Why There Are No Christian Terrorists

Ralph Sidway on Raymond Ibrahim's site explains the difference between Islamic fundamentalists and Christian fundamentalists. These are some excerpts from The Religious Equivalency Fallacy:

I personally know many fundamentalist Christians who exemplify qualities of charity, generosity, kindness, peacefulness, and with their lives refute the various caricatures that have become attached to the word fundamentalist. That they base their faith on the fundamentals of the Christian kerygma is to their credit, when so many “nuancey” Christians seem to get it all muddled up and one can’t tell if they really stand for something, or if they’re liable to fall for anything.

Interestingly, in Orthodox Christianity, one does not really see fundamentalism so much as what the New Testament calls “zeal not according to knowledge” (Romans 10:2). That is to say, that Orthodoxy is so rich and varied with its many sources of tradition — Scripture, oral tradition, early church writers, worship, liturgical texts, Church councils, canon law, iconography — that the term fundamentalist does not comprehensively describe the phenomenon of one who is somehow getting worked up over issues of observance and correctness.

Thus, in the Orthodox Church we sometimes speak of the “crazy convert” syndrome, or the “correctness disease,” where strictness of observance and proper fulfillment of the externals of Christian life become the focus, to the point of judging others, and ultimately to the exclusion of basic Christian virtues of warmth of heart, forgiveness, and charity towards one’s neighbor. In Biblical terms, this can also be termed Pharisaism, holding to the letter of the law while denying the heart of it. (This is much of what Jesus Christ warned against, and to this day this wrong-headed attitude turns people off to Christianity.)...

For a Christian, “zeal not according to knowledge” is a passion, a sickness of the soul to be rooted out...

As visually hinted in the comparison photo at top, the most “extreme” form of Orthodox Christian “fundamentalism” — both interior and in rejection of the world — is monasticism. The most common form of Christian monasticism is cenobitic, in which monks or nuns live in a community, under vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, in order to live out the Gospel teachings of Christ as fully as possible, and to strive to know God through unceasing prayer. Stillness, even in the midst of activity (and monastics work hard, with daily chores, or “obediences” assigned for the upkeep and provision of the monastery’s needs) is foundational; one will often see at a monastery little signs reminding one of the rule: “Prayer — Work — Silence.”...

Muslim apologists in the United States seek to convince non-Muslims that jihad merely means an interior struggle, and that the term has been hijacked by Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups. They often cite a hadith in which Muhammad, after returning from battle, said “We have returned from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad.” When his followers asked him “What is the greater jihad?” he replied “The jihad of the heart, the jihad against one’s ego.”

Yet, in Islamic jurisprudence, the hadith supporting this statement is not considered a sound hadith and is rejected by such authorities as the 14th century classical Muslim scholar Ibn Taymiyya, and significantly also by Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and by Abdullah Azzam, co-founder of Al Qaeda and mentor of Osama bin Laden. The understanding of warfare against infidels as the “higher jihad” is codified in The Reliance of the Traveller, the Shafi’i manual certified by the highest authority in Sunni Islam, Al Azhar University in Cairo, which states:

Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word mujahada signifying warfare to establish the religion.

The scriptural basis for jihad, prior to scholarly consensus (def: b7) is such Koranic verses as:

“Fighting is prescribed for you” (Koran 2:216); “Slay them wherever you find them” (Koran 4:89); “Fight the idolators utterly” (Koran 9:36);

and such hadiths as the one related by Bukhari and Muslim that the Prophet said:

“I have been commanded to fight people until they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and perform the prayer, and pay zakat. If they say it, they have saved their blood and possessions from me, except for the rights of Islam over them. And their final reckoning is with Allah”;

and the hadith reported by Muslim,

“To go forth in the morning or evening to fight in the path of Allah is better than the whole world and everything in it.” (Reliance of the Traveller, o9.0, o9.1, o9.8, o9.9)

Indeed, seen in the light of traditional, mainstream Islamic teaching, and understood in the context of Islam’s history of jihad warfare against non-Muslims, the inner jihad is a devout Muslim’s pious preparation for the external jihad of war against non-Muslims.

Regarding this pious preparation, Nicolai Sennels writes:

Both the Quran and Muhammed… mentions several times how important it is for Muslims to be willing to give up everything, even their lives, in order to wage jihad for Allah…

Greater jihad is thus an inner psychological process of removing emotional obstacles, such as the survival instinct and the natural biological attachment to offspring, spouses and a safe and comfortable dwelling, making the believer ready and willing to submit and give up every personal desire and attachment to spread Islam.

