Month: June 2015

Ancient Scrolls Say Prophet Mohammed Committed Suicide

Reuters, June 8, 2015, Cairo, Egypt. British and
Pakistani archeologists working at an undisclosed site in Jordan have found
what they say is hard evidence that the founder of the Islamic religion
committed suicide.

While analyzing scrolls dating back approximately
to the year 630 A.D., Dr. Jummara Hashish, chief archeologist of the Islamabad
Institute of Islamic Studies in Pakistan, says a hand-written note at the
bottom of a common prayer scroll revealed that one of Mohammed’s wives
witnessed the suicide. She later wrote a brief account of the event, and hid it
and the suicide note in a clay pot used for storing grain, along with several
other scrolls. It is believed by scholars that the documents are authentic.
They and the other documents found in the jar were subjected to carbon-14 and
other tests to determine their age.

Scholars who have been painstakingly translating
the documents, which were in a remarkably well-preserved state, say the scroll written
by the wife details the last moments of the prophet’s life.  His final
message, never seen until now, says:

“To all those who have faithfully followed my blessed example and
supported the campaign to bring the true message of Allah to the world these
past decades… I bid farewell.  I have made an unforgivable error which
must not go uncorrected or unpunished.  Yesterday I drew a picture of
myself to send to my nephew in Benny al-Hill.  I did this of my own free
will and with what little skill I have at sketching.  During the night, I
had a revelation in which Allah through Gabriel told me that anyone who drew an
image of me (blessings and peace be upon me!) was to be put to death,
preferably by beheading.  I do now what must be done, what Allah
commands.”

Unfortunately, no sketch or self-portrait of
Mohammad was found with the two documents. It is thought that his nephew was at
the time living in Dumat al-Jandal (also known then as Benny al-Hill) with the
Banu Tayy tribe (nicknamed then as the Banyan Trees), near what is now Amman,
Jordan.

The rest of the account, in the words of his wife, whose name remains unknown,
is a bit difficult to understand because of changes in the Arabic language over
the past fourteen centuries. But it appears to indicate that after signing his
mark to the aforementioned suicide note – also drafted by his wife since the
prophet could neither read nor write nor knew how to hold a stylus except as a
weapon – Mohammed took up a knife used for butchering sheep and attempted to
cut off his own head.  About a quarter of the way through, he expired from
blood loss.

The wife’s account indicates that in addition to
the blood loss, it was attempting to cut through his own neck bone that gave Mohammad
the most trouble.

When the wife determined that her husband was dead,
she wrote that she immediately informed his sixteen other wives, who all
embarked on a week-long period of mourning, fasting and Sharia-mandated
ululation.

It is not known how the Islamic world at the time received
news of the prophet’s passing as a suicide. Islamic historian Bilious Hisham Kabboomi,
head of the Center for Islamic Dawa at the University of Cambridge, noted that “While
it is written that if at death Mohammad’s body was indeed lifted by angels and
taken directly to Paradise where his partially severed head was restored by a
merciful Allah, then the person buried in the Al-Masjid an-Nabaw, or the Prophet’s Mosque, in Medina is an
imposter. This is indeed an unprecedented conundrum facing the Ulema. By that I
mean the Sunni or Wahhabist Ulema, not the Shi’ite or Heretical Ulema.”

This week, upon hearing the news, a representative from the Islamic State
paused in video-recording the cutting off the head of a 10-year-old Christian
boy in Raqqa, Syria, and commented, “This scroll shows the ultimate Jihad,
and just proves the prophet was the real deal!  I only hope that I too
might be given a revelation from Allah and find the strength to follow his
example. What good is an intact head compared to mindless devotion to the
one true religion of peace?! See this kid? Soon he will be at peace – and in
two pieces! Hah, hah, hah!”

Mohammad would have been between sixty and
sixty-two years old at the time of his suicide. He was buried in Medina, where
he and his family spent his retirement after the prophet’s career of conquest,
slaughter, rape, mayhem, banditry, looting, and habitual bloody-mindedness. It
is not known how the scrolls made their way to Jordan from Medina, a distance
of over 560 miles or 960 kilometers, except by camel caravan.

Additional reporting by Jack Battler and Ed Cline

Skeen did not have
to search far for Harker’s titles. A block and a half from his office, he found
three of them in the Bell Buoy Bookstore. He had found many of the reference
books in his office and home study bookshelves in this store.

He did not bother
browsing for Harker’s titles, but asked the lone clerk if he carried any. The
store was empty of customers and browsers, and the clerk looked like he wanted
to talk to someone.

The clerk, a bald,
roly-poly little man wearing thick glasses, responded immediately. “Hosanna
Harker? Yes, sir, I have several of his books here! I’ve stacked them all
together. This way, sir.” He knew Skeen as a customer, but did not know his
name.

The man led Skeen
down some aisles of books and pointed to a line of gray spines on a middle
shelf. “There we are! Which ones would you be interested in, sir?”

“One in
particular, The Crystal Magician,”
said Skeen.

“Ah! His Erskine
Childers title!” The clerk reached up, drew out the book, and handed it to
Skeen.

It was a superb
looking book. It had a thick gray leather cover with embossed gilt lettering
and a colored, embossed map of an island in the middle in a black frame. The
pages were gilt-edged, as well. Skeen opened the book. The title page read,
“The Crystal Magician, by Hosanna Paul Harker. A story of suspense.” At the
bottom of the title page was the Manxman colophon, a silhouette of a leaping
Manx cat within an arched Latin inscription, Ego Sapientia Emin Miucullum.

Skeen said, “My Latin is rusty. What does the colophon
say?”

The clerk scoffed. “Roughly translated, sir, it means, ‘I
heed my meows.’ Kind of daft and silly, if you ask me. I think ‘meows’ was
supposed to be ‘mews’ for ‘muse,’ but that didn’t translate well.”

“No comment,”
replied Skeen. He flipped through the pages, some three hundred of them. “What
did you call it?” he asked.

“That’s his
Childers book. You know, after The Riddle
of the Sands? If you’re not familiar with it, that was a pre-war novel
about a planned invasion of Britain by Germany from the Frisian Islands. Lots
of sailing and intrigue. A very popular espionage novel. Still a strong seller.
This one here is much like it, but is set during the war, although it was
published in 1921. It isn’t badly done. It’s set on the Isle of Man. That’s a map
of it on the cover. As you can see, it’s also illustrated. Very nice etchings.
All the Harker novels are illustrated. The copy in your hand was probably read
once. Not much foxing on the pages, and there are thumbprints on a few of the
pages, in the margins, and one very slight tear. Every one of these Harkers
came from an estate sale.”

“That’s odd,” said
Skeen, thinking out loud.

“What’s odd?”
asked the clerk.

Skeen shook his
head. “Nothing,” he answered. “It’s odd that one of Manxman Press’s first titles
should also feature the Isle of Man as the setting.”

 “Harker got all his details right,” said the
clerk, “about the Isle of Man and longitude and latitude and where on Man an
army could be landed, although Childers was a bit more realistic in his invasion
angle, with the Germans coming over in dozens of barges towed by tugboats to
land on England’s east coast. Harker’s invasion involves the Germans landing an
army on Man from a fleet of submarines, taking over the place, and then
plotting to sail over to Liverpool in preparation for a general invasion. Not
bad for a suspense novel, although I thought the writing was pedestrian.”

“I see The Spoiled Granary up there. Let me
look at it, too.”

The clerk reached
up and took down the title. “This is his Upton Sinclair-Frank Norris novel!”

Again, Skeen
looked perplexed.

