New York City’s Democratic voters chose Zohran Mamdani as their nominee. It says a lot about how bad Mamdani is, though, that a lot of people thought the allegedly handsy former governor of New York, who left office in disgrace, was a better option, but the voters have spoken.
While it’s entirely possible someone else will prevail in the general election, the odds are good that Mamdani will win based on current polling.
There’s a lot for me to dislike about Mamdani, including his previous call to ban all guns, but a lot of New Yorkers aren’t going to disagree with that on any level, unfortunately, and since I can’t vote against him, my own feelings are irrelevant.
But there’s a reason everyone in the Big Apple should be concerned, and that’s just how soft on crime he’s shaping up to be.
For example, he says that violence is an artificial construct.
Now, I get that he’s claiming that non-violent crimes are being prosecuted as acts of violence, even when they’re not, but I’m rather skeptical of that claim without some hard evidence backing it up. [Editor’s Note: New York actually prosecutes gun possession without a permit as a violent crime, so there is some evidence that’s the case – Cam]
Breaking into a business that has an attached but separate dwelling isn’t likely to be viewed as the same as breaking into a home in court. I seriously doubt a prosecutor would even try it.
Of course, sometimes horrible things happen. Vile people do vile things, even if they work in a prosecutor’s office or with law enforcement. I get that.
But the language here matters.
Mamdani could have just started off by arguing that people are overprosecuted and left it there. That’s something people will likely rally behind and something that his opponents will have a hard time attacking him for.
Instead, though, he says “violence is an artificial construction,” which is the kind of language we hear in a lot of other debates. Gender is an artificial construct. Gender roles are an artificial construct. Even rights have been termed as artificial constructs.
In short, the term “artificial construct” or “artificial construction” is a common buzzword used for undermining the mere existence of a thing.
Violence, on the other hand, isn’t. How we define “good” and “bad” forms of violence might be, but the act of being violent is no such thing. It’s an objective fact that violence happens, that people do it to others, and victims get hurt as a result.
This isn’t artificial, nor is it constructed.
What Mamdani is doing, even if unintentionally, is laying the groundwork to excuse violent crime entirely because if it’s an artificial construction, then there’s no reason to punish it beyond our need to uphold this artificial construction. Since it’s clear he’s hostile toward such artificial constructions, it seems that he favors violence not being punished.
It’s a reasonable extrapolation, after all.
Overprosecution, which may or may not be happening, isn’t a case of violence being an artificial construction. It’s a case of prosecutors crossing the line from what is acceptable and just to injustice and unacceptability.
Mamdani’s entire argument, however, hinges on this idea, which means that it’s a good thing the Bruen decision put an end to shall-issue permitting in New York City, because New Yorkers are probably going to need those guns pretty soon if he’s elected.
Right after 9/11, while the dust of Ground Zero was still settling, a proposal emerged to build an Islamic mosque and community center just steps away from where nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered by jihadists.
It was called Park51. It was a test to see if the West would tolerate symbolic victory on the site of its own defeat. It was about watching how far Islam could push.
Now, nearly 25 years later, a candidate, shaped by the same worldview that killed 3000 Americans that day, just won a Democratic primary in New York.
This is the consequence of a society that has become so obsessed with appearing color-blind that it has gone morally blind.
Islamic jihad is not like you. It does not apologize when caught, it doubles down. The moment you give it room, it plants a flag.
Park51 was not the last attempt. It was one of many. Today, the battleground is no longer symbolic, it’s political. And New York just opened the door.
Lurch is at it again.
“You cannot bomb away the memory of how to make a bomb,” says former Secretary of State John Kerry
Um, actually, you can—by ‘bombing away’ those who know how to make a bomb. When you do that, the memory of how to make a bomb goes into eternity with them.
As the dust and smoke settle over Iran’s devastated nuclear weapons program, President Donald Trump’s method of waging war is coming into focus. We had hints of what I call the “Trump Doctrine” in his first term as he annihilated ISIS in Syria, but the two-decade war in Afghanistan that he had inherited initially obscured what has now become a coherent doctrine.
In his second term, the freedom of navigation attacks against Yemen’s Houthis were once again a hint of Trump’s way of war, but Saturday’s attack on Iran—and the events leading up to it—tell us much about the deliberate and precise manner in which Trump seeks to conduct American wars.
Similar to (but different from) the famous “Powell Doctrine” promulgated by former Secretary of State Colin Powell (more on that later), the Trump Doctrine is the doctrine of a businessman serving his stockholders. Explained another way, the Trump Doctrine is the “Businessman’s Way of War.”