The greater jihad, the mental replacement of personal desires with an absolute loyalty towards Allah and his prophet and laws, is aided by what could be called the cultural psychological spine of Islamic culture: the recitation of the Islamic scriptures (some even learn the whole Quran by heart), expressions of loyalty through prayer five times a day by repeating the salah (“O Allah, how perfect You are and praise be to You. Blessed is Your name, and exalted is Your majesty. There is no god but You.”), and the well-known and severe religious and social control that ensure the rule of Sharia in Muslim societies…

Seen from a psychological perspective, the greater jihad is nothing but self-radicalisation — an inner holy war of brainwashing oneself that is deeply ingrained in Islamic tradition — to go against human nature, which includes basic survival instincts and the natural aversion — also among animals — to the killing of members of one’s own species.

Thus, according to canonical, legitimate Islamic sources, the inner jihad is meant to prepare the true Muslim for the external jihad of warfare against non-Muslims. This is the whole purpose of devotion, piety, zeal and the interior struggle, as the Muslim follows the teachings and example of Muhammad. Muslim terrorists are revered in the Islamic world as Mujahideen, “strugglers,” or more literally, “people doing jihad.”


Peaceful Jihad?

Before concluding, we must address the notion that the Sufi tradition is an example of a more mystical, peaceful form of Islam, the better to be compared with Orthodox Christian monasticism. For many Western writers, the Sufi strain seems like a ray of hope, holding potential for reform within Islam. Is Sufism mystical? Yes, but peaceful? Not so much. In fact, as Andrew Bostom shows in his exhaustively researched 2005 article Sufi Jihad?, Sufism is just as committed to Islamic supremacism and jihad as the most extreme Wahhabist or Salafist sects:

Throughout the 20th century, and at present, Sufi ideologues and mass movements (especially the Naqshbandiya) have been engaged in defensive—offensive jihad campaigns designed not only to expel real (or perceived) ‘colonial powers’, but also to create supra—national (regional) shari’a states, or even a frank Caliphate (i.e., a single unified global shari’a state). The restored Shi’ite theocracy in Iran, whose contemporary shari’a—based system of dhimmitude was drafted by a leading Sufi—Sultanhussein Tabandeh—provides a sobering example of what ‘Sufi ecumenism’ towards non—Muslims means in practice.

Why No Podvig Terror Attacks?

So, turning back to Orthodoxy, which has a lively and vigorous tradition of interior struggle, why is it we never once hear of a podvig [“ascetic spiritual struggle” in Orthodox Christian theology] terror attack? This is an especially relevant question, as the demographics are so similar; there are almost exactly the same number of Orthodox Christians in the United States as Muslims, and many of each group consider themselves members of a “diaspora”: Russian, Greek, Serbian, Lebanese, Syrian, Coptic Orthodox —Somali, Syrian, Egyptian, Iraqi, Iranian, Saudi Arabian, Indonesian Muslims.

Even when bishops of the Orthodox Church call for “podvig” against the corrupting influences of the contemporary world, we never see that manifested in attacks against people or property. We see it through increased prayer, fasting, charity, kindness, as Christian strugglers internalize the teachings and example of Jesus.

Nor out of geo-political motivations do we see podvig terrorist attacks.

Even though President Bill Clinton led the United States into war against the Serbians (an Orthodox Christian people), siding with the Bosnian Muslims during the Yugoslav war, we do not see Serbs or other Slavic sympathizers waging podvig on American streets with suicide vests, cleavers and guns. And we certainly do not see sedition being preached against the United States in Serbian Orthodox Churches in America (compared to four separate studies over the last decade which reveal that 80% of mosques in America preach violent jihad and Islamic supremacism).

Instead, it is axiomatic that as an Orthodox Christian grows in piety and zeal according to knowledge, the more peace-filled they should become. One of the most beloved saints of the Church, Seraphim of Sarov, condensed this teaching down to the following saying:

“Acquire the Spirit of Peace, and a thousand will be saved around you.”

It should be clear that in Orthodox Christianity, the 2,000 year tradition of inner ascetical struggle — podvig in Russian — has as its goal deliverance and purification from the passions, so that one can ascend to illumination, and eventually to union (theosis) with God. There is no double-speak in Christianity, beguiling outsiders with platitudes about “inner struggle” while preparing believers through that very inner struggle to wage harsh warfare against the unsuspecting infidels. Individual Christian believers may have challenges due to “zeal not according to knowledge,” but the goal is to be healed of such ailments.

Conversely, as a devout Muslim grows in knowledge of his faith, the more he realizes he is called to wage jihad. Proper zeal, and worship pleasing to Allah —“Zeal according to knowledge” — for a Muslim means joining the ranks of the Mujahideen. In contrast to the saying of St Seraphim of Sarov, a zealous Muslim might use these words cited above from The Reliance of the Traveller:

"To go forth in the morning or evening to fight in the path of Allah is better than the whole world and everything in it." (Hadith from Sahih Muslim)

“Fight the idolators utterly.” (Koran 9:36)


Defilement or Honor?

Now, let’s look again at the one line refutation of the “religious equivalency fallacy”:

They [Christian and Muslim fundamentalists] certainly both defile their religion, but one group becomes intolerant and arrogant, the other intolerant and violent.