The clerk handed
him the book. “You see, most of Harker’s books are ‘after’ the works of established
or well-known novelists. That one there is a so-called exposé of the grain
storage business in the Midwest before the war. A kind of melding of Sinclair’s
The Jungle and Norris’s The Octopus, complete with an insipid
romance between the daughter of the owner of a Minnesota grain elevator and an
agent of the Grange movement who wants to buy it for the cooperative.”

“Good God!” Skeen
muttered under his breath. He simply glanced at the equally rich-looking cover.
“Thank you for the review. Now, for the last one, A Numidian Slave.”

The clerk
shrugged, reached up while exclaiming, “Ah! His Joseph Conrad novel!” and took
down that title. He handed it to Skeen.

Skeen asked,
“Which one of Conrad’s?”

“Heart of Darkness. What else?” explained
the clerk. “It’s about an Ethiopian black fellow who’s enslaved by some Arabs
but who converts to Islam and becomes a slave-driver himself after all kinds of
suffering and horrible experiences, all graphically described.”

The clerk paused
to read off some of the other Harker titles, touching a finger to each of their
spines. “There’s his Victor Hugo novel, A
Son of a Harem, after The Man Who
Laughs. That’s about a fellow who’s the son of an English aristocrat lady
who’s captured at sea by Turks and sold into a sultan’s harem, where he’s born,
then as a young man who’s escaped being turned into a eunuch by the sultan he
gets back to England to claim a peerage and meets a lot of grief because he
can’t prove he’s the son of a late peer and not the bastard son of a sultan.

“There’s his
Sherwood Anderson novel, Day Coach from
Passiac, after Winesburg, Ohio,
both are a series of short stories, about a fellow who leaves a small town for
the big world. Either of them made me
feel glad to be born in San Francisco.”

“Doesn’t sound
like Harker is much of an original writer,” Skeen remarked.

“Well, no, I guess
he isn’t,” conceded the clerk with a sigh.

Skeen hefted the
three tomes. “I’ll take these. I might come back for those others later. No
promises, however.”

“They’re five
dollars each, sir,” the clerk warned.

“No matter.”

The clerk led him
back to the front of the store. At the cash register behind the counter, he
asked, “May I ask why you’re so interested in Harker’s novels? He’s in jail,
you know. Seems he murdered the publisher.”

Skeen smiled and
handed the clerk some bills. “No, you may not ask. And, yes, I know Mr. Harker
is in jail.”

“I know you from
somewhere,” said the clerk.

“Keep it that
way,” said Skeen, not wanting to identify himself. He did not know if the clerk
could keep a secret and he didn’t want to start speculation that might be
picked up by the newspapers, and he wasn’t ready to deal with those people, not
yet.

The clerk rang up
the sale, wrapped the books in brown paper, sealed the bundle with adhesive
tape, and asked no more questions.

Skeen thanked him.
He paused to ask, “What’s your name?”

The clerk blinked once.
“Harry Hampton, sir. Why do you ask?”

“You’ll see,”
Skeen answered. He left the shop, and walked back to the Hall of Justice near
where he had parked his roadster and drove home to Carmel Towers.

֎

“These
are very good etchings,” said Dilys. She sat with Skeen at the dinner table,
having a coffee. She held open The
Crystal Magician and was leisurely leafing through it. “Overall, these are
very handsomely made books. I wonder if the stories are handsomely written, as
well.”

Skeen
shook his head. He held open A Soiled
Granary. “I don’t think they are. The bookstore clerk I bought these from
gave me impromptu assessments of these and the others by Harker he had in the
store. I’ve only read the first few pages of this one, and I recognized
Sinclair’s kind of story almost immediately, and also pieces of Norris’s.” He
paused. “The clerk said that the writing in The
Crystal Magician was ‘pedestrian.’ I think he wanted to say it was
‘pedestrian’ in a blanket appraisal of all the novels, but didn’t say it because
he couldn’t know whether or not I liked Harker’s stuff.”

Dilys
scowled at her husband. “You’ve read that trash? Sinclair’s and Norris’s, I
mean.”

“Long
ago, before I met you, darling. It was semi-required reading at Yale.”

“I’ve
sampled it, just out of curiosity,” said Dilys. “I wanted to know what all the
fuss was about them.” She paused. “I’d like to get to know this Cyril Enfante,
the illustrator, if only to congratulate him on his skill. I wonder where he
lives.”

Skeen
replied, “I wonder if he’s read all
the Harker novels.”

“Who?”

“Cyril
EnFante.”

“Why
would you doubt it?”

“He
couldn’t be so illiterate or so ignorant that he’d not be able to recognize a
plagiarized story. I don’t know how many more novels Harker wrote and which
Manxman published here and in altered form in Britain. He would need to have
read each of these novels to know what in them was worth illustrating, just as
you read my stories.”

“This
is true,” said Dilys.

“Oh,
here’s something interesting.” Skeen had turned to the last pages of The Soiled Granary and came upon a page
with print in a different font and size, which was followed by the cat colophon.
“This should be helpful.” He read it out loud.

“Manxman
Press was born in January 1919 on the lovely, secluded Isle of Man. The founder
of this Press was recuperating from a concussion received in the blood and mud
of the Meuse-Argonne trenches. Being so incapacitated during a German artillery
barrage, and unable to continue his duties as a journalist for some American
newspapers, he hit upon the perfect restorative therapy. He conceived of a new
publishing house that would seek out and introduce to the world the lights and
spirits of those in the trenches who survived the blood and mud and injuries
far more severe than a concussion. He spent a year there in the convivial
company of Manxmen. From them he received much encouragement. And so that is
the name of this venture. Manxman Press will publish the distinguished and
outstanding literary efforts of our best and brightest writers in quality
editions.”

Dilys
turned to the end of The Crystal Magician.
“It’s here, too,” she said. She frowned again. “How could a man who could write
something like that choose to become predatory thief?”

Skeen
shrugged. “I don’t know, darling. Many decent men get worn down by the world
and turn on it.” Skeen shoved his book aside. “Anyway, that little piece of
information confirms what Susan Harker told me.”

“What
is she like?”

Skeen
described the woman and gave Dilys a précis of his conversation with her.

Dilys
put her book aside and rested her chin on her folded hands. “There’s another
mystery, darling. Women who remain loyal to rakes and bounders and completely
contemptible beasts. The kind that beat their wives or are just all-round
louts.” She paused. “Speaking of which – what was Harker like? I gathered you
weren’t much impressed with him.”

Skeen
chuckled. “Nor he with me. He’s just another all-round lout who happens to be a
writer with literary pretensions.”

Dilys
smiled ironically at her husband. “But you still want to try to prove he didn’t
murder another lout.”

“I’m
glad you said ‘try.’ It’s going to be difficult, and, at this point, for all I
know, he did murder Pearson. But even
louts deserve some justice. We’ll see what The Mouse Trap shows.”

“The
Mouse Trap?”

Skeen
scowled mockingly at Dilys. “’The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the
conscience of the king.’ Hamlet, Act Two, Scene Two. The Mouse Trap was the
name of the play Hamlet had the acting troupe put on to recreate how his uncle Claudius
murdered his brother.”

“It
isn’t your habit to quote Shakespeare, darling,” Dilys answered with a mock
disapproving shake of her head. “Why now?”

“It’s
a literary case, sweetheart. It seems Mr. Pearson and Mr. Harker got caught in
a mouse trap of their own making.”

Dilys
made a face. “And you’ve assigned yourself the task of picking them up by their
filthy tails and tossing them down the garbage chute? I would rather see you go
after just ordinary, run-of-the-mill stranglers and bank robbers.”

