Popularity of 'Putin the Shiite' Sky High in Iraq

AFP 
By Jean-Marc Mojon with Raji Nasser in Najaf

Iraqi artist Mohammed Karim Nihaya touches up a painting of Russian
President Vladimir Putin in his studio in the Karada district of Baghdad

Baghdad (AFP) - Russian President Vladimir Putin's bullish entry into the Syrian conflict has worked wonders for his popularity in neighbouring Iraq, where some await "Hajji Putin" like a saviour.

Sitting at his easel in his central Baghdad workshop, painter Mohammed Karim Nihaya touches up a portrait of Putin he copied from the Internet.

"I have been waiting for Russia to get involved in the fight against Daesh," he says, referring to the Islamic State group that last year declared a "caliphate" straddling Iraq and Syria.

"They get results. The United States and its allies on the other hand have been bombing for a year and achieved nothing," the bespectacled artist says.

The US-led coalition has had some successes in helping Iraqi forces reconquer territory lost to IS in 2014 but overall the campaign has also suffered setbacks.

Russian warplanes began bombing targets in Syria on September 30 and on Wednesday Moscow ramped up its air war, unleashing cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea.

Putin leaving Elysee Palace in Paris AFP Photo

Some of them crossed Iraqi airspace and many here, especially among the Shiite majority, would welcome a bit of Russia's firepower on home soil as a much-awaited game-changer.

Only a fraction of Russian air strikes in Syria may have been destined for IS but Mohammed, a young jobless man outside the painter's shop, does not let statistics cloud his enthusiasm.

"We don't want the international coalition, we want only Russia and we will slaughter a sheep to welcome them," he says.

Some Iraqis see Moscow -- which has staunchly backed Damascus and Tehran in recent years -- as a more natural ally than the United States, which occupied the country for eight years.

Putin's patented leadership brand of bare-chested antics and cold determination is a also hit in Iraq, where the cult of the strong leader is alive and well 12 years after Saddam Hussein's ouster.

On social media, many have already made him an honorary citizen, with one widely circulated joke even detecting phonetic evidence of Iraqi antecedents in the Russian president's name.

It goes like this: Putin's father was an Iraqi grocer from the Shiite south, near Nasiriyah, who introduced figs ("tin" in Arabic) to local markets and thus became known as "Abu Tin".

After World War II, he moved to the Soviet Union, married "a blonde Russian girl" and named their son Abdulamir. That proved a bit of a mouthful for locals who Russianised it into Vladimir.

The apocryphal nature of the story appears lost on some Facebook users, who have embraced "Putin the Shiite" and even replaced their profile pictures with a portrait of the Russian strongman.

A Russian warship launches a cruise missile in the
Caspian Sea during a strike against Islamic State

"We should give Putin Iraqi and Syrian citizenship because he loves us more than our own politicians," says Mohammed al-Bahadli, a student walking on a street in the Shiite shrine city of Najaf.

"Muslims bomb us because we are Rafidha," says Saad Abdullah, who owns a convenience store in Najaf, employing a term which means "rejectionists" and is used by IS to refer to Shiites.

"Meanwhile Putin, who is an Orthodox man, is defending us.... Maybe he really is a Shiite and we didn't know about it," he says before flashing a huge smile.

Taxi driver Ali al-Rammahi says Putin is the only reason he hasn't already joined the thousands of Iraqis fleeing the country to knock on Europe's doors.

"I thank Putin because he convinced me to stay in Iraq... Hajji Putin is better than Hussein Obama," he says, using the title given to Muslims who have performed the pilgrimage to Mecca.

"Putinmania" has also gripped some of Iraq's politicians, creating some confusion over Baghdad's stance on a Russian intervention.

Hakim al-Zamili, the head of parliament's defence committee and a leader in a Shiite militia that once fought US forces, has suggested Baghdad has decided to request Russian air strikes.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who is supported by the West, has been more equivocal but has not ruled out enlisting Russia's help.

Moscow recently increased its footprint in Iraq by joining a coordination cell set up in Baghdad to pool intelligence on IS fighters with non-coalition members Syria and Iran.

Another Eminent Scientist Laughs Off Man-Made Climate Change

As with my previous post on this subject, I repeat that I'm not convinced of this assertion. However, I have an open mind and I am always willing to tell both sides of a debate. 

