Daniel Greenfield provides excellent commentary here on a liberal hostage whose knowledge of Islam and the Qur’an, and his bitter personal experience as a hostage of jihadists, don’t shake his fashionable illusions. Note also that all this happened to him at the hands of the “moderate,” Obama-backed Free Syrian Army.
“What Does It Take for a Liberal Hostage to Lose His Illusions About Islam?,” by Daniel Greenfield, FrontPage, November 11, 2014:
…Theo Padnos’ account of his time as a hostage is honestly told. This is a man who studied in a “religious academy”, who could quote verses from the Koran, who fell into a nightmare in which he discovered what Islam really was.
I began my studies in a neighborhood mosque, then enrolled in a religious school popular among those who dream of a “back to the days of the prophet” version of Islam. Later, I moved to Syria to study at a religious academy in Damascus
Somehow none of that alerted him to the difference between what Muslims believe and what liberals think they believe.
Padnos believed that the Free Syrian Army was some kind of resistance group, instead of another name for a bunch of Islamist militias with ties to Al Qaeda. He learned his mistake in the worst way possible.
One afternoon in Antakya, I met three young Syrians. They seemed a bit shifty, but not, as far as I could tell, more militantly Islamic than anyone else. “Our job is to bring stuff from here to the Free Syrian Army,” they told me. They offered to take me with them. Thinking I’d be back in a few days, I told no one, not even my Tunisian roommate, where I was going.
…When we were done, the cameraman smiled, walked across the room and kicked me in the face. His friends held me down. Abu Osama stomped on my chest, then called out for handcuffs. Someone else bound my feet. The cameraman aimed a pistol at my head.
“We’re from Al Tanzeem Al Qaeda,” Abu Osama said, grinning. “You didn’t know?” He told me I would be killed within the week if my family didn’t provide the cash equivalent of a quarter kilogram of gold — which the kidnappers thought was about $400,000 but was actually closer to $10,000 — the sum to which he was entitled, he said, by the laws of Islam.
… Note the “Laws of Islam” part of it.
At this point he might have escaped and been safe, but he still believed the nonsense about Islam and the Free Syrian army.
That night, I slipped out of the handcuffs that attached me to one of the sleeping men. In the soft sunlight of the Syrian dawn, I sprinted past walls covered in graffiti, through a cemetery and over a median strip, then stopped a passing minibus. “Take me to the Free Syrian Army right away,” I said. “This is an emergency.”
When I arrived at the F.S.A. headquarters, I appealed to the officers in the most desperate terms. They argued a bit among themselves, then took me to an Islamic court, where a judge questioned me and remanded me to a cell that had been converted from a Turkish toilet. There were prisoners in the cells on either side of me. I poked my head through a food hatch. A 10-year-old boy did the same. “What did you do?” I said. He withdrew, and a middle-aged man, his father, I presumed, poked his head out. “What did you do?” I repeated.
A helpless grin appeared on his face. “We’re Shia,” he said.
“I see,” I said.
Ten minutes later, the F.S.A. officers returned, accompanied by my kidnappers, and I was trundled into a car and taken to an F.S.A. safe house. There I was placed in a hole in the ground. Was I six feet below the surface? Only three? I didn’t know. Officers threw dirt on me, laughing and shouting insults. Someone jumped down and landed on my chest. Someone else beat me with the butt of his Kalashnikov. One officer insisted that I reply to his questions by yelling out, “I am filth, sir!”
These are McCain’s moderate friendly secular rebels whom we’re supposed to be funding.
But did Padnos really think, after all his studies of Islam, that an Islamic mediation would result in a captive of a Muslim force being freed?
That would be most un-Islamic. The FSA followed Islamic law.
The F.S.A., it turned out, had given me to the Nusra Front, or Jebhat al Nusra, which was using the Children’s Hospital in Aleppo as a headquarters and a prison.
Al-Nusra is also Al Qaeda and currently ISIS.
It seemed to me that I had been walking calmly through an olive grove with Syrian friends, that a rent in the earth had opened, that I had fallen into the darkness and woken in a netherworld, the kind found in myths or nightmares.
