Betrayal of the Christians...by the usual suspects

From Gloria TV:

Barbarians IN the gates

Two black teenagers murder a white woman and then take the corpse on a joy ride.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/teens-allegedly-kill-woman-car-wash-body-joyride-article-1.2433766

The victim

To try to comment on this will be impossible. How can one comment on it?  Let it serve, then, only as a warning.

To those who believe things like this can be turned around, I offer this letter from a school teacher who teaches at a predominantly black school.  It is a comment (slightly edited to remove some of the more disgusting comments by the students) from an article in the UNZ review.  The author is not vindictive nor does he mince any words.  He uses the dialect of the persons involved not to mock but to give an idea of what a teacher has to face when trying to educate them.

A Teacher From a Black High School:

The truth is usually a tough thing to accept, so I understand if this is flagged. It would be a cowardly thing to do, but I understand it. Some people just ignore unpleasant truths. However, if you think ignoring the problem, or trying to censor the truth, will help our black children improve, you’re dreaming. This is important, so I’m happy to repost – indefinitely if necessary. I find it interesting that NO ONE has had the intellect to refute anything in the essay. They can only attempt to censor it, as if doing so somehow makes it invalid. Weak minds, weak minds.

Until recently I taught at a predominantly black high school in a southeastern state.

The mainstream press gives a hint of what conditions are like in black schools, but only a hint. Expressions journalists use like “chaotic” or “poor learning environment” or “lack of discipline” do not capture what really happens. There is nothing like the day-to-day experience of teaching black children and that is what I will try to convey.

Most whites simply do not know what black people are like in large numbers, and the first encounter can be a shock.

One of the most immediately striking things about my students was that they were loud. They had little conception of ordinary decorum. It was not unusual for five blacks to be screaming at me at once. Instead of calming down and waiting for a lull in the din to make their point — something that occurs to even the dimmest white students — blacks just tried to yell over each other.

It did no good to try to quiet them, and white women were particularly inept at trying. I sat in on one woman’s class as she begged the children to pipe down. They just yelled louder so their voices would carry over hers.

Many of my black students would repeat themselves over and over again — just louder. It was as if they suffered from Tourette syndrome. They seemed to have no conception of waiting for an appropriate time to say something. They would get ideas in their heads and simply had to shout them out. I might be leading a discussion on government and suddenly be interrupted: “We gotta get more Democrats! Clinton, she good!” The student may seem content with that outburst but two minutes later, he would suddenly start yelling again: “Clinton good!”

Anyone who is around young blacks will probably get a constant diet of rap music. Blacks often make up their own jingles, and it was not uncommon for 15 black boys to swagger into a classroom, bouncing their shoulders and jiving back.

They were yelling back and forth, rapping 15 different sets of words in the same harsh, rasping dialect. The words were almost invariably a childish form of boasting: “Who got dem shine rim, who got dem shine shoe, who got dem shine grill (gold and silver dental caps)?” The amateur rapper usually ends with a claim–in the crudest terms imaginable — that all womankind is sexually devoted to him. 

Black women love to dance — in a way white people might call gyrating. So many black girls dance in the hall, in the classroom, on the chairs, next to the chairs, under the chairs, everywhere. Once I took a call on my cell phone and had to step outside of class. I was away about two minutes but when I got back the black girls had lined up at the front of the classroom and were convulsing to the delight of the boys.

Many black people, especially black women, are enormously fat. Some are so fat I had to arrange special seating to accommodate their bulk. I am not saying there are no fat white students — there are — but it is a matter of numbers and attitudes. Many black girls simply do not care that they are fat. There are plenty of white anorexics, but I have never met or heard of a black anorexic.

“Black women be big Mr. Jackson,” my students would explain.

Blacks, on average, are the most directly critical people I have ever met: “Dat shirt stupid. Yo’ kid a bastard. Yo’ lips big.” Unlike whites, who tread gingerly around the subject of race, they can be brutally to the point. Once I needed to send a student to the office to deliver a message. I asked for volunteers, and suddenly you would think my classroom was a bastion of civic engagement. Thirty dark hands shot into the air. My students loved to leave the classroom and slack off, even if just for a few minutes, away from the eye of white authority. I picked a light-skinned boy to deliver the message. One very black student was indignant: “You pick da half-breed.” And immediately other blacks take up the cry, and half a dozen mouths are screaming, “He half-breed.”

For decades, the country has been lamenting the poor academic performance of blacks and there is much to lament. There is no question, however, that many blacks come to school with a serious handicap that is not their fault. At home they have learned a dialect that is almost a different language. Blacks not only mispronounce words; their grammar is often wrong. When a black wants to ask, “Where is the bathroom?” he may actually say “Whar da badroom be?” Grammatically, this is the equivalent of “Where the bathroom is?” And this is the way they speak in high school. Students write the way they speak, so this is the language that shows up in written assignments.

It is true that some whites face a similar handicap. They speak with what I would call a “country” accent that is hard to reproduce but results in sentences such as “I’m gonna gemme a Coke.” Some of these country whites had to learn correct pronunciation and usage. The difference is that most whites overcome this handicap and learn to speak correctly; many blacks do not.

