Pat Condell lays down some unpleasant truths for the Eurocrats who, in order to fight fascism, are instituting fascism across their continent. No wonder Europeans are repudiating their ostensible leaders. For more on the mushrooming rape epidemic in Europe, see Jim Goad’s disturbing essay in Taki Mag.

This past weekend saw a flurry of action in California, as Governor Jerry Brown took action on a raft of legislation that passed his desk after the end of the current legislative session, signing a bill that would effectively give driver’s licenses to those illegal aliens amnestied by the Obama administration while vetoing one which would have gutted immigration enforcement within the state. 

Unfortunately, it looks like governor Jerry Brown has decided to split the difference, as California continues to apply double standards to different classes of people, even as thousands of productive, tax-paying citizens flee the state. Don’t worry though, I’m sure their replacements will fill state coffers to the brim. If not, then there’s always Plan B, which enjoys the full-throated support of the people who’ve driven the state to this impasse. But as we all know, tax hikes always increase revenue.

My innate sarcasm aside, credit is due Jamiel Shaw Sr., Althea Rae Shaw, as well as the rest of the Shaw family, for  holding Governor Brown’s feet to the fire. Jamiel’s Law should be the law of the land, not only in Los Angeles, but throughout the nation. It will only become a reality when the rest of us put the same effort into standing up for American lives that the Shaw family has for these past four years.

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.

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the latest installment in the Half King’s weekly reading series. It’s only fitting that the guest of honor that evening was the intrepid English-born, Mexico City-based journalist Ioan Grillo, since the bar is owned by renowned  journalist and documentarian Sebastian Junger. Junger  is probably best known for his reporting from war zones, specifically Afghanistan, and there is a plaque in the bar honoring his former collaborator on the film Restrepo, the late English photojournalist Tim Hetherington. Mr. Grillo was there in order to share some anecdotes and observations related to his newly released book, El Narco, an in-depth analysis of the sociological and political reasons behind the rise of what he described as a “parallel state” built upon drug-financed and cartel-derived institutions inside of Mexico. 

His talk was particularly timely, given a report just published in the Los Angeles Times which examines the connection between international banking institutions and  those seeking to launder money from illicit sources within Mexico. The systemic nature of the narco problem, its global scope, and the duration of the fight against its symptoms-if not causes-was vividly illustrated by Grillo, who in an hour-long discussion ranged from the impact of drugs on his birthplace of Brighton, England, to the wholly ineffectual attempt to impound heroin being trafficked over the Mexican-American border through Operation Intercept, to the thirteen individuals that were intimately involved in this book, including five who contributed materially to its creation who were killed during or after the writing of El Narco. 

Although the industry of trafficking drugs into the United States from Mexico has existed since Congress effectively prohibited the distribution and production of a wide range of heretofore legal opiates with the Harrison Act, the transformation of this somewhat lucrative trade in contraband into an over thirty billion dollar per annum “insurgencia,” a noun fraught with meaning, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has learned, is a story that requires a more holistic explanation, which Ioan Grillo attempts to provide in El Narco. Rather than focusing simply upon the horrific, heart-rending atrocities that we associate with Mexico from American media reports, Grillo digs deeper into what he describes as the “machinery of murder” by interviewing those who participate in it directly. He traces the arc of the “low intensity war” that has erupted in the decade since he’s been reporting from Mexico and which escalated with the 2006 decision by President Felipe Calderon to wage war against the cartels, a decision which has led to the loss of over 45,000 lives in the ensuing years.

Some of the more interesting things that the author discussed included the intimate link between Colombia, where much of the drugs that come into this country are produced, and Mexico, through which most of our illegal narcotics are smuggled. Not only is there practical cooperation between narcos in both countries, there has also been a wholesale Mexicanization of the most conspicuous aspects of the Colombian narco culture; from the endemic corruption of political parties on the take of cartels, to the ostentatious display of wealth by drug barons, to the advent of the sicario-a Colombian derivation of a Latin word for assassin that Mexicans know all too well-to the development of paramilitary wings of cartels posing as vigilantes, such as Matas Zetas, i.e. the “Zetas killers.”  

The day-to-day lives of journalists in Mexico-and what they do and do not report-was another interesting subject that was addressed at some length. While the cartels have no problem with Grillo reporting on the idosyncracies of cartel members-such as the young assassin who also loves his Sony Playstation-identifying those responsible for specific murders is verboten and often punished by death, which is why domestic journalists often ommit the names of the cartels culpable for specific crimes-even when their identities are widely known.

