FDR's decision to "normalize" diplomatic relations with Stalin's dictatorship of blood on November 16, 1933 is the seminal event in modern American history, I argue in American Betrayal -- one reason I was very happy to participate in the 80th commemoration of the event presented by CSP, hosted by Frank Gaffney, and also featuring M. Stanton Evans, Chris Farrell, and Stephen Coughlin. The moral, intellectual and strategic repercussions plague us to this minute.

From American Betrayal,...

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It is rather hilarious, in a mirthless way, to hear Learned Professors still attempting to maintain the domain of "Cold War Studies" as a rather sterile realm in which the Rosenbergs, Hiss and lesser known "spies" lurked, only stealing secret formulas, never actually influencing anything, certainly not the course of American strategy or the movement of world events. In this same realm, Joseph McCarthy remains wrong about everything. My book American Betrayal takes, shall we say, a broader view. 

Well, the Learned Professors say, maybe McCarthy wasn't wrong about everything -- not "the larger point," as Prof. Harvey Klehr recently semi-conceded,...

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From the New York Daily "News":

Trying to explain his controversial comments that President Obama doesn’t love America, Rudy Giuliani said Friday that he believes the President has been influenced by communism and socialism.

“Look, this man was brought up basically in a white family, so whatever he learned or didn’t learn, I attribute this more to the influence of communism and socialism” than to his race, Giuliani told the Daily News.

“I don’t (see) this President as being particularly a product of African-American society or something like that. He isn’t,” the former mayor added. “Logically, think about his background... The ideas that are troubling me and are leading to this come from communists with whom he associated when he was 9 years old” through family connections.

When Obama was 9, he was living...

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The unhinged attack of American Betrayal -- curiously, as noted, led by ex-Communists -- made much of my "occupation" metaphor. This would be the "occupation" of Washington by a Soviet intelligence army of literally hundreds of covert American agents who became embedded in the halls of power during the Roosevelt years, working on behalf of global Communism as led by Stalin's dictatorship. 

The evidence that sparks the metaphor is actually overwhelming. In fact, it is a rather obvious conclusion to draw, even if it has...

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There is great disbelief in the land -- disbelief that Obama and the rest of the global elites refuse to make the rational, logical connection between Islam and Islamic violence, whether in Syria or Copenhagen.

This "populist" response is the logical, healthy, rational effort to assess facts and draw conclusions, to abandon narratives -- agit prop -- and perhaps even to judge --  Islam is not a religion of peace; it is an existential threat to all we hold dear. This vital practice of judging, however, has been drummed out of our morally relative society, a historical process American Betrayal highlights. 

Will the good guys win? Be warned. Our patriotic forbears did not win their...

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Attempts to explain the unhinged campaign (spearheaded, curiously, by ex-Communists) to save "court history" from the newly dusted-off, newly inter-connected evidence presented in American Betrayal have logically pointed to the arguments in the book that pull FDR from his pedestal and lift McCarthy from history's hell.

As I now record the audiobook, however, I am struck anew by other arguments mustered in the book that augur a change in the way we also regard Truman, Eisenhower and many more. Such arguments make the case for a seismic shift in our conception of the "American Century."

...

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The following post originally appeared on March 10, 2012. Its contents remain as staggering today as they were then. "We will hoid sacred the beliefs held sacred by others": Are they kidding? No.

 

Conclusion? No, it's the end.

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Almost exactly one year ago, I came across the ISAF website headline,  "The Religious Importance of the Qu'ran," I wrote:

As a well-known sucker for the religious importance of the "Qur'an" -- I prefer "Ko-ran," with Texas inflection -- I just had...

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Earlier this week, I participated in the Center for Security Policy's Defeat Jihad Summit. 

I find that the several hours of speeches and discussion have distilled into some salient recollections and comments.

1) There remains a chasm between American "messaging" and that of some of our European friends who were invited to speak, including the Netherlands' Geert Wilders, who contributed a taped message, and Lars Hedegaard, who addressed the conference via Skype from Denmark.

American participants in the main demand, even a little truculently, that we now, finally, break the bonds of "political correctness" and speak frankly about "radical Islam," "Islamism," "ideas of ISIS," etc. 

