Islamic State of Iraq & the Levant Supports "Gun Control"

Totalitarian regimes of all stripes have many things in common.  The one feature they share most ardently is a pathological obsession with restricting their subjects' behavior.  In that spirit, the terrorist organization currently taking over Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, AKA the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham; ISIS), released a set of rules they imposed on the people of Mosul (Nineveh) in northern Iraq. 

Firstly it tells "anyone who is asking," who its members are and what it is about: "We are soldiers of Islam and we've taken on our responsibility to bring back glory of the Islamic Caliphate."

Obviously, they understand the utility of a mission statement.

It confirms that it seized up to half a billion dollars from the Mosul branch of the Bank of Iraq but states it can be trusted with the funds.

"Comrades, turn in your arms!"

Stealing coupled with assurances of moral purity - another common feature of totalitarian regimes.  Here's the best part.

No public gathering other than those organised by ISIS will be allowed at any stage. No guns will be allowed outside of its ranks. 

From Lenin, to Hitler, to Stalin, to Mao, to Castro - and now ISIL/ISIS - totalitarians agree.  Oppressing people is much easier after you've disarmed them.

Ironically, the Iraqi government, impotent against ISIL/ISIS' advance, asked Iraqi civilians to fight the terrorists in its stead.

Iraq’s embattled government urged the terrified residents of Mosul to set up armed vigilante groups and fight Islamic militants who have taken over  the city, the country’s second-largest and in Nineveh province. 

In a meeting in Baghdad presided by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, members of the Nineveh Crisis Team said the city vigilantes should help the Iraqi police and security forces in their fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which stormed into Mosul on Sunday, after about 24 hours of clashes with the police and army.

It's ironic because the Iraqi government already did a great deal of ISIL/ISIS' job for them.

Dhia al-Wakil, spokesman for the office of the armed forces commander-in-chief, suggested that the firearm registration scheme made sense for "organisational and statistical" reasons. 

“It is designed to limit the numbers of arms owned by civilians, and hence it’s in the interests of people's safety and security," Wakil said. 

Officials at the interior ministry, whose police will issue the gun licenses, said the process would be properly conducted. 

"The people who get gun licenses will undergo checks," deputy interior minister Ahmed al-Khafaji said. "The decision permits possession of a firearm inside houses, not outside them, and just one per home – no more.” 

By limiting gun ownership to one gun per household, the Iraqi government made it impossible for law abiding Iraqis to defend their communities against ISIL/ISIS.  And by forcing law-abiding Iraqis to register their guns, they made it easier for ISIL/ISIS to finish disarming decent Iraqis.  All the terrorists have to do is go to each local police station (most of which are abandoned anyway), take the list of registered weapons owners, then go house-to-house confiscating their guns.  With only one gun per house, there's no way a family could defend themselves against a group of armed, battle-hardened men.  An entire neighborhood, with only one gun per house, would be unlikely to defend themselves.

How do mostly-disarmed people defend themselves against this?

'Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms' - Instavision

'Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms' - Instavision

The role of the KKK and Jim Crow proponents disarming black people also doesn't get a lot of attention.  "Birth of a Nation", which was a film Woodrow Wilson praised, shows Klansmen disarming blacks, and at the same time there were armed blacks resisting the Klan. 

Woodrow Wilson, by the way, was a "Progressive" Democrat.

It's really simple.  The most basic human right is the right to live, because one cannot exercise any other right if one is dead.  If humans have the right to live, then by logical extension, we have the right to defend our right to live.

If, as "gun control" proponents believe, we have no right to defend our right to live, then by logical extension, we have no right to live.  And if we have no right to live, then we have no rights.  Period.

The KKK, of course, denies the humanity - and therefore the human rights - of blacks, so their desire to disarm blacks is logically consistent with their "values".

Think about that the next time a politician tells you that you have no right to use a gun to defend your right to live.

Egypt's New Pharaoh

Where are all those "enlightened ones" who told us the Muslim Brotherhood is a "moderate" political organization?

Almost two years after Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak was removed from power, Cairo's Tahrir Square is still an epicenter of protest and violence. It's an epicenter of protest and violence because Egypt is again ruled by a man who has declared himself dictator. The country's new president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party, announced that constitutional declarations, decisions and laws issued by the president are final and not subject to appeal.

That didn't take long.  Egypt just went through the age-old cycle: despotism to revolution, to democracy, right back to despotism.

Running Out of Other People's Money

Margaret Thatcher famously said that "the problem with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money".  She didn't say what happens then.  Greece gives us an idea.

Private businesses have closed down in the thousands. Unemployment stands at a record 25 percent, with more than half of Greece's young people out of work. Caught between plunging incomes and ever increasing taxes, families are finding it hard to make ends meet. Higher heating fuel prices have meant many apartment tenants have opted not to buy heating fuel this year. Instead, they'll make do with blankets, gas heaters and firewood to get through the winter. Lines at soup kitchens have grown longer.

But at least Greeks are pulling together in hard times, right?

Life in Athens is often punctuated by demonstrations big and small, sometimes on a daily basis. Rows of shuttered shops stand between the restaurants that have managed to stay open. Vigilantes roam inner city neighborhoods, vowing to "clean up" what they claim the demoralized police have failed to do. Right-wing extremists beat migrants, anarchists beat the right-wing thugs and desperate local residents quietly cheer one side or the other as society grows increasingly polarized.

