There’s good news for Manchester.

The city with the highest death rate and some of the worst drug and alcohol problems in England is
getting a statue of Friedrich Engels.

A scowling bearded cement statue of Marx’s best friend will fix everything wrong with Manchester.

The statue comes to Manchester courtesy of Phil Collins. That’s not the singer who crooned, “You’ll Be In My Heart”, but the British artist who introduced East German instructors of Marxism-Leninism to Manchester with Marxism Today. Like the more famous Phil, he has his share of love songs, but it’s Marx and Engels, who are in his heart.

Manchester had no statues of Engels. Now thanks to Collins, it will.

Phil Collins lives in Berlin. The Engels statue comes from the Ukraine. And he would like to bring the unemployed instructors of Marxism-Leninism from East Germany to Manchester “to teach Marxism in schools there.” It failed in the Ukraine. It failed in East Germany. But it’s bound to work in Manchester.

The search for the statue started out in the Russian city of Engels: a post-industrial disaster area where unemployment is high and drug smuggling and human trafficking are major industries. The old Communist infrastructure is coming apart. And so on he went to Mala Pereshchepina in the Ukraine.

Mala Pereshchepina had previously been best known for the tomb of Kubrat, founder of Old Great Bulgaria, who had been laid to rest surrounded by golden vessels and jeweled rings. There Phil found a broken cement statue of an old monster and decided to haul the ugly old thing over to Manchester.

There’s always been a market for the art and tchotchkes of fallen totalitarian regimes. There’s a booming market in Nazi and Communist souvenirs. And Collins isn’t the first sympathizers to haul back one of the many Comrade Ozymandias statues that were tossed into the dirt when the Soviet Union fell.

There’s a Lenin statue in Fremont, Seattle. It was bought and shipped over by an English teacher who mortgaged his house to pay for the statue of a mass murderer. It’s been for sale for over twenty years. The current asking price is $250K. So far no capitalist has acquired Lenin as a lawn ornament.

The New York Lenin facing Wall Street hasn’t done any better. On Houston Street, the Red Square building houses a FedEx, a Dunkin’ Donuts, a Sleepy’s and an H&R Block. The building was built by a former NYU professor of “radical sociology”. Then it was bought for $100 million. The Red Square was renamed, Lenin came down and occupies a humbler perch on an eyesore of a tenement.

The icons of Communism don’t hold up well against the march of capitalism.

Being derivative, Phil Collins has to compensate by being twice as loud. The Engels statue will encourage Manchester’s working class to contemplate the “conditions of the working class” today. But Collins seems oddly uninterested in contemplating the condition of the working class in the former Communist countries he passed through while searching for the kitschy junk souvenirs of Marxist tyranny.

Indeed, the only people whose conditions he seemed interested in had been pushing Marxism-Leninism.

Phil Collins would not have done well under Communism. Just ask the Russian Futurists. What began with a boisterous call to throw the art and literature of the past overboard from the “steamship of modernity” ended with a muffled whimper as the Futurists were forced to adopt Socialist Realism. Collins’ statue is, among other things, a tribute to the Communist suppression of modern art.

The irony of modern art celebrating its own suppression is both heartbreaking and stupefying.

The Engels statue will sit in Tony Wilson Place. Mr. Manchester’s spot has a certain appropriateness and inappropriateness. Wilson was a Socialist who refused to pay for private health care, despite being fairly wealthy. Engels profited from the same misery that he graphically condemned. But none of it matters.

A mile away from Mr. Engels’ new digs is the Manchester Arena where Salman Ramadan Abedi, a second-generation Muslim refugee, murdered 22 concert goers and wounded hundreds more.

A specter had stalked the streets of Manchester. And it was no longer the specter of Communism. It was Salman howling, “There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is the messenger of Allah”. Forget Marx. In Manchester, it’s Mohammed time. And Islam does not allow any paintings, cartoons or statues of Mo.

Cops raided Abedi’s home in a part of South Manchester where sixteen other Jihadis had operated. Forget Engels, you can tour the home of Abu Qaqa al-Britani, the ISIS propaganda point man who did for the Islamic terror group what Engels had done for the popularization of his left-wing cause. If that doesn't float your boat, there are the Abdallah brothers, the Halane sisters and Jamal Al-Harith

Friedrich Engels had lived in Moss Side, Manchester. These days Moss Side is best known as a no-go zone in progress. The neighborhood swarms with Muslim migrants. It’s violent and broken. 36% of the population is Christian and 34% Muslim. 12% of the population comes from Somalia or Pakistan.

The Engels house was long since demolished. But Salman Abedi’s home is still standing in Moss Side.

There is a different breed of radicals in Manchester now. Forget the old folks flying the red flag. It’s the black and white flag of the Jihad that counts now. The new radicals of Manchester aren’t fighting for the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the tyranny of Sharia.

The new murderous utopian movement cares nothing for Das Kapital. Its guidebook is the Koran.

Dumping a statue of Engels salvaged from the wreck of Communism into a city on the verge of being wrecked by the left’s enthusiasm for migration is more of a morbid prank than anything else. The left’s nostalgia for its murderous past has blinded it to the reality of the murderous present and future.

Engels viewed the “Mohammedan revolution” as class warfare. The Manifesto of the Communist Party written by Marx and Engels sees their radical movement as the superior inheritors of Islamic fanaticism.

"Islam was unconquerable so long as it trusted in itself alone and saw an enemy in every non-Mohammedan," they write in its closing message. “From the moment when Islam entered upon the path of compromise and united with the non-Mohammedan, the so-called civilized powers, its conquering power was gone. With Islam it could not have been otherwise. It was not the true world redeeming faith.”

“Socialism, however, is this, and socialism cannot conquer nor redeem the world if it ceases to believe upon itself alone,” they conclude.

