After spending ten days in Iraq and Syria with the Islamic State, Jürgen Todenhöfer, a German journalist, provided a summary of the ideology that animated them. “One day we will conquer Europe, the question is not if we will do it, but when, for us, it is obvious,” a German jihadist who spoke on behalf of the ISIS command told him. “Our expansion will be perpetual and the Europeans must know that when we come, it will not be beautiful, it will be with our weapons, and those who do not convert to Islam or who do not pay the Islamic tax will be killed,” the terrorist said.
And if they refuse to convert, Todenhöfer questions? “150 million, 200 million or 500 million, it doesn’t matter. We will kill them all,” replies the jihadist, who then justifies the enslavement of non-Muslims. “They are preparing for the biggest religious cleansing in history,” concludes the German journalist.
We didn’t take ISIS seriously and we saw how it ended.
Sunni or Shiite, the Islamic apocalypse is a serious matter and should be taken as such. Instead, we Westerners think we live in a candy pink world.
In 2015, Khamenei ordered the Revolutionary Guards to release a video showing Muslim soldiers looking at Jerusalem and preparing to conquer it. The sequence opens with close-ups of four soldiers with covered faces as they lace up their boots and prepare their weapons. The coats of arms of the Iranian Guards, Hamas and Hezbollah are visible on the uniforms. The shot widens to show the group of fighters on a hill as they survey Jerusalem and the al Aqsa Mosque waiting for the attack. The clip bears the title “Preparation for the complete destruction of Israel by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards”.
In 2017 there was the inauguration of a digital clock in a square in Tehran, appropriately renamed “Palestine Square”. It does not indicate the time. Instead, it counts the days until the destruction of Israel.
In 2020, Khamenei shared a poster on his website: it shows people celebrating in the Temple Mount compound in Jerusalem after they capture it, and a Palestinian flag rising over the al Aqsa mosque. “Final solution,” says the text. The “final solution to the Jewish question” is the expression used by the Nazis at the Wannsee Conference which planned the extermination of eleven million Jews (the Nazis managed to incinerate six of them).
The Supreme Leader of Iran has published a book entitled “Palestine” in which he explains the destruction of the “Zionist regime”. “Nabudi” (annihilate), “imha” (dissolve) and “zaval” (erase): the three words around which the project revolves ranian on Israel, referred to as “adou” (enemy) and “cancerous tumor.” Khamenei explains that his plan does not involve a “classical war”, but a low intensity one that aims to “wear down” the resistance of the Israelis and the international community.
Khamenei recommends making life in Israel so difficult that Israelis are forced to leave to escape the threats looming over them. Khamenei describes the tactic of inducing the international community to “get fed up with Israel” until the West realizes that supporting the “Zionist project” is too costly and will abandon Israel.
This brings us to the Times investigation of recent days: Iran gave Hamas $222 million to destroy Israel.
Yet, if Voltaire’s Candide the Naive had a passport today, it would undoubtedly be that of the West, this mega conglomerate of eternal children, accustomed to a gentle world, educated in a privileged and protected condition, immature and ultra-optimistic peoples , childish and bold, who in the face of Islamic fundamentalism find themselves vulnerable and defenseless, like puppies.
Now we think that the world is all like our good neighbor. As if luck and well-being had produced a civilization incapable of seeing the world for what it is, zoo animals in isolated and protected ecosystems that have never known predators and lost all self-defense mechanisms.
And for a sort of auto immune disease, we identify the enemy in the few among us who have retained the ability to smell danger and raise the alert. We are the beautiful souls that luck has deprived of the survival instinct.
Priests enter San Firenze Church holding a high cross, Florence, Italy Francesco Cantone/Shutterstock.com
Traditionally Catholic Italy is facing a catastrophic collapse of the faith as Mass attendance falls precipitously to 10 percent of the population and even less in some areas.
The steady, even accelerating, decline in the practice of the Catholic faith among Italians is detailed in a new study published by Professor Luca Diotallevi of the University of Rome in a book entitled La messa è sbiadita: La partecipazione ai riti religiosi in Italia dal 1993 al 2019(The Mass has faded: Participation in religious rites in Italy from 1993 to 2019).
In the book, Diotallevi examines the numbers, demographics, and possible causes of the sharp collapse of Sunday Mass attendance in Italy over the last 30 years. According to his findings, Italian Catholicism is on the cusp of disappearing.
According to Diotallevi’s study, which is based on figures from ISTAT, the Italian National Statistics Institute, Mass attendance in Italy has been in freefall since 1993, with a more marked decline from 2005 on and another dive in 2020 and 2021, corresponding with the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2017 for the first time, the number of Italian Catholics who “never” attend Mass exceeded the number who said they attended “at least once a week.”