.....

After battering his Egyptian assistant, the mob turned on Mr Abdulbasset, who had defied police to keep his shop open...  The riot police watched on but did not intervene

The authorities will take care of all this vigilante justice, right?

Greece's sclerotic justice system has been hit by a protracted strike that has left courts only functioning for an hour a day as judges and prosecutors protest salary cuts.

At least if they get beat up, Greeks still have "universal", government-provided medicine, right?

A sign taped to a wall in an Athens hospital appealed for civility from patients. "The doctors on duty have been unpaid since May," it read, "Please respect their work."
.....
"When the pharmacies are closed and I can't get my insulin, which is my life for me, what do I do? ... How can we survive?" asked Voula Hasiotou, a member of an association of diabetics who turned out for the rally.

Keep all this in mind when politicians tell you we need to keep borrowing over $1 Trillion per year, as we have during all four years of Pres Obama's first term. 

Think this can't happen in the US?  On the contrary, there's no reason why it can't.  And if we let it happen, it'll be far worse.  The US and EU bailed Greece out.  Our population is 31x bigger than that of Greece, and our economy is the biggest in history.  No one is big enough to bail us out.

Here's one last quote from the AP article on Greece.

"Our society is on a razor's edge," Public Order Minister Nikos Dendias said recently, after striking shipyard workers broke into the grounds of the Defense Ministry. "If we can't contain ourselves, if we can't maintain our social cohesion, if we can't continue to act within the rules ... I fear we will end up being a jungle."

Not even close, Mr Dendias.  Greece is following the eternal cycle.  From oppression to revolution, from revolution to freedom, from freedom to prosperity, from prosperity to entitlement and indolence, from entitlement and indolence to anarchy, and finally from anarchy to dictatorship and oppression.

And we're heading in the same direction.

When Theories Trump Evidence

Have you ever known anyone who insists that Communism is a wonderful system, despite all the evidence - particularly the piles of hundreds of millions of dead bodies - contradicting their theory?

I have.

Without exception, they always reply with some variation of the following statement when I point to that evidence: "But they didn't do it correctly".

My reply to that excuse is always the same.  It doesn't matter how an idea works in theory.  All that matters is the results of its application in real life, and Communism applied in real life always, without exception, results in misery, poverty, repression, oppression, a complete loss of civil liberties and millions of people murdered by their own government.

So, why do some people continue to sing the praises (or at the very least make excuses on behalf of) Communism?  Bill Whittle explains that some people are just so personally invested in a theory, that no amount of evidence will change their minds.



This explains why most of the people I've met who still think Communism is a good idea, or at least not all that bad, were in college.  Ideas have consequences in the real world.  Academia shields people from the consequences of their ideas.  It shields people fro the real world.

There's a good reason for that.  People become gun shy after facing negative consequences brought on by their ideas, so they get stuck in an intellectual rut.  By protecting people from the consequences of their ideas, academia encourages people to think big.  But that protection is supposed to be temporary.  People are supposed to leave the academic cocoon, apply their ideas in the real world and face the consequences.

Those who stay in the cocoon never learn the lessons that experience alone can teach.  Which is fine.  Until they take that lack of experience to the White House.

The Obama Spangled Banner

Presidents always receive some measure of hero worship.  It's human nature, unfortunately.  However, Obama worshipers take it to levels normally unseen outside third world dictatorships.  Case in point; the Obama Spangled Banner.

“It’s a cult of personality to show his face, like Stalin or Mao,” said John Masterjohn, a former Marine and retired schoolteacher from Leesburg. “It’s despicable. They don’t realize how sick they are.” 

Like I said, this is the kind of thing normally seen in third world dictatorships.  Qaddafi, Assad, Hussein, the Kims - all of them actively cultivate(d) this kind of worship.

“It’s absolutely disrespectful,” Jim Bradford, a 71-year-old veteran who participated in the Bay of Pigs Invasion told FoxNews.com. “It’s totally ridiculous. To put somebody’s picture there, to me, it’s a disgrace to do that.” 

Amen, brother.  It doesn't surprise me at all that fellow war veterans are the ones who called attention to this insanity.

Here's what I don't understand, though.  People in Communist China, the Soviet Union, North Korea and every other Socialist utopia (i.e., hell hole) are forced to worship at gun point.  They got (or get) sent to "re-education camps" if they fail to do so.

Obamaphiles do it voluntarily.  In fact, they go out of their way to worship their god.  For example, these people in Florida actually had to get these Obama flags specially made.  Seriously; what's wrong with these people?

I don't know about you, but I already have a Savior.  I don't need another one.

That brings me to another point.  Christians; this is yet another reason to oppose bloated, morbidly obese government - it becomes a god - people's omnipotent, benevolent provider and protector.  Look at Europe.  It's not a coincidence that their atheism/agnosticism and government control rose congruently through the second half of the 20th century.

The worst part is that many of Pres Obama's worshipers are "Liberal" Christians who should know better.

Bill Whittle's Guide to the Election

Bill Whittle, in his inimitable way, explains the choice before us.

I highly recommend all his informative videos.