Quotulatiousness

March 3, 2026

Iran in the news

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I haven’t bothered trying to keep up with the firehose of “news” about the combined US/Israeli operations against the Islamic State, as much of what is initially reported will be re-stated, retracted, refuted, and other words starting with “R” until something vaguely resembling objective analysis can be done. There are uncounted mainstream, specialist, and advocacy sites and there’s no point trying to keep up with them (for me, anyway). Here are a few bits of internet flotsam on issues arising from Operation Brass Balls (or whatever name they chose for it):

First up, J.D. Tuccille on the legality around President Trump’s decision to strike Iran:

The BBC has a long history of … careful wording in describing events in Iran since 1979. I don’t think this cartoon is unfair in portraying that.

The world is undoubtedly a better place after the killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and roughly 40 of his murderous colleagues by joint Israeli and American military strikes. Iran’s Islamist regime has slaughtered its own people while encouraging terrorism around the world for decades. But those strikes carry serious risks and costs. Are they worth the tradeoffs? The Trump administration should have made its case to Congress and the already skeptical public and satisfied the Constitution’s requirements by doing so.

War Without Debate

On Saturday, the U.S. and Israel launched much-anticipated strikes after claiming negotiations with the Iranian regime over the status of its nuclear weapons program had stalled.

“A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran,” President Donald Trump announced. “Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime — a vicious group of very hard, terrible people. Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas, and our allies throughout the world. For 47 years the Iranian regime has chanted ‘death to America’ and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder, targeting the United States, our troops, and the innocent people in many, many countries.”

True enough. The president recited a litany of crimes in which the Islamist regime has been implicated, including the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut by Iranian proxy Hezbollah, and the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, which Iranian forces helped plan. To this list we can add the attempted assassinations of Iranian dissident Masih Alinejad in Brooklyn and of then-presidential candidate Trump himself. Trump also called out Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. And he urged the suffering Iranian people, who have weathered brutal attempts to suppress protests, to take advantage of the military strikes to overthrow the regime.

Unfortunately, this was the first time many Americans — members of the public and lawmakers alike — heard the Trump administration make a somewhat coherent argument for taking on Iran’s government. It came as strikes were already underway despite the Constitution reserving to Congress the responsibility to “provide for the common Defence”, “to declare War”, “to raise and support Armies”, and “to provide and maintain a Navy”. Lawmakers were informed of the attack on Iran, but only after the country was committed to hostilities and their related dangers and expense.

Congress and the People Were Never Consulted

“I am opposed to this War,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) objected. “This is not ‘America First’. When Congress reconvenes, I will work with @RepRoKhanna to force a Congressional vote on war with Iran. The Constitution requires a vote, and your Representative needs to be on record as opposing or supporting this war.”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) shares Massie’s skepticism towards military action. He and Massie might have voted against authorizing war with Iran even if they’d heard the administration’s arguments. Or perhaps they and other lawmakers would have been persuaded. We don’t know, because the president didn’t make a case until bombs and missiles had already been launched.

Andrew Doyle on the need for regime change:

The end point of armed conflict is impossible to predict. In her book On Violence (1970), the philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that when it comes to political violence, “the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals”. However well planned and executed, wars have a tendency to spiral out of control in ways never envisaged.

Whether Donald Trump’s decision to attack Iran will pay off depends upon the fates as much as anything else. The goal is regime change, which – given the appalling tyranny under which the Iranian people have suffered for five decades – is admirable and just. Yet the numerous unknown variables make this war the biggest risk that Trump has yet taken as president.

This war has the potential to escalate and engulf the entire region. Iran is already striking neighbouring Arab states allied with the US in a scattershot and desperate manner. With the death of the Ayatollah, it may be that the regime will be forced into a ceasefire while it seeks to re-establish its power. Yet the scenes of wild celebration on the streets of Iran would suggest that domestic revolution is its greatest threat. If the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (not the country’s national army, but a kind of Praetorian guard for the mullahs) can be turned, the regime will fall.

Perhaps the worst case scenario is a widespread power struggle between competing militias and separatist groups. The IRGC itself could fragment, and we may see the kind of chaos that ensued after the Iraq war of 2003. The Trump administration has the advantage of the latest military technology and will insist that this enterprise will never require “boots on the ground”. It may be right, but who knows what factions will emerge with no centralised authority?

Those of us without a crystal ball should get used to the phrase: “we don’t know”. Various social media pundits are asserting with absolute certainty where all of this will lead. They would be wise to exercise greater caution. After the Twelve-Day War last June in which Israel and the US destroyed much of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and air defence capabilities, many on the “America First” right were quick to prophesy the advent of World War III. Their claims to clairvoyance were unfounded.

CDR Salamander argues in favour of the punitive expedition as a legitimate tool in the nation’s war locker:

I support the strikes on Iran because it firmly fits into a view I have held on the use of national military power for decades, based on thousands of years of military practice. If you are not up to speed with the thousands of Americans dead and maimed by the Islamic Republic and its proxies over the last 47 years, then I have nothing more to discuss with you.