Skeen
rose, came around the table, and pecked Dilys on the forehead. “It’s an
occupational hazard, darling. I promise to wear surgeon’s gloves, and to scrub
my hands thoroughly after it’s all over.”

Δ

I am convinced that Barack Obama’s strategy
to swamp America with immigrants Muslim and Mexican was inspired by his
watching Star Trek: The Next Generation,
which was broadcast between 1987 and 1994. What he likely took away from the
series was a plan very similar to that of the Borg. As Jean-Luc Picard,
commander of the Enterprise, said of the Borg:  “In their collective state, the Borg
are utterly without mercy; driven by one will alone: the will to conquer. They
are beyond
redemption, beyond reason.”

You know what the Borg are, don’t you? That interstellar
beehive of conquered worlds, using the enslaved as disposable pawns in that
will to power? “Resistance is futile.” Resist, and you die. Submit, and you
survive as a numbered cipher in service to the Collective.

That was a good plan, Obama must have thought,
while he was “community organizing” in Chicago and teaching – or maligning or
mis-teaching with tongue in cheek – constitutional law at the University of Chicago,
as a “visiting fellow.”  He was going to “fix”
this country. It was too “white.” Too beholden to the “flawed” Constitution.
Too European.  He had a plan to swamp the
country with Muslims and Mexicans, that is, with any real Mexicans or Central
Americans passing through Mexico to enter the U.S. 

As long as the “immigrants” were brown or black or
fifty shades of gray between those hues, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if
they wore burqas or niqabs or baseball caps or Pancho Villa hoodies, one and
all were welcome to come and overwhelm Honky. He certainly wasn’t going to
encourage and enable the invasion of the U.S. by white Europeans who wished to
flee their looting welfare states, as I’m sure many want to. Use the Muslims and
Mexicans as one would use salt and sand on icy roads. Salt will break up the
ice, sand will give traction. After all, grains of salt or sand have no individual
identities. Being Muslims, Mexicans, and assorted varieties of manqués and
ciphers in between those hues,  their “selves”
are inextricably linked to the tribe, the Umma, the Cube, the race, La
Raza.  You don’t give them dirty
looks or they’ll hit you.

But if you even think of hitting them, you’re
guilty of racism and thoughtcrime.

In the name of multiculturalism, Obama has his own Treky
Prime Directive: Never, ever ask Muslims and Mexicans to discard their stagnant
or alleged cultures and assimilate into American culture and adopt American values
of freedom. To expect them to would confess that “latent”
racism among white and Asian Americans and even among blacks that Obama and
Hillary Clinton are so well-acquainted with. Muslims of whatever race and Mexicans,
even if some of them do resemble Vicente Fox, are not to be
charged with racism.  That, after all, would
be racist.

And then came along the hit TV series, The Walking Dead, in 2010, two years
into his first term, and Barack Obama had another brilliant idea: Treat the herds
of flesh- and wealth-eating Muslims and Mexicans as brainless zombies feeding off
of American efforts and sweat (via the welfare state and protected minority
laws), who have invested – or  infested,
if you like – the U.S. as “the walking dead,” but on the sly, so their feelings
won’t be hurt. (¡Somos los muertos vivientes
y usted no puede tocarnos!)  Obama won’t reveal that he
has nothing but contempt for the people he claims he represents, or champions,
or uses his executive powers for. Muslims and Mexicans are merely pawns in his
quest for power. Please! No falafels or enchiladas at the White House dinner
table! We’re not that common! Michelle! You spilled some of that Sauce
Cardinal all over your $500 Erin Featherstone
blouse! Do you think I’m made of money? Oh. That’s right. Taxpayers are made of
money.

The primary goal of Obama’s Borg/Mexican strategy is
to “get Whitey.” That has been the leitmotif of his seven-year reign. To drown civilization
with social and economic ballast as it was drowned by zombies in World War Z.  To get Americans to accept halal food and to whistle “La cucaracha”
while they worked and to fast with their fellow Muslim-citizens on Ramadan or
suffer another terrorist attack and refrain from wearing American flag t-shirts
in the presence of “Mexican-American” high school students.

Dare we call Obama a racist? Yes. Would he admit
it? No, not in so many words. He would deny it in his usual folksy yadda-yadda patois. But if one were to attach a summary
evaluation of his words and actions over the last seven years – aside from his
booby-trapped foreign policy and Marxist economic “reforms” – that’s the only
conclusion one can come to. He’s out to impoverish the country. To “transform”
it. To play the black knock-down game on it as many times as possible until it
swears eternal fealty to the Umma and obeys the Ulema and white Americans revere
Saul Alinsky and Karl Marx and their neighborhood El Salvadoran rapist and thug
with his “colors” tattooed to his chin.

It may be interesting to witness the clash between Muslims
and Mexicans over who gets to lord it over the fetid swamp that will be America
when it’s multiculturally conquered and “properly” ethnically diverse once Obama
is finished stocking it with alligators, escaped pythons, poisonous snakes,
mosquitoes, and unpotable water. The paddle tour will not be as entertaining as
one through The Great Okefenokee Swamp.

On  June 16th on FrontPage Daniel Greenfield wrote
a review of Ann Coulter’s book on this very subject and “amnesty,” ¡Adios, America!.

Amnesty is a sinkhole of corrupt
interests, from businesses looking for cheap labor to Democrats looking for
cheap votes, and panic by fossilized political entities like the NAACP, unions
and the Republican Party; eager to surrender out of fear that they will be be
left behind by the demographic future…..

Coulter’s latest book, “Adios,
America” is an uncompromising attack on the policies, justifications and
rhetoric of amnesty. It’s full of the punchy quotes she’s known for, such as
“Americans ought to be suspicious about being told incessantly fences don’t
work. It’s like being told wheels don’t work”, accompanied by a broad survey of
the entire immigration and illegal immigration debate.

The biggest targets are the latest
efforts at amnesty, from the disastrous Republican amnesty effort to Obama’s
unilateral legalizations, which have been disguised by Orwellian word games.
After years of amnestiers claiming that their amnesty isn’t really amnesty, she
lays out the simple fact that “Any law that forgives an illegal act, in whole
or part, is an amnesty….”

But…but….all those defamed “illegals”
will boost the economy and help to create wealth and not take jobs away from
blacks and whites, won’t they? Isn’t that what the immigrants from Europe did
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries?

Yes. That’s what they did
then.  The catch is that there  was no welfare state for them to hook up to,
either. No federal teats three dozen little piglets could suck on. Nor were
they looking for any. Immigrants of the past, as recently as Cubans, were
looking for freedom – not freedom to loot and become parasites.

As she points out, the vast majority of illegal aliens once
legalized will begin collecting between $14,642 and $36,992 from the taxpayer.

“We’re always told that we need to
amnesty illegals to shore up Social Security. How, exactly, are people who make
so little money that they don’t pay income taxes going to save Social
Security?” she asks.

Mexicans
can play the cultural, economic and civilizational jihad game as well as Muslims. All they need to do is take a leaf
from their Islamic ilk about how to milk the welfare state and never pay into
it.  Soren Kern had some interesting
statistics to report in his Gatestone article, “Welfare Jihad in
Europe” from May 31st.

Anjem Choudary, a British-born
radical Islamic cleric who lives off the British welfare state, has repeatedly urged
his followers to quit their jobs and claim unemployment benefits so they have
more time to plot holy war against non-Muslims.

Choudary believes that Muslims
are entitled to welfare payments because they are a form of jizya, a tax
imposed on non-Muslims in countries run by Muslims, as a reminder that
non-Muslims are permanently inferior and subservient to Muslims.