Most of the blacks I taught simply had no interest in academic subjects. I taught history, and students would often say they didn’t want to do an assignment or they didn’t like history because it was all about white people. Of course, this was “diversity” history, in which every cowboy’s black cook got a special page on how he contributed to winning the West, but black children still found it inadequate. So I would throw up my hands and assign them a project on a real, historical black person. My favorite was Marcus Garvey. They had never heard of him, and I would tell them to research him, but they never did. They didn’t care and they didn’t want to do any work.

Anyone who teaches blacks soon learns that they have a completely different view of government from whites. Once I decided to fill 25 minutes by having students write about one thing the government should do to improve America. I gave this question to three classes totaling about 100 students, approximately 80 of whom were black. My few white students came back with generally “conservative” ideas. “We need to cut off people who don’t work,” was the most common suggestion. Nearly every black gave a variation on the theme of “We need more government services.”

My students had only the vaguest notion of who pays for government services. For them, it was like a magical piggy bank that never goes empty. One black girl was exhorting the class on the need for more social services and I kept trying to explain that people, real live people, are taxed for the money to pay for those services. “Yeah, it come from whites,” she finally said. “They stingy anyway.”

“Many black people make over $50,000 dollars a year and you would also be taking away from your own people,” I said.

She had an answer to that: “Dey half breed.” The class agreed. I let the subject drop.

Many black girls are perfectly happy to be welfare queens. On career day, one girl explained to the class that she was going to have lots of children and get fat checks from the government. No one in the class seemed to have any objection to this career choice.

Surprising attitudes can come out in class discussion. We were talking about the crimes committed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and I brought up the rape of a young girl in the bathroom of the Superdome. A majority of my students believed this was a horrible crime but a few took it lightly. One black boy spoke up without raising his hand: “Dat no big deal. They thought they is gonna die so they figured they have some fun. Dey jus’ wanna have a fun time; you know what I’m sayin’?” A few black heads nodded in agreement.

My department head once asked all the teachers to get a response from all students to the following question: “Do you think it is okay to break the law if it will benefit you greatly?” By then, I had been teaching for a while and was not surprised by answers that left a young, liberal, white woman colleague aghast. “Yeah” was the favorite answer. As one student explained, “Get dat green.”

There is a level of conformity among blacks that whites would find hard to believe. They like one kind of music: rap. They will vote for one political party: Democrat. They dance one way, speak one way, are loud the same way, and fail their exams in the same way. Of course, there are exceptions but they are rare.

Whites are different. Some like country music, others heavy metal, some prefer pop, and still others, God forbid, enjoy rap music. They have different associations, groups, almost ideologies. There are jocks, nerds, preppies, and hunters. Blacks are all — well — black, and they are quick to let other blacks know when they deviate from the norm.

One might object that there are important group differences among blacks that a white man simply cannot detect. I have done my best to find them, but so far as I can tell, they dress the same, talk the same, think the same. Certainly, they form rival groups, but the groups are not different in any discernible way. There simply are no groups of blacks that are as distinctly different from each other as white “nerds,” “hunters,” or “Goths,” for example.

How the world looks to blacks: One point on which all blacks agree is that everything is “racis’.” This is one message of liberalism they have absorbed completely. Did you do your homework? “Na, homework racis’.” Why did you get an F on the test? “Test racis’.”

I was trying to teach a unit on British philosophers and the first thing the students noticed about Bentham, Hobbes, and Locke was “Dey all white! Where da black philosopher a’?” I tried to explain there were no blacks in eighteenth century Britain. You can probably guess what they said to that: “Dat racis’!” One student accused me of deliberately failing him on a test because I didn’t like black people.

“Do you think I really hate black people?”
“Yeah.”
“Have I done anything to make you feel this way? How do you know?”
“You just do.”
“Why do you say that?”

He just smirked, looked out the window, and sucked air through his teeth. Perhaps this was a regional thing, but the blacks often sucked air through their teeth as a wordless expression of disdain or hostility.

My students were sometimes unable to see the world except through the lens of their own blackness. I had a class that was host to a German exchange student. One day he put on a Power Point presentation with famous German landmarks as well as his school and family.

From time to time during the presentation, blacks would scream, “Where da black folk?!” The exasperated German tried several times to explain that there were no black people where he lived in Germany. The students did not believe him. I told them Germany is in Europe, where white people are from, and Africa is where black people are from. They insisted that the German student was racist, and deliberately refused to associate with blacks.

Blacks are keenly interested in their own racial characteristics. I have learned, for example, that some blacks have “good hair.” Good hair is black parlance for black-white hybrid hair. Apparently, it is less kinky, easier to style, and considered more attractive. Blacks are also proud of light skin. Imagine two black students shouting insults across the room. One is dark but slim; the other light and obese. The dark one begins the exchange: “You fat, Ridario!” Ridario smiles, doesn’t deign to look at his detractor, shakes his head like a wobbling top, and says, “You wish you light skinned.”

They could go on like this, repeating the same insults over and over.

My black students had nothing but contempt for Hispanic immigrants. They would vent their feelings so crudely that our department strongly advised us never to talk about immigration in class in case the principal or some outsider might overhear.