There are many Socialist militants in the UK, but they have made their compromise with Islam.

That’s why Jeremy Corbyn winks and nods at Hamas and Hezbollah. It’s why Phil Collins went to the West Bank. For his Ramallah production, he screened The Battle of Algiers which glamorized the FLN terrorists who desecrated the Great Synagogue in Algiers, planted an FLN flag and scrawled, “Death to the Jews”. The synagogue is now a mosque. Yesterday Algiers, tomorrow Manchester.

Labour meetings in Manchester have been known to be segregated by gender. The police spend more time hunting Islamophobes than fighting Islamic terror. The specter isn’t of Communism, but of Sharia.

Muslims in Manchester know what the true world redeeming faith is. And it wasn’t preached by Engels. It was the left, not Islam that failed. The left turned over its mission to Third World radicals who were more Islamic than Socialist, but who had the courage to bomb and kill that the European left no longer did. And then when the Socialism vanished and there was only Islam, the Socialists bowed their heads.

Forget Engels. Mohammed is in Manchester now.

Chaya Salomon was murdered at a Sabbath dinner with her family. The 46-year-old Jewish woman was stabbed to death alongside her 70-year-old father Yosef and her 36-year-old brother Elad.

Photos show the kitchen of the Salomon house in the Israeli village of Neve Tsuf covered in blood. The youngest Salomon daughter had given birth to a new member of the family. The bottle of Glenfiddich on the table was never opened. Instead an Islamic terrorist burst in and stabbed the new grandfather. Tova, the new grandmother was badly wounded. Elad’s wife rushed the children to a safe room.

The smiling terrorist was taken away. He had come armed with a Koran and a knife. “I know that with Allah my dreams will come true," he had posted on Facebook. "I will go to heaven.”

His dreams coming true have more to do with the Palestinian Authority and American taxpayers. Like all terrorists who kill Israelis, he will be receiving a salary from the PA. And the PA is funded by you and me.

Abbas, the terrorist leader who is Israel’s “peace partner” in the “two-state solution”, touched off this atrocity. Fatah, the organization behind the Palestinian Authority, has repeatedly called for violence. The terrorist’s Facebook message included this plea, "Put in my grave Arafat's Keffiyah and the ribbon of the Al-Aqsa Brigades". The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade is the “military wing” of Abbas’ Fatah movement.

Another terrorist attack. More funerals. More calls for restraint by both sides.

There are the formal condemnations before everyone moves on to the business of being pro-Israel. The term “pro-Israel” doesn’t mean much. Anyone and everyone can be pro-Israel.

AIPAC isn’t backing the Taylor Force Act which would cut off taxpayer money to the Palestinian Authority until it stops funding these attacks. J Street, the anti-Israel group which claims to be pro-Israel and also claimed to be “appalled” by the Salomon murders, is lobbying against the Taylor Force Act.

What did this fake pro-Israel posturing amount to when Chaya was being murdered in her own home?

In previous weeks, liberal Jewish clergy fulminated angrily at their more conservative counterparts in Israel over a religious controversy. Daniel Gordis, who makes an excellent living writing “pro-Israel books”, put forward his own version of BDS. Netanyahu and “Israel’s consuls-general in the US should be shunned and disinvited”. Americans should fly Delta and United instead of El-Al. “Meetings with hospitals’ fund-raisers should be canceled. The hospitals did nothing wrong, but when they start running out of money, Israelis will start to care.”

No doubt.

I don’t write to take a position on this issue. Only to note that some “pro-Israel” figures can dig into more reserves of anger when fighting the Jewish “right” than over the murder of Israeli Jews.

It’s easier for even professionally “pro-Israel” figures to rage at Israel than at the murderers of Jews. If only they could feel a fraction of the same anger when looking at the Salomon’s bloody kitchen floor.

Where is Gordis’ call to watch Muslims die in hospitals in Ramallah to make them care? It would be deemed monstrous. “Un-Jewish.” Anyone proposing it would be shunned in “pro-Israel” circles.

If Gordis has a position on cutting off aid to the PA after its murders of Israelis, I have yet to find it.

So much of pro-Israel advocacy consists of meaningless lip service. Israel is an abstraction for many of them. Chaya Salomon was a real person. She bled out on a white kitchen floor on Shabbat.

And so I offer a counterproposal. Instead of being pro-Israel, let’s be pro-Chaya.

Pro-Israel is a meaningless metric. Obama claimed to be pro-Israel while funding the terrorist murder of Jews from the West Bank to Iran. “I am 100 percent pro-Israel," Bernie Sanders insisted after pushing for an anti-Israel platform, falsely accusing Israel of killing 10,000 “innocent” people in Gaza and putting a BDS activist in charge of his Jewish outreach. If that’s pro-Israel, what exactly is anti-Israel?

It’s easier to understand what it is to be pro-Chaya than to be pro-Israel. If you want to be pro-Chaya, don’t fund her killers. And not just pro-Chaya, but pro-Hallel. Hallel-Yaffa Ariel was a 13-year-old girl who came home from a dance recital and was stabbed to death by a Muslim terrorist in her bedroom. Or pro-Michael. Rabbi Michael Mark was driving home with his wife and children when he was murdered. Or Pro-Taylor. Taylor Force was a veteran of two wars who was stabbed to death in Tel Aviv.

The Taylor Force Act that would cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority if it continues funding terrorism is named after him.

Pro-Israel can cover a multitude of sins. It devolves easily into abstractions. And then we are told that giving money to Islamic terrorists is the pro-Israel position because Israeli security depends on the terrorists keeping the peace. For decades, we have been told that the two-state solution which creates a terrorist state inside Israel is actually pro-Israel. And therefore the destruction of Israel is pro-Israel.

