The Second American Revolution

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Well… there we are then. I’ve predicted the outcome of two major votes this year and been wrong about both of them. I’m not sure what to say. Perhaps there is nothing to say, other than to warn the reader never to take advice from me on lottery numbers or business investments.

America, as you’ll now be aware, has just elected Donald J Trump to the highest office in the land. And with the GOP also triumphant in both houses of Congress, for the next four years, the New York billionaire will have an almost unprecedented level of control over the mechanisms of Western government,

This is the beginning of what will inevitably be referred to by historians as the ‘Trump Era’ – a four-to-eight year period dominated by the decisions and personality of a single, remarkable man.

I am both pleased and nervous about the result. As someone who made the case for Trump (as best I could on a UK-based blog), my satisfaction with the unexpected success of the Republican is naturally tempered with unease and foreboding.

Trump is not a perfect man – far from it. Many of the criticisms made by his opponents over the past 12 months (or was it lifetimes) were perfectly valid and based in solid fact. He is often boorish, unpredictable, erratic and – in some key ways – he is inexperienced. No matter how passionate your support for his reign may be, you cannot sensibly deny that his election represents a gamble.

But it was a gamble the people of America were forced by circumstance to make. The elite, which includes the press, has lost all contact with, and respect for, the ordinary population of the United States. Unless a US citizen lives in New York or Los Angeles, he simply doesn’t matter to the decision-making class. His voice, projected at a polite volume, is muffled to a whisper by distance, farmland and poverty. On Nov. 8th, therefore, he was left with no choice but to shout, to shout so loud that windows were broken, and so they have been.

Hillary Clinton prepares to give her concession speech in New York

Those members of the global elite currently tearing their expensively shampooed hair out have no right to be surprised by what has happened. How could their disregard and arrogance have led to any other destination? Trump was and is a shock of history, but he was not an unforeseeable one.

Nevertheless, the shockwaves of the election result have been palpable. Jonathan Freedland, a normally level-headed liberal commentator, spoke for many in the London-New York-LA bubble when he wrote (in an article dramatically entitled ‘Will Donald Trump Destroy America?’) “What if (Trump) goes ahead and deports 11.3 million undocumented migrants? What if he really does ban all Muslims entering the country? What if he tries to use the powers of the state to go after media organisations that have criticised him – making life difficult for the businesses that own inquisitive newspapers such as the Washington Post, for example – as he has said he will? What if he overturns abortion rights, even imposing “some form of punishment” on a woman who terminates a pregnancy, as he once suggested? And what if he really does build that wall?… There are plenty who believe that if Trump went ahead and actually implemented his programme, he would create a different country: closed, xenophobic and at odds with some of the founding principles – religious equality or freedom of speech – that have defined the United States since its founding. The country would still exist – but it would no longer be America.”

Freedland’s words may be misguided, but his tone is surely appropriate. This really is a major turning point in American history – a second American revolution, if you will. By the time Trump has finished his work, however that goes, America will be a drastically changed place. There are so many differences between his approach and that of his predecessors that such an outcome is irresistible.

Donald Trump, unlike Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and practically every president stretching back to the Eisenhower administration, is an Americanist. He believes that America, despite its size and power, is a real, flesh and blood country – with real, flesh and blood people living in it. America is not, to him, an idea, a hope, or a ‘dream’. It is a pulsating, living, breathing reality. If one thing divides him from the presidents of the recent past, it is that his focus is largely limited by loyalty and affection to and toward the United States (and those countries like it – *I was greatly encouraged to hear Mr Trump describe the UK as a special friend this week).

Donald Trump is not a neo-con, preoccupied with the security prospects of the Saudis, Turks and Qataris. He looks at the world with the purity of the patriot; an honest, crystalline simplicity. To him, something is either good for America, or not. That seems to be his only consideration.

I do understand and appreciate that many parts of the world (and parts of America) will be unnerved by Trump’s election. This is only inevitable. Change always brings anxiety. Nevertheless, such places and people must be calm and reasonable enough to give the president-elect a chance to show his governing style before jumping to rash conclusions.

In Israel, there is some stress over President Trump’s words regarding the conflict with the Palestinians. Back in the primary debates, Mr Trump shocked the gathered by stating that it wasn’t helpful to pick a side in foreign conflicts and that he would, as president, strive to be more fair-minded. Since then, Trump has reconfirmed his intention to make a ‘deal’ on the Israel-Palestine face-off. What does he mean by this? What kind of ‘deal’ does he have in mind? We have no way of knowing, so worrying about it is a waste of time.

As on Israel, so on many other issues. Trump is simply a mystery to us at this point. Will he tame his fiery populism upon entering the White House? Will he go back on his promises made at his roaring rallies? Will the wall be built? What will happen to the 11 million illegal migrants currently embedded in American society? We don’t know. We can’t know. Only time will tell us.

It is my belief that Donald Trump will either be the greatest president of the past 50 years, or he will be the worst. There is no in-between with him. His personality is too spectacular, his confidence too muscled. As things stand, the former seems more likely to me than the latter.

D, LDN

 

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Justifying the Extraordinary: Trump and the Debates

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In seven days time the first of four presidential debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will take place in Hempstead, New York State. It is probably fair to say that no such debate has been as hotly anticipated in recent memory as this one now is. The debate marks the biggest test Donald Trump has faced since the launch of his candidacy for the Republican nomination back in 2015. It represents a vital trial of the New Yorker’s presidential character, professionalism and natural wit.

Hillary Clinton, now lagging behind Trump in many national polls, will be placing a lot of her hopes on the debates. Unlike Trump, the Democrat is a natural when it comes to conventional political combat. She – and her team – will be hoping (and expecting) Trump to be suffocated by the polite constraints of traditional procedure and to show his unease by lashing out wildly at Clinton’s character, appearance, dress sense, femininity, etc. Put simply, they hope and expect Trump to suffer a meltdown.

Whilst I would love to say that Clinton’s strategy is unrealistic, I cannot, as it is perfectly feasible. Trump’s Achilles heel, as he has proven time and time again, is his volcanic and unpredictable personality, his tendency to hit back after every real or perceived slight with much greater force and immaturity than is required or appropriate. All Clinton has to do in these contests is provoke that kind of reaction. All she has to do is poke the tiger until it growls.

This is the most obvious and likely strategy for Hillary to pursue, but there are other possibilities open to her. The rabidly pro-Clinton Washington Post made the following suggestions for their preferred candidate: “Take (Trump) up on his word. He said he “regrets” certain things. Invite him to apologize to Judge Gonzalo Curiel or the Gold Star parents of Capt. Humayun Khan… Another tactic is to press him on empty and unintelligible answers. Trump rarely completes a sentence or can articulate any level of detail about his proposals. When Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and CNN’s Dana Bash tag-teamed, forcing Trump to explain what was in his health-care plan, it became patently obvious that he had a whole lot of nothing to offer. She can certainly take a page from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s book (used against Rubio) in pointing out that Trump repeats the same platitudes. Tell us, Donald, what’s your plan to reduce crime in Chicago? Have you ever sat down with law enforcement?… There are oodles of issues (such as the nuclear triad) about which Trump knows nothing. Challenge him to spell out his stance on net neutrality, the South China Sea and student loans. In other cases — the minimum wage, repayment of U.S. debt and immigration, of course — he has been all over the lot. Force him to pick a position and explain why he has said the opposite.”

