Muslims Tell Europe: "One Day All This Will Be Ours" - Giulio Meotti

by Giulio Meotti

"Muslim believers know very well that their fertility is such today, that they call it... the Great Replacement. They tell you in a very calm, very positive way: One day all this, all this will be ours...".

• The Archbishop of Strasbourg Luc Ravel, nominated by Pope Francis in February, just declared that "Muslim believers know very well that their fertility is such today, that they call it... the Great Replacement. They tell you in a very calm, very positive way: One day all this, all this will be ours...".
• Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán just warned against a "Muslimized Europe". According to him, "the question of the upcoming decades is whether Europe will continue to belong to Europeans".
• "In the coming 30 years, the number of Africans will grow by more than one billion people. That is twice the population of the entire European Union... The demographic pressure will be enormous. Last year, more than 180,000 people crossed in shabby boats from Libya. And this is just the beginning. According to EU Commissioner Avramopoulos, at this very moment, 3 million migrants are waiting to enter Europe". — Geert Wilders, MP, The Netherlands, and leader of the Party for Freedom and Democracy (PVV).

This week, yet another Islamic terrorist attack targeted the Spanish city of Barcelona. As it was for many years under Muslim rule, it is, therefore, like Israel, land which many Islamists believe they are entitled to repossess.

At the same time, far from Spain, elementary schools have been closing, shuttered by the state after the number of children dropped to less than 10% of the population. The government is converting these structures into hospices, providing care for the elderly in a country where 40% of the people are 65 or older. That is not a science-fiction novel. That is Japan, the world's oldest and most sterile nation, where there is a popular expression: "ghost civilization".

According to Japan's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, by 2040 most of the country's smaller cities will see a dramatic drop of one-third to one-half of their population. Due to a dramatic demographic decrease, many Japanese councils can no longer operate and have been closed. Restaurants have decreased from 850,000 in 1990 to 350,000 today, pointing to a "drying up of vitality". Predictions also suggest that in 15 years, Japan will have 20 million empty houses. Is that also the future of Europe?

Among the experts in demography, there is a tendency to call Europe "the new Japan". Japan, however, is dealing with this demographic catastrophe with its own resources, and banning Muslim immigration to the country.

"Europe is committing demographic suicide, systematically depopulating itself in what British historian Niall Ferguson has called "the greatest sustained reduction in European population since the Black Death in the fourteenth century'", as George Weigel recently noted.

Europe's Muslims appear to be dreaming of filling this vacuum. The Archbishop of Strasbourg, Luc Ravel, nominated by Pope Francis in February, recently declared that "Muslim believers know very well that their fertility is such today, that they call it ... the Great Replacement. They tell you in a very calm, very positive way: 'One day all this, all this will be ours' ...".

A new report by the Italian think tank Centro Machiavelli just revealed that if current trends continue, by 2065 first- and second-generation immigrants will exceed 22 million persons, or more than 40% of Italy's total population. In Germany, as well, 36% of children under the age of five are being born to immigrant parents. In 13 of the 28 EU member countries, more people died than were born last year; without migration, the populations of Germany and Italy are expected to decline by 18% and 16%, respectively.

The impact of demographic free-fall is most visible in what was once called the "new Europe", the countries of the former Soviet bloc such as Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, to distinguish these from the so called "old Europe", France and Germany. Those Eastern countries are now the ones most exposed to the "depopulation bomb", the devastating collapse in birth rate that the current-events analyst and author Mark Steyn has called "the biggest issue of our time".

The New York Times asked why, "despite shrinking population, Eastern Europe resists accepting migrants". The shrinking demography is precisely the reason they fear being replaced by migrants. In addition, much of Eastern Europe has already experienced being occupied by Muslims for hundreds of years under the Ottoman Empire, and are all too well aware what would be in store for them were they to come there again. Aging countries fear the antipathetic values sure to appear if there were a replacement by the current young foreign population.

"There are two distinct views in Europe today to consider [regarding the decline and aging of the population]", Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán recently said. "One of these is held by those who want to address Europe's demographic problems through immigration. And there is another view, held by Central Europe – and, within it, Hungary. Our view is that we must solve our demographic problems by relying on our own resources and mobilising our own reserves, and – let us acknowledge it – by renewing ourselves spiritually". Orbán just warned against a "Muslimized Europe". According to him, "the question of the upcoming decades is whether Europe will continue to belong to Europeans".

Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán recently said: "Our view is that we must solve our demographic problems by relying on our own resources and mobilising our own reserves, and... by renewing ourselves spiritually". (Image source: David Plas/Wikimedia Commons)

Africa is also pressing Europe with a demographic time bomb. According to Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders:

"In the coming 30 years, the number of Africans will grow by more than one billion people. That is twice the population of the entire European Union... The demographic pressure will be enormous. One-third of the Africans want to move abroad, and many want to come to Europe. Last year, over 180,000 people crossed in shabby boats from Libya. And this is just the beginning. According to EU Commissioner Avramopoulos, at his very moment, 3 million migrants are waiting to enter Europe".

Eastern Europe is thinning out. Demography has even become a problem for Europe's security. There are fewer people to serve in Europe's military and social welfare posts. The President of Bulgaria, Georgi Parvanov, has, in fact, called on the country's leaders to attend a meeting of the national Consultative Committee entirely devoted to the problem of national security. Once Eastern European countries feared Soviet tanks; now, they fear empty cradles.

The United Nations estimated that there were about 292 million people in Eastern Europe last year, 18 million fewer than in the early 1990s. The number is equivalent to the disappearance of the entire population of the Netherlands.

The Financial Times had called this situation in Eastern Europe "the largest loss of population in modern history". Its population is shrinking as has no other before. Not even the Second World War, with its massacres, deportations and population movements, had come to that abyss.

Orbán's way -- dealing with a demographic decline using the country's own resources -- is the only way for Europe to avoid Archbishop's Ravel's prediction of a "great replacement". Mass immigration will most likely fill those empty cradles -- but Europe will then become also just a becomes a "ghost civilization"; it is just a different kind of suicide.

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.

APPENDIX

Romania will lose 22% of its population by 2050, followed by Moldova (20%), Latvia (19%), Lithuania (17%), Croatia (16%) and Hungary (16%). Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine are the countries where the population decline will be most severe. Poland's population is estimated to decrease by 2050 to 32 million from the current 38 million. Nearly 200 schools have closed, but there are enough children to fill the remaining ones.