In 1993 the number of practicing Catholics in relation to the total population of Italy was already low at 37.3 percent. This fell to 23.7 percent in 2019. Diotallevi points out that declared regular Sunday Mass attendance is always higher than actual attendance, so the actual percentage of practicing Catholics is even lower than official stats show.
The Roman professor wrote:
In the Italian population (of age and above), individual declarations of participation with ‘at least weekly’ frequency in highly institutionalized religious rituals, and thus also characterized by some form of significantly centralized regulation, in the period from 1993 to 2019 (source ISTAT, AVQ) have experienced a drastic decrease: they have lost about a third of their initial value. The indicator (which structurally overestimates ‘real’ participation) in the indicated period has experienced not only a consistent decline but also an acceleration. Such acceleration experienced a significant moment roughly in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century.
Diotallevi’s study also revealed demographic trends in Italy’s decline of Mass attendance. One notable trend was a marked increase in the abandonment of the faith by Italian women, once regarded in the Catholic nation as the “pillars of the parish.”
Diotallevi wrote, “On a par with the decline and its acceleration, and perhaps as a cause of these, must be counted the progressive detachment between women and religious rites of the type under consideration. It alters and almost erases a constitutive feature of contemporary (and perhaps not only contemporary) Italian religion.”
He continued, “Women are deserting highly institutionalized religious rites at a faster rate than men. Often, in the same cohort, the step backward taken by women is much larger than that taken by male peers. The ‘at least weekly’ practice levels of the former have now almost caught up with them. For the youth and early adulthood ages, the run-up can be said to be essentially successfully completed.”
Highlighting the consequences for the traditional manner of handing on the faith within the home, the Italian author argued that the abandonment of the practice of Catholicism by Italian women spell a drastic further decline that will be seen in the next generation, which will have been raised without faith.
He wrote, “Since women in Italy have traditionally been the protagonists in the transmission of religious practices and beliefs to the younger generations, and women have also often been the strongest link between adults and religion – for example, in family communities – the flight of older women from religious rituals, which has been going on for several decades now, is fraught with consequences for the present and even more so for the future of religion in Italy, and thus also for the society and culture of this country.”
In fact, Diotallevi argued that it is due to the work of Italian women, especially younger women, that the practice of religion is being cast off in accelerated rates in Italian society.
“The women, and especially the less senior of them, are really giving themselves to work hard to ‘unmask’ Italian society from this kind of ritual and the kind of religion that it implies. It is also their doing if religious ritual of the type considered here is ‘fading.’ Which in no way authorizes religious authorities to pass themselves off purely and simply as victims.”
The Italian author also detailed the way in which there has been a decline in the return to the faith among Italy’s growing elderly population. An observable trend in the practice of Catholicism in Italy was that Mass attendance was higher among youth and young adults, prior to marriage, than among those in mid-life, with an observable return to religion among those in later life.
However, the return to the practice of the faith and Mass attendance among the elderly in Italy is declining, corresponding to the increased decline in Mass attendance in early adolescence.
“Each generation practices a little less than the previous one (cohort effect), anticipating the time of detachment from this type of ritual and witnessing a softening to the point of cancellation of recovery at older ages,” Diotallevi wrote.
Exploring the possible causes of such a catastrophic abandonment of Catholicism in a land which lies at the heart of the Church, the Roman professor surmised that among the likely causes are the liturgical abuses and upheavals to which the Church in Italy has been subjected. He particularly pointed to the “progressive spectacularization of Vatican liturgies that has occurred over the past three pontificates” in Rome, as well as the liturgical innovations with which Italian clergy have scandalized faithful Catholics.
“Many of the nominally still highly institutionalized and centralized (‘liturgy-centered’) rituals may now have been transformed, in part or entirely, into ‘performance-centered rituals.’” Diotallevi wrote. “For Catholic liturgies, a push in this direction may also have come from the progressive spectacularization of Vatican liturgies that has occurred over the past three pontificates, from the substantial deregulation of increasingly large sectors of ‘Catholic’ liturgical offerings, as well as from many of the solutions adopted by clergy during the lockdowns that have recently taken place to counter the spread of COVID-19 pandemic.”
The public liturgical abuses that Italy has seen in recent include a Mass sacrilegiously offered on a surf board, in the water, at the beach, with the priest bare-chested, an outrage that prompted local civil authorities to consider charging the priest with the crime of a public offense against religion. Another priest offered Mass at a park in a rainbow “pride” stole and a skin-tight cycling outfit, and joked when hosts were blown by the wind onto the ground after the consecration.
This is not even to mention the many moral, doctrinal, and financial scandals with which the Vatican has long been riddled, which have certainly disaffected Italian Catholics from trusting the Church and practicing the faith.