My position continues to be that the global temperature is increasing and we are contributing to it - whether we contribute 1% or 80%, I cannot hazard a guess. And anyone who does hazard a guess is doing just that, guessing.

This story, like the previous is a bit dated. I hope you will forgive me for that as I try to get caught-up on this file.

Another scientist has pushed back against the doom-and-gloom climate change predictions from the United Nations and other governmental agencies.

Dr. Leslie Woodcock, emeritus professor at the University of Manchester (UK) School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science, is a former NASA scientist along with other impressive accomplishments on his distinguished professional resume.

In an interview, he laughed off man-made climate change as nonsense and a money-making industry for the green lobby, which approaches the subject with a religious fervor. 

Explained Woodcock:
“The term ‘climate change’ is meaningless. The Earth’s climate has been changing since time immemorial, that is since the Earth was formed 1,000 million years ago. The theory of ‘man-made climate change’ is an unsubstantiated hypothesis [about] our climate [which says it] has been adversely affected by the burning of fossil fuels in the last 100 years, causing the average temperature on the earth’s surface to increase very slightly but with disastrous environmental consequences. The theory is that the CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuel is the ‘greenhouse gas’ causes ‘global warming’ — in fact, water is a much more powerful greenhouse gas and there is 20 time more of it in our atmosphere (around one per cent of the atmosphere) whereas CO2 is only 0.04 per cent. There is no reproducible scientific evidence CO2 has significantly increased in the last 100 years. Anecdotal evidence doesn’t mean anything in science, it’s not significant…”

Added Woodcock:
Even the term ‘global warming’ does not mean anything unless you give it a time scale. The temperature of the earth has been going up and down for millions of years, if there are extremes, it’s nothing to do with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it’s not permanent and it’s not caused by us. Global warming is nonsense.”

Politicians and journalists — two groups who ordinarily lack any scientific training or background — insist that the global warming debate is settled and there are no dissenting scientists.

So-called green guru Dr. James Lovelock also questioned the climate change movement (which used to be called global cooling and then global warming). He described the environmental movement as becoming like “a religion, and religions don’t worry too much about facts.” He added that “It’s just as silly to be a denier as it is to be a believer. You can’t be certain.”

In perhaps a further contrary development for the climate change adherents, it’s been reported that the polar ice cap is actually expanding rather than contracting: “… In fact, receding Arctic ice rebounded between 2012 and 2013, growing by 29 percent into an unbroken patch more than half the size of Europe and within 5 percent of what it was 30 years ago, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Last month near the South Pole, a Russian ship carrying scientists and tourists traveled to the bottom of the Earth so passengers might document global warming and shrinking ice caps. But the ship got stuck on ice that was thicker than at any time since records started being kept in 1978.”

This article, except for my input, was written in the spring of 2014. Arctic sea ice expanded in extent during 2013 and remained nearly constant through 2014. In 2015, however, it resumed its downward trend since sea ice began to be measured in 1979.

Dr. Patrick Moore, a Greenpeace co-founder, has also publicly expressed the opinion that “There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years… no actual proof, as it is understood in science, actually exists.”

As The Inquisitr recently reported, Americans are apparently increasingly becoming convinced that global warming and/or climate change is a hoax.

That is obvious just from the responses to this blog.

An Outside View on America's Frequent Massacres

America’s gun massacre blues seem to play on an endless loop

Suicidal Sam

The tragedy lies not only in the trauma of the victims but in the apparent helplessness of the political class

By Gary Younge
The Guardian via
Gulf News

Within the American polity there is a cyclical requiem in the wake of each mass shooting — a predictable collective lament for a calamity that ostensibly everyone regrets and nobody can resolve. Profiles of the victims emerge as reporters opine in front of police tape, wringing every last detail from tear-stained survivors. Gradually, facts about the shooter emerge, followed by endless speculation about his (they are almost always men) motives before the president calls for prayer and healing.

Everybody knows their lines. With 45 mass shootings already this year (this seems to be the number of school mass-shootings this year; one definition of mass-shootings has nearly 300 occurrences this year) they have rehearsed them often enough. Indeed, the tragedy lies not only in the trauma of the victims but in the apparent helplessness of the political class and the hopelessness that the deathly cycle might be broken.

On Thursday night, following the shootings in Oregon, US President Barack Obama once again changed the tenor. Alongside the tone of sorrow and despair there was anger and frustration. “As I said just a few months ago, and I said a few months before that, and each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough,” he said. “It does nothing to prevent this carnage being inflicted some place in America, next week or a couple of months from now. Somehow this has become routine.”