It didn’t reach him that he never had any Syrian friends. The Koran commands Muslims not to take non-Muslims as friends.
What was happening to him was caused by Islam, by Islamic xenophobia, hate and supremacism. These were good Muslims. The problem is that good Muslims, like good Nazis or good Communists, are terrible human beings.
… The leader — I’m not sure who it was, I couldn’t see — carried a heavy stick and a cattle prod. As I lay there, he hit me across the back of the head, then strolled around the room reciting prayers.
… During an interrogation session, the Kurd, who liked to be called Sheikh Kawa, nodded at a prisoner whose wrists were cuffed to a pipe just beneath the ceiling. His feet bicycled through the air. “You must let me down, for the sake of Allah! For the sake of Muhammad and Allah!” he screamed.
“This is our music!” Kawa yelled at me. “Do you hear it?”
… When religious authorities or higher-ranking Nusra Front members — anyone with bodyguards — came by my cell, I sometimes recited verses from the Quran. These were verses that I loved, and the visitors seemed pleased. But the net result of these recitations was . . . nothing. Eventually, one of the more educated guards explained to me that as a Christian and an American, I was his enemy. Islam compelled him to hate me.
“Does it really?” I asked…
Anyway, the Quran forbade amicable relations: “O you who believe!” this guard would recite. “Do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends. They are friends one to another. And whoso among you takes them for friends is indeed one of them.”
That’s Qur’an 5:51.
There you go. You don’t have Muslim friends. You have Muslim acquaintances who will kidnap you or slit your throat the moment it’s in their interest to do so because their religion tells them that you aren’t really a person.
Converting to Islam doesn’t help because the religion is partly racial. Muslims look down on Dhimmi converts.
It was January 2013 when the prison administration began offering me the opportunity to convert to Islam. Every day, the guards preached to me and recited the Quran. In Arabic, you don’t convert to Islam, you “submit” to it. “Ya, Bitar” (“O, Peter”), the fighters would say, “why haven’t you submitted yet?” For a while, I thought that if I submitted, my life would improve, but I soon learned that even conversion would not help me…
Matt asked for an English-language Quran. A guard gave it to him. A few days later, Matt said the magic words — “I testify that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is his prophet” — in front of witnesses. When word got around that Matt had converted, the younger fighters would point at him and say, “You, good!” Then they would point at me and say, “You, bad!”
But the conversion did not get Matt better food, and it certainly did not get him home. Once, one of the more volatile guards slapped him as we were being taken to the bathroom. “You, bad!” he said to Matt. “You lie about religion.” The guard nodded at me. “You, you Christian,” he said. “You, good.”
But having learned nothing, he tries to make contact with the Free Syrian Army… even though it was the FSA that put him here.
I returned to the F.S.A. troops. One told me that his unit had recently traveled to Jordan to receive training from American forces in fighting groups like the Nusra Front.
“Really?” I said. “The Americans? I hope it was good training.”
“Certainly, very,” he replied.
The fighters stared at me. I stared at them.
After a few moments, I asked, “About this business of fighting Jebhat al Nusra?”
“Oh, that,” one said. “We lied to the Americans about that.”
And they still are. We’re arming and training Al Qaeda.
I listened to the fighters musing about their futures. “Hey, Abu Petra,” they asked me, “what is Sweden like?” If they were to present themselves as Syrian dissidents to the authorities, what would happen next? Was I familiar with the procedures in Sweden for seeking political asylum? And what about Berlin, supposing they found their way to Germany? How long would it take for them to learn German?
Yup. Some of these guys are coming to a place near you.
By this point, I knew better than to seek refuge among the “moderates” of the Free Syrian Army.
That was progress… but he still thought that he could find refuge with Muslims. Any Muslims.
At the hospital, a dour-looking man greeted me. “I am a journalist,” I said. “From Ireland. Please, you must help me. I love the Syrian people.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I am the F.S.A.” He admitted me to an inner room. “No one comes in here without my leave,” he said. “You can relax. You are safe.” I asked if I could contact my family. “Of course,” he said. The easiest way, he said, was for me to send an email. But the man with the computer’s password was away. It would take just a few minutes for him to get to the hospital. Did I need tea? Medical attention?