While I understand the academic argument of many that before any action takes place, there is a whole series of hoops, barriers, and puzzles of our own creation that we need to go through — I firmly believe that not only are those Constitutionally unnecessary for punitive expeditions in 2026, if done, needed and deserved strikes like we have seen in Iran could not take place without

Fortunes were made, institutions funded, and employment justified for legions under the old and failed post-WWII process swamp and GWOT nomenklatura that gave us unending and stillborn conflicts. To go that route again wouldn’t just be folly, it would be a self-destructive folly to refuse to change in the face of evidence.

I’ve seen older versions of OPLANS for Iran. Huge, bloody, and frankly undoable. They were only that way because they met the requirements of an old system that everyone nodded their heads to because all the smart people from Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Princeton and all the usual places said we had to do it this way.

Enough. Bollocks to all that. They have been measured the last quarter century and have been found wanting.

A series of events since October 7, 2023, including the 2024 election, has opened a window to do what we have not been able to do for a whole host of reasons — and there is a debt waiting to be paid.

We’ve been here before with Iran. In the modern context, we sank two warships and three speedboats of the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy in 1988 during Operation Praying Mantis as punishment for damaging USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG 58) and Iran’s mining international waters in the Persian Gulf. We’ve played slap-n-tickle with them here and there while they have brutalized us at every turn when they are not brutalizing their own people.

Yes, it’s personal — but part of the reason we have been hesitant is that our national security intellectuals have been stuck in a world view that prevented action, by design.

Though not exclusive, the Powell Doctrine’s “Pottery Barn Rule” (that it appears he got from one of Thomas Frack’n Friedman’s columns), made it appear that we could only take action if we took the entire country and then remade it in our image.

We know how that operationalized over the last couple of decades.

We’ve done plenty of punitive expeditions in our nation’s history — but in the last few decades as a certain pedigree of policy maker held sway over our national security doctrine, it fell out of favor.

They failed the nation. Their institutions failed the nation. Their worldview was little more than a self-licking ice cream cone of self-regard.

There are also those who can find the funny aspects of any serious situation:

February 8, 2026

QotD: Life of Brian in modern day Europe

Filed under: Europe, Humour, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“What bad has mass immigration to Europe ever done for us?”

– “The raping?”

“What?”

– “The raping”

“Oh yeah yeah. They do rape an awful lot that’s true yes.”

– “And the welfare costs”

– “Oh yes the welfare costs, Rich. The unemployment benefits alone.”

“Ok, I will grant you the raping, and the welfare costs, are two bad things mass immigration have done for us.”

– “And the terrorism”

“Oh yeah obviously the terrorism. I mean the terrorism goes without saying. But apart from the raping, the welfare costs, and the terrorism …”

– “Violent crime”

– “Honor killings”

– “Car bombings”

“Yeah, you are all right, fair enough.”

– “Burqas”

– [nodding among the group] “Yeah, that is something we’d really not miss if the immigrants left.”

– “Political support for bad economic policies.”

– “And it’s less safe to walk in the streets at night now, Rich.”

Ok, but apart from the raping, the welfare costs, the terrorism, the violent crime, the honor killings, the car bombings, the burqas, political support for bad economic policies and the unsafe streets, what bad has mass immigration ever done for us?

Jonatan Pallesen, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-11-06.

January 19, 2026

British Islamists scare Islamic governments more than the British government

Filed under: Britain, Education, Government, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In Spiked, Rakib Ehsan discusses the recent efforts by the governments of some Gulf states to limit potential radicalization of their own people by reducing support for students attending British universities:

Flag of the United Arab Emirates (UAE)

In yet another blow to Britain’s reputation on the global stage, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has curbed state funding for its citizens seeking to enrol at UK universities, over concerns they will be radicalised by Islamists.

As reported in the Telegraph last week, the Gulf state has taken this drastic step because of the influence in the UK of the Muslim Brotherhood – a transnational Sunni Islamist organisation, which is a designated terror group in the UAE. It is also banned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The UAE has long offered Emirati students generous grants – including rent and living allowances – for studying “priority” subjects at British universities. These scholarships have now ended because, according to a source quoted in the Telegraph, “the UAE doesn’t want its kids to be radicalised on campus”.

This is not the first time that the UK has been embarrassed for being a soft touch on Islamism by a Muslim country. In January last year, the UAE placed eight UK-based organisations on its local terror list on the grounds of their alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. Most of these entities, which range from property firms to video-production outlets, are registered in London. Then, in April, the head of the Muslim World League, Saudi Arabia’s Sheikh Mohammad bin Abdulkarim al-Issa, warned that the UK should treat poor integration as a national-security issue. He said that young British Muslims had grown disillusioned because of conflicts in the Middle East, advising the UK that “a political situation outside should not interfere with integration inside”.