Whites were “racis’,” of course, but they thought of us at least as Americans. Not the Mexicans. Blacks have a certain, not necessarily hostile understanding of white people. They know how whites act, and it is clear they believe whites are smart and are good at organizing things. At the same time, they probably suspect whites are just putting on an act when they talk about equality, as if it is all a sham that makes it easier for whites to control blacks. Blacks want a bigger piece of the American pie. I’m convinced that if it were up to them they would give whites a considerably smaller piece than whites get now, but they would give us something. They wouldn’t give Mexicans anything.

What about black boys and white girls? No one is supposed to notice this or talk about it but it is glaringly obvious: Black boys are obsessed with white girls. I’ve witnessed the following drama countless times. A black boy saunters up to a white girl. The cocky black dances around her, not really in a menacing way. It’s more a shuffle than a threat. As he bobs and shuffles he asks, “When you gonna go wit’ me?”

There are two kinds of reply. The more confident white girl gets annoyed, looks away from the black and shouts, “I don’t wanna go out with you!” The more demure girl will look at her feet and mumble a polite excuse but ultimately say no.

There is only one response from the black boy: “You racis’.” Many girls — all too many — actually feel guilty because they do not want to date blacks. Most white girls at my school stayed away from blacks, but a few, particularly the ones who were addicted to drugs, fell in with them.

There is something else that is striking about blacks. They seem to have no sense of romance, of falling in love. What brings men and women together is sex, pure and simple, and there is a crude openness about this. There are many degenerate whites, of course, but some of my white students were capable of real devotion and tenderness, emotions that seemed absent from blacks — especially the boys.

Black schools are violent and the few whites who are too poor to escape are caught in the storm. The violence is astonishing, not so much that it happens, but the atmosphere in which it happens. Blacks can be smiling, seemingly perfectly content with what they are doing, having a good time, and then, suddenly start fighting. It’s uncanny. Not long ago, I was walking through the halls and a group of black boys were walking in front of me. All of a sudden they started fighting with another group in the hallway.

Blacks are extraordinarily quick to take offense. Once I accidentally scuffed a black boy’s white sneaker with my shoe. He immediately rubbed his body up against mine and threatened to attack me. I stepped outside the class and had a security guard escort the student to the office. It was unusual for students to threaten teachers physically this way, but among themselves, they were quick to fight for similar reasons.

The real victims are the unfortunate whites caught in this. They are always in danger and their educations suffer. White weaklings are particularly susceptible, but mostly to petty violence. They may be slapped or get a couple of kicks when they are trying to open a bottom locker. Typically, blacks save the hard, serious violence for each other.

There was a lot of promiscuous sex among my students and this led to violence. Black girls were constantly fighting over black boys. It was not uncommon to see two girls literally ripping each other’s hair out with a police officer in the middle trying to break up the fight. The black boy they were fighting over would be standing by with a smile, enjoying the show he had created. For reasons I cannot explain, boys seldom fought over girls.

Pregnancy was common among the blacks, though many black girls were so fat I could not tell the difference. I don’t know how many girls got abortions, but when they had the baby they usually stayed in school and had their own parents look after the child. The school did not offer daycare.

Aside from the police officers constantly on patrol, a sure sign that you are in a black school is the coke cage: the chain-link fence that many majority-black schools use to protect vending machines. The cage surrounds the machine and even covers its top. Delivery employees have to unlock a gate on the front of the cage to service the machines. Companies would prefer not to build cages around vending machines. They are expensive, ugly, and a bother, but black students smashed the machines so many times it was cheaper to build a cage than repair the damage. Rumor had it that before the cages went up blacks would turn the machines upside down in the hope that the money would fall out.

Security guards are everywhere in black schools — we had one on every hall. They also sat in on unruly classes and escorted students to the office. They were unarmed, but worked closely with the three city police officers who were constantly on duty.

There was a lot of drug-dealing at my school. This was a good way to make a fair amount of money but it also gave boys power over girls who wanted drugs. An addicted girl — black or white — became the plaything of anyone who could get her drugs.

One of my students was a notorious drug dealer. Everyone knew it. He was 19 years old and in eleventh grade. Once he got a score of three out of 100 on a test. He had been locked up four times since he was 13.

One day, I asked him, “Why do you come to school?”

He wouldn’t answer. He just looked out the window, smiled, and sucked air through his teeth. His friend Yidarius ventured an explanation: “He get dat green and get dem females.”

“What is the green?” I asked. “Money or dope?” “Both,” said Yidarius with a smile.

A very fat black interrupted from across the room: “We get dat lunch,” Mr. Jackson. “We gotta get dat lunch and brickfuss.” He means the free breakfast and lunch poor students get every day. “Nigga, we know’d you be lovin’ brickfuss!” shouts another student.

Some readers may believe that I have drawn a cruel caricature of black students. After all, according to official figures some 85 percent of them graduate. It would be instructive to know how many of those scraped by with barely a C- record. They go from grade to grade and they finally get their diplomas because there is so much pressure on teachers to push them through. It saves money to move them along, the school looks good, and the teachers look good.

Many of these children should have been failed, but the system would crack under their weight if they were all held back.