Wilders, whose Party for Freedom is No. 1 in the Dutch polls, and Dispatch International editor Hedegaard both speak, and have always spoken about "Islam" -- pure and very simple.

...

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JCC Gen. Martin E. Dempsey

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Sen. Ted Cruz spoke at the CSP Defeat Jihad Summit yesterday, recounting an exchange he had with the Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs when they came before Senate Armed Services Committee several months ago.

Sen. Cruz said he asked the following question:

What would be required militarily if the objective were to destroy -- not to degrade, not to weaken, but to destroy ISIS in 90 days?

Cruz continued:  

The response from General Dempsey: I'm sorry that is simply not possible.

Now my response was OK. Perhaps that time frame is unrealistic. You tell me, from the military perspective, if the object is to destroy ISIS,, what is required to do so.

The response was we cannot destroy ISIS until we change the underlying conditions  on the ground that make young men in poverty susceptible to extremism.

At the...

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Audio clip thanks to Vlad Tepes  

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Something unexpected and exceptional happened on the Sean Hannity radio show during a discussion of the current cycle of expansionist Islam.

On Thursday, February 5, guest Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, said there were "two things I hope our listeners can do in terms of education."

The first was to view his recent speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit, "Why Were Losing the Global War with Radical Islam"...

and I would say second, read Diana West’s book American Betrayal, which is very chilling in telling us about a similar period in the 1940s and early 1950s in which...

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Bolsheviks meet to congratulate UC Cal Student Gov for advances in world peace and understanding

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One of the pieces of evidence I offer to bolster my arguments from American Betrayal that "we" -- the US-led West -- lost the Cold War (World War II, also, but that argument requires more space than I wish to use here, or total immersion in the book) is the fact that our college campuses, private and taxpayer-funded, are outposts of Marx.

How can a nation claim victory in an epic "battle of ideas" -- classicial liberalism vs. Marxist ideology -- when its institutions of "higher learning,"  its incubators of leaders, continue to churn out a hardened "nomenklatura" whose allegiance is to the pillars of...

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Below is a column that was first published 10 years ago this summer. I am extremely sorry to say, with a couple of timely tweaks, it could have been written today.

We have learned nothing. We have lost much.

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Only one faith on Earth may be more messianic than Islam: multiculturalism. Without it -- without its fanatics who believe all civilizations are the same -- the engine that projects Islam into the unprotected heart of Western civilization would stall and fail. It's as simple as that. To live among the believers -- the multiculturalists -- is to watch the assault, the jihad, take place un-repulsed by our suicidal societies. These societies are not doomed to submit; rather, they are eager to do so in the name of a masochistic brand of tolerance that, short of drastic measures, is surely terminal.

I'm not talking about our soldiers, policemen, rescue workers and, now, even train conductors,...

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There is much that is existentially threatening to the rah-rah conventional wisdom about FDR, World War II, the Cold War and more in American Betrayal, all of which serves to strip the cover off the riddling rot of Communist infiltrators and fellow travelers who worked covertly to expand the reach and power of Stalin's regime under cover of Allied "victory" in the "Good War."   

In my last post from the audiobook recording sessions, I noted that Lend Lease served to supply the evil empire with not only war materiel, but also post-war materiel including all manner of atomic materiel -- even embargoed uranium -- which was, as Richard Rhodes, author of Dark Sun, put it, "useful in constructing...

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One of the exercises I undertook in American Betrayal was to try to track certain key facts and personages that had disappeared from the current form of the historical record, the "court history" we are taught by consensus historians. 

For example, in sworn testimony before Congress in 1949 and 1950, retired Army Maj. George Racey Jordan revealed that during World War II and the top-secret Manhattan Project, the Roosevelt administration shipped atomic materials, including uranium and heavy water, to the USSR, flouting the embargo on uranium exports set by Manhattan Project chief Gen. Leslie Groves.

Where is this fact or this personage in our history books? If true, our understanding...