In Central Europe, the proportion of "over 65s" increased by more than one-third between 1990 and 2010. The Hungarian population is at its lowest point in half a century. The number of people fell from 10,709,000 in 1980 to the current 9,986,000 million. In 2050, there will be fewer than 8 million people in Hungary; and one in three will be over the age of 65. Hungary today has a fertility rate of 1.5 children per woman. If you exclude the Roma population, this figure drops to 0.8, the lowest in the world -- the reason Prime Minister Orbán announced new measures to solve the demographic crisis.

Bulgaria will have the fastest population decline in the world between 2015 and 2050. Bulgaria is part of a group that is expected to decrease by more than 15% between 2015 to 2050, along with Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine. Bulgaria's population of about 7.15 million people is estimated to fall to 5.15 million in 30 years -- a decline of 27.9%.

Official figures show that 178,000 babies were born in Romania. By comparison, in 1990, the first post-Communist year, there were 315,000 births. Croatia last year had 32,000 births, a decline of 20% from 2015. The depopulation of Croatia could come to more than 50,000 people each year.

When the Czech Republic was part of the Communist bloc (as part of Czechoslovakia), its total fertility rate was conveniently close to the replacement rate (2.1). Today it is the fifth most barren country in the world. Slovenia has the highest GDP per capita in Eastern Europe, but an extremely low fertility rate.

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10748/europe-muslims-demography

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Destroy a state, not build one - Dr. Reuven Berko

by Dr. Reuven Berko

Israel erred when it accepted Umm al-Fahm from Jordan in 1949 • Proof of that lies in a 2006 manifesto from the Israeli Arab leadership and the ongoing murderous ideology of the city's native son, Raed Salah of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement.

Sheikh Raed Salah of the outlawed Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement | Photo credit: Yoav Ari Dudkevitch

Sheikh Raed Salah of the Islamic Movement, whose nerve center is in the city of Umm al-Fahm in northern Israel, was arrested this week for the umpteenth time after inciting to bloodshed at Al-Aqsa mosque. This activity, alongside the subversiveness of many senior members of the Joint Arab Party, threw a spotlight on the city's central role as a hotbed of terrorists and Islamic State recruits, most of whom belong to the Jabarin clan -- three members of which were responsible for the murder of two Border Police officers at Al Aqsa on July 14. 

There is no difference between Salah's movement and other Islamist terrorist organizations throughout the world. They all operate according to the Muslim Brotherhood's interpretation of Islam, and their message is clear: slaughtering minorities, Jews, and Christians; rape; and the destruction of mosques and churches. Salah's operational code called for the Islamic State model to move from Raqqa in Syria to Israel; Umm al-Fahm was supposed to become an isolated military city from which offenses were launched; and Jerusalem was supposed to look like the ruined Damascus. We got a glance of that scenario at the funerals of the Al-Aqsa murders, and from the terrorists and Islamic State volunteers from Umm al-Fahm who were raised on the diet of violence fed to them by Salah and his people. 

One of the main purposes of the nation-state bill is to prevent the democracy being exploited for purposes of subversiveness and incitement, which come both from the Islamists and from the political wing of the Israeli Arab leadership. The bill aims to protect the identity of the country and protect it from those who hate it. 

As a representative of those who seek to erase Israel from the regional map and make it into another Palestine like the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and Jordan, MK Yousef Jabareen from Umm al-Fahm has taken a stance against the bill. In an orderly legal document, MK Jabarin argued that "the bill increases inequality between the [Jewish and Arab] populations, and subjugates the Arab minority to the interests of the Jewish majority and ignores the ties of the Palestinian people to the homeland of their birth. The bill throws the legitimacy of Israel as a democracy into question in Israel and abroad." 

It turns out that Jabarin and his colleagues want to establish a "Palestine" that is "clean" of Jews in Judea and Samaria, but demand that Israel forgo its symbols, its flag, its menorah emblem and its national Jewish holidays and become a state "of all its citizens." His argument is based on U.N. Resolution 181, which addresses the establishment of two states, one Arab and one Jewish. According to Jabarin, a two-state constitution is supposed to "give every member of the opposing minority equal rights and protection under the law." But according to that citation, the equality applies only to "every person" and not to giving legitimacy to isolationist organization in the other state, as his hostile belief system calls to do. 

Indeed, "The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel" manifesto of 2006, brought to us by the National Committee for the Heads of the Arab Local Authorities in Israel, and whose legal chapter Jabareen wrote, demands "isolation as a group, a nation, autonomy, Palestinian in every aspect of life in the state," as well as a demand for enforced equality and an influence on the main body of government in Israel and its institutions, far beyond their demographic representation. 

You have to read it to believe it 

The arguments in the "Future Vision" and Jabareen's letter are worse than the demands themselves. You need to read them to believe them: they are based on "the Arabs of Israel being a 'native' minority to be protected, and should benefit from affirmative action," given the perception that "the Palestinian Arabs of Israel are the landlords and the Jews who invaded are the result of Western colonialism," as well as "the Jews forced a Jewish character on the state and prevented the natives, who are oppressed and who hold the true rights, from being able to conduct popular activity and a public struggle." 

And that's not all: "Israeli citizenship was forced on the Arabs to keep them oppressed," and "Israel intentionally prevents physical and spiritual national contact with Palestinians in the territories, enforces a culture of occupation, and treats the Arabs like a minority ethnic group and not as a single national Arab minority." Therefore, Jabareen concludes, "the Arab Israeli leadership refuses a Jewish, democratic Israel, as a wall that keeps Arabs from achieving equality." 

The documents also reject the nation-state bill and call to "rebuild Israel's political, social, and economic institutions by turning into an ordered democracy." The change, the documents say, will ensure "that both nation groups in the state will be balanced partners in government," and from a "balanced place at the table, the Jews will divide resources, land, and decision making and national symbols with the national Palestinian elected body, including a mutual veto." Under this arrangement, the Palestinians would be paid reparations, have equal rights to move to Israel, the "domestic refugees" would be able to return to their cities and villages, and the Muslim Waqf and the Christian and Muslim holy sites will be under the exclusive control of the Palestinians." 