Professor Diotallevi’s dire diagnosis is that very soon in Italy, the practice of the Catholic faith through attendance at Sunday Mass “will be reduced to a figure approaching 10% of the population, which in many parts of the country corresponds to an actual figure in the single digits.”
The crisis of religion today, he concludes, is evidenced in the imminent near total collapse of Catholicism in a country that has produced more than 200 popes, and within which lies the heart of the Church.
He writes, “The quarter-century-long decline of ‘regular’ participation in highly institutionalized and significantly centralized religious rituals in Italy well represents an important part of the crisis of ‘religion,’ a crisis that moreover is precisely observed with reference to the scientifically invaluable Italian case.”
Last month, police were deployed to form a ring of steel around the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, London, to protect it from the hands of an irate pro-Palestinian mob.
Needless to say, there is something of an irony here: although Churchill is being targeted on the hackneyed view that he was a leading member of the White Patriarchy (aka, the root of all evil) — BLM attacked this same statue for that very reason in 2020 — the British statesman did, in fact, have some insightful things to say about the religion of many of his would-be attackers.
Consider the following quote from Churchill’s 1899 book, The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan (vol.1):
How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement, the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.
The United Kingdom — as well as many other Western nations and polities that host large Muslim populations — has been learning the truths of this excerpt the hard way. As just one example, crime, including sex crimes, have soared — unsurprisingly so, since “insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live,” to say nothing of the aforementioned “degraded sensualism,” “fanatical frenzy,” and “slovenly systems.” (It’s the same all throughout European nations with large Muslim populations. In Sweden, violent crime has increased by 300% and rapes by 1,472% — thanks to its burgeoning Muslim demographic.)
Note too Churchill’s fair observation that “Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.” This assertion perfectly explains the truth behind so-called “moderate Muslims” who end up making for good citizens in the West. They are good in spite of, not because of, the teachings of their religion.
Churchill is also noteworthy for warning against the dangers of pacifism in the face of growing threats — another topic relevant to the UK’s circumstances vis-à-vis its overwhelming Muslim population. While the following excerpt was written in response to the policy of appeasing Hitler leading up to WWII, it is especially relevant to the UK’s “migrant problem,” and the appeasement it has been met with, resulting in a demographic conquest: in the very capital of the UK — London, where Churchill’s statue stands, and where a few days ago rioting Muslim mobs hurled trash at passive police — the name “Muhammad” is today the most popular name for newborn baby boys (as well as in several other Western capitals, including Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Oslo, et al).
While it is doubtful that Churchill — or any other Brit born in the late nineteenth century — could ever have conceived that Britain would willingly give itself over to Islam, here are his rather applicable words concerning passivity in the face of growing threats (in this case, Hitler):
[I]f you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.
Such words are proving increasingly ominous for much of Western Europe — with Londonistan at the fore.
A serial sex offender has been convicted of assaulting a disabled teen girl in Wisconsin. Adam Hetke, who identifies as a female vampire named Sabrina, has a lengthy criminal history involving multiple sex offenses against women and outstanding charges related to a homicide.
Hetke, 35, was charged in July of 2021 with first-degree sexual assault by threatening the use of a dangerous weapon and second-degree sexual assault of a mentally ill victim. The assault occurred in Waukesha, and involved a 16-year-old cognitively disabled girl Hetke had met at a local gas station.
According to the complaint, Hetke terrified the girl, telling her he was a “vampire” who would harm her if she did not comply with his demands. He then followed her to her nearby home and sexually assaulted her. During the assault, Hetke kept a knife nearby and threatened to use it to harm her before the girl jumped out of a bedroom window and fled for help.
When he was arrested, he was wearing a one-piece swimsuit under his clothes and was holding a knife.
During trial, Hetke underwent a number of assessments to determine his ability to stand trial, but was found to be competent and deemed ineligible for the insanity plea. On April 11, Hetke was convicted on both counts he was charged with, and is set to be sentenced on June 7.
Hetke as of 2024. Photo Courtesy of the Waukesha Police Department.
But this is not Hetke’s first run-in with law enforcement.
Hetke is a registered sex offender in the state of Wisconsin, dating back to a 2007 conviction for second degree sexual assault. At the time, Hetke had been staying at a residential facility, and he physically overpowered a female staff member before groping her repeatedly. The victim was able to escape his grip and get away.
For the assault, Hetke was sentenced to 8 years in prison with 4 years on extended supervision, and was ordered to the sex offender registry for life.
Just before his release on January 26, 2016, the Waukesha Police Department warned the community that Hetke was at “high risk” to reoffend. In the announcement, they noted Hetke had no fixed residence, but that he would be monitored by a GPS tracker.