The F.S.A. soldier stepped out. Ten minutes later, he returned, beckoning me with the index finger of his right hand. He seemed to do it in slow motion, as a jailer might summon an innocent prisoner to his execution.
In the front hallway of the hospital stood a group of about 15 Nusra Front fighters, Kalashnikovs dangling from their right hands. No one spoke. A few seconds passed, and then someone said in a barely audible voice, “Come, American.”
At this point we ought to be bombing the FSA.
Earlier, in March, the Nusra Front commanders in Deir al-Zour put a pair of Islamic State commanders in the cells on either side of mine…
“But surely,” I said, “this violence is not good for Islam.”
They temporized… Assad was bound to slink away into the undergrowth.
The battle against his forces was just a skirmish in the great global combat to come, in which the believers would prevail against the unbelievers.
“After we conquer Jerusalem, we will conquer Rome,” Abu Amran told me.
“No one is trying to conquer you,” I said. “Why do you want to conquer everybody?”
Because Muhammad said so: “The Messenger of Allah sallallaahu `alayhi wa sallam was asked: ‘Which of these two cities will be conquered first, Constantinople or Rome?’ He said, ‘The city of Heraclius will first be conquered.’ He meant Constantinople.” (Al-Hakim, Al-Mustadrak, 4.508) Note that he didn’t say that Rome would not be conquered by the Muslims; he just said that Constantinople would be conquered first.
Over the last 22 months, I had stopped being surprised when Nusra Front commanders introduced their 8-year-old sons to me by saying, “He will be a suicide martyr someday, by the will of God.” The children participated in the torture sessions. Around the prisons, they wore large pouches with red wires sticking out of them — apparently suicide belts — and sang their “destroy the Jews, death to America” anthems in the hallways.
…
The Nusra Front higher-ups were inviting Westerners to the jihad in Syria not so much because they needed more foot soldiers — they didn’t — but because they want to teach the Westerners to take the struggle into every neighborhood and subway station back home. They want these Westerners to train their 8-year-olds to do the same. Over time, they said, the jihadists would carve mini-Islamic emirates out of the Western countries, as the Islamic State had done in Syria and Iraq. There, Western Muslims would at last live with dignity, under a true Quranic dispensation.
And that takes us right back to reality. This is about a Clash of Civilizations and it only took him years of being surrounded by Jihadists to grasp that….
KrazyKafir says
Cognitive dissonance: a real liberal mental illness.
Darren says
As much as I dislike the liberal Dhimmi, I believe this is a trait most humans share to one degree or another. Normalcy bias is plaguing the west. The suburbanite mentality is a major hinderance. People want to wake up have their coffee watch Sports center and go about their day like always. They hate thinking about dark things, and remind me in some ways of children. We have been coddled in the west and have lived the good life mainly off of what our forebearers have done.
Sadly our generation and many others before it pretty much gave away the store. Things like opening us up to China and other suicidal policies for instance. Most people are desperate to continue their lives as always and don’t want to accept a dark reality because it breaks the safe little bubble they created for themselves. Europeans thought they could keep doing the same thing, having their cup of tea while watching a football game, well as we all see the blissful dreamworld they inhabit is starting to be infringed upon. We in the U.S are no different from our European counterparts, we are just as neutralized by political correctness and just as beholden to normalcy bias and cognitive dissonance.
The only thing that is different is their muslim population has reached a higher percentage than ours. As everyone here knows once their muslim pop reaches 20% or more you will start to see them trying to carve out a state within a state, this has happened in so many different locations around the world already why list the places. I’ll simply use Kosovo as a prime example. We in all our wisdom backed the wrong side too go figure.
Western governments as they stand will most likely back the wrong side, we are on our own the government isn’t coming to help us, if anything they will make the problem worse. Carving out a state within a state is already happening in many places in Europe, what do you think a no go zone is? They come to colonize not become citizens, they view us as little more than beasts to serve them.