To preview succinctly, the Trump Doctrine consists of a series of business-like, iterative steps for all uses of American military force, and it performs as follows:
We are assured that it’s not the group that calls itself an Islamic State because our political leaders and our media have told us so. It’s the same with Boko Haram. They regularly slaughter Christians, women and children included. Spokesmen for Boko Haram say that they represent Islamic teaching, but no: our leaders have assured us that that is not the case. “No religion,” said Obama, “condones the killing of innocents.”
Has the former president contemplated the glorious history of Islam and the glittering deeds of Mohammed? We have it on the highest—and for Muslims, the only—authority that the Prophet regularly slaughtered innocents. Consider, to take just one example,the siege of Medina in the year 627, then home to a Jewish tribe. After a couple of weeks, the inhabitants surrendered unconditionally. Mohammad then had the 600-800 men butchered and sold the women and children into slavery.
“We are not at war with Islam,” our leaders tell us. “We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”
The impolitic question is, where are all those unperverted Muslims? In the common rooms of American universities? Maybe. In our cities and suburbs? Perhaps. But I think we can agree that it is not (to make an arbitrary and woefully incomplete list) the people behind such actions as
The Charlie Hebdo and Jewish supermarket slaughters in France (“folks shot in a deli” was how Obama described the latter)
The Danish shootings by another “Allahu Akbar”-shouting chap.
Islam, or a perversion of Islam? At some point, as Hillary Clinton might put it, what difference does it make? As we contemplate the future of Iran, I would suggest pondering the possibility that, even if “we are not at war with Islam,” Islam may well be at war with us.
People have been singing about it since 1980, but yesterday’s bombing raids on Iranian nuclear facilities were the first bombing attack since the 1979 hostage seizure.
Despite numerous calls for action against the Islamic Republic, Operation Midnight Hammer was the first U.S. military action against important Iranian assets on Iranian territory. The bombs fell less than 24 hours ago, but here are a few preliminary takes.
Competence. The most striking thing about the attacks was the extreme competence displayed by the Air Force, the Defense Department under Secretary Pete Hegseth, the various intelligence assets involved, the State Department, and the entire administration. There were no leaks. (How did they avoid leaks? Basically, they didn’t tell any Democrats what was coming. Take note.)
Not only were there no leaks, but President Trump and the diplomatic apparatus kept the Iranians in the dark, giving the impression of waffling in the White House even as things were being lined up. They received unintentional help in this from Sen. Charles Schumer, who had been for some time pushing the “TACO” acronym — Trump Always Chickens Out — in the service of a storyline that Trump was all bluster and no follow-through. The Iranians, apparently dumb enough to believe Democrats and the mainstream news media (but I repeat myself) were snookered.
New Diplomacy: In dealing with the Iranians in the 1980s, Donald Regan told President Reagan that America had been repeatedly “snookered” by a bunch of “rug merchants.” The Iranians were in fact very good at leading Americans down the garden path, invoking (often imaginary) splits between “hard-line” and “moderate” Islamists in their government as excuses for delay and backtracking.
We’ll see if moderation follows. (I doubt it, as I think the “irrational regime hypothesis” applies heavily to Iran. See below.) But one thing that follows is that threats and deadlines from the Trump administration, unlike those from the Obama and Biden administrations, will be taken seriously in the future. Obama’s “red line” was bluster; Trump’s was not. He gave the Iranians a deadline and when they failed to comply, he destroyed their nuclear capability.
For a couple of decades after World War II, U.S. diplomacy was backed by the belief that words would be backed by force. After a while, our foreign policy elite began to see diplomacy as a substitute for force, not an adjunct to it. As soon as that happened, diplomacy lost most of its power. “Jaw jaw” as Churchill said, may be better than “war war,” but the jawing mostly works because war is the alternative. If the alternative is just more jawing, not so much.
Unsurprisingly the author of “The Art of the Deal” knew this.
The Humiliation of the Foreign Policy Establishment
We’ve had “Middle East experts” for years. Their track record, as the above suggests, has been poor. Our universities have departments of “Middle East Studies,” who have mostly pumped out poorly informed activists, and horrible takes by risible faculty members. Their existence has revolved around the Arab-Israeli conflict, which is in the process of disappearing as the Arab nations have all reached accommodations with Israel, and as the Palestinians suffer humiliating defeat, and the loss of their last major patron, Iran, which will be in no position to help them financially or militarily any time soon, if ever.