To the outside world the solution seems straightforward: less guns, more gun control. With roughly 90 guns for every 100 inhabitants, America has far more guns per capita than any other nation and fewer controls on how many guns you can buy, how you buy them, who can own them. Nowhere else in the world has this kind of problem on this kind of scale. This is one example of American exceptionalism few are keen to emulate.

But these arguments, when pitted against the cultural allure of the settler-frontiersman and rugged individualism, the profits of the gun lobby and a tendentious interpretation of the second amendment, rarely get a hearing beyond the comfort zones from which they emerge. “None of us in the free world would have what we have if it were not for guns,” David Britt, a gun rights advocate, once told me . “It’s about freedom, it’s not about violence.”

So however it looks from the outside, from within America the landscape on which these debates are held — when they are held at all — are more thorny. When it comes to specific remedies Obama’s speaks for the nation. A Pew poll last month showed that 85 per cent of Americans support background checks for gun shows and private sales, 79 per cent back laws to prevent mentally-ill people form buying guns, 70 per cent are in favour of a federal database to track gun sales and 57 per cent support a ban on assault-style weapons. But when it comes to the broader issue of gun control, the country is deeply divided. Currently, 50 per cent say it is more important to control gun ownership, while 47 per cent say it is more important to protect gun rights.

That divide parallels the partisan fault line that has created so much dysfunction and stasis from shutting down the government to immigration reform. And while gun rights supporters are marginally outnumbered they are far more motivated as a single-issue pressure group than those who back gun control.

Guns are just tools

The fact that media attention only turns to the issue after incidents such as this also skews the debate. The overwhelming majority of Americans who are killed by firearms do not die in mass shootings — they kill themselves. Moreover, over the past 30 years the number of people killed by guns has actually fallen, as has the proportion of Americans who own guns. Meanwhile, the sale of guns has gone up, as those who do own them generally own more of them — on average seven each.

“Whether they’re used in war or for keeping the peace guns are just tools,” wrote the late Chris Kyle, the US navy Seal made globally famous by the movie American Sniper, in American Gun: A History of the US in 10 Firearms. “And like any tool, the way they’re used reflects the society they’re part of.”

He had a point. There is far more to both gun violence in general and mass shootings in particular than just guns . The absence of a universal health care has made the prison system the principle provider of mental health care in America. The mentally-ill in the US are less likely to be diagnosed, less likely to be treated and more likely to be criminalised than anywhere else in the western world. The presence of mass poverty, significant economic inequality and widespread racial segregation combine to produce desperation, resentment and fear.

Other countries have these problems to lesser or greater degrees. The difference is that no other country has these problems and then a huge stockpile of easily available weapons to virtually anybody who wants them.

And so the requiem continues. A painful elegy for a nation careless enough to lose its innocence on a weekly basis, one which can expend extraordinary resources looking for water on Mars yet is apparently incapable of finding a way to keep its people safe in cinemas, colleges and churches.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

3 Days, 4 Jews Murdered - Palestinians Celebrate

Palestinians are not only hate-filled murderers,

they're downright stupid

Palestinians celebrate the murder of Jewish couple

Throngs of Palestinians took to the streets on Thursday night to celebrate the brutal slaying of an Israeli couple in a shooting attack in the West Bank.

The festivities included the launching of fireworks and the waving of flags in the streets, Ofir Gendelman, a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.

Gendelman posted on Twitter a photo of the scene. Most of the flying banners were of the Palestinian Fatah faction, the armed wing of which claimed responsibility for the attack that killed Eitam and Naama Henkin. Revelers in Nablus, near the site of the shooting, set off fireworks, he said, adding that Palestinians on social media networks were “ecstatic” about the killings.

The Henkins, who were in their early 30s, were shot dead on Thursday night in northern Samaria while travelling in their vehicle near the Palestinian village of Beit Furik. Paramedics found them at the scene with bullet wounds to their torsos. Their four children, who were in the backseat of the car, were unharmed. The couple was buried on Har Hamenuchot in the Givat Shaul neighborhood of Jerusalem on Friday morning.

Young couple, murdered by Palestinians, leave four children orphans 

Leading members of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party, Azzam Al-Ahmad and General Sultan Abu Al-Einen, praised the attack, Gendelman said. He added that General Al-Einen, who serves as Abbas’ adviser on NGOs, called for more attacks on Israelis.