In 2019, Hetke was convicted once more of sexual assault involving a female victim, and was released from prison in 2020. The police bulletin again noted that Hetke was homeless and would be subjected to GPS monitoring, but also indicated that Hetke had begun identifying as a “woman.”
Following his second release from prison, Hetke was allegedly involved in a homicide in Milwaukee, for which he has yet to stand trial.
According to the complaint in that case, Hetke reportedly strangled a man to death using a power cord in April of 2021, though he apparently blamed the murder on a “demon.” He told Milwaukee police that the victim was “possessed by a demon” and began stabbing himself in the chest with tongs.
Hetke said he was only trying to exorcise the demon from the victim, but that the demon caused the victim to wrap a cord around his own neck and pull the ends. But a witness in that case has testified that Hetke admitted to murdering the man because he “disrespected” him, and that Hetke told the witness he was an incarnation of Satan.
Hetke is set to appear in court for that case on April 30.
According to the Wisconsin Sex Offender Registry, Hetke goes by a number of aliases including: Sabrina, Morrigan, Black Dragon, White Chocolate, Katie, and Andre.
A taxpayer-funded course exploring “Transphobic Invocations of Archaeology” at the University of York has been branded a “scam” by a Conservative MP.
A student at the Russel Group University is receiving payment from the Arts Humanities Research Council of £18,622 to fund their studies.
They presented a paper earlier this year titled Bones Don’t Care About Your Feelings: Challenging Transphobic Invocations of Archaeology in (Social) Media.
In the presentation, the student asks: “What if I told you that when an archaeologist finds human remains, it is a fact that there are only two choices for gender identification.”
The course has promoted a Tory MP to call for a review into the use of taxpayer money to fund higher education.
Nick Fletcher, MP for Don Valley, said: “We need to call a scam a scam when we see it. This is taxpayers’ money, at a time when households are struggling – and the tax burden is at an all-time high.
“We should consider establishing a ‘Taxpayers’ Review Process’ to enable ordinary people to review and challenge UKRI and AHRC spending – similar to the process available for residents to review and challenge local authority accounts.”
Featured in the paper is branding for the University of York, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) – a non-departmental government body that issues money for research, and AHRC’s White Rose University Consortium – a doctoral training partnership between the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York.
Dr Emma Hilton, co-founder of Sex Matters, told The Telegraph: “Human remains cannot tell us anything about the unembodied ‘gender identity’ of a person. A female Viking warrior buried with male-typical war possessions tells us only that some women successfully broke through early glass ceilings.”
A UKRI spokesman said: “UKRI invests in a diverse research and innovation portfolio. Decisions to fund the research projects we support are made via a rigorous peer review process by relevant independent experts from across academia and business.
“The research councils also award block grants to Higher Education institutions to support PhD studentships. The institutions make decisions and allocate the funding to specific studentship proposals, following an application process.”
The project is part of the university’s efforts to address its own “legacies of enslavement and empire” and it is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which distributes taxpayer funding for research.
The advertisement states that the University’s collections have “some of the world’s most celebrated animals and plants, from tigers to dodos and rhododendrons and tea…such specimens in our collections represent how colonial histories and environmental histories became tied to the same processes”.
“The outcomes of this project will be significant. They have the potential to help shape how the natural history museum sector grapples with understanding its colonial legacy,” it said.
The successful applicant will work with PhD supervisors to uncover these histories, with a particular focus on south Asia and islands including Mauritius, Réunion and Rodrigues.
Reform UK MP Lee Anderson said: “Maybe these universities should concentrate on solving present-day problems rather than wasting resources to decolonise the dodo.”
GB News has reached out to the University of York for comment.
The German governing coalition is an unmitigated train wreck, with a grand total of 17% of citizens polled favoring it.
Led by Olaf Scholz, the most unpopular Chancellor in recent history, the coalition spends most of the time fighting against itself.
Now, Transport Minister Volker Wissing has attracted backlash from within his own ranks after he ‘threatened’ to impose weekend driving bans in the summer.
The move would be meant to conform to the ‘climate protection law,’ and it’s yet another latest dispute within Berlin’s failing coalition over their climate alarmist obsession with ‘decarburizing.’
Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico did not wait long after regaining power (he previously served in the post 2006-10 and 2012-18) to make waves in his country and across the European Union. In short order, he eliminated the position of Special Prosecutor, began moving people aligned with him into permanent democratic positions, proposed changes to the country’s publicly-owned media, and re-vamped Slovakian foreign policy. To cap it all off, he managed to get his hand-picked candidate, former Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini, elected to the (essentially symbolic) office of President of Slovakia. For Brussels, this has all added up to make him the next rule of law threat, a socially democratic Viktor Orbán.