Well, an establishment that is organized around a problem is unlikely to go about actually solving that problem: What will its high-paid people, in prestigious jobs, do if that happens?
As it turns out, the solutions were always pretty simple, it just took someone from outside the field to find them. Trump brought Arabs and Israelis together under the Abraham Accords in his first term; now he’s bringing Iran to heel in his second. In both cases it took a willingness to be hard-nosed, and to say and do things that were anathema before because they would have interfered with big donations from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Keep It Simple, Stupid. And that’s a bigger lesson regarding the Trump approach. Our establishment at some level wants things to be complicated and intractable. Solving problems makes them go away, which is unfortunate. We were told before that addressing illegal immigration across the borders required legislation from Congress that would be complicated and require the greasing of lots of interests. Instead Trump just enforced the law, and illegal border crossing basically stopped. We were told that government spending was impossible to control and DOGE showed us otherwise. Obama told us we couldn’t drill our way out of oil shortages. Turned out Sarah Palin was right and “drill baby, drill” did just that — not so coincidentally also strengthening our hand in bringing about the Abraham Accords, etc. Iran’s nuclear program, we were told, was just something we’d have to live with, only it turned out it was something the Iranians could die with.
Our Political Class is Full of Traitors, Liars, and Fools. Okay, this isn’t really news. I’ve been pointing out for over two decades that the “anti-war” movement isn’t so much antiwar as just on the other side. But the speed with which mobs waving Hamas flags turned into mobs waving Mexican flags and then into mobs waving Iranian flags — al with support from pretty much the same gang of pundits and politicians — has been truly striking. Ed Morrissey points out Democrats’ “breathtaking hypocrisy” on War Powers, and of course, it would be more breathtaking if it were any sort of surprise.
Democrats thought it was fine when Obama did it because Lightbringer.
Whatever, Chardonnay Lady. Anyway, no need to take these people seriously on this, and nobody does. Even Ilhan Omar is being corrected by an Imam:
Behave yourself, indeed. Well, I’m not naive enough to expect that will happen. But I do think the Democrats attacking this action are once again on the 20% end of an 80/20 issue.Iran, as I mentioned above, seems to be an example of the “irrational regime hypothesis,” in which the actions needed to achieve internal power in a regime are at odds with the actions needed to succeed in the outside world. (World War II Japan is a classic example.) But it looks as if the Democratic Party today is another such irrational regime, in which the actions needed to move up the ladder with internal activists and donors are counterproductive in the larger world.It generally takes a big shock to overcome this dynamic once it’s in place. Hiroshima and Nagasaki did it for the Japanese. The Israeli/American air campaign may do it for Iran. I have no idea what might turn around the Democratic Party.
It’s going to take more than losing another election, though.
BREAKING: President Trump says Iran's nuclear facilities have been "totally obliterated." pic.twitter.com/doentvmWLS
Israel managed to trigger an emergency where most of Iran‘s military top brass gathered in one place. Then Israel took them all out.
One of the marvels of yesterday was the Israeli military’s incredible precision and effectiveness. It can blast a terrorist leader to his eternal reward without destroying the whole building. It could have a secret drone base in Iran. And it could apparently induce most of Iran’s military — especially air force — leaders to group together in one place for their own annihilation.
It is too bad that Israel didn’t take out Iran’s political leaders, including the ever-insidious Ayatollah Khamenei, but Israel definitely had its hands full, and it did incredibly well. After all, with reportedly every one of the top air force and several of the other top military leadership gone, presumably it will be much more difficult for Iran to plan its retaliation against Israel, especially since Israel also took out a lot of its military targets and thus its weapons. There might not be — hopefully — an awful lot left ready to fire at Israel.
Fox News talked to an Israeli security officer who claimed that it was no coincidence that so many Iranian military leaders, all of whom have been complicit in terrorist activities, had conveniently gathered together for an Israeli strike. “We carried out specific activities to help us learn more about them, and then used that information to influence their behavior,” the source told Fox. “We knew this would lead them to meet — but more importantly, we knew how to keep them there.”
The official added that the strikes were more successful than Israel had anticipated. According to the source, air defense systems and ballistic missiles that were intended for use against Israel were preemptively targeted.
So was a nuclear facility. Among the Iranian casualties were most of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ (IRGC) Air Force leadership, according to Fox, including commander Amir Ali Hajizadeh, along with Revolutionary Guard leader Gen. Hossein Salami and armed forces chief of staff Gen. Mohammad Bagheri. They have gone to join their master below.