A short-lived partnership 

These ideas unite Arab MKs who are atheists, communists, militants, and radical leftists with Salah's Islamist agenda, despite the knowledge that most of the Arab population rejects the Islamist regression, its laws, its dress code, and its takeover, and it's clear that this partnership is short-lived. 

But most of the Arab MKs, who swore an oath of allegiance in the Knesset, hypocritically incite to enact this Islamist agenda, which actually threatens both the Palestinian Authority and the moderate Arab states. They support Hezbollah, Hamas terrorism, rioting, propaganda (Al Jazeera), fanning the interreligious conflict at Al-Aqsa, and international condemnation of Israel. In doing so, they also create Arab antagonism to the Palestinian issue. 

It's amazing: representatives of the Arab minority, which makes up some 20% of the population, are trying to enforce their wishes on the country's solid 80% majority. If the "native, oppressed" people of the Triangle region of Arab towns "on whom citizenship was forced," wanted to implement their vision, they would unite their homes, their land, and their property with their brothers in the Palestinian Authority and build their own "native" majority state. Without oppression, without "apartheid." But the oppressed refuse to do that. They don't want to build a state; they want to destroy one. 

There are also some who dream of "resistance" as a whitewashed term for terrorism. The blow that the rioters of October 2000 sustained quelled that desire a bit. If the Arab MKs and Salah manage to kick up riots similar to the "October events," it would be a Pyrrhic victory for their voters. 

Israel erred when it accepted Umm al-Fahm from Jordan in 1949, and when it included the villages around Jerusalem in the municipality. A withdrawal and "transfer to Israel" will fix that. Yes, under the "Umm al-Fahm first" plan, Israel is to withdraw -- as it did from Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip -- and close the city's western border. In doing so, Israel will help make the "Future Vision" a reality.

Dr. Reuven Berko

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=44739

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Is a Tolerant Culture Being Replaced by an Intolerant One? - Saher Fares

by Saher Fares

Volumes of revered Islamic texts establish in great detail the grounds of violence and oppression of non-believers and those deemed heretical. These supposed grounds -- are childishly dismissed by Western liberals as immaterial.

• One need not go back centuries to the Muslim conquest of the Christian late classical world -- the medieval Barbary corsair raids, the Ottoman yoke in Central and Eastern Europe or the slave markets of Kaffa in Tatar Muslim Crimea -- to understand that this violence clearly predates the European colonial era, the creation of the modern state of Israel, or the issue of climate change.
• Countries such as China, Nigeria or Kenya that are not Western, not "imperialist", not whatever the excuses that Islamists make, are still spectacularly attacked by similar stabbings. Month on month, there seems almost nowhere that Islamic terror did not strike.
• Volumes of revered Islamic texts establish in great detail the grounds of violence and oppression of non-believers and those deemed heretical. These supposed grounds -- made alive daily in madrassas and mosques across the world before being acted upon by religiously-trained terrorists -- are childishly dismissed by Western liberals as immaterial.
• The first step towards a solution is to question the received knowledge tirelessly dished out by media pundits in the West. What is lacking is simply seeing a huge body of evidence of theological justification for Islamist terror.

How thin can excuses wear every time an atrocity is committed in the name of Islam?

When 13 people were killed and scores more injured this week in a vehicle-ramming attack in Barcelona, Spain, and stabbing men shouting "This is for Allah!" on London Bridge and in Borough Market in June, what the victims least cared about was the Western elite pontificating that the latest atrocity "had nothing to do with Islam".

British Prime Minister Theresa May said, "It is time to say enough is enough" and promised a review of her country's counter-terrorism strategy.

In the absence, however, of an honest and tempered look at the root causes of this terrorism, sacred or not, and a painful soul-searching by Muslims themselves of the grounds in their religion that give rise to such violence, it will never be "enough".

On June 4, British PM Theresa May said, "It is time to say enough is enough" and promised a review of her country's counter-terrorism strategy. In the absence, however, of an honest look at the root causes of this terrorism, and a painful soul-searching by Muslims of the grounds in their religion that give rise to such violence, it will never be "enough". (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

One need not go back centuries to the Muslim conquest of the Christian late classical world -- the medieval Barbary corsair raids, the Ottoman yoke in Central and Eastern Europe or the slave markets of Kaffa in Tatar Muslim Crimea -- to understand that this violence clearly predates the European colonial era, the creation of the modern state of Israel, or the issue of climate change.

Only a fortnight ago, 29 Christian Copts were killed for refusing to say, "There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet" while on a trip to an Egyptian monastery on May 26. Separately, an unconfirmed number of Christians were killed and taken hostage by a mix of Saudi, Pakistani, Chechen, Moroccan and local jihadists in the southern Philippines during the past few weeks. In addition, 90 people were killed in a bombing in Kabul on May 31, and 26 people were killed at an ice cream parlor in Baghdad during Ramadan. None of these massacres had anything to do with "Bush's war" in Iraq or U.S. President Donald J. Trump's proposed "Muslim ban".

Countries such as China, Nigeria or Kenya that are not Western, not "imperialist", not whatever the excuses that Islamists make, are still spectacularly attacked by similar stabbings. Month on month, there seems almost nowhere Islamic terror did not strike. In January 2014, there the kidnapping and forced conversion of Christian Chibok girls by Boko Haram in Nigeria. In March 2014, there were stabbings at China's Kunming Railway Station in by eight terrorists of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement -- male and female attackers pulled out long-bladed knives and stabbed and slashed passengers. In May 2014, there was the shooting at the Jewish Museum in Brussels. In June 2014, there was the murder of 48 people in Mpeketoni in Kenya, and the list goes on for just the first half of 2014 alone.

The slaughter at London's Parliament Square; the Manchester Arena; the St. Petersburg Metro; Paris's Bataclan Theater and sports stadium; the three bombings targeting travelers in Brussels; last Christmas's truck-ramming attack on a packed festival market in Berlin, to name but a few of the further incidents -- all really had nothing to do with avenging the Congolese from the onerous legacy of King Leopold.