The UAE’s latest decision should hardly come as a surprise. Indeed, for some time, British universities have embraced the very extremism that Muslim-majority countries have long sought to root out.

December 31, 2025

The Royal Canadian Navy … a terrorist organization according to Iran

Filed under: Cancon, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

An unexpected post from True North Strategic Review, as Noah shares the details of a new announcement from the Islamic Republic of Iran about that well-known terrorist group known as His Majesty King Charles’s Royal Canadian Navy (RCN):

Statement from the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, via True North Strategic Review

Welp. Sometimes you wake up to the most random things imaginable. This is certainly one of them in my books.

The Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has released a statement today officially designating the Royal Canadian Navy as a Terrorist Entity under the “Tit-for-Tat” trigger outlined in Article 7 of the Reciprocal Action Against the Declaration of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a Terrorist Organization by the United States Act.

Here is the translated statement for those curious:

    Since the Canadian government has declared the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is recognized as one of the pillars of the country’s official armed forces, a terrorist organization, contrary to the fundamental principles of international law, the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, based on the principle of reciprocity and based on Article 7 of the “Reciprocal Action Against the Declaration of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a Terrorist Organization by the United States” Act passed in 2019, which stipulates that “all countries that in any way comply with or support the decision of the United States of America to declare the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization shall be subject to reciprocity,” considers the Royal Canadian Navy to be subject to the aforementioned Act and its provisions, and therefore, within the framework of reciprocity, identifies and declares it as a terrorist organization.

For a bit of context, under the Reciprocal Action Against the Declaration of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a Terrorist Organization by the United States Act, the Iranian government includes a clause stating that any country that supports or complies with the U.S. decision to label the IRGC as terrorists is also subject to reciprocity.

This retaliation clause is in direct response to the Canadian government’s decision last June to declare the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist entity. Although quite late to respond, the decision to designate the Royal Canadian Navy specifically is a curious one.

The likely scenario is that the choice was made based on operational proximity. The Royal Canadian Navy is the branch of the Canadian military most likely to physically encounter Iranian forces. They’re really the only branch that maintains a tangible, visible presence near Iranian territory. By designating the Navy specifically, Iran is creating a legal pretext to harass or target Canadian vessels in these international waters under the guise of Counter-Terrorism operations.

December 19, 2025

Brendan O’Neill on the Islamophobia racket

Filed under: Australia, Government, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Brendan O’Neill criticizes Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in particular, but he’s just the most recent exemplar of western politicians trying to blame society in general and “right wing extremists” in particular for the terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists:

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke a total of 5,022 words in the day after the slaughter of Jews at Bondi Beach. And not one of those words was “Islam”. Or “Muslim”. Or even “Islamic extremism”.

He did talk about the “far right” though. Twice. We need to tackle “the rise of right-wing extremist groups”, he said.

What an odd thing to focus on the day after a father-and-son Islamofascist outfit had mown down 15 innocents, all while proudly displaying the black flag of ISIS.

To fret about the far right hours after suspected Islamic militants had carried out the worst slaughter of Jews in Australian history is cognitive dissonance of epic proportions.

It would be like turning up to the bloody aftermath of a KKK massacre and flat-out refusing to say the words “Klansmen”, “racist” or “white supremacist”. Well, we wouldn’t want to offend the pointed-hood community.

Some Australians were dumbfounded by the PM’s bullish refusal to name the ideology that fuelled this act of antisemitic savagery.

After all, at the time he was holding forth on the various threats to the Aussie way of life, officialdom had found the killers’ ISIS flag and other paraphernalia suggesting they had taken the knee to the death cult of radical Islam.

“What happened at Bondi was an act of radical Islamic terrorism”, thundered Sean Bell of the populist party One Nation. If the PM “cannot be honest” about the “radical Islamic ideology”, he said, “then he has no place leading the country”.

It’s hard to disagree. The first duty of a leader following the barbarous slaying of citizens is to tell the truth. If Albanese can’t even bring himself to mouth the words “Islamic extremism”, how’s he going to fight it?

The PM’s yellow-bellied dodging of the i-word was shocking but not surprising. Other Western leaders have behaved similarly in the wake of Islamist outrages. They have furiously thumbed their thesauruses for spins on the word “extremist” — fanatic, militant, evil — all so that they can avoid committing that most gauche faux pas in polite society: talking about the problems in Islam.

This is the dire handiwork of the Islamophobia industry. For years now, Islam has been ruthlessly ringfenced from free, frank discussion.

Mock Muhammad and you’ll be damned as “phobic”. Crack a joke about the Koran and you can expect a mob of fundamentalists at your front door. Say Islam has an extremism problem and the self-elected guardians of correct-think will drag you off for re-education.