Rival Palestinian terror group Hamas also applauded the attack. Spokesman Husam Badran congratulated Palestinians on the killings and referred to the shooting as a “heroic operation.”

Israel Defense Forces spokesman Peter Lerner said on Thursday that the IDF will deploy four battalions in the West Bank to prevent an escalation of violence and to search for the gunmen. He called the incident a “ruthless, heinous barbaric attack.”

15 year old Moshe Malka stabbed by Palestinian

A Palestinian man stabbed an Israeli teen outside Jerusalem’s Old City early Sunday morning, in the second such attack in the past day.

The suspected assailant was reportedly shot dead by Israeli security forces.

The 15-year-old victim, later named as Moshe Malka, was moderately injured and received treated on site by paramedics. He was taken to Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Hospital in stable condition with wounds to the chest and back.

The attack took place near the Old City’s Damascus Gate.

Israeli Police and the body of Palestinian terrorist

The attacker reportedly fled the scene after stabbing the teen. A video posted online appeared to show him several hundred yards from the site of the attack, on the light rail tracks, where he was shot by police officers.

Hamas media identified the suspected stabber as Fadi Aloon, a resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya. In a Facebook post from an account attributed to Aloon he expressed his intent to become a martyr (shahid) and entreated God to forgive for his sins.

Good luck with that!!!

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had just taken off for Israel around the time of the stabbing early Sunday morning, told reporters that Israel would “launch a severe offensive against Palestinian terrorism.”

Palestinians living in Israel have it far, far better than those living in Gaza, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon or anywhere else. But they seem determined to destroy that and make everyone's life miserable.

He was set to travel directly to the IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv upon his arrival in Israel on Sunday, and convene a security cabinet meeting to discuss the spike in terrorist attacks.

Sunday’s early morning stabbing came just hours after Nehemia Lavi and Aharon Bennett were killed in a terrorist attack in the Old City on Saturday night, and Benet’s wife and child were injured.

The Palestinian terrorist was identified as Muhanad Shafeq Halabi, 19, from al-Bireh, near Ramallah in the West Bank. He was shot dead by police.

Benet’s wife was in serious condition and their two-year-old baby was lightly wounded. The mother was taken to Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem and is undergoing surgery. The toddler was taken to Shaare Zedek Medical Center for treatment where he remains in stable condition.

Just two days earlier on Thursday night, two Israelis were shot dead in their car in the West Bank in a terrorist attack claimed by the Fatah movement’s armed wing.

In response to the attacks, Israel Police limited entrance to the Old City of Jerusalem to Israeli citizens, business owners, residents and tourists for the next two days. Entrance for Muslim worshippers was limited to men over the age of 50, and access was limited the Lion’s Gate, closest to the Temple Mount.

The NRA is Right, Only Because of the NRA

The right to carry arms in America is sacrosanct. It trumps even the right to life. Americans in Roseburg, Oregon were defending the right to bear arms the day after ten people were murdered by a lunatic with three guns.

The NRA when they make their official statement will say that the students and professors should all have been carrying guns, or, at least, the school should have had armed guards, lots of them. The concept of a gun free zone, as the school was, is absurd and dangerous.

How can you argue with that? You can't! It's too late! Any lunatic in America has the right to buy as many hand guns, and assault rifles as he can afford. There are more guns than people in the US, and there are more gun deaths per capita in the US than any other industrialized country in the world. 

A recent new story revealed that they averaged approximately 1.1 mass shootings per day in the US in 2015. (Mass shooting defined as 4 or more people being shot). School shooting happen weekly, with deaths from school shootings happening monthly. The amazing thing is, most of these stories only make local news now. It's not even sensational anymore! Americans have conceded that daily, mass shootings are the price of the right to bear arms without restrictions.

Since 9/11, this right has cost 150,000 American lives. Since Sandy Hook, 142 school shooting have occurred. Is it worth it? It is to the NRA, who, if we dug deeply enough we would probably find that they were originally funded by gun manufacturers and importers. That's what this is really about - money; keeping the inventory of death moving. Of course, now they are self-sustaining, making hundreds of millions of dollars on membership dues and paying absolutely no taxes. 