The left is adept at such Orwellian insults to reality. In the same way that bringing Muslim terrorists to America is hailed as patriotic, funding Islamic terrorists and Iran’s nukes become vital to Israel’s security.

And so let’s take a step back from the hall of mirrors. Let’s consider instead what is pro-Sarah.

Sarah will be the next victim of Islamic terrorism. Somewhere she is getting on a bus or cooking dinner for her family. And the next Muslim terrorist, let’s call him Mohammed, is plotting to kill her.

Mohammed has been listening to the calls by Fatah to kill Jews. He has seen crowds cheer the murderer of Chaya, Yosef and Elad. He has been told by the preacher on Palestinian Authority television that if he kills a Jew, he will go to heaven. He sees Fatah's Facebook message, "If I fall I will not be the first to die, and not the last to die #Rage!" And he knows that he will receive $2,000 a month if he succeeds.

What is the pro-Sarah policy?

Is it to pour millions more into the war chest of the terrorists so that they can pay Mohammed for her murder? Is it the continuing championing of the Palestinian Islamic State that Mohammed is killing for?

Let us break through the intellectual abstractions because Sarah and Mohammed are real. In a week or two from now, Sarah will be bleeding out on the living room floor while her children scream. Or she will lie dying on the back seat of her car with blood and broken glass surrounding her head. It’s happened before and it will go on happening until the pro-Israel position becomes the pro-Sarah position.

Everyone or almost everyone is pro-Israel in theory. As long as pro-Israel encompasses both opposing and supporting the murder of Jews, both opposition to BDS and support for BDS, both opposition to terrorists and support for terrorists, then anyone can join and it’s meaningless.

Israel is not an abstract idea. It is a nation of millions of individuals. And these individuals are being killed, one by one, by the genocidal imperative of Islamic Supremacism. If Israel, its geopolitical role, its complex political and religious institutions, its history of thousands of years, its relationship to the Jews of the diaspora is too much to take in, it may be easier to focus on the lives of those individuals.

There is a booming pro-Israel industry. Much of this industry accomplishes very little. It celebrates boosterism and eschews controversy. It seeks a meaningless middle ground. It believes that Israel is morally superior because it continues to strive for peace even at the expense of Israeli terror victims.

There is no pro-Sarah industry. But maybe there ought to be one. And in the future, if we want to determine whether someone is truly pro-Israel, we should ask whether they are pro-Sarah.

Are they for doing whatever it takes to stop her from being murdered tomorrow?

Because you can’t be pro-Israel if you aren’t pro-Sarah. You can’t be pro-Israel if you support funding the murderers of Israelis. You can’t support both Israel and her enemies or support Sarah and her killer.

Then we’ll know who is and isn’t pro-Israel. Because pro-Israel will finally mean something.

Things are going smashingly well in Londonistan.

The City of London has the highest murder rate in the land. While the authorities launch investigations into pork being left at a mosque or a hijab supposedly being torn off, crime continues to rise.

Gun control has worked so wonderfully well that gun crime in London rose 42%. When gun control advocates insist that we should be more like the UK, London’s 2,544 gun crime offenses probably aren’t what they have in mind.

But gun control does work in London after a fashion. Those gang members who can’t lay their hand on a firearm must make do with a sharp blade. Knife crimes in London rose 24% to 12,074 recorded offences. 60 people were stabbed to death last year.

Why? Here’s a hint from the Metropolitan Police’s assistant commissioner. “There are complex social reasons why more young people are carrying knives and this cannot be solved by the police alone.”

Those complex social reasons would seem to involve stabbing other people. But like Islamic terrorism, stabbings in London are one of those things that can’t be solved by the police. Unlike people saying mean things about Muslims on Facebook and Twitter which the Met cops are well equipped to solve.

Still the authorities have been doing their best to tackle stabbings with a knife ban. Carry a knife without a “good reason” and you can get four years in prison. Good reasons for carrying knives include using it as a prop in a production of Romeo and Juliet, taking it to a museum or “religious reasons”. The ban, which covers “sword-sticks”, samurai swords and “zombie knives” that are sold to fight zombies, isn’t working.

But it’s working well enough that many of the gangs responsible for the violence are turning to acid.

Acid attacks in London rose from 162 in 2012 to 454 last year. There have already been 199 acid attacks this year. Five acid attacks just happened in London in the space of little more than an hour.

And so the obvious new solution is drain cleaner control.

The push is on to “license” corrosive substances while banning anyone from carrying drain cleaner unless they have a good reason. When the public is banned from buying drain cleaners, then finally everyone in London will be safe. It’s worked for guns and knives. Bound to work for acid. And being stuck with a clogged toilet, like Allah Akbar car rammings, is the price we must all pay for diversity.

It’s easy to blame and ban inanimate objects. And it avoids any discussion of the perpetrators.

Newham is the London borough with the highest number of acid attacks. It also has the second highest percentage of Muslims in the UK. 398 acid attacks occurred in 5 years in the area named as “the most ethnically diverse district in England and Wales”. 33% of Newham consists of non-UK passport holders.

But surely that’s some sort of random coincidence.

Except that the place with the third highest number of acid attacks is Tower Hamlets. Tower Hamlets is a Muslim no-go zone. It has one of the smallest native British populations in the country. 35% of the population is Muslim. Most of those are Bangladeshis with a healthy sprinkling of Somalis.

There were 84 acid attacks in what has been dubbed “The Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets”.

Also, entirely by coincidence, Bangladesh has the highest rate of acid attacks in the world. But if anyone suggests that these two statistics are related, the Met police will investigate them for hate crimes.

The second highest acid attack location in London was Barking and Dagenham, a growing Muslim enclave which elected its first Muslim mayor whose plans include holding an Islamic festival “for the whole community—regardless of religion”.