How did my experiences make me feel about blacks? Ultimately, I lost sympathy for them. In so many ways they seem to make their own beds. There they were in an integrationist’s fantasy–in the same classroom with white students, eating the same lunch, using the same bathrooms, listening to the same teachers–and yet the blacks fail while the whites pass.

One tragic outcome among whites who have been teaching for too long is that it can engender something close to hatred. One teacher I knew gave up fast food–not for health reasons but because where he lived most fast-food workers were black. He had enough of blacks on the job. This was an extreme example but years of frustration can take their toll. Many of my white colleagues with any experience were well on their way to that state of mind.

There is an unutterable secret among teachers: Almost all realize that blacks do not respond to traditional white instruction. Does that put the lie to environmentalism? Not at all. It is what brings about endless, pointless innovation that is supposed to bring blacks up to the white level. The solution is more diversity–or put more generally, the solution is change. Change is an almost holy word in education, and you can fail a million times as long as you keep changing. That is why liberals keep revamping the curriculum and the way it is taught. For example, teachers are told that blacks need hands-on instruction and more group work.

Teachers are told that blacks are more vocal and do not learn through reading and lectures. The implication is that they have certain traits that lend themselves to a different kind of teaching.

Whites have learned a certain way for centuries but it just doesn’t work with blacks. Of course, this implies racial differences but if pressed, most liberal teachers would say different racial learning styles come from some indefinable cultural characteristic unique to blacks. Therefore, schools must change, America must change. But into what? How do you turn quantum physics into hands-on instruction or group work? No one knows, but we must keep changing until we find something that works.

Public school has certainly changed since anyone reading this was a student. I have a friend who teaches elementary school, and she tells me that every week the students get a new diversity lesson, shipped in fresh from some bureaucrat’s office in Washington or the state capital. She showed me the materials for one week: a large poster, about the size of a forty-two inch flat-screen television. It shows an utterly diverse group — I mean diverse: handicapped, Muslim, Jewish, effeminate, poor, rich, brown, slightly brown, yellow, etc.–sitting at a table, smiling gaily, accomplishing some undefined task. The poster comes with a sheet of questions the teacher is supposed to ask. One might be: “These kids sure look different, but they look happy. Can you tell me which one in the picture is an American?”

Some eight-year-old, mired in ignorance, will point to a white child like himself. “That one.”

The teacher reads from the answer, conveniently printed along with the question. “No, Billy, all these children are Americans. They are just as American as you.”

The children get a snack, and the poster goes up on the wall until another one comes a week later. This is what happens at predominately white, middle-class, elementary schools everywhere. Elementary school teachers love All of the Colors of the Race, by award-winning children’s poet Arnold Adoff.

These are some of the lines they read to the children: “Mama is chocolate . . . Daddy is vanilla . . . Me (sic) is better . . . It is a new color. It is a new flavor. For love. Sometimes blackness seems too black for me, and whiteness is too sickly pale; and I wish every one were golden. Remember: long ago before people moved and migrated, and mixed and matched . . . there was one people: one color, one race. The colors are flowing from what was before me to what will be after. All the colors.”

Teaching as a career: It may come as a surprise after what I have written, but my experiences have given me a deep appreciation for teaching as a career. It offers a stable, middle-class life but comes with the capacity to make real differences in the lives of children. In our modern, atomized world children often have very little communication with adults — especially, or even, with their parents — so there is potential for a real transaction between pupil and teacher, disciple and master.

A rewarding relationship can grow up between an exceptional, interested student and his teacher. I have stayed in my classroom with a group of students discussing ideas and playing chess until the janitor kicked us out. I was the old gentleman, imparting my history, culture, personal loves and triumphs, defeats and failures to young kinsman. Sometimes I fancied myself Tyrtaeus, the Spartan poet, who counseled the youth to honor and loyalty. I never had this kind intimacy with a black student, and I know of no other white teacher who did.

Teaching can be fun. For a certain kind of person it is exhilarating to map out battles on chalkboards, and teach heroism. It is rewarding to challenge liberal prejudices, to leave my mark on these children, but what I aimed for with my white students I could never achieve with the blacks.

There is a kind of child whose look can melt your heart: some working-class castaway, in and out of foster homes, often abused, who is nevertheless almost an angel. Your heart melts for these children, this refuse of the modern world.

Many white students possess a certain innocence; their cheeks still blush. Try as I might, I could not get the blacks to care one bit about Beethoven or Sherman’s march to the sea, or Tyrtaeus, or Oswald Spengler, or even liberals like John Rawls, or their own history. They cared about nothing I tried to teach them. When this goes on year after year it chokes the soul out of a teacher, destroys his pathos, and sends him guiltily searching for The Bell Curve on the Internet.

Blacks break down the intimacy that can be achieved in the classroom, and leave you convinced that that intimacy is really a form of kinship. Without intending to, they destroy what is most beautiful–whether it be your belief in human equality, your daughter’s innocence, or even the state of the hallway.

Just last year I read on the bathroom stall the words “F**k Whitey.” Not two feet away, on the same stall, was a small swastika.

The National Council for the Social Studies, the leading authority on social science education in the United States, urges teachers to inculcate such values as equality of opportunity, individual property rights, and a democratic form of government. Even if teachers could inculcate this milquetoast ideology into whites, liberalism is doomed because so many non-whites are not receptive to education of any kind beyond the merest basics.