The reality, of course, is that a democratic presidential election is not an affront to the rule of law, nor is anything else of what Fico has done thus far. Instead, Fico’s actions—and the establishment’s reactions—demonstrate two things. One, that Brussels views populist governments as simply illegitimate, lesser than their establishment-friendly counterparts. After all, a close look at Fico’s actions reveals that they are no different from what any other government would do. The difference here, it would seem, is that Fico’s actions are not in Brussels’ interest.
Second, they reveal fears over something larger than Slovakia: the establishment reaction demonstrates how liberal internationalists use a permanent bureaucratic class to achieve their goals, even when they are removed from elected office and replaced in democratic elections.
The issue eliciting most cries of foul play against Fico is his elimination of the position of Special Prosecutor, an action that the head of the European Prosecutor’s Office said she was “concerned” by. For its part, the European Commission subtly threatened sanctions over the move. If you would hear it from Fico’s opponents, the Special Prosecutor is a divinely inspired position of Biblical importance, a judicial Messiah bringing down investigations upon the corrupt. It is, in their telling, a position which is entirely without bias: its compass always points toward true justice.
But a closer look at the actual history of Slovakia’s now-past-tense Special Prosecutor position reveals something less than sacrosanct. In Slovakia’s entire history of independence, there have been only two special prosecutors. The first held the position for 16 years, from 2004 to 2020 and was ultimately removed for blatant corruption.
The second, Daniel Lipšic, was confirmed by the Slovak National Assembly in 2021. Far from being a non-political, blind-justice type, Lipšic was deeply partisan, having served in multiple ministerial positions in governments opposed to Fico. Transparency International argued against his appointment as Special Prosecutor, saying that his connections to governing parties were too strong. Voters agreed; polling at around the time of his appointment showed that he was trusted by only just over 30% of Slovaks, while over 60% did not trust him.
It is also worth looking at the situation in which Lipšic was made prosecutor. The Slovak government, which had been elected only in 2020, was already teetering; the incumbent prime minister had an approval rating of around 15%. There were whispers of new elections, and COVID-19 was arriving. But yet, in the midst of this chaos, the government found the time to put into place an ally who would be able to serve a seven-year term and would have to answer to no democratic authority.
This is not to say that Fico’s opponents were incorrect to appoint a Special Prosecutor; they had fairly won the preceding election, and the appointment raised no constitutional issues. But it is likewise wrong to suggest that it is anti-democratic for Fico to eliminate a position that seemed blatantly constructed to act as a failsafe in case he returned to power. Fico won in December 2023 fairly; there has been no evidence whatsoever that he returned to power through foul play. It is therefore absurd to argue that he cannot democratically undo what a previous government democratically did. To argue this would be to essentially make the case that certain democratically-elected governments—namely those on the Left—are inherently more legitimate than others.
But this belief may explain the outrage over Fico’s plan to, as one political analyst said in an interview, “put his own people in power.” In the United States, former president Donald Trump has railed against a deep state of bureaucrats who are almost uniformly supportive of the Democratic Party; much hay has been made over conservative plans to remake it, should Trump return to power. Fico seems to be in a similar position; after all, if the bureaucrats Fico wishes to replace were already supportive of him, it is hard to imagine anyone in Brussels would care.
The same goes for the criticism over Fico’s attempts to change the supposedly independent public media. His government desires to create a council, selected by the parliament, who can fire the incumbent director without cause. It goes without saying—stop me if you have heard this one before—that the current director was appointed by anti-Fico politicians.
But for having the audacity to replace one political appointee with another, Fico has fallen under attack. The European Broadcasting Union attacked the law, saying it threatens “media independence.” Other critics said it violates EU laws, which “states that governments must ensure the independence of public service media providers.” The current director of Slovak public media said it reminds him of “the days of communism and censors.”
If you are keeping track at home, appointment by a pro-EU government equals independence. Appointment by an EU-skeptical government equals communism.
Anyone who has ever watched European government media, in any country, can immediately tell where its loyalties lie. It is not with populistic usurpers; be it Germany’s public media covering the AfD or the Austrian ÖRF covering the Freedom Party, there is universal revulsion against the populists. Some have a more extreme slant than others, but rarely do non-populists fall under the withering criticism that populists do. Which is a pity; after all, public media is democratically created. There is no inherent reason why a democratically elected government needs to fund institutions which are quite literally predisposed to fight against it.
The outrage over Fico putting his own people into power is made rather rich when one realizes that this is precisely what the former government did when they appointed Lipšic as Special Prosecutor.
