The Envy of the Mob

What Is the Violence in American Cities All About?

The point of the mob is to destroy what it cannot create.

Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online


It is hard to tell what the current revolutionary violence in our major cities is all about.

So far, hundreds of police have been injured, dozens of people have been killed, and we have seen billions of dollars in property and collateral damage.  Ostensibly, many of the summer demonstrations were in protest over the gruesome detention and death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody on May 25.

Yet three months later, few of those trying to burn down a Portland police precinct — with police barricaded inside — or looting the high-end boutiques of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, or indiscriminately beating up innocent pedestrians, appear to be driven by Floyd’s death.

Apologists argue that the perfect-storm furor of June, July, and August was the dividend of a collective six-month fear over the COVID-19 pandemic that has, as of this writing, killed nearly 180,000 Americans.   The unprecedented national quarantine and the sudden, self-generated recession of a once-booming economy certainly added to the tensions.

Millions of youths were sequestered in their apartments and basements, unemployed, without school, and worried over their career prospects. Many simply wanted to vent their rage at the world and almost everything in it.

"Check Your Privilege" Rubbish

Chicago Politicians Shout Profanity At Each Other

Most Violent Weekend In 60 Years

Tristan Justice
The Federalist

Chicago suffered its most violent Sunday in 60 years with 18 murders on May 31, according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab reported by the Chicago Sun-Times which only traces crime back to 1961.

The Midwestern city hit the somber milestone as another round of ruthless rioting hit the streets following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody which sparked the worst outbreak of nationwide civil unrest in decades.

Chicago saw seven murders between May 29-30, bringing the weekend total 25 making it the deadliest weekend in the city’s modern history, which had already struggled to shed an international reputation for its rampant crime, according to the Sun-Times.

As lawmakers confronted its latest epidemic of violence to grip the community, leaked audio from a May 31 conference call between the mayor and 50 alderman shows the meeting escalated into a profanity-laced shouting match. One alderman demanded answers on how the city was caught so unprepared and responded so poorly to riots, allowing businesses to go up in flames.

Name and Shame

Training For War Upon the US

Portland Antifa Cell Trains Recruits to ‘Eye Gouge,’ ‘Destroy Your Enemy’.  

Chris Tomlinson
Breitbart London

Investigative journalist group Project Veritas has released purported undercover footage of the secretive Rose City Antifa group in Portland, Oregon, alleging to show activists promoting violence and teaching combat techniques.

The footage was released on Thursday morning and reveals that Project Veritas, led by investigative journalist James O’Keefe, had infiltrated Rose City Antifa (RCA) through an unnamed individual who had taken undercover footage of the violent group’s ultra-secretive meetings. 

In one of the clips, a man identified as Nicholas Cifuni states that RCA members needed to hide their weapons from the police saying, “don’t be that fucking guy with the goddamn spike brass knuckles getting photos taken of you.”

“Police are going to be like, ‘perfect we can prosecute these fuckers, look how violent they are,’ and not that we aren’t, but we need to fucking hide that shit,” he says.  “Practice things like an eye gouge, it takes very little pressure to injure someone’s eyes,” the man continues. “It’s not boxing, it’s not kickboxing, it’s like destroying your enemy.”

Maori Youth In Our Courts

Facing Up--Or Not

It appears there are no solutions to the endless lines of Maori in our courts to be sentenced for serious crime.  Secular humanism has come to a dead end.  What on earth is to be done?  No-one knows.  No-one is prepared to speculate, let alone say.  

When the fundamental fabric of human society is torn up and thrown away, government programmes laced with billions of dollars will only exacerbate the problem--as has happened.  New Zealand's great god of the age--Secular Gummint--has failed miserably.  The tsunami of crime continues.  More hands are wrung.  More lamentations are heard.  Nothing changes.  Except for the worse.

We published an article on Maori youth yesterday, which included the following:

One of the most poignant sentencing notes I've read was by Judge Gerard Winter. A judge in Auckland for seven years, he was sentencing an 18-year-old for kidnap and aggravated robbery last year. He robbed two international students at gunpoint.

Before sentencing the man to 25 months' jail, the judge traversed the figures of Māori crime and incarceration rates included in the Waitangi Tribunal's Tū Mai te Rangi report. Judge Winter granted the youth a five-month discount to his sentence on the strength of a cultural report that covered the decades and generations that preceded the youth, and his whānau's rural-to-urban move and its impacts.  "Each and every day this court is engaged in sentencing, far too often there are young Māori offenders appearing for sentence on the very worst crime at category 3 level," the judge said. 