It is impossible to get them to care about such abstractions as property rights or democratic citizenship. They do not see much further than the fact that you live in a big house and “we in da pro-jek.” Of course, there are a few loutish whites who will never think past their next meal and a few sensitive blacks for whom anything is possible, but no society takes on the characteristics of its exceptions.

Once I asked my students, “What do you think of the Constitution?” “It white,” one slouching black rang out. The class began to laugh. And I caught myself laughing along with them, laughing while Pompeii’s volcano simmers, while the barbarians swell around the Palatine, while the country I love, and the job I love, and the community I love become dimmer by the day.

I read a book by an expatriate Rhodesian who visited Zimbabwe not too many years ago. Traveling with a companion, she stopped at a store along the highway. A black man materialized next to her car window. “Job, boss, (I) work good, boss,” he pleaded. “You give job.”

“What happened to your old job?” the expatriate white asked. The black man replied in the straightforward manner of his race: “We drove out the whites. No more jobs. You give job.”

At some level, my students understand the same thing. One day I asked the bored, black faces staring back at me. “What would happen if all the white people in America disappeared tomorrow?”

“We screwed,” a young, pitch-black boy screamed back. The rest of the blacks laughed.

I have had children tell me to my face as they struggled with an assignment. “I cain’t do dis,” Mr. Jackson. “I black.”

The point is that human beings are not always rational. It is in the black man’s interest to have whites in Zimbabwe but he drives them out and starves. Most whites do not think black Americans could ever do anything so irrational. They see blacks on television smiling, fighting evil whites, embodying white values. But the real black is not on television, and you pull your purse closer when you see him, and you lock the car doors when he swaggers by with his pants hanging down almost to his knees.

For those of you with children, better a smaller house in a white district than a fancy one near a black school.

I have been in parent-teacher conferences that broke my heart: the child pleading with his parents to take him out of school; the parents convinced their child’s fears are groundless. If you love your child, show her you care — not by giving her fancy vacations or a car, but making her innocent years safe and happy. Give her the gift of a not-heavily black school.

More blowback?

David Stockman writes his theory of the Paris horrors saying, convincingly, that it is another case of "blowback" by enraged Muslims who do not take kindly to unwelcome interventions in their countries.  In his long article he makes some interesting points, among them:

That is, the gates of hell have been opened by Washington’s senseless destruction of regimes in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere that refused to do its bidding. Yet not one of these backwaters of tyranny and economic and military insignificance posed any threat whatsoever to the safety and security of American citizens in Lincoln NE or Manchester NH.

That the middle east and the Arab/Islamic world in particular is now a burned out zone of failed states and an incubator of barbaric religious and sectarian fanaticism is because Imperial Washington made it that way.

So what has metastasized from the ruins left by American intervention is not an organized military threat or a tide of state sponsored attacks on the civilian life of the West; it is random blowback of the suicidal flotsam and jetsam that have been puked from the very same jaws of hell which Washington so foolishly opened

We do not see it as something as simple as that.  There are more complexities to consider though Stockman does put his finger on an important point. Like many observers of this awful jihadist mess Mr Stockman avoids mentioning the large elephant in the room that stands there like an albatross hanging over the world, and is so influential that it can snap its fingers and make super powers jump. But careful readers who have looked into these matters know that there are "behind-the-scenes" actors who are at the very least manipulating these murderous thugs into doing their dirty work for them.

The article can be read here.

Paris: Mr Putin wants to know who is "pulling the strings"

Vladimir Putin has asked the right question again: Who is pulling the strings?

We would like to know that too.

He might also have asked (if he hasn't already): Who benefits from the Paris horror?

http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/paris-tragedy-its-necessary-know-whos-pulling-strings/ri11201

Mr Putin also points out some facts which certain unnamed countries find inconvenient, namely: that ISIS is selling stolen oil at cut-rate prices to these unnamed countries who are, thereby, financing ISIS.

https://www.rt.com/news/322305-isis-financed-40-countries/

http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/putin-exposes-g20s-financial-ties-isis-during-antalya-summit/ri11199

The US has supposedly been bombing ISIS for donkey's years but they always seemed to miss those convoys of ISIS oil.  How odd.

Syrian History 101

A quote from the Walt and Mearsheimer book, "The Israeli Lobby":

