-We begin today’s rattle with an interesting story about an Indian-or Muslim, depending upon PR needs of the open borders squad-athlete who was ushered into this country by our very own Senator Chuck Schumer. Unfortunately, this gifted sportsman is also a sex offender. Perhaps this isn’t quite as bad as having an alien interning for your office who is also a registered sex offender, but it does make you question the collective wisdom of our Democratic friends in Congress. Maybe we shouldn’t be taking their advice, vis-a-vis, controversial immigration decisions made by the Executive branch.

-In a reminder that there are actually rational people living in The People’s Republic of Vermont, the voters of Rutland have just turned out their incumbent mayor, Chris Louras, after he attempted to deluge their town with Muslim refugees from Syria and Iraq. While ignoring the public’s deep discontent with our government’s refugee resettlement programs-when not imputing racism and bigotry to Americans who express reservations about these schemes-is the norm, even the alternative weekly was forced to concede the enormous political consequences of this decision.

-For those of you who were wondering whatever happened to the thousands of unaccompanied minors who were allowed to enter into this country, wonder no more. According to an in-depth backgrounder from the Center for Immigration Studies, our government has absolutely no clue what it’s doing. While over 80 percent of their sponsors are illegal aliens, 44 percent of the UACs in question were ordered deported. Have the vast majority of these children been deported? Of course not, silly!

-You may ask yourself, “Why is this important?” It’s a good question. After all, it’s not as if these individuals will bring brutal Central American inter-gang warfare to the placidity of our nation’s suburbs, right? Well, I have some bad news for you on that score. It turns out that Latin American gangs, including MS-13, one of the most prolific and ruthless criminal networks in the Western Hemisphere, has actually established a pretty firm beachhead in our own backyard. Naturally, almost all of these gangbangers are criminal aliens. In an ironic twist, the moniker of the man who made an abortive attempt to unify the Mara Salvatrucha within the United States is, you guessed it, Dreamer.

-For those of you who think Europe’s approach to immigration is any less self-defeating and preposterous than the United States, I give you France. A nation where municipal authorities in Calais are attempting to prevent thousands of migrants from recreating the notorious refugee camp known as The Jungle. The biggest proponents of turning The Camp of the Saints into reality are, of course, other Europeans who believe Western civilization is uniquely evil. The ostensible plight of migrants from the third world is simply a cudgel with which the Gramscian left-with the help of corporate bean counters-can beat native Europeans into submission.

-After all, what are a few dozen, or a few hundred, honor killings in the grand scheme of things? Is the systemic dehumanization and murder of girls in nations which were responsible for the idea of religious toleration and freedom of conscience too high a price to pay for erecting the beautiful mosaic? When bad whites are saying intemperate, obnoxious things about people who are off-white, doesn’t that negate their entire philosophical worldview?  Even if that perspective is confirmed multiple times every single day?

-Everyone knows that the real reason millions of Muslims across the world support ISIS, Al Qaeda, and similar jihadist networks is because there isn’t enough inclusion in Hollywood casting decisions. See, the real villain isn’t Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It’s those bastards who refused to green light an all-Muslim reboot of Star Trek!

-The cognitive dissonance at work in the mind of an an open borders leftist must be overpowering. They want to live in a high-trust, quasi-collectivist techno-utopia-along the lines of something created by Gene Roddenberry-yet simultaneously support policies which make this already far-fetched goal virtually impossible. The mentality of a social justice warrior in high dudgeon can be found in this VICE piece, which laments the role homeless shelters have been playing in the deportation of migrants. The traditional liberal concern for the working class and the poor is discarded when it conflicts with the categorical imperative, i.e. preserving diversity. The spiritual hollowness and intellectual vapidity of this type of leftist ‘thinking’ was brilliantly and caustically skewered by George Orwell nearly a century ago. It’s good to know that some things haven’t changed all that much.

-I’d like to leave you on a good note, so here’s some refreshing news to come out of Austria. 8 Iraqi men have been convicted of the gang rape of a tourist. Unlike the Middle Eastern cab driver in Halifax who was, to all intents and purposes, high-fived by a Nova Scotia judge for raping an unconscious passenger, these rapists were actually given (relatively) stiff prison sentences. What’s more, we’ve discovered that these horrific incidents actually constitute an anomaly within the Islamic immigrant community.

Migrants and refugees from other countries expressed concern that the crime will make Austrians hostile toward all newcomers.

“Eight people raping a woman — that’s honor-less! Such a thing doesn’t exist in our religion,” Burhan Akbas, a migrant from Turkey, said.