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Arthur Koestler (1905-1983)

The following excerpt from American Betrayal appears today in slightly edited form at Breitbart News:

In his contribution to the famous 1949 collection of essays by ex-Communists titled The God That Failed, Arthur Koestler carefully illustrates how set language binds thought to ideology at the expense of evidence. Koestler, author of the unparalleled novel of Stalin’s show trials, Darkness at Noon, describes a conversation he had early in his Communist career with “Edgar,” his Party contact, in which they discuss the front page of a Communist newspaper.

“But every word on the front page is contradicted by the facts,” I objected. Edgar gave me a tolerant smile. “You still have the mechanistic outlook, he said, and then proceeded...

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I couldn't have been more delighted to see that Newt Gingrich has cited American Betrayal in his latest column:

As Diana West writes in her remarkable book American Betrayal,...

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A sharia-dictator dies (Abdullah), a new sharia-dictator takes power (Salman, above), and the US doesn't just bow, it glorifies (Dempsey, above). 

I know this news is a couple of days old, but I just can't get over it. 

Here's the handout from the US Department of Defense: 

"Dempsey Sponsors Essay Competition to Honor Saudi King" WASHINGTON, Jan. 26, 2015 – The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has established a research and essay competition in honor of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Bin Abdul-Aziz hosted by the National Defense University.

The king, who died Jan. 23 at age 90, oversaw the modernization of his country’s military during the time he spent as commander of the Saudi Arabian National Guard, a position he held from 1963 until he became king in 2005.

Army Gen. Martin...

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While recording the audiobook of American Betrayal, I am occasionally posting sections that challenge the creaky orthodoxy taught, written and perpetuated by "court historians" who continue to avoid incorporating the evidence of the deep and wide Soviet penetration of the US government and other institutions into our general history.    

Today's installment opens with the consensus-challenging work of prize-winning war correspondent and noted military analyst Hanson Baldwin. Indeed, Baldwin's 1949 book, Great Mistakes of the War, proved to be invaluable to the course of my research. In this book, Baldwin examines military mistakes of World War II (thanks to consensus-history betcha didn't...

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Long has the sun done set on the enterprise once known as Great Britain -- aka "England, Mother England," as in "Merrie Olde," "sceptered isle" and all that.

With the flag over Buckingham Palace at half staff in national mourning for sharia- dictator Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (a "reformer," a "real progressive," according to Fox News, practically a sufragette), the Telegraph reports that a senior BBC official has deemed that the men who stormed Charlie Hebdo's office and slayed the staff and others are not to be called "terrorists."

Tarik Kafala, the head of BBC Arabic, the largest of the BBC’s non-English...

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At Gates of Vienna, the Norwegian writer Fjordman reports on what he saw in Dresden at the January 15 PEGIDA rally against Islamization. He concludes with customary flashes of insight that illuminate the shared political turf from which multicultural (read: Marx-inspired) elites and forces of Islamization together stand against native populations.. 

I had an interesting discussion with some Scandinavian friends about why PEGIDA started in Dresden in the former East Germany. You can see more veiled Muslim women within five minutes in Berlin, or in a Western German city such as Hamburg or Cologne, than you will probably see during an entire day in Dresden. Dresden is still a European city. So why did protests against Islamization start there? Normal 0 false false false...

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As I record the audiobook of American Betrayal, I am rereading the book for the first time since I shipped the corrected manuscript back to the publisher in December 2012. It is also my first careful read since American Betrayal was smeared in an orchestrated attack led by a tiny band of septuagenarian ex-Communists starting several months after it came out in 2013. As I read, I confess to taking extra delight in certain sections that I can now imagine drove such people nuts.

I am thinking...

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I am currently recording American Betrayal for an audio book and just came across an unforgettable "lost" scene from our past: when Rep. Martin Dies, the founding chairman (1938) of the House Un-American Activities Committee, runs into Sen. Joseph McCarthy shortly before McCarthy began his investigations into rampant Communist subversion of the federal government in 1950. 

It comes from a section in Chapter 3 recounting the deep bitterness of the investigators, such as House Committe on Un-American Activities' Robert E. Stripling, and the witnesses, such as Whittaker Chambers, who labored to expose the secret, massive Moscow-directed intelligence army of traitors that, in effect, occupied the halls of power in Washington (London, Berlin,...