Israeli leaders did not push the Bush Administration to put its crosshairs on Syria before March 2003, because they were too busy pushing for war against Iraq. But once Baghdad fell in mid‐April, Sharon and his lieutenants began urging Washington to target Damascus. On April 16, for example, Sharon and Shaul Mofaz, his defense minister, gave high profile interviews in different Israeli newspapers. Sharon, in Yedioth Ahronoth, called for the United States to put “very heavy” pressure on Syria. Mofaz told Ma’ariv that, “We have a long list of issues that we are thinking of demanding of the Syrians and it is appropriate that it should be done through the Americans.” Sharon’s national security advisor, Ephraim Halevy, told a WINEP audience that it was now important for the United States to get rough with Syria, and the Washington Post reported that Israel was “fueling the campaign” against Syria by feeding the United States intelligence reports about the actions of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Prominent members of the Lobby made the same arguments after Baghdad fell. Wolfowitz declared that “there has got to be regime change in Syria,” and Richard Perle told a journalist that “We could deliver a short message, a two‐ worded message [to other hostile regimes in the Middle East]: ‘You’re next’.” In early April, WINEP released a bipartisan report stating that Syria “should not miss the message that countries that pursue Saddam’s reckless, irresponsible and defiant behavior could end up sharing his fate.” On April 15, Yossi Klein Halevi wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times entitled “Next, Turn the Screws on Syria,” while the next day Zev Chafets wrote an article for the New York Daily News entitled “Terror‐Friendly Syria Needs a Change, Too.” Not to be outdone, Lawrence Kaplan wrote in the New Republic on April 21 that Syrian leader Assad was a serious threat to America.
Back on Capitol Hill, Congressman Eliot Engel (D‐NY) had reintroduced the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act on April 12. It threatened sanctions against Syria if it did not withdraw from Lebanon, give up its WMD, and stop supporting terrorism, and it also called for Syria and Lebanon to take concrete steps to make peace with Israel. This legislation was strongly endorsed by the Lobby—especially AIPAC—and “framed,” according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency, “by some of Israel’s best friends in Congress.” It had been on the back burner for some time, largely because the Bush Administration had little enthusiasm for it, but the anti‐Syrian act passed overwhelmingly (398‐4) in the House; 89‐4 in the Senate), and Bush signed it into law on December 12, 2003.
Yet the Bush Administration was still divided about the wisdom of targeting Syria at this time. Although the neoconservatives were eager to pick a fight with Damascus, the CIA and the State Department were opposed. And even after Bush signed the new law, he emphasized that he would go slowly in implementing it.
Bush’s ambivalence is understandable. First, the Syrian government had been providing the United States with important intelligence about al Qaeda since 9/11 and had also warned Washington about a planned terrorist attack in the Gulf. Syria had also given CIA interrogators access to Mohammed Zammar, the alleged recruiter of some of the 9/11 hijackers. Targeting the Assad regime would jeopardize these valuable connections, and thus undermine the larger war on terrorism.
Second, Syria was not on bad terms with Washington before the Iraq war (e.g., it had even voted for U.N. Resolution 1441), and it was no threat to the United States. Playing hardball with Syria would make the United States look like a bully with an insatiable appetite for beating up Arab states. Finally, putting Syria on the American hit list would give Damascus a powerful incentive to cause trouble in Iraq. Even if one wanted to pressure Syria, it made good sense to finish the job in Iraq first.
Yet Congress insisted on putting the screws to Damascus, largely in response to pressure from Israel officials and pro‐Israel groups like AIPAC. If there were no Lobby, there would have been no Syria Accountability Act and U.S. policy toward Damascus would have been more in line with the U.S. national interest.

 Hopefully this will help in understanding why we are in the mess we are in

Paris: When the Church is sick, the world is sick

When the Church is sick, the world is sick.  And when the Church is healed the world will also be healed.

That should not be looked upon as a simplistic view of what ails us.  Common logic demands that we begin to notice the connection between the Church and the world.  After all, we have 2,000 years of history to well and truly prove this point.

People are still reeling from the attacks last night in Paris and at this juncture we cannot add any definitive explanation as to exactly who was behind this (though of course we can offer conjecture). The mainstream media will be useless when it comes to explanations, as will the heads of governments, like Hollande, Obama, Merkel and others who can be counted upon to offer all the approved cliches.  We will have to await serious evaluation by non-mainstream and mostly foreign news sources to at least help in understanding what happened,

(It is pathetic that many of the dead and wounded were attending a "concert" given by something called "Eagles of Death Metal".  It is more pathetic to have watched a talking head last night breathlessly announcing that the rock singers were uninjured.  Pity.)
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Briefly, the illness of the Catholic Church, which has been plaguing her for a long, long time, has prevented her from speaking clearly on matters of faith, morals and worldly matters.  As such the current leaders of the Church will never say who it was who awakened a dormant militant Islam, who it is that uses it for its own ends and who it is who wants to create chaos among nations. They are too cowardly to tell the truth.  Just as they are too cowardly to tell the truth about the other attacks upon the Faith which are moral and spiritual in nature.

An emasculated Church will sit silent and agree with the Approved Narrative, of that we may be relatively certain.  They will offer the simplistic explanation.  If they would dare to delve deeper into the reasons for this madness they would have to confront the powerful entities who provoke these things as well as confronting their own inadequacies, and that our weak and ailing Church is not prepared to do.

In terms of conjectures as to what motivated this latest murder spree we would refer our readers to this interesting piece:

http://www.unz.com/akarlin/the-paris-terror-attacks/

The linked article is a fascinating initial reaction to last night's horrors and well worth reading and thinking about.  You won't get that kind of thing from the media, or from the elitists who lord it over us.