But the apparent democratic illegitimacy of populists does not stop in domestic affairs. Fico received condemnation for his statement that Ukraine would likely have to give up land in order to end the Russo-Ukrainian War. Regardless of how one views the conflict, Slovakia has a history of being oppressed by Russia in the form of the Warsaw Pact. If Fico believes that Ukraine is doomed to lose regardless of the aid proffered by the EU, a continuation of the war risks Russia being on Slovakia’s borders; ending the war quickly may be in his country’s interest.
But for a moment, let us put aside the reasons Fico came to his position and instead look at the Slovakians themselves. Polling has showed that Slovakia was one of the most Ukraine-skeptical countries in the European Union, even while the government was solidly pro-Ukraine. In early 2023, the Eurobarometer found that 61% of Slovakians disapproved of the government’s response to the Russo-Ukrainian War and that 56% opposed the funding of weapons sales to Ukraine. The then-government’s pro-Ukraine course was an aberration, an example of an elected government refusing to adhere to the will of their people. Which is, of course, the prerogative of any democratic-republican government. But it is likewise the prerogative of any democratic-republican government to adhere to their people’s will, as Fico has by reversing on Ukraine. To suggest that such a move is anti-democratic is essentially to call into question any government that would disagree with what those in Brussels would desire.
But of course, this is what is happening here. From the former PiS government in Poland, to Janez Janša’s former (and if polls hold, future) government in Slovenia, to Orbán’s in Hungary, to Fico’s in Slovakia, all have one thing in common: they were essentially treated as illegitimate by the establishments they sought to work against. While this would be fine, historically (after all, any usurper is always ‘illegitimate’ to the ruling elites), it is not here, because those same elites have placed their authority upon democratic legitimacy. They may have tried to play a two-step of calling it liberal democracy (which has essentially become ‘progressive democracy’), but at the end of the day, their claim to power—call it their Mandate of Heaven—rests on the laurels of winning democratic elections.
Which is why they are now panicking over the unceasing populist waves. Usually, populist movements are short; they are either successful or they leave. Take in Austria, for example. The first time the populist-right Austrian Freedom Party had real success was the election of 1999, when they spiked to an incredibly high showing and bested the center-right. But from there, they proceeded to drop precipitously in the succeeding elections.
The next time around, however, they were more successful; with the exception of when Sebastian Kurz led the People’s Party, they have done reasonably well in the polls and are set to win Austria’s parliamentary elections later this year. This has been reflected across Europe: the Freedom Party, Fico, France’s Le Pen, Italy’s Meloni, and others are all either staying strong or increasing in strength.
When populist waves were short, establishments could survive by putting their people into power (the very thing they are accusing Fico of doing). With friendly judges and bureaucrats, they can outlast and limit ‘damage’ caused by populist laws and slow their implementation. When the populist wave ends, the establishment can get back on top.
But now that the populist waves are not receding, establishments are worrying that their emergency breaks are not going to last. Before he was ousted, Janša received opprobrium from Brussels for daring to question the independence of his country’s judiciary. And German politicians are working on changes to how government operates in order to “protect” the judiciary from a possible AfD government making changes to it—something which has been a democratic prerogative since modern constitutionalism was first enforced.
This sense of panic is so great that Brussels was nervously awaiting the second round of the elections for president of the Slovak Republic, which recently resulted in a win for Peter Pellegrini, a Fico ally. Pellegrini bested Fico opponent and former Minister of Foreign Affairs Ivan Korčok, by a not particularly close six-point margin. The office is almost entirely symbolic; a veto can be overridden by a simple majority of parliament, meaning that Korčok would have had no power to stop Fico’s laws.
But it is an important vote nonetheless, as a Pellegrini victory symbolically handed Fico total control over Slovakia. The opposition recognized this importance. One opposition politician lambasted pro-Fico voters, saying “It’s not enough for them to have [the parliament], they want everything.” The nerve of voters to select their preferred politicians! Another pro-establishment analyst said voters, in selecting Pellegrini, sent the message that they “don’t want to live in a free society.”
This, therefore, gets to the heart of the matter. It is not Pellegrini who is giving Fico power over Slovakia. It is not the Freedom Party who, in Austria, could have power over public media there. It is not the AfD in Germany who could magically gain the power to select new judges.
It is the voters who would be giving those parties the power to do these things. In the most literal sense, it is democracy at work. And for all their talk about defending democracy, it is this fact which Western establishments are clearly having trouble accepting.
How many ways could Iran have announced its attack? We were being told beforehand in the media that Iran would attack in the next 36 hours. That’s the opposite of a conventional surprise attack.
And Iran passed on word to Turkey, whose terror regime is one of the backchannels being used by the Biden admin.
Iran informed Turkey in advance of its planned operation against Israel, a Turkish diplomatic source told Reuters on Sunday, adding that Washington had conveyed to Tehran via Ankara that any action it took had to be “within certain limits.”