Although this is a clever spontaneous rejoinder to purveyors of the religious equivalency myth, I think we have seen that zealous Muslims, the Mujahideen, do not defile their religion at all. Rather, by waging jihad they honor the teachings of their religion and their prophet in the most fervent, traditional, way.

We ought never hear of a Podvig Terror Attack, whereas, tragically, we will continue to see multiplied before our eyes ever more Jihad Terror Attacks, especially as Islam’s Rule of Numbers is borne out in Europe, the U.K and the United States, and zealous Muslims feel ever more emboldened and compelled to openly honor the actual teachings and commands of their prophet and their religion.

Christians in Syria: Separating Grim Reality from Islamist Propaganda

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri

A recently released video of an interview with a Syrian rebel — and would-be-martyr – gives extraordinary insight into the mentality of the Syrian opposition. Believing that he’s speaking to European jihadist volunteers, the rebel says that Christians must be killed to impose a Sharia state in Syria, after which they will be given the classic choice: pay the jizya, convert or die. He also says that the rebels intend to move on from Syria to attack Europe and America.

Similarly, another rebel clearly explains that Islam must be the sole source of authority of the future Syrian state.  In the meantime, Syrian militants just massacred a Christian village’s population. Many Syrian Christians have been kidnapped and killed or never seen again.

Targeting Syrian Christians for kidnapping and attacks on churches is condemned by Human Rights Watch.  An U.N. Independent Inquiry on Syria concludes: “Entire communities are at risk of being forced out of the country or of being killed inside the country”—two cautiously worded reminders of the reality of Christian suffering in Syria at the hands of Islamist militants.  During a recent Congressional hearing on Syria’s minorities, witnesses rightly testified that Christians are more fearful for their lives than other group, because they are targeted for religious cleansing.

Despite the overwhelming amount of evidence concerning the plight of Syria’s Christians, there are those who are not convinced that Syrian Christians are being deliberately targeted in a religious purification campaign.

One of them is Muslim college student, Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, who lives in the UK and authored the report Christians in Syria: Separating Fact from Fiction, published by The Henry Jackson Society, a UK neoconservative think tank.

Through psychological tactics, like his title Fact and Fiction, and the questioning of absolute figures, percentages and details, Al-Tamimi tries to use the conflicting reports regarding some specific events in order to generate doubts about the veracity of Syrian Christians’ persecution.

Among other things, by claiming that the narrative of those concerned about the Christians’ fate is not the only possible one, he subtly and surreptitiously creates suspicions that those people lie or distort the evidence.

The main problem with his report isn’t so much that it disputes specific details of events. Initially the Western media was rehashing the stories created by the insurgents’ anti-Assad propaganda. Later it became clear that these reports were one-sided and adjustments were made:

For nearly two years, SOHR [Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an organization of Syrian rebels in exile] has reported only acts of violence by the regime against the rebels. Mainstream international media like the BBC, al-Jazeera and al-Arabya, have relied on it as their sole source of news.

In recent months, several experts and Syrians interviewed by AsiaNews accused Western and Gulf State media of selective reporting. More recently, coverage has become more impartial, but SOHR continues to defend Islamic extremists to avoid losing support among rebel forces.

The jihadists are particularly ruthless in their hide-and-seek mind games, reminiscent of Hamas in its conflict with Israel.

In these conflicts many media reporters on the ground aren’t dispassionate observers but have a stake in the matter. As in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which several freelancers supplying news materials are under Hamas’ control, Western media’s flirtation with the Syrian rebels is well-documented.

For example, from Biased War Photography in Western Media:

[T]he portrayal of the “Syrian revolution” is decidedly one-sided… the images taken to supply Western Media all portrayed the Syrian rebels in a way to render sympathy and support.

Here are some other examples.

The Vatican’s news-gathering facilities are a welcome counterbalance to mainstream Western media’s bias.  Of course, there can be a margin of error or doubt concerning the details of some events. Yet what is problematic with the Henry Jackson Report is the arbitrariness with which its author, Al-Tamimi, cherry-picks his favorite sources and rejects those he doesn’t like, without giving reasons or criteria.

This is his account about Qusayr:

Modeled on the story of the ethnic cleansing of 90 per cent of Homs’ Christian population, stories began to circulate that 9,000 out-of-a-supposed population of 10,000 Christians had left the city of Qusayr on the basis of an ultimatum issued by a rebel battalion. However, the rebels in Qusayr denied this story. The truth about what happened, most likely, lies in the account given by a couple of reports in the Wall Street Journal.

So, reports from Jihad Watch and from the Vatican news agency Fides, Vatican Insider, and Barnabas Fund, aren’t to be trusted, but the rebels, who are, for all intents and purposes, the suspects of heinous crimes and so naturally deny it, are more trustworthy?