The first presidential debate will be held at Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York

Trump’s strategy for the debates is less clear at this point in time. When asked about his intended approach, the Republican has wisely dodged the question, explaining that he would prefer to not give anything away to the opposition prior to the event. We can thus only speculate.

I have a inkling that Trump’s strategy will hinge on portraying Clinton, as he has done all through his campaign so far, as ‘crooked’, dishonest, corrupt and in the pocket of the financial elite; an image he will then contrast with his own man-of-the-people persona.

The email scandal will undoubtedly be raised repeatedly, with Trump going off track and questioning Clinton directly about the thousands of inexplicably deleted messages. He will also link these questions to the issue of the Clinton Foundation and its highly suspicious ties to foreign leaders (including foreign and Islamic dictators).

The Clinton Foundation is coming under intense scrutiny for its ties to foreign regimes

This approach will carry Trump some of the way, but not all of it. He will need to have more strings to his bow prepared if he is to the win the debate outright.

To arrive at the best strategy for winning the debates, Trump would do best to look at what has carried him through the process thus far. I would say that, more than anything else, it is his credentials relating to the Islamist threat that have won over the hearts of patriotic American voters (including true liberals and Democrats). His positions on ISIS, Muslim immigration, Syrian refugee policy and other connected issues have been wildly popular with a broad cross-section of American society. Pushing hard on Clinton’s weakness on Islamism will pave the way for a very important ideological touchdown.

It is possible that in the days that remain before the November election there will be another Islamist atrocity somewhere in the world, perhaps even in the Western World*. This will serve as a timely reminder of how extraordinary the problems we (as a civilisation) face really are, and thus how inappropriate it would be to elect an ordinary candidate to solve them.

ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State

The Islamist challenge is so total and grave that all other issues melt under its heat. Trump and his team must realise this fact and base their approach on it. Sure, there are problems with the American economy which require ironing out; sure, illegal immigration from Mexico is undermining American sovereignty and nationhood; sure, the trade deficit with China is growing at an alarming rate.  But none of these issues are new or so extraordinary as to justify the American electorate taking a risk on a provocative and unconventional candidate (and that, undoubtedly, is what Trump is). Trump’s presidency is so unique and strange a prospect that he must build an equally strange and unique context in which it will seem appropriate and necessary. The only way he can achieve this, in my opinion, is with reference to the Islamist threat.

At the debates, Trump must be specific about how he will deal with this extraordinary issue. Soundbites, however popular they may be, should be avoided. It simply isn’t enough to say things like “We need to get tough and we need to get smart.” This is so vague as to be meaningless. Trump must map out a strategy for pulverising Islamism, demolishing it so severely that it will not dare raise its evil head for decades to come.

*Today, as I write, debris is once again being cleaned up from the streets of a Western city. In Manhattan, NYC, two bombs have exploded, injuring almost thirty innocent civilians. Meanwhile, in the peaceful, Scandinavian-American State of Minnesota, eight people have been stabbed at a shopping mall, the attacker allegedly interrogating potential victims as to their religious beliefs prior to attacking them.

These are indeed extraordinary times. They require an extraordinary leader. Next week in New York, Donald Trump would do best not to try and make himself seem ordinary, but rather embrace his uniqueness, tying it to the uniqueness of the times in which we find ourselves.

D, LDN

Is Trump Imploding – and What Would It Mean If He Is?

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According to the pundits of the mainstream media, it looks increasingly likely that the US election in November will be a landslide victory for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her only genuine rival, Donald Trump, is all but out,  they say, having wrecked his chances of winning over the ‘moderate majority’ with a series of astonishing lapses of judgement and discipline.

I wish I could say with certainty that these pundits are wrong, but I can’t. To do so would be to place hope over observable reality.

The truth is the past fortnight has been by far the worst of Donald Trump’s short (if dazzling) political career. In rally after rally, the New York mogul has allowed his tongue to get the better of his political intelligence, making statements that can at the very best be described as ‘ill-advised’ and at worst as ‘politically suicidal’. 

And of these clangers, surely none seems destined for greater infamy than the following comment the Republican nominee made in Wilmington, North Carolina on Tuesday, August 9th: “If she (Hillary) gets to pick her (supreme court) judges, (there’s) nothing you can do, folks,” Trump said,  before adding, “although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”

Now, there are two ways in which this remark can be interpreted. One interpretation – one that gives Mr Trump the benefit of the doubt – is that he was simply suggesting ‘2nd amendment people’ might be able to organise into a legal, peaceful political force and persuade the Clinton regime to pick pro-gun judges. Another interpretation – that which the media has uniformly preferred – is that Mr Trump was suggesting – jokingly or not – that pro-gun activists assassinate Ms Clinton before she gets the chance to pick any judges.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is gaining in momentum following a series of Trump controversies.

It doesn’t really matter which interpretation is correct – at least politically speaking. The remark, whatever its meaning, was stupidly vague, needlessly provocative and incredibly unwise.

Donald Trump is not the idiot many liberals make him out to be. He is a clever, competent businessman, a graduate of the prestigious Wharton School of Finance and the son of successful professionals. He must have known as soon as the remark left his lips that it was the vocalisation of a grave error of judgement.

Personally, I do not believe Donald Trump would ever sincerely advocate political violence. It just isn’t the kind of man he is. Those people who know him personally  are unanimous in their testimony that the billionaire is. at heart, a kindly, charitable and honest person; much softer and gentler in private than in public. He is not a Putin, in other words, let alone a Hitler.

But even his supporters must be honest enough to admit that remarks of this kind are a gift to the opposition. Even we should acknowledge (in the spirit of tough love) that if such provocations continue to issue from Trump’s mouth, the November election is almost certainly destined to result in a Clinton rout.

As I said at the top, the media (both in America and Europe) have been quick to interpret the recent controversies as signalling the death knell for Trump’s entire campaign. In the words of the (liberal and pro-Hillary) New York Times: “The effort to save Mr. Trump from himself has plainly failed. He has repeatedly signaled to his advisers and allies his willingness to change and adapt, but has grown only more volatile and prone to provocation since then, making comments that have been seen as inciting violence and linking his political opponents to terrorism… Advisers who once hoped a Pygmalion-like transformation would refashion a crudely effective political showman into a plausible American president now increasingly concede that Mr. Trump may be beyond coaching. He has ignored their pleas and counsel as his poll numbers have dropped… And (even) Mr. Trump has begun to acknowledge to associates and even in public that he might lose. In an interview on CNBC on Thursday, he said he was prepared to face defeat.”