The recommendations Grillo makes seem sensible enough, especially the concept of reconsidering the unrealistic nature of current interdiction efforts, exemplified by the unironic motto of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime: A Drug-Free World. He also recommended a consolidation of the currently fragmented federal police system, which includes over 2,000 different-and often rivalrous-police forces by his estimation. Whatever the solutions are, I think Ioan Grillo’s book-which includes some startling photographs of the real victims of El Narco-is a good place to start the conversation.

The debt crisis currently afflicting the developed world, particularly Western European nations like Greece and Italy, has been the top news story for much of this year. However, even as we debate whether Greece should remain part of the European Union, or whether Silvio Berlusconi should be forced to resign, you might recall that just last year one of the most widely covered subjects was Prime Minister Nicholas Sarkozy’s decision to deport thousands of Gypsies living in France. Notwithstanding the overwrought and inapt comparisons to policies pursued by Nazi Germany, the repatriation of these individuals did raise the intriguing question of whether multiculturalism and open borders had been rejected by those Europeans upon whom these dogmas had been forced over the past half century. 

I bring this up today because I recently read an essay published in Taki Mag by Gavin McInnes which reexamines the issue of Gyspy culture from a distinctly negative perspective, but which can be applied more generally to many of the unwelcome changes that Europeans and Americans are forced to accept under the rubric of multiculturalism. The notion that we should uncritically embrace every exotic, imported cultural practice or custom-and that we should modify our laws and beliefs in doing so-is an attitude that prevails among elite opinion. The insanity of this philosophy is vividly illustrated in a piece  by New York Times columnist John Tierney, explored in some detail in Bill McGowan’s illuminating work Gray Lady Down, which tries to dispassionately weigh the pros and cons of female genital mutilation.

Whether it’s the fetishization of migrants from the Balkans encamped outside of large European cities, or the indulgent attitude our media displays towards unassimilable Muslim refugees from Somalia, the fact remains that the chasm which exists between the public and its ostensible leaders is vast. Kudos to Gavin McInnes for pointing out an unspoken, yet ineluctable, truth in this regard.

One of those most inexplicable aspects of immigration policy in developed, Western nations is the tendency to give refuge to people who want to eradicate-or utterly transform-our way of life. While the media in this country often highlight the unresolved issues that stem from our shared border with Mexico, it rarely if ever discloses the fact that many migrants entering the country illegally are not Latin Americans, let alone Mexicans. The number of  aliens from state sponsors of terror-or merely Arab-Muslim nations where anti-Americanism and Islamic extremism are rife-crossing our border is increasing. What’s more, even the immigrants who come to this country legally pose grave risks to Americans, especially when they retain the same deep-rooted values that made their countries of origin so hellish they were forced to flee to the United States.

Unfortunately, the September 11th massacres, the July 7th bombings launched by British Muslims against London, and every subsequent attempt-successful or failed-at obliterating markers of Western culture or annihilating non-Muslims inside of the West has been met with a collective shrug by those ensconced in power, who continue to extol the virtues of open borders and espouse multiculturalist dogma. And while the efficacy and constitutionality of Anwar al-Awlaki’s assassination is debated throughout the blogsophere, no one asks why his parents-born in a country where antipathy towards Americans and Western norms is nearly universal-were allowed to immigrate to the United States in the first place. Only in certain quarters, which up to this point have not influenced immigration policymaking, is the notion that some immigrants might not be potential Americans even suggested.

To find concrete examples illustrating the insanity following this policy to its logical conclusion produces, you need not look very far. In Australia, an Algerian-born illegal alien was recently spared trial for conspiring to murder scores of Australian civilians. In the United Kingdom, yet another Islamic terrorist has been granted virtual immunity for his crimes by the British legal system. The generous freedoms afforded to defendents in our culture’s criminal justice systems, in concert with the decadent multiculturalism that has prevented the assimilation of foreigners, combines to undermine the fundamental structure of our society. The solution, of course, is to prevent this conflict from occurring in the first place, i.e. imposing rational, sensible immigration reforms. However, that is unlikely to occur so long as the ruling class in the United States, Europe and elsewhere are possessed by mania that prizes diversity and multiculturalism over the lives and values of their ostensible countrymen.

One of the most trenchant social observers and luminous writers in the English language is Theodore Dalrymple, the nom de plume of British doctor and essayist Anthony Daniels. Formerly a prison physician and psychiatrist who spent his time diagnosing the symptoms of cultural decay, Dalrymple now devotes his career to addressing the diseases that gave rise to these symptoms. In light of the unrestrained, premeditated chaos enveloping London, Manchester, Birmingham, as well as many other English urban centers, I thought it appropriate to bring up an essay he wrote two years ago. Although one need not be prescient in order to have foreseen the mindless barbarity of the riots currently engulfing England, as history tells us, the observations he made in this piece are remarkably astute in pinpointing the problems that have led almost ineluctably to the current, post-modern calamity playing out on TV screens across the globe.

