Saleh Ali was one of 64,000 Syrian refugees living in the Netherlands. The vast majority, like Ali, are young men. And the largest number of these migrants spend their days idling in Amsterdam.

On Thursday morning, Saleh Ali took a walk to trendy Amstelveenseweg while wearing a keffiyah and waving a terrorist PLO flag. He stopped in front of a Jewish restaurant, shouted “Allahu Akbar” and began smashing the windows. The Amsterdam police stood by and watched quizzically until he was done. Then when he entered the restaurant, they finally called him out and arrested him.

And in two days he was back on the street.

Amsterdam is a very tolerant place. Not just of drugs or prostitution, but of Islamic violence.

Saleh Ali had lied about his past to get his temporary residence permit while claiming to be a refugee. He had combat training and had fought with Jihadists in and out of Syria. He told the police that he had been prepared to die in the attack on the restaurant and that he will continue engaging in violence.

But this information was kept secret until an anonymous source in the police department leaked it. The lawyer for HaCarmel, the restaurant that had been assaulted by the Islamic terrorist, issued a statement expressing outrage that the attacker who had pledged to commit more attacks was back on the street.

“It is incomprehensible and shocking that this man with a terrorist background, who claims to be prepared to commit violence, has been released,” wrote Herman Loonstein, a lawyer and Jewish civil rights activist. He warned that the attacker poses “a serious danger to society.”

And the prosecutor’s office took immediate action by filing a complaint against the restaurant’s lawyer. The Chief Officer of the Public Prosecution Service objected that, “sharing of information from the police interrogation report is ’inappropriate’". It’s inappropriate because it revealed that Saleh Ali should never have been in the Netherlands and that the authorities had stood around watching while a trained terrorist attacked a Jewish restaurant and then let him go even after he vowed to launch further attacks.

While the prosecutors went after the restaurant for exposing the terrorist past of the attacker, the attacker was headed back to court for an appearance before a three judge panel.

Saleh Ali wore camouflage to court. According to Matthys van Raalten, a conservative commentator, he told the court that, “he feels like a volcano that is waiting to erupt”. He had already informed an officer that “the attack on the kosher restaurant was only the “first step” and that a next step would come.

He refused to discuss what the next step would be.

So of course they let him go a second time.

“If we assume that this person is a danger to society, we will not just put this person on the street,” the Public Prosecution Service claimed. But what more could Saleh Ali possibly do to prove he’s a danger to society?

He’s a Jihadist with weapons training who staged a violent attack, expressed a willingness to die during the attack, and promised that he would carry out future attacks, both to the police and the court.

Ali showed off a Koran, threatened violence and so the authorities, as they often do, decided that he might be suffering from psychological problems. And so the court released him for three months while a psychiatrist and a psychologist take turns trying to exonerate him on the grounds of mental illness.

Mental illness is a popular defense for Islamic terrorists in Europe.

A Muslim terrorist stabbed four people at a train station near Munich while screaming, “Allahu Akbar”. He shouted that his victims were all “unbelievers” and, “Infidel, you must die”.

The German authorities blamed mental illness.

In Russia, Gyulchekhra Bobokulova beheaded a 4-year-old girl and displayed her head in the street while shouting, “Allahu Akbar. I hate democracy. I am a terrorist. I want you dead.”

The Russian authorities decided that this could only mean mental illness.

In France, Karim Cheurfi had been investigated for terrorism activities for months. The French police had questioned him about his threats to kill police officers. Finally he opened fire on police officers in the Champs-Élysées. ISIS claimed credit for the attack. So of course his former lawyer claimed that he wasn't an Islamic terrorist, but suffered from a “psychologically fragile character”.

When Kobili Traore attacked Sarah Halimi, the 66-year-old director of an Orthodox Jewish nursery in Paris, while shouting, "Allahu Akbar", the police refused to do anything until she was thrown out of a window. The authorities then tried to blame the Muslim killer’s actions on "psychiatric problems."

Abdellah rammed his car into three Chinese students near a campus in a suburb of Toulouse. He told the police, “I am on a mission” and revealed that he had planned the attack for a month. The prosecutor insisted that it wasn’t terrorism. "What matters in this case is the psychiatric profile,” he said.

And you can bet that by the time the farce is done, Saleh Ali will also have a “psychiatric profile”. Sympathetic shrinks will reveal that he has a “psychologically fragile character” because his mother didn’t love him and his father was unimpressed by his Jewish restaurant window smashing skills.

The video and the police leak undermined the plot to pass Saleh Ali off as another poor, mentally ill terrorist whom only cruel bigots would accuse of being an anti-Semitic Jihadist. But Saleh is still back on the street. The court warned him to stay away from the Jewish restaurant he had already attacked.

Geert Wilders, the leader of the Freedom Party, declared that the authorities are putting “innocent Dutch people in great danger by letting terrorists run around freely.”

And Saleh Ali is one of thousands of Syrian migrants who are being allowed to run around freely. The authorities did everything they could to cover up his attack. Not only did they let a Jihadist stay in the Netherlands, but the Amsterdam police watched as he smashed up a Jewish restaurant. Then he was released twice, despite vowing violence twice, and the only meaningful action in this case was taken against a Jewish civil rights activist who had revealed his terrorist past and his threats of future violence.

According to Ali’s lawyer, the terrorist won’t carry out future attacks in the Netherlands. And he will only use violence in “self-defense”. Like defending himself against the windows of a Jewish eatery. But according to the lawyer, Ali only smashed the windows when he got mad that the door was closed.

The anti-Semitic terrorist’s lawyer insisted that his client has nothing against Jews, but actually likes living in a place where different religions can co-exist. Of course his idea of interfaith coexistence is being able to practice his Islamic religious beliefs about attacking Jews while everyone in the Netherlands practices their secular religion of tolerating Islamic violence.

Saleh Ali’s case is one of many. It stands out because his attack was caught on video. And because the police leak told us the rare truth about an Islamic terrorist’s actual motivation before the authorities could begin dissecting his “psychologically fragile character”.

The Netherlands, like many European countries, has welcomed in Syrian refugees and other Muslim migrants. And then it’s done its best to cover up the violence that they brought with them.

Amsterdam’s authorities have behaved the way that the Cologne police did after the mass migrant sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve. The police did little to stop them and the authorities denied everything. It was only when police sources leaked the truth about the assaults that the authorities were forced to put on a show of doing something. And that’s just as true in Amsterdam and across Europe.

European governments would rather tolerate terrorists than fight them. The No-Go Zone isn’t just a place; it’s a state of mind. The No-Go Zone is anywhere that Islamic supremacism is asserted with no meaningful resistance from law enforcement. The No-Go Zone can appear at any moment near you.

It can be a Jewish restaurant in a trendy Dutch neighborhood or New Year’s Eve celebrations outside a German cathedral. It’s anywhere that Muslim violence is tolerated and protected from criticism.

Saleh Ali and all his fellow colonists know that the European authorities can’t and won’t resist them. Because they would rather tolerate terrorists than tolerate those who tell the truth about Islam.