Trump rally in Orlando, Florida.

Of course, no-one can really say for sure whether it is ‘all over’ for Trump at this stage. It is still far too early to jump to any conclusions. Nevertheless, at the time of writing, Hillary Clinton enjoys a terrifying 8 point lead over the Republican in most national polls. That lead represents a massive turnaround from just a few weeks ago, when Trump led in most polls by an average of 2 points. To be honest – and there is no point in being dishonest – this looks very grim indeed.

We – the Western World as a whole – simply cannot afford for Trump to lose in November. If the New Yorker fails to resuscitate his campaign in the next three months, America will find itself led by one of the most corrupt, opinion-less and manipulative executives in living memory.

Let there be not a doubt in your mind, reader; Hillary Rodham Clinton is considerably more dangerous to America’s well-being than Barack Obama ever was.

Unlike the current CIC, Mrs Clinton is not an ideologue. She is something far worse than that. She is an opportunist, a beneficiary of funds and a puppet of the special interests that have so corrupted American politics for decades. She will not, as president, do as she wants. She will do as she’s told. And that (in my opinion) is a million times more unpredictable, dangerous and sinister than the stable, pedestrian liberalism of Barack Hussein Obama.

Barack Obama has been far less damaging to America than Hillary promises to be.

In Trump’s own words: “Hillary Clinton has perfected the politics of personal profit and even theft… She ran the State Department like her own personal hedge fund, doing favors for oppressive regimes, and many others… in exchange for cash, pure and simple. Pure and simple.”

At several of his rallies Mr Trump has listed many of the foreign countries known to have lent material support to the Clinton campaign – states which include such beacons of liberty as Algeria, Morocco, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. What, I ask, do they have in common?

Like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton is notorious for refusing to use the words ‘radical Islam’ when talking of the crimes of ISIS, preferring to use more culturally vague terms like ‘terrorism’, ‘murder’, ‘criminality’ and ‘violence’. Perhaps the list of nations backing the Clinton effort goes some way in explaining this, but not all the way.

The UAE is friendly with the Clinton campaign.

While Clinton is not – as Trump needlessly alleged – the ‘co-founder’ of ISIS, she is nevertheless on the same page as ISIS in regard to certain vital regional issues. Clinton is, for example, quite fanatical in her insistence that Bashar al-Assad (a man who has done more to combat ISIS than anyone) is the greatest evil currently active in Syria and has spoken more often in criticism of his regime than of the band of maniacs currently at war with it.

This stance would appear to be in sync with a school of thought devised in the murkier corridors of the neo-conservative movement; one which argues that ISIS, far from being a grave threat to America, may ultimately be good for it; that if ISIS can overthrow the Assad regime, even by instituting a medieval theocracy in its place, then that will benefit the US by knocking out a long-standing threat to its regional interests  – (by which they presumably mean the Assad government’s stockpile of chemical and biological weapons, some – but not all – of which have been dismantled).

This is all hypothetical, of course; but given the intransigence of the Clinton campaign, we can only be hypothetical. And that, in many essential ways, is just the point, isn’t it? 

Nothing is for certain with Clinton. She has no clear agenda. Everything about her is blurred behind a film of dust, money and Middle-Eastern smog.

So please, Mr Trump – play a smarter game. Stop giving the press exactly what they want. Stop feeding them headlines. Stop lighting unnecessary fires. There is no honour in losing on principle in this election. The stakes are considerably too high for that.

D, LDN

On the Events in Dallas

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Anyone who lives in America, loves America, or places hope in its example and leadership will have lost a considerable amount of sleep these past few days. The  ghastly news from Dallas, Texas that five police officers have been shot and killed, apparently in revenge for the deaths of two African-American police suspects in Minnesota and Louisiana, has shocked the nation to its core.

“Suddenly,” NYT correspondents Timothy Williams and Michael Wines observe, “the panoply of fears and resentments that have made this a foreboding summer (have) been brought into sharp relief… Police officers and sociologists alike say that racial tension is approaching a point last seen during the street riots that swept urban America in the late 1960s when disturbances erupted in places like the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts and Detroit and Newark, during summers of deep discontent.”

I won’t detail the specific incidents in Louisiana and Minnesota here. They have already been exhaustively covered by the press. Instead, I will ask the general question: Why is this still happening in America? Why is an ethnic rivalry that should have disappeared decades ago persisting in defiance of the current of political progress? 

The answer, I believe, is incitement.

For as long as I care to remember, the insinuations of American news personalities, cynical politicians and radical ‘community leaders’ have issued without qualification or fact-checking from every form of US media. As a direct result of this, a whole generation of Black Americans has been exposed to an unremitting deep-tissue massage of poisonous miseducation and political conditioning, the fruits of which are now ripening into a terrible, violent greenness on the streets of American cities.

The narrative pushed by these crooks, it would seem successfully, is that American law enforcement (and by logical extension – the US Government itself) is institutionally racist, if not nakedly White supremacist, and dedicated to the perpetual oppression of all US minority groups. If you think I’m exaggerating these exaggerations, I would refer you to any of the hundreds of blogs written in support of the criminal network ‘Black Lives Matter’, all of which have advanced this nonsense consistently ever since the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012.

The ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement has been active across America this past week

It would appear to matter nothing to the preachers of this false gospel that the available evidence suggests no such campaign has existed in America for several decades; that the police, far from being dedicated to offending or harming the African-American community, are increasingly required to be particularly cautious in their dealings with them, perhaps even more cautious and light-handed than with any other racial group. Truth, however, has never been a concern of propagandists. It only gets in the way.

As I wrote in an earlier article on this blog regarding racial tensions in America, there is actually a very simple explanation for the frequency (which can sometimes seem remarkable) of police abuses against Black citizens:

“Black people (on average) commit more crime in America than any other racial group. This is why there is more police action against Black people than against members of other races. This is also why there is more police brutality against Black people than against other races. Since there will always be bad apples in a national police force, and given the greater priority that force is compelled to give to one race, it is statistically more likely the bad apples will fall on them.”

Alton Sterling was killed by police officers after resisting arrest in Louisiana, prompting national outrage

Now, and of course, no-one with a heart and mind would dispute that the shooting of unarmed Americans is morally unacceptable. It is. Nor would any right-minded person dispute that the American police – in some cases, not in all – have taken to behaving more like an occupying military than a protective social service. Just type in ‘militarisation of the police in America’ into Google images and you will be treated to universally unappealing photographs of SWAT teams riding down democratic streets in infantry-fighting vehicles and modified tanks.