In 2010, The Sun reported
that Choudary takes home more than £25,000 ($39,000) a year in welfare
benefits. Among other handouts, Choudary receives £15,600 a year in housing
benefit to keep him in a £320,000 ($495,000) house in Leytonstone, East London.
He also receives £1,820 council tax allowance, £5,200 income support and £3,120
child benefits. Because his welfare payments are not taxed, his income is
equivalent to a £32,500 ($50,000) salary. By comparison, the average annual
earnings of full-time workers in Britain was
£26,936 ($41,000) in 2014.

Moreover,
Kern reports that social welfare fraud of the kind perpetrated in Denmark is being
repeated throughout Europe, and that a Swedish soldier deployed in
Afghanistan said that he was likely to get less help when he came back to
Sweden than returning jihadists [from Syria and ISIS] were.

What’s
at stake is the composition of the electorate in any election year. Writes
Greenfield about Coulter’s book. The composition will be Borg and Mexican:

The transnational assumption behind
the advocacy for illegal immigration is that the Americans, the French or the
Israelis are not entitled to have their country the way they want it, but must
bow to a higher international agenda. And if the locals don’t like it, they can
always be displaced and replaced by a new herd of voters who may be a financial
burden, but who will always vote the correct way.

 Taking apart the 11 million figure often
bandied about, Coulter contends that it’s more like 30 million and warns that
amnesty is the final and ultimate political issue of the Republic.

“If we lose immigration,” writes
Coulter, “we lose everything.”

Now, isn’t
that “racist”?

Mexicans
can also take another leaf from their Muslim  compañeros de armas  in Europe once they become permanent, “legalized”
settlers in America who refuse to assimilate.  In 2012, Walid Shoebat discovered something
called the Institute
of Muslim Minority Affairs. I’m sure La Raza has
a similar organization that researches and describes how the gringo culture can
be made to bend to the Hispanic will.

The manifesto
explains “Muslim Minority Affairs” as more than an organization or a
social concept, but as a calculated foreign policy of the Saudi Ministry of
Religious Affairs, designed to achieve these specific goals. Now, don’t start
denigrating the Saudis. They’re our “friends,” aren’t they?

1) Recruit individual Muslims who
live in non-Muslim lands and transform them as a collective unit by
establishing Islamic centers, educational programs, mosques, and organizations
(like the Islamic
Society of North America and the Muslim
Students Association) that serve to prevent Muslims from assimilating into
the cultures of their non-Muslim host nations.

2) Encourage these Muslim residents of non-Muslim host nations to shift the
demographic scales in their own favor by means of population growth—and
separatism—thereby enabling them to more effectively advance an agenda based on
fundamentalist Wahhabi [i.e., Saudi] teachings and the legitimation and spread
of Sharia Law in the West.

3) Eventually the proliferation of Muslims in the host nations will hit
critical mass, tilting those societies toward majority-Muslim status.

4) Ultimately, the host states will join the Muslim commonwealth.

Once the
Muslims have dealt with those pesky, nominally Catholic Mexicans, that is.

To be
continued.

A book has appeared that ought to become a primer
for all future studies of the subjects of marriage, romantic love, and
heterosexuality vs. homosexuality. This is Ron Pisaturo’s Masculine
Power, Feminine Beauty: The Volitional, Objective Basis for Heterosexuality in
Romantic Love and Marriage.

On April 7th, when Masculine Power first appeared on Amazon for sale, I wrote there:

I
recommend this book highly for anyone confused by today’s “sexual
politics.”‘ Pisaturo gets down to the basics of gender and gender
identity. Those wishing (literally) to be something else are sure to disagree
with Pisaturo’s fact-based discussion on the nature of the male and female
genders. One’s gender is not disposable, it is not a suit of clothes one can
discard and adopt another. One can’t discard it just because one doesn’t
“feel right” in it. If one’s gender doesn’t “feel right,”
that points up to a more serious and deep-rooted psychological condition and
problem than merely wanting to “switch sides.” Frankly, most gays and
lesbians and LGBTs are play-acting, even when they have “life
partners” or get “married.” Pisaturo doesn’t touch much on the
subject, but the whole “gay rights” phenomenon is a product of
Marxist deconstruction campaigns. On the other hand, Pisaturo argues
compellingly on the rightness of heterosexuality.

It is the Marxist interpretation and treatment of
heterosexuality and homosexuality that need to be combated and refuted. It is
basically a philosophical task that would challenge both Immanuel Kant and
Georg F. Hegel (and their principal political heir, Karl Marx). They have
poisoned psychoanalysis and the medical view of the subject of “sexual
orientation,” which are Progressive party lines promulgated in academia and
even in primary and secondary schools.

Daniel Greenfield as Sultan Knish wrote a fine
essay about the war on sex and marriage in his April 15th column, The
Deconstruction of Marriage. Among other things he points out that:

There
are two ways to destroy a thing. You can either run it at while swinging a
hammer with both hands or you can attack its structure until it no longer means
anything….

The left hasn’t gone all out by outlawing marriage, instead it has
deconstructed it, taking apart each of its assumptions, from the economic to
the cooperative to the emotional to the social, until it no longer means
anything at all. Until there is no way to distinguish marriage from a temporary
liaison between members of uncertain sexes for reasons that due to their
vagueness cannot be held to have any solemn and meaningful purpose….

The
deconstruction of marriage is only a subset of the deconstruction of gender
from a state of being to a state of mind. The decline of marriage was preceded
by the deconstruction of gender roles and gay marriage is being succeeded by
the destruction of gender as anything other than a voluntary identity, a costume
that one puts on and takes off….

Destroying gender roles was a prerequisite to destroying gender. Each
deconstruction leads naturally to the next deconstruction with no final
destination except total deconstruction….

Gay marriage is not a stopping point, just as men in women’s clothing using the
ladies room is not a stopping point. There is no stopping point at all….

(This is also the way of the Islamization of America
to make it Sharia-compliant. It begins with footbaths in restrooms and prayer
space at work and not reproducing Mohammad cartoons and including Muslim holidays
on desk calendars and serving halal food in restaurants.  With Islam, there is no “stopping point,”  either.  It will end with gorgeous
Megyn Kelly wearing a nijab or a burqa on Fox News so as not to offend all
the Muslims she interviews (and usually dresses down for rudeness and being proselytizing,
simple-minded blabbermouths).

For evidence of how the war on sex is metastasizing
in America, see these two links about how primary schools in Virginia
and Nebraska
are going to teach children there are no sexes or genders, and that they can
choose their own “sexual orientation” regardless of their physical attributes, or
how the venerable Oxford
English Dictionary has caved to gay and LGBT pressure and redefined the
term marriage (in 2013), and the chortling
of gays over that surrender.

My own take on the definition of marriage is this: From
an etymological standpoint, to “marry” two or more entities presumes that the
entities are unlike but “marriageable”
to form a new entity. Thus marriage
means the union of a man and woman; it does not mean the “marriage” of a man
and a man or of a woman and a woman, or the “marriage of likes. If the entities
weren’t unlike, there would be no purpose in trying to “marry” them and the
term would not be applicable. Other terms suggested by the OED for a “civil union” of gays or lesbians come to mind: union,
alliance, fusion, amalgamation, combination, affiliation, association,
connection, coupling, merger, unification, all listed by the OED as synonyms.

These alternative terms, however, are rejected by
gays and the LGBT advocates, because it is the concept of marriage they wish to suborn and corrupt, and to legitimatize their
whim-worshipping, emotional, irrational states of “orientation.” They have
politicized an otherwise innocuous concept. They want to “normalize”
homosexuality while at the same time scuttle the term normal, and to denigrate the concept of heterosexuality as just another
mode of sexual existence, so that, as Greenfield stresses, marriage can mean everything
and nothing.

