Gates of Vienna News Feed 4/23/2014

An Austrian model aircraft enthusiast was seriously injured by his model helicopter, and is now in intensive care. His very expensive helicopter went out of control while flying, and when the man attempted to catch it, he was badly cut by the rotors.

In other Austrian news, Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner announced that Austria would take in an additional 1,000 Syrian refugees, tripling its original quota of 500.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, JP, Steen, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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Prayer March for Persecuted Christians

On May 17th there will be a prayer march for persecuted Christians in Orlando, Florida. Among the speakers at the rally after the march will be Sister Hatune Dogan and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff.

In the following video, the Rev. Bruce Lieske of Burning Bush Ministries provides some background on the worldwide persecution of Christians — primarily, but not entirely, at the hands of Muslims:

Rev. Lieske sends these details on the event:

Prayer March for Persecuted Christians Orlando, FL May 17

Location:   Lake Eola Park, at the Forum (opposite Panera Bread)
Date:   Saturday, May 17, 2014
Time:   6:30-9:00 PM
Conclusion:   Trinity Lutheran Church, 123 E. Livingston 8-9 PM
Speakers:   Sister Hatune Dogan, Elizabeth Sabaditsch Wolff, Mrs. Julie Dass, and others from Egypt, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, and Europe
Cost:   Free and Open To The Public
Dress:   March will cover 1 mile so wear comfortable shoes.
Speakers:   If you can’t physically do the walk go to Trinity Lutheran Church before 8 PM to hear our international speakers and prayer service.
Parking:   Free covered parking across street from Trinity Lutheran Church, 123 E. Livingston (Park there and walk to muster area at the park.)
 

The march will begin at 6:30 PM, East end of Lake Eola Park, at the Forum opposite Panera Bread [“S” on map], proceeding along the South end of Lake Eola, Northward on Rosalind, concluding with a prayer rally at Trinity Lutheran Church, 123 E. Livingston Street [“F” on map].

8 PM, at Trinity Lutheran Church, we will have International speakers from Europe, Egypt, Syria, and Pakistan sharing their personal accounts of Christian persecution.

A 2014 Pew Study reports, Christians are the most persecuted group in the world. In 2013, a Vatican spokesman reported 100,000 Christians are murdered each year.

Churches are regularly burned in Nigeria, Egypt, Syria, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Iraq. Christian pastors have been jailed and beheaded.

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The Glazov Gang: “Easy Meat”

Gavin Boby made his second appearance on “The Glazov Gang” last Friday. This time the focus was on the Islamic sex-slavery gangs in the UK, and in particular the comprehensive “Easy Meat” report on the history and extent of the “localized grooming” scandal:

For more on Gavin Boby and the Law and Freedom Foundation, see the Law and Freedom Foundation Archives.

Hat tip: Vlad Tepes.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 4/22/2014

Vice President Joe Biden is visiting Kiev to express the United States’ support for the new government of Ukraine in its confrontation with Russia. He told the Ukrainians, “You will not walk this road alone.”

In other news, Sweden’s center-right government says that if it wins next September’s elections, it will beef up the Swedish air force to counter the growing aggressiveness of Russia.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Diana West, Egghead, Fjordman, Insubria, JP, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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Has Germany Gone Nuts?

Akif Pirinçci is a Turkish-German fiction writer who has turned to social-political criticism in his latest book. If he were not an immigrant, he would probably have been prosecuted for his scathing denunciation of Modern Multicultural Germany’s obsession with feminism, sexual perversion, and immigration. As the interviewer in the video below says, Mr. Pirinçci makes Thilo Sarrazin look like a wimp.

In the following introduction to the video, our Canadian correspondent Rembrandt Clancy provides some context to the uproar over Akif Pirinçci, whose interview on the state television network ZDF was censored and then removed from the network’s website. The translator also includes a full transcript of the subtitled interview.