American police

This isn’t natural, nor necessary, nor proportionate. America is the greatest country on Earth, with a spirit and philosophy of freedom envied the whole world over. It would be a world-historic tragedy were such a beacon of hope to be snuffed out under the leather boot of authoritarian statism.

But again we must strive to make clear that there is no institutional crusade against Black people ongoing in the US. The excesses of the police affect all races in proportion. Indeed, just a few weeks before the death of Mr Sterling, a 17 year-old White youth in Missouri was left with permanent brain damage after being repeatedly tasered for failing to exit his vehicle after a traffic stop. There are many other examples one could furnish, but the point is already made. America has a problem with police overreach, not Black America.

I truly hope that the prophecies being made of a coming ‘race war’ in the United States are as daffy as they sound, but I cannot be sure at this point. The tensions revealed over the past few days in online forums and on social media have been shockingly, burningly hot. Many young Blacks, though they should rightly be ashamed of what has been done in their name, have instead taken to actively glorifying Micah Xavier Johnson online, referring to the killer variously as a ’hero’ and a ‘resistance fighter’, as well as setting up facebook tribute pages in his honour.

Micah Xavier Johnson – one of the confirmed perpetrators of the massacre in Dallas, Texas

And many Whites have been busily striving to equal this bigotry, with some calling for a violent civil conflict to re-establish a segregated America; others proposing the wholesale murder of all non-Whites, and still others blaming the entire problem on the Hebrews,

This is the Middle Eastern style of politics. It is, or should be, beneath the West, especially America; but the poison is now in the bloodstream. The Leftist crooks and inciters have achieved their desired outcome. The United States population is fragmenting as we speak into warring tribes, each of them armed to the teeth and readied for a fresh era of endless, pointless combat. There is no way of putting the toothpaste back into the tube now. I hope the media are happy. The Muslims certainly are.

That’s right – ever since the killings in Dallas were first reported, Muslims (or people with Muslim names) have been openly gloating on social media and in the YouTube comment section.

“America is like third world! Hahahahaha!” One illiterate message read. – “You say you are civilised and we are backward. You are worse!” Another jeered. – “America is doomed!” – “Time for you to suffer like the Syrians.” – And so on, and so on.

It is of course obvious why Muslims are so enraptured by America’s latest troubles. In an age when the Islamic world is collapsing into fiery embers, the stability and affluence of Allah’s arch enemy (the US) has long seemed a taunting and persuasive reminder of Islam’s fundamental cultural inferiority. As Syria and Iraq, once gold-plated centres of Islamic power and cultural dynamism, burn unceremoniously down to the ground, Americans watch football, drink cold beer and laugh at sitcoms. This hurts the Muslims. It gnaws away at them, making them think critically (and you know how much they hate doing that). American popular culture is a constant (and free) propaganda loop, effective because it advertises a peaceful, functioning society its enemies can never hope to replicate or compete with.

It was with this bitterness in mind that Osama Bin Laden once suggested weakening America by forming a destructive alliance with its radical minority populations, especially with disenfranchised Blacks. Being a man of some intellect (though not culture), the terrorist leader saw all too keenly how fragile America’s infuriating success could be made with the right amount of cynicism and professional manipulation.

I hope devoutly that his vulgar ambitions are not about to be realised.

D, LDN

Islam and Black Americans

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A common perspective holds that America is a haven of non-Islam, of kafirdom and cultural infidelity, and that while Europe is destined to become ever more Middle Eastern and North African in the future, America shall long remain a shining city on a hill; proudly old-fashioned in its Christian, patriotic Anglo-Saxonism.

This is not entirely inaccurate. Compared to Western Europe, America has certainly retained an enviable cultural-religious clarity. It is still uncontroversial to postulate that America is a ‘Judeo-Christian’ country, either in the media or from the political podium. The only protest aroused by such a claim tends to be from spectacle wearing atheists, and who on Earth could find them intimidating? By contrast, if one made the same claim about Europe, the backlash would be of an immeasurably more serious kind. People would die. Windows would be smashed. Heads might possibly be removed. America is simply more confident and self-assured than Europe – more willing to stand its ground and preserve its original identity.

But this is not to say that America doesn’t have a problem with Islam. On the contrary, the nation may have more of a problem with Islam than Europe, depending entirely on how ‘Islam’ is defined.

African-American Muslims are today the most powerful Muslim community in the United States and in the West more broadly. Unlike the Arab and Persian Muslim communities, African-American believers are socially and culturally integrated, acceptable, part of the national fabric. Many African-American icons are or were Muslims: from Malcolm X (AKA el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz), to the late Cassius Clay (AKA Muhammad Ali), to Shahrazad Ali, to Louis Farrakhan. These figures are not like marginalised Arab-American activists or obscure Pakistani-American Imams. They are nationally recognised faces, with enduring influence on the mainstream media and the mainstream political conversation.

Louis Farrakhan

They are also protected against the kind of contempt one might safely direct against Arabs and Pakistanis by the firewall of political correctness. You cannot speak as liberally about Black people as you can against Middle-Easterners. Given the horrors of the African-American past, Black leaders are typically treated gently and apologetically by White political analysts. Their comments, however ridiculous, are rarely dismissed, but debated and scrutinised. Therein lies political power.

Of all the African-American Muslim movements in operation today, none is more famous, or infamous, than the so-called ‘Nation of Islam’. Conceived in Detroit in 1930, the Nation of Islam (or NOI) now commands the allegiance of up to 50,000 American citizens; a membership that has in the past included such figures as Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X.

The NOI ‘brand’ is recognised across the United States. Few people have never heard of the organisation. And this notoriety is well earned. NOI members are routinely condemned for their homophobic, anti-Semitic and anti-White demonstrations, some of which have proven very difficult and expensive to police. NOI chapters on university campuses are also noted for their combativeness and hostility to rival groups and demographics, including more moderate or secular African-American fraternities.

Women of the NOI

So what do they want? It’s difficult to say. The NOI website currently features a list of ten ‘demands’, entitled ‘The Muslim Program’. It functions as a kind of manifesto, and has been little changed for several years. I won’t paste the entire thing, since many of the demands are vacuous and jingoistic. But here are three of the most interesting:

“3. We want equality of opportunity. We want equal membership in society with the best in civilized society.

4. We want our people in America whose parents or grandparents were descendants from slaves, to be allowed to establish a separate state or territory of their own – either on this continent or elsewhere. We believe that our former slave masters are obligated to provide such land and that the area must be fertile and minerally rich. We believe that our former slave masters are obligated to maintain and supply our needs in this separate territory for the next 20 to 25 years–until we are able to produce and supply our own needs…..