Human nature being what it is, we most likely won’t react until their are RPG attacks and car bombs and militias operating within our respective countries. I want us to act now before it comes to that, but you know as well as I that we won’t. It took Hitler invading and Japan bombing the U.S before the west reacted. The same thing will happen again. What’s worse you most likely will have Russia and China backing the muslims once the civil war breaks out so they can wage a proxy war from afar and weaken us. Though Russia has it’s own muslim problem, they won’t pass up the chance to score one against the West, it’s in their DNA, just like we would do the same thing to them, in fact we already have. I think the best thing our side can do now until the war happens is prepare, train and educate, we know it’s going to happen but governments won’t react because it might cost them a few votes, and the majority of the populace won’t react because most humans suffer from normalcy bias and cognitive dissonance and won’t react until their feet are in the fire. It is what it is, let’s just make sure when the war happens we win and don’t fight a politically correct war.
Jen says
I was feeling soothed by your comment Darren. This is a good comment. State within a state…China and Russia….opening up to China…human nature….western governments…all of this…You are reading my mind. It’s an overlapping of problems which weaken the west. I get knots in my stomach when thinking about all of this, in a broader sense. I want to hide away sometimes. When I’m not seething with hatred and thinking about joining the military that is….Who would I be defending though, when so many people are too busy watching the Kardashians. You would be putting your life on the line for people that act like they don’t give a damn, even when you try to tell them…It makes me bitter…
JoeC says
You don’t join the service for “them”. You join it for the ideals. To preserve the world’s last, best chance at democracy, at decency, at peace. The Pax Americana was the greatest thing to happen to the world since the Pax Romana. But that time is coming to an end now, a lot of that because of our own doing.
Just as we did with Japan, we helped raise up our latest adversary (China) from the depths of communistic despair. We thought economic progress would liberalize them, but that was a fool’s dream. Now we all will pay the price for Nixon’s “China strategy”.
Back to joining the service… only do it if you’re all-in. Don’t worry about fellow citizens who rest upon their laurels and engage in shallow pursuits. This is as its always been and how it will always be. No doubt, a lonely Roman legionnaire manning one of the Rhine forts, far away from home, cringed at news from comrades of the seemingly frivolous going-ons back in Rome. But that didn’t cause him to do his job any less well. And, who knows, we may also get our own Marcus Aurelius and our Empire will be saved.
Darren says
The worst part is I know there is nothing I can do to change what is coming, all I can do is watch what I know will happen, and comment on it with like minded people. To me it’s more of a hobby than a crusade, I know as a peasant on a keyboard, I can’t effect change, but I can’t help but comment on it. I’d rather face the dark reality knowing the truth, than to stick my head in the sand or deny the reality exists.
It reminds me of a show I watched it was a Dystopian setting, you have a people who’s society is in the process of being destroyed and the two main characters have the attitude that they will face whatever dark reality awaits instead of pretending the reality is something other than what it is. The rest of the people get killed and they are the only two survivors at the end of the show, a very dark show, but I loved the theme of normalcy bias, denying reality, and cognitive dissonance.
Even when everything was falling a part you had the majority of the populace pretend everything was all right. I see that now in the west. One scene was memorable the whole city was on fire, and you have this office worker still typing away on a keyboard that isn’t even there. We have many in this country still typing away despite the keyboard not being there.
The same dark reality is coming, whether we want it to or not. There is more than the coming war with islam, first in Europe then maybe even on our shores (depending on how large the muslim pop gets) , but there are other major issues that no one will address, because they would rather keep typing on that keyboard that no longer exists. I’d rather be like the two main characters of this show and accept the truth and deal with the reality.
You saw what happened to the rest of the people who denied it, they still got wiped out at the end of the show. I’m not saying we are all going to die in some zombie apoc, it’s a simple metaphor for what is happening in our society. What frightens me is I know from observing people and reading about history that normalcy bias, cognitive dissonance, and denying reality until peoples feet are actually in the fire is very strong in most people. I hope I’m wrong but I foresee some dark times ahead that could be a lot darker, depending on how the people react in the West.