Note: The translated quotes from Akif Pirinçci contain vulgarities. I have redacted out the naughtiest words, but some of the lesser solecisms remain. Readers who are offended by vulgar or suggestive language may want to skip this post.

Akif Pirinçci: “Red-Green Polluted Politics”

By Rembrandt Clancy

The purpose of this contribution is to draw to the attention of Gates of Vienna readers the successful German writer of Turkish origin, Akif Pirinçci, who has been subjected to an explicit mainstream media censorship in Germany following the publication of his first non-fiction book in late March, Deutschland von Sinnen: Der irre Kult um Frauen, Homosexuelle und Zuwanderer (“Germany out of her Senses: The Mad Cult around Women, Homosexuals and Immigrants”). The book’s subtitle is suggestive of some of the topics which the reader will find represented below, all facets of what the author calls Germany’s “Red-Green polluted politics” (Rot-Grün versiffte Politik).

Pirinçci’s notoriety in Germany is comparable to that of Thilo Sarrazin (cf. recent interview: “The Axioms of PC Madness”, Gates of Vienna) who captured the nation with his Deutschland schafft sich ab (“Germany is Abolishing Herself”).

Akif Pirinçci grew up in a poor family. “For us, an egg was a feast”, he said recently in an interview with Bild am Sonntag. In 1969 the Pirinçcis emigrated from Istanbul to the Federal Republic of Germany where his parents joined the growing population of Turkish Gastarbeiter (Guest Workers) who helped to power Germany’s post-war Wirtschaftswunder. The ten-year-old Akif completed his growing years in the beautifully green, low-mountainous region of the Eifel near the Belgian border. He showed an early interest in writing and by the age of twenty-one he published his first book. But his cat detective series, Felidae, — with Cat-Inspector Francis as the main character — won Pirinçci international renown; and perhaps without realising it at the time, the cat lover Akif Pirinçci achieved his political independence.

Felidae has been translated into English and sixteen other languages.

Akif Pirinçci on Evolution and Power

Pirinçci was unknown as a critic of the “the Left-Green dictatorship of thought and values” (Gesinnungsdiktatur) until his controversial essay, in which that phrase appears, was published on the internet portal Die Achse des Guten as “Das Schlachten hat Begonnen (English version: “The slaughter has begun”). It depicts a “creeping genocide against Germans” (Pirinçci: German Video Interview, 43.00 min.), and it created an Internet storm.

The piece was prompted by the unprovoked murder of the courageous German, Daniel Siefert, who was also a Christian. Upon his attempt to mediate a dispute, Siefert suffered fatal head injuries when he was brutally kicked to death by a pack of Turkish immigrants in the district of Kirchweyhe in Lower Saxony on 10 March 2013. English readers will find a recent summary of this bestial event and its aftermath at EuropeNews.

In “The Slaughter has Begun” Pirinçci treats the Siefert murder as one instance of a type and frames it within Darwin’s mechanistic concept of “evolution”, a “game theoretical model for explaining developments and manifestations of nature, including human behaviour”. The central vehicle of blind evolution, for Pirinçci, is the swarm of muckers (Kumpelschar), which acts according to the “evolutionary strategy of wolves”, or what Elias Canetti in his Crowds and Power (1973), calls the “increase pack” (Vermehrungsmeute — see Gates of Vienna).

For Pirinçci as for Canetti, the evolutionary function of the “swarm of muckers” or the “increase pack” is “increased chances of propagation” (Fortflanzungschancen). In Pirinçci’s version, the mechanism is blind, but effective: the men are killed and the women raped. The Germans for their part, however, suffer a kind of madness which siphons their instinct for physical survival into a substitute, socially-based self-defence against being defamed as Nazis if they resist the invasion of their country. This negative strategy is further reinforced by the displacement activity (Übersprungshandlung) of denigrating their own country and countrymen, and this in turn is complemented by a reaction formation (Freud); that is, a kind of Stockholm syndrome vis-à-vis their Muslim conqueror.