We’ve witnessed the rehabilitation of medieval strictures against “blasphemy”. The end result is that even as women and children writhe in agony from the wounds inflicted on them by Islamist militants, still our leaders won’t say that i-word. It clogs in their throats. They dread cancellation more than they cherish truth.

[…]

After every attack, the same platitudes are trotted out. “Nothing to do with Islam”. “Islam is a religion of peace”. We’re gagged from naming the threat we face, from correctly identifying the men who are killing our fellow citizens.

Believe them when they show you what they are, Oz edition:

In The Line, Ariella Kimmel thinks there are signs that at least some political figures are getting the right lessons out of the events of the last few years:

In the wake of the terrorist attack in Bondi Beach, it seems as if leaders are finally starting to realize the risk of allowing antisemitic extremism to run unchecked for years.

Calgary’s new mayor offered a powerful example of what this means in practice.

At Calgary City Hall’s Chanukah celebration, Mayor Jeromy Farkas delivered remarks that stood out not only for their eloquence, but for their accountability. He spoke plainly about antisemitism and acknowledged the very real fear that Jewish communities are living with. Most importantly, he made clear that civic leadership means showing up publicly, consistently, and without excuses.

In a room of just over a thousand, he declared “let me be absolutely crystal clear. There is no place for antisemitism in Calgary. Not on our streets, not in our schools or campuses, not at protests, not online, not hidden behind slogans, not excused as politics, because Jewish lives are not expendable. Jewish safety is not expendable.”

That moment was especially symbolic given Calgary’s recent past. Two years ago, then-Mayor Jyoti Gondek refused to attend a Chanukah event amid pressure and controversy. Farkas’ presence this week marked a break from that pattern. It signalled that someone, finally, was willing to take responsibility.

That is what leadership looks like.

The Bondi Beach attack should force a reckoning in Canada. If we want to avoid becoming the next headline, this country must do more than mourn; we must decide, clearly and concretely, that extremism has consequences and that antisemitism will not be indulged.

In Canada, politicians were quick to offer condolences. Statements flowed with the standard lines – “my thoughts are with the community”, “our government condemns all forms of hate”, “no one should be targeted for practicing their religion”. The words are familiar, and quite frankly hollow, because for the past two years, many of the same leaders issuing their thoughts and prayers have either ignored, excused, or actively engaged with movements that normalize hostility toward Jews.

Since October 7, Jewish Canadians have watched as public spaces became hostile territory. Synagogues require police protection, while Jewish schools are shot at and community centres are defaced. Rallies openly glorify terrorist groups, call for the destruction of Israel, and chant slogans that any reasonable person understands as genocidal, such as calls to “globalize the intifada”, “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free”, “there is only one solution, intifada revolution”, and “resistance is justified”.

What makes the current moment particularly dangerous is the gap between rhetoric and reality among leaders. Politicians speak of fighting hate while refusing to enforce existing laws against intimidation, mischief, and hate-motivated harassment. They speak of unity while legitimizing groups and movements that openly reject the safety of Jewish communities, even giving funding through government programs meant to combat antisemitism, to organizations that perpetrate it. They issue statements condemning violence abroad while tolerating the ideological conditions that make violence inevitable at home.

December 17, 2025

“The core hypocrisy of modern Western governance”

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, Europe, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tom Marazzo discusses the extremely weird experience we’ve all lived through since 9/11 in almost every major western nation:

For more than 20 years, Western governments told their citizens that Islamist extremism posed an existential threat. Entire generations were sent to fight the Global War on Terror. Soldiers were killed, families were broken, civil liberties were curtailed, and trillions were spent, all justified by the claim that terrorism had to be stopped over there so it would not reach us here.

Then something strange happened.

The same governments that built their legitimacy on that fear now insist that even discussing the cultural, security, or integration risks associated with mass immigration from unstable regions is immoral. Raise concerns and you are no longer a citizen asking questions, but a bigot, an extremist, or a threat yourself. In some countries, speech alone now draws police attention, while violent acts are reframed as isolated incidents or stripped of ideological context.

The irony deepens when you look at the timeline.

During the first years of Covid, terrorism all but vanished from news coverage, just as Covid seemed to erase the common cold, cancer, and every other cause of death from public discourse. Nothing had disappeared. The narrative had simply changed. Attention was redirected. Fear was reassigned.

Now, as governments pursue aggressive mass immigration policies, the public is told that questioning outcomes is unacceptable, even as the very threats once used to justify war reappear domestically. The message is clear and profoundly cynical: the danger was real when it justified foreign wars, but discussion becomes forbidden when it complicates domestic policy.

This is not tolerance. It is coercion.

And now comes the final insult.

The same political class that demands silence at home is preparing to demand sacrifice abroad. The same citizens who are told to accept social breakdown, rising crime, collapsing services, and cultural fragmentation are being told they may soon be required to fight Russia to “defend our way of life”.

What way of life, exactly?