The NRA, I believe, is the propaganda vehicle for arms merchants to convince Americans that they not only have an unrestricted right to own guns, but that they absolutely need to own guns to protect themselves not just from criminals, but even more so from the government which, it says, is trying to dis-arm Americans so they can be....ah....something! 

Gullible, flag-wearing Americans are convinced that the day will come when it's own military will turn against its own people and start murdering them for...God only knows why. That this is utterly impossible in America doesn't affect them in the least. 

The NRA has successfully created a theater of fear in America. It's a fear that is deflected from reality in that Americans are afraid of what could possibly happen while the most terrifying thing in America is already happening. And the merchants of death are laughing all the way to the bank.

Jessica Vazquez hugs her aunt, Leticia Acaraz, as they await word on Acaraz's
daughter after a deadly shooting at Umpqua Community College in
Roseburg, Oregon, on Thursday that left nine people dead.
(Andy Nelson/The Register-Guard/Associated Press)

ANALYSIS

The evil banality of guns in America

Even Obama seems resigned to the futility of changing the U.S. gun culture

By Neil Macdonald, 
CBC News 

Neil Macdonald is a Senior Correspondent for CBC News, currently based in Ottawa. Prior to that he was the CBC's Washington correspondent for 12 years, and before that he spent five years reporting from the Middle East. He also had a previous career in newspapers, and speaks English and French fluently, and some Arabic.

Conventional journo-wisdom has always held that it's not just dangerous but unspeakably stupid for a reporter to carry a gun in a war zone.

Get caught with one and you instantly go from observer to participant. You can get yourself killed, and maybe other journalists, too.

Your best weapons, the old reporters said, are your wits and your neutrality.

I believed in and abided by that. And I applied more or less the same logic to living in America.

I could have bought a gun there anytime I wanted. A pistol, an assault weapon, a sniper rifle — anything my credit card could handle.

I didn't, though. I'm well aware that the presence of a gun in a home vastly increases the chance of homicide, suicide or accidental death.

Plus, you have to train constantly to be of any use with the thing, and anyway, I generally believe the fewer guns in circulation the better.

But war zones have changed. Journalists are now hunted. And in America, being gunned down, either by someone you know or a perfect stranger, is now so common it's almost banal.

Resigned and bitter

Someone killing people indiscriminately with a gun, or guns, is just another news story these days, and almost a minor one at that, unless the body count is double-digit, or the victims are all kids, or churchgoers slaughtered at prayer, or, of course, if the shooter is a Muslim (in which case it's almost always a huge story, even if there's only one victim).

There have been so many slaughters and rampages on Barack Obama's watch that he's developed a sort of set-piece speech — expressions of grief, speculation on the senseless nature of it all, and, of course, frustration that gun-lovers and Second Amendment fanatics have managed to block or dismantle most gun control efforts.

Sometimes he mixes in some Christian love and we-shall-overcome optimism.

But there was none of that when he talked Thursday about the mass murder at an Oregon community college.

He actually invited reporters to add up the numbers of Americans killed by terrorists in the past decade and compare that number to all the people killed by gun violence in the U.S.

Citing the Global Terrorism Database and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, NBC put the numbers at just over 3,000 versus just over 150,000, going back to 9/11.

'Bad guy with a gun'

The gun lobby actually once feared Obama. It warned its acolytes that he'd take away their guns (a scare tactic that triggered a boom in gun and ammo sales in the early Obama years), but now basically ignores him.

After all, he lost the fight, and he'll be gone soon anyway.

Obama, and liberals across America, thought they had their chance after 20 schoolchildren and six school staff were massacred by a deranged young man with an Bushmaster rifle and two pistols three years ago in Newtown, Conn.

In its wake, the White House proposed some mild gun controls.

Then the NRA stepped in. It basically declared that the school had been negligent.

Schools, it said, should let teachers carry guns, or at least hire armed guards. "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," announced the NRA's chief spokesman Wayne Lapierre.

Not necessarily true, but never mind. The NRA essentially terrorized Congress into blocking Obama's reforms.

The gun lobby has also won in the courts, which have largely dismantled municipal gun control efforts in cities like Chicago and Washington, D.C.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the constitutional right to bear arms is literal, and once the Supreme Court rules, that's that.

Nasty corners

But back to the NRA message: After a white supremacist opened fire on black worshippers at a Charleston church in June, killing nine, an NRA board member suggested the worshippers and pastor might have survived had they been armed.