The Great Secular Humanist dream has turned into a nightmare.  The only thing that has changed is that now a few more people are prepared to own up to its wretched failures.  But they have no solution to offer, except more of the same.  We are approaching the layman's definition of insanity.

This is not a racial issue.

Politicians and Do-Gooders Living in Alice's Wonderland

Gangs are Changing All Right – For The Worse

David Garrett
Kiwiblog

Gangs are changing alright – for the worse

One of the “experts” at Andrew Little’s justice talkfest is Dr Jarrod Gilbert of Canterbury University. Gilbert has pretty much supplanted Greg Newbold as the media’s “go to” guy on gangs and crime. Gilbert is the author of “Patched: the history of gangs in New Zealand”. In it, Gilbert manages for the most part to disguise the fact that he is essentially an apologist for gangs. His recent message – and no doubt the message  he will  preach  at the Justice Summit – is that gangs are changing for the better, and so must our attitude to them. The subtext is that gangs are becoming more like the “alternative form of whanau” that Tariana Turia has claimed for years that they are. Nothing could be further from  the truth.

This morning, 21 August,  Stuff reports a gang shooting in Wanganui in which a gang member died  when a rival gang invaded his house. Two months ago there was a similar incident in which a young gang associate died and his girlfriend, who he apparently died trying to protect, was seriously injured. Wanganui was also the scene of a drive by gang shooting in which a young baby was killed in 2007.

And it’s not just  gang members shooting at  each other. In January 2017 the Black Power took a funeral procession through Mongrel Mob “territory” in Whakatane. It was an organized confrontation in  which numerous shots were fired at police in the streets of Whakatane. The members of the two gangs involved  were obviously totally unconcerned about the safety of innocent bystanders. By pure chance, no-one was killed.

This sort of behaviour has been going on for at least twenty years, and contrary to Gilbert’s claims,  gang violence involving firearms is becoming more not less common.  This morning’s murder is just the latest such incident. And for any reader of Gilbert’s book, none of this can be a surprise. The Mongrel Mob for example idolize  and aspire to ever more “mongrelish behaviour”. “Mongrelish behaviour” is anything which is contrary to and grossly affronts the norms of ordinary civilized behaviour: raping and sometimes killing women to get a patch (Mallory Manning); bashing and even  killing anyone who gets in their way; bashing, raping and intimidating the “bitches” who serve their material and sexual needs.

The gang problem is of course not new: in 1972 Norman Kirk pledged to “take the bikes off the bikies”. Once in office, nothing was done.

"Crazy, Violent City"

London Burning

Liam Deacon
Breitbart London

A young father and a woman were stabbed in London within 30 minutes last night, as the number murdered in the capital this year hits 59. The killings come as News Yorkers living in London said they fear the “crazy” violent crime wave overtaking the city. “It’s like home but without the breakdancing,” one said.

The Metropolitan force launched the first murder probe after Raul Nicolaie, 26, was stabbed at his flat in Colindale, north London. He was rushed to hospital but died from the injuries.  A woman, 34, was arrested at the scene and was taken to a north London police station. She and the dead man were known to each other.

Just half an hour after later, a woman in her 30s was found with fatal knife wounds at a house in Brixton at around 6.30pm on Sunday. She was pronounced dead at the scene, police said.  A man in his 20s was arrested on suspicion of the killing and he remains in custody at a south London police station. It is thought the victim and the man arrested were known to each other.

Inglorious London

First, There Was Sodom and Gomorrah--And Now, London.

Churchgoer Is 19th Homicide Victim in Sadiq Khan’s London This Month

Jack Montgomery
Breitbart News

A 50-year-old Christian has become the 19th homicide victim in Sadiq Khan’s London this month.
David Potter was found stabbed to death in his flat above an Asian off-licence in Tooting by police on Monday afternoon, the Evening Standard reports.

Thought to be the eleventh homicide victim in the British capital in a fortnight, Mr. Potter is said to have been a regular churchgoer, and often took in homeless people to stay with him after having spent some time as a rough sleeper himself in 2003.  “He was a good man. There was never a problem,” commented a worker at the off-licence he lived above.

Religion and Violence

Cheap Propaganda

One never ceases to chuckle at the nonsense spouted about "religion" by the allegedly irreligious, or by those who should know better.  Here is a classic of the genre:

It is somewhat trite, but nevertheless sadly true, to say that more wars have been waged, more people killed, and these days more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history.  [Charles Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2002),  p.1.]

Ah, yes.  Trite indeed.  Why not make the following claim--equally true, and meaningless: "more wars have been waged under the influence of breathing than any other force in history"?  As Christians, we should never fall into the trap of such lazy, foolish generalisations.  Coincidence does not mean causality, as any student of Logic 101 would insist.  Kimball, being a professing Christian, should know better.