10. We believe that intermarriage or race mixing should be prohibited. We want the religion of Islam taught without hindrance or suppression.” – Source: https://www.noi.org/muslim-program/

The Nation of Islam was founded in 1930

Eagle-eyed readers will notice at once that all three of these demands are in contradiction with each other. How can there be equality of opportunity (presumably they mean between different races) in a Black-only state? Why also would race-mixing need to prohibited in that state? And so on…

But while one can nit-pick this manifesto for hours on end, that is not the point of this article. What we are trying to scrutinise is the nature of Black Islam and what its followers are aiming to achieve in the United States of America. Judging by the text quoted (as well as other texts available on the Nation of Islam website), Black Islam appears to be a movement dedicated to racial separatism; that is, to the permanent separation of Whites and Blacks, ostensibly for the benefit of both.

Whether you find this a good suggestion or not is not the issue to focus on; rather, we should ask: What has this to do with the Islamic religion authored by the Arabs in the 7th century? Indeed, is this Islam at all? Does the Nation of Islam actually care about Islam, or are they merely using it as a façade, as a cosmetic and/or political cover?

Few questions are more important for the future of America. Given how many African-American ‘Muslims’ there are in the country, and given how mainstream some of them have become in the Black community, the answers to these questions may reveal whether Islam, in the truest sense of the word, has any future in America at all.

‘Conventional’ American Muslims

It is revealing (and comforting) to note that Black Islam has yet to be formally recognised by any conventional Islamic authority, either in America or around the world. The Sunni and Shia religious establishments have only limited ties with the NOI. Even al-Qaeda, an organisation usually welcoming to Western supporters, has greeted Black Islam with a mistrustfully slow handclap.

We hardly need wonder why this is the case. The Nation of Islam has a very, very liberal attitude to Islamic dogma. Not only do NOI clerics preach the infallibility of the Qur’an; they also provide a generous heap of new-age, Afrocentric Apocrypha to go with it. In NOI theology, for example, White people (understood as those of pure Northern – but not Southern – European descent) are a breed of scoundrels and devils, inferior to the pure and ancient Black African race (the race, allegedly, of the Egyptians, Moors, Ancient Arabs, Hebrews, Romans and Greeks). NOI theorists explain White misbehaviour as being congenital to – and ineradicable from – White psychology. Slavery was not, then, a terrible aberration by an otherwise civilised people, but merely the natural expression of White human nature, of White evil.

As much as they might find this kind of analysis appealing, given the contemporary antagonism between East and West, no orthodox Muslim would recognise these ideas as Islamic. They are not based in the Qur’an, and nor do they have any root in the sayings or teachings of the Prophet. For those reasons, Orthodox Muslims will reject a great portion of Black Islamic thought outright. Then there are the UFOs to consider…

The NOI has a lot to say about spacecraft, especially a peculiar UFO called the ‘Mother Wheel’. Minister Farrakhan is quoted on Wikipedia as having said the following: “That Mother Wheel is a dreadful-looking thing. White folks are making movies now to make these planes look like fiction, but it is based on something real. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad (Note: NOI leader from 1934-75) said that the Mother Plane is so powerful that with sound reverberating in the atmosphere, just with a sound, she can crumble buildings.”

Ufology is integral to the NOI worldview

I think that’s probably enough to prove the point. These frankly daffy beliefs are not compatible with any major school or tradition of Islam. On the matter of theology, Black Islam is out on its own.

What about politics? What about the aims of Islamism? Well, happily enough, I have yet to hear of a single case where a Black Muslim (of the NOI style) has travelled to join either al-Qaeda or ISIS, or has carried out, or been apprehended in the process of carrying out, a major terrorist attack. This is most probably because there is a major disconnect between the goals of the NOI Muslims and those of the conventional Islamists. Radical Islamists of the conventional style wish to create a global, multiracial caliphate under the rule of Sharia law. NOI Muslims, by contrast, wish only to create a Black homeland in America or in Africa where they can be free from non-Black oppression. Would NOI Muslims be happy living in an Arab or Pakistani-controlled caliphate? No, of course not. The NOI only exists because Black Americans became tired of being treated as secondary human beings. In a caliphate, the White devils would quickly be replaced in NOI grudge-theology by Arab devils.

For these and various other reasons, I find it quite unlikely that Black Islam will ever threaten American culture in the same way that real Islam threatens Europe. Black Islam is just too silly, too fake, and too cobbled-together to ever mount an effective opposition to modern civilization.

D, LDN

Civil War on the American Right

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The rise of Donald J. Trump over the past 12 months has impacted almost every area of American political life. But nowhere is his impact more apparent than on the culture of American Conservatism – the political right; a culture that was – prior to the billionaire’s rise – ostensibly united in thought and action, but which has since split into combatant political blocs.

On one side of this divide is the Paleo Right (PR), Trump’s own favoured niche, which stresses what is good for the American Republic itself over what is good for the world. On the other is the Neo Right (or neoconservative right), which stresses more the cause of liberty and democracy abroad than the condition of America at home. These two camps have sat awkwardly together for over two decades now. It was always inevitable that they would split. It just so happens that the chisel is Trump-shaped.

Both schools of thought have much to recommend them. The Neo Right has played a vital role in preserving the Pax Americana against the threats of Islamism, Communism and Dictatorship. Israel, Japan, Ukraine and Georgia, as well as many other democratic states in undemocratic neighbourhoods rely on the American Neo Right for their prosperity and security. Democrats in non-democratic countries look to the NR for moral and financial support. The net effect of the Neo Right is positive. Few conservative movements have been so charitably international.

Prominent Neo-Cons: Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld

The Paleo Right, meanwhile, has safe-guarded (or where they have failed, attempted to safeguard) the uniqueness of America, battling against moral and social subversion from within, and maintaining America’s spirit of patriotism and peculiarity. They are motivated by core social issues like abortion, gay marriage, keeping prayer and the pledge of allegiance in public schools, the need to defend the sacredness of the Star-Spangled Banner, and so on. Foreign affairs is to them a secondary concern, if a concern at all. They tend to favour a non-interventionist policy in regard to the Middle East, even while being generally supportive of Israel and other pro-Western regimes. Paleo rightists objected (and were right to object) to the war in Iraq, and have no desire to repeat the experiment with Iraq’s elephantine neighbour. They favour a strong, advanced military, but believe the army should be retained for life and death confrontations, as opposed to constabulary duties. Many Paleos also nurture an obsession with civil liberties, viewing the US government as semi-tyrannical and bloated out of constitutional design. On this matter, too, they are providing a vital voice of caution which all should heed.

Paleo-Con icon Pat Buchanan

As I said, it is a wonder how these two inclinations managed to sit politely together for so long. Now that they have parted, it seems unlikely they will re-unite any time soon. If Donald Trump clinches the White House, the Paleos will have control over the GOP for the next 4 to 8 years.

Neo Rightists are not taking this development well. Fox News – which despite its tangential forays into abortion and homosexuality – is a solidly Neo Right entity, has been thrown into a frenzied identity crisis. The over-publicised ‘spat’ between Donald Trump and Fox Anchor Megan Kelly is just a symptom of the underlying divide. Fox, just like every other part of the conservative establishment, is uncomfortable with Trump’s candidacy and secretly wishes to stall or destroy it.