The Turkish source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan had spoken to both his US and Iranian counterparts in the past week to discuss the planned Iranian operation, adding Ankara had been made aware of possible developments.
Earlier this week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to Fidan to make clear that escalation in the Middle East was not in anyone’s interest.
“Iran informed us in advance of what would happen. Possible developments also came up during the meeting with Blinken, and they (the US) conveyed to Iran through us that this reaction must be within certain limits,” the source said.
And then the ‘Swiss channel’ was used to convey information after the attack.
The United States learned that the Iranian strike on Israel was completed through Swiss channels, a senior administration official said Sunday.
A senior administration official told reporters in a briefing Sunday that the U.S. had a “series of direct communications through the Swiss channel” with Iran leading up to the attack. The official said Iran communicated through the Swiss channel that its strike on Israel was complete as the attacks were ongoing.
“We received a message from the Iranians as this was ongoing, through the Swiss. This was basically suggesting that they were finished after this, but it was still an ongoing attack,” the official told reporters.
Why bother doing all this? It’s coordination. It also means, as I’ve said before, that this is not the real attack. It’s a feint. A light show for publicity purposes. A test of U.S. and Israeli defenses. And a way to assure the Biden administration that its addiction to diplomacy still works.
During the night from Friday to Saturday, the harbour inspectorate of Dunkirk in the north of the country reported around 60 migrants carrying a rubber dinghy. The local police asked them to leave the boat, but the migrants threw stones at them, a police source told the newspaper Valeurs. Despite local and CRS reinforcements being called in, the migrants retook the boat and went into the forest, still throwing stones. The police were eventually able to take the boat and neutralise it, but the migrants attacked again, shouting “Allah Akbar” and “Fuck Police”. Around 60 tear gas grenades and 20 LBD shots were fired for an hour and a half before the situation calmed down again.
🔴 Dans la nuit de vendredi à samedi, la surveillance du port de Dunkerque dans le Nord a signalé une soixantaine de migrants portant un bateau pneumatique. Les policiers sur place les ont sommés de partir mais les migrants leur ont lancé des pierres, indique une source policière…
Reduxx can reveal that a Dutch-American academic with a history of advocating for the normalization of adult-child sexual relationships has had a working relationship with the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). Theodore Sandfort’s research has been presented at the organization’s symposium as recently as 2016.
Sandfort, a Columbia-affiliated academic and LGBT activist, previously worked with self-declared pedophiles in the Netherlands, documenting adult men’s sexual abuse of boys as evidence to support his theory that adult-child relationships are “predominantly positive.”
Prior to relocating to Columbia University, Sandfort received a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He was also the Chairman of the Interfaculty Department of Lesbian and Gay Studies at Utrecht University and Director of the Research Program “Diversity, Lifestyles and Health” at the Netherlands Institute of Social Sexological Research.
A faculty member at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, Sandfort has also been employed as a Professor of Clinical Sociomedical Sciences, and worked at the university’s HIV Center alongside former WPATH president and Director of the institution’s Gender Identity Program, Walter Bockting. Like Sandfort, Bockting relocated to Columbia University from the Netherlands, having completed his doctoral degree in psychology from the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.
Bockting and Sandfort also worked together in a professional capacity while acting as members of the editorial board for the academic journal Psychology and Sexuality in 2015.
The paper, titled “Gender nonconformity and peer victimization: Sexual attraction and gender differences by age,” focused on the experiences of Dutch same-sex attracted adolescents aged 11 to 18. The study concluded that gender non-conforming youth were bullied by their peers, leading Sandfort and his colleagues to recommend that “key educational messages that address sexual and gender diversity should be delivered during childhood before early adolescence.”
However, Sandfort’s prior work dealt with sympathetic portrayals of pedophilic relationships between adult men and adolescent boys. In recent years, he has also had access to vulnerable youth in New York City’s foster care system, and, in 2020, he was dismissed from this position when his troubling research history dealing with the sexuality of children came to light.
In 1983, Sandfort authored an article for Youth and Society (Jeugd en Samenleving) titled “Erotic moments in working with children,” a small-scale study of sexual desires among five adult group leaders for the children in their care.
The men described deriving sexual pleasure from working with children, specifically when exercising together, bathing the children, or holding them on their laps. One man, identified as “Lex,” spoke of being aroused while “tickling” children aged “2 or 3,” wearing only his underwear, and proceeding to touch the toddlers’ genitals.
“Pedophile relationships in the Netherlands: Alternative lifestyle for children?” concluded that “the partner and relationship, including sexual aspects, were experienced in predominately positive terms; evidence of exploitation or misuse was absent.”