Barking is a wonderful place where you have the choice to be Muslim or Muslim. Regardless of religion.

The native British population made up 80% of Barking in 2001. Now it’s fallen to less than half. According to the 2011 census figures, "All religious groups have increased except for Christian and Jewish religions". This was where Islamists brandished signs reading, “British soldiers go to hell”.

Now why in the world might Barking be a haven for acid attacks?

Fifth on the acid list is Redbridge where the native British population fell by 40,844 in a decade. The last census showed British and Irish natives fleeing Redbridge while Pakistanis and Bangladeshis stormed in. The Christian and Jewish population fell while the Muslim population rose 11%. So did the acid attacks.

Pakistan has one of the highest rate of acid attacks in the world. It lags behind Bangladesh. But fortunately Redbridge boasts a diversity of both Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. And acid attacks.

But surely this is yet another unfathomable coincidence. Like 2 + 2 equaling 4.

Hackney, sixth on the list, was where a Sharia patrol pal of the Muslim beheaders of British soldier Lee Rigby, posted videos boasting “British people will never be safe on the streets of London.”

They certainly aren’t safe in Hackney.

At 14%, Islam is the second largest religious group in Hackney. The indigenous British population has fallen to 36%. That’s down from 44% in 2001. And, according to officials, it’s “reflective of Hackney’s increasing diversity which currently marks it out as the 6th most ethnically diverse borough in London after Newham, Redbridge, etc…”

Sixth in diversity and sixth in acid attacks.

Of the remaining four on the list, three, Croydon, Ealing and Hilingdon, were white minority or bare majority areas. Meanwhile Kensington and Chelsea, which have a decisive majority, have the lowest rate of acid attacks. So naturally the media has tried to blame the attacks on British natives.

But the numbers don’t lie.

London is experiencing a splash of the acid test of diversity. That burning feeling on your face is the thrilling sensation of corrosive multiculturalism eating away at British communities.

Banning guns, knives, drain cleaner, plungers and ostrich feathers won’t address the problem. The fallacy of gun control, knife control and acid control is that inanimate objects don’t kill people.

Guns don’t shoot themselves. Knives don’t unsheathe in broad daylight and stab pedestrians. Bottles of acid don’t knock on cars and then splash the occupants when they roll down the window.

Immigration imported acid attacks to the UK the way that it imported gangs of Muslim men stabbing waitresses in eateries while shouting, “This is for Allah”.

Allah and acid are both imports from the Muslim world.

Murders in London, like murders in most major American cities, are driven by gang violence. Behind the shootings, stabbings and acid attacks are gangs. Many of those gangs are made up of first and second generation migrants and settlers from the Muslim world. The UK’s prisons bulge with Muslim convicts. And these criminal gangs naturally feed recruits into Islamic terrorism as they do in Iraq and Syria.

Banning drain cleaner won’t stop acid attacks. Drain cleaner control is no solution. Migration control is.

Immigration from violent societies prone to terrorism is the acid that is eating away at Europe. Migration advocates have splashed acid on Britain, on America, on Australia and on Canada. The bombings and stabbings, the child rapes and acid attacks, are the burning sensation of the attack.

But the corrosive acid does its work in less sensational ways. When Britons no longer feel at home in their own communities, when mosques replace churches and synagogues, when Sharia patrols march through the streets, when English is drowned out by Urdu and Arabic in the streets, that is also the acid of immigration eating away at the flesh and bone of a nation.

Acid attacks don’t immediately kill. They maim and disfigure. Newham, Barking, Tower Hamlets and so much of London have been left maimed and disfigured so that longtime residents no longer know them.

Britannia has had acid splashed in her lovely face. Her clear features have been scarred and mutilated. Now, from London to Manchester, from Birmingham to Bradford, she suffers and burns.

ISIS has been defeated. That’s the official word out of Iraq. But don’t count it out just yet.

We beat ISIS twice before. Once in its previous incarnation as Al Qaeda in Iraq and in its even earlier incarnation as Saddam Hussein’s regime whose Sunni Baathists went on to play a crucial role in ISIS.

Each time it was reborn as another murderous monstrosity.

We don’t know what the next incarnation will look like, but considering Saddam Hussein’s rape rooms, Al Qaeda in Iraq’s love of suicide bombings and ISIS taking public torture to a new level, it will be bad.

We beat Saddam, Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic State. But it keeps coming back because we don’t understand what it is. And we don’t get it because we don’t understand what Islamic terrorism is.

Islamic terrorists are not a “tiny minority of extremists” who “pervert Islam”. They are Islam.

ISIS keeps coming back because it’s rooted in the local Sunni Islamic Arab population and the religion of Islam. The Sunni link is why ISIS keeps popping back up. Bush suppressed Al Qaeda in Iraq by allying with Sunni tribes. Obama made a deal with Iran and let its Shiites dominate Iraq. Sunnis flocked to ISIS’ ex-Baathists who promised to bring back the good old days of Saddam’s supremacy for Sunnis.

As long as the Sunni-Shiite tensions in Iraq and Syria, not to mention those between Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen continue to play out, ISIS will stick around in some form waiting to make a comeback. The cycle of Sunnis turning to Al Qaeda/ISIS to beat the Shiites and then to the US to beat ISIS will continue.

Critics who accuse the US of creating ISIS by bombing Iraq miss the point. ISIS is the latest embodiment of Sunni supremacism and historical nostalgia for the Abbasid Caliphate. Both Saddam and the Caliph of ISIS capitalized on that nostalgia the way that Hitler did on Charlemagne. We didn’t create it. And it isn’t going anywhere. We can’t defeat it without breaking the historical aspirations of the Sunni population. That is what we are up against.

We’re not just fighting a bunch of ragged terrorists. We’re fighting against the sense of manifest destiny of a large Muslim population, not just in Iraq and Syria, but in London, Paris and every state in America.