Rather, volumes of revered Islamic texts establish in great detail the grounds of violence and oppression of non-believers and those deemed heretical. These supposed grounds -- made alive daily in madrassas and mosques across the world before being acted upon by religiously trained terrorists -- are childishly dismissed by Western liberals as immaterial.

Meanwhile, men, women and children are being offered as human sacrifices on the altar of political cynicism. Divine justice will doubtlessly judge not only the murderers and a creed that often seems bloodthirsty, but also those who insist, against all evidence, that this creed has nothing to do with those deaths.

The first step towards a solution is to question the received knowledge tirelessly dished out by media pundits in the West, and confirmed by too many supposed Muslim "moderates" both at home and abroad. What is lacking is simply seeing a huge body of evidence of theological justification for Islamist terror.


Have the statements by politicians in the 1990s (for example, at the time of Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman's plot against the World Trade Center) changed from those uttered in the wake of 9/11, or again from those repeated after the San Bernardino attack in 2015? Do politicians give their "Islam is a religion of peace" platitudes out of political expediency or even the slightest knowledge of the ideology of Islam? Do they know actually know more about Islam than many of Islam's learned ulema (scholars), including Ibn Taymiyyah, or the authentic hadith (actions and sayings of Muhammad)? One says:

"Allah's Apostle said, 'I have been sent with the shortest expressions bearing the widest meanings, and I have been made victorious with terror.'" (Sahih Al-Bukhari 122)

How does one read verses in the Quran such as:

"I will instil terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers. Smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them. This is because they contended against Allah and His Messenger. If any contend against Allah and His Messenger, Allah is strict in punishment." (8:12-13)?

When it is said that Islam has nothing to do with verses such as these, is that meant to appease Muslims, comfort the victims of Islamic terror or support the comfort of the non-Muslim community? If it is the first, well, as history teaches, appeasement simply does not work. Besides, it would be an offensive to presume that Muslims, all Muslims, are to be held responsible for a creed that, in their own understanding of it, greatly varies from one individual to another. If the denial is intended to comfort victims, it does not. And as for the comfort of the non-Muslim community, what is being served up has to be based on what is visibly true. Should such arguments not first be pitched to try to convince those who are willing to kill and be killed in the name of Islam, rather than to those out to have a good time on a Saturday evening?

Will the time come when reformers in the Islamic world will have louder voices in scrutinizing Islam -- despite the obvious dangers to their lives -- than Western elites, who are merely afraid of being falsely accused of being "Islamophobes"? Why should it be "Islamophobic" to want to defend yourself?


For nearly two years, a prime-time TV program by a young Egyptian reformist, Islam el-Beheiry, has called for an overhaul of the millennium-old compilation of hadiths. He argues that much of it is incompatible with modernity and the best understanding of divinity and prophethood:

"Such tradition has very little good amid a multitude of evil, least of which is the insistence by all the Four Schools of Sunni Islam that Christians can be killed with impunity. A Muslim life is 'superior' to that of a non-Muslim. Such is the Ijmaa' (jurisprudence consensus)."

Beheiry was sentenced in May 2015 to five years in prison with hard labor for "defamation of religion" -- thanks to Egypt's blasphemy law. The sentence was reduced in December 2015 to one year. After serving most of his sentence, he was released on a presidential pardon.

Still, this Ramadan 2017, Beheiry was back again on the screen with a program he calls "The Map", in which he is trying to build a scientific way of judging what he thinks is divine and what is not in the mass of Islamic literature.

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, an army general who in 2014 came to power following vast street protests against the short-lived rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, said it was no longer feasible that the Muslim World would set itself "in enmity against the whole world".

Now, in Europe, some rightly ask: If one in a thousand is a bad apple, why should we judge all the apples. One also needs to ask: If one in a thousand apple blows up in my yard, how many more violent incidents will Europe get after bringing in a cartload of millions more? Or, what if the problem is not really with the fruit, but with the tree itself?

Why is a desire to preserve one's own culture deemed racist? I do not believe that I am better because I am or am not a Muslim. Is it "xenophobic" to ask such questions when the violence keeps edging closer and closer to home? Why should it be "Islamophobic" to want to defend yourself?


I do not fear Muslims, but I fear that a tolerant culture is being replaced by an intolerant, misogynistic, anti-Semitic and supremacist one -- espoused, even semi-consciously, by much of the Islamic world today. It is a world that is being assured by its scholars that such intolerant, misogynistic, anti-Semitic and supremacist manifestations are, in all ages, in the best spirit of Islam.

Is it "Islamophobic" to be angry at such atrocities committed every day, or to be angry at politicians who lie about what Islam is and is not, and merely call their challengers names while failing to do anything to stop the atrocities?

Should European courts and parliaments criminalize free speech that criticizes this understanding of Islam among the bulk of Islamic jurists, when those jurists stand at the head of an assembly-line of suicide bombers targeting Western nationals?

Should those who ask questions about Islamic terror be ostracized by the mainstream media and academia, while those institutions themselves give no answers to the jihadist problem of "holy hate" in our midst?


I do not wish the world to turn against Muslims. I only wish the sages would stop and think if all this really has "nothing to do with Islam." Can we not say, "stop justifying murderers in the name of your religion"?


Can we not simply say that such creeds will not be allowed here in the West, will not be whitewashed, glossed over, or explained away by Westerners through a mixture of cultural cringe and a misguided sense of guilt? Can we not reject jihad, accept apostasy, and be able freely to ask questions in our public spaces, on our television shows, in our schools and on our streets?

Saher Fares is an Arabic linguist and researcher from the Middle East.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10521/intolerant-culture

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Charlottesville Is Not about the Forces of Good vs. the Forces of Evil - Abraham H. Miller

by Abraham H. Miller

The chaos in Charlottesville is about two groups of fascists taunting each other in the public square and fighting it out.

If President Trump called out each right-wing bigot that invaded Charlottesville, it would not be enough. Some obsessive Trump antagonist standing behind the arc of Klieg lights while holding a microphone would find that somehow, somewhere, he had left out something.

If there is anything we can agree on, say liberal pundits, it is that fascism is evil, and Trump should have rushed to condemn them after the vehicular assault on demonstrators.

James Fields, the alleged perpetrator of the vehicular assault in Charleston, is identified as a white nationalist but belonged to no group. Moreover, he seems to be mentally ill.