Pisaturo isn’t content with simply arguing the fact
of male-female differences, which he has done as thoroughly as no other study
of the subject that I have read in the past. He delves into the hocus-pocus of
modern psychoanalysis and the alleged “scientific” explanations of “normal” vs.
“abnormal” sexual “predilections.”

Over all, Pisaturo’s book is an overture to
rational studies of heterosexuality, which studies would necessarily reflect on
the deviation of homosexuality. It wasn’t so long ago that homosexuals were
regarded as “deviants.” Masculine Power
and Pisaturo, however, stand in the same historical position as did Robert Boyle
(1627-1691) when he published his papers on chemistry
and permanently debunked alchemy as a legitimate field of study and
experimentation.  Indeed, Pisaturo has
culled and discusses the best studies of sex in the psychological fields, but
found little else but voodoo-like pronouncements that discount reality, volition
and the Law of Identity, and are little else but exercises in subjectivism and nihilism.

Pisaturo reveals that modern studies of sexual
orientation are basically governed by two main threads of “thought”: That men
and women are somehow, prenatally and biologically programmed to become
homosexuals (absent any scientific evidence to support the assertion), and so
“can’t help themselves”; or they are “conditioned” by society to suppress their
supposed polymorphic disposition to become one or the other gender.

On the social 
“conditioning” argument, he quotes Gregory M. Herek from his 1986
article in American Behavioral Scientist
(and subsequently reprinted in  1993 in Psychological Perspectives on Lesbian &
Gay Male Experiences):

Another
set of empirical findings conerns the role of defensiveness in homophobia [an
alleged neurotic fear that heterosexuals have of homosexuals, allegedly often
due to the heterosexuals fearing that they themselves have homosexual
feelings]. In psychodynamic terms, defensiveness involves an unconscious
distortion of reality as a strategy for avoiding recognition of some
unacceptable part of the self. One mode of defense is externalization of
unacceptable characteristics through projection and other strategies…..

The
social constructionist position holds that what most people call reality is a
consensus worldview that develops through social interaction (see Berger and
Luckmann 1966; Gergen 1985; Foucault 1978; Gergen 1985; Plummer 1981)….(pp.
74-75)

Pisaturo writes:

Thus
Herek here [and in other places cited by Pisaturo] reveals explicitly what I
showed was implicit in the earlier appeal to primitive tribes: Herek is arguing
that not merely is it sexual orientation that is socially constructed, and not
merely is it all of sexuality that is socially constructed, but all of reality
is socially constructed. (p. 75)

Pisaturo writes, in delineating the physiological
and psychological roles of men and women:

The
man is hard, strong, unbending, decisive, the leader, the champion, the
protector, the physically dominant one, the indomitable. The woman is soft,
supple, eager, challenging, judgmental….The man asserts his power; the woman
clutches it and feeds on it. The man dominates and conquers; the woman judges
and surrenders. The man’s actions say: “This is how I face nature alone, and
command it, for myself and for you. For my success, you are my highest reward.”
The woman’s actions say, “Yes. I approve! I commend my self to you, my
champion.” (pp. 21-22)

So, Pisaturo asks, if a man is the initiator of sex
and the dominant party between him and a woman, what can one say about men who
dominate other men in the sex act?

Such
a solitary triumph [of a man and woman separately, as individuals] is not
possible if there are two men involved in a sexual act. And, of course, the
aroused anatomical parts of two men do not fit together. (This physical fact is
one of the ‘elephants in the room’, which I will discuss later, that seem to be
taboo in contemporary academic writings in support of homosexuality.) But there
is something much worse about sexual intercourse between two men. A man needs
to know that he is indomitable. The notion of dominating another man, or being
dominated by someone – as the highest form of pleasure and spiritual
fulfillment – is a betrayal of every ounce of a man’s being. The matter is not primarily
one of physical attraction or repulsion, but of man’s need for self-esteem.  (p. 23)

Pisaturo’s book, though short, is packed with
philosophical and ideological dynamite. It is certain to find its defenders and
detractors. It is a breath of fresh air in a realm cloyingly saturated with
irrationality and political correctness.

Masculine
Power, Feminine Beauty: The Volitional, Objective Basis for Heterosexuality in
Romantic Love and Marriage, by Ron Pisaturo. CreateSpace Independent
Publishing Platform, April 2015. Paperback edition $10, Kindle edition $3.00.

No matter where I turned on the Internet today, I
encountered the Vanity
Fair cover of Bruce Jenner pretending to be a woman. I got so sick of
encountering that cover that I decided to write about it.  

Note: The link to the Vanity Fair cover story has
been removed by Vanity Fair; I was able to print the story just before the URL
was scuttled; substituting for it will be New York Times and Washington Post
stories (virtually identical in text) which highlight the Vanity Fair and Diane
Sawyer interviews of Jenner, complete with the Vanity Fair videos. (I refuse to
reproduce the Vanity Fair cover here.)

Transgenders, apparently, are the new privileged
minority. Just as Muslims are. A Muslim baker or photographer refusing to serve
gays or have them as customers — frankly, they don’t even need to have a
reason — doesn’t make the news. Only Christians, Jews, or atheists refusing to
validate homosexuality by accepting gays as “normal” clients make the news, and
then they’re excoriated for hurting the feelings of gays (or Muslims). How dare
they row against the stream of insanity?

Gays, lesbians, transgenders, and creatures great
and small in between those parameters as a whole are the new protected group, patronized
by the government and by the MSM, just as Muslims are, celebrated in especially
the news media for their cultural or gender “diversity.” You can’t offend them
without risking a lawsuit and the smears and sneers of their allies in government
and in the mainstream media. (Even Merriam-Webster,
the online dictionary, got into the act.)

Homosexuals and lesbians can be viciously nasty,
and even violent, if one rejects them as “normal” persons. If they don’t get
their way, they’ll make time to attack anyone who doesn’t submit. Lately, they’ll
farm out  their nastiness by proxy and invite  the heavy guns of the government coercion and
the skewed wisdom of suborned courts and judicial twits to enforce their whims.
They don’t necessarily seek recognition as “normal” persons. They seek obedience by normal heterosexuals. Just as
Muslims and Islam expect non-Muslims to accept Islam as the one true religion,
or else. See Daniel Greenfield’s masterful article of June 3rd, “How
Islam in America Became a Privileged Religion” for similarities between how
the LGBT movement has adopted the same tactics as Muslim “civil rights” groups
use to impose Sharia Law on the country and its institutions.

What lit my fuse was stumbling on an ESPN
press release announcing that Jenner would receive a special ESPYS award on
July 15th, the Arthur Ashe Courage Award.  Courage for what? For “coming out” and
allowing himself to become the center of a media circus freak show? Well, yes.
After all, freaks have “rights,” too, and it should be against the law to
denigrate them. According to Jay Jay (not a typo) Nesheim on June 1st:

Jenner’s
unyielding resolve and hard work enabled him to win a gold medal in the 1976
Olympics and break world records. He then parlayed that success into a variety
of roles across different areas including television, film, auto racing and
business. Although Jenner first captured the attention of the nation for his
athletic prowess and determination, the same strength of character shone
through this past April when he sat down with ABC’s Diane Sawyer to come out as
a transgender woman.

