khan, who has succeeded in trolling Donald Trump by exploiting the combat death of his son in Iraq, was an intellectual follower of Said Ramadan, grandfather of the European Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan and "unofficial foreign minister of the Muslim Brotherhood."  Tariq Ramadan was banned from entering the United States by the Bush Administration, this ban was lifted by orders of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Clinton, as Secretary of State, helped and praised many Brotherhood affiliates.

     The Brotherhood's goal of global Islamic rule is, of course, a long term project.  In working towards it in the United States, the Brotherhood and their affiliates have cultivated Republican activists and politicians with as much enthusiasm and success as they have Democrats.  Brotherhood activists have found powerful Republican allies for their program of strengthening political Islam through immigration, education, and conversion.  The election of Donald Trump, who has proposed banning Muslim immigration into the United States until better methods are found for screening out those Muslims who immigrate in order to wage violent jihad, would of course be a serious setback for the Brotherhood's American political agenda.
     In January 2015 Michel Houellebecq published his novel Submission.  The plot of that novel hinges on a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of France.  In the novel, the Brotherhood comes to power democratically, winning the 2022 Presidential election in alliance with the liberal left, who join with Islamists and adopt their agenda in order to defeat the populist nationalists (this, at least, should ring bells with Americans!).  The Islamists, you see, are thoroughly Europeanist, as they reject all forms of nationalism and work toward achieving a superstate that unites Europe and the Mediterranean under the rule of Islam.
     Some reviewers claimed that Houellebecq's plot belongs "to the world of fervid fantasy and café millennialism."  But given the stunning success of the Muslim Brotherhood in making the Hillary Clinton campaign a vehicle for its ambitions, it would be more prudent to say that, in the United States at least, the Brotherhood has come far even though it has yet far to go.

Brexit Blues, or Why, oh Why, must I have my vanilla ice cream with syrup of ipecac on top?

John Lanchester's Brexit Blues is thoughtful... for a Bremainder...
But the money quote is this:
"The [Brexit] campaign’s second big lie was that the UK would be able to have access to the single market without accepting the free movement of people from the EU. No country has this arrangement, and there is no reason to think it is possible. If Britain were to secure a deal whereby it had access to the single market and control over EU immigration, it would be the end of the EU – because other countries would leave the EU and demand the same."
So since everybody wants access to the single market, and nobody wants open borders, they have to be forced to take them as a package.
But who is forcing them? And why do they have to buy the package at all?
Comcast makes you take the yuck! with the yes! because it makes them money.
Who wants to retain free movement within the EU after Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray and Munich and Ansbach and Nice and Balacan and Charlie Hebdo? Cui bono?

How Trump can rebuild Nato

Putin is not Hitler. He is not even Brezhnev.

But everything depends on whether you believe that a Russian invasion of the Baltics can be stopped or reversed without NATO using nuclear weapons. I don't think it can. And I don't think the US should engage in thermonuclear war to keep the Russians out of Riga.

So if I were Trump's National Security Advisor I would set before President Trump the following Trump-style proposal for the Baltics:

1. Order a big exercise wargaming the defense of the Baltics using only conventional arms.

2. If Blue Force loses, then demand that everybody in NATO pony up their fair share the conventional forces necessary for blue force to win, or the US is leaving the alliance.

3. What counts as one's fair share? Well, for one thing the Baltic states themselves are going to have to go from 1.1% of GDP on defense, (Latvia and Lithuania -- below their NATO commitment!), to something like Israel's 5.4% or Kuwait's 8.2%.

"Go for broke", or Trumpoid thoughts on Muslim terror

A former Tel Aviv colleague writes: "You do know that terrorism in the name of Islam kills far more Muslims than non-M westerners, right? And that the portion of Muslims who participate in terror is tiny, right? Just wondering, b/c so much that Trump says is factually absurd. I suppose it's easy to get confused."

But I say:

1.The portion of Muslims who actively participate in terror by silence, financial, or moral support is not so tiny. Western countries need to persuade their existing Muslim populations that unless they actively give every effort to defeating Islamist terror, they have no future in those countries. Not a pretty thought, but a thought the grandparents of some of the people I grew up with in Seattle were able to act on.

