The Western Spring

Belmont Club and Richard Fernandez have come up with a good term to describe what is happening now.

It’s on, the long awaited fight against PC orthodoxy is finally on. Trump is unlikely to apologize, CAIR even more unlikely to back down. With 3 million Middle Eastern and African refugees due to arrive in Europe this year the clashes between German protesters are only likely to intensify.

The commotion you hear is not going to stop, it will only get worse. The Western Spring is finally here, and before it’s done it threatens to change everything.

The “Arab Spring” has proved a disaster for the Middle East. Much of that disaster was midwifed by Obama and Hillary. Obama helped The Muslim Brotherhood overthrow our ally, Mubarak. The Washington Post was very optimistic.

CAIRO – It was sparked on social-networking sites, and inspired by a revolution in Tunisia. In 18 days, it grew into something astounding – a leaderless people’s movement that at every turn outsmarted a government with an almost unblemished 30-year record of suppressing dissent.

Of course, it didn’t turn out the way they expected.

Despite the government’s efforts to sow violence that could be pinned on the demonstrators, the vast majority did not take the bait.

In the first days of the protests, they were attacked with high-pressure water hoses, tear gas, birdshot, rubber bullets and live ammunition. Protesters responded with rocks, but also with pamphlets instructing demonstrators to appeal to the police as fellow Egyptians.

When police withdrew from the streets and prisoners were released from their cells, Egyptians formed security committees to protect their neighborhoods. And when pro-Mubarak forces – many of them thought to be paid thugs and undercover police – attacked anti-government demonstrators, the protesters fought back but did not escalate the violence.

More than 300 people were killed over the past 18 days, with each death giving the movement more momentum. In Tahrir Square, posters of the dead grace every corner. A curly haired girl named Sally, a man named Hassan, a boy named Mohammed.

There is no mention of what happened to Lara Logan in Tahrir Square during the “innocent demonstrations.”

Lara Logan thought she was going to die in Tahrir Square when she was sexually assaulted by a mob on the night that Hosni Mubarak’s government fell in Cairo.

Ms. Logan, a CBS News correspondent, was in the square preparing a report for “60 Minutes” on Feb. 11 when the celebratory mood suddenly turned threatening. She was ripped away from her producer and bodyguard by a group of men who tore at her clothes and groped and beat her body. “For an extended period of time, they raped me with their hands,” Ms. Logan said in an interview with The New York Times. She estimated that the attack involved 200 to 300 men. Sounds like a preview, doesn’t it ?

The leftist innocence drips from the WaPo article.

Mubarak believed that the US conspired to bring him down. Knowing Obama, he was probably correct. Of course, we should follow Napoleon’s rule, “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.”

“The revolution was started by the Americans in 2005,” he can be heard saying. “I felt that, and they told me so. I told them I would leave power in 2011, and not hand over to my son what they called inherited power. My son had already had enough insults.”
Mr Mubarak’s comments, leaked to a daily Egyptian newspaper, shed an interesting new light on events in 2011. Mr Mubarak at first refused to compromise with protesters, and by the time he agreed to American demands that he promise not to stand again for elections due to take place in September 2011, or to hand over power to Gamal, it was too late and the momentum that led to his immediate departure from office had already built.

This would place the blame on Bush and it cannot be ruled out that he might be so naive. Obama, of course, would never be so patient and concern about consequences is not known to deter him from his ideology.

The Muslim Brotherhood is reputed to have fully infiltrated the Obama Administration.

“There’s no question we got a hell of a job ahead of us,” Admiral Lyons said. “With the Muslim Brotherhood penetration in every one of our national security agencies, including all our intelligence agencies,” he proclaimed.

Admiral Lyons said that our “lead intelligence agency” is “headed by a Muslim convert,” a reference to Obama CIA head John Brennan.

Some of this may be overblown but it is curious how much influence CAIR has with the Administration and even Departments.

The admission of meetings with the Council on American-Islamic Relations came from George Selim, the White House’s new director for community partnerships, which was formed in January to ensure cooperation by law enforcement and social service agencies with Muslim identity groups in the United States.

“There is [sic] hundreds of examples of departments and agencies that meet with CAIR on a range of issues,” he told The Daily Caller, after being asked if his office refuses to meet with any Muslim groups.