Which way will we go, is the question. I shall hope for the best, but a part of me is expecting the worst, and I hate being a pessimist. The future isn’t set in stone though, so maybe whatever spark that made the West great will be reignited once we face some trials by fire. This is what I am hoping for a revival of the west, as it stands now we are stagnating as a society, and remind me of the society in the series Foundation. When the empire was slowly crumbling. Most of the people didn’t see it or want to see it. I’m no Harri Seldon, I’m a simple peasant who is aware of both human nature and history nothing more.
change watch says
You are right Darren but as individuals anything we do ourselves will land us in jail. I guess trying to get the truth out there and wake people up is a start. Read A Consequence of Apathy by NR Baldwin, he warns of all you say.
Ed says
A major part of the cognitive dissonance is the liberal view of the Second Amendment. The exercise of the Constitutional right to arms is a major impediment to Islamic action in America. If Dianne Feinstein, Charlie Schumer, Michael Bloomberg, and other anti-gun zealots have their way, we will have jihadist carnage on our streets.
Beagle says
That was a fascinating story right up to the end when his UN helpers were attacked by his Nusra Front captors as well. Sadly, there were no reader comments allowed. I would love to see how the average NYT reader, erudite in some ways and yet utterly clueless about Islam, would react to that story.
Beagle says
Check that. Reader comments link at the top. This should be interesting.
Beagle says
It’s fair to say one in a hundred reader comments at the NYT makes sense in any way, despite the prevalence of correct grammar and verbiage.
The overarching common themes in the comments I’ve read so far is that much of the problems in the Middle East are the West’s fault, but there is nothing we can do about it. The US should not side with anyone as there are no good guys, but it’s unfair to generalize about Islam. My favorite is the comment which praises Obama for having been reluctant to aid the FSA and completely ignores his entire strategy is based on aiding the FSA.
I feel stupider for the effort overall. I should probably shower again to get off the cognitive dissonance I just splashed all over myself by reading the comments.
Darren says
When car bombs are a daily occurrence and their favorite star bucks gets bombed for not serving halal approved lattes and a few of them get beheaded in the streets a few of them might wake up. Isn’t cognitive dissonance and normalcy bias a sight to behold in a person?
Alarmed Pig Farmer says
… one in a hundred reader comments at the NYT makes sense in any way, despite the prevalence of correct grammar and verbiage.
It’s all in the presentation, that’s how fictive bubbles are made to float. No factuality = no gravity.
… a religious school popular among those who dream of a “back to the days of the prophet” version of Islam.
Ah, the good old daze when this the ideal “religion” was born. Back then Islam was better: they had the protection racket, the armed robberies, the sieges, the theft of large tracts of land and everything on it, the contract murders, the mass murders, the sex-slaving. Yes, those were the good old daze back when Islam was pure. Let us hark back to the fundamental, let us be conservative by conserving the system as it was born.
Duh.
Darren says
The good old days of islam were great if you were the one doing the conquering and pillaging. I’m sure when the Vikings invaded England it was a great time to be a Viking, it must have sucked being the one being pillaged, raped, and killed though. They want to go back to the good old days of pillaging, islam has a lot in common with the Vikings. I’d rather not go back to those good old days, I like waking up having my coffee, watching sports center and going to work in peace. I assume 99.9% of all non muslims would agree.
Jaladhi says
Liberals are just as brain dead as Muslims!! Nothing can help them!!
Rob Porter says
Yes, liberal are are brain dead, just in a different way to Muslims. They are in denial, like David Cameron, William Hague and other imbeciles like Theresa May. (Obama for his part simply assists jihadists such as those in Libya and Syria, so is not in their camp even if they think he is). They refuse to believe what is uncomfortable or frightening to believe, so imagine that all of this ‘Islamic stuff’ can all be averted if they are friendly and accommodating appeasers – even at the expense of liberty and freedoms hard-fought for in two world wars. As if Muslims don’t consider them weak, fools and cowards! Liberals meanwhile think that through their cowardice Muslims will become nice guys. Not a clue about what the Qur’an teaches and not much interest because it sounds ‘nasty’. In this regard I have a sister and brother-in-law – the latter brilliant in his engineering field – but in the area of global jihad just thick as brick. I think they think this ‘nasty Islam stuff’ will just go away if they do nice things towards Muslims and treat Muslim in a manner that reflects their understanding that not all want to hack your head off. Meanwhile I now have in my car a steel bar, soon will add an axe, and if I see a Muslim threatening the life of someone I will simply sink the axe in their head or neck – or whatever is convenient to strike.