Or the truth, he moderately suggests, is “in the middle”—that is, in places like The Wall Street Journal, that supports Obama’s decision to arm the Syrian rebels and he only regrets Obama didn’t make this decision sooner, and in The Independent, whose senior Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk had the honor of a personal recommendation from Osama Bin Laden and demonizes Christians for supporting Assad.

Al-Tamimi offers no reason for adopting those two pro-Arab-Spring newspapers’ version of the events.

“The rebels deny it,” Al-Tamimi pronounces. Here’s what the rebels also say:

Syrian opposition spokesmen have repeatedly said that Syrian rebels do not target Christians or other minorities and believe in creating a democratic society once Assad is ousted.

To which we can add: and pigs might fly. To believe that al-Qaeda-linked Islamists want a democratic society—in the Western sense of giving everyone equal rights, and not in the Muslim Brotherhood’s interpretation of it as a means to impose an Islamic state—is, at best, naïve. That part of the Syrian opposition’s statement should throw doubt on the other part, that rebels don’t target Christians.

But Al-Tamimi, who must surely know about taqiyya—lying to non-believers to advance the cause of Islam—behaves as if he didn’t.

The conclusion of Al-Tamimi’s report looks like a highly precarious assembling of statements counterbalancing, if not contradicting, each other to produce a very confused and confusing result.
He writes:

The evidence surveyed here does not, as of yet, suggest the existence of an organized campaign of militant Islamic persecution of Christians throughout Syria… Have there been incidents of anti-Christian violence in Syria? Undoubtedly, but one should always be alert to those pro-Assad propaganda outlets which are willing to exploit, for their own ends, what they see as Western concerns about the status of Christians in the country. In addition, analysts should be more nuanced… At the same time, one must avoid complacency: the ever-growing infiltration of Syria by foreign jihadists (e.g. from Jordan to the south) poses an increasing threat to the survival of the various Christian communities of Syria.

First, that the evidence doesn’t suggest “an organized campaign” is puzzling. What evidence of an “organized” campaign would Al-Tamimi accept?

The Syrian opposition has no effective centralized political or military leadership, so how could there be an organized campaign of any sort?

Muslim persecution of Christians doesn’t require central, bureaucratic coordination. Its organization derives from Islamic law and the hostility it breeds for Christians.

Al-Tamimi warns that we should be alert to pro-Assad propaganda exploiting Western concerns about Christians—without bothering to mention that the propaganda war is fought on both fronts. So why should we be more alert to one side of it than the other?

Apparently simply because one source confirms what Al-Tamimi wants to believe and validates his agenda.

In the end, however, after another series of self-limiting statements, his final conclusion is that there’s an increasing threat to the survival of the various Christian communities of Syria.

Isn’t that enough reason for concern? Why nitpick—why write this convoluted report trying to minimize the persecution of Syrian Christians in the first place—if in the end you must, perhaps begrudgingly, admit that there is “an increasing threat to the survival of the various Christian communities of Syria.”

This research doesn’t lead to a new interpretation of the events. Its conclusion is remarkably similar to that of most counterjihad analysts.

What’s its point then? It’s not immediately clear until one remembers that it was published by the neoconservative think tank The Henry Jackson Society, calling for Western intervention to assist Syrian rebels. Hence the “nuances” that Al-Tamimi mentions, which would help erase any black and white contrast and paint the rebels a uniform, unintelligible gray.

Hate, Racism, Family: the Left's Power Is in Its Changes to the Meaning of Words

About the recent Birmingham mosque stabbings of 4, including a policeman, the TV said that it is not considered as a hate crime.

This simply means that the suspect, a man of Somali appearance, was not a non-Muslim, making him a Muslim (sounds a bit circumvoluted but this is what circumvoluted ways of thinking result in).

But why? If you look at the way Muslims kill and massacre each other all over the world, especially those of rival sects, it looks like fellow Muslims are very much capable of hating a Muslim.

On the other hand, a non-Muslim could very well kill a Muslim without hating him, for whatever practical reason.

It derives from all this that the word "hate" has now acquired a new meaning, it no longer means a sustained emotion of profound aversion and distaste for someone, a sin in Christian theology. Instead it denotes a political sin that, unlike the Christian one, cannot be forgiven, the crime of thinking differently from what the ideological orthodoxy prescribes, the secular heresy par excellence, in short the guilt, more serious than murder, of having politically incorrect thoughts.

Atheists are not doing away with religion. Even they, despite all the hatred that they (at least in the case of militant, fundamentalist atheists) have for religion, cannot help confirming for the umpteenth time that humanity cannot avoid thinking in a religious way.

Atheists are simply replacing a religion, Christianity, where at least the principles, precepts, rules and values are clear and have required several centuries of rational thought to arrive at, with another, which we may call 'cultural Marxism' or 'political correctness', in which the principles are half-baked, the precepts are fluid, the rules are self-contradictory and the values have no solid foundation but change with the ideological fashion.

Religion is a way of thinking embedded in the human mind. That is why all societies of all places and times have always had a religion.