The Army discharged Fields after a few months in a manner that bespeaks mental problems -- but let’s not raise that issue. It will prevent us from feeling sanctimonious about condemning the right.

We most certainly would not want to put Fields in the same category as Major Nidal Hassan, He committed that act of workplace violence at Fort Hood, slaughtering fellow soldiers while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

When former attorney general Eric Holder jumped into the discussion of the Charlottesville vehicular killing, calling it terrorism, he was summarily mocked for his contrasting depiction of Hassan as merely a perpetrator of workplace violence. The hypocrisy was palpable.

Of course, nearly everyone wants Trump to condemn only the right. Far be it for us to examine the politics of the left.

If we think of fascism as a system of authoritarian rule, the suppression of basic liberties, a belief system organized around hatred for the “other” and the inevitability and glory of war (or violence) as a solution to political problems, there were a lot of candidates for the label in the streets of Charlottesville. Some of them were most definitely from the left.

If we can all agree that fascists should be condemned, let’s not stop with the neo-Nazis and white nationalists, let’s demand that the President condemn all the fascists.

The American Jewish Committee has called on President Trump to condemn the far-right groups in Charlottesville. Let us disabuse them of the idea that only the far right is anti-Semitic. One thing nearly every one of the major groups in the street shared is their antipathy toward Jews.

Yet the AJC depicted the events in Charleston as a conflict between the voices of hate and those who chose to stop hate in its tracks. We wonder if the AJC bothers to read the news or just dreams up this material. Since when are Black Lives Matter and Antifa concerned about stopping hate, especially hatred against Jews?

While progressive Jews were being warriors for social justice and the causes of others, the far left and their Muslim allies were building intersectionality, whose very foundation is anti-Semitism. 

Intersectionality singles out the world’s only Jewish state as a source of oppression and the denial of human rights. Not only is the characterization mindless, but every Muslim state busy stoning gays and female rape victims is given a pass.

That’s why Jews and Jewish symbols were bluewashed from Chicago’s Dyke March and Jews were found to be of insufficient virtue to participate in the city’s Slut Walk.

Jews should have seen the signs. They were much earlier ostracized from Occupy Wall Street.
Black Lives Matter has embraced every anti-Semitic trope found in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel. BLM’s anti-Semitic founding document could have been penned by Hamas.

BLM’s offshoot the Dreamer Defenders received the Potemkin Village tour of Jerusalem and came back spewing every asinine accusation about Israeli apartheid and oppression. It’s a wonder their tour guide provided by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (the people who created airline hijacking) did not show them pictures of Israelis drawing blood from Palestinian children to make matzos.

The Antifa thrives on violence and wreaks havoc wherever it gathers. Violence is its calling card, raising the question of whether the high on violence is as much a motivation for protesting as are the political issues. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, who covered Charlottesville for the New York Times, spontaneously tweeted about Antifa’s violence and hate. Subsequently, she corrected her tweet. It obviously departed from the acceptable leftist narrative.

The chaos in Charlottesville is about two groups of fascists taunting each other in the public square and fighting it out.

Whether one is a greater threat to civilization than the other is a question for debate, but let us not indulge the silly fantasy of Charlottesville being a conflict between the forces of good and the forces of evil.

President Trump was correct in condemning all the violence in Charlottesville, and no matter what he did, there are those who would ineluctably find fault with his words. 

Abraham H. Miller

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/08/charlottesville_is_not_about_the_forces_of_good_v_the_forces_of_evil.html

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The Forbidden Faction: Stigmatizing White Identity Politics - Michael Thau

by Michael Thau

Many have -- pointed out that Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe and local officials appear to have intentionally pushed the peaceably assembled "Unite the Right" marchers into the Antifa mob

In his response to last Saturday's horrific events in Charlottesville, President Trump became the first Republican politician to stand up to the bullying tactics the corporate press uses to enforce its delusional narrative about political hatred and violence in America. Most of the sympathetic commentary has rightly praised him for refusing to minimize Antifa's role and, by extension, calling attention the wave of left-wing violence over the past year that the corporate press has gone out of its way to keep hidden. Many have also pointed out that Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe and local officials appear to have intentionally pushed the peaceably assembled "Unite the Right" marchers into the Antifa mob, and that McAuliffe and local Democratic Party officials who let armed and masked men roam the streets of Charlottesville deserve most of the blame and ought to be prosecuted, punished, and ruined for their despicable designs.

The rest of the sympathetic commentary has mostly focused on the president's brave defense of the legitimacy of monuments to the Confederate dead and his pointing out that the logical conclusion of demolishing and removing them will be the denigration of our nation's founders. But there's been mostly silence concerning his remark that not all the "Unite to Right" protesters were vile people who deserved what they got, regardless of how illegal and repulsive the mechanism of delivery was. Those supporting the president have largely been content with granting the corporate media's assumption that the legally assembled marchers were all white supremacist Nazi yahoos and only insisting that their Antifa opponents were no better. This is not without reason, since discussing whether any of the Unite the Right protesters might have legitimate concerns beyond the destruction of historical monuments takes us well outside the Overton window of current acceptable public discourse.

But the president's remarks did move that window a fair bit away from corporate media-propagated delusions and toward reality, and perhaps the rest of us can now move it a bit farther.

Some of the marchers' dress unquestionably showed a glorification of Nazism. My German Jewish paternal grandparents were killed by the Nazis; if what I was told as a child is accurate, they were forced to dig their own graves and then machine-gunned into them. My father managed to escape by staying a little ahead of the German army as it marched eastward. He wound up in Moscow, where he met my Russian Jewish mother. Hitler had no more love for the Slavic part of my mother's heritage than he did for the Semitic one. He called the Slavic people "a mass of born slaves," and the Nazis intentionally starved over 3 million Russian prisoners of war to death.

Those Nazi-worshipers at the "Unite the Right" rally shouldn't be allowed the delusion that the pathetic loser they idolize, whose greatest contribution to history is a nuclear-armed Jewish state, was in any way a champion of white folks. Nor should we accept their delusions and call them "Nazis." They are sorry fools who are as taken in by Hollywood's stock choice of villains as their Antifa counterparts, and who respond by cosplaying as Nazis. Despite what Hollywood teaches, the ideology they worship was particular to Germany and was destroyed in WWII, and they are no more real Nazis than a psychopath who files his teeth and wears a black cape is a real vampire. If he's dangerous, of course the law must take him down. But we don't dignify and feed his pathetic delusions by yielding to them.

