The progressive mind functions in terms of fossilized paradigms into which every crisis and problem are fitted, no matter how many qualifying or contradictory facts are left behind. These paradigms are part of a worldview, a picture of human existence that gives it coherence and meaning, and a narrative that gives people an identity and a morality. With these paradigms we can sort out the good from the bad, the saved from the damned, the political goals we should pursue, the ones we should avoid––and who gets the power to decide. Read more →
Who is ultimately responsible for the ongoing attacks on Christians and their churches throughout the Islamic world?
Focusing on one of the most obvious nations where Christians are regularly targeted—Egypt’s Coptic Christians—one finds that the “mob” is the most visible and obvious culprit. One Copt accused of some transgression against Muslim sensibilities—from having relations with a Muslim woman, to ruining a Muslim man’s shirt—is often enough to prompt Muslim mobs to destroy entire Christian villages and their churches. Read more →
Within the context of keeping the Syrian jihad alive, it seems there is no end to the attempts of some Islamic clerics to legitimize otherwise forbidden behavior in order to gratify the sexual urges of the jihadis and keep them fighting Syrian president Bashar Assad. Read more →
A new video of the twelve Christian nuns kidnapped in Syria recently appeared. In it, the nuns are taped sitting in a room and being questioned by an unseen man, presumably a member of the kidnappers. He asks them how they are, if they’ve been mistreated, etc.
They respond that they are being treated fine, that they very much look forward to being returned to their convent, that they heartily thank the world for its concern, and that they continually pray that God grant peace to all nations.
Their words say one thing, their expressions and demeanor another. Put differently, as female captives of Islamic jihadis, what else could they say but what they were told to say? (See, for example, how the nun in glasses had to be forced to face the camera at 1:46.) Even if one of them dared to Read more →
Diversity has become corporatized on American campuses, with scores of bureaucrats and administrators accentuating different pedigrees and
Americophile via wikicommons
ancestries. That’s odd, because diversity no longer means “variety” or “points of difference,” in the way it used to be defined.
Instead, diversity has become an industry synonymous with orthodoxy and intolerance, especially in its homogeneity of political thought.
When campuses sloganeer “celebrate diversity,” that does not mean they encourage all sorts of political views. If it did, faculties and student groups would better reflect the U.S.’s political realities and might fall roughly into two equal groups: liberal and conservative.
Do colleges routinely invite graduation speakers who are skeptical of man-made global warming, and have reservations about present abortion laws, gay marriage, or illegal immigration — if only for the sake of ensuring diverse views?
Nor does diversity mean consistently ensuring that institutions should reflect “what America looks like.”
If it did, all sorts of problems could follow. As we see in the NBA and NFL, for example, many of our institutions do not always reflect the proportional racial and ethnic makeup of America. Do we really want all institutions to weigh diversity rather than merit so that coveted spots reflect the race and gender percentages of American society?
Does anyone care that for decades the diverse state of California’s three most powerful elected officials have been most undiverse? Representative Nancy Pelosi, Senator Barbara Boxer, and Senator Dianne Feinstein are all mature women, quite liberal, very wealthy, married to rich professionals or entrepreneurs, and all once lived within commuting distance of each other in the Bay Area. Read more →
If there are executive orders overriding federal immigration law to extend amnesty to foreign nationals, without legal residence, and to continue their educations, there are also de facto all sorts of un-Dream Acts that simply allow anyone wishing to enter the United States without much audit. In other words, one of the strangest things about illegal immigration is that a nation that is monitored, taped, videoed, and bugged, that is struggling now with the AP, IRS, and NSA scandals whose common theme is excessive government intrusions in our private lives, knows absolutely nothing about those who arrive illegally into the U.S. Read more →
As the full ramification of the Muslim Brotherhood’s year in power continues to be exposed, a new study by Al Azhar’s Fatwa Committee dedicated to exploring the fatwas, or Islamic decrees, issued by the Brotherhood and Salafis—the Islamists—was recently published. Read more →
Note: A 15-minute video of men and women from various nations discussing their experiences with the sex jihad in Syria, translated from Arabic to English by my colleagues, appears beneath this article (you may need to click on “CC” (closed caption”) for the English subtitles to appear).
As news of the sex jihad continues toproliferate in Mideast media, and as the West continues to bury its head in the sand—here for example is Der Spiegel’s attempt to portray as “false” the “tales of rebels engaging in ‘sex jihad’ and massacring Christians”—it is instructive to note that even the practice of sex jihad has specific doctrinal validation in Islam (which should hardly be surprising considering that “adult breastfeeding” also has validation).
First there is the general justification for sex jihad, namely that, because Muslim men waging jihad have become sexually frustrated in their camps, losing morale and quitting the theatre of war, Read more →
Foreign Policy magazine recently demonstrated why U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, is a disaster: because the establishment has a hard time factoring the foreign in their policies (more’s the irony). Put differently, whatever information doesn’t comport with modern Western epistemology—our subjective worldviews—must simply be false, unreal, to be discarded from any consideration in Western foreign policy. Read more →
The Arabic media has been full of interviews with some of the many Tunisian girls that went to the sex jihad in Syria. The other day Tunisian newspaper Al Sharaouk (“Sunrise) shed light on the horrific experiences of one of these girls.
Her name is Lamia, and she’s 19-years-old. While in Syria, she had sex with jihadis fighting to overthrow the secular Bashar Assad regime. Among other nationalities she recalls having slept with were Pakistanis, Afghanis, Libyans, Tunisians, Iraqis, Saudis, and Somalis, all in the context of the “sex jihad.”
Such a diverse array of jihadis is a reminder of the nature of the “rebellion”: it’s less about indigenous Syrians fighting for freedom and more about international jihadis fighting for Sharia. Read more →
Victor takes on Joe Biden, golden-goose-strangler; the radical new rules imposed on post-America; COVID realities in the face of expert lockdown-love; Delta, Major League Baseball, and other big business virtue-signalers accommodating the Woke Police (while deal-making with Red China’s oppressors); and Young Victor meets Martin Luther King in 1965. Today’s episode is sponsored by the Bradley Foundation’s “We the People” speaker series.
Victor takes on the latest Fauci winging-it, flip floppery, whether America is committing suicide, the trouble of our military’s progressive “recalibration,” the bizarre morality of anti-racism racism, and reflections on pal Conrad Black’s argument that the Trump-Hate coalition is crumbling. This episode is sponsored by a great friend of the Victor Davis Hanson Podcast, Shraga Kawior.
Victor discusses America’s new class warfare, the foreign-policy consequences of our Feeble POTUS, the Biden Administration’s getting out-manipulated by Red China and Russia, how the “party of science” loves superstition and prefers ideology, and a media starting to weakly admit that Scranton Joe owns the border crisis. Today’s episode is sponsored by the Bradley Foundation’s “We the People” video series.
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Victor Davis Hanson examines the dramatic change in elite racial attitudes in recent years and issues a stern warning: there’s never been a bigger threat to America’s ability to hold together as a successful multiethnic society.
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Iran’s next move, a Senate impeachment trial, and the beginning of the Democratic primaries. Despite January and February’s uncertainties, Victor Davis Hanson, the Hoover Institution’s Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow, believes in this certainty: President Trump is on a path to reelection this fall.
Victor Davis Hanson discusses the damaging disclosure about Obama keeping tabs on the FBI Hillary Clinton email investigation, State Department unmasking, why Hillary’s and Obama’s hubris may be their own downfall and how this can very well be a Watergate or Iran-Contra type scandal.