Following its playbook for cases of mass slaughter, the NRA currently says it won't comment on the Oregon murders "until all the facts are known." (Fact: a guy wearing body armour and carrying several guns murdered nine people). But it isn't hard to imagine what it will eventually say.

Allow students to carry weapons, issue weapons to professors, hire armed undercover mercenaries, install gun racks in class, whatever. Just make sure more and more people have guns.

It sounds crazed, but as America's gun anarchy grows, it has a weird logic.

Common-sense solutions — like the crackdown Australia imposed after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 — are not just politically impossible in America, they're impossible, period.

There are as many guns as people in the U.S. Plus, guns don't have expiry dates.

That means that for generations to come, nutcases and violent racists and other criminals will have all the firepower their hearts' desire.

A line stretches outside a blood donor clinic for the shooting victims in
Roseburg. CBC National news reporter Chris Brown said every person he
spoke to in line rejected gun control. (CBC News)

So the old rules don't sound as sensible. If I were to cover war zones again, I might take a different view.

For all the logic of the no-guns rule back in the day, I suspect I'd be awfully happy to have some sort of weapon, the more destructive the better, if my car was headed off by a bunch of characters dressed in black in a Toyota pickup in some nasty corner of nowhere.

America, too, is now full of nasty, violent corners of nowhere. They erupt all the time, and if you're there, you're on your own.

If I spent much time in a public place in the U.S., like a government building, or subway stations, or, above all, a university or even a high school, I think I'd rather have a gun than hide behind a desk, hoping the latest whack job with a Bushmaster doesn't find me.

I might not trust myself totally with a gun, but I trust myself more than I trust all the violent, crazy, evil people the NRA has helped arm.

It's happened. The ceremony of innocence that was once the American ideal is drowned. Common sense is moot. It no longer even applies.

Norwegian Imam on live TV: “We Have The Right to Kill Anyone Who Does Not Respect Islam”

This is a moderate, intelligent, articulate, Norwegian Imam

In the ten minute interview, he states quite emphatically that Muslims have the right to kill anyone who insults Islam, regardless of whether they are in Syria or Oslo or Washington. He praised the assassins of Charlie Hebdo and threatened Norway if such unIslamic behaviour were to appear there.

Europeans already know that 'free-speech' is a thing of the past. 'Free speech' and 'truth' are not acceptable behaviour to Muslims.

The Imam also acknowledges that Islam is not just a religion but is also a political movement with more than 500 verses in the Quran that are political rather than spiritual. This contrasts greatly with the Bible, he admits. The Bible is either historical or spiritual. There is no politics in the New Testament except to honour and obey your political leaders for they are chosen by God.

It is an interesting and revealing interview and I believe his views are not radical but are representative of most western Imams. And we just keep on inviting them in.

Europe’s Migrant Crisis Is Simply Muslim History vs. Western Fantasy

This guy has it exactly right!

Progressive Europe erased or rewrote its own history. Now they can't recognize 

an invasion by people to whom history is everything

by Raymond Ibrahim
PJ Media

The world as understood by Islamic nations varies wildly from the Western nations’ understanding of the world. Whereas Muslims see the world through the lens of history, the West has jettisoned or rewritten history to suit its ideologies.

This dichotomy of Muslim and Western thinking is evident everywhere. When the Islamic State declared that it will “conquer Rome” and “break its crosses,” few in the West realized that those are the verbatim words and goals of Islam’s founder and his companions as recorded in Muslim sources — words and goals that prompted over a thousand years of jihad on Europe.

Most recently, the Islamic State released a map of the areas it plans on expanding into over the next five years. Not only are Mideast and Asian regions included, but the map includes European lands: Portugal, Spain, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Greece, parts of Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, Armenia, Georgia, Crete, and Cyprus.

The reason for this is simple. According to Islamic law, once a country has been conquered (or “opened,” as the euphemistic Arabic words it), it becomes Islamic in perpetuity.

This, incidentally, is the real reason Muslims despise Israel. The motivation is not sympathy for the Palestinians — if it was, neighboring Arab nations would’ve absorbed them long ago, just as they would be absorbing all of today’s Muslim refugees. No, Israel is hated because the descendants of “apes and pigs” — according to the Koran — dare to rule land that was once “opened” by jihad and therefore must be returned to Islam. (Read more about Islam’s “How Dare You?” phenomenon to understand the source of Islamic rage.)