Pathetic Nazi cosplayers were, by all the available evidence, few and far between among those protesting the destruction of monuments commemorating the Confederate Civil War dead. But, though only a minority were worshipers of a failed 20th-century German ideology built by one of history's greatest losers, I do believe that all were there to do more than protest the destruction of historically significant monuments. They were also protesting to promote the forbidden idea that there's nothing wrong with white Christian Americans advocating for their group or being proud of their heritage.

If I wanted to form another Jewish advocacy group to add to the many already existing ones, no one would bat an eye. And this is true even though Jews have substantially more political and economic power, given our proportion of the population, than white Christians could ever hope to attain. If a couple of Asians wanted to form an Asian advocacy group, that would be perfectly acceptable as well, even though, as a group, they too are socioeconomically better off than white Christians. Jews and Asians are also generally successful enough to be insulated from the negative effects of affirmative action and the importation of cheap third-world labor.

White middle- and lower-class Christians bear the brunt of globalism's destruction of the American working middle class. As a result, deaths from alcohol and drug poisoning, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease have risen dramatically for them. Leading scholars on both the right and the left proclaim that white Americans are in crisis, and, though they don't typically add the "Christian" qualifier, it's understood that the population is almost exclusively of Christian descent. Many of them had ancestors here long before my parents were admitted as refugees, and many had fathers and grandfathers who helped defeat the real-life Nazis who killed my grandparents. Yet they alone among all the ethnic groups in America are automatically branded as "repellent racists" if they make any attempts to organize to protect or enlarge their slice of the pie or even suggest that it might just possibly be okay to express pride in their heritage. When moderate and reasonable advocacy gets shouted down and falsely branded as hateful, all that's left is the sort of outlandish but nonviolent ideas of Richard Spencer and the much more outlandish and violent ones of Nazi cosplayers.

One way to normalize abhorrent ideas is to present them as normal. But another more insidious way is to silence reasonable concerns by conflating them with abhorrent ones so that the space for normal people to express their reasonable concerns is eliminated, and the only ideas and leaders left to follow are extremist. Tucker Carlson is right that rampant identity politics cuts against the idea of our being a single nation united by the bonds of citizenry. But I'm sure he's not foolish enough to think the identity politics permitted as a matter of course to everyone except white Christians has any hope of disappearing anytime soon. And he's certainly right that extremist white identity politics is the natural and expected reaction if all reasonable means white Christians have for addressing legitimate concerns are automatically branded hateful and extreme.

It's both appalling and self-destructive for sensible people to buy into the idea that all the marchers who suffered a government-planned assault in Charlottesville are repellent racists and yahoos for wanting to defend and show pride in their own in the same way every other ethnic group in America can and, indeed, is encouraged to. If the crisis in their community isn't enough to justify allowing them the same space to organize and be proud that every other subdivision of American citizens has and shows no willingness to abandon, what happened to them in Charlottesville, which everyone knows wouldn't have conceivably been allowed to happen to any other group, is more than enough justification for doing so. For people worried about Richard Spencer's extreme and impossible ideas, and the far worse hateful ideas of Nazi cosplayers, the surest way to increase their following is to continue to stigmatize reasonable concerns and maliciously and hysterically brand all attempts to address them, no matter how reasonable and peaceful, as hateful.


Michael Thau has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton. He works as a freelance ghostwriter and content marketer and blogs at A Clearer Picture. He can be reached there or at thauwordsmith@gmail.com.

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/08/the_forbidden_faction_stigmatizing_white_identity_politics.html

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Uphold independence of thought - Dror Eydar

by Dror Eydar

radical left-wing organizations -- have penetrated the heart of the Democratic Party and are dictating the discourse, so even fair Democratic elected officials aren't able to oppose the stupidity without encountering a media lynch.

1.

The lines between the different political camps are becoming more and more clear. The herd of individuals, where everyone things exactly the same and there is no one who will so much as peep out of tune with the chorus, vs. the free thinkers, who are not giving in to the media's violent attempt to educate us about what to think and to what extent we should observe the commandment to be horrified. 

U.S. President Donald Trump did not condemn the riots in Charlottesville in the exact manner that would have satisfied the political correctness crazies. Indeed, if it had been up to me, I would have written him more stringent remarks. But the thought that he did not address neo-Nazism severely is utterly ridiculous (he went back and explained his intention) and aimed at delegitimizing him and the people who voted for him. We are very familiar with that tactic. 

2.

The more I went back and watched his response to the incident, the less I got the impression that his remarks were "the strongest defense of racism and white supremacy by a senior American politician since the 1960s," as journalist Nadav Eyal irresponsibly wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth. It was certainly no "defense of American Nazism," as Eyal went on to say with appalling righteousness. Eyal didn't rest until he had compared Trump to Nero (!), the same tyrant who according to legend fiddled while Rome was burning. Nothing less. What will happen when all the possible comparisons are used up -- will we get to Hitler? 

As crazy as it sounds, even this was heard in the storm of insanity that gripped the leftist media. Hemi Shalev lost it in the "defeated" family newspaper Haaretz: "He [Trump] gave the supporters of the Ku Klux Klan and fans of Adolf Hitler a present more valuable than gold." Nice, right? And here's more of Shalev's nice spirit: "The president of the U.S. helps Nazis, anti-Semites, and racists." Take a look at his article and you'll see that there wasn't a curse or insult Shalev didn't include in his ridiculous piece against Trump. 

3.

The joke is that for decades, this righteous bunch -- which moralizes to everyone other than themselves -- were the main propagandists for the biggest murderers of Jews since World War II. PLO founder Yasser Arafat was, for them, an innocent statesman who wanted to make peace, while Israel was responsible for preventing it. The leaders of the worldwide Left worshipped almost every regime of terror that opposed the West: They supported Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hezbollah, Hamas, and more. For them, Israel is worse than the Nazis. At almost every left-wing demonstration in the U.S. and Europe, no matter what it's about, we can find anti-Israeli-ism, which is just anti-Semitism in disguise. 