CAIR is “the group with the worst record of deception and the deepest ties to terrorists,” said Steven Emerson, the director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, which tracks the public activities of Islamist lobbying groups.

Germany is in serious trouble with the Muslim invasion.

The underlying controversy here is not a new one. For decades conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic have warned that Europe’s generous immigration policies, often pursued in defiance of ordinary Europeans’ wishes, threaten to destabilize the continent.

The conservatives have made important points about the difficulty of assimilation, the threat of radicalization, and the likelihood of Paris-style and Cologne-style violence in European cities.

But they have also trafficked in more apocalyptic predictions — fears of a “Eurabia,” of mass Islamification — that were somewhat harder to credit. Until recently, Europe’s assimilation challenge looked unpleasant but not insurmountable, and the likelihood of Yugoslavian-style balkanization relatively remote.

With the current migration, though, we’re in uncharted territory. The issue isn’t just that immigrants are arriving in the hundreds of thousands rather than the tens of thousands. It’s that a huge proportion of them are teenage and twentysomething men.

That is The New York Times !

When immigration proceeds at a steady but modest clip, deep change comes slowly, and there’s time for assimilation to do its work. That’s why the Muslim population in Europe has been growing only at one percentage point a decade; it’s why many of the Turkish and North African immigrants who arrived in Germany and France decades ago are reasonably Europeanized today.

But if you add a million (or millions) of people, most of them young men, in one short period, you get a very different kind of shift.

Fernandez has some thoughts about this.

But the impetus may switch since in the nature of things activists who oppose the radical left may get around to doing something equally stupid or mean. Politics is a two-way street. The Narrative will have its good days to the consternation of those who find themselves whipsawed between a status quo they can no longer accept and the leadership of an insurgency they have yet to trust. The leaders of the terror may perish by their own instruments after the aristocrats are gone and Paris will be beautiful again, but not before a lot of water goes over the dam.

There is nothing unusual in this. It is in fact standard for the status quo to encourage the most disturbing alternative to itself on the theory that people prefer the devil they know to one they have just met. Bashar Assad, for example, actually encouraged the rise of ISIS to leave no alternative to anyone but himself. The Western Spring may bring hope, but it also brings peril, for it unleashes one set of forces to counter another.

One of those forces may be Trump and a new ruling class in America.

One advantage the United States theoretically enjoys over Europe during periods of free-surface flooding is the Constitution. This serves as a foundation, a sort of ballast which lowers the meta-centric height of the ship of state and keeps it on an even keel in all but the roughest sailing.

It was meant to provide a check against excesses from either side in a political duel. The Constitution itself used to rest upon an even more basic rock, a widely shared set of assumptions, moral and religious beliefs which obtained at the beginnings of the nation. That gave it tremendous stabilizing power. Unfortunately the left has steadily chipped away at this Constitutional ballast and the stone on which it was builded, a fact they may regret before long.

They certain that they are on “the right side of history.” Our society is so divided into tribes that we may find no choice to return to stablity.

If I had to define “tolerance” it would be something like “respect and kindness toward members of an outgroup”.

And today we have an almost unprecedented situation.

We have a lot of people like the Emperor boasting of being able to tolerate everyone from every outgroup they can imagine, loving the outgroup, writing long paeans to how great the outgroup is, staying up at night fretting that somebody else might not like the outgroup enough.

And we have those same people absolutely ripping into their in-groups straight, white, male, hetero, cis, American, whatever talking day in and day out to anyone who will listen about how terrible their in-group is, how it is responsible for all evils, how something needs to be done about it, how they’re ashamed to be associated with it at all.

This is really surprising. It’s a total reversal of everything we know about human psychology up to this point. No one did any genetic engineering. No one passed out weird glowing pills in the public schools. And yet suddenly we get an entire group of people who conspicuously love their outgroups, the outer the better, and gain status by talking about how terrible their own groups are.

What is going on here?

It sounds a lot like cultural suicide. There was a 1964 book called “Suicide of the West” that discussed the left’s tendency to attack its own interests in a lunatic attempt to choose the perfect over the good. A review on Amazon makes the point.