And religion does not even need to be theistic, namely include a belief in God, but it can also be atheistic.

And we cannot do away with faith. Everything requires faith, from the hope that the train will eventually arrive to the trust in your spouse when s/he declares to you absolute faithfulness, from the belief that political change for the better is possible to the credence that everything, the whole universe, was born out of chance or, alternatively, design.

Going back, the Left has highjacked the use of certain words or completely changed their meaning.

It has revolutionised the English vocabulary and, as in all revolutions, it has dispossessed someone, all of us, of it. It has self-appropriated, stolen the English dictionary, become its self-appointed master.

We cannot use the word "gay" any more, except in the particular sense that the Left has dictated. And incidentally it has appropriated for itself the rainbow as a symbol.

It has made the use of certain words (nigger, faggot, poofter, Paki etc) impossible, while at the same time made perfectly acceptable the use of others, swear words and expletives especially of a sexual or bodily nature, which were not allowed before.

It has utterly transformed the meanings of "hate", "racism" and "family".

This is where the power of the Left lies, these are its culture war victories.

The power of the Left is in its theft of the language for its own purposes: by controlling what words people utter and with what meaning, it controls what people think.

In the USA Blacks Can Get Away with Murder

In the trial of George Zimmerman the prosecution has finished and the defence has begun its case.

George Zimmerman was a white-Hispanic (with an Afro-Peruvian great-grandfather) neighbourhood watch volunteer patrolling a white gated community where there had been a spat of recent break-ins and burglaries committed by blacks.

He shot dead, claiming in self-defence, Trayvon Martin, a black 17-year-old who had entered the area and was acting in a way that arose Zimmerman's suspicions. There was an altercation seen by a witness, who said he saw Martin on top of Zimmerman bashing his head, confirming the latter's testimony, also confirmed by his injuries.

In addition, Martin had injuries to his knuckles, in conformity with the idea that he had hit someone's head hard.

There seems to be at the very least reasonable doubt for acquittal. But the black community is asking for blood, and there are fears that, in case of discharge, black riots may erupt.

In the meantime, African Americans have already taken their "revenge" on European Americans but very few people take any notice. From FrontPage Magazine:

The trial of George Zimmerman is winding down with a meltdown of the prosecution’s case and lurid predictions of riots if a “politically correct” decision is not reached. Why is it in America today that racial issues like this one so resemble the Wonderland world where, as the Red Queen famously says, “first the sentence, then the evidence”? Why is it that Americans consider blacks to be much more racist on the whole than whites, yet the latter is exclusively singled out for scorn? David Horowitz and John Perazzo provide answers in their pamphlet Black Skin Privilege, written not long after Zimmerman was arrested in connection with the Trayvon Martin death. Here’s what Horowitz and Perazzo say:

In America today, blacks generally can conduct racist assaults on whites and count on “civil rights” activists and the media not to notice. In the two months following Trayvon Martin’s death, black assailants carried out at least 14 fourteen known attacks against white victims with the idea of “avenging” the fallen youth. In East Toledo, six juveniles beat a 78-year-old white man, shouting: “This is for Trayvon … Trayvon lives, white [man]. Kill that white [man]!” In Gainesville, five blacks shouting “Trayvon!” beat a 27-year-old white man, leaving his face permanently disfigured. In another Gainesville incident, a black crowd shouting “Trayvon!” assaulted and stomped on a white man who was trying to recover his female companion’s purse from the hands of a black thief. In Chicago, two black teenagers beat and robbed a 19-year-old white man because, as one of the attackers explained, they were angry about Trayvon Martin. In Baltimore, a group of blacks beat and robbed a white man, stripping him naked, then posted a video of the assault online with the caption: “me an my boys helped get justice fore trayvon.” In Mobile, a white man named Matthew Owens was brutalized by twenty African Americans armed with brass knuckles, bricks, chairs, bats and steel pipes after he asked them to stop playing basketball in the street directly in front of his home. As the assailants left the scene, one of them looked back at the victim, who was bleeding profusely, and shouted,: “Now that’s justice for Trayvon!” It is unlikely that many Americans have heard of these racial attacks, because the perpetrators are protected by a media that does not want to notice that the racists are black, and their victims are white.

The same as in Britain, actually.

Within weeks of the Trayvon Martin shooting, a parallel killing occurred with the skin colors reversed at a Taco Bell restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona. A 22-year-old black motorist got into an altercation with Daniel Adkins, a 29-year-old, mentally disabled “white Hispanic” who was walking by. When the argument grew heated, the motorist drew a gun and killed Adkins. When police arrived at the scene, the black shooter claimed that Adkins had swung a bat or metal pipe at him, although no such items were found at the scene. Arizona, like Florida, has a “Stand Your Ground” law that allows a person to use deadly force to protect himself when faced with a life-or-death confrontation. A protective media withheld the shooter’s name, and there was no racial mob calling for his head. Unlike George Zimmerman, the gunman was not arrested nor charged with a crime. Call that black skin privilege.