True, we need to fight neo-Nazis without compromise and condemn them in every way possible, but sick individuals like David Duke can be dealt with easily. He will remain on the fringes of the American Right. The same cannot be said for radical left-wing organizations: They penetrated the heart of the Democratic Party and are dictating the discourse, so even fair Democratic elected officials aren't able to oppose the stupidity without encountering a media lynch. 

4.

What disturbed the Left was the accusation that they were violent in Charlottesville, too. It's true; leftist violence also exists. Do you remember the violent demonstrations immediately after Trump was elected president or at the G-20 summit? And it's not just physical violence: Who is it that silences conservative and right-wing lecturers on university campuses -- Mother Theresa? Who consistently and evilly fights against the existence of the only Jewish state and against its right to defend itself from its enemies -- the Ku Klux Klan, or the multitude of left-wing organization that hide behind hazy "human rights," which mean rights for everyone except Jews?

Here's the rule: When everywhere you turn you see unity and an ideological phalanx that force us to think one way and not another and try to force us to see reality in only one way, you need people of truth who will battle this steamroller of consciousness and present alternative ideas. 

5.

It's hard to believe the moral horror that is enveloping us from every side. We didn't see it in other cases, for example when former President Barack Obama addressed the terrorist shooting in the Hyper Cacher market in Paris in January 2015 that murdered several Jews as "random shots fired at a group of people." What was that, if not politically correct forgiveness for an anti-Semitic murder? Would you have imagined a front page like the one we saw from Yedioth Ahronoth on Thursday, with its hollow headline "The disgrace"? They won't give us a moral stamp of approval. Our sages taught us: "Adorn yourself before adorning others" (Bava Batra 60b), that is, act properly before requiring others to do so.

Dror Eydar

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=19711

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Vehicular Jihad Comes to Barcelona - Robert Spencer

by Robert Spencer

Meanwhile, on CNN, the denial and willful ignorance continue.

In Spain Thursday, a man drove a truck into a crowd at Barcelona’s popular Costa Dorada area, killing at least 13 and injuring 100. On CNN, Wolf Blitzer asked, “There will be questions about copycats. Questions, if what happened in Barcelona, was at all, at all, a copycat version of what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia.”

No, Wolf, it was a phenomenon with which you and your CNN colleagues have only a glancing familiarity: Islamic jihad. Of course Wolf Blitzer immediately reached for a connection with Charlottesville, because he most likely doesn’t believe that there are Islamic jihadis at all, just mentally ill lone wolves driven to violence by “Islamophobia.” Jihad doesn’t fit his network’s narrative. And vehicular jihad? Wolf has never heard of such a thing.

Last June, the Islamic State published a poster depicting an SUV driving over a heap of skulls and bearing the legend “Run Over Them Without Mercy.”

And the Islamic State issued this call in September 2014:

So O muwahhid, do not let this battle pass you by wherever you may be. You must strike the soldiers, patrons, and troops of the tawaghit. Strike their police, security, and intelligence members, as well as their treacherous agents. Destroy their beds. Embitter their lives for them and busy them with themselves. If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be….If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him….

Many Muslims in the West have heeded this call. The man who rented the van used in the Barcelona attack was a Muslim from Morocco named Driss Oukabier, who was arrested, while one of his apparent accomplices was killed in a gun battle with police. This could have been just one part of a much larger jihad plot, as Spanish police now believe that a massive explosion in a house in Alcanar, 120 miles south of Barcelona, was also linked to the Barcelona jihad plotters.

There have been many other vehicular jihad attacks. Just last week in France, a Muslim named Hamou Bachir hit six French soldiers with his car in Levallois-Perret, where the headquarters of the DGSI (General Directorate for Internal Security), the country’s primary counter-terrorism intelligence agency, are located. In June, a Muslim drove his car into a crowd on the London Bridge and then jumped out and started stabbing people. We have seen several other vehicular jihadis get out of the car after they plowed into pedestrians, and start stabbing people. In June 2015, a Muslim in Austria drove his car into a crowd, killing three, and then got out and stabbed passersby. Then in November 2016, a Muslim student at Ohio State University named Abdul Razak Ali Artan drove his car into a crowd, then got out and stabbed several others.

There have been many others in 2016 and this year: in Nice, in Berlin, in Jerusalem, in Paris, and elsewhere. Yet on CNN and elsewhere in the establishment media, no analysts have connected the dots between these jihad attacks, which have an obvious connection with one another in sharing the same motivating ideology and the same goal. But Wolf Blitzer readily sees a wholly imaginary connection between Charlottesville (in which a neo-Nazi was imitating jihadis, not the other way around) and Barcelona, because he wishes to exaggerate the importance and influence of white supremacists, while minimizing the magnitude of the jihad threat.

And so it goes in the daily news of the contemporary West: another jihad massacre, and another reason to turn off CNN.

Robert Spencer

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/267619/vehicular-jihad-comes-barcelona-robert-spencer

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Sharpton Targets The Jefferson Memorial - Matthew Vadum

by Matthew Vadum

The Left’s Cultural Revolution accelerates.

Racial arsonist Al Sharpton is demanding the federal government shut down the historic Jefferson Memorial in the nation’s capital because the long-dead president honored by the monument owned slaves.                    
                                       
Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president, the man who wrote the justly revered Declaration of Independence, is also the man who penned this noble sentence: "I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." Perhaps he was thinking of future Al Sharptons when he wrote it.

Boiled down, this is a case where one of the most important, heroic, inspirational, intellectually robust, accomplished, and beloved figures in American history is under assault by one of the most repulsive, cowardly, sociopathic, intellectually deficient, unaccomplished, and despised figures in American history.

It was President John F. Kennedy who said at a White House dinner honoring a cohort of Nobel Prize winners from across the Western hemisphere:

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

“Someone once said that Thomas Jefferson was a gentleman of 32 who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, and dance the minuet,” Kennedy said April 29, 1962.

No one has ever said anything similar about the dullard Sharpton, a vicious left-wing community organizer who, through his hate-filled racist and anti-Semitic rants, has gotten people killed.