The Islamic terrorist groups of the Middle East are especially dangerous because, as ISIS did with its Caliphate, they can closely link

themselves to crucial epochs in Islam. Al Qaeda leveraged its Saudi face to form a visceral connection with Muslims worldwide. ISIS repeated the same trick with its Iraqi link. And large numbers of non-Arabs and converts to Islam rallied from around the world to the Jihad. ISIS is now the new Al Qaeda. It may not be able to run Mosul, but it has become an international terrorist organization that is even more dangerous than Al Qaeda. And that may be what it wanted.

Like the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups, the Islamic State was never very good at running things. The PA won’t make peace with Israel for the same reason that Hamas won’t make peace with the PA: statehood is a compelling imperative, but requires hard work in reality. It’s much easier to send off a few useful idiots to blow themselves up and then collect the Qatari checks.

Civilizations manage societies. Barbarians have more fun destroying things than taking out the garbage or cleaning the streets. That is why ISIS lost and why the Jihad will finally succeed only if civilization implodes too badly to resist its incursions or through the unstoppable force of brute demographics.

The original Islamic conquests wrecked the societies and cultures they overran the way that barbarians always do. They wouldn’t have succeeded if civilization had not been in a state of collapse. Today’s Islamic conquests are a similar reaction to our civilizational decline. But as long as we can send jets and drones to wreak havoc on Islamic terrorists anywhere in the world, the conquests can only work on a demographic, not a military level. ISIS claimed that it could win a military showdown: it was wrong.

But the demographic conquest is going very well. Just ask the frightened natives of Paris and London. The Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy of political and demographic invasion, sneered at by ISIS, may be less glamorous, but it has equally close echoes in Mohammed’s tactics against his non-Muslim foes.

The challenge for Islamic terrorists is turning that demographic growth into military strength. ISIS emerged as the Uber of Islamic terrorism by unlocking the key to turning Muslims anywhere into terrorists with no training or recruitment. While Al Qaeda had pioneered the strategy, ISIS made it work.

Dismissing the terrorists who have been killing for ISIS in the West as “lone wolves” misses the point.

The Islamic terrorist who goes on a stabbing spree in London or a shooting spree in Orlando is no more a “lone wolf” than an Uber driver who picks up a passenger is just some random eccentric. They’re parts of a distributed network that is deliberately decentralized to better fulfill its central purpose.

CVE and other efforts to tackle “online extremism” fight messaging wars that ignore the demographics. But our targeted strikes on ISIS ignore demographics in the same way. We keep looking at the trees while missing the forest. But the forest is where the trees come from. Muslim terrorists emerge from an Islamic population. They aren’t aberrations. Instead they represent its religious and historic aspirations.

ISIS and Islamic terrorists aren’t going anywhere. Defeating them through patronizing lectures about the peacefulness of Islam, as Obama’s CVE policy proposed to do, was a futile farce. Bombing them temporarily suppresses them as an organized military force, but not their religious and cultural origins.

As long as we go on seeing Islamic terrorism as an aberration that has no connection to the history and religion of Islam, our efforts to defeat it will be pinpricks that treat the symptoms, but not the problem.

Only when we recognize that Islamic terrorism is Islam, that the crimes of ISIS and countless others dating back to Mohammed were committed to achieve the goals of the Islamic population, will we be ready to face the war that we’re in and to defend ourselves against what is to come not just in Iraq or Afghanistan, but in America, Australia, Canada, Europe, India, Israel and everywhere else.

We are not fighting a handful of Islamic terrorists. We are standing in the path of the manifest destiny of Islam. Either that manifest destiny will break against us, as it did at the Gates of Vienna, or it will break us. The attacks were once yearly. Now they are monthly. Soon they will become daily.

Every attack is a pebble in an avalanche. A pebble falls in Brussels, in Fresno, in Dusseldorf, in New York, in Munich, in London, in Garland, in Paris, in Jerusalem, in Mumbai, in Boston and in more places than anyone can count. We are too close to the bloodshed to see the big picture. We only see the smoke and hear the screams. We see the boats bringing armies into Europe. We see refugees fill our airports.

Those are the trees, not the forest: the pebbles, not the avalanche. Those are the battles, not the war.

The Islamic State is not going anywhere. It’s not a name. It’s an Islamic imperative. And it’s here.

When President Trump tweeted that his measure to protect Americans from Islamic terror was a “travel ban” and that it should never have been watered down, he was right.

Calling it a pause hasn’t appeased a single of the radical judges abusing their authority. It doesn’t matter what the lawyers call it, when courts insist on referencing President Trump’s campaign rhetoric instead. Watering down the ban achieved nothing. The judicial coup can’t be appeased with a “moderate” ban.

Stripping Iraq from the list of countries undermined the effectiveness of the measure considering that the vast majority of refugees being investigated for terror links in this country are Iraqis.

Most of the rest are from the other countries listed on the travel ban.

And the failure to protect Middle Eastern Christians by prioritizing them as refugees is a left-wing war crime. The lawyers, activists, media bosses and judges responsible for it have blood on their hands. Even as they mouth hollow platitudes about compassion, they have become complicit in Islamic genocide.

Waiting on the Supreme Court didn't work. The temporary compromise measure violated presidential authority while giving the left the room it needed to continue its judicial coup by expanding "prior relationship" to mean anything while unconstitutionally undermining the refugee cap.

There are legitimate debates about the limits of presidential authority in every administration. It’s fair to question whether any president, of any party, should be able to engage in military action without Congress because the Constitution grants the legislative branch the authority to declare war. But there can be no doubt whatsoever that President Trump is acting within his legal authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act which grants him the authority to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants” for as long as he thinks it’s necessary.