The "Charlie Hebdo" crowd, fresh from their blasphemies against the Mother of God and all things beautiful, will possibly be silent about this.  "Charlie Hebdo" is a Rothschild-owned rag that recently took great delight, complete with their trademark inane cartoons, in the Russian airliner tragedy.  As commenter "Rehmat" noted in the comments section of the above link,

To understand France’s “Allah Akbar” yelling terrorists – one has to read recently published book, “Who is Charlie?” authored by no other than French historian, anthropologist, demographic, sociologist, and political scientist, Emmanuel Todd (Jewish).

After the release of book, Who is Charlie? – Manuel Valls, the pro-Israel French Zionist prime minister with an Israeli wife, posted a letter in country’s top newspaper Le Monde (May 7, 2015) denouncing the book and defending the ‘Million March’ in Paris in support of Rothschild-owned Charlie Hebdo’s rights to insult Islam and Christianity but not Judaism or Holocaust.

Another interesting initial reaction, from Christopher Manion:

https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/cause-effect-paris-chapter/

A quote:

In March 2003, Pope John Paul II sent his personal emissary, Cardinal Pio Laghi, to deliver a letter to that “wonderful Christian,” George W. Bush, at the White House.

Bush curtly lay the letter aside, unopened, unread, and proceeded to deliver a churlish and childish lecture for Cardinal Laghi to convey back in Rome to one of the most gifted and intelligent men in recent history.

(In his heart of hearts, was this reformed drunk simply a belligerent bully?)

What did the sainted Pope’s letter say? It was simple: “Your invasion will cause chaos in the entire region, far beyond Iraq. Don’t do it!”

Some understandably angry Christians want to begin an actual war with these monsters.  Fine with me.  But who will they be at war with, the terrorist pawns who pull the triggers or the dark powers who have unleashed them in the first place?  Some idiots will no doubt go smashing into mosques with their SUVs thinking they are striking a blow against these animals.  But if they do that they will be playing directly into the hands of what writer Pepe Escobar calls "the Empire of Chaos".  If you want to fight this evil by all means take up arms and fight where appropriate, but at the same time don't forget to condemn the power-mad psychopaths who are using these terrorists to achieve ends that they want.  [Editor's Note: We are already hearing from "the media" that the assassins were screaming about "Syria".  How incredibly convenient for the powers-that-be.] While warring against actual Muslim fanatics denounce at the same time the people who have given them the money, training, weapons and logistics they need.

The Vatican, instead of telling the world that its rejection of Christ and those who are forcing that rejection upon mankind is the source of these unending atrocities, will offer its customary meaningless platitudes about the Paris nightmare.  We are already seeing some of these tedious statements in the media from prominent prelates.

Will anyone in the hierarchy admit that the Church is suffering from a debilitating illness that is not only destroying Her but the world?

Sadly, it is unlikely.

Until the Catholic Church is well again expect every sort of atrocity, immorality and evil to have full sway.  In the meantime we Catholics know how we must carry on.

Pope Platitude the First speaks

“Before the problems of the church it is not useful to search for solutions in conservatism or fundamentalism, in the restoration of obsolete conduct and forms that no longer have the capacity of being significant culturally,”

Well, so much for Beethoven, Shakespeare, Dante and Palestrina, I guess.  Not to mention a few thousand Saints and martyrs.  And simple Catholics. All these people were prone to respect "form" - musical, artistic, spiritual - and to engage in Catholic conduct now considered obsolete by this strange man who occupies Peter's throne.

From a purely artistic view the above comment is the most ignorant kind of rubbish.  Michelangelo used forms that may be considered culturally insignificant by, say, Elton John.  But strangely enough the rest of the world still thinks them culturally significant...and beautiful.  But this is what happens when one wallows in the ugly Novus Ordo Mass, a Mass as devoid of culture, or any connection with a two thousand year past, as a rock concert.  The "reformed" Church of the swinging sixties has done its work on Bergoglio, and it shows.  But I would like to ask the man: what kind of conduct does he consider to be "obsolete"?  We poor unwashed need examples. Of course he is too, shall we say, "shy" to answer that one directly; he prefers innuendo accompanied by the papal stiletto in the heart.  The answer, though, is more than a little obvious.

Frankly, I am growing weary of these remarks which come from an artistic ignoramus, be he a critic from the New York Times or a Pope of the Church.  If he really believes the bilge he has been speaking and is not just throwing fish to his adoring yelping seals then he should get off the Chair and steal away silently into the night.

Historically, fanatics, like John Brown for example, typically do not go away quietly.  Their messianic missions keep them going to the bitter end.  They never give up, ever, because they are doing Noble Work.  This vision led Brown to the attack on Harper's Ferry, and that opened up an orgy of bloodshed and fratricide that destroyed America, a destruction from which the country has never recovered.  I think it fair to sometimes wonder if the current pontiff has his own Harper's Ferry Incident ready to unleash.  (His annulment Moto Proprio might be that catalyst.)

Raymond Massey's brilliant portrayal of Brown in "Santa Fe Trail"

It is a sad time for simple Catholics who only want to live their Faith and achieve Heaven. Ridiculed by the liberals and conservatives alike, attacked by a lunatic government trying to force them to commit heinous sins, abandoned by a hierarchy only too willing to accomodate the world and all its pomps and works, simple Catholics are the true "marginalized", to use Pope Francis' favorite word. 