Both Pirinçci and Canetti are using metaphor to highlight what otherwise is difficult to describe satisfactorily in rational terms. Canetti depicts the primal “increase pack” as follows:

It consists of a group of men in a state of excitement whose fiercest wish is to be more [in number]. In whatever they undertake together, whether hunting or fighting, they would fare better if there were more of them.” [Canetti, Elias, Crowds and Power, Trans. Carol Stewart. New York: Continuum Publishing, 1973. p. 93].

Pirinçci combines this propagatory function of brutality and the procreative function of rape as inseparable streams of the same blind mechanism of evolution. For Canetti too, these two methods for the increase of the pack cannot be distinguished:

The full range of its [the increase pack’s] effectiveness has never been properly understood because the concept of [sexual] propagation has distorted and obscured the actual processes of increase. (English Source: Canetti, Elias, op. cit. p. 107)

Also apropos of Pirinçci’s “hunting wolves”, Hans Peter-Raddatz makes the following observation:

Furthermore, along with the growing similarity to the Islamic model, emulation of [Islamic] religious police is to be expected through the formation of Western packs, which suppress the emergence of Islamophobic nests of activity; and just to maintain the same Canetti-metaphor of the archaic herd, the packs can be expected to radicalise themselves from being the guardian of the herd to the function of bloodhound. [Cf. Islamic Seasons and “Democratic” Global Policy: Part II, Section 4 at Gates of Vienna]

Selections from “Germany out of her Senses”: The Mad Cult around Women, Homosexuals and Immigrants”

[Source: Politically Incorrect. Translated by Rembrandt Clancy]

Akif Pirinçci: Germany, Oh Golden Elysium

Pirinçci writes the following few paragraphs against the background of German national self-hatred mentioned above. It has been observed that the elites in Germany promote the EU on the basis that it was nationalism which caused the war, and not socialism, in its contemporary mutation as National Socialism. Therefore the national state must be abandoned along with all consciousness of national identity.

Like Canetti before him in Crowds and Power (p. 173), Pirinçci introduces the image of the forest as a central characteristic of the Germanic soul. His reference to German Arminius of the Cherusci tribe impregnates the forest imagery with the very deepest significance, for Pirinçci is calling to mind the Varian Disaster, so called from the standpoint of the Romans, who lost three crack legions to Arminius in the Battle of Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD. Arminius, or Hermann the German, was sent to Rome as a boy, became a soldier of equestrian rank; and later, not having forgotten his patrimony, “the liberator of Germany” (Tacitus) defeated his former Roman comrades-in-arms in the Teutoburg Forest. The Varian legions, having been marched out of their accustomed space, found themselves unable to consolidate their disciplined battle formations. It was a defeat which shook Rome to her foundations. Never again would the numbers of the XVII, XVIII, and XIX legions take their place in the Roman order of battle. With the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, Germans ceased to be a mere polyglot of tribes. They entered the conscious light of history, and were destined to be the womb of the greatest culture the world has ever known.

Pirinçci’s repeated high praise of “Germanness”, also evident in the video below, is to be seen in the context of awakening Germany to her greatness. It is a “salvo” against those who are betraying Germany, if not a call to resistance. And now the pertinent paragraphs:

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The March of Jihad in Yemen

Last week an jihad video surfaced that showed an Al Qaeda a meeting in Yemen. The leader of the group, a man named Nasser al-Wuhayshi, exhorted his followers to become martyrs in the jihad against America, “the leader of the Infidels”.

Yesterday a drone attack killed dozens of suspected Al Qaeda fighters in Yemen. Did last week’s video provide targeting information for the drone strike?

Many thanks to Russkiy for translating this video excerpt, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

Below are excerpts from an article in The Jerusalem Post about the Al Qaeda meeting in Yemen:

Watch: Al-Qaida Holds Largest, Most Dangerous Gathering in Years

Group’s 2nd in command is shown announcing his plan to “eliminate” America; CNN reports US must have not been aware of meeting.