All of the aforementioned European nations are seen as being currently “occupied” by Christian “infidels” and in need of “liberation.” This is why jihadi organizations refer to terrorist attacks on such countries as “defensive jihads.” One rarely hears about Islamic designs on European nations because they are large and blocked together, altogether distant from the Muslim world. Conversely, tiny Israel is in the heart of the Islamic world, hence it has received most of the jihadi attention: it was a more realistic conquest. But now that the “caliphate” has been reborn and is expanding before a paralytic West, dreams of reconquering portions of Europe — if not through jihad, then through migration — are becoming more plausible, perhaps more so than conquering Israel.

Because of their historical experiences with Islam, some central and east European nations are aware of Muslim aspirations. Hungary’s prime minister even cited his nation’s unpleasant past under Islamic rule (in the guise of the Ottoman Empire) as a reason to disallow Muslim refugees from entering. But for more “enlightened” Western nations — that is, for idealistic nations that reject or rewrite history according to their subjective fantasies — Hungary’s reasoning is unjust, inhumane, and racist.

To be sure, most of Europe has experience with Islamic depredations. As late as the 17th century, even Iceland was being invaded by Muslim slave traders. Roughly 800 years earlier, in 846, Rome was sacked and the Vatican defiled by Muslim raiders.

Some of the Muslims migrating to Italy vow to do the same today, and Pope Francis acknowledges it — yet he still suggests that “you can take precautions, and put these people to work.”

We’ve seen this sort of thinking before: the U.S. State Department cited a lack of “job opportunities” as reason for the existence of the Islamic State.

Perhaps because the UK, Scandinavia, and North America were never conquered and occupied by the sword of Islam — unlike the southeast European nations that are rejecting Muslim refugees — they feel free to rewrite history according to their subjective ideals. Specifically, they stress that historic Christianity is bad and all other religions and people are good. Indeed, books and courses on the “sins” of Christian Europe from the Crusades to colonialism abound. (Most recently, a book traced the rise of Islamic supremacism in Egypt to the disciplining of a rude Muslim girl by a Christian nun.)

This “new history” – which claims that Muslims are the historic “victims” of “intolerant” Western Christians — has metastasized everywhere, from high school to college and from Hollywood to the news media, institutions which are becoming increasingly harder to distinguish from one another. When U.S. President Barack Obama condemned medieval Christians as a way to relativize Islamic State atrocities — or at best to claim that religion, any religion, is never the driving force of violence — he was merely being representative of the mainstream way history is taught in the West.

Even good, authoritative books of history contribute to this distorted thinking. While such works may mention “Ottoman expansion” into Europe, the Islamic element is omitted. Turks are portrayed as just another competitive people, out to carve a niche for themselves in Europe with motivations no different than, say, the Austrians, their rivals. That the “Ottomans” were operating under the distinctly Islamic banner of jihad, just like the Islamic State is today, is never made clear.

Generations of this false history have led the West to think that being suspicious or judgmental of Muslims is unacceptable, and that Muslims need to be accommodated. Perhaps then, they’ll like the West.

Such is progressive wisdom.

Meanwhile, in schools across much of the Muslim world, children are being indoctrinated into glorifying and reminiscing about the jihadi conquests of yore — conquests by the sword and in the name of Allah. While the progressive West demonizes European/Christian history — when I was in elementary school, Christopher Columbus was a hero, when I got into college, he became a villain — Mehmet the Conqueror, whose atrocities against Christian Europeans make the Islamic State look like boy scouts, is praised every year in “secular” Turkey on the anniversary of the savage sack of Constantinople.

The result of Western fantasies and Islamic history is that today Muslims are entering the West unfettered in the guise of refugees. They refuse to assimilate with the “infidels,” and form enclaves — in Islamic terminology, ribats – that serve as frontier posts to wage jihad against the infidel one way or another.

This in not conjecture. The Islamic State is intentionally driving the refugee phenomenon, and has promised to send half a million people — mostly Muslims — into Europe. It claims that 4,000 of these refugees are its own operatives:

Just wait. … It’s our dream that there should be a caliphate not only in Syria but in all the world, and we will have it soon, inshallah.

It is often said that those who ignore history are destined to repeat it. What happens to those who rewrite history in a way to demonize their ancestors while whitewashing the crimes of their ancestors’ enemies? The result is before us. History is not repeating itself; sword-waving Muslims are not militarily conquering Europe. Rather, they are being allowed to walk right in.