Fox coverage of candidates Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz has been tainted with bias from the very beginning. With the partial exception of Sean Hannity, most anchors have treated Trump with rubber gloves, as if handling radioactive waste. Trump was never being paranoid or irrational in protesting this treatment.

Megyn Kelly

The Neo Right is substantially more powerful than the Paleo Right in material terms. Most conservative TV networks are Neo Right, as are most Think Tanks, magazines and newspapers. This is the legacy of the long period of uncontested domination of the conservative universe by academic, economic and intellectual elites that is now being ripped to pieces by the Trumpsters. This is why (to the untrained eye) Trump supporters appear to be ‘anti-intellectual’. If the conservative era is to switch from Neo to Paleo, there is a lot of hierarchy to tear down in the process. This is intellectual and ideological regime change. It was always going to be messy.

How valid are Neo Right objections to Donald Trump? Let’s go through a few of them.

Charge 1: Donald Trump is insufficiently supportive of the State of Israel.

On the subject of the Middle East, Donald Trump has said he thinks it unhelpful to frame the conflict as being between ‘a good guy and a bad guy’. Whilst I disagree with the spirit of this quotation (Hamas certainly qualifies as a ‘bad guy’ in my opinion), it seems more rooted in a sense of fairness and pragmatism, than in any bad will towards the Israelis or Zionism. Trump’s beloved daughter Ivanka is Jewish (by conversion) and Trump has spoken of her adopted ethnicity with pride and understanding. There is no direct evidence that Mr Trump has an anti-Semitic bone in his body. Rumours about his keeping Hitler’s collected speeches by his bedside have never been corroborated outside of delirious chat-rooms. Until they are, we should treat them much like we treat rumours that the Earth is a pancake.

Pro-Israel donors obviously prefer Marco Rubio because he is so malleable. Rubio will do whatever his backers tell him to do. This is not meant as an anti-Semitic dog-whistle. It is a fact of politics that donors influence policy, and not only foreign policy. The Koch Brothers, as the left never stops bleating on about, have enormous influence over social and economic issues. Donors – of all varieties – hate Trump because they can’t buy him. Donors also invest in media networks. Media networks hate Trump because they are told to. I adore America. But let’s call a spade a spade here. Trump is battling against a corrupt political establishment.

Ivanka Trump

Charge 2: Donald Trump is not pro-free market.

Donald Trump has stated his determination to bring back manufacturing jobs from Asia and Mexico. When asked how he intends to accomplish this, the GOP front-runner explains that he will impose taxes on US companies that outsource jobs. This is not a violation of the free-market, nor of the regular rules of capitalism. It is a common sense measure to maintain prosperity for the American working class. It is also no different to what China and Mexico have done for several decades without American complaint.

Charge 3: Donald Trump is anti-mass immigration.

Guilty as charged. Donald Trump has been admirably clear on the subject of open borders. He opposes the idea, top to bottom. He wants to build a wall, and make Mexico pay for that wall. He wants to put a freeze on Muslims entering the United States. He also wants to deport the illegal immigrants already resident in the country, only allowing to return those who have clean criminal records and a professional command of English. This should be the default conservative position. No objections to this policy make for any sense.

The Neo Right’s love of open borders isn’t quite treachery, but it is moral and ideological confusion. Yes, Muslim immigration should be avoided as a special case, but this doesn’t mean the entire non-Muslim world is suitable for Western settlement. We have a good thing going here in the Western, Modern world. Allowing in people from regressive or intolerant cultures (of which Islam is only one example) is counter-productive. It jeopardizes what is precious to us.

Other objections to Trump by the Neo Right are similar to those made by the Political Left. The idea that Trump is akin to Mussolini is wildly popular on both sides of the ideological aisle. What evidence is there to support this idiotic claim? Some point to the enthusiasm whipped up at Trump rallies, but then if this is a crime, we’d better convict the Dallas Cowboys, Manchester United and Oprah Winfrey while we’re at it.

Viral photo from Trump rally

People are so refreshed by Trump’s style that they are overjoyed by his message. Joy is not an offence. Emotion might be rare at formulaic rallies with tedious politicians, but Trump is anything but formulaic or tedious. There is real contagious enthusiasm being generated by this man. Politics is being rejuvenated.

The patronising distaste with which the media and economic elite view the pleasures and aspirations of ordinary people is scandalous. People are people. Americans are Americans. All deserve to be heard, appreciated and spoken to, whatever their race, faith or economic category.

If Donald Trump wins the nomination, the Republican Party will never be the same again. The Neo-Con racket – the art of calling oneself a conservative whilst being left-wing on everything except foreign policy – will have been exposed and replaced with a straight-shooting honesty more in line with the fine history of the Grand Old Party.

D, LDN

The Case for Trump

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The star of English comedian John Oliver (sorry for him, America) has been rising fast this past week, largely (or entirely) due to the viral success of his ‘Make Donald Drumpf Again’ routine, a 20 minute rant that has since been shared over 50 million times on facebook and viewed over 4 million times on YouTube.

The piece has been praised as “timely”, “politically explosive”, and “devastating”. Observers (mainly on the centre left) claim Oliver has ‘destroyed’ Trump’s credibility, if not his entire candidacy in one fell swoop. Is this true? No.

The majority of Oliver’s points in this clip are embellishments of points already made elsewhere, often with greater force and skill. Not one of them is valid. Few of them even have a cogency able to survive the deduction of humour. Let’s go through a few of them.

Oliver repeatedly notes that Donald Trump is unpredictable and has changed his political positions over time. This was likely intended to make Trump supporters question their favoured candidate’s authenticity. Like previous attempts to wound Trump’s reputation, this failed miserably. As Mr Trump himself has noted, Ronald Reagan – the untouchable giant of recent Republican history – shifted position on many important topics prior to settling on his widely adored Presidential agenda. So have many other great political figures. Though this defence is simple, it is also devastating. Why the hell can’t a man change his mind? Do figures on the left hold everyone to this rigorous account? If a right-winger goes to the left later in life, would they be so suspicious of his or her integrity? Of course not. The matter should thus be closed.

Another charge Oliver advanced in the Drumpf routine involves Trump’s claim that we should kill (or threaten to kill) the families of terrorists in order to make them play ball. Trump’s rationale on this matter (almost always excluded from the quote in reports) is that terrorists care about little outside of their own private universe. They are obviously, demonstrably willing to sacrifice the lives of random Muslims for their eschatological cause. They are also obviously, demonstrably willing to sacrifice their own lives, which they view as intolerable spiritual encumbrances obstructing entry into a garden of olives and virgins. It is rational – whatever else it is – for Trump to float the idea that these brutes may care about their families, if about anything at all.