Obama made use of this power to temporarily halt Iraqi migration. So have other presidents in the past. Immigration is in the hands of Congress and the White House. It is not up to judges to decide who can come to America.

Our entire system of immigration “discriminates” based on religion and national origin. It allots visas and refugee status based on national origin and membership in persecuted religious groups.

If the judicial coup succeeds, elected officials will lose their authority over immigration. And that means that the American people will lose all control over immigration.

The implications go far beyond the travel ban.

Judge Derrick Watson, an Obama pal, didn’t just go after the ban, but asserted that he had the authority to decide how many refugees should be allowed in. The Supreme Court chose to split the difference there. It’s a short hop and a skip from there to judges deciding that they have the constitutional authority to set the annual number of refugees and immigrants to prevent “discrimination” by the elected branches.

If you want to imagine the end of America, that’s a good place to start.


Federal courts have been unconstitutionally treating states like this for far too long, intervening in everything from elections to prison populations, but now they’re using the general anti-Trump hysteria to assert judicial supremacy over the elected branches of government.

If this judicial coup is allowed to stand, anything that any White House official or member of Congress says at any time in the past, can and will be used by Federal courts to seize control over any policy.

And then we will be living under a permanent reign of judicial terror.

This was the nightmare loophole that opened up when we declared that preventing discrimination was such a compelling interest that it could be used to override nearly everything else. Now the legal butcher’s bill might be coming due. And when it arrives, the Bill of Rights will cease to exist and the elected branches of government will wither under the shadow of black robes and falling gavels.

That is what is at stake here.

President Trump isn’t just defending us against Islamic terror. It’s up to him to defend government of the people against two political coups; one that seeks to reverse the results of the election with a manufactured scandal based on a Hillary conspiracy theory and the other that aspires to make elections irrelevant through a judicial ruling class.

A civil war is underway. Trump, like Lincoln, isn’t just fighting an elitist Democrat ruling class embedded in secessionist enclaves of gated communities surrounded by political plantations of minority poor.

Both Republican presidents had to face off in a civil war against judicial supremacy.

During the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Abraham Lincoln asserted that the decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case did not suffice to “have the citizen conform his vote to that decision; the member of Congress, his; the President, his use of the veto power”.

Lincoln then quoted Thomas Jefferson’s warning that, “to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions” would be “a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy”.

And that is exactly what judicial supremacy has done.

Thomas Jefferson cautioned that judges have "the same passions for party, for power" and "their power is the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control."

He stated firmly, "The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that, to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign with themselves."

Both the first Democratic-Republican and the first Republican presidents rejected judicial supremacy. They did so because it undermined a government of the people and imposed a judicial oligarchy.

What of the first Democrat president? In his veto of the Bank of the United States, President Andrew Jackson affirmed Jefferson’s “co-equal” and “co-sovereign” principle stating that, “the Congress, the Executive and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution.”

Jackson’s portrait now hangs over President Trump in the Oval Office. It is up to Trump to defend Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln’s understanding of the Constitution against judicial supremacy.

For too long the conservative position has been that we must defend the Constitution from judicial activism by putting the right sort of men on the Supreme Court. This approach has been somewhat successful. But trying to solve the abuse of judicial authority with judicial authority is like plugging a leak with water. Conservatives seek judicial saints who will never overstep the boundaries of their power while the left merely needs to find judges who will have no compunction about abusing their authority.

That is the judicial coup which has placed us in a political stalemate. Conservatives hope that the Supreme Court will follow the Constitution. And if it doesn’t, a whole new “law of the land” appears.

Even if the Supreme Court does the right thing, the challenges won’t end. And the judicial coup will have proven that its members can freeze any presidential policy for the better part of a year while the administration runs a gauntlet of political appointees who deliberately humiliate and undermine it.

And they won’t stop now.

Conservatives should continue seeking judges who will respect the Constitution. But truly respecting and protecting the Constitution means rejecting judicial supremacy. And the battle against judicial supremacy can’t be fought and won in the courts. Only the White House can defy the courts.

The Civil War was fought over the supremacy of the Constitution. Then, as now, the Democrat secessionists privileged the Supreme Court’s interpretation over the written text of the Constitution.

In his inaugural address, President Lincoln opposed judicial supremacy, warning that if government policy for the entire country is “irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court... the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers.”

During the Civil War, he rejected a decision by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney and arrested Judge Richard Bennett Carmichael. Judge William Matthew Merrick, an Associate Justice of the D.C. Circuit Court, was placed under house arrest and had his salary suspended. Merrick, like today’s secessionist Democrat judges had attempted to undermine the war effort through legal obstructionism.

The Civil War should have settled the question of judicial supremacy. But Democrats snuck their judicial fetish through the back door until it has become the greatest threat to our rights and our freedoms.

And it must be defeated again.

Lincoln and Jackson defied judicial supremacy by rejecting its illegitimate authority. President Trump must do the same. The travel ban is within his authority. No serious legal challenge has been made to that authority. It is the legality of his motives that has come under constant attack, but the President of the United States is not obligated to justify his motives to a paternal court to exercise his authority.

By ignoring the courts, President Trump will restore respect for his authority, for the separation of powers and for the power of the people to rule themselves.

And he will be following in the tradition of Jefferson, Lincoln and Jackson.

The majority of Americans support his policy. The law, in both the legislative text and judicial precedent, supports his actions. As the death toll in Europe mounts, they are waiting for him to do the right thing.

Charlie Brown has been down on his luck before. But he’s never been targeted by an entire state. What insane dictator could possibly hate the lovable Peanuts character? Kim Jong-Un? No, Governor Brown.

Good grief!

Art by Bosch Fawstin

Governor Jerry Brown, who despite having slightly more hair than Charlie, is much less popular than Schultz’s beloved creation. And Brown (the one who makes small children cry) is at the top of an insane leftist political system so out of touch with reality that it makes Snoopy’s fantasies seem down to earth.