“Foremost,” the NASA administrator described his marching orders from Obama, “he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world.” The great new mission of America's space agency would be to make Muslims "feel good about their historic contribution to science.”

President Trump has another mission for NASA.

Looking over at former Senator Schmitt, the last living man to walk on the moon in the Apollo 17 mission forty-five years ago, President Trump said, “Today, we pledge that he will not be the last.”

“This time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprint, we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars and, perhaps, someday to many worlds beyond.”

The message was clear. American greatness would no longer be held hostage to political correctness.

Obama had reimagined NASA as an “Earth Improvement Agency” that would push Global Warming and Muslim self-esteem. NASA’s iconic shuttles were turned into museum pieces. The replacement vehicles were sidelined. Bush era plans to go the Moon and Mars were thrown out. What was left of NASA’s space exploration was reduced to buying tickets on rickety Russian Soyuz rockets just to get into space.

And the Russians jacked up the price.

“By buying the services of space transportation, rather than the vehicles themselves, we can continue to ensure rigorous safety standards are met,” Obama had bafflingly claimed.

Neil Armstrong shot back, “It was asserted that by buying taxi service to Low Earth Orbit rather than owning the taxis, ‘we can continue to ensure rigorous safety standards are met’. The logic of that statement is mystifying.”

But the Armstrong era was over.

Administrator Charles Bolden, the most inept hack to oversee NASA, announced that the era of American space exploration had ended. “We’re not going to go anywhere beyond low earth orbit as a single entity. The United States can’t do it… no single nation is going to go to a place like Mars alone.”

“NASA will not take the lead on a human lunar mission. NASA is not going to the Moon,” he whined.

“We are probably never again going to see Americans on the Moon, on Mars, near an asteroid, or anywhere,” he insisted.

President Trump disagrees.

While CNN’s talking heads were jabbering about how many sodas he drinks, President Trump was signing Space Policy Directive 1 which declares that the United States will “lead the return of humans to the Moon”, a Mars expedition and “human expansion across the solar system”.

Muslim self-esteem may be one of the casualties along with the media’s vapid nonsense.

Having former Senator Schmitt at the signing was a powerful reminder of what we had aspired to. And what we had lost. Apollo 17 wasn’t just our last manned mission to the moon; it was the last time we left low-earth orbit. For forty-five years, we’ve had a space program in name only.

The last time we left our own planet, Nixon was in the White House.

Schmitt was a young man when he became the last person to step out from a spacecraft onto the moon. He’s 82 now. The rest of his crew is dead. The photo he took of the earth hangs on a thousand dorm room walls. But none of those students have had the opportunity to take another one like it. And if Obama had gotten his way, that’s how the legacy of our space program would have ended.

When Obama trashed what was left of our space program, the space shuttles were parceled off to connected museums and cities. And were stowed next to the Apollo and Gemini gear as relics. Children could peer at them through glass walls as the artifacts of another culture that actually did great things.

“Imagine the possibilities waiting in those big, beautiful stars if we dare to dream big.” President Trump urged. “And that’s what our country is doing again: We’re dreaming big.”

The media is pretending that Obama had some sort of space exploration plan that Trump scrapped.

He didn’t. Take it from the first man to walk on the moon.

“With regard to President Obama's 2010 plan, I have yet to find a person in NASA, the Defense Department, the Air Force, the National Academies, industry, or academia that had any knowledge of the plan prior to its announcement,” Neil Armstrong wrote. "I believe the President was poorly advised.”

That’s an understatement.

The media has been touting Obama’s asteroid nonsense. The National Research Council found that the plan wasn’t even generally accepted within NASA. “The 2011 NASA strategic plan and associated documents do not, in our view, constitute a strategy,” study chairman Albert Carnesale had said.

There is a strategy now. It doesn’t involve Muslim self-esteem or making Al Gore even richer. Nor is it about disposable missions that don’t do anything except keep agencies and contractors in business. Instead it reboots the Republican plan of building a sustainable pathway to the stars by returning to the moon. If Obama hadn’t trashed it for Muslim self-esteem, 2015 would have seen our first lunar mission.

The destruction of our space program was one of the wounds that Obama and his cronies inflicted on the nation. President Trump’s space directive intends to heal another of them by rebuilding American greatness. But what has crippled our ability to move forward is that plans for space exploration have to be carried out over longer terms than that of any single occupant of the White House.

While space exploration is most associated with President Kennedy, the radicalization of his political party has made the heroic idea of Americans setting foot on another world much less popular with his Democrat successors. The manned journeys of the Space Exploration Initiative of the first Bush administration were replaced by Bill Clinton with probes. Clinton’s new "faster, better, cheaper" NASA proved to be none of the above. History repeated itself with Obama torpedoing Bush’s plans.

Clinton and Obama just didn’t see manned space exploration as something worth funding. Obama was far more interested in Muslim self-esteem than in a human presence across the solar system. If another Democrat succeeds Trump, the odds are good that he or she will do the same thing.

But unlike some of his predecessors, Trump isn’t waiting for years before tackling space policy. And Pence’s presence ensures that there will be a vocal advocate for the space program in the White House. The earlier you start a program, the more time it has to develop momentum and win support from interests in Congress. And that makes it harder to kill. That’s why, despite his best efforts, Obama wasn’t able to fully kill Constellation. The earlier Trump starts implementing his vision, the more momentum it will have and the harder it will be for the Obamas and Clintons of tomorrow to stop our space program.

The Democrats are expected to fight Trump’s nomination of Rep. Bridenstine to head NASA for partisan reasons. At Bridenstine’s hearing, Senate Democrats showed no interest in discussing space policy. Instead they wanted to pound their pulpits about global warming, Muslim self-esteem and gay marriage.

"So if you're NASA administrator, and someone asks you questions about sexual morality, you're going to stay consistent with your past statements on how you view same-sex couples raising children?" Senator Cory Booker bizarrely asked.

Senator Patty Murray announced that she would vote against the former Navy pilot because of his appearances at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and other “anti-Muslim groups”. For Murray, Muslim self-esteem is apparently still central to NASA’s mission.

Booker and Murray demonstrate the Dem unseriousness and disinterest in space exploration. Why bother going to the stars when you can wallow in the sewer of intersectional identity politics instead.

Democrats have claimed that anyone who doesn’t believe that the Flying Global Warming Monster is sending storms to punish us for not sending enough money to Al Gore’s carbon credit schemes can’t work at NASA.

But Schmitt, the last living man to walk on the moon, has made it clear that he doesn’t believe it.

President Trump is rebuilding NASA as an agency of human space exploration while discarding the post-modernist angst about human industrial progress that powers pseudoscientific myths about ‘Global Warming’. A new age of American confidence is discarding these insecurities about our purpose and place in the universe. It’s replacing them with purpose, vision and meaning.

The leftward tilt of the Democrats has convinced them that this nation’s founding, our technological achievements and our entire civilization, are tragic mistakes, if not outright crimes. It’s no wonder that ideologues who don’t believe in America, also don’t believe in Americans traveling to other worlds.

But there are still Americans in this country. And their vision goes beyond adding another letter to the LGBTQIA alphabet, another microaggression grievance and another angry protest against America.