The Scriptures declare that all men are religious, and act with religious motivation of one kind or another.  It is the fool who says in his heart that there is no God  [Psalm 14:1; Psalm 53:1].  Moreover, every single human being knows the true God, according to Romans 1:21:

For although they knew God, they did not honour him as God or give thanks to him, but they [mankind] became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

The key issue is not whether a man is religiously motivated, or not--since all are to one extent or another--but what the particular doctrines and precepts are which that man's religion teaches.   Stalin, for example, was an intensely religious man.

Cutting Through the Fog

Will The Real Islamic Believer Please Stand Up

Islam has a problem with violence and warfare.  The "problem" lies here: warfare, violence, and oppression are found at the heart of the religion.

Before going further, we need to take stock of some strenuous efforts on the part of some who strive for an Islamic "Reformation" which, whilst acknowledging Islam's roots and past, would move to a modernised, pacific set of beliefs.  We might call it neo-Islam, or liberal Islam, or enlightened Islam.  People such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali have been so committed to this cause that she has lived her life in virtual hiding, under endless fatwa and death threats.  The threateners confirm the need of what Ali espouses--namely, that modern and moderate Islam must break away from the Islam's historical legacy of violence and bloodshed.

Terms like "reformation" can be deceptive; hence, the quotation marks.  The Protestant Reformation was an attempt to uncover and recover the original purity, the founding doctrines and praxis of the Christian faith.  The "reformation of Islam" means something entirely the opposite.  In this case, "reformation" means modern Islam breaking away from the doctrines and practice of the founders of Islam--namely, Muhammad and the four "rightly guided Caliphs".  In other words, the kind of reformation Ayaan Hirsi Ali wants to see is a modern Islam which has rejected all primitive, violent, and extreme doctrines and practices.

Antifa Thugs are the New Brownshirts

Antifa Just Showed Its True Colors. Again.

There is no apologetic for Marxist violence.

By David French
National Review Online

If 2016 is the year when our political parties failed, inflicting on America arguably its worst presidential choice in our nation’s history, then 2017 is when our broader institutions began to lose their collective minds. This is the year when reasonable men surrendered to unreason — when political tribalism trumped human decency.

The primary tragedy of Charlottesville was the loss of a young woman’s life. The secondary tragedy was the distortion of our political culture. The president of the United States actually declared some portion of a collection of neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and alt-right white nationalists to be “very fine people.” He just couldn’t bring himself to completely disavow men and women who’d supported him since the day he descended down the escalator at Trump Tower.

Yet rather than doing the easiest and most sensible thing in the world — condemning white supremacy while also condemning political violence on the far left — some portion of the left-wing intelligentsia actually decided to embrace their own thugs. They supported Antifa. They decided to lionize some of the worst people in American life. And in so doing, they actually compared them to the American heroes who stormed Omaha Beach. The tweets below, as the saying goes, did not age well.

Letter from America (About Leftist Violence Being Only Loving Correction)

‘No Enemies on the Left’ Is Still the Mantra of  Liberals

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission refuses to condemn antifa violence.

By John Fund
National Review Online

One of the great gifts the British writer George Orwell gave us, in addition to his classics 1984 and Animal Farm, was a clear and uncompromising look at dangerous ideologies. In “Orwell and the British Left,” British writer Ian Williams recalls Orwell’s underlining of “the old, true and unpalatable conclusion that a Communist and a Fascist are somewhat nearer to one another than either is to a democrat.” Orwell’s well-observed conclusion nonetheless scandalized many on the left who rallied behind the Marxist phrase “no enemies on the left.”

Sadly, a quarter century after the fall of Communism, too many leftists are still ignoring Orwell and refusing to acknowledge the reality of left-wing brutality. In the wake of Charlottesville, eyewitnesses and reporters agreed that while the violence was instigated by neo-Nazis and white nationalists, it was countered with bloody counterattacks by left-wingers and black-shirted anarchists wearing masks. There was a clear asymmetric outcome to the violence: A white nationalist mowed down protestors with his car, killing a 32-year-old woman.

But that didn’t mean there were no victims of left-wing violence. Antifa — short for “anti-fascist” — protestors came armed with pepper spray, bricks, and clubs. Antifa members believe that racist speech is violence and that they must counter it physically, not just oppose it with rhetoric or better ideas.