Nemesis says
The guy’s capacity to be at once so naive and so stubborn is explained when he introduces himself to the man at the hospital as an Irish journalist.
mortimer says
Ben Affleck needs to read this story. The terrorists in it were not ‘religious fanatics’ before joining Al Qaeda, but ordinary working people, ‘moderate Muslims’. Put a weapon in their hands and they are supremacists who enjoy hurting subhuman ‘others’.
The key part of the article is: ‘There you go. You don’t have Muslim friends. You have Muslim acquaintances who will kidnap you or slit your throat the moment it’s in their interest to do so because their religion tells them that you aren’t really a person.’
Don McKellar says
You have to remember who is writing this. It is coming from a hardcore leftist who lives in a semi-delusional reality which very much does feel like a high school writing project. The idealist leftist-liberal lives in a very juvenile world, hence their naivety. They are always one step removed from reality — and when reality hits them hard, they step back and reestablish their fantasy layer removal very quickly. This makes it very authentic. Not that I’m saying the events happened exactly as described, but that he is doing his best to describe what he thought he experienced.
Darren says
As most people here know naive idealists get people killed without exception, many times they get themselves killed as well.
Mike says
Well written comments, and I enjoy your insights. The progressives do have many common traits. They tend to be dull, passive, and quite banal. I’m amazed how they survive until I realize so many inhabit government bureaucracies and academia. They do have some talents. Most seem to be fairly accomplished parasites, contributing nothing but bringing home a paycheck none the less.
change watch says
Spot on Mike. I work with these traitors. The damage these Yoghurt Weavers do is to deliberately hide the failure of multiculturalism and the bigotry of Islam.
quotha raven says
I think you are right, Don McK.
mortimer says
In spite of his tragic, painful experiences in communist prison camp, John McCain was completely hoodwinked by professional liars in Syria who assured him they favored democracy and pluralism. They are Al Qaeda wolves in sheep’s clothing.
nacazo says
If you read his story he still has empathy for the leader of his captors and he’s still willing to say good things about islam.
This is a bad case of stockholm syndrome or he knows how the pc forces work and is following the party line.
eduardo odraude says
“[Duh], no one is trying to conquer you. Why do you want to conquer others?”
What can you make of someone like that, who goes into a notoriously deadly part of the world without actually studying the Islamic texts, except perhaps as filtered through some partisan political culture. Someone who never questions whether the one side of the argument to which he adheres might not have the whole picture? It must be a person who lacks a capacity for critical thinking, except when it conforms to the culture he finds congenial (leftish self-centered moral preening).
quotha raven says
Yes, Eduardo, those two brain dead questions makes the guy look like an imbecile.
Mild Bill Hickok says
This dumb turd is another victim of the core curriculum.
voegelinian says
“The problem is that good Muslims, like good Nazis or good Communists, are terrible human beings.”
That is part of the problem. The other part that gets routinely and massively ignored, if not creatively (when not dimwittedly) obfuscated, is that if there do exist “bad Muslims” (i.e., harmless Muslims — an opposite category obviously implied by Robert Spencer’s “good Muslims”), we have no adequate way of discerning the difference — which wouldn’t be that thorny of a problem were there not a global revival of “good Islam” with innumerable “good Muslims” pullulating out of the Muslim world into our own free world to revive the violent supremacist dream of Islam; and were there not the added, crucial difficulty of taqiyya.
I.e., the problem is not some asymptotic permutation of the TMOE (Tiny Minority of Extremists); the problem is all Muslims.
quotha raven says
Voeg – “pullulating”? Yikes. Great, new word! Thanks!)))))
voegelinian says
Yes, Muslims bring out the unusual words in me.
voegelinian says
There may be; but of what use is their hypothetical existence to our #1 problem, the safety of our societies? (Or is that the #1 priority to some of the Counter-Jihad Softies, one wonders…?)