"After braving the vast unknown and discovering the new world, our forefathers did not only merely sail home," President Trump said. "They stayed, they explored, they built, they guided, and through that pioneering spirit, they imagined all of the possibilities that few dared to dream. Today, the same spirit beckons us to begin new journeys of exploration and discovery, to lift our eyes all the way up to the heavens."

Akayed Ullah, a Bangladeshi Muslim living in Brooklyn, really hated Christmas. He hated Christmas so much that he used Christmas tree lights (along with a battery and some wire) as a trigger for a pipe bomb. He filled the pipe bomb with screws so that when it went off, metal shrapnel would tear bloody holes through morning commuters in Manhattan.

Wearing a hooded jacket and a backpack to cover the pipe bomb strapped to his body, Ullah got on the F Train at the 18th Avenue elevated subway station off Little Bangladesh. Like the Duke Ellington song says, he switched over to the A Train at Jay Street. It was early morning, but there were plenty of people riding the train. Jay Street is a major transit hub. But Ullah was waiting to blow up somewhere else.

He got off in the crush at the 42nd-St. Port Authority station. Here a whole lot of people can be found rushing up and down crowded staircases and shoving their way through cramped corridors.

Ullah took the long underground corridor that runs between the Port Authority station and Times Square. He strode past movie and beauty ads. He walked under the discouraging poem, “Overslept, So tired, If late, Get fired, Why bother? Why the pain? Just go home. Do it again.” But he wasn’t going home. And there would be no opportunities to do it again. The Muslim terrorist was right on time.

Rush hour was just getting started in the city that never sleeps. The Muslim terrorist probably passed hundreds of people: not to mention a saxophonist or drummer trying out his act on tired commuters.

But he was waiting for something else. Finally he saw it. A Christmas poster.

That’s when he detonated the pipe bomb using a Christmas tree light near a Christmas poster. Because if there was one thing that Akayed Ullah, like his ISIS masters truly hated, it was Christmas.

Last month, ISIS supporters had circulated a poorly photoshopped poster of Santa next to a box of dynamite overlooking Times Square. "We meet at Christmas in New York... soon," it read.

As he walked toward Times Square, Ullah appeared determined to carry out the ISIS threat. Using a Christmas tree light in his bomb and detonating near a Christmas poster was a clear statement.

Ullah came to this country in 2011. Three years later, he had already been ‘radicalized’. The Bangladeshi terrorist had come here on a chain migration link that began with a diversity lottery visa. But Ullah didn’t actually like diversity. He didn’t want to share a city or country with Christians.

And so he set out to kill them.

In Ullah’s native Bangladesh, Christian churches have shut down midnight mass before due to threats of violence.

“This is the first time in my life that I find Christians celebrating Christmas with such panic and fear," the Bangladesh Christian Association secretary general had said.

But with the diversity visa lottery, you don’t have to be a Christian living in Bangladesh to be terrorized by Bangladeshi Muslim violence.

And maybe that’s a diversity we could do without.

That same year, Bangladeshi authorities stopped a Christmas Day plot that involves a suicide bomb vest. But this year, America had its very own Bangladeshi suicide bomber. Christians are readying to celebrate Christmas in Bangladeshi churches this year with metal detectors and thousands of security personnel.

But these days that’s not just Christmas in Bangladesh. It’s Christmas in Europe.

Bangladeshi immigration means that we all live in Bangladesh now. Pakistani migration means we all live in Pakistan. Iraqi migration means that to a certain degree we all live in Iraq.

Muslim Christmas violence spread terror across Europe last year. These ranged from the ‘Kindergarten bomber’, a 12-year-old Iraqi who planted a nail bomb in a German Christmas market to the Tunisian refugee who rammed a truck into another German Christmas market killing 12 people and wounding 68. These days, German Christmas markets come with car barriers that are gift wrapped with bows.

An estimated 29 ‘lone wolves’ were arrested last year in Christmas terror plots in the UK, France, Brussels and Australia. A number of these plots targeted Christmas markets, carnivals and cathedrals.

The year before, a Pakistani married couple had opened fire at a Christmas party at the Department of Public Health in San Bernardino. The worst half of the couple had groused about the Christmas decorations. Previous attack plots had included the Christmas Day bomber (the Nigerian terrorist also known as the underwear bomber) and Portland’s Somali Christmas tree lighting bomb plot.

This is what a religious war looks like.

Muslim violence spikes around Ramadan, and around Christian and Jewish holidays, because Islamic violence is inherently religious in nature. Islamic Supremacist terrorists like Ullah are lashing out at non-Islamic religions in order to clear the way for the imposition of Islamic rule.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, the lefty pol who dismantled the NYPD’s counterterrorism programs at the behest of Islamist pressure groups, insisted at the post-attack press conference that, “We actually show that society of many faiths and many backgrounds can work.”

A society of many faiths can work. As long as all of them practice mutual tolerance.

When a society includes Akayed Ullah, Sayfullo Saipov, the Uzbeki Muslim who ran over tourists on a Manhattan bike path in October, Ahmad Khan Rahimi, the Afghan who set off bombs in New York and New Jersey last year, Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani who tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square, Talha Haroon, another Pakistani who wanted to massacre New Yorkers in Times Square, Quazi Mohammad, another Bangladeshi who wanted to bomb the Federal Reserve and Raees Qazi, another Pakistani who scouted Times Square for an attack, that society can’t and won’t work.

You can’t coexist with people who refuse to coexist with you. They’re just ticking time bombs. Like Ullah riding the F Train and then the A Train while the passengers around him unthinkingly played games or clicked through Trump headlines not knowing that he could have detonated the bomb at any moment.

There are plenty of Ullahs all around us. Sometimes they wait years before blowing up. Other times hours and minutes. If we’re unlucky, it’s seconds. But the bombs, real and metaphorical, are there.

This is life in a society that has opened its borders to migrants from Islamic states where terrorism isn’t a horrifying aberration, but an ancient religious tradition to which the penitent sinner may turn to when his life no longer seems to have purpose or meaning. This is how we live now. And it will get worse.

Our politicians tout diversity after every attack. They tell us how much it enriches and improves us.

Akayed Ullah was a livery cab driver. His predecessor, Sayfullo Saipov, was an Uber driver. Do we really need two cab drivers so badly that we have to accept eight deaths and sixteen injuries in exchange?

Could we get our cab drivers from somewhere beyond Bangladesh and Uzbekistan?

We don’t have to live like this. We’re only living like this because we’ve been told that it would be mean and unfair of us to actually have a common sense immigration policy that keeps Islamic terrorists out.

The question is would we rather be mean to the Uber drivers of tomorrow or sit next to a ticking time bomb waiting to detonate at the first sight of a Christmas poster?

We’ve been told often enough that a common sense travel ban would violate religious freedom. But the greatest violation of religious freedom isn’t a selective immigration policy, it’s being murdered for your religion. That’s not just the reality in Bangladesh. It’s now the reality in America and Europe.