The one being systematically dismantled by the very governments issuing the call. The one they are actively transforming into something unrecognizable through reckless policy, moral intimidation, and managed decline. They are asking people to die for values they no longer practice and for societies they are actively degrading.

This is the core hypocrisy of modern Western governance.

We were told to fight, bleed, and die to defend liberal democratic values. Now we are told those same values require silence, compliance, and obedience, while our countries are reshaped without consent and against the will of the people who built them.

A government that suppresses debate at home while demanding loyalty abroad is not defending democracy. It is consuming it.

And history is not kind to regimes that ask their people to die for a future they are busy destroying.

December 3, 2025

Like him or loathe him, Trump’s response to the DC shootings was “spot on”

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Conservative Woman, Richard North makes the case that US President Donald Trump is the only western political leader who can stop the migration crisis:

Like him or loathe him, question his inconsistencies and his many other flaws, but in my view Donald Trump’s response to the shooting of two members of the West Virginia National Guard in Washington DC by an Afghan migrant was spot on.

There was none of the pussyfooting “my thoughts are with …” etc. Without equivocation, he immediately branded the shooting “an act of evil, an act of hatred and an act of terror”, adding: “It was a crime against our entire nation”.

Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted a tweet declaring: “President Trump’s State Department has paused visa issuance for ALL individuals travelling on Afghan passports. The United States has no higher priority than protecting our nation and our people.”

Attached was an official tweet from the Department of State making it clear that the ban was of immediate effect, with the Department “taking all necessary steps to protect US national security and public safety”.

This added to the ban in June when Trump imposed restrictions on citizens from 12 countries, including Afghanistan, but that ban did not revoke visas previously issued, and holders of Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) were exempt.

Now Trump has gone further. In a Thanksgiving message posted on X, he offered a salutation which, in Trumpian style, didn’t mince words. It started with: “A very Happy Thanksgiving salutation to all of our Great American Citizens and Patriots who have been so nice in allowing our country to be divided, disrupted, carved up, murdered, beaten, mugged, and laughed at, along with certain other foolish countries throughout the world, for being ‘politically correct’, and just plain STUPID, when it comes to immigration …”

That was only the start of a very long and quite extraordinary tweet which, if nothing else, can be criticised for a complete absence of paragraphs and sentences which rivalled in length those in a Dickens novel.

With his opening out of the way, Trump asserted that the official United States foreign population stands at 53million, most of whom, he averred, “are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels”.

“They and their children,” Trump continued, “are supported through massive payments from patriotic American citizens who, because of their beautiful hearts, do not want to openly complain or cause trouble in any way, shape or form”.

Warming to his theme, he declared: “They put up with what has happened to our country, but it’s eating them alive to do so! A migrant earning $30,000 [£27,000] with a green card will get roughly $50,000 [£38,000] in yearly benefits for their family. The real migrant population is much higher.”

Pressing his point, he stated what none of Starmer’s motley crew will admit.

“This refugee burden is the leading cause of social dysfunction in America, something that did not exist after World War II (failed schools, high crime, urban decay, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages, and large deficits, etc)”, the Donald wrote.

In a passage which might have got him arrested had he posted in the UK, with refreshing candour, the President gave the example of “hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia” who were “completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota”.

Somali gangs, he said, “are roving the streets looking for ‘prey’ as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone”.

No matter which country they end up in, Somalis tend to be bad news. There are multiple reports stretching back to 2007 of a plague of criminal gangs among the 32,000 Somalis who have settled in Minnesota.

Recently the Minnesota gangs have been associated with a series of massive welfare fraud schemes, the proceeds of which may have been funnelled to the Somalia-based terror group al-Shabab.

The largest fraud scandal involving Somalis was the “Feeding Our Future” scheme. Prosecutors racked up 56 criminal convictions in what they alleged was a plot to steal $300million (£270million) from a federally funded programme meant to feed children during the covid event.

November 30, 2025

Canada’s growing Islamist problem

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Juno News, Joe Adam George points to the problems Britain is having with their well-established Muslim extremists and says Canada has exactly the same issues here:

When 35-year-old Jihad al-Shamie terrorized a Manchester synagogue last month on Yom Kippur pledging allegiance to ISIS, few were shocked by what investigators later uncovered. He attended a Salafi-inspired mosque where extremist rhetoric was routine. His father had praised Hamas’s October 7 attackers as “Allah’s men on earth”. Years of indoctrination taught him that violence was virtue, resistance was glory, and terror was faith.

What unfolded in Manchester is a warning to Canada, where similar currents of Islamist radicalism have been manifestly gathering strength. Across Canadian cities, extremist narratives are taking root among young people through community networks, activist circles, and online echo chambers.