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After the curtain went up on the Leftist street theatre in Paris calling itself a "unity" march following the Charlie Hebdo-Jewish market massacre, there was a point at which the mask dropped.

While spectators might have been trying to figure out what, if anything, the march was showing "unity" for or against -- besides being against Marine Le Pen, who was not invited, and against Benjamin Netanyahu, who, we later discovered, was urged not to come -- marchers lifted their voices to accompany loudspeakers blasting "Imagine." The face of "unity" was visible for all to see.

I'm referring, of course, to John Lennon's "Imagine," that maudlin pop-anthem to global Marxian negationisn.

" ...Imagine there's no countries ... nothing to kill or die for ... no religion too ... no possessions ... no need for greed or hunger ... Imagine all the people/Sharing all the world..."

With this anthem, the symbolic message of the march becomes unmistakable. Accordingly, it made perfect sense for the...

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Jyllands Posten, September 30, 2005. This page demonstrated that Denmark was not under Islamic blasphemy law. The same cannot be said today.

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On December 30, 2010. I posted the below post as gleaned from WikiLeaks as netted by Norway's Aftenposten via Islam in Europe.

I am reposting it today as the essential backstory to why Jyllands Posten would today be "afraid" to post the latest Charlie Hebdo Mohammed cartoon.

I suggest reading it sitting down, and with bourbon (or poison of your choice) within reach. Let's just say our founders...

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Worst news of the ....

The Star Tribune reports Jyllands Posten, the paper that set out to prove that Denmark did not accept Islamic blasphemy law by running a page of a dozen cartoons of Mohammed in 2005, has not published the new Charlie Hebdo cover illustration of Mohammed.

Why?

“We aren’t republishing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons because we are afraid,” Flemming Rose, former cultural editor or the paper, said. “But I know well that if you give in to intimidation, it works.”

Afraid, and probably weary, too. It was a long and violent and costly siege that the Danes held without any other country's support -- including the First Amendament-waving USA.

But just imagine if the West, media, "world leaders," etc., had screwed up the barest modicum of courage to hold the coats of those brave Danish journalists who, alone, tried to hold back the battering ram of Islamic law in the West. 

...

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Naturally, as the last of the 3 million press run of Charlie Hebdo was snapped up, the magazines began to pop up on Ebay, as much media have noted, priced from $4.95 to hundreds of dollars apiece.

I find, however, that there is only one offering of the big daddy Motoon of them all -- a high-quality signed print of bomb-turban Mohammed by Kurt Westergaard, produced and originally sold by the International Free Press Society under Lars Hedegaard (yours truly presiding as vice president).The seller is thinking big: $40,000 to "buy it now."

What price free speech?

From the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR):

Today, SIGAR released an audit of U.S.-funded salary payments for the Afghan National Police (ANP), which total $1.3 billion. 

The audit found:

--The U.S. is spending over $300 million annually for ANP salaries with little assurance that these funds are going to active police personnel or that the amounts paid are correct.

--There are almost twice as many ANP identification cards in circulation as there are active police personnel.

--After 9 years of effort, an electronic human resources system has still not been successfully implemented.

--Reports have disclosed inflated police rosters, payments being made to more police personnel than are authorized in particular locations, and police personnel receiving inflated salaries.

...

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The Death of the Grown-Up came out in August 2007. I am not happy to report that nearly seven years later, the book retains a tragic topicality.

The book marries the decadent "arrested development" of American culture with the dynamics of dhmmitude, which in certain ways may be thought of as the forced "arrested development" of the non-Muslim, on pain of death, according to Islamic law.  

No dhimmi or person living in dhimmitude functions as a free citizen -- a fully developed adult human being. His speech is censored according to Islamic law; his beliefs, particularly critiques of Islam, must be kept to whispers or altogether private. As a non-Muslim (or female), he is treated unequally before the law. He pays the jizya -- Islamic protection money -- for continued sufferance. Always, he lives under threat of Islamic violence or attack,...