The diversity visa lottery has brought us the wrong kind of diversity. Our cities have become a diverse assortment of immigrants who will and won’t kill you over your religion. There isn’t much religious diversity in Bangladesh, Pakistan or Afghanistan. If we want to preserve our own religious diversity from going the same way, we have to exclude those immigrants who would kill anyone who is different.

And we need to hurry because the Ullahs of tomorrow are applying for their visas today.

A candle is a brief flare of light. A wick dipped in oil burns and then goes out again. The light of Chanukah appears to follow the same narrative. Briefly there is light and warmth and then darkness again.

Out of the exile of Babylon, the handful that returned to resettle and rebuild the land faced the might of new empires. The Jews who returned from the exile of one evil empire some twenty-six hundred years ago were forced to decide whether they would be a people with their own faith and history, or the colony of another empire, with its history and beliefs.

Jerusalem's wealthy elites threw in their lot with the empire and its ways. But out in the rural heartland where the old ways where still kept, a spark flared to life. Modi'in. Maccabee.

And so war came between the handfuls of Jewish Maccabee partisans and the armies of Antiochus IV’s Selecuid empire. A war that had its echoes in the past and would have it again in the future as lightly armed and untrained armies of Jewish soldiers would go on to fight in those same hills and valleys against the Romans and eventually the armies of six Arab nations.

The Syrian Greek armies were among the best of their day. The Maccabees were living in the backwaters of Israel, a nation that had not been independently ruled since the armies of Babylon had flooded across the land, destroying everything in their path.

In the wilderness of Judea a band of brothers vowed that they would bow to no man and let no foreigners rule over their land. Apollonius brought his Samaritan forces against the brothers, and Judah, first among the Macabees, killed him, took his sword and wore it for his own.

Seron, General of the army of Coele-Syria, brought together his soldiers, along with renegade Jewish mercenaries, and was broken at Beit Haran. The Governor of Syria dispatched two generals, Nicanor, and Gorgias, with forty thousand soldiers and seven thousand horsemen to conquer Judea, destroy Jerusalem and abolish the whole Jewish nation forever. So certain were they of victory that they brought with them merchant caravans to fill with the Hebrew slaves of a destroyed nation.

Judah walked among his brothers and fellow rebels and spoke to them of the thing for which they fought; “O my fellow soldiers, no other time remains more opportune than the present for courage and contempt of dangers; for if you now fight manfully, you may recover your liberty, which, as it is a thing of itself agreeable to all men, so it proves to be to us much more desirable, by its affording us the liberty of worshiping God.

"Since therefore you are in such circumstances at present, you must either recover that liberty, and so regain a happy and blessed way of living, which is that according to our laws, and the customs of our country, or to submit to the most opprobrious sufferings; nor will any seed of your nation remain if you be beat in this battle. Fight therefore manfully; and suppose that you must die, though you do not fight; but believe, that besides such glorious rewards as those of the liberty of your country, of your laws, of your religion, you shall then obtain everlasting glory.

"Prepare yourselves, therefore, and put yourselves into such an agreeable posture, that you may be ready to fight with the enemy as soon as it is day tomorrow morning."

Though the Macabees were but three thousand, starving and dressed in bare rags, the God for whom they fought and their native wits and courage, gave them victory over thousands and tens of thousands. Worn from battle, the Macabees did not flee back into their Judean wilderness, instead they went on to Jerusalem and its Temple, to reclaim their land and their God, only to find the Temple and the capital in ruins.

The Macabees had fought courageously for the freedom to worship God once again as their fathers had, but courage alone could not make the Menorah burn and thus renew the Temple service again. Yet it had not been mere berserker’s courage that had brought them this far. Like their ancestors before them who had leaped into furnaces and the raging sea, they had dared the impossible on faith. Faith in a God who watched over his nation and intervened in the affairs of men. And so on faith they poured the oil of that single flask in the Menorah, oil that could only last for a single day. And then having done all they could, the priests and sons of priests who had fought through entire armies to reach this place, accepted that they had done all they could and left the remainder in the hands of the Almighty.

If they had won by the strength of their hands alone, then the lamps would burn for a day and then flicker out. But if it had been more than mere force of arms that had brought them here, if it had been more than mere happenstance that a small band of ragged and starving rebels had shattered the armies of an empire, then the flames of the Menorah would burn on.

The sun rose and set again. The day came to its end and the men watched the lights of the Menorah to see if they would burn or die out. And if the flame in their hearts could have kindled the lamps, they would have burst into bright flame then and there. Darkness fell that night and still the lamps burned on.

For eight days and nights the Menorah burned on that single lonely pure flask of oil, until more could be found, and the men who for a time had been soldiers and had once again become priests, saw that while it may be men who kindle lamps and hearts, it is the Almighty who provides them with the fuel of the spirit through which they burn.

120 years after the Maccabees drove out the foreign invaders and their collaborators, another foreign invader, Herod, the son of Rome's Arab governor, was placed on the throne by the Roman Empire, disposing of the last of the Maccabean kings and ending the brief revival of the Jewish kingdom.

The revived kingdom had been a plaything in the game of empires. Exiled by Babylon, restored by Persia, conquered by the Greeks, ground under the heel of the remnants of Alexander's empire, briefly liberated by the Parthians, tricked into servitude and destroyed by Rome. The victory of the Maccabean brothers in reclaiming Jerusalem was a brief flare of light in the dark centuries and even that light was shadowed by the growing darkness.

The fall of the Roman Republic and the civil wars of the new empire, its uncontrollable spending and greed made it hopelessly corrupt. Caesar repaid Jewish loyalty by rewarding the Arab-Idumean murderers of Jewish kings, and his successors saw the Jewish state as a way to bring in some quick money. Out went the Jewish kings, in came the son of Rome's tax collector, Herod.

The promises made by Senate to the Maccabees ceased to matter. Imperial greed collided with Jewish nationalism in a war that for a brief shining moment seemed as if it might end in another Chanukah, but ended instead in massacre and atrocity. The exiles went forth once again, some on foot and some in slave ships. Israel became Palestine. Jerusalem was renamed and resettled. The long night had begun.

But no darkness lasts forever.

Two thousand years after the Jews had come to believe that wars were for other people and miracles meant escaping alive, Jewish armies stood and held the line against an empire and the would be empires of the region.

And now the flame still burns, though it is flickering. Sixty-eight years is a long time for oil to burn, especially when the black oil next door seems so much more useful to the empires and republics across the sea. And the children of many of those who first lit the flame no longer see the point in that hoary old light.

But that old light is still the light of possibilities. It burns to remind us of the extraordinary things that our ancestors did and of the extraordinary assistance that they received. We cannot always expect oil to burn for eight days, just as we cannot always expect the bullet to miss or the rocket to fall short. And yet even in those moments of darkness the reminder of the flame is with us for no darkness lasts forever and no exile, whether of the body of the spirit, endures. Sooner or later the spark flares to life again and the oil burns again. Sooner or later the light returns.

It is the miracle that we commemorate because it is a reminder of possibilities. Each time we light a candle or dip a wick in oil, we release a flare of light from the darkness comes to remind us of what was, is and can still be.