“When such people come here and screw up like that, then everybody will think that Chechens, Afghans, all refugees from war areas are all the same,” Mansur Salamou, an asylum-seeker from Chechnya, said. “But it’s not like that. For example, the majority of us — we also cause problems, commit crimes. But no rape! Only criminal assaults and robberies.”

See, Europeans?! You only have to worry about being assaulted and robbed by the millions of North African and Middle Eastern refugees and migrants making their way towards Europe. What a relief.

Just a reminder that tomorrow night the Irish Exit will host Let’s Talk About Open Borders, a discussion of an issue that impacts us all. You can find out more about the event here, and purchase your tickets here. Is a borderless, multicultural society an atomized dystopia devoid of social capital? Or is it the economically dynamic nirvana envisioned by its advocates? Or is it, perhaps, some strange amalgam of both?!

Find out the answers on Tuesday, as you eat some delicious finger foods and swill some beer in (relative) luxury. Until then, take a look at my examination of  immigration, as it’s been portrayed in popular culture, from this ancient, pre-Trump essay.

For those of you still laboring under the impression that Islam is not at war with the West-including the presumptive Democratic nominee for President-I have some shocking news. It turns out that the followers of Mohammed have other ideas. The plan to assassinate free speech, counterjihad activist Pamela Geller-which was, thankfully, thwarted through the work of the FBI and a tactically placed drone strike-was simply one of many plots devised by jihadist networks which have agents inside of the United States. Networks that have yet to be penetrated by American human intelligence and which now have a steady supply of recruits thanks to horrifically misguided immigration policies.

What should continue to infuriate those of you who have been paying attention is the way this issue is being framed by willfully ignorant and/or malicious hacks within the enemedia. A typical example of journalistic malpractice can be found in the Daily Mail, which-as Robert Spencer points out-has the strange distinction of being the newspaper most preoccupied with the Islamification of Europe while simultaneously denying that Islam itself is a problem. Apparently, the target of at least 2 known assassination plots provoked her would-be murderers by publicly dissenting from the dogma promulgated by the Fourth Estate’s favorite religion. A religion which is unique in enjoying blanket immunity from criticism.

Perhaps that has something to do with how adherents to the Religion of Peace deal with legitimate critiques of their faith. A pattern of violence and coercion that can be traced back to the founder of this religion, who himself didn’t countenance rational criticism. This campaign of brutality and intolerance has been so successful that it has silenced all but a few courageous voices in the West, which in turn makes it that much easier for jihadists to hunt down its intended targets, a reality which hasn’t been lost on Mark Steyn. It has also turned the mainstream media, ranging from commercial and public broadcasting networks-both radio and television-cable news, national and regional newspapers, and incredibly powerful websites into mouthpieces for the most retrograde, illiberal ideology known to man.

One wonders if the people asserting that Pamela Geller “provoked” these Islamic bombs-duds, fortunately, in this case-feel the same way about Gerard O’Neill and Dick Lehr. Did they provoke mobster James Bulger Jr. through their critical investigative reporting into his murderous criminal empire? What about controversial author and radio host Howie Carr? Was the grizzled Irish mobster nicknamed Whitey justified in his attempt to eliminate Carr for his insolence? Employing the logic used by the regressive left to slander Geller and her allies in the counter-jihad movement, one would come to that ineluctable conclusion.

What’s perplexing  is the implicit assumption that by blackening the name of  notorious “Islamophobes” and trying to preempt any public debate on the nature of Islam these journalists are assuring their own safety, which could not be further from the truth. The idea that you can somehow preserve the institutions of Western civilization  for yourself while eroding them for your perceived enemies-who actually believe in and exercise those values, unlike your reactionary Islamist allies-is a staggering form of cognitive dissonance. The brutal, globally shared execution of non-right wing, non-Islamophobic journalist Steven Sotloff should have demonstrated this, if the murder of dozens of other journalists, NGO workers, and even an Israel-hating, Italian Marxist did not. Somehow, the rather elementary notion that you can’t compromise with people who demand your complete and utter submission-up to and including your own death-hasn’t penetrated the minds of those who man North American and European news desks.

The collective amnesia these individuals must suffer from is astounding to contemplate. I would recommend reading The Camp of the Saints, a grim portrait of the future of the West, but I doubt it would change their minds, which seem predetermined to ignore any portions of reality which conflict with their surreal conception of human nature. Then again, there’s always the chance that some will come to their senses. If so, perhaps Pamela Geller won’t be our Cassandra. If not, we have a bleak future, and many regrets, ahead of us.