A prominent Shia mosque in Windsor, Ontario, recently held a memorial service for slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah — for the second year running — where youths eulogised the notorious terrorist as a “hero” and “martyr”. The Toronto Metropolitan University’s arts faculty funded a research paper which argues that Canada’s designation of Islamist groups as terrorist organizations is deeply flawed because of “systemic Islamophobia” and racism. Such episodes do not merely glorify violence; they sanctify terrorism and rebrand militancy as a necessity.

Earlier this year, Canada’s spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, warned it was “increasingly concerned” about the threat of ISIS-inspired attacks. That concern is well-founded. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police reported a staggering 488 per cent rise in terrorism-related charges between April 2023 and March 2024, much of it driven by ISIS-motivated youth radicalisation. In the same period, antisemitic incidents surged by more than 670 per cent. An ISIS-inspired teenager was arrested in Montreal in August for terrorism offences. These are not isolated events but symptoms of a cultural shift — where extremism masquerades as activism and hate is sold as justice.

Since the breakout of the Israel-Hamas war, unrestrained radicalisation has seeped into mosques, schools, charities, and universities — often protected by Canada’s own liberal frameworks. Islamist networks have mastered the art of exploiting the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to propagate radical ideologies while deflecting scrutiny. Wrapped in the language of “human rights” and “anti-racism”, they advance intolerance behind a façade of moral virtue.

As former FBI agent and counter-terrorism expert Lara Burns noted, it’s a tactic that echoes the Muslim Brotherhood’s “sabotage strategy” in North America — infiltrating institutions to steer public debate and soften attitudes toward Islamist causes.

Campaigns to institutionalize so-called “anti-Palestinian racism” (APR) is turning Canada’s classrooms and government offices into laboratories for grievance politics. Marketed as anti-discrimination, APR in reality brands any criticism of Palestinian militancy as racism, giving extremists a moral shield and silencing dissent. Even Canada’s Islamophobia czar, Amira Elghawaby, has been accused of abusing her taxpayer-funded post to conjure up Islamophobia and APR where none existed. During a visit to London in June, she reportedly met officials shaping the UK’s own Islamophobia legislation — a troubling sign of cross-pollination between partisan ideologues.

November 29, 2025

The Manhattan Project (1986 film) and Deterrence

Filed under: Media, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 8 Sept 2023

This film reminds me of several topics from nuclear deterrence to the impact of social media to that kid I went to high school with who tried to build a reactor in his mom’s shed. Yeah, this is a rambly one.

00:00 Intro
01:02 Summary
02:25 Social Media
04:35 Deterrence
06:51 Radioactive Boy Scout
09:50 Modern Security State

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November 25, 2025

You might as well watch Guru Nanak Jahaz, since you’ve already paid for it

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, India, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Canadian government loves handing out money — they hand out a lot of money — so it shouldn’t be surprising to find out that Canadian taxpayers funded the creation of a movie about a Sikh terrorist who assassinated a Canadian official … or that the assassin is the hero of the movie. After all, isn’t that the heart and soul of multiculturalism? Celebrating other cultures and traditions as being superior to those of ordinary Canadians? The feds seem to believe it.

If you can find a way to watch the recently released Khalistani propaganda film Guru Nanak Jahaz, you might as well watch it. You paid for it, after all.

The film, which depicts the assassination of a Canadian civil servant by a Sikh terrorist as a heroic act of justice, has a “Funded by the Government of Canada” credit at the end. It was also supported by the B.C. government and gives special thanks to Conservative MP Tim Uppal and Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal. While the Liberals didn’t return a request for comment, a spokesperson for Uppal told me that he was not involved in the film and that the filmmakers did not communicate with him about the credit at any point.

Set in 1914, the plot follows the assassin, who you likely never heard about, and the voyage of the more familiar Komagata Maru, a ship which carried nearly 400 Indian passengers from Hong Kong to Vancouver, only to be denied entry to Canada. It was screened in some Cineplex theatres earlier this year.

The official narrative that you’ll find on government websites explains that this was purely a matter of baseless Canadian racism, and it’s been wholeheartedly adopted by politicians today: as prime minister, Justin Trudeau apologized for the incident in 2016, and the Conservative party releases annual statements commemorating the event, praising the bravery of the passengers and their craving for freedom.

That’s the whitewashed version, however. It leaves out that the Komagata Maru voyage was organized by the Indian Ghadar movement — the word literally means “revolution” — which advocated for violent resistance against the British Empire. (India was a British possession at that time and would continue to be until 1947). Its members were primarily Sikhs who lived in North America. And while they did experience racism, and while changes to Canada’s immigration laws in 1908 indirectly restricted Indian immigration, there were also reasons for the Canadian government to be apprehensive.

Ghadar members dreamed of a return to India, but wanted to rid that land of the British first. They remembered the Indian Mutiny of 1857 with regret — that bloody event saw many British-Indian regiments unsuccessfully take up arms against the Empire; Sikh Punjabis were among the exceptions, largely siding with the British. Decades later, the mostly Sikh Punjabi Ghadarites proposed another 1857-like uprising while applauding anti-British terrorism.