Amsterdam’s HaCarmel restaurant sits between two other restaurants. The Jewish kosher eatery whose big blue sign boasts fish, meat and vegetarian options is sandwiched between a sidewalk café with its inevitable Heineken umbrellas on one corner of Amstelveenseweg and an ice cream place on the other corner. There’s an Italian restaurant across the street with some very nice front windows.

If the Muslim refugee had wanted to smash up any eatery, he had plenty of options. But he went to the Kosher restaurant. Inside were wooden chairs, white tablecloths and red roses. Outside came the guttural shriek of, “Allahu Akbar.” This was the battle cry with which Mohammed had inaugurated his massacre and enslavement of the Jews. The cuisine inside HaCarmel is Middle Eastern, but the attack showed why there are few Jews (or Christians) left in the Middle East outside Israel.

The Amsterdam cops had plenty of warning. The “Palestinian” was wearing a Keffiyah on his head, waving a large PLO flag in one hand and brandishing a club in the other while shouting, “Allahu akbar.”

Even in a city where 1 in 4 are Muslim, the attacker was putting on a hell of a display. He had done everything but put an ad in the paper announcing that he’s an Islamic terrorist. And so the police were already on the scene by the time the Islamic thug reached the Jewish restaurant.

Synagogues, kosher restaurants and any recognizably Jewish buildings in Europe are at risk of being attacked. Police officers and, in some countries, soldiers usually aren’t too far away from potential targets in nicer areas. But being there and actually stopping the attack is not at all the same thing.

Video shows the police officer arriving on the scene just in time. The Muslim refugee goes on shouting. Then he smashes HaCarmel’s front windows. The police, in typically European fashion, do nothing. Instead they stand there watching the Muslim thug as he smashes the glass with blow after blow as if they were attending the opening of an interesting art exhibit instead of a violent racist attack.

He starts smashing the door and the Amsterdam cops amble over for a better view. Their body language is casual and loose. They’re interested in the attack in the way that sightseers are. Maybe they’re admiring his Kosher restaurant window smashing techniques. But they’re not about to intervene.

A Muslim’s got a right to smash up a Jewish restaurant’s windows, is their attitude. Or maybe those are their orders. Their job is the usual job of cops to see that the situation doesn’t get out of control.

European cops do have their red lines. Even when it comes to outbursts of Muslim anti-Semitism.

Watching the video makes it clear what those red lines are. Muslims can safely smash Jewish windows while screaming, “Allahu Akbar”. It’s only when he finishes kicking through the glass and actually moves into the restaurant that one of the officers unhurriedly approaches him and urges him to come outside.

Then he’s finally tackled and arrested.

The European red line for anti-Semitism is that you can smash Jewish windows while the cops watch, but you won’t be allowed to potentially attack Jewish people. At least while the cops watch.

Once he was de-flagged, de-keffiyahed and taken down to the local police version of downtown, the “Palestinian” refugee told the police that he’s not anti-Semitic. It was just another of those Muslim attacks on Jews that have nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

Lefty politicians and the media rushed to blame Trump. But the Muslim refugee never mentioned Trump or Jerusalem. Muslims have been attacking Jews in Amsterdam long before Trump’s announcement.

Things were bad enough that cops dressed as Jews had been deployed to stop anti-Semitic attacks.

Rabbi Benjamin Jacobs, the Chief Rabbi of Holland, has had rocks thrown at him, he’s been called a dirty Jew and was nearly hit by a car. His house not far from Amsterdam has been vandalized five times. And the police have warned him not to travel by train. All this was before Trump had recognized Jerusalem.

Who’s doing all this?

According to the Jewish community’s anti-Semitism watchdog, 70% of anti-Semitic attacks in the Netherlands had been carried out by immigrants. And we aren’t talking about the Chinese.

Muslim harassment isn’t new at HaCarmel.

Passerby routinely spit at the windows. Nazi salutes and middle fingers are also commonplace. But the good people offering Nazi salutes to a Kosher restaurant aren’t the ones that the left expects. When a Jewish broadcaster filmed a Rabbi walking through a Moroccan neighborhood in Amsterdam, the men offering them Nazi salutes were as Aryan as Arafat, but as Muslim as Mohammed.

Supporting Muslim migration is the new Nazi collaboration. It’s smashing Jewish store windows, firebombing synagogues and driving Jews out of the cities of Europe.

HaCarmel isn’t located in a Muslim no-go zone. It’s a trendy area full of trendy eateries. The Heineken Experience and the Van Gogh Museum are less than 2 miles away. The Vondelpark is a few blocks away.

If this is what it’s like on Amstelveenseweg (“the new place to be in Amsterdam Old South”) imagine what it’s like in areas where the police won’t show up to stop the tourists from being too rattled. Imagine what it’s like to be in a synagogue that looks like an unremarkable concrete fortress and still gets vandalized every few weeks. Imagine what it’s like for ordinary Jews when even the Chief Rabbi regularly gets called a dirty Jew and has rocks thrown through his windows.

Left-wing politicians were quick to blame Trump. Reinier van Dantzig of D66, who touts Muslim refugees, blamed the “ill-considered statements of the leader of the free world.” But Trump didn’t come down to Amsterdam to smash a Jewish restaurant’s window. A Muslim migrant did that.

But meanwhile conservative Dutch politicians visited the restaurant in a show of solidarity.

That’s the usual shameful pattern in which the left excuses and defends Muslim anti-Semitism by blaming the Jews. “A distinction should be made between traditional anti-Semitism, which should be condemned and Muslim hatred for Jews, which stems from the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians,” Howard Gutman, Obama’s disgraced ambassador to Belgium, had argued.

The distinction is really an exception and a justification. Anti-Semitism is wrong unless Muslims do it. And Muslim anti-Semitism is just really a response to their oppression by the Jews.

The Kosher restaurant wasn’t the victim. It was the perpetrator.

Blaming Trump for anti-Semitic violence in Europe really blames the Jews. Trump just recognized the reality that Jerusalem is the center of Jewish religious, historic and political life. He didn’t create that reality. And so blaming Trump for recognizing the reality of Jewish Jerusalem just blames the Jews.

After the HaCarmel attack, Daniel Baron, the owner’s son, began sweeping up the mess. Friends from the Jewish community came by to help. But the customers haven’t come drifting back. Muslim terror has already depressed the nightlife in Paris and other European cities. And Jewish restaurants have long been the targets of Muslim violence. The closing act to the Charlie Hebdo attack was the massacre at a Kosher supermarket in Paris before the Sabbath. Obama famously described it as a random attack on “a bunch of folks in a deli." There have been lots of those "random” attacks by “lone wolves.”

But HaCarmel isn’t giving up.

“For what Trump did, they can break the windows ten more times,” Daniel Baron stated. “Jerusalem will still be Israel’s capital.”

The anti-Israel lobby of J Street, If Not Now, T’ruah and the rest of the gang often claim that they’re standing up to racists. But this is what actually standing up to racists, instead of collaborating with them, looks like.

Hamas has announced that President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel has opened the “gates of hell.” Its Muslim Brotherhood parent has declared America an “enemy state.”

The Arab League boss warned that the Jerusalem move “will fuel extremism and result in violence.” The Jordanian Foreign Minister claimed that it would “trigger anger” and “fuel tension.”