If you’re black and possibly guilty but a white person is involved, the media will actively volunteer to be your advocate…. In the Trayvon Martin case, the media withheld details of the crime that were damaging to Trayvon in order to protect him and indict Zimmerman — that the mainly white community he had entered at night had been the target of a rash of recent break-ins and burglaries by young African -American men; that the hoodie Trayvon was [sic] wore was a uniform for burglars; and that Trayvon had been suspended from school after burglary tools were discovered on his person along with unaccounted-for jewelry.

There were several other media "mistakes" and convenient omissions. One was this: the TV channel ABC News obtained a surveillance video of Zimmerman and said that no abrasions or blood could be seen in the video. The conservative media outlet The Daily Caller disputed this claim, and posted a still from the same ABC video showing the injury on the back of Zimmerman's head.

At the same time, the press flooded the airwaves and front pages with sentimental photos of Trayvon as an innocent adolescent, while withholding others of the six-foot-two, 17-year-old who beat the smaller Zimmerman to the ground, smashing his head on the concrete and causing him to scream repeatedly for his life before he fired his gun in self-defense.

Looking at the Martin case, black skin privilege means you can form a lynch mob if the target is a “white” man and the press will overlook it; you can demand a judgment in advance of the facts, and can conclude his guilt in advance of a trial. You can even take “justice” into your own hands by threatening his life as the Black Panthers did to George Zimmerman or twittering his home address like vigilante filmmaker Spike Lee and comedienne Roseanne Barr did in the hope that someone might go after him. If this isn’t a rebirth of the cracker mentality of the segregated South, it is hard to know what would be…

The pamphlet Black Skin Privilege by David Horowitz and John Perazzo derives its name from the expression "white skin privilege", first made popular during the 1960s by the Weatherman terrorists as they launched their bombing run against America. The rest of the Weatherman's ideas were rejected by the dominant culture, but their views on race were not.
From the introduction to the pamphlet:

Black skin privilege means the press will fail to report an epidemic of race riots targeting whites for beatings, shooting and other violence in major American cities over the last several years. Black sin privilege has created an optical illusion in the liberal culture that white on black attack are commonplace events when in fact there are five times as many black attacks on whites as the reverse. As Horowitz and Perazzo note, in 2010, blacks committed more than 25 times the number of acts of interracvial [sic] violence than whites did.

UK TV Broadcasting Muslim Call to Prayer Each Morning during Ramadan

Here in Albion, we are getting every day closer to becoming a fully-implemented Sharia state.

Ralph Lee, boss of the British TV Channel 4, must find the destruction of the West and Christianity, starting with the UK, amusing.

He said it will screen a Muslim call to prayer every day during Ramadan — because it is more relevant than the Diamond Jubilee.

Boss Ralph Lee claimed the fact that 2.8 million UK Muslims will celebrate the holy month from next week put last year’s Royal celebrations in the shade.

He added: “Nearly five per cent of the country will actively engage in Ramadan".

And there lies a huge problem, Ralph. You should mourn it, although you probably "celebrate diversity".

We now have home-grown cells of al-Qaeda in Britain, as well as terrorist "lone wolves". What more diversity than that do you want?

Ralph went on to say: “I want to set out to provoke people to think about Islam in ways that aren’t associated with terrorism”.

So, he now wants people to associate Islam with cacophony, horrendous sounds. Better than murder and mayhem, I suppose, but do we need it?

Channel 4 will screen a full three-minute chant by Hassen Rasool, a muezzin or prayer call leader, from the start of Ramadan next Tuesday. It will then break into its regular schedule to mark the first prayer of each day at 3am.

On the first day Channel 4 will also air 20-second bursts of the chant at four other prayer times — 1.11pm, 5.26pm, 9.20pm and 10.49pm..”

This will do wonders for Channel 4's ratings, I'm sure.

Radical preacher Anjem Choudary, accused of encouraging terrorism, said he welcomed any move to promote Islam.

He added: “Islam is the fastest growing ideology in this country — by some accounts Britain could be a Muslim country by 2015.”

Marvellous.

Abu Zakariyya, of the radical Islamic Emergency Defence group, added: “We want to see Sharia law in the UK and only God knows if this could be a step towards it.”

You're in good company, Ralph. Anjem Choudary and Abu Zakariyya approve of your decision and see it as a means to achieving their ends. If you wanted to win friends among the "radical Muslim community", you got it right. But if you wanted to create nice associations with Islam in people's minds, away from terrorism, hand-amputation and lack of aesthetic sense in music, you're not on the right track. Mind you, I've no idea of what you could have chosen instead, though.

Pope's First Official Visit Is to Lampedusa, Tiny Sicilian Island Flooded by African Migrants

This is the second part of Lampedusa, Italy.

The island of Lampedusa, the southernmost appendix of Italy in the Mediterranean, has the bad luck of being geographically too close for comfort to the Muslim world. Its history is testament to this.