The global jihad against speech-aided and abetted by our enemedia-was the primary subject of discussion at the SION conference this past Tuesday, and the panels assembled represented the full spectrum of thought and action that is being suppressed as a result of the collaboration between government officials-both elected and unelected-intent on “managing” our ever-diminishing pool of  liberty, the custodians of the fifth estate, and the presumptive caliphate which is using them as its ideological cat’s paw. The mobs overwhelming embassies in North Africa and the Middle East and slaughtering American citizens represent the physical violence that most associate with the term jihad, yet there is another more potent element of jihadist doctrine which involves employing coercive means more subtle than car bombs, rocket propelled-grenades, and Kalashnikovs.

The most powerful and efficacious weapon against jihadist ideology is, in fact, the truth. Which is why the vanguards of Islam and their accomplices go to such great lengths in order to suppress the means through which the truth is disseminated. That was the main theme of the second panel of the Stop Islamization of Nations Congress, which comprised men and women from England-until recently, one of the most resilient bastions of free expression on the planet-and Australia, a much younger parliamentary democracy whose citizens find themselves caught beneath a resurgent Islamic tidal wave facilitated by its leaders abandonment of sound immigration policy.

Debbie Robinson, of the Q Society, gave us a detailed overview of the parlous situation Australians find themselves in due to the proliferation of Muslim immigrants faithful to the Koran now living on a continent built upon British common law. The most recent  manifestation of this danger can be found in Muslim Brotherhood acolytes calling for the summary execution of the filmmaker who, in their eyes, committed blasphemy, exploiting the very freedom which they could never hope to enjoy in one of the many despotic Muslim nations from which they emigrated.

However, the question of sharia law’s application in Australia is not one of recent vintage, despite the befuddled media coverage of jihadi demonstrations in that nation’s capital this week. In fact, it is a question which has become so embedded within national discourse that a former Chief Justice of Australia has publicly rejected the notion that sharia law can coexist with the laws of his country. You need look no further than the scourging  a convert to Wahabbism received at the hands of his masked attackers to realize that this isn’t a theoretical debate for Australians. Is it really that far-fetched to conceive of a day when the punishment meted out to a member of the Burns’ Gang in the drama The Proposition might befall the unfortunate recipient of justice from a sharia court?

That question is even more pertinent to the men who came to New York City from England, which some would characterize as Ground Zero in the war between Islamic supremacism and Western societal norms.

Kevin Carroll of the English Defense League-seen above-described some of the battles in this titanic struggle. Currently running for sheriff in a newly created constituency, Mr. Carroll and other members of the EDL have been subjected not only to physical attacks-some so violent as to require hospitalization-by crypto-fascist, Marxist goon squads and their Islamist accomplices, but have been persecuted by the English authorities, which view those exercising their rights to assemble lawfully and express support for the United Kingdom as posing more of an exigent threat than those organizing terror plots in what is now the hub of pan-Islamic nationalism and jihad within Europe.

The extent to which the inherent rights exercised by Englishmen and women have been curtailed in the name of insulating Islam and its practitioners from any substantive criticism was brought home by Tommy Robinson, the founder and leader of the English Defense League. A life-long resident of town of Luton in the county of Bedfordshire, England,  Robinson embodies the selfless patriotism and commitment to family that were once hallmarks of the English working class. Unfortunately, today he represents a besieged minority under attack on the streets, in the courtroom, and in the yellow press for defending what the intelligentsia consider antiquated notions of Englishness. Instead of resisting the Islamists and their leftist shock troops who are threatening the lives of Robinson and his family, the British police have instructed him to remove himself from Luton-his childhood home-lest he antagonize the Muslim supremacists behind  one of England’s numerous, unofficial Sharia law zones.

The skewed priorities of UK law enforcement-which view the EDL as posing a more exigent threat than the intellectual progeny of Bin Laden did not come as a surprise. What did strike me though was Tommy Robinson’s almost apologetic defense of the gifts he brings to bear in this struggle against Islamic nationalism and its infection of contemporary Europe. He made the inexorable point that, unlike the rest of the continent, Great Britain-with a few notable exceptions-does not have any towering intellectuals or courageous political leaders to rally public opinion on behalf of the Enlightenment values which are now imperiled. The political class within the UK is effectively neutered, spinelessness being virtually a prerequisite for public office, as Tommy and his cousin Kevin Carroll pointed out during their speeches.

The same can be said of most British pseudo-intellectuals, who are equally culpable for the disastrous cultural and spiritual degradation of contemporary Great Britain. The political extermination Northern Irish classicist, poet and parliamentarian Enoch Powell experienced at the hands of England’s opinion-shapers for daring to question the status quo is one of the main reasons why the fight against Islamist ideology is being led by men like Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll, although I don’t believe either man has to qualify the vitally important elements of courage and honesty in identifying the problems facing Britain they both bring to this task. After all, the battle over whether sharia law and Islamic doctrine should prevail over the values of the Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution will be decided in the streets and the homes of ordinary Britons, not intellectual salons in London.