…Executive
producer Maura Mandt: “Bruce has received many accolades over the years for
being one of the greatest Olympians of our time but The ESPYS are honored to celebrate Bruce
becoming Caitlyn. She has shown the courage to embrace a truth that had been hidden
for years, and to embark on a journey that may not only give comfort to those
facing similar circumstances, but can also help to educate people on the
challenges that the transgender community faces.”

….The
Arthur Ashe Courage Award is presented each year to individuals whose
contributions transcend sports. 

What has Bruce Jenner “contributed” but the
capacity to reveal just how much of a narcissistic, attention-hogging fool he
is in parading his mental illness, pathological selflessness, and emotion-driven fantasies before the whole world
and claiming that his “womanly feelings” transcend the reality that he isn’t a
woman? Wishing will make is so? What has he “contributed” but becoming the
willing “poster person” of the irrational as an approved mode of living,
approved by the government, academics, by the LGBT movement, and by especially
the MSM?

J.E. Dyer at Liberty Unyielding gropes for an
explanation in her June 5th article, “Bruce/’Caitlyn’
Jenner and the Collapse of the Western Mind,” but doesn’t come up with a
conclusive one, handicapped as she is in that quest by mixing elements of
altruism (“compassion”) with objective reality. She does, however, make this
important observation:

I
think what’s remarkable today is the profound sense of divorcement between the
ordinary people, many of whom still carry the stamp of the traditional West,
and the cultural elite.  It’s not just that the elite tends to exploit and
despise the ordinary people.  That happens in every age.  It’s that
the ordinary people and the elite aren’t even pulling in the same
direction.  The elite is so estranged from the people, and so paralyzed by
its own hostility to coherent metanarratives, that it makes the West
effectively leaderless.

Where
today’s elite does have metanarratives – e.g., the metanarrative of “climate
change” – they are chronically inconsistent and anti-empirical.  They are
useless for any constructive purpose…

For
the first time in a very, very long time – perhaps since the Dark Ages; perhaps
even since 2,500 years ago, or virtually all of the West’s arc of existence and
prominence – the West is without a functioning, traditionally Western
leadership.  People who still bear the stamp of Western civilization are
frustrated and worried, because there seems to be no way to organize to promote
and defend it.

This is true, and while there are some valuable,
thoughtful points made in Dyer’s essay, I much prefer Daniel Greenfield’s
the-gloves-are-off approach to Bruce Jenner and others who wish to become
poster persons of all kinds of pathologies. In his FrontPage article, “Transgender,
Transabled and Otherkin” of June 2nd, he wrote, focusing on the Otherkin
movement:

It’s
an obvious mental disorder, but in these days of identity as subjective
reality, mental illness is just another identity group.

The
media shrilly insists that Bruce Jenner, a mentally ill man, is now a woman. It
makes sense that people who want to be disabled would follow after tranny civil
rights since both involve amputation and the expansion of victim groups. But
the Otherkin, people who identify as wolves or housecats, are on the horizon.

One is now allowed – nay, encouraged, under penalty
of some form of ostracism – to disregard objective facts about one’s gender (or
even species), and that meme is now being partnered with a smorgasbord of “lifestyle”
options. Greenfield concludes:

We’ve
already tossed away the biology textbook and are busy pretending that anyone
can change gender with a little mutilation, or even just by willing himself to
identify as a member of a different sex.  Why not species? Just like the
question about why gay marriage and not polygamy, there is no actual dividing
line. Once you deconstruct a basic paradigm, anyone can play.

Once
you insist that mental perception is valid and biology isn’t, there’s no reason
to draw the line at men who mutilate themselves to pretend to be women.

Failing that, one can always move to California and
send one’s confused child to a public school where he (or she) will have the “right”
to choose which
bathroom and locker
room to use based on his (or her) feelings.

Pretending? Wishing it were so?  If a reader has the stomach and fortitude and
wishes to read portions of the Vanity Fair and Diane Sawyer interviews with
Jenner, he can read the New York Times version of June 1st, “Caitlyn
Jenner, Formerly Bruce, Introduces Herself in Vanity Fair,” or the clonish Washington
Post version here.
It’s all cotton candy cogitations, Jenner riding side-saddle on a unicorn
gelding, prancing merrily through the groves of fruits and nuts. These
interviews include portions of the time a cross-dressing aficionado, Buzz
Bissinger, spent to prepare for the Vanity Fair article with Jenner during his
alleged “transition” from male to female. In the Washington Post story, Soraya
Nadia McDonald reveals that Jenner has not yet taken that final step.

Jenner
did not have genital surgery. Bissinger cited the World Professional
Association for Transgender Health’s “Standard of Care” recommendation that
those who transition are encouraged to wait at least a year before proceeding
with genital surgery.

That is, Jenner has not yet been neutered, spayed,
castrated, or “fixed.” So, at the moment, until he takes that final step to
irrevocable self-mutilation, he could be called a faux hermaphrodite — with the catch that,
unlike hermaphrodites in nature, he won’t be able to reproduce.

Which, I guess, is a blessing.

Blogger and author Ron Pisaturo has written
extensively on the subject of male and female identities, and has recently
published a book, Masculine Power, Feminine Beauty: The Volitional Objective Basis for Heterosexuality
in Romantic Love and Marriage, made these observations in a recent blog
posting about Bruce Jenner, “Bruce
Jenner Case Reveals Absurdity and Evil of LGBT Movement”:  Pisaturo begins by quoting from his book:

Of
all the hoodwinking perpetrated by the LGBT movement, the worst has been to
hoodwink decent people into believing that there are no important ideas
underlying their sexual orientation. But there are.

He moves on to Bruce Jenner.

This
same kind of hoodwinking—this time, in regard to a person’s sense of self—is
occurring in the case of Bruce Jenner, who made these statements in his
interview with Diane Sawyer on April 24:

“My
brain is much more female than it is male. It is hard for people to understand
that, but that is what my soul is….

It’s
just the way I am, the way I was born.”

This
pair of statements is absurd.

Jenner
is not claiming that the physical composition or structure of his brain is more
like most female brains than most male brains. He is claiming that his soul—his
thoughts, values, and emotions—are more like those of a woman than of a man.
Then he is claiming that he was born that way.

That is, he is claiming that the contents of his
mind are determined by his genes. He can’t help it. Nature makes him think that
way.

Pisaturo makes a very important point:

But
emotions come from values, which come from thoughts, and so Jenner is claiming
that some of his thoughts—indeed, very important thoughts—are innate. That is,
he is advocating a doctrine of innate ideas, which is absurd.

I don’t think Jenner is advocating any kind of doctrine – I don’t think he
possesses or ever developed the necessary intellectual equipment to formulate a
doctrine, except in a pedestrian, haphazard way, as is evident in his various
interviews – but he is, on one hand, a product and victim of René Descartes’s famous assertion, “I
think, therefore I am.” (“Cogito ergo
sum”). On the other hand he also believes that, as Descartes implied,
reality is created by the mind. If one doesn’t care for the reality handed one
by reality (of being born male or female), one has the option of discarding the
evidence of one’s senses of perception and metaphysics and epistemology and be
guided by one’s emotions. Pisaturo writes:

Here
is something that someone should have [been] explained to Bruce Jenner when he
began going for therapy for this issue decades ago. No one feels that he
is a man, and no one feels that he is a woman.

A
man knows that he is a man, as a boy knows that he is a boy, by a
combination of perceptual observation and conceptual thought. A boy observes
perceptual differences between men and women, boys and girls, and thereby forms
the concepts ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘boy’ and ‘girl’. A boy also perceives physical
characteristics of himself, and conceptually identifies himself as a boy who
will grow into a man.