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Two years ago next month, the world renowned Danish free speech advocate, journalist and historian Lars Hedegaard was shot at point blank outside his apartment near Copenhagen by an Islamic assailant who would eventually be arrested as an ISIS footsoldier (and then later released to ISIS in a prisoner exchange by the Turkish government). Thankfully, Lars, a dear friend and colleague, was unhurt, and visited Washington shortly after this attempted assassination. 

While in town, Lars sat down with The Daily Caller's Ginni Thomas for an interview, posted here,

I mention this particular interview because Ginni's first question in March 2013 is the same question people are now asking today in the aftermath of the Islamic jihad massacre at the Charlie Hebdo magazine offices in Paris.

Why, Ginni Thomas asked Lars Hedegaard,...

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The Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, France is a milestone in the progress of Islamic blasphemy law in the Western world.

Magazine editor Stephane "Charb" Charbonnier was among the twelve innocents, ten journalists and two policemen, murdered today in the magazine offices by an Islamic military-style assault team. The assassins were enforcing Islamic blasphemy law, the barbarous essence of mainstream, authoritative Islam. Such law is embraced by Muslims around the world, and that includes in the United States. In a 2012 election poll of American Muslims by Wenzel Strategies, nearly 60 percent American Muslims said that criticism of Islam should not be permitted under the US Constitution's First...

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John Boehner, President Obama's leader in the US House of Representatives, was re-elected today with 216 votes out of 408 cast.

Twenty-five, count 'em & bless 'em, Republicans voted for someone else or present.

That's it.

That means that's also it for conservative representation in the House.

Out of 435 members, just 25 went to Washington to try to turn the 2014 Stop-Obama electoral wave, brought to you by We, the American people, into legitimate political power. The rest -- the dwindling Democrat minority and that largest Republican majority since the 1920s -- went to Washington to grease the skids of business as usual. Ergo, Boehner as usual.

Last week, I was just guessing when I imagined that Sweden was more fortunate than America in having 13 percent...

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“Identity Fraud and the Mickey Mouse Media”

From the "A" section of the New York Times, p. 15, in less than 100 words, the psychosis of denial as it is hard-wired into American journalism:

Six years into his presidency, there seems to be almost nothing the nation does not know about Mr. Obama, ranging from his views on the use of drones to target terrorists to how his daughters have less interest in hanging out with him as they become teenagers.

But little is known about the state of his game and what he is like on the golf course,where he has spent roughly 1,000 hours playing 214 rounds since he was elected in 2008, according to Mark Knoller, a CBS correspondent who has kept track of the president’s schedule.

With this, the "paper of record" proceeds to "inform" readers about the never-before-revealed details of Barack Hussein Obama's golf game.

Now we know everything?

Fat chance....

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Victims of jihad in Australia a century apart: Alma Cowie, aged 17, and Katrina Dawson, aged 38

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In the spirit of sermons and soda water, Mark Durie provides a clarifying essay that opens the historical horizons on last month's deadly Martin Place jihad siege in Australia by comparing it to a strikingly similar jihad attack against picnickers in Australia on New Year's Day, 1915 (via Ruthfully). In discussing these and other cases of "individual jihad" (including reference to the Dutch colonial experience in Aceh) where Muslim killers answer the Islamic call to jihad, Durie demonstrates that the go-to, feel-good explanations about "lone wolves" and "crazies"...

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Meet the Mousavis, leaders of the Iranian "opposition" 

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Michael Ledeen ends another year touting the allegedly Good "opposition" movement of former Iranian prime minister Mousavi, the "Green Revolution" leader under house arrest since 2009.

Ledeen concludes:

If we had a foreign policy team worthy of us, we’d be supporting the Iranian opposition, but Obama has proven that he prefers Khamenei to Mousavi.

I was baffled by this same sentiment back in 2009, and remain so today.

How might it be "worthy" of the United States to back a man who wants to turn Iran, as Mousavi declared in...