I don’t believe for a moment that Mr Trump would order US airmen to bomb the houses of innocent people. It is more likely that his comments were meant as an argument for intensive bombing – which might result in the deaths of innocents.  This is a crucial distinction; one the media should be more careful to add when they raise the issue.

Oliver’s argument that Trump is a bad businessman is both untrue and completely irrelevant. Trump is obviously a very successful man, worth  – even according to the estimates of his enemies – over 8 billion dollars. Though the son of a wealthy businessman, Trump was supplied with a comparatively tiny loan by his father which he has since multiplied consistently with no outside help. Turning a small amount of money into a huge amount is no small art. If you don’t believe me, try turning $1000 into $80,000. If it was easy, everyone would have a tower.

As I say, Trump’s financial history is not only fake but irrelevant. Trump is not running as a businessman. He is running as a patriot. Even if Trump Steaks or Trump University did fall flat, why would this have anything to say about the billionaire’s competence as a leader? It could even be said to recommend him further. The world economy is like a violent sea. Its current tosses big and small ships alike. Every vessel, however expertly designed, is at risk. What matters most is not the occasional random, unforeseeable shock of fortune, but the staying afloat. Trump has absorbed great turbulence over his life and still managed to survive and flourish beyond it. Experience like that cannot be bought.

The only original conceit of the Drumpf routine is Oliver’s genuinely penetrating insight that ‘Trump’ rhymes in the unconscious mind with ‘luxury’, ‘quality’, ‘exclusive’ and other aspirational nouns and adjectives. Ordinary folk, Oliver explained, instinctively associated names with the qualities their bearers are famous for. Tiger Woods, for a different example, brings to mind victory, health, Black achievement and sporting excellence. You are substantially more likely to buy a product with the name Tiger Woods emblazoned on it than one emblazoned with the name of Vanilla Ice or George Zimmerman. Similarly, in politics – a choice of product like any other – we are naturally drawn to individuals based on positive associations. Trump is wealth. Trump is success, luxury and New York. Trump is a five star hotel on the top floor of the capitalist universe. People find this very difficult to refuse.

But does this observation make choosing Trump for President any less rational? No, it doesn’t. Trump is not only admired for subliminal reasons, but for fully rational, real-world advantages. He is (as he is absolutely right to remind us) the only self-funded candidate. This matters a great deal, much more than Trump’s detractors are willing to admit. Marco Rubio, his articulate speaking aside, is a bought and paid-for puppet of the Republican establishment. His manifesto is ghost-written by wealthy donors who are completely unaccountable to – and disinterested in – the general public. The American people are no longer willing to accept this callous type of flyover politics; the politics of ‘we know what is good for you because we have degrees and you don’t’. 

If Oliver’s routine was a serious attempt to cripple Trump and take him out of the game then it has surely failed. Trump’s polling figures are as high as ever. Not one of the tycoon’s rivals appears able to mount a consequential challenge. Super Tuesday was a splendorous triumph for The Donald. He won states in the north and in the south, perplexing analysts who had long called these for Rubio and Cruz respectively.

Although (surprisingly) Oliver didn’t dwell on it too heavily, we must also address here the idea that Trump is somehow a ‘racist’ or a ‘White Nationalist’. Of all the slurs directed at him, this is by far the most frequent and potentially effective. Where is the evidence?

Some might immediately point to the comments the candidate made about Muslims – namely, his lightening-rod suggestion that the US bar foreign Muslims for a temporary period on security grounds. This proposal has been wildly criticised by all and sundry, but is it racist? No, obviously not. As the world should be tired of hearing by now, Islam is not a race. Muslims are not a biological family. To propose their exclusion is no more racist than proposing the exclusion of Mormons. There are White Muslims, Arab Muslims, Persian Muslims, Turkic Muslims, Chinese Muslims, Indonesian and Malaysian and African Muslims. Under Trump’s policy, all will be subject to the same measure, whereas Christian Arabs, Atheist Turks or Buddhist Malaysians will not be. Bottom line – race is irrelevant.

Trump’s attitudes to Mexicans and Blacks are also far from troubling. As regards the former, the billionaire has famously called for the deportation of 11 million illegal migrants. While sensational to an unreliable and skittish media, this isn’t even a policy shift. It is the enforcement of an existing law. It should be no more controversial than to propose the enforcement of parking legislation. Trump is not opposed to Mexican Americans legally resident in the United States. To the contrary, he has repeatedly praised the ‘spirit’ of the Mexican people and highlighted his determination to improve living standards and job opportunities for the Latin and Hispanic community.

Trump’s anti-immigration posture is for the benefit of all working Americans, with no distinction made of race, religion or class. It is a policy that should be welcomed by the Right and Left alike. Illegal immigration devalues the native labour force and undercuts the wages and expectations of American workers. It isn’t fair. It isn’t right. It cannot be tolerated.

Donald Trump is an opportunity that will not come again. He is a one-off: unscripted, un-bought, willing to fight for real-world advantages and speak up against real-world injustice, strong enough to resist the fury of a whipped up media class, patriotic enough to risk a personal fortune to enter politics – this is far from the ordinary. Should he be rejected, something amazing will have been squandered; something historic will have been rejected, and for no greater reason than a queasy fear of the novel and the real.

Trump’s manifesto is the red pill, the uncomfortable jerk that awakens the comfortably numb out of their demon-haunted repose. Trump will redefine American politics, smash the cross-party liberal consensus and reintroduce essential ideas into a pacified and muddled American consciousness. The ‘conservatives’ who are bulking at the prospect of his presidency never were conservatives to begin with. The liars are being separated from the truth. The cards are being laid on the table.

Will you stand with him?

D, LDN

Black Lives Matter: A Study in Fanaticism

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Black lives matter. It’s not a sentence easily disagreed with. Indeed, when it first went viral (after a spate of controversial police shootings) I found it rather articulate. The only improvement perhaps would have been the addition of ‘too’ at the end. But that didn’t really matter. The message was still simple and direct: Black lives are not inherently less valuable than white or Hispanic lives, and so the police shouldn’t feel more entitled to fire at black criminals than criminals of any other background. Fair enough.

The best part of a year on from its inception, however, and Black Lives Matter has become something far less reasonable. Despite any noble beginnings, BLM is now a barely-organised cult of anger, of random society-bashing and raging self-pity. Its proponents are motivated more by hatred of white people than by sympathy for vulnerable blacks. Some on the political right have gone so far as to designate it ‘racist’ and a ‘hate group’; the mirror image of the KKK. I am not compelled to disagree with them.

Whether on college campuses, at political rallies, or in the street, BLM activists have been causing a riotous disruption to American intellectual life, and for no reason greater than the exercise and development of an industry of phoney grievance and community self-denial.