When rumblings of war with Germany began to brew in 1914, the Ghadarites grew excited — now was the time to strike. In August 1914, after the war broke out, the movement’s newspaper advocated, “Go to India and incite the native troops. Preach mutiny openly. Take arms from the troops of the native states and wherever you see the British, kill them. … There is hope that Germany will help you.” Expats in the Orient organized ships to return home and revolt.

The Komagata Maru was part of this movement. Organized by Ghadarites before the breakout of the First World War, it attempted to bring more movement adherents into Vancouver to settle. Canada was right not to let it dock because the entire envoy was a security threat.

The S.S. Komagata Maru was at the centre of an attempt to bring 400 Sikh revolutionaries into Canada to agitate for the destruction of British rule in India in 1914.

November 17, 2025

Cyprus on Fire: The 3-Way War That Broke an Empire – W2W 053

Filed under: Britain, Greece, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 16 Nov 2025

Cyprus, 1950s–60s. An island divided between Greek Cypriots, Turkish Cypriots, and the British Empire becomes the battleground for one of the Cold War’s most explosive regional crises. What begins as a struggle for independence soon spirals into a three-way conflict of nationalism, colonial strategy, and clashing identities — with Archbishop Makarios III, paramilitary groups, Athens, Ankara, and London all pulling in different directions.

In this episode of War 2 War, we uncover how Cyprus became:

  • A central front in the decline of the British Empire
  • A stage for espionage, guerrilla warfare, and political assassinations
  • A diplomatic nightmare for NATO
  • A struggle where UN peacekeepers become critical to preventing total collapse
  • A conflict whose consequences still shape Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean today

We’ll trace the rise of EOKA, the reaction in the Turkish Cypriot community, the impossible balancing act of Makarios III, and how superpower pressure from the USA and USSR escalated an already volatile situation.

This is the hidden story of how one island’s crisis reshaped the politics of an entire region — and marked the end of Britain as a global imperial power.
(more…)

November 13, 2025

QotD: Anarchists

Filed under: Europe, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It is a sign of age, I fear, but I seem to be the last person to lament the declining quality of our Anarchists. Those of more than a century ago were rugged individualists, to a fault. With one well-placed bomb, they could do what takes the contemporary anarchist a cumbersome bureaucratic organization. They were men of action; and some of the women, too. No one could confuse them with party hacks. You could not coerce them into a party line.

When I was younger and, perhaps, more spunky, I used to read Proudhon and Kropotkin. These were all very well, but the systemizing tendency had infected both. Utopianism also muddled their thinking. Without going back to Zeno of Cilium, let me just say that the posterior tradition in recommending anarchy was more subtle and arch. (Read the Antigone, for instance. Today it’s just the brand name for a Givenchy bag.) Anarchy was an inheritance from Greece and even Rome. It could never have been reduced to an election manifesto.

It is interesting that the first English use of the term, anarchisme, dates back to Henry VIII. Those resisting his Divorce and Reformation were taken to be anarchists. Nobly they defended the ancient liturgical order, in such spontaneous actions as the Pilgrimage of Grace.

Prominent anarchists of our modern age have, at their best (or worst, depending on one’s point-of-view), had dodgy ideological affiliations, but a real appreciation for economy of means. One thinks of e.g. Gavrilo Princip, the ingenious Serbian, able to ignite a Great War with a few gunshots, and bring down the Austro-Hungarian Empire almost as an aside. Or a certain Osama bin Laden, able to drag a superpower into pointless foreign wars, with very limited means. I do not approve of either gentleman, please note, but their efficiency was astounding.

David Warren, “Anarchia”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-07-09.

October 14, 2025

White Hoods, Bloody Hands: The Klan as America’s First Terrorists – W2W 048

Filed under: History, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 12 Oct 2025

From Pulaski to Stone Mountain to Brown v. Board, the Ku Klux Klan evolves from Reconstruction terror to a decentralized, Cold War–era movement that bombed churches, lynched citizens, and hid behind “anti-communism”. We trace the First, Second, and Third Klans — rituals, networks, and the brutal campaign against desegregation and civil rights.
(more…)

October 11, 2025

Antifa declared a foreign terrorist organization

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR claims a win from his earlier analysis posts on Antifa in the United States:

For those of you who have been tracking my intelligence analysis posts about Antifa, I now get to claim a correct prediction.

The President of the United States has declared Antifa a foreign terrorist organization.

Providing aid to an FTO is a crime (18 U.S.C. § 2339B). This declaration unlocks the legal tools required to go after Antifa’s funding network and allies, both foreign and domestic.

Those of you who are watching as USAID was unmasked as a left-wing slush fund won’t have any trouble understanding how the funding network functions. Allies of revolutionary Communism and nihilism at large charitable foundations direct money to smaller foundations which act as pass-throughs to others. After enough layers of this to maintain deniability (because the federal statute specifies “knowingly”), direct enablers of terrorism collect the money and use to fund things like a bullet ripping through Charlie Kirk’s neck.