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Back in June 2009, I wrote a column examining the Green Pundit Rush to Judgment that told us "the Persian street" was filled with Our Kind of People: anti-Khomeini, anti-sharia, anti-Islamic Revolution, anti-regime, anti-nuke, pro-West, pro-Israel, pro-secular masses, all yearning to "free" in the Western sense, which emphasizes the rights and will of the individual. Such a concept of freedom has nothing to do with the Islamic sense of freedom ("hurriya"), which speaks to a "perfect enslavement" to Allah. 

I am reposting that column below, having just commented on Michael Ledeen's PJ Media latest essay in which he calls for...

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In a post titled "The Christmas Junta,' Gates of Vienna reports on appalling developments in Sweden, where the political establishment's policy of population replacement via mass Third World immigration is being challenged in parliament by the lone opposition party, Sweden Democrats. Rather than play by democracy's rules, the Establishment is going junta.

This is a very important piece with direct relevance to our condition here. Why?

The American people are undergoing an identical "junta"-like suppression here, particularly if we allow for the differences between the US and Swedish governing systems. We have the same Democrat/GOP Establishment flouting the wishes (votes) of Americans, ramming through, with shameful ease,...

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Having continually offered reports including eyewitness dispatches about the ever-receding tide of Western civilization, I think I probably owe a little escape — or, better, escapism — to readers, some respite from reality. At least until the end of the holidays.

After sorting through the vaults for some diverting holiday fare, here is a festival's worth of A-list movies set in some of the great cities of the world — those same places that often serve as a backdrop to the ongoing multi-pronged war on the West that, alas, characterizes our era. But enough of that for now.

Given the gloom, some parameters. First, freshness. While these movies are what you could certainly call Cinema Antique, some of them may well prove to be new discoveries. In other words, no "It's a Wonderful Life" or "Casablanca" here — although "Casablanca" wouldn't make this particular cut because of my second criterion: total uplift....

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When will "the authorities" take into consideration this snap of Koran 8:60 that, as Charles C. Johnson reported at gotnews.com, police-murderer Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley posted at his now-discontinued Facebook page?  

So far, no MSM, no police or political officials have even admitted its existence.

Instead, as the Washington Post reports:

Bratton said investigators were looking into all of Brinsley’s ­social-media accounts in...

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Speaking of normalizing relations with Communist dictatorships vs. fighting for liberation ....

Have you ever wondered why Ronald Reagan calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire" has historically caused more outrage in the West than the evil of the Soviet empire itself? Today, Geert Wilders faces even more opprobrium for honest political discourse about another collectivist, totalitarian system that threatens Western liberty -- Islam.

I believe the reason for this lies in is the mainly unknown, still hidden assault on our nation's character as chronicled in American Betrayal. Something...

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The Dutch public prosecutor announced today that legal proceedings will begin against Party for Freedom (PVV) leader Geert Wilders "on charges of insulting a group of people based on race and incitement to discrimination and hatred."   

"The decision to prosecute me is incomprehensible," Wilders has said in a statement.

Yes it is; but only in a moral, rational Judeo-Christian -- i.e., Western -- world.

In our world, circa 2014, the decision is perfectly comprehensible. In our world, powerful global elites seek to destroy the indigenous cultures of Europe (and their descendants here) through "multicultural" -- read: Marxist and anti-nationhood -- policies that ride the pressure plates of expansionist Islam and, additionally in our hemisphere, Hispanic south and central America and beyond.        

In a statement released by PVV, Wilders said, “I have said what millions of people think .... For the second time, [the state] apparently wants to deal with someone who speaks the truth. It...

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Way back in the summer of 2006, I was guest-blogging at Michelle Malkin's website and wrote a post called "Jihad and Dhimmitude: A Real-Life Test Case."

I am re-posting excerpts below as the world once again reels and deals quite badly inside the vortex of another jihad-dhimmitude cycle, this time triggered by the Sydney jihad hostage siege. As is always the case, the threat from murdering Muslims -- more jihad -- is exponentially compounded by what follows -- deeper dhimmitude.

Here is the pattern as observed in 2006:

... Above all else, understanding jihad and dhimmitude is crucial to understanding what we call the war on terror.

Jihad, of course, means “holy...