A civilian video has surfaced on YouTube illustrating the largest gathering of al-Qaida in years, reported CNN on Tuesday.

The meeting, which reportedly took place in Yemen, shows Nasser al-Wuhayshi a man known to be al-Qaida’s second in command, a man who, according to CNN, has previously announced his determination to attack the United States.

According to the international news organization, either the US was not aware of the dangerous meeting, or was not notified with enough time to attack.

“We must eliminate the cross,” says the al-Qaida leader in a speech in the video. “The bearer of the cross is America.”

US officials believe the professionally produced video is recent, says CNN, and that an attack could be in planning stages.

Video transcript (times are from the original longer video):

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 4/21/2014

About twelve hundred additional illegal migrants were rescued by the Italian navy off Sicily over the weekend. The acceleration of the immigration emergency caused the Lega Nord to demand that Italy suspend its policy of rescuing migrants at sea, which it says the country cannot afford. Meanwhile, seven illegal Moroccan migrants who had landed on a tiny Spanish island off the coast of Morocco were repatriated by Spanish soldiers.

In other news, landslides in the Alps brought on by higher temperatures threatened highways and forced the closing of the Mont Blanc tunnel.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Insubria, Jerry Gordon, JP, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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Digging in Along the Virgin River

Mike Vanderboegh of Sipsey Street Irregulars attended Easter services at the Bundy ranch yesterday and spent some time with the armed patriots who have volunteered to guard the Bundys.

Below are excerpts from his report:

After the [Easter] service, I hitched a ride up the road to the volunteer base camp, where Jerry, the tactical commander of the Oath Keeper-supported security force led another service for the troops from Chapter Six of Ephesians. Somehow, hearing Paul’s words about pulling on the full armor of God there, in that setting, as I looked from one face to the other of these volunteers — who have come so far and risked so much already and who still risk all in a confrontation of right and wrong with the militarized police forces of the most powerful government on the planet — I shuddered with the power of the image, the emotion of that moment, unchanging since the Founding, immortal in its moral force.

There is a feeling among those who merely pay attention to the news cycle that this is somehow over, that the potential for disaster has been averted. It has not. The men and women dug in on the banks of the Virgin River understand that and are in it for the long haul. It ain’t over until it’s over. The defensive operation, almost despairingly comic in its early days of confusion, is coming together now. Volunteers come in, others leave, but will be back. The logistics, fueled by the generous donations of money and material from all over the country, are coming together, as are the various “shops” of planning, operations, communications and support. The inevitable snitches, most of them painfully obvious, have nothing to report to their masters for no laws are being broken. The paid provocateurs are gradually tipping their hands as well. Jerry, his hardy band of mission-focused veterans, and the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters who form the teeth of the teams in overwatch and the muscle of the logistics tail are doing pretty well, thank you very much, despite all the psy-war games played by the Feds, including a regular but invisible bombardment of all of the various forms of our communications by the Feds. (Notice that we still haven’t been able to get the videos of Saturday’s speeches on YouTube? Your tax dollars at work.)

Today I must fly out of here, having helped, I hope, in my own small way. Left behind will be that determined minority of increasingly confident and competent volunteers. I wish I didn’t have to leave. My instincts cry out to stay. But I have other duties that must be seen to. Yet, I know I will be back. These men and women are where God placed them at this precise moment and place in history, carrying out the function of that “well-regulated militia” that the Founders intended to defend the people in times such as these. They represent the shield, the armor, of a free people. They are also a tripwire. The Feds must go through them — they must kill them — to get to the Bundys. The Feds know this, and they are hesitant about what will happen if they try. That is called strategic uncertainty. And in the present context, that is a very good thing. They need to be cautious.