In the words of Wall Street Journal columnist Jason L Riley “(BLM) is not about the fate of blacks per se but about scapegoating the police in particular, and white America in general, for antisocial ghetto behavior. It’s about holding whites to a higher standard than the young black men in these neighborhoods hold each other to. Ultimately, it’s a political movement, the inevitable extension of a racial and ethnic spoils system that helps Democrats get elected. The Black Lives Matter narrative may be demonstrably false, but it’s also politically expedient…It’s the black poor—the primary victims of violent crimes and thus the people most in need of effective policing—who must live with the effects of these falsehoods.”

Mr Riley’s comment about black victims of violent (black) crime deserves extended analysis. It is still acceptable in liberal academia to blame the failings of African Americans on the existence of ‘institutionalised’ or ‘structural’ racism. A more honest and pro-black narrative would highlight the pitifully high rates of black-on-black crime in the neighbourhoods in which the acts of police ‘brutality’ are alleged to have occurred. Could it be that the police are merely trying hard to save black lives? Could it be that police excess in these neighbourhoods is the unfortunate overspill of a desire to protect black people?

No. It couldn’t be that. Well, not according to BLM anyway. Crackers, they reason, are just being crackers. White people love the sight of a puddle of black blood expanding on a pavement. It’s what got them to enrol in the first place.

Falsehoods cannot persist indefinitely. Sooner or later even the most doctrinaire bien pensant will end up reading forbidden arguments, or hearing unapproved statistics. Given enough time, and enough rope, the BLM cult will burst like a bubble.

And American Blacks will be all the better off for it.

D, LDN

A Better Proposal

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I can’t recall any statement in modern history making waves higher than those generated by Donald Trump’s Muslim comments this week. From the moment the proposal left his snarled lips, the entire world has been ideologically drunk, stumbling about with no sense of proportion, history, law or context. The New York Times described the outrage directed at Trump as ‘withering fire’. The UK papers called it a ‘perfect storm’ and ‘political sensation’. In the Guardian, the normally level-headed Gary Younge reacted by saying that ‘bigotry’ (presumably he meant anti-Islam sentiment) is now ‘out, loud and proud’ in both politics and society. And so on..

As far as I have noticed, the only major political commentator to approve of Trump’s proposal is (the ever-dependable) Ann Coulter, who tweeted ‘Go, Trump, Go!” and went even further by suggesting the policy should cover all foreigners.

What actually was the idea? Well, there have been many myths advanced about what Trump actually said and meant, either to make it seem better, or – more commonly – to make it seem worse, but put most basically, Trump suggested that all Muslims be barred from entering the United States until ‘(America’s leaders) figure out what is going on (with ISIS, terrorism etc…’. At first the billionaire seemed to maintain that this would apply even to Muslim-Americans serving in wars abroad after their term had been completed, but this aspect has since been removed.

This isn’t a crazy idea, at least from a European perspective. The reason hell broke loose is because America is not Europe, and America’s Muslims are not like Europe’s Muslims. While the latter are the result of recent immigration (and a smattering of conversions), the former have a complex and native root that would be difficult or impossible to cleanly excise. Many American Muslims are Black Africans, and Black Africans are generally considered to be as American as apple pie. Given this reality, it came as little surprise to see the prodigious employment of a certain boxing legend on social media following Trump’s announcement. Indeed, were there still people not yet primed to what was going on, they might have honestly surmised that Muhammad Ali had perished, such was his ubiquity on the internet last Tuesday evening.

My own reaction to this announcement has been ambivalent. I salute and congratulate Mr Trump on his boldness, his daring and his commitment to the Western World and the preservation of its culture. But the prospect of a wholesale ban on Muslim travel is utopian. However happy the proposal’s consequences might be, it flies against the complexity of the world as it is, as well as against the realities of the United States itself. In the globalised world, it remains necessary that certain people from non-Western nations travel to the West (and vice versa). Muslim businessmen, diplomats and government officials require access for official functions – functions which are essential for the United States’ economy and for the furtherance of its global agenda. If the Muslim travel ban was implemented, the United Nations would have to be moved outside of the US – drastically diminishing the country’s soft power and shifting the political emphasis to Europe. For these (and many other) reasons I do not believe Donald Trump’s proposal is workable at the present moment. Nonetheless, the proposal is far from ‘mad’, and Mr Trump did not deserve the orgiastic right-wing back-stabbing of the past 7 days.

In my humble opinion, a more workable proposal is that advanced by many ‘radical’ parties; namely, that while (some) Muslims should be allowed to travel to the West, these must never become Western. Western citizenship should not be bestowed on any non-native person of Islamic faith. Ever. Period. The risks are too high, and the benefits are too inconsiderable for the admission of Muslims into the Western organism to make sense.

I am aware that the announcement of this policy would cause as much or more controversy as the one Trump announced, but reactions are inevitable and we have to do something.

We cannot de-Islamise Muhammad Ali, but we can make damn sure the current inhabitants of the Islamic world do not become permanent inhabitants of Boston, New York, Washington, Paris, London and Madrid.

D, LDN

This Week in Savagery

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This past week has been an eventful one for the demonic coalition variously known as Islamic State/ISIS/ISIL or (if you feel like being politically correct) ‘Daesh’.

First, in San Bernardino country, California, ISIS members cruelly abbreviated the lives of a random crowd of unfortunate civilians, shooting them all in cold blood. A few days after this, ISIS functionaries in Syria decapitated a Russian citizen before uploading footage of the crime onto the internet. And most recently, yesterday, a degenerate Muslim in London sought to slash members of the public to death on the London Underground with a machete (in this case fortunately he failed to accomplish any fatalities).

The reaction to these crimes has been different in each case, with the distinctions generally reflecting the differences in political climate in the victims’ homelands.

America reacted with that familiar blend of indignation and fury we have come to expect from our great, patriotic ally. After the identities (and religious affiliation) of the perpetrators was finally confirmed (after much prior confusion) Fox News and other right-leaning media outlets referred to the action as ‘savage’, ‘evil’ and ‘a national wake-up call’.

In Russia, as in America, the tone was one of purple-faced rage. President Vladimir Putin vowed to spill the blood of the terrorists in a tit-for-tat calculation hugely popular with the citizenry of nations which still believe in themselves (Russia, Israel, America, Australia etc…)

And Britain, dreary, silly old Britain, we responded with a hashtag campaign aimed at dampening down the threat of an anti-Muslim backlash… What a ridiculous crèche this country has become! I’m reminded of the words of Christopher Hitchens when he said  (half-jokingly) that if a Leftist found a venomous snake in their child’s bed, their first instincts would be to phone the RSPCA.

We’ve learnt nothing new over the last 7 days. ISIS have committed evil acts, but then we knew they would (somewhere). David Cameron’s decision to use our wonderful Tornado jets against Raqqa have very quickly returned an unpleasant consequence, but then we knew that would happen. The best the commentariat can do for now is to wish RAF bombs the greatest possible accuracy and the fires they generate the greatest possible heat.

Death to ISIS.

D, LDN