In 813 AD, despite a 10-year truce signed in 805 by the Emir Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab with Byzantine Sicily's governor Constantine, the Arabs, who had not kept another previous truce established in 728 and many others since, proceeded to break this one too and, after attacking Sardinia and Corsica, sacked and devastated minor Italian islands including Lampedusa. The rest of Sicily was conquered by Muslim armies later.

After all, as the Encyclopaedia of Islam, considered as the reference work on Islam in the Muslim and non-Muslim academic worlds alike, says:

The duty of the jihad exists as long as the universal domination of Islam has not been attained. Peace with non-Muslim nations is, therefore, a provisional state of affairs only; the chance of circumstances alone can justify it temporarily. Furthermore there can be no question of genuine peace treaties with these nations; only truces, whose duration ought not, in principle, to exceed ten years, are authorized. But even such truces are precarious, inasmuch as they can, before they expire, be repudiated unilaterally should it appear more profitable for Islam to resume the conflict.

Things have changed since the 9th century, Muslims are not so strong militarily, and invasion and destruction take subtler forms.

Now they come to our shores carrying a white flag and a refugee label, demanding to be housed, fed and that all their needs be met.

This, which started after the beginning of the "Arab Spring", was a pseudo humanitarian crisis, the illegals overwhelmingly were not refugees, they were economic migrants in search of what they probably thought were easy jobs or welfare benefits in Europe. Tunisians should have remained in their country, to help rebuild the economy there.

Italy has been justly criticized for mishandling the situation and allowing the illegals to remain and to enter the rest of the EU through temporary visas. To really help the Tunisians, it would have been more useful to ship the illegals back to where they came from, after - if at all possible - establishing who was among them a real asylum seeker in danger of persecution.

Allowing our cities and towns to be flooded with Third World immigrants is as misguided as helping benefit scroungers or giving international aid that is only going to make the receiving countries' local tyrants richer to better oppress and use violence against their people; it is as unwise as giving money to alcoholics and drug addicts to buy their drug of choice.

Charity does not have to be a jerk reaction dictated by misplaced feelings of guilt, it has to be accompanied by a rational evaluation. Not all charity helps its recipients.

Paolo Lo Iudice, the blogger of Vivere in Tunisia about Italians living in Tunisia, says regarding the illegal migrants: "These people are Tunisian but do not love Tunisia. We have stayed here to defend our homes, jobs, projects and people in whom we believe, we love this land although we are not Tunisian. They should be ashamed of themselves, instead of rolling up their sleeves and building a new Tunisia they went to Italy spending 2,000 dinars just to get more money, most of them have all they need here in Tunisia, there is only one thing they lack ...the desire to work".

A year after, the so-called emergency was still not over in Lampedusa, with illegals having continued to arrive during the spring and summer from Sub-Saharan African countries like Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia as well.

The difference was that the island's reception centre, destroyed by a fire started by the illegals the previous year, did not exist anymore, so the migrants had to be accommodated in hotels and tourist villages which are virtually the place's only economic resources.

In the meantime, the so-called "humanitarian" one-year temporary visas issued in 2011 to tens of thousands North-Africans had expired, but the latter had not been repatriated. Most were still thought to be in Italy.

Even now, two years after, "refugees" are still landing on Lampedusa's shores. Only two days ago, over 200 of them arrived on a boat after being rescued and transported to the island by the Navy on the Coast Guard patrol boats, ahead of Pope Francis' visit to Lampedusa on Monday July 8, his first official trip. Other 80 immigrants were rescued shortly after.

No other pope before Francis visited Lampedusa. The Holy Father has chosen it for being "the frontier of the desperate".

The Italian party Lega Nord (Northern League) Senator Angela Maraventano, not re-elected in the last February election, commented:

Of course, we are proud to receive the Pope but I hope that his words are not an additional encouragement for crossings of the Strait of Sicily [separating Sicily from Tunisia]. Africa's problems must be solved in Africa and those who think otherwise objectively become accomplices of the owners of the boats, the killers who pocket cash without risking anything. I'm saying this with a clear conscience, I will be judged by God, not men.

The "killers" reference is to the fact that people may die during these crossings.

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After two years of this experience rather exceptional even by dhimmi Eurabian standards, there are two interesting aspects of the Lampedusa situation for Europe generally.

The first is that the island's small population size, that renders it easily overwhelmed by groups of immigrants, and its proximity to North Africa make it a good test (in which Lampedusans are the unfortunate guinea pigs) of things to come.

Lampedusa represents a miniature image of what can happen to the rest of Western Europe if both current Muslim immigration and European demographic trends continue, when the proportion of natives and migrants will be the same in Europe as it has recently been in Lampedusa.

The second aspect showing what can lie ahead for the rest of Europe is the reaction of the inhabitants.