There’s some rake-off along the way, of course. Can’t have all those elite failsons and faildaughters going without sinecures, after all. They have expensive habits to maintain.

Following the FTO declaration, the government can now gin up a case for seizing the assets of anybody in the funding chain, all the way back to the initial donors. The usual doctrine that “knowingly” extends to those who should have known, and who willfully failed to perform due diligence in order to avoid criminal exposure, applies here. Precedent for this was well established by organized-crime prosecutions 50 years ago; it’s why we have RICO laws.

It remains to be seen how much political will there is to actually bring down this hammer. In the maximal scenario,

(1) Trump issues a loud public warning to all charitable donors that they’d better cut ties to any organization that doesn’t provide them with full transparency about where the money is going.

(2) Left-wing dark money outfits like Arabella and the Tides Foundation get sent formal spoliation-of-evidence warnings, followed swiftly with audits by people with zero sense of humor.

I wish I were confident that all of this is going to happen. There’s going to be a lot of obstruction from Democrats and screaming by the media — the people who keep telling you that Antifa doesn’t exist because they want to keep their army of brownshirts intact. The administration could lose its nerve.

But at least it’s possible now. The political conditions for it are better than they have been in my entire lifetime.

Update: Fixed messed-up URL.

October 6, 2025

“[Starmer’s] love of football feels like something an alien would simulate, trying to blend in with our ways”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Britain’s current prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is not having even the echo of a political honeymoon despite the utter collapse of the Conservatives in the last general election. Andrew Sullivan, who knew Starmer in school, thinks that Starmer’s plight is a useful illustration of what might have happened in the last US federal election if Kamala Harris had won:

The other day I sat, slack-jawed, reading Kamala Harris’ book — which was not easy to do with my eyeballs permanently rolled into the back of my head. (On one issue that killed her campaign, trans policy, she still hasn’t got the slightest clue what she’s talking about.) At one point, I even tried to imagine what America would be like today if this woke lawyer had actually won last year.

Then it occurred to me that we already kind of know. We actually have a pretty good test case of exactly that: a center-left lawyer-politician coming to power last year after a massive immigration wave had discredited and ousted the previous incumbent. Enter Keir Starmer, my high school frenemy, and now prime minister.

But unlike Harris, Starmer has at least shown signs of understanding his problem: he kicked the far-left Corbynites out of the party, called out anti-semitism, and in his big speech to his party’s annual conference this week, spoke proudly of flying the Union Jack, saying “we placed too much faith in globalization”. In office, he backed Israel’s war against Hamas strongly for a year-and-a-half, followed the science by banning puberty blockers and sex changes for kids, tightened immigration rules a bit, and pursued deregulation of the private sector, especially housing.

So how is he doing?

In one recent poll, his approval rating is 18 percent, with 61 percent disapproving. His government, just a year old, is polling around 19 percent. And in his first year in office, the new anti-immigration Reform Party has doubled its support from 15 to around 31 percent. The Tories — who gave Brits a massive wave of non-white, non-European immigration after Brexit — are at a historic low of 15 percent. Boris may have done what no leftist could: destroy the most successful political party in the West.

This, to put it mildly, is an earthquake. A party barely a year old is almost more popular than the Tories and Labour combined. On paper, Starmer still has four years to right the ship. But in reality, a prime minister who is loathed by four out of five Brits is like Wile E Coyote five feet off the cliff edge. To get a flavor of the general public’s view of Keir, check out this hilarious profile. Money quote:

    Then there is the voice — a cornucopia for sketch writers. We could fill pages with descriptions of the thing — an expiring corncrake, a Dalek suffering stasis of the lower bowel, a fart in a coffin, etc. His love of football feels like something an alien would simulate, trying to blend in with our ways — “I follow the game like any other carbon-based life form”.

The fart in a coffin did his best this week — and survived. Critically, he acknowledged the centrality of mass immigration to the national discourse, the way it has undermined a sense of common culture, undercut wages, begun to replace Christianity with Islam, required ever higher levels of censorship, killed Jews, and turned the cities my grandparents knew into something they wouldn’t even recognize as British.

No vote was ever taken on this policy of making London 40 percent foreign-born, a place where English is now often not heard at all — and even where it is, is almost always in a foreign accent. But the minute anyone ever proffered the slightest objection to mass migration (around a million migrants a year for the past four years), the charge of “hate” and “racism” was instantaneous and deafening.

Elite right and left were as one, defying the public for decade after decade. The hangover, especially after Boris’ brutal betrayal, is now here. (For a single glimpse, think of yesterday when a British citizen named Jihad attacked a synagogue, with two dead, and a flash mob of Hamas supporters swarmed Downing Street.)

Update, 7 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

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