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Rockets From Gaza Mark the End of Passover

Rockets fired from Gaza landed in Sderot again early this morning. While we were still asleep, our Israeli correspondent MC sent this brief email after the first one struck:

It’s 7:55.

We’ve just has one land closer than usual about five minutes ago. It would normally be school time but it is the last day of the feast of Unleavened Bread.

I had just been reading the mail and the new posts, I will pick up the news as it becomes apparent. This one hit the city…

And a little while later:

We had another missile over, and now heavy machine gun fire, sounds like a .50 cal (09:50), I think the last day of Unleavened Bread is going to be not as restful as Yah intended.

Below are excerpts from a YNet News report:

Four rockets hit Sderot, Sha’ar HaNegev

Silence of holiday morning disrupted by rockets fired from Gaza; one rocket lands in road near market store. None were injured but minor damage caused.
Three rockets fired from the Gaza Strip exploded in open fields in Sderot and in the Sha’ar HaNegev Regional Council early Monday morning. No one was hurt and no damage was caused.

A fourth rocket fell on a road near a market store, causing minor damage but no injuries.

Residents in the area reported on sounds of explosion and the Code Red siren was heard…

A later revision of the same article adds this:

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 4/20/2014

A movement has emerged on the Internet calling for the island of Sardinia to be annexed by Switzerland. The idea is that Italy would sell Sardinia to Switzerland, and the island could then become the 27th canton of the Confoederatio Helvetica.

In other news, the confirmed death toll in the South Korean ferry disaster rose past fifty as divers began to remove bodies from the sunken vessel.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, JP, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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“These Are No Ordinary Times”

Yesterday, April 19th, 2014, was Patriots’ Day. It was the 239th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, which marked the beginning of the War of American Independence.

Below are excerpts from the Patriot’s Day speech given by Mike Vanderboegh yesterday in Bunkerville, Nevada on the occasion of awarding Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) the 2014 “Incitement to Civil War Trophy”:

“History is written not by the historians but by the people who lived it.”

So says William Hallahan, in his book The Day the American Revolution Began about the 19th of April, 1775. And as I stand here today in the Nevada desert, I see a whole host of historians who lived it — and wrote it.

Now what Hallahan says is true, but I would refine it further. History is written not by the historians BUT BY THE PEOPLE WHO LIVED IT AND WHO MADE IT HAPPEN.

This is nothing new. Throughout our own history, these self-made historians are most often just simple, ordinary people, people who are nothing special – not rich, not powerful in and of themselves, not influential, not even respected by those who claim to be their betters — but people who know who they are; people who know who God is; people who know the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, tyranny and liberty and cannot be persuaded otherwise by all the seductive lies that others tell to hide their evil intentions behind.

In ordinary times it takes very bad behavior on the part of a government to provoke such people into action for they are first and foremost pragmatic realists. Knowing who they are, and how the world works, and of the chronic follies and corruptions of man, they don’t expect much from governments, content to live their lives, raise their families, enjoy life and love and friendship, to worship God, to work hard and make a living around and despite those follies and corruptions, because they understand that THAT is what makes life important and worth living.

When a father sees his kids at play, learning with breathless excitement the everyday miracles that make up God’s world — when he sees his wife’s love and care for them in a million ways despite all the aggravations and distractions of daily life — when at the end of a long day he sees her exhausted and distracted — no longer the young girl he married but with this inner core of steel wrapped in boundless love — when the light hits her mussed-up hair and her careworn face just right — well, a man will do anything to protect those moments, to shield those people he loves from the evil that he knows always lurks right outside the door. He will do anything — ANYTHING — to protect their future and the time-tested principles that secure that future.

And I tell you now — and I proclaim to the world — to all the would-be tyrants in this country who would victimize such honest, simple people with their evil corruptions, their follies, their schemes of power and their insatiable appetites for other people’s liberty, property and lives —

YOU MESS WITH SUCH PEOPLE AT YOUR OWN DEADLY PERIL.