2. Islamists kill who they can reach. The best way to keep them out of reach, as your boy Sharon proved, is to build walls and keep them on the other side.

Why I prefer President Donald J. Trump to President Hillary Clinton

Somebody near and dear emailed me to ask "why would you prefer a Trump to a Clinton presidency?"
Here is why:

Positive reasons (things on which I agree with Trump):

1.  I am a trade protectionist and an immigration restrictionist.  As an American I think trade and immigration policies should be for the benefit of current US citizens and their descendants, "ourselves and our posterity."

2.  I think the right economic policy is one that offers men the opportunity to earn dignity as providers for their families. Cheap goods mean cheap men, as Calvin Coolidge used to say.

3.  The US needs to control the border with Mexico.  A wall is a good start, as Israel has shown along its Egyptian border.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Egypt_barrier

4.  The US needs to rethink its international role.  Certainly it should 1) no longer open the US market  in the unconsidered hope of gaining brownie points with exporters; 2) extricate itself from its obligations to South Korea and possibly Japan, which make it subject to NK blackmail.  

I do think, however, that after Crimea the US needs to continue its nuclear umbrella over NATO, which is the only thing keeping the Rooskies out of Riga (and possibly out of Scotland).  Trump has come around to supporting NATO; but he thought about it first, which I don't see as a bad thing. 

5.  Trump has promised to appoint originalist, "dead constitution," judges on the Scalia model.  As a conservative, I know he is buying us off on an issue on which he cares little.  But I say, let's take the deal! 

6.  Political correctness is literally killing people:  it has crippled the fight against domestic terror, and has greatly exacerbated the current strife over race and policing.  Its effects on education and education policy in the United States are as severe as its Marxist version ever had in the Communist block.   

Negative reasons (why Hillary  Clinton is a bad choice in ways that say, Bernie Sanders, would not have been):

1.  Mrs. Clinton is personally corrupt (she has been taking bribes for nearly forty years). and with LBJ (whose corruption was Bush league and consisted mainly of having a television broadcast license assigned to his wife) she is the only major party nominee ever who is personally corrupt -- unless you count bribes to her as bribes to Bill -- which I suppose you should,

2.  In case you think that private vices are outweighed by public virtues, as some might claim in the case of her husband (who has been an active party in her bribe-taking since the beginning, of course):  In her years as Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has no accomplishments of significance.  She also has made some big mistakes:  she supported Bush's invasion of Iraq, opposed the surge, and supported Obama's withdrawal:  I don't know anybody else in US public life who shares this trifecta of failure.  She has supported the failed American efforts in Afghanistan.  She urged the Obama's administration failed intervention in the Libyan civil war.  She has also supported Obama's Iran deal, which was a far worse policy for the US than if they had done nothing at all.

3.  The email scandal is a big deal.  Mrs. Clinton committed serious crimes, both from the security and public records point of view, by channeling her official email through an unsecured private server, and than ordering her lawyers to wipe allegedly personal emails rather than preserving them.  She refused to collaborate with the State Department internal investigation, unlike every other SecState of the email era.  These crimes and derelictions would be sufficient, in the case of any other government employee, to ensure that the person would never work for the Federal government again.  Her conduct on this matter does not admit of any honest or even plausible defense.

4.  She is in thrall to the Black Lives Matter crowd and the Al Sharptons, who have spread the lie that police racism rather than black criminality is responsible for the disproportionate number of black men killed by police.

5.  She is a globalist on trade and immigration.

2+2=5 Director Comey loves Big Sister

In his prepared statement concluding the FBI criminal investigation, FBI Director James B. Comey states that "All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice." Director Comey explains exactly how Secretary of State Clinton engaged in "clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information" by using multiple unsecured devices: "Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain."
He also states the "vast quantities of material exposed" (over 2000 classified emails), and the efforts to obstruct justice by wiping out emails.
Director Comey sums up that "we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts."
2+2=5 Director Comey loves Big Sister.