As the New York Daily News reported, among antifa’s victims were journalists:

Left-Wing Brown Shirts

 Angry Left Stirs Up Violent Hatred

Karl Du Fresne
Stuff

Hamburg last week was described as looking like a war zone after masked rioters ransacked shops, torched cars and built barricades, which they then set alight.   The rioters were protesting against the G20 summit, although what noble purpose was served by looting shops, burning cars and making off with stolen ATMs wasn't clear.

Nonetheless we're expected to believe that the protesters had more high-minded motives than the G20 leaders, whom the protesters insist are all irredeemably venal and corrupt.  Meanwhile, thousands of kilometres away, a violent mob stormed the Venezuelan parliament and attacked opposition MPs, some of whom suffered broken ribs and head injuries.   In both instances, the perpetrators were from the Left: in Hamburg, anarchists, communists and environmental activists; in Caracas, supporters of the socialist president Nicolas Maduro.

The Left has a problem here.

Disturbing Trends

Violence Is No Respecter of Persons

Is the Left prone to violence in its propagation of its ideology?  Clearly there are millions of left-wing folk who detest violence and eschew it to the depths of their being.  Clearly there are plenty of left-wing politicians who speak against attempting to promote their ideology by deploying force.  Nonetheless there is now a disturbing trend (it would seem) for some left wing folk to resort to aggressive behaviour, if not outright violence.

The latest example is James ‘Tom’ Hodgkinson, a left-wing protagonist who "shot congressman Steve Scalise during an attack on a Republican congressional baseball practice session on Wednesday, was a leftwing political activist with a record of domestic violence."  [The Guardian]

James Hodgkinson

But this is not an isolated occurrence.

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

It's Not OK to Punch Fascists

Even if they deserve the term

Liam Hehir
Stuff

Not long ago, disreputable Right-winger Richard Spencer was attacked on live television. Spencer is often accused of being a Nazi though he disputes that label.

A man attacks Richard Spencer during the ABC's live interview.

He is undoubtedly a purveyor of white identity politics, however, and is notable for coining the term "alt-right". At the time he was attacked he was being interviewed on the street during the Trump presidential inauguration. A man came up, smashed him in the side of the face and ran off.

A punch directly to the head is serious business. A blow to the cranium – even a relatively restrained one – can cause lasting damage. Spencer could have been seriously hurt or even killed.

Nevertheless, for many "liberals" in the United States and elsewhere, the sight of such a villainous personage being clocked caused much glee. The offender was compared to Indiana Jones, Captain America, the Blues Brothers and other pop-culture icons who were famous for their (fictional) assaults on Nazis.  Videos of the incident set to music went viral, with a former Obama administration speechwriter tweeting that, "I don't care how many different songs you set Richard Spencer being punched to, I'll laugh at every one."

Since then, it has become clear that the idea of using violence against alleged fascists has gained some respectability.

The Layman's Koran, Part II

Easy Recruits to Violence and Murder

The fog of war still swirls around the Orlando shooting, but the murderer of fifty or so people appears to be Islamic, who had attended a homosexual bar, either to "case the joint" or to participate in the bar's social life, or something else.

But once again it begs the question of how Islamic people can so easily be radicalised and commit murder.  What is it about the faith of Islam that makes it the most violent and murderous religion upon the planet by a long, long shot?

Reading the Koran provides some clues.  We offer a possible explanation.  On virtually every page of the Koran the reader is threatened with references to Hell, hellfire, judgment, and curse.  Allah is a minatory deity.  The key reason to persuade people to believe and follow Islam is to avoid the judgement of Allah for their sins.  These precepts are repetitive and pervasive throughout the Koran.  Pick any chapter.  Here is one chosen at random:

Hell will lie in ambush, a home for the transgressors.  There they shall abide long ages; there they shall taste neither refreshment nor any drink, save boiling water and decaying filth: a fitting recompense. [The Tidings]

 But at the same time there are repeated references to Allah being both compassionate and merciful.

Here is the question: to whom is Allah compassionate and merciful?

Family Violence

Axe Grinding On a Whetstone of Half-Truths

One of the local rags has been running an extended feature on domestic violence, with almost sole concentration upon males assaulting females.  Some of it has been utter nonsense, such as when an erstwhile academic claimed that one in three women has suffered violence at the hands of a male.  Such wild exaggerations do the cause no good at all and severely discredit the case.

But domestic violence of the category "Male assaults female" remains despicable.  It is criminal.  It deserves the full weight of the law and justice to roll down upon it.  However, the way this has been dealt with in the newspapers has been flagrantly sexist.  There has been nary a peep about the other half--that is, the violence perpetrated when "Female assaults male" or "Female assaults child".  Once again, the ideological cant of the media and the protagonists of the cause end up discrediting the entire matter.  They are all embarrassing advocates indeed.