Yes, history is written by the people who lived it and made it happen, but it is also true that such people , at any time in our history, never have been more than a determined minority. In the war of independence that we celebrate here today, there were never more than three percent of the American colonists who actively
took the field against the forces of the King. Although this was long before opinion polls, they probably represented no more than a third of the total population. Another third supported the King of England and a further third blew with the wind and took what came. When I founded the modern Three Percent movement it was this determined minority that I had in mind.

Today’s Three Percent have drawn a line, just as you here drew a line, that we will not cross. We Three Percenters state very plainly to would-be tyrants that we will not disarm. They cannot convince us. They cannot intimidate us. They can kill us, if they think they can, but they should remember that we’ll shoot back. That is the calculation that you presented the federal government the other day. They came to force you with state-sponsored violence. They came to bend you to their will. But they discovered that you would not be bent. On that day, they didn’t like the odds. But the odds would have meant nothing without your determination. And you WERE determined.

As I said, in ordinary times it takes very bad behavior on the part of a government to provoke such people into action — BUT THESE ARE NO ORDINARY TIMES. You know that — in your head and in your gut — or you would not be here today. You would not have accomplished what many thought was flatly impossible a few days and weeks ago. You know why you came here and stood in the gap, interposing with your own bodies, at the risk of your lives, that dangerous ground between liberty and tyranny.

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Happy Easter

Easter is the cornerstone of the Christian faith. That has always been both its strength and its scandal. The notion of resurrection is so radical that unless one encounters in some fashion “the Risen Christ”…well, then all the rest is merely a nice story. A bit bloody around the edges, but a lovely myth.

Christmas gets the most notice, but it is a nighttime story and tangential to the center of Christianity. The celebration takes place at midnight, deep in the northern European cold. That story gets the children through the hard winter.

Easter though, is intimately connected to Passover. Without Passover, there would be no Easter. No glorious sunrise, no empty tomb.

Since I didn’t come here to argue but merely to celebrate this beautiful Easter morning, I’ll simply let C.S. Lewis take the stand to make the case for Easter.

You can find this essay here: God in the Dock .

In the twelfth piece from this collection, the one used for the title of his book, Lewis puts Jesus on trial so that reasonable men — and we are, all of us, “reasonable men” — can have a say in this very old argument:

…[The] problem is to reconcile two things. On the one hand you have got the almost generally admitted depth and sanity of His moral teaching, which is not very seriously questioned, even by those who are opposed to Christianity. In fact, I find when I am arguing with very anti-God people that they rather make a point of saying, ‘I am entirely in favour of the moral teaching of Christianity’ — and there seems to be a general agreement that in the teaching of this Man and of His immediate followers, moral truth is exhibited at its purest and best. It is not sloppy idealism; it is full of wisdom and shrewdness. The whole thing is realistic, fresh to the highest degree, the product of a sane mind. That is one phenomenon.