“Moderate” Muslim leaders excel at threatening violence on behalf of the “extremists”.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) warned that recognizing Jerusalem will trigger an Islamic summit and be considered a "blatant attack on the Arab and Islamic nations."

The last time the OIC was this mad, someone drew Mohammed. And wasn’t stoned to death for it.

According to the Saudi ambassador, it will “heighten tensions”. The Deputy Prime Minister of Islamist Turkey called it a “major catastrophe”. And the leader of the largest Muslim country in Europe, France's Emmanuel Macron "expressed concern" that America will “unilaterally recognize Jerusalem."

PLO leaders and minions meanwhile made it quite clear that now the dead peace process is truly dead.

The Palestinian Authority’s boss warned that recognizing Jerusalem will “destroy the peace process”. The PLO’s envoy in D.C. threatened that it would be the “final lethal blow” and “the kiss of death to the two-state solution”. A top PA advisor claimed it “will end any chance of a peace process.”

A day later, the peace process is still as alive and as dead as it ever was.

Since the chance of a peace process is about the same as being hit by lightning while scoring a Royal Flush, that “chance” doesn’t amount to anything. The peace process has been deader than Dracula for ages. And even a PLO terrorist should know that you can’t threaten to kill a dead hostage.

The only kiss of death here came from Arafat.

Peace wasn’t killed though. It was never alive. Because a permanent peace is Islamically impossible.

"The world will pay the price," warned Mahmoud Habash, the Palestinian Authority’s Supreme Sharia judge.

Habash isn’t just the bigwig of Islamic law, he’s also the Islamic adviser to the leader of the Palestinian Authority. And Abbas, the terror organization’s leader, was there when Habash made his remarks.

Previously Habash had declared that the Kotel, the Western Wall of the fallen Temple, the holiest site in Judaism, “can never be for non-Muslims. It cannot be under the sovereignty of non-Muslims.”

While the official warnings from the Palestinian Authority, the Arab League and assorted other Islamic organizations have claimed that recognizing Jerusalem threatens the non-existent peace process, Habash had in the past had made it quite clear that the issue wasn’t land, it was Jihad.

“The struggle over this land is not merely a struggle over a piece of land here or there. Not at all. The struggle has the symbolism of holiness, or blessing. It is a struggle between those whom Allah has chosen for Ribat and those who are trying to mutilate the land of Ribat," Habash had declared.

Ribat means that Israel is a frontier outpost between the territories of Islam and the free world. The Muslim terrorists who call themselves “Palestinians” have, according to the Abbas adviser, been chosen for “Ribat” to stand guard on the Islamic frontier and expand the territories of Islam.

The sense of Ribat is that the Jihadists may not yet be able to win a definitive victory, but must maintain their vigilance for the ultimate goal, which a Hadith defines as performing Ribat “against my enemy and your enemy until he abandons his religion for your religion."

That is what’s at stake here.

It’s not about a “piece of land here or there”, as the PA’s top Sharia judge clarifies, it’s a religious war. And Israel is not just a religious war between Muslims and Jews, but a shifting frontier in the larger war between Islam and the rest of the world. It’s another territory to be conquered on the way to Europe. And Europe is another territory to be conquered on the way to America.

There can be no peace in a religious war. Nor is there anything to negotiate.

“It isn't possible to compromise on or negotiate over Jerusalem,” Habash had said. “In politics there can be compromises here and there... In politics there can be negotiation. However, in matters of religion, faith, values, ethics, and history, there can be no compromises.”

There’s an extremely thin line in Islamic theocracy between politics and religion. But what Habash is really saying is that there might be room to negotiate how many times a week the garbage truck comes to pick up the trash, but not who gives him the orders. Islamic supremacism is non-negotiable.

The Supreme Sharia judge warned Trump that moving the embassy is “a declaration of war on all Muslims.” Why all Muslims? Because the “Palestinians” are a myth. Islamic conquests are collective.

And it’s not as if any of the Muslim leaders disagree.

Why is Jerusalem their business? It’s not empathy for the “Palestinians”. Kuwait ethnically cleansed huge numbers of them. They aren’t treated all that much better in other Arab Muslim countries.

It’s not about them. The Muslim settlers in Israel are just there as “Ribat”. They’re the frontier guard of the Islamic conquest. Much like the Sharia patrols in the No-Go Zones of Europe or the Jihadists in Kashmir, the Rohingya in Burma and all the other Islamic Volksdeutsche variants of occupying colonists.

Sunni may fight Shiite. Muslim countries, tribes and clans may war with each other. But the land they’re fighting over belongs to all of them collectively.

It can never belong to non-Muslims. That is the essence of Islam where conquest is religion.

That’s true of Jerusalem. And of the entire world.

That is what is truly at stake in the war over Jerusalem. When countries refuse to move their embassies to Jerusalem, they are submitting to Sharia law and Islamic supremacism. The issue at stake is the same one as drawing Mohammed. It’s not about a “piece of land”. It’s about the supremacy of Islam.

Refusing to move the embassy doesn’t prevent violence. Islamic terrorism continues to claim lives in Jerusalem. And Islamic violence has been a constant before Israel liberated Jerusalem or before there was even a free Israel. The Arab League, the Jordanians, the Saudis and the rest of the gang aren’t promising an end to the violence. Instead they warn that if we don’t obey, it will grow worse.

That’s not diplomacy. It’s a hostage crisis.

President Trump made the right decision by refusing to let our foreign policy be held hostage. We don’t win by giving in to terrorists.

We win by resisting them. Or else we’ll have to live our lives as hostages of Islamic terror.

Jerusalem is a metaphor. Every free country has its own Jerusalem. In America, it’s the First Amendment. Our Jerusalem is not just a piece of land, it’s a value. And the Islamic Jihad seeks to intimidate us into giving it up until, as the Hadith states, we abandon our religion for Islam.

Moving the embassy to Jerusalem will do much more for America than it will for Israel.

The Israelis already know where their capital is. We need to remember where we left our freedom. Islamic terrorists win when they terrorize us into being too afraid to do the right thing.

President Trump sent a message to the terrorists that America will not be terrorized.

Previous administrations allowed the terrorists to decide where we put our embassy. But Trump has made it clear that we won’t let Islamic terrorists decide where we put our embassies, what cartoons we will draw or how we live our lives. That is what real freedom means.

"Everybody f____g knew," a top Hollywood screenwriter wrote of Harvey Weinstein. "Everybody knew" about Matt Lauer at NBC, Variety reports, and it "wasn’t even considered a secret." "Every female in the press corps knew that, right, don’t get in elevator with him," ABC's Cokie Roberts said of Rep. Conyers.

Everybody knew.

The #MeToo sexual harassment scandals have hit CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR, PBS, Vox, New Republic, Mother Jones. Forget Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose. They were just the talent. Their big decisions were limited to which hairpiece looked best in all three mirrors and which naïve intern to prey on this month. The heads of the men who actually make the news are rolling left and right.