Years of fostering an entitlement mentality, along with the past two and half decades of unfettered immigration, have combined to form a toxic environment that has now consumed the economic epicenter of the United Kingdom. The 2009 piece brilliantly dissects how these two forces have irrevocably altered British life. And now, thanks to the Daily News, we have a new column by Mr. Daniels which expresses his thoughts on the current terrorism directed against the productive, law-abiding  sector of English society.

Whether or not you agree with its conclusions-and it’s hard to escape the fact that many of his predictions about the unraveling social fabric, and its roots in misguided cultural policies, have been born out by events like the London riots-you have to acknowledge whence he derived his insights. Namely, years of communication with and treatment of young men and women who came from the dysfunctional families and morally impoverished backgrounds that have given rise to the flames devouring Albion. We ignore the thoughts of Theodore Dalrymple at our own peril.

There are a number of lessons to be gleaned from the rapidly imploding criminal case against the former head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Beyond the usual, insincere breast-beating and lamentation over the media’s predictable rush to judgement, as well as questions of whether the traditional perp walk is a violation of a defendant’s due process rights, there is a much broader discussion that has yet to be broached. And that discussion entails the morass of fraud that lies at the heart of our country’s immigration system, especially the application process for potential asylum-seekers. 

The New York Post had an extensive analysis of why the credibility of DSK’s accuser has been called into question in yesterday’s edition. Although there are numerous accusations being leveled against the Guinean maid, including charges of tax evasion and lying about the aftermath of the alleged sexual assault by Khan, the allegations that I’d like to explore involve the deception she employed in order to get into this country in the first place.

One of ugly truths that the rah-rah, open borders at any cost crowd refuses to admit-but which is acknowledged by almost anyone else with a shred of integrity-is that political asylees and foreigners applying for refugee status in Western countries, including the United States, lie. They lie in order to gain access to the bounty that is Western Europe, or Australia, or North America-Mexico excluded-and they lie in order to protect their status within these very special places once they have arrived there. So the fact that this woman created an elaborate patchwork of lies, starting with a fictitious gang-rape that allegedly took place within her home country of Guinea, in order to gain political asylum  is not surprising in the least. In fact, those of you with good memories might recall the case of Adelaide Abankwah, a phony Nigerian “princess” whose story of  a potential clitoridectomy gained her the favor of our own esteemed, open borders pinheads, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney and Senator Chuck Schumer. Interestingly enough, Mr. Strauss-Khan’s accuser also maintains that she was the victim of genital mutilation-and that her daughter in Guinea is under threat of FGM-a claim that might or might not withstand increased media scrutiny in the coming days. The similarities between these two examples of West African immigration scams might strike some as uncanny, until, that is, you remember that this sort of deception is par for the course.

Misrepresenting your circumstances in order to remain in a wealthy, industrialized nation is such a common occurrence that women’s rights activist and Islamic apostate Ayaan Hirsi Ali devotes an entire chapter to her own asylum case in her engrossing memoir, Nomad. She readily admits that she lied during the application process in order to avoid an arranged marriage and remain in The Netherlands, and that most asylum-seekers also fudge the facts in their cases, for better or worse. The mendacity of asylum-seekers is so widespread-it can be said to be almost universal-that it was satirized in a Steven Spielberg-directed film called The Terminal, a tedious comedy starring Tom Hanks as a wholesome immigrant who is forced to live inside of an airport because of overly officious Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureaucrats.

And if you think immigration fraud is limited to the United States, then you obviously haven’t been an avid reader of UK tabloids and broadsheets, or a follower of the BBC, which recount cases of fraudulent asylum-seekers gaming the system on a daily basis. The only surprising part of this case, in my opinion, is the shockingly long time it took the mainstream media to investigate the claims lodged by the accuser in this case. Unfortunately, I doubt this will lead the same journalists to question the wisdom of our government’s endorsement of unfettered immigration. To the contrary, the revelation that many of her initial claims were falsehoods was accompanied-at least in the New York Times-by a series of soft focus stories lamenting the potential negative repercussions these new developments will have on Guinean immigrants living in New York City. Leave it to the drive-by media to miss the point yet again. That is why this website exists, my friends.

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?