Burnham spends the first two-thirds of the book describing the liberal worldview in intellectual and moral terms. He begins by first outlining the major tenets of liberalism and shows from whence they arose. He then demonstrates how some of these tenets are intellectually weak due to their internal inconsistency, mutual incompatibility, and failures in application.
Burnham then shifts to the moral/psychological aspect of liberalism, specifically the role of values in liberal ideology; and the priority that liberals give to those values. He also explains the sentiments that drive the commitment to liberalism and explains how, in many cases, those sentiments are inconsistent with the intellectual tenets of liberalism. He also describes the powerful role guilt plays in the liberal impulse towards egalitarianism.

The threat at the time that book was written was communism but the points are as valid today toward Islam. Richard Fernandez has addressed the issue in more modern terms.

The West is filled with millions of people like Alex, all of them waiting for Someone. They are the product of a multi-decade campaign to deliberately empty people of their culture; to actually make them ashamed of it. They were purposely drained of God, country, family like chickens so they could be stuffed with the latest narrative of the progressive meme machine. The Gramscian idea was to produce a blank slate upon which the Marxist narrative could be written.

Too bad for the Gramscians that the Islamists are beating them to the empty sheets of paper. And they are better at it too. Maybe the old Bolsheviks could have given ISIS a run for its money, but today’s liberals have declined from their sires. George Orwell observed the takeover of hardcore Bolshevism by the periphery in the 1930s, in “The Road to Wigan Pier.”

The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years’ time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting.

The left of today is totally incompetent to protect the west, even if it wanted to do so. What we are seeing is a mass migration which will bring ancient problems here.

To hear the Left tell it, the debate over mass Muslim immigration — especially from conflict zones — is a simple contest between compassionate tolerance and cowardly xenophobia. They claim their opponents are cowards because the percentage of refugees or immigrants who are terrorists is very small (your bathtub is more dangerous than a Muslim immigrant), and they’re xenophobes because they have no understanding or appreciation for the blessings and benefits of diversity. Conservatives are all fear and no heart. According to the rules of this debate, there are but two kinds of Muslim immigrants — the tiny few terrorists and the overwhelmingly deserving, suffering majority. Question this narrative, or call attention to the vast cultural gaps between the refugees and the Western nations they’re fleeing to, and you’re a racist. After all, our cultural elite understands the Muslim world better than you do. They went to Harvard with Muslims, and the Muslims they know have great accents, cool customs, and — most importantly — tales of imperialist oppression that turn the leftist heart to mush. What’s not to love?

The honest voice of the left is harder to find. This essay has some of it.

I don’t mean the sort of light-matter conservatives who go around complaining about Big Government and occasionally voting for Romney. I see those guys all the time. What I mean is well, take creationists. According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country.

And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.

About forty percent of Americans want to ban gay marriage. I think if I really stretch it, maybe ten of my top hundred fifty friends might fall into this group. This is less astronomically unlikely; the odds are a mere one to one hundred quintillion against.

They don’t know anyone who disagrees with them. This is a clue to the furious reaction of the left toward Trump.

Rose Hamid, a 56-year-old flight attendant, was removed from Donald Trump’s rally Friday night while silently protesting, one of several disruptions to occur during the Republican presidential candidate’s event.
Hamid, who wore a shirt reading “Salam I Come In Peace” and a yellow “Muslim” star, a reference to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, told CNN later that she attended the event with peaceful intentions.
“I have this sincere belief that if people get to know each other, one on one, that they’ll stop being afraid of each other and we’ll be able to get rid of all this hate in the world, literally,” Hamid told CNN’s Don Lemon. “So that was really my goal, was to let people see that Muslims are not that scary.”

She has now been shown to be a professional agitator and activist.

She is president of the nonprofit Muslim Women of the Carolinas. Their Facebook page is here. She and is associated with several groups, including the Muslim American Society(MAS) of NC, CAIR, and the Islamic Society of Charlotte. We reported several years ago on Shoebat.com that the MAS is a front for the terrorist group Muslim Brotherhood. CAIR is an internationally recognized terrorist organization. The Islamic Society of Charlotte has ties to the infamous Holy Land Foundation Terrorist Financing case, as has been reported by the Carolina Journal Online:

And so it goes. The “Western Spiring ” will bring many changes.