We’ve been told for so many years that Iran was close to a nuclear weapon that we have become bored with it, but let’s be honest — isn’t it entirely possible Iran has a nuclear weapon, which no one wanted to admit? Or maybe they did have one before last night.
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations told Fox that Iran has been planning to attack the United States and Israel. In fact, Iran was already attacking Israel through its terror proxies, the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah. And the Iranian regime certainly prioritizes hatred for America and Israel. Whatever was going on behind the scenes in Iran, it is true however that the Israeli attack yesterday seriously crippled the genocidal regime.
Esmail Qaani took command of Iran’s Quds Force after the assassination of his predecessor, Qasem Soleimani, in a US drone strike in 2020
The Quds Force is an elite branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) responsible for extraterritorial military operations and supporting proxy groups across the Middle East.
Qaani began his military career during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, leading several brigades before becoming deputy commander of the Quds Force in 1997, serving under Soleimani. Unlike Soleimani, who was often seen on the frontlines with Tehran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, Qaani has maintained a lower profile, conducting meetings privately and away from public view. His leadership has coincided with increased Israeli airstrikes against Iranian proxies such as Hezbollah and other paramilitary groups.
In October 2024, Qaani was reported missing after Israeli airstrikes targeted the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh. He had travelled to Lebanon following the death of Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli strike in late September. The attack also targeted Hashem Safieddine, Nasrallah’s presumed successor, who has also been unreachable since.
“Moments ago, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, a targeted military operation to roll back the Iranian threat to Israel’s very survival”
– Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
Iran has been secretly advancing a plan for the “technological advancement of all parts of the development of a nuclear weapon,” the Israeli military says, after launching strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Reported to have been killed, so far:
Mohammad Bagherim, Chief of the Iranian military
Gholam Ali Rashid, Deputy Chief of the Iranian military
Hossein Salami, Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps
Ali Shamkhani, reported to be Supreme Leader Khamenei’s right hand man
Mohammad Tehranchi, President, Azad University, theoretical physicist.
Fereydoon Abbasi, former head, Atomic Energy Organization & MP.
Strikes reported on:
The D2O (heavy water) manufacturing facility in Arak.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps HQ in Tehran
The Natanz uranium enrichment facility in Isfahan
The guy was literally shouting “free Palestine” and “end Israel” while he lit people on fire but sure, motive seems murky. https://t.co/Y2kFxq2aQ7
“On May 29, 1453,” the state-run Turkish broadcaster TRT World reported happily on Thursday, the 572nd anniversary of the fateful day, “a 21-year-old Sultan Mehmed II led the Ottoman army to a decisive victory over the Byzantine Empire. The conquest of Istanbul remains a shining jewel in the crown of the Ottoman Empire.” Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s desire to restore the lost glory of that empire is well known, but those who are the children and heirs of the victims of its bloody expansion look on this anniversary with somewhat less enthusiasm than TRT World displayed.
Some Greek Orthodox Christians to this day refer to May 29, 1453, as “the last day of the world.” In a very real sense, that is exactly what it was: the end of over two thousand years of the Roman Empire, the end of what had for centuries been the world’s foremost power and leading Christian state. The conquest of Constantinople meant the eclipse of Christianity in Asia Minor, which had been such an important center of the faith that three of Paul’s New Testament epistles — Galatians, Ephesians, and Colossians — were addressed to Christian congregations there.
Constantinople had been the center of Christianity in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, and the second see in the Church, after only Rome. After the East/West schism of 1054, Constantinople was the heart of Orthodox Christianity. As “The History of Jihad” recounts in detail, however, on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the armies of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II finally broke through Constantinople’s defenses after a long siege, marking the end of the great Christian Roman Empire.
The conquerors were extraordinarily brutal, raiding monasteries and convents, emptying them of their inhabitants, and plundering private houses. They entered Hagia Sophia, which for nearly a thousand years had been the grandest church in Christendom. The faithful had gathered within its hallowed walls to pray during the city’s last agony. The Muslims halted the celebration of Orthros (morning prayer), while the priests, according to legend, took the sacred vessels and disappeared into the cathedral’s eastern wall, through which they shall return to complete the divine service one day. Muslim men then killed the elderly and weak and led the rest off into slavery.
The Byzantine scholar Bessarion wrote to the Doge of Venice in July 1453, saying that Constantinople had been “sacked by the most inhuman barbarians and the most savage enemies of the Christian faith, by the fiercest of wild beasts. The public treasure has been consumed, private wealth has been destroyed, the temples have been stripped of gold, silver, jewels, the relics of the saints, and other most precious ornaments. Men have been butchered like cattle, women abducted, virgins ravished, and children snatched from the arms of their parents.”