Sam says
Islam and liberalism (unfortunately) must be defeated by force. How long will it take for us to realize that we can not discuss Islam and freedom with Moslems and Liberals. They turn off their brain (the part objective if any) when Islam and Liberal Agenda is mentioned. So we got to stop them by FORCE. Sorry I do not see any other way. It may even come to a civil war, yes in the USA. This time I am for the South for JW readers.
harry lime says
It could not be said better Sam.
Salah says
@Sam,
“So we got to stop them by FORCE.”
You’re absolutely right. But, how?
You have 2 solutions:
1- A civil war, with a lot of bloodshed.
2- A massive popular uprising big enough to overthrow the PC rulers without having to fire one single bullet. Like this:
http://crossmuslims.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-end-of-muslim-brotherhood.html
Ted says
Two points:
1) the leftists/liberals control the education establishment. OUR CHILDREN are being indoctrinated by them. I’ve seen it with my own kids and their friends. So there is at least a whole generation -maybe two – that believes “The West” is evil and the cause of Islamic militancy. They believe and teach our kids that “White guilt” crap and basically teach them to hate everything about our own culture. So as if the Muslims weren’t enough of a problem, the leftists among us are a huge problem on their own.
2) The U.S/E.U are broke! If there’s any way to avoid a total 1930’s style collapse, darned if I can see it. Hate being negative, but cripe, the debt has to be tamed and nobody gives a damn. The US is what? 16 Trillion in the whole? Nobody can even comprehend the amounts any more. What can’t continue – won’t, sad to say. It’ll be friggin’ nasty when that day comes and we’ve gotta deal with violent Muslims in our midst at the same time.
Gotta say I love reading the comments here. Only place where I feel people have a grasp of whats REALLY going on.
quotha raven says
Perhaps a little off topic, but you are right, Ted. My son went to private, purely academic Episcopal school in NYC for grammar school, a small, delightful-seeming New England boarding school for four yrs of high school, and the U of Vermont, where he graduated, somewhat to my shock and dismay, a smart, motivated young man steeped in liberalism!
Today, at 45, he is a happy, busy guy with wife and kids and his own business, which he runs with his wife. He has little time to keep up on current events, but he retains the leftist foundations his education installed in him, and he is somewhat skeptical of anything I tell him to the contrary.
He is beginning to cast a jaundiced eye on Islam lately, however, so he is not totally intractable. He is puzzled and mildly appalled at what his kids (10 and 12) are being taught in public school about Islam, and he saw a Frontline show about how vicious ISIS is, both of which lend credibility to what I have been trying to tell him.
You sound younger than I am; this virtual brainwashing has been going on for a LONG time, and it is ever more pervasive in the USA educational system, public AND private. NB the Ivy Leagues! Princeton recently voted to divest itself of any Israeli investment. And who funds Princeton? Saudi Arabia? Qatar? Time to start watching our backs! Cheers! oh, p.s. I, too, think the comments here add great depth to the articles they respond to, and some of the posters are brill. One gets one’s favorites…)))
Baconeatkingkaffir says
When you play on the freeway, don’t whine when you’re mowed down by cars. What kind of a tool thinks that koranderthals will see them as any different than the rest of us kuffar? After the Danny Pearl incident, one would think that the special snowflakes would learn. Lying, and deceit are all mohammedan traits and highly encouraged in their terrorist holy book.
Carlos Danger says
Darwin at work. dorks like this are useless (except as examples) in the war against the Hajis.
Uncle Vladdi says
The Stockholm Syndrome comes easily to liberals because they are all victimology-swilling masochists.
The reason they used to kill cowards during wartime, is because most cowards are also masochsits – and that means traitors to rationality and civilization.
Masochists pretend to themselves to be able to “control” their fears BY causing those same, worst-case scenario pains which they fear the most.
Re: “… During an interrogation session, the Kurd, who liked to be called Sheikh Kawa, nodded at a prisoner whose wrists were cuffed to a pipe just beneath the ceiling. His feet bicycled through the air. “You must let me down, for the sake of Allah! For the sake of Muhammad and Allah!” he screamed.
“This is our music!” Kawa yelled at me. “Do you hear it?””
PEOPLE HERE SEEM TO FORGET THAT THE KURDS ARE STILL MUSLIMS.