A
man may feel emotions about his being a man, or about his not
being a woman. For instance, he may feel happy that he is a man, or he may feel
fear about being a man; or he may feel a desire to be a woman, or he may
feel a kind of comfort or relief or excitement when imagining that he
were a woman. But no man can feel that he is a woman, or a man, or
anything else for that matter. Emotions are responses, not identifications. A
man’s claim that he feels that he is a woman is a claim of revelation: it is a
claim that some consciousness other than his own has attached identification to
his emotion.

But if one abandons reason – and the evidence of
one’s senses – then the new, acceptable, not-to-be-judged-or-else-we’ll-sue madness
is that if one is dissatisfied with one’s sexual identity, one can pretend in
earnest to be either Greta Garbo
(once a favorite icon of homosexuals) or Rocky the Flying Squirrel or Albert
Einstein in a tutu.

Pisaturo concludes:

Many
of the “thousands and thousands of people” who allegedly “know with certainty
that their real gender is not the same as their anatomy” are children who have
been reassigned to the opposite sex based on thoughts and feelings described by
the children themselves.

A
case can be made that the LGBT movement is the single most evil ideological
movement in the history of Western civilization, because this movement
advocates and practices the purest form of mindless indulgence of emotion.

I beg to differ. At this point in time, I regard Islam
as the single most evil ideological movement in the history of Western
civilization, and Islam doesn’t tolerate the existence of Bruce-cum-Caitlyn
Jenners or just ordinary run-of-the-mill homosexuals. They’re thrown to their
deaths from rooftops to the entertainment of run-of-the-mill Muslims in the
Mideast (in Shi’ite Iran, they’re hanged to cheering mobs). Ayn Rand, the
novelist/philosopher, delineated the true forces of evil that are assaulting
the West: the mystics of the mind – in this case represented by the LGBT
Movement – and the mystics of muscle (Islam, ISIS, the EPA, the TSA, the DHS, etc.).

And now I can return to writing a novel in which the
hero, the detective Cyrus Skeen, possesses the courage to be an unabashed,
virile, and thinking heterosexual.

One’s first inclination is to laugh – laugh heartily
or perhaps in despair – at the idea that college students, or students of any
kind, require “trigger warnings” that they will encounter “upsetting” material
in the books they are reading. I nearly laughed out loud when I read an
article, which is linked in a Daniel Greenfield book review of a title produced
by an especially repulsive writer, David K. Shipler. Greenfield wrote in “Shameless
Liar: The Strange Dishonest World of David K. Shipler”:

The linked article of April 14th is on Inside
Higher Ed, “Oberlin
backs down on ‘trigger warnings’ for professors who teach sensitive material.”
Its author, Colleen Flaherty wrote: 

Trigger
warnings, which are common in blogs but also have begun to appear on college
and university syllabuses, are supposed to signal to readers that forthcoming
material may be uncomfortable or upsetting. Trigger warned-subject matter – in
literature, films or other texts – usually relates to sexual assault and other
kinds of violence, racism, and the like, and advocates say students have a
right to know of sensitive material in advance.

It saves our short-attention span smitten students
the trouble of actually reading a book, don’t you see? Better to strain ones
neck reading one’s iPod, or iPhone.

But
some critics of trigger warnings say that higher education is rooted in
confronting uncomfortable ideas and experiences. And more practically, critics
say, it’s nearly impossible in classes with students with differing
sensibilities to define what deserves a trigger warning.

How did Oberlin define a “trigger” or a “trigger
warning”?

“Triggers
are not only relevant to sexual misconduct, but also to anything that might
cause trauma,” the policy said. “Be aware of racism, classism, sexism,
heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression.
Realize that all forms of violence are traumatic, and that your students have
lives before and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or
understand.” The policy said that “anything could be a trigger,” and advised
professors to “[r]emove triggering material when it does not contribute
directly to the course learning goals.”

Oberlin later “tabled the policy” because its
faculty complained it wasn’t consulted on its content and recommendations. After
all, how could they indoctrinate their students in the Marxist/Progressive
litany of capitalist crimes of “of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and
other issues of privilege and oppression” if they had to preface every mention
of Western “crimes” and “cultural imperialism” with a warning?

Given
the lack of consensus on trigger warnings in the classroom, it was perhaps
unsurprising that the extensive trigger warning policy Oberlin College
published in its Sexual Offense Resource Guide proved controversial earlier
this academic year. Faculty members criticized the policy from within, saying
it had been drafted largely without their input, even though they stood on the
front lines of such a policy….

“This
section of the resource guide is currently under revision, after thoughtful
discussion on campus suggested that some changes could make the guide more
useful for faculty,” Meredith Raimondo, associate dean of the College of Arts
and Sciences and co-chair of the Sexual Offense Policy Task Force, said via
email. “As the resource guide has always stated, the task force values both
academic freedom and support for survivors of sexualized violence. We do not
see these as contradictory projects, but rather that both are necessary to
create an appropriately challenging and effective learning environment.” Oberlin’s
sexual offense policy page for faculty contains a similar message under the
heading “How can I make my classroom more inclusive for survivors of
sexualized violence?”

The Higher Ed article reported that most of the
Oberlin faculty, which initially endorsed such a policy, realized that to
adhere to such a policy would render teaching anything virtually impossible. A
teacher would need the faculty of omniscience to know the “sensitivities” and “trauma”
potentialities of his students to pen such “trigger warnings” to his syllabus. Were
it the subject of study, the violence in The Old Testament of the Bible would
require ten or twenty dozen “trigger warnings,” as well as the seduction scenes
in Alfred HItchcock’s North by Northwest, in one of which Eva Marie Saint is being seduced by Cary
Grant, who says he might murder her, and she says, “Please
do.”

It would be enough to drive a gay or LGBT student
up the wall and cause it seek therapy, or seek some form of medicinal relief,
and plummet it to the deepest depths of depression to see heterosexuals
flaunting their cultural “privilege” and sexual hegemony so shamelessly.

Meghan Daum, in her Los Angeles Times article of April
3rd, 2014, “Why
‘trigger warnings’? We already live in a hair-trigger world,” reported:

Academia
has always been an easy target for mockery. Henry Kissinger observed that
university politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so low, and
one logical extension is that liberal arts departments are steeped in
self-importance precisely because their impact on the “real world” is
negligible.

Ergo,
the recent campus phenomenon known as the “trigger warning.” Originating
on certain feminist, self-help and social activist blogs, trigger warnings are
meant to inform readers that the ensuing material deals with subjects, such as
war or sexual violence, that might upset those suffering from post-traumatic
stress related to those issues….

Now
the practice is creeping toward liberal arts syllabi. The UC Santa Barbara
student Senate recently passed a resolution calling for professors to label
potentially upsetting course material and even excuse “triggered”
students from some classes. Oberlin College in Ohio has already implemented
such guidelines, advising instructors not to assign triggering material at all
unless it’s directly relevant to the lesson.

Distressing
as such potential incursions on academic freedom and inquiry may be, the real
trend here may not be trigger warnings but the torrent of outrage they’ve set
off. They’re ripe for bemused chatter, to say the least. A New Republic article
supplied a list of warning-worthy triggers: bullying, sizism, ablism,
transphobia, slut shaming, alcohol and (seriously) animals in wigs. In
December, Slate declared 2013 “the year of the trigger warning.” Even
the satirical Onion has been called out for failing to warn readers about
disturbing content in fake stories.

Yes, “trigger warnings” are eminently susceptible
to ribaldry and mockery, but the fact that such an issue even arises in the ivy
of politically correctness that currently chokes the halls of academe should
serve as a signal that students and teachers alike are thriving on the
nonsense.