When the slaughter and pillage were finished, Mehmed II ordered an Islamic scholar to mount the high pulpit of the Hagia Sophia and declare that there was no God but Allah, and Muhammad was his prophet. The magnificent old church was turned into a mosque; hundreds of other churches in Constantinople and elsewhere suffered the same fate. Millions of Christians joined the ranks of the dhimmis; others were enslaved, and many were killed.
Once the Muslims had thoroughly subdued Constantinople, they set out to Islamize it. According to the Muslim chronicler Hoca Sa’deddin, tutor of the sixteenth-century Sultans Murad III and Mehmed III, “churches which were within the city were emptied of their vile idols and cleansed from the filthy and idolatrous impurities and by the defacement of their images and the erection of Islamic prayer niches and pulpits many monasteries and chapels became the envy of the gardens of Paradise.”
It has come to be known as Black Tuesday, the Last Day of the World. Ever since, many Greek Christians regard Tuesday as unlucky. The world has forgotten what happened on Black Tuesday and on so many other days like it from India to Spain, and today persists in the fantasy that Islam does not contain an imperialist impulse and that Muslims can be admitted without limit into Western countries without any attempt to determine how many would like ultimately to subjugate and Islamize their new countries, the way their forefathers did to Constantinople so long ago.
There are, however, some people who remember — and they want to do it again. Back in 2008, Sheik Ali Al-Faqir, former Jordanian minister of religious endowment, said this on Al-Aqsa TV: “We proclaim that we will conquer Rome, like Constantinople was conquered once…” Hamas MP and Islamic cleric Yunis Al-Astal said this, also on Al-Aqsa TV several years ago: “Very soon, Allah willing, Rome will be conquered, just like Constantinople was, as was prophesized by our Prophet Muhammad.”
The man who was the most popular Islamic TV preacher until his death several years ago, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, also remembered. In writing about “signs of the victory of Islam,” he referred to a hadith: “The Prophet Muhammad was asked: ‘What city will be conquered first, Constantinople or Romiyya?’ He answered: ‘The city of Hirqil [that is, the Roman emperor Heraclius] will be conquered first’ – that is, Constantinople… Romiyya is the city called today ‘Rome,’ the capital of Italy. The city of Hirqil [that is, Constantinople] was conquered by the young 23-year-old Ottoman Muhammad bin Morad, known in history as Muhammad the Conqueror, in 1453. The other city, Romiyya, remains, and we hope and believe [that it too will be conquered].”
Mehmed the Conqueror was motivated by exactly the same religious ideology that motivates the Islamic warriors of the contemporary era. They remember, and still celebrate, what happened in Constantinople on May 29, 1453. For free people in the West and elsewhere, May 29 should be a day for all those threatened by Islamic jihad and Sharia oppression to redouble our efforts to resist, so that more such catastrophes may never again destroy the lives of free people.
A Palestinian support group and domestic terror outfit that operates with impunity on many U.S. college campuses has now admitted openly that they see it as their job to destroy the United States of America by subvert our youth.
The group, Students for Justice in Palestine, is responsible for many of the racist, anti-Jewish protests at schools all across the country.
These Muslim terrorists pretend that they are supporting the human rights of so-called “Palestinians” and are protesting “genocide” being perpetrated against Gazans by Israel.
Now, before we go any farther, the singular truth is that there is no genocide taking place in Gaza against the mythic “Palestinians.” The proof of that statement lies in the population numbers in the region. For instance, in 1950, the population of Gaza was 63,444 citizens. And what is it today? 823,407… yeah… if the Jews are trying to conduct “genocide” in Gaza, they have really, REALLY failed at it!
Anyway, the leader of this terror group infesting Temple University recently let the cat out of the bag.
Temple University activist Rishi Arun openly admitted that “It is our job to destroy imperialism, destroy the United States, and destroy capitalism.”
“We will do it by organizing that actively undermines and destabilizes the legitimacy and the power of [the United States],” he adds, “and the power and legitimacy of capitalism,” this terrorist added.
WATCH:
Temple University Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) President Rishi Arun during a Panel Honoring Cop-Killer Mumia Abu-Jamal: It Is Our Job to Destroy the U.S.; Samidoun Official Mohammed Khatib: Liberating Palestine Will Help Dismantle America pic.twitter.com/i3DszQMEzm