The other phenomenon is the quite appalling nature of this Man’s theological remarks. You all know what I mean, and I want rather to stress the point that the appalling claim, which this Man seems to be making, is not merely made at one moment of His career. There is, of course, the one moment, which led to His execution. The moment at which the High Priest said to Him, ‘Who are you?’ ‘I am the Anointed, the Son of the uncreated God, and you shall see me appearing at the end of all history as the judge of the universe.’ But that claim, in fact, does not rest on this one dramatic moment. When you look into his conversation you will find this sort of claim running throughout the whole thing. For instance, He went about saying to people, ‘I forgive your sins’. Now it is quite natural for a man to forgive something you do to him. Thus if somebody cheats me out of five pounds it is quite possible and reasonable for me to say, ‘Well, I forgive him, we will say no more about it.’ What on earth would you say if somebody had done you out of five pounds and I said, ‘That is all right, I forgive him? Then there is a curious thing, which seems to slip out almost by accident. On one occasion this Man is sitting looking down on Jerusalem from the hill about it and suddenly in comes an extraordinary remark — ‘I keep on sending you prophets and wise men.’ Nobody comments on it. And yet, quite suddenly, almost incidentally, He is claiming to be the power that all through the centuries is sending wise men and leaders into the world. Here is another curious remark: in almost every religion there are unpleasant observances like fasting. This Man suddenly remarks one day, ‘No one need fast while I am here.’ Who is this man who remarks one day, ‘No one need fast while I am here.’ Who is this Man who remarks that His mere presence suspends all normal rules? Who is the person who can suddenly tell the School they can have a half-holiday? Sometimes the statements put forward the assumption that He, the Speaker, is completely without sin or fault. This is always the attitude. ‘You, to whom I am talking, are all sinners,’ and He never remotely suggests that this same reproach can be brought against Him. He says again, ‘I am the begotten of the One God, before Abraham was, I am,’ And remember what the words ‘I am’ were in Hebrew. They were the name of God, which must not be spoken by any human being, the name which it was death to utter.

Well, that is the other side. On the one side clear, definite moral teaching. On the other, claims which, if not true, are those of a megalomaniac, compared with whom Hitler was the most same and humble of men.

And indeed, Jesus’ own mother had her doubts. According to the New Testament his family sought to grab him and haul him off. He was obviously the black sheep in their family, and as black sheep are wont to do, he stayed two steps ahead of them. I do wish C. S. Lewis had pointed that out.

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The Feds Invade Las Vegas

It appears that agents of the federal government — BLM, FBI, DHS, and perhaps other letters of the alphabet soup — are swarming into Las Vegas, cramming the hotels and casinos and trying unsuccessfully to look like recreational gamblers. Whatever move they’re planning, they don’t seem overly concerned about operational security, since the patriots encamped to the northeast near Bunkerville are well aware of what’s happening eighty miles down Interstate 15 in the glittering city.

Here’s the latest report from Mike Vanderboegh at Sipsey Street Irregulars:

Looking like nothing so much as the evil-eaten Emperor Palpatine from the Star Wars saga, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has promised local media that “this isn’t over.” And, in truth, reports on the Internet of Fed cops of various agencies’ jack-booted thug teams flooding into Las Vegas hotels are certainly correct. They are there by the hundreds, taking over entire floors, playing the slot machines and trying to look inconspicuous, which is working out about as well as you might expect. This is known to just about everybody who’s paying attention to the situation in Bunkerville, including the local media who are not reporting it, for now. Just who this demonstration of stark naked so-called “operational security” and impotent puffery is supposed to impress is another matter. Harry Reid, perhaps.

Bob Wright has observed that Harry seems to believe he’s in a “biggest [manly equipment]” contest with Cliven Bundy. Like the juvenile high school hall monitor who can’t get the other kids to stop running, Harry is throwing a hissy fit. Personally, I’m happy for him. Every time Harry opens his mouth, we get another hundred thousand converts to our cause nationwide. Indeed, if the mumbling, bumbling Harry did not exist, we might have to invent him. Of course, your average high school hall monitor doesn’t have the power and might of the militarized federal police establishment at his beck and call. Still, what this is supposed to accomplish, beyond a ratcheting up of the attempted psy-war campaign against the Bundys and the volunteers who guard them, is a mystery to the analysts I talk to.

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 4/19/2014

More than fifty political leaders from nine western states gathered in Utah yesterday to discuss the return of public land managed by the federal government to state control. The meeting had been planned before the standoff at the Bundy ranch in Nevada, but group noted that the recent incident in Bunkerville underlines the urgency of the issue.

In other news, approximately 850 illegal migrants were rescued today from the Mediterranean and brought to shore by two ships of the Italian Navy.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to Andy Bostom, C. Cantoni, Insubria, JD, JP, Papa Whiskey, Steen, Vlad Tepes, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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