The blockheaded Brown signed into law Assembly Bill 1887. It wasn’t the craziest thing to come out of the California legislature. That would be the time that the California Senate passed a universal health care bill costing $400 billion a year with no way to pay for it. That’s a tricky proposition since California’s budget is over $100 billion. Foiled again! By 2 + 2 = 4 and the notorious right-wing bias of mathematics.

Still Assembly Bill 1887, by Assemblyman Evan Low, who represents Silicon Valley causing it to be dubbed the “Silicon Curtain”, led directly to banning travel to Kentucky because of Charlie Brown.

The “Silicon Curtain” travel ban was also backed by Nancy Pelosi and the ACLU.

Governor Brown can travel to the People’s Republic of China with its forced abortions and death camps. But a California official can’t travel to Kentucky because he might encounter a Charlie Brown Christmas.

Why do Pelosi, Low, Brown and the ACLU hate Charlie Brown? Maybe their miserable childhoods made them into the miserable adults they are today. And the transformation of California from a democracy into a banana republic run by loony lefties leads to lots of bills with unintended consequences.

Assembly Bill 1887 was passed to ban travel to “anti-gay” states. How did Charlie Brown turn anti-gay?

The story begins with “A Charlie Brown Christmas” when the W.R. Castle Elementary School in Johnson County, Kentucky deleted Linus reading passages from the New Testament. The ACLU took an anti-Charlie position. The Charlie Brown Bill was introduced to protect the religious freedom of students in Kentucky schools. The ACLU again objected. The bill passed over furious Democrat opposition.

Lefty publications dubbed it an anti-gay bill even though there was no mention of homosexuality anywhere in it. Then California included Kentucky on its list of banned states along with Texas, Alabama, South Dakota, North Carolina, Kansas, Mississippi and Tennessee. That’s eight states compromising some 70 million people whom California officials aren’t allowed to visit.

A quarter of the United States of America now officially has California cooties.

The state-funded travel ban was a lunatic proposition when it merely targeted states over gay rights. But it’s escalated to targeting states with various religious freedom measures.

13 more states have religious freedom laws on the books of the kind that California would object to. At that rate, the People’s Republic of California will be boycotting 21 states and 150 million people.

That’s half the country.

The only two border states that California can still feel safely comfortable with are Oregon and Mexico. Not New Mexico, Mexico.

Good grief, indeed.

The travel bans don’t just affect politicians like Brown and Becerra, but the University of California. It means football, basketball and other sports teams will have trouble competing outside California. Becerra is “mulling” over whether the ban applies to coaches traveling to games in banned states.

The last time this happened, Soviet athletes were being preventing from competing overseas because they might defect to the free world. Is Governor Brown afraid that California football players, like California businesses, will defect to Texas if they’re allowed to leave the Silicon Curtain?

California is becoming a banana republic with lavish mansions and sports cars, but no personal freedom. Its masters live in terror that its public officials might visit a free state where they can experience an unexpurgated Charlie Brown Christmas or take their groceries home in a plastic bag.

Becerra and Brown are building Berlin Walls against a quarter of the country. And if they insist on outlawing any state with religious freedom, it will quickly become half the country. In China, Governor Brown insisted that California was a nation state that could make its own foreign policy. And declare war on the other states that reject his radical secessionist agenda.

The great irony of this latest assault on freedom is that Evan Low was formerly the Mayor of Campbell: the site of the Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins free speech case. But freedom has been foiled.

“The ACLU is proud to stand with our partners and Attorney General Becerra, and do our part to make freedom and justice a reality,” declared the Organizing Director of the ACLU of Northern California.

And how better to make freedom a reality than with travel bans to prevent Californians from experiencing what real freedom is?

These travel bans are cutting off California from America in absurd and illegal ways.

Becerra’s assault on Kentucky is actually in violation of the text of AB 1887 which requires sanctions on states that affirmatively take action to authorize discrimination against homosexuals. The Charlie Brown Law does no such thing. The Kentucky ban is a violation of the law that it’s based on.

But banana republics don’t have laws. They have whims.

"Our country has made great strides in dismantling prejudicial laws that have deprived too many of our fellow Americans of their precious rights. Sadly, that is not the case in all parts of our nation," Becerra has said.

It’s certainly not the case in California where recall elections are being suppressed, freedom of speech is met with violence and prejudicial laws impose a Silicon Curtain to cut off California from the free world.

Not to mention, a Charlie Brown Christmas.

In the spring of ’46, Winston Churchill visited Fulton, Missouri where he warned that, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

From Sacramento to San Francisco, from Los Angeles to San Diego, a silicon curtain has descended across California. There’s no room for religious or political freedom under that curtain.

And Missouri has also come under fire from the ACLU over its religious freedom. It may not be long before the location of Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech becomes the latest target of the Silicon Curtain.

Today Texas and Kentucky, tomorrow Missouri. And, before long, the rest of America.

And then the People’s Republic of California can get to work building its light rail to Cuba or North Korea. Both of which are the only other places on earth to have banned the Peanuts gang.

We always knew that the California left hated America. But who would have believed that even its hateful fanatics, steam coming out of their ears and foam from their mouths, could hate Charlie?

You’re a bad man, Governor Brown.

In April, media types were crowing that CNN had brought in Eric Lichtblau who had been, in the Washington Post’s words, at “the forefront of the New York Times’s reporting on the relationship between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia.” It was “an investment in investigative reporting and the sprawling Russia story”. It didn’t take long for the investigative investment to sprawl badly.

Lichtblau has resigned from CNN in a growing scandal over a Fake News story about a Trump associate.