Pope Francis and his adoring enablers and fans are beginning to look suspiciously like that cockle that grows alongside the wheat.  It does not end well for the cockle.


[with thanks to Vox Cantoris for the the papal quote]

The Forgotten Ones

I've often tried to think about the most forgotten soul in Purgatory, the one no one ever thinks of or prays for or remembers.  There was at one time, I believe, a special devotion to the most forgotten soul there, which was encouraged by the Church. When my cluttered mind is occasionally at rest I do try to say a Hail Mary for them.  They are there, suffering, waiting for someone to help them with a prayer or a Mass.

A good devotion that, to recall them with at least a prayer that will alleviate some of their sufferings.

Our parish priest said on Sunday that this is the month of the year when we must strive with our prayers to empty Purgatory.  A fine thought.

Dom Cuthbert Butler: Papal Infallibility, Yes; Despotism, No

Dom Cuthbert Butler

{From the May, 1978 issue of Approaches, edited by the late Hamish Fraser. The Eye-Witness is indebted to the late Anthony Fraser and the Fraser family for their kind permission to republish this and other writings from both Approaches and Apropos.]

PAPAL INFALLIBILITY DOES NOT IMPLY "FANTASTIC DESPOTISM OR ABSOLUTISM"
by Hamish Fraser

The following is an expert from pp 342-343 of 'The Vatican Council 1969-1870' by Dom Cuthbert Butler of Downside Abbey

"The last speaker was Freppel.  He had been professor of theology in the Catholic faculty of the Sorbonne, and one of the theologians called to Rome to prepare for the Council; and during the Council he had been made Bishop of Angers.  Ullathorne commends the high quality of his speeches.  He dealt with the principal objections that had been raised.

"The right of the Patriarchs are by ecclesiastical law, those of the Pope by divine law, and what is of divine law cannot be limited by what is of ecclesiastical law.  ('Bravo; first rate!)  We are making a dogmatic, not a disciplinary, decree, and it would cause confusion to bring in what is only of ecclesiastical law.

"Ordinary and immediate are no new terms for the Pope's universal jurisdiction; the former was used by the Fourth Lateran Council, the latter by St Thomas.  When Popes have said they may not act counter to the canons, does that imply that they are bound by the canons?  I distinguish: as a legislator by his own law, yes; as an inferior to a superior, no.  Every legislator in every kind of government is bound to observe the laws he has made or confirmed, unless and until they are lawfully abrogated; this by natural and divine law, because the common good and right order in any society require it. (emphasis added)  But the Pope has the power, for good cause, to dispense, or change, or abrogate any canons.

"This distinction excludes the fantastic despotism, or absolutism, that we have heard spoken of.  Absolutism is the principle of ulpian in the Roman law, that the mere will of the Prince is law.  But who has ever said that the Roman pontiff should govern the Church according to his sweet will, by his nod, by arbitrary power, by fancy, that is, without the laws and canons? (emphasis added)  We all exclude mere arbitrary power; but we all assert full and perfect power.  Is power arbitrary because it is supreme?  Are civil governments arbitrary because supreme?  Or a General Council confirmed by the Pope?  Let all  this confusion of ideas go!  Let the doctrine of the schema be accepted in its true, proper, genuine sense, without preposterous interpretation. (Applause)" 

In effect...the Pope is by far the most constitutional monarch of all time.

This does not mean that he is impotent as in the case of the British monarchy.  But then it is in no sense a monarchy properly so called.  It is rather a mere "traditional" figleaf deliberately retained to disguise the democratic absolutism of a Jacobin parliament which refuses to respect either the most hallowed national traditions or the laws of God Himself.  The impotence of the British monarchy is indeed such that it has been said that it is as much as the King's life is worth to refuse to sign his own death warrant.

By contrast, the Pope is a very real monarch who is subject to no human person, institution or organisation whatsoever, not even an oecumenical council of the universal Church.

But while supreme, the Pope's power is not arbitrary.  For he must operate within the very narrow sphere the boundaries of which have been delineated by Revelation, by defined dogma, and by the consistent ordinary magisterium of his predecessors.

As is stated in the Catholic Dictionary (Virtue and Co. Ltd, 1951):  "It must not be supposed for a moment that the Pope is an absolute monarch.  He cannot....annul the constitutions of the Church ordained by Christ.  His power of definition is limited by a multitude of previous definitions due to his predecessors, to the councils, to the ordinary exercise of the Church's magisterium through the pastors united to the Holy See."



Note by editor of The Eye Witness:

The above piece by Hamish Fraser was written in 1978, when the odd actions of Popes like Paul VI were causing no little consternation in the Catholic world.  But it reads as if it might have been written for the current Pontiff himself.

It is important to republish important pieces like this if for no other reason than to educate ourselves on something that should be obvious, and for reminding papolaters of all stripes - including the new Modernist papolaters for whom Francis is the only Pope in history worth listening to - that papal despotism is not the norm.  Theological idiots like Cupich, Wuerl, Kasper and others, who could not quote a historical Pope to save their souls, hang on every confusing word of the present occupant of Peter's throne, and wish to hornswaggle us into thinking the man's words are divinely inspired and infallible.  A reading of Dom Cuthbert's remarks easily put those people in their place.