NPR lost its Chief News Editor and its Senior VP of News. Vox lost its Editorial Director. The New York Times lost its White House Correspondent and Mother Jones lost its D.C. Bureau Chief. MSNBC lost two prominent contributors who had done much to shape the political landscape, Mark Halperin, who had written the definitive media account of the ’08 election, and David Corn, who had debuted the 47% attack on Romney and got the first look at Hillary’s Trump dossier.

The massive media machine built to smear and steamroll Republicans never bothered to report what everybody on the inside already knew. The wannabe Woodwards and Bernsteins in every paper, news bureau and explainer site weren’t investigating the scandals they already knew about. Those weren’t the scandals they were looking for.

That’s why no one trusts them.

Hollywood, the media and the Democrats have been preaching to us about sexism and feminism for generations. Meanwhile behind the cameras and the chambers, an assault spree was in progress.

And everybody knew.

The Democrats didn’t suddenly realize that Bill Clinton was a rapist. They knew it all along. And they denied it for political convenience. The same way that Nancy Pelosi praised Conyers as an “icon” and dismissed his female accusers or that Rep. Clyburn claimed that he was being attacked by white women. When Senator Gillibrand, who had been opportunistically playing the sexual harassment card for a presidential bid, was asked whether Franken should resign, her response was, “It's his decision.”

And, as Cokie’s comments show, the media knew all about Conyers. And, likely, Franken. Before Franken was groping women as a politician, he was doing it while bleating leftist twaddle at Air America. Between Saturday Night Live and winning the vote of the Undead-Americans of Minnesota, the Great Groper of the Democratic Farmer Labor Party was in the same business as the rest of the media.

The media liked to pretend that its reporting on politicians and celebrities keeps them honest. But it was all one club. And everybody in the club knew what everyone else was up to. And kept quiet about it.

The politicians and celebrities, and the reporters who interviewed them, weren’t in three separate businesses. They were in three interrelated branches of the same industry of narratives. It was the media’s job to turn some politicians and celebrities into culture heroes based on their politics. While doing everything possible to destroy those politicians and celebrities with the wrong views.

The politicians were expected to pass the agendas that the reporters and celebrities wanted. And it was the job of the celebrities to make the politicians and the reporters look as cool as possible.

Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, John Conyers, Al Franken, Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose were all in the same business. They were just working different ends of it. And working over different victims: underage boys, overworked female staffers, random fans, harried interns, famous actresses. But the details don’t really matter. Power has its privileges. The issue isn’t the privilege, it’s the power.

And the immunity from scrutiny that came with that power.

The left has done its best to make this about men. But it’s not about men. It’s about power. Men and women may abuse power somewhat differently. But the same arrogance that led Hillary Clinton to boost her presidential campaign with an illegal war in Libya led her husband to sexually abuse women.

The reporters who covered for Obama’s use of the IRS against his political opponents also covered for each other’s sexual misdeeds. These are not separate issues. They’re the same issue.

And the issue is accountability in institutions that put political solidarity over ethics and integrity.

The left builds political networks in every institution. Some, like unions, are official. Others, like the media, are unofficial. But they all create walls of silence that protect fellow leftist abusers.

These abuses happened because the left insists on distinguishing between political abuses and personal abuses. It’s one thing to lie, cheat and abuse people for a progressive political cause. But that’s not supposed to translate into a similar immunity for abusing people on purely selfish grounds.

Except that’s not how human nature works.

Power corrupts. And that corruption won’t just stop at any neat intersectional line. The myth of the pure revolutionary should have been buried with Stalin, Pol Pot and Che. But the left can’t escape the corrupt conviction that abusing power for a good cause is profoundly different than just abusing power.

And so the same sordid dramas keep playing out again.

Socialist regimes turn feudal. The revolutionaries become tyrants. Murder for the cause becomes just murder. Redistribution of wealth flows to the redistributors. Civil rights activists turn racist. Male feminists rape. The liars don’t just lie for the cause. They lie for their friends and for themselves.

The Obama scandals had three phases. 1. It’s right-wing nonsense. 2. It’s complicated. 3. Everybody knew. Number 3 was the climax to the denials and explainers of the previous two phases. It meant that this was just how it was done. The only people who didn’t know were just ignorant of the corrupt game.

Everybody knew. Everybody who matters always knows.

Each scandal comes with histrionic handwringing. The media churns with phony thinkpieces wondering how we can prevent a culture of abuse. The answer is as easy as it is hateful to the left.

Bring back checks and balances by breaking up the leftist networks.

The American system is built around checks and balances. Groups and individuals prevent the corruption of power by constantly struggling with each other. That’s the opposite of the left which wants to create a perfectly united world by imposing one master theory on everyone. While conservatives accept the imperfections of human nature, leftists are convinced that there is a single solution to human nature.

The abuses being uncovered by #MeToo are a side effect of the left’s consolidation of power.

The First Amendment is another of the checks and balances on power. The press was meant to check the power of political institutions. But rival papers were also meant to challenge each other. Instead the media functions as a consolidated political trust. The same singleness of purpose that allowed everyone in the media to go after President Trump every single day also let #MeToo’s sexual harassment thrive.

It’s why everyone in the press corps knew about Conyers and kept quiet. They were on the same team.

This more power the left acquires, the worse it will get.

The sexual abuses of some politicians, celebrities and media people are only a symptom of the abuses of power that the left’s political tribalism and consolidation of power over entire institutions enables. Their belated exposure is only a side effect of a war between the old guard and the new guard on the left. It doesn’t mean that the abuses are going away. Only that a new generation is rising to power.

But the abuses are a warning that leftist power doesn’t lead to utopias, but to dystopias. We don’t have to visit Cuba to understand that. Spend some time in an industry or institution controlled by the left and you will learn the same lesson. The only way to change that is to end leftist monopolies on power.

A progressive monopoly on power doesn’t make the world better. Just ask the victims of #MeToo.

Huma “Abedin did not know that Clinton had a private server until about a year and a half ago when it became public knowledge.”

Abedin, Hillary’s closest aide, was being interviewed at the FBI’s Washington D.C. field office by two unnamed agents. Also present was Peter Strzok, the counterintelligence FBI figure embroiled in a scandal because of the pro-Hillary and anti-Trump texts exposed by his extramarital affair.

The field office is another one of those bland government buildings located near enough to the Mall for tourists who are going the wrong way to stumble on it, but not interesting enough for them to notice it. The building, like so many others, is part of the deeper architecture of the governing city that matters far more than the showy museums or even the White House and its adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The decisions that make the news happen in the White House and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. But the decisions that really matter take place in more obscure places, like a bland government building.

That other less glamorous government is bureaucratic. It runs on seemingly meaningless paperwork and procedures that conceal hidden motives and agendas. The bureaucracy is a theater. The titles are roles and masks. The actors read from the script, but they are all starring in the same play.

On the stage of the FBI field office were Huma Abedin, a woman living dual lives as a devout Muslim with links to the Muslim Brotherhood and a progressive activist with a Jewish husband, Karen Dunn, from Boies, Schiller & Flexner, the powerful firm with close ties to Democrats and the Clintons, who was set to be Hillary’s White House Counsel, David Laufman, a DOJ official who was an Obama donor, and Peter Strzok, a top FBI man who was actually a passionate Hillary supporter.