Michael Rubin, in his Commentary Magazine article, “I
need a Trigger Warning on Trigger Warnings” of May 6th, 2015,  treats trigger warnings with the contempt they
deserve.

I
have to admit, the first time I heard about trigger warnings, I thought they
were a joke. In short, trigger warnings assume that students are so infantile
that they cannot handle classroom discussion or themes in great literature that
push them beyond their comfort zone. Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
(about whose work I previously blogged here),
discusses trigger warnings in Freedom
from Speech, his new Encounter Broadside booklet:

In May 2014, the New
York Times called attention to a new arrival on the college campus:
trigger warnings. Seemingly overnight, colleges and universities across America
have begun fielding student demands that their professors issue content
warnings before covering any material that might evoke a negative emotional
response…. By way of illustration, the Times
article pointed to a Rutgers’ student’s op-ed requesting trigger
warnings for The Great Gatsby,
which apparently “possesses a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive
and misogynistic violence.”

Rubin later in his piece sends up trigger warnings
in a paragraph full of trigger warnings, ending with:

Trigger
warnings, even if well intentioned, might remind them of this oppressive and
sometimes lethal political correctness and cause undue stress. Accordingly, in
order to protect the mental well-being of those who value liberty, intellectual
freedom, and oppose censorship, perhaps it’s time to agree to put trigger
warnings ahead of trigger warnings to ensure that no one is inadvertently
stressed out by the decline in mental and intellectual maturity and the
infantilization of society which trigger warnings represent.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP))
reported in August 2014 in “On Trigger Warnings”:

A
current threat to academic freedom in the classroom comes from a demand that
teachers provide warnings in advance if assigned material contains anything
that might trigger difficult emotional responses for students.  This
follows from earlier calls not to offend students’ sensibilities by introducing
material that challenges their values and beliefs….

As
one report noted, at Wellesley College students objected to “a sculpture
of a man in his underwear because it might be a source of ‘triggering thoughts
regarding sexual assault.’ While the [students’] petition acknowledged that the
sculpture might not disturb everyone on campus, it insisted that we share a
‘responsibility to pay attention to and attempt to answer the needs of all of
our community members.’ Even after the artist explained that the figure was
supposed to be sleepwalking, students continued to insist it be moved
indoors.”

The
presumption that students need to be protected rather than challenged in a
classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual.  It makes
comfort a higher priority than intellectual engagement and—as the Oberlin list
demonstrates—it singles out politically controversial topics like sex, race,
class, capitalism, and colonialism for attention. 

Jennifer Medina in her May 2014 New York Times article,
“The
Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm,” also noted:

Colleges
across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for
what are known as “trigger warnings,” explicit alerts that the material they
are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students
assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or
in war veterans. The warnings, which have their ideological roots in feminist
thought, have gained the most traction at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, where the student government formally called for them.
But there have been similar requests from students at Oberlin College, Rutgers University, the University of
Michigan, George Washington University and other
schools.…

The
most vociferous criticism has focused on trigger warnings for materials that
have an established place on syllabuses across the country. Among the
suggestions for books that would benefit from trigger warnings are
Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” (contains anti-Semitism) and Virginia
Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” (addresses suicide)….

“Frankly
it seems this is sort of an inevitable movement toward people increasingly
expecting physical comfort and intellectual comfort in their lives,” said Greg
Lukianoff, president of the Foundation
for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit group that advocates free
speech. “It is only going to get harder to teach people that there is a real
important and serious value to being offended. Part of that is talking about
deadly serious and uncomfortable subjects.”

The New Republic also weighed in on the subject here,
making many of the same points about “shielding students’ psyches” from “uncomfortable”
or “traumatizing” literary and even cinematic content in the classroom and in
readings.

I wonder how many “trigger warnings” would be
required for students reading Ayn Rand’s The
Fountainhead that there is a rape
scene in the novel (which Rand called “rape
by engraved invitation”). On the side of the sexual assault coin is the
rampage of rapes by ISIS on Yazidis and other non-Muslim women. But then, in
today’s universities, Rand’s novels are not studied, and criticizing Islam is
out of the question, as well.

My own hypothesis about the newly ubiquitous
phenomena of “trigger warnings” is that that they are a direct result of the
McDonald’s “hot coffee” lawsuit and similar lawsuits that followed it. That
lawsuit resulted a huge “compensatory” award to the “victim” of scalding hot
coffee. The LectLaw site
has some interesting information on the case:

Stella
Liebeck of Albuquerque, New Mexico, was in the passenger seat of her grandson’s
car when she was severely burned by McDonalds’ coffee in February 1992.
Liebeck, 79 at the time, ordered coffee that was served in a Styrofoam cup at
the drive-through window of a local McDonalds.

After
receiving the order, the grandson pulled his car forward and stopped
momentarily so that Liebeck could add cream and sugar to her coffee. (Critics
of civil justice, who have pounced on this case, often charge that Liebeck was
driving the car or that the vehicle was in motion when she spilled the coffee;
neither is true.) Liebeck placed the cup between her knees and attempted to
remove the plastic lid from the cup. As she removed the lid, the entire
contents of the cup spilled into her lap. The sweatpants Liebeck was wearing
absorbed the coffee and held it next to her skin. A vascular surgeon determined
that Liebeck suffered full thickness burns (or third-degree burns) over 6
percent of her body, including her inner thighs, perineum, buttocks, and
genital and groin areas.

So, instead of setting the Styrofoam cup on her arm
rest, or on the dashboard, or opening the glove compartment in front of her and
placing the cup on the swing-open door to add her cream and sugar, she placed
it between her knees. Naturally, this would require a bit of a squeeze by her
knees to keep the cup steady, even were the car not moving. Naturally, the
liquid would exert pressure on the plastic lid.  A sudden jolt would result in a caffeine
eruption from the cup. Duh! This is carelessness with a capital C.

Liebeck might retort: “But I didn’t think of doing that! It’s McDonald’s
fault I didn’t think! I shouldn’t have
to think!”

And there’s your problem with product liability
suits and “consumer” protection laws and warning labels on especially food
packaging: It’s all devised to appeal to people who are habitually or congenitally
non-thinkers, to stay the hands of the stupid, to deter the actions of the
dense, and for companies to protect or insulate themselves from ruinous
lawsuits by the thoughtless and their
conniving lawyers.

There are now countless “trigger warnings” on food
packaging, such as, “Caution: Product will be hot!” and “Lift lid carefully. It’s
hot!” especially on microwavable snacks and entrées. Which is in the way of
obviating the whole purpose of heating the meal in the first place. Such warnings
seem addressed to anyone with a short-term memory who has forgotten the nature
of heat.  These are in addition to the superfluous
advisories to wait one or five minutes for the “product to complete cooking”
after a microwaving, when it will sit in a microwave oven daring you to reach
inside and touch the product before it cools to a presumably scientifically
measured temperature and to a minimal point of tactile tolerance. Otherwise,
you would presumably cook your fingers.

I must confess that I’ve squeezed a Styrofoam cup
more than once and saw the liquid spill onto my Chicken McNuggets (but never
into my lap). I’ve also been so drowsy in the morning that I’ve tried to brush
my teeth with shaving cream and lather my face with toothpaste. I blame
Barbasol and Crest for not providing me with “trigger warnings.” Those episodes
of semi-consciousness cost me irreparable mental anguish.

I’m sure there are countless lovers of Marie
Callender’s chicken pot pies who, without the trigger

warning that’s not only on the packaging, but on
the pie wrapping itself, would thoughtlessly reach with their bare fingers into
a steaming, freshly nuked pie and blame Marie Callender for their pains.