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Mayor Bill de Blasio at the dedication of NYPD memorial, Oct. 10, 2014 (Mayor's office photo)

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An update on what NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio is lauding as "an example to the world on how to protest" from the New York Times: 

At least five officers have been assaulted by protesters — including two lieutenants on Saturday during a nighttime melee on the Brooklyn Bridge. Earlier on Saturday, at Madison Avenue and 28th Street, a group of protesters surrounded a pair of traffic agents in a marked police car and smashed the rear window with a trash bin and a side window with a metal pole.

The New York Post reports on...

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In a post called CIA Torture: An Insider's View,The XX Committee blog recounts:

For much of the IC [Intelligence Community], the months after 9/11 were a blur. I spent more time at the office, or on the road, than at home; my recollections of that era — easily the most exciting time of my life, when all of Uncle Sam’s spooks thought our personal contributions, each day, might make the difference between a “nuclear 9/11″ happening or not — are therefore impressionistic, with occasional vivid recall of specific operations. I never had Dick Cheney call me, or anyone close to me, screaming into the phone to “get tough.” This was unnecessary: we all knew what the stakes were.

I provided counsel to senior leadership at Guantanamo Bay, the dreaded GTMO, on how to deal with interrogations. From what I saw, their operation was a shitshow — a characterization top IC officials agreed with, off-record. They knew it was all going wrong, but they wanted to prevent terrorism. They listened to, and rejected, my counsel, which was to get serious and professionalize their approach, without delay. Specifically, they needed to adopt something like the Israeli model....

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Breaking: After more or less 15 years of continuous weekly newspaper syndication, I have just filed the final column in the string. 

Here it is:

Dear Readers,

This is a hard one to write. After more or less 15 years of continuous newspaper syndication, this column you are reading is the end of the line. I am not ceasing to write, of course. All of my content -- columns, essays, posts, and, of course, books -- will continue to appear at my website, www.dianawest.net, and elsewhere.

But my weekly conversation with readers in good old-fashioned newsprint stops at the bottom of the page. In some ways, that's too bad. For one thing, there is a kind of journalistic romance to appearing on the pages of a real paper that is still hurled at a front porch. Internet-generated...

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FLASH: Another attempt to shrink the broad canvas of American Betrayal into a micro-dot, this time by Haynes & Klehr -- sorry, Klehr & Haynes -- in an article about "19" published in a summer 2014 issue of the academic journal Intelligence and National Security. (And I thought this was all I had to deal with last summer.)

"19"  -- one paragraph in American Betrayal, but an unending (see perfume bottle) of the consensus historians. 

For anyone interested in delving into these weeds, the M. Stanton Evans-John Earl Haynes Memos(aka...

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As the news-sentient world knows, Rolling Stone "walked away" from its single-sourced, anonymous account of a torture session via gang rape by seven members of a University of Virginia fraternity. Managing editor Will Dana issued the retraction through a soft lens.

Dana's Note to Readers concludes:

In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced. We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story.

"Jackie's account," in other words, fell apart. What...

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... this email below has made writing a column that is not just online, where niche-reading is the norm, but in local newspaper papers across the country, very gratifying as a writer.   

The email-writer, who is in law enforcement, tells me he was having service work done on a Ford cruiser in small-city USA when he came across my column in the local paper lying in the lounge.  

Hi Diana,

As a veteran police officer with 27 years of experience in the field, I just wanted to thank you for an article that speaks for the police and soldiers.  I could not believe I found an article that was actually based on facts and common sense rather than the typical knee-jerk reaction of the ill-informed.  It is always those with the loudest opinions who have never defended...

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Whizzed in and out of NYC yesterday.

Destination No. 1 (above) : Flat Iron Building, home of St Martin's Press, and office of executive editor Michael Flamini, my wonderful editor on The Death of the Grown-Up and American Betrayal both.

Destination No. 2 (below): The Union League Club Annual Holiday Book Fair, chock ablock with authors from Nelson Demille to Steve Forbes, signing books for charity Christmas shopping. I signed American Betrayals at a table with economist Milton Ezrati, author of 30 Tomorrows, across the room from Ann Coulter, semper fabulous, signing Never Trust a LIberal Over 3 -- Especially a Republican. 





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