"Eric will guide our coverage and thinking," Lex Haris, executive editor of CNN Investigates, had boasted. "And when he’s onto a investigation, he’ll still be reporting and writing too.”

Not for long. And Haris has joined Lichtblau on the unemployment line after the Fake News scandal.

CNN Investigates had been announced after President Trump’s inauguration. Its hit pieces had followed the same pattern as the Scaramucci attack that would be its undoing. Go after a personality tipped for a job with the new administration. CNN Investigates had previously targeted Monica Crowley and Sheriff Clarke with plagiarism accusations. But this time around, CNN’s anti-Trump unit had made a big mistake.

Unlike K-File’s petty harassment of Trump associates, the Scaramucci hit piece came from the heavier hitters poached by CNN from mainstream media papers who were supposed to bring down Trump.

The men behind the disaster were no lightweights. Thomas Frank had been nominated for a Pulitzer. Eric Lichtblau had shared a Pulitzer for bashing the Bush administration over, of all things, surveillance. Their names were all over CNN hit pieces tying to tie Trump to an impeachable Russian scandal.

That was what they had been hired for.

CNN claimed that Lichtblau had been “reporting on Comey for more than a decade.” And Frank was busy rolling out fresh grist for the Trump-Russia mill. One Frank article on CNN breathlessly claimed, "One week, three more Trump-Russia connections." CNN was riding the impeachment train to Moscow.

And yet Lichtblau’s tenure at CNN quickly became troubled. An early June piece denied that Comey had told President Trump that he was not under investigation.

“Comey expected to refute Trump," was the headline. The headline didn’t hold up. An awkward correction was appended conceding that its premise had been discredited by Comey’s testimony.

The sources were, as usual, anonymous. The Fake News story was full of "a source tells CNN" and "another source said" attributions. Seventeen of them.

The hodgepodge of anonymous sources read like a bizarre fairy tale or mystery novel.

Was "the source said" the first anonymous source? Was "a source adds" the second anonymous source? Or a third anonymous source? Was "a source" the same as "one source" who claimed to be “familiar” with Comey's thinking?

"This source" seemed to be different than "one source." But what about "another source"? And the "sources"?

This wasn’t journalism, it was gibberish. But building news stories out of conspiratorial insider fairy tales like these had become routine at the big city papers of record. The New York Times got its readership boom with anonymously sourced conspiracy theories just like these. CNN knew what it was getting when it lured Lichtblau in. It wasn’t looking for journalism, but breaking fake news scandal theater.

It was riding the same boom as the Washington Post and the New York Times. As CNN supervising producer John Bonifield admitted in a Project Veritas video, it was about the ratings.

“It’s mostly b___t right now,” he conceded.

“Just to give you some context, President Trump pulled out of the climate accords and for a day and a half we covered the climate accords,” Bonifield said. “And the CEO of CNN said in our internal meeting, he said good job everybody covering the climate accords, but we’re done with that, let’s get back to Russia.”

Why Russia? It was a popular conspiracy theory. CNN, like its dead tree competitors, was exploiting the paranoia and anger of the left for big ratings and profits. But it also carried more risk. The Times and the Post had crossed the twilight zone into publishing anonymously sourced conspiracy theories. It had become sufficient to build a link connecting a few people or organizations in the loosest and most casual way possible and then pad that out with anonymously sourced insider gossip about an investigation.

The anonymously sourced insider gossip was the only difference between many of these conspiracy theories at the Times and the Post and any random fringe ravings on leftist blogs. That and the credibility of its authors who could boast a Pulitzer and insider connections that just had to be real.

That was the business that CNN had gotten into with its “investment in investigative reporting and the sprawling Russia story”.

The end came with yet another anonymously sourced gossip hit piece trying to link Anthony Scaramucci, a Trump adviser, with the Russia investigation. The Senate Intelligence Committee investigation referenced in the piece turned out not to exist. CNN’s legal people never cleared the piece. Heads rolled.

The heads included Eric Lichtblau’s noggin, as well as Thomas Frank’s dome and Haris’ noodle.

Russia stories will now receive extra scrutiny at CNN. Why Russia, rather than Trump? Because CNN has accurately identified Russia as a major failure point in the reporting. Most in the media know very little about Russia. And the reporting isn’t being done by former bureau chiefs in Moscow, but by the usual media types who get their insight from search engines and insider gossip. Loose connections are drawn and then transformed into major stories based on a casual meeting between someone who knows Trump and someone who knows Putin. There’s an endless appetite for such stories on the left, not because of their content, but because they reaffirm the left’s conviction in Trump’s downfall.

No one actually reads through the latest story about how a guy who once shook hands with Trump might have run into a Russian who was once photographed with Vladimir Putin and is now being investigated by the Senate double secret probation committee meeting in someone’s imagination.

They just share it on social media. That’s why the viral hit pieces are popular and profitable.

It’s how the New York Times and the Washington Post found themselves in the black. And why CNN is suddenly in big trouble. The dirty business of conspiracy theories is a dangerous one. It depends on walking a fine line by implying things without saying them out loud or actually stating falsifiable facts.

That’s why Comey madness was so useful. But there was only so much mileage that could be gotten out of him. And as the media turned back to splicing together conspiracies about real people, the bell rang.

CNN’s hit team had made their big mistake with Scaramucci. After all the money spent on buying BuzzFeed’s pranksters and big city paper hitmen like Lichtblau, Trump is the one claiming the scalps.

Conspiracy theories die hard. Fake news is very profitable. But what happened at CNN should be a lesson to the rest of the industry eager to cash in on the irrational fear and loathing of the left.

A few months after the Post’s Eric Wemple had touted CNN’s hire of Lichtblau, he was forced to report on his resignation. CNN has taken a beating. The two titans of anonymously sourced Trump hit pieces, the New York Times and the Washington Post, are next.