Their predicament was illustrated by one of them in this video showing the fire that destroyed the reception centre: "We are really worried about our safety. Even our children were used to walk freely in the streets, and now at 7pm all of us are barricaded in our homes with the doors locked lest something happens to us, because we are seriously afraid."

In a post titled "Defecating on Walls in the Name of Freedom", the Italian political blog Digicontact wrote: "After this first wave of new barbarians the island of Lampedusa counts its damages. Over 60 houses devastated by 'refugees'. They have just arrived and already behave like criminals. What should be the attitude of us Italians facing such behaviour? We got a bit tired of being non-racist at all costs. Faced with such behaviour everybody should be able to understand that this is just the beginning of an invasion and not a simple immigration wave, least of all of refugees, because in Tunisia there is no war. ...Put yourselves in the shoes of those who find their house in Lampedusa destroyed by a group of poor immigrants who escape from hunger by defecating on floors and walls and destroying furniture and whatever they can find".

Confronted with an unprecedented crisis and left to their own devices to deal with it, the people of Lampedusa have used "direct action" methods.

They stopped and delayed by a few hours the Italian Coast Guard patrol boat, loaded with still more "rescued" North Africans, docking at the harbour. Enraged, women later occupied the harbour and docks for several hours and chained themselves, overturning wheelie bins and blocking the road. They then incited fishermen, who with ropes pulled twelve of the many boats on which the migrants had travelled, moored at the docks and obstructing fishing boats (another of the many unresolved problems), to the entrance to the harbour. "Nobody enters here any more", the women shouted from the quay where the flags of Trinacria (ancient name of Sicily) and of the Pelagie Archipelago were flying. To chants of "freedom!" they raised a banner: "We are full".

The island descended into chaos. An urban guerilla, something described by Lampedusa's mayor Dino De Rubeis with the words "We are at war, people have now decided to get justice with their own hands", occurred with violent clashes when hundreds of Tunisians demonstrated in the streets, the police charged them and some of the island's inhabitants protested against the migrants. Dozens of both police and migrants were injured. Three Lampedusans tried to assault the mayor, who was then escorted by the police and barricaded in his office while outside dozens were protesting against him and the Tunisians who wandered around the streets after having burnt down the reception centre where they were staying. In a drawer he kept a baseball bat for self-defence.

The locals vented their fury against journalists and TV crews, attacking them verbally and sometimes physically.

Dozens of Tunisians and Lampedusans threw rocks at each others at a petrol pump, after a group of illegals threatened to explode gas cylinders near the petrol pump in the old harbour, provoking the islanders' reaction.

"Lampedusa Guerilla. Refugees? No, Criminals" is the title of an article that announces: "Italy, invaded, rebels. It is time to say it's enough, everybody go home, whoever comes back must be jailed until he is shipped back. Or else the social revolt about which Antonio Di Pietro talks unthinkingly will be rightfully staged by the inhabitants of Lampedusa and of the other areas of Italy tormented and persecuted by reception centres which are in fact criminal dens".

Record Disapproval of Supreme Court among Americans

This is the result of a Rasmussen survey that should make those people who keep saying that public opinion is in favour of same-sex marriage meditate. Public Approval of Supreme Court Falls to All-Time Low (emphases added):

The U.S. Supreme Court finished its term with big decisions on voting rights, affirmative action and same-sex marriage. Following those rulings, public approval of the court has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded in more than nine years of polling.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 28% believe the Supreme Court is doing a good or an excellent job. At the same time, 30% rate its performance as poor. That’s the highest-ever poor rating. It’s also the first time ever that the poor ratings have topped the positive assessments. Thirty-nine percent (39%) give the court middling reviews and rate its performance as fair. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

These numbers are even weaker than the numbers recorded following the Supreme Court ruling upholding the president’s health care law last year. Just before the court heard arguments on the health care law, 28% gave the justices good or excellent marks. However, disapproval was far lower than it is today. Then, following those arguments, many thought the court was likely to overturn the law. At that point, positive ratings for the court shot up to 41%, the highest level in years. However, when the court eventually upheld the health care law, the numbers fell again. Just 29% offered a positive review early that September.

Just prior to last week, 30% gave the court good or excellent marks. While the overall number fell only slightly following the final flurry of rulings, there were significant changes beneath the surface. Positive ratings increased among liberal voters by 13 points. However, they fell by eight points among conservatives and by seven among moderates.

Following the Supreme Court session four years ago, 48% thought the justices were doing a good or an excellent job. The numbers have been all downhill since then. During 2010 and 2011, the ratings were in the mid-30s.

Looking back over the past four years, the changes have been remarkable. Following the 2009 court session, 48% of conservatives gave the court good marks. So did 51% of moderates and 46% of liberals. Since then, approval among conservatives has fallen by 32 points to 16%. Positive reviews among moderates has fallen 21 points to 30%. However, the numbers among liberals are unchanged.

Overall, 39% of voters now believe the court is too liberal, while 24% believe it is too conservative.