Everyone on the stage had a dual role. They were playing their parts as FBI investigators, lawyers, DOJ officials and government aides. And behind the kabuki masks, they were all Hillary Clinton supporters.

The particular decision that made the Huma Abedin interview little more than a formality had already been made. Peter Strzok was in on the drafting of the Comey letter exonerating Hillary Clinton. He had made sure that “grossly negligent” would be turned into “extremely careless”. So it didn’t matter very much that Huma Abedin was lying through her carefully polished teeth or whether her interlocutors were “grossly negligent” or just “extremely careless”.

Huma “Abedin did not know that Clinton had a private server until about a year and a half ago when it became public knowledge,” the notes read. But emails showed that Abedin was aware of the server that she claimed not to have known about. Justin Cooper, the Clinton aide behind the infamous email server, had told the FBI that he and Huma Abedin had discussed what kind of email domain to set up on the server and signed off on the Clintonemail.com domain name.

Not only that, but Huma Abedin had her own clintonemail.com account. Anyone who wanted to reach her, emailed huma@clintonemail.com. And she used it frequently. Materials from her State Department account were routinely forwarded to her private email. These included classified documents. But Huma Abedin claimed not to understand how communications technology or classified information worked. Like Hillary, she tried to plead ignorance or ambiguity to everything.

An aide whose whole public image had been built on superhuman competence suddenly didn’t know how anything worked. Huma couldn’t access her email or archive it and had no idea where the Hillary laptop archive had gone.

Monica Hanley, Hillary’s “confidential” assistant, however suggested that she had given the Clinton email archive to Huma on a thumb drive. Huma Abedin had picked Hillary’s email address and was responsible for managing her passwords. Huma pleaded ignorance to everything and was never held challenged or held accountable for it by the men who had all the evidence of her deceptions in their hands.

Huma Abedin repeated Hillary Clinton’s lie about the Secretary of State using a personal phone because she didn’t want to carry around two devices. In reality, Cooper, had told the FBI that Hillary Clinton liked using a flip phone and a BlackBerry. There were a total of 11 BlackBerry devices. Some of these were physically destroyed with a hammer by Cooper. And then there were all the iPads.

The claim that Hillary Clinton just couldn’t handle more than one device had already been disproven. But Strzok and Laufman never challenged Huma Abedin about the basic contradictions in her story.

There were certainly plenty of grounds for the FBI to conclude that Huma Abedin had lied. And her efforts to play dumb were blatantly misleading. But instead Huma Abedin, like Cheryl Mills and other Hillary associates, received a pass. The same ruthless pressure that would be brought to bear by Strzok and others on General Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort and others were wholly absent here.

Flynn and Papadopoulos would be forced to plead guilty to lying to the FBI. Huma Abedin’s deceit was met with no such sanction. The raids and arrests that targeted Trump associates had no parallel on the Clinton side of the political border. While Papadopoulos was arrested at the airport to rattle him into admitting everything, Abedin was brought in for a chummy chat overseen by two political allies of her boss. It was not the first time that Huma Abedin had received a pass over deeply problematic behavior.

Abedin’s charmed existence included working for the State Department, the Clinton Foundation and Teneo, a Clinton allied consultancy. Teneo was paying her $350,000 even while she was working for the government. Teneo’s clients include multinationals. It has offices in Dubai and Qatar. Teneo was involved in a curious Clinton intervention in Iran. And a figure touted as a “Teneo operative in London” praised Obama’s nuclear arrangement with Iran.

Behind these financial dealings, contacts and covert deals, is the older and darker history of Huma Abedin’s Islamist allegiances. Raised in Saudi Arabia by staunchly Islamist parents until she was ready to go to college, Huma Abedin was the product of an environment fundamentally hostile to the United States.

Her parents, Syed and Saleha Mahmood Abedin, were unrelenting adherents of organizations such as the Union of Good, a Hamas fundraising front, and the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, which had its own links to Al Qaeda and Hamas. Her mother apparently continues to be employed by the Saudi government to promote these dangerous and threatening Islamic supremacist views.

Huma Abedin had worked for the IMMA for twelve years and had served on the editorial board for its journal. During her tenure, IMMA’s journal promoted Jihad, violence toward non-Muslims, female genital mutilation and the supremacy of Islamic law over all political and legal systems. The journal contained threatening messages toward Jews and Christians.

Abedin had played a leadership role at George Washington University's Muslim Students Association when its chaplain was Anwar Al-Awlaki, a future leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. MSA chapters have been notorious for producing future leaders of Al Qaeda, and for indoctrinating their members with hateful views toward non-Muslims, toward Jews and Christians, and toward America.

Any of these troubling issues should have been enough to preclude Huma Abedin from gaining open access to classified information and becoming the closest trusted aide to the Secretary of State, let alone to a woman aspiring to become the President of the United States.

But the rules never actually applied to Huma Abedin. And they didn’t apply to her because Hillary Clinton decided that her own exemption from the rules should also cover Huma Abedin.

Hillary Clinton was able to ignore the rules on handling classified information. And so was Huma. Conflicts of interest between the Clinton Foundation, the State Department and assorted side projects that pulled in money from wealthy and powerful interests, some of them foreign, were not an issue.

And so Huma, like Hillary, was able to cash in on her government job in the private sector even while still being employed by the government. Huma could use a Yahoo email account for classified information, an account that had likely been hacked, with no consequences. Like Hillary, Huma could pretend that she didn’t remember and didn’t understand how email or classified information worked.

Hillary Clinton was able to lie to the FBI and get away with it. And so was Huma Abedin.

And, like Hillary, Huma’s radical associations and extremist views were not subject to any scrutiny. When attempts were made to examine her family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the establishment rushed to shut them down. It wasn’t merely a fear of Islamophobia. It was, more accurately, Hillaryphilia.

That was the staged drama that unfolded in the FBI field office unbeknownst to the tourists riding their Uber and Lyft pickups to the National Air and Space Museum or to the National Archives to see copies of the founding documents that were being trampled on in bland government buildings like these.

Everyone in the room knew what Huma Abedin had done. They knew she was lying. And they didn’t care.

Huma Abedin had never been held accountable for her Islamist past. Working for an organization that advocated terrorism and violence against women had never been held against her. Juggling the influence operations of Teneo and the State Department had never resulted in any consequences. And abusing classified information and then lying about it to the FBI was just business as usual.

Huma Abedin lied to the FBI and got away it. And that lie is almost trivial compared to the larger deceptions that allowed a woman with ties to enemies of this country to sit at the right hand of the Secretary of State. When Hillary Clinton arrived in a foreign country, she did not ride with our ambassador, as is traditional, but with Huma Abedin. This offensive behavior flouted diplomatic tradition and humiliated our ambassadors, but it also showed the power Huma had over Hillary.

Collusion is all the talk of the town in Washington D.C. Obscure associations with Russia are examined and turned over from every angle. But some forms of collusion are as obvious as the Abedin family.

And even when they are hidden away in obscure government buildings, they cannot hide for long.