That anyone would care what a racial-hoax-generating charlatan thinks of Jefferson’s legacy is a revealing and sad commentary on the profound damage that eight long years of Barack Obama’s racial agitations inflicted on America. Sharpton himself is a living example of this ugliness and depravity; recall that President Obama made the vile so-called community leader a trusted confidant and brought his friends, the pro-cop-killer leaders of Black Lives Matter, to the White House as honored guests.

Black Lives Matter is cheerleading the destruction of the republic. In light of recent events, Black Lives Matter Chicago is effectively demanding the repeal of the First Amendment. “After WWII, Germany outlawed the Nazis, their symbols, salutes & their flags. All confederate flags & statue, & groups should be illegal,” the group tweeted.

Minutes later it added, "The fact that the Confederate flag & statues permeate the south is evidence that white supremacy was never overthrown in the United States."

Except maybe for the abolition of slavery, Jim Crow, and the advent of civil rights laws. Oops.

But this desire to settle scores by shutting down the Jefferson Memorial is part of the Maoist-style cultural revolution unleashed by the Left in the Obama era and amplified exponentially in the Trump era. Every day or so there is a new fake, race-related outrage amplified by the dishonest mainstream media and cheered on by the resurgent left-wing fascist movement known as antifa, which has been embraced in recent days by the so-called conservatives at National Review and Weekly Standard, as well as by Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Marco Rubio. Tearing down statues has suddenly become fashionable and plenty of establishment Republicans and conservatives are apparently fine with the mayhem.

They are aligning themselves with people like Al Sharpton who told CBS host Charlie Rose: “When you look at the fact that public monuments are supported by public funds you’re asking me to subsidize the insult of my family.”

“I would repeat that the public should not be paying to uphold somebody who has had that kind of background,” Sharpton said. “You have private museums, you have other things that you may want to do there.”

Jefferson “had slaves and children with his slaves,” he continued. “And it does matter.”

Well, it doesn’t matter as much as Sharpton suggests and the claim Jefferson fathered children by a female slave or slaves may not even be true. The story started circulating in the form of a political attack on Jefferson. DNA testing in recent years has revealed that Jefferson, or any of two dozen of his male relatives, may have fathered the children of Sally Hemings, a slave he owned.

Nor should the fact that someone in the past owned slaves when it was lawful and socially acceptable necessarily invalidate all of the person’s accomplishments. Slavery, which everyone today – except for parts of the Muslim world and perhaps a handful of spots elsewhere – acknowledges is a horrible, inhumane institution, used to be a well-accepted fact of life essentially everywhere in the world. At the time, slaves were property, after all; owners could more or less do what they wanted with them, no matter what we think of the institution today.

This does not excuse what we now consider to be bad behavior from the past but it does place it in its proper context. Jefferson, whether he turned a single slave he owned into a concubine, helped to lay the foundation for its eventual abolition in the United States. Lamenting the scourge of slavery, Jefferson famously wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just[.]”

When the Thirteen Colonies decided to break away from the British Empire, their leaders believed the new nation had to be as large and powerful as possible to survive, even if that meant allowing slavery in some of the new states. The Framers of the Constitution were largely opposed, and even embarrassed by slavery, which helps to explain why the Constitution forbade the importation of slaves after 1808 and did not even mention slaves or slavery. The compromise that allowed slaves to count as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of congressional apportionment wasn’t intended as an insult to the enslaved blacks, as Sharpton and other leftist demagogues routinely assert. It was inserted in the document to limit the voting power of the slave states in the hope that slavery could one day be abolished, or at least limited.

“One cannot question the genuineness of Jefferson’s liberal dreams,” historian David Brion Davis has written. “He was one of the first statesmen in any part of the world to advocate concrete measures for restricting and eradicating Negro slavery.”

So Jefferson embodies the contradictions of the American founding itself. When we condemn him, we condemn this great experiment in self-government we call the United States of America.

We can still respect and admire Jefferson even if he slept with a slave in his household, an allegation that has not been proven.

Something that Sharpton fails to grasp, or may be choosing to ignore, is that applying the ideas or moral standards of today to a bygone age is a very dangerous game that some call presentism. It is a recipe for disaster and it reflects the Whig view of history, a laughable school of thought that holds that progress toward enlightenment and other good things is constant and inevitable. Another way of putting is, things have never been better than they are today and each day things get better. It is not easily reconciled with the onset of the Dark Ages that followed the collapse of the violent but civilizing Roman Empire.

(One of the best explications of the icon-smashing, anti-Jefferson position is a piece, “Thomas Jefferson: Radical and Racist,” penned by Irish writer Conor Cruise O’Brien in 1996. Whether Sharpton has, or even could, read it, is unclear.)

And if the statue of Jefferson in his memorial is toppled as Sharpton demands, what happens next?

The U.S. Capitol and the White House were built with slave labor. By Sharpton’s logic, they too must be torn down.

If the same principle is applied consistently, everything associated with slave-owning presidents will have to come down.

A lot of pages will have to be ripped out of American history textbooks, faces painted out of historic works of art, and statues melted down or pulverized. The creators of PhotoShop will make a mint.

A quarter of the nation’s presidents will suddenly become unpersons.

Twelve (or 13 if you count James Buchanan – see below) of the nation’s 45 presidents owned slaves, and eight of them owned slaves while president. (Actually, there have only been 44 individuals who served as president – Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, served two nonconsecutive terms.)

Those who owned slaves while president were George Washington, Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, John Tyler, James K. Polk, and Zachary Taylor. Those who owned slaves but not while serving as president are Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S. Grant.

James Buchanan is a special case. In his home state of Pennsylvania, slavery was illegal. It could be said that he was not a slave owner de jure but was one de facto. While thinking about running for higher office, it donned on him that his sister’s ownership of two slaves in the then-slave state of Virginia could hurt him politically so he purchased them and made them indentured servants, bound to him for a fixed period of time. Historians Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund say many free blacks of the era lived in a sort of “twilight zone between slavery and freedom” in the Keystone State.

Tearing down statues of presidents that modern-day Americans may not even have heard of – thanks to the union-dominated public education system – benefits no one except maybe for demolition companies, the occasional real estate developer, and direct-mail firms servicing Democrats.

No good can come of it.

Matthew Vadum, senior vice president at the investigative think tank Capital Research Center, is an award-winning investigative reporter and author of the book, "Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers."

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/267626/sharpton-targets-jefferson-memorial-matthew-vadum

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