A far more faithful, truth-telling advocate has been Bob McCroskrie, of Family First New Zealand.

Letter From the UK (About Swedish Gun Crime)

Gun Crime in Just One Swedish City Higher Than All Nordic Nations Combined

By Oliver Lane
BreitbartLondon

As neighbouring Norway becomes so safe police are preparing to hand in their firearms, Sweden is riding on the crest of a migrant gun crime wave fuelled by bloody gang wars.

Not only is gun crime in Sweden higher than all other Nordic nations combined, but such violence in just one city is enough alone to beat Sweden’s neighbours. Third largest city Malmö, in Sweden’s south-west, and just a ten minute train ride from Danish capital Copenhagen over the border, has recorded 63 people shot in the past five years.

In next-door Copenhagen, the number is 30. In Oslo and Helsinki, the capitals of Norway and Finland respectively, just ten people have been shot in the past five years each. Already multicultural paradise Malmö is higher than these three capitals combined, but this number is dwarfed in turn by gang warfare trouble city Gothenburg, where 109 people have been shot.

In Sweden’s own capital Stockholm, 189 people have been shot in the same time frame, reports AftonBladet.

The latest of these attacks was on Saturday, as a 37-year-old man was killed in a Southern Stockholm suburb. Shot 14 times in the chest and back, the Expressen reports he had previous convictions for drug dealing. This shooting came less than 24-hours after a 26-year-old man was shot to death in Gothenburg, western-Sweden while he played hockey on a school field. A sub-machine gun, pistol, and hand grenade were later found discarded nearby.

Tolerance Has Its Limits

Some Murders are More Acceptable Than Others

Sweden has been called the most peaceful country in Europe. It has been a nation which celebrates tolerance, albeit in a secular humanist form.  Anything and everything goes, as long as one does not disturb the peace.  Humanitarianism--which is much celebrated in a self-satisfied manner--proclaims that nothing human is foreign or intrinsically bad.  The adage, "I am the master of all things, and nothing human is foreign to me" is the credo of its humanitarian society.  Sweden has sought to live out these beliefs consistently in its civil and national government.

One has always suspected that the official blurb did not reflect reality.  Recently, the suspicion has hardened into evidential certainty.  Sweden is under attack from external, yet imported, forces.  It is crumbling from within because effete smugness and self-satisfaction does not cope well with violent external threats.  For the Swedes, the reason violence is rising lies with the failure of Swedish society.

Migrant, imported violence is on the rise.  The Swedes feel guilty about it.  Sweden is to blame.  Smugness has morphed into guilt.  At the same time, violence against migrants is also rising.  Once again, Sweden is racked with guilt.  This from Oliver Lane, writing for Breitbart London:

Secularism's Messiah

Salvation by Law and the Prison

It is axiomatic in a Christian Commonwealth that a sharp distinction is drawn between sins and crimes.  All crimes, of course, are sins.  But not all sins are crimes--in fact, very few of them are.

But in the world of Unbelief no-one can draw a demarcation between sins and crimes.  All iniquities, all evil is potentially criminal.  Since, in modern secularist Unbelief there is no god or saviour apart from the state, all attempts to remove evil from society will lead inevitably to more and more sins being criminalised.  The upshot is the rise of a progressive tyranny.  The state becomes more and more authoritarian, intrusive, hectoring, demanding, ruling, and bossy.  In the end, authoritarianism risks developing into full throated totalitarianism.

In the United Kingdom (once a Christian Commonwealth, now a secularist paradise) a draft bill would have husbands face fourteen years in prison if they shout at their wives.

Advocates Posing as Academics

Propaganda and The Anti-Smacking Shills

The fallacy of false cause is pretty much universal amongst academics these days--which is to say they cannot think straight.  We have had presented to us one of the more hyper-ventilated examples recently.  In the NZ Herald an Australian academic breathlessly informs us that parental smacking of children to discipline them is utterly terrible.  The academic in question, Bernadette Saunders is introduced to us as follows:

Bernadette Saunders is a Senior Lecturer Social Work at Monash University. She has received two separate funding grants from the Australian Research Council and the Legal Services Board Grants Program to pursue research on the physical punishment /lawful correction of children.

Our academic expert has received money to "pursue research" into the "physical punishment/lawful correction of children".  This is a thorough misdirection.  Mz Saunders is an ideological advocate, a shill, not an objective researcher.  She is being funded for purposes of propaganda.  She is not an honest trader.  How do we know this?

Firstly, the piece published in the NZ Herald was based upon an article by Saunders published in The Conversation  otherwise known as The Diatribe.