That said, the address delivered by George Igler, the creator of the Discourse Institute, outlined the intellectual argument against the UK’s increasingly restrictive view of individual liberty. At least, that liberty not enjoyed by Islamic ideologues. The son of parents who experienced the absence of liberty firsthand behind the Iron Curtain of Communist Hungary, Igler recognizes the inherent tenuousness of liberties that most Westerners have taken for granted for centuries. His speech focused upon the ways in which British bureaucrats and politicians had distorted the relationship between man and state, pointing out that our sufferance of government is tied exclusively to the protection of inalienable-and non government-derived-rights. This compact has been abrogated by a state that now views its function as maintaining stability in inter-communal relations, which means that some groups, e.g. Muslim immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bosnia-as well as their offspring-are given protection from the critical speech of groups like the EDL. This fundamental negation of rights illustrates why conferences like the Stop Islamization of Nations Congress are so urgent at this moment in time.

They, along with the Discourse Institute, wouldn’t be necessary if the “free” press exercised its right to dissent from political and religious orthodoxy, rather than attempting to hunt down individuals who blasphemed Islam or to blacken the name of patriotic citizens who want to ensure that their children enjoy the same freedoms they once did. But the fact remains that we are not only facing an aggressive, resurgent political Islam, but a much greater threat posed by those who would do away with our patrimony from England, and ultimately, Greece, in order to placate the sensitivities of an ideology with whom no mutual reciprocity exists and which, according to its holy book-none can be achieved.

In Part III of our report, we’ll be examining how the threat of Islamic jihad is experienced by those in the continent from which the armies of Mohammed first emerged.

From the invaluable European weblog The Gates of Vienna comes a deeply disturbing video that highlights the extent of illegal migration currently afflicting the continent, especially now that the ‘Arab Spring’ has loosened border controls throughout North Africa and the Middle East.

The confluence of  liberalized intra-European visa requirements, large scale exoduses from failed Arab-Muslim states across the Mediterranean, and a European Union still unable to effectively address the “peaceful” invasion that is starting to resemble a real-life version of The Camp of the Saints, has turned what was once a minor inconvenience into a problem with potentially disastrous consequences for the future of Europe. 

Christopher Caldwell examined the inexorable changes European nations are undergoing in his book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, which should serve as a warning to American policy-makers and liberal actvists who routinely extol multiculturalism and mass immigration as the ultimate solution to America’s irredeemably racist past. In fact, the new Islamic immigrants have not ameliorated the racial and religious hatreds that wracked Europe during the 20th century. If anything, they’ve reinvigorated long-dormant feelings of anti-Semitism and bigotry, and given a new lease on life to native European racists. From Londonistan’s boycott of Holocaust Remembrance Day, to the sustained jihad waged within formerly peaceful Swedish hamlets like Malmo, to the French banlieues that have become so anarchic that they are the subject of futuristic, apocalyptic, yet not entirely implausible, action films modeled after movies like The Running Man, Europe’s grand experiment has proven to be a colossal failure. 

The shocking video above should stand as a pointed reminder of what can happen to a place that has lost sight of its roots, which in this case stem from Enlightenment values, the Renaissance, and Western civilization at its very core, i.e. classical Greece and Rome. That genuine European heritage is the very antithesis of the ersatz culture Eurocrats are trying to fashion from the seeds of politically correct, leftist dogma, post-war bureaucratization and hierarchy, and massive waves of unassimilable Islamic immigrants. That segment should serve as a sobering message to all of us of what happens when we cede the right to determine our future on our terms. Today those images come from Europe, but can America be far behind?

The problem of broken borders is one shared by our neighbors to the north, as this story from the Voice of America illustrates. Apparently, a ship filled of Tamil refugees is seeking to dock in Canada, most likely because of its extremely liberal asylum policies.

You might ask yourself, why not just return these people to their country of origin? After all, it’s quite possible that this boat carries people who belong to international terrorist groups, almost certain that it has among its passengers human smugglers, and the fact that it is transporting those suffering from tubercolosis has been all but been confirmed by official sources.

The reason this ship can’t be returned is because Canada is bound by international law, which apparently nullifies any obligation the Canadian government has to protect its citizens from foreign invasion. Despite Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s admirable attempts to limit the onslaught of boat people from Sri Lanka, the truth is that Canada will never be able to fix this problem until it asserts its sovereign right to decide who it wants to accept or reject from its shores.

Until then, it’s open season for any politically opportunistic “refugee.”