Sandfort’s 1988 paper and dissertation, published through Utrecht University, “The importance of the experience: about sexual contacts in early childhood and sexual behavior and experience later in life,” (Het belang van de ervaring) deals with cases studies of the sexual experiences of girls and boys under the age of sixteen.
Yet these were not the only instances where Sandfort expressed pro-pedophile leanings – rather, he has an extensive history of publishing writings and research sympathetic to pedophilia. While still living in the Netherlands, the psychologist and sexologist penned several academic texts on the topic of adult-child sexual relationships.
The psychiatrist was also listed as an editorial board member of an academic pro-pedophilia journal called Paidika, which was printed in Amsterdam from 1987 to 1995, alongside a founding member of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), Lawrence Stanley. Two editions of Paidika, in the 1993 and 1994 magazines, featured his research on the “sexual experiences of children”.
Sandfort’s 1987 publication, “Boys on Their Contacts with Men,” presented a study of 25 boys between the ages of 10 and 16 involved in sexual relationships with adult men.
The psychologist and sex researcher had reportedly recruited men from among members of the multiple pedophilia lobbying groups in the Netherlands at that time to solicit them for their views on adult-child sexual encounters.
“Why… should pedophiles, just as other humans with deviant sexual preferences, not have the right to express their sexual desires?” wrote Sandfort, while condemning the feminist movement as “moral dictators” for holding stances against child sexual abuse and pornography.
In several of the case studies documented by Sandfort, young boys are passed around from one adult man to another for sexual use. One of the boys interviewed by Sandfort, Simon, aged 12, describes how he came to know Ed, aged 32, at a community center through another man called Ton.
“Ton is also a pedophile that I first used to go to,” Simon told Sandfort. “He was a sort of Dracula – he sucked everyone in, and after he’d once done it he turned you loose a little later.”
“Did he do that to you?” Sandfort asked the boy. Simon replied, “Yes, he sure did!”
In his conclusion, Sandfort stated that he hoped to present evidence that not all children solicited for sex by adults were being sexually abused.
“Almost all previous research on sex between children and adults has been grounded on the reports of ‘victims’ seeking help or of people who, because of their sexual behavior, have come into contact with the police. The biased picture emerging from such research is to some extent counter-balanced by this investigation.”
Sexologist and psychologist Dr. John Money, known for having popularized the term “gender identity” – as well as his disturbing medical experiments on children – authored a foreword for Sandfort’s book, praising the text as having “great scientific merit.”
“Juveniles and teenagers are attracted to the way their older lovers treat them as equals,” wrote Money, before asserting that the book “constitute[s] that one wall on and around which more may be built.”
In 1991, Sandfort co-edited a compilation of essays defending pedophilia titled Male Intergenerational Intimacy. An introduction co-authored by Sandfort, “Man-Boy Relationships: Different Concepts for a Diversity of Phenomena,” reads:
Chart from Sandfort’s 1987 publication, “Boys on Their Contacts with Men”
“It is difficult to predict in the future with respect to man-boy relationships, child sexuality, the position of children in our society. Will pedophilia become a lifestyle for some people, based on their personally designed sexual orientation? Will society allow people to adopt such a lifestyle, or will society persist in seeing them only as child molesters?
Can sexual involvement between adults and children be only conceived as child sexual abuse, or will the professionals and the public come to realize that there are various kinds of intimate involvement between adults and children and that distinctions between voluntary involvement and forced involvement can be made?”
The book is composed of the writings of over a dozen pro-pedophilia activists, including an essay by David Thorstad, the founder of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), and Edward Brongersma, a Dutch politician who advocated for lowering the age of consent in the Netherlands with a specific focus on sexual relations between adult men and boys.
In 2020, after his previous pro-pedophile writings resurfaced, New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services issued a public statement cutting all ties with Sandfort, who had been working with foster youth aged 13 to 21 in order to conduct surveys.
The child welfare agency spent roughly $416,000 in public and private funds over a period of five years for the survey project led by Sandfort.
The Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) spokesperson Marisa Kaufman stated, “The City of New York has zero tolerance for pedophilia. The health, safety, and well-being of children is our top priority, and those who endanger children are contrary to the values of our city. Our work with Dr. Sandfort began over five years ago and current ACS leadership was not aware of these previous writings until after the survey findings were released. ACS has severed all ties with Dr. Sandfort.”
In 2008, Sandfort received the John Money Award from the Society of the Scientific Study of Sexuality for his work – an organization that former WPATH president Bockting also had previously been involved with in a leadership position.
Sandfort served as President of the International Academy of Sex Research and the Dutch Society of Sexology, and was a fellow with the American Psychological Association (APA), the organization which produces the authoritative guide on psychiatric diagnoses, known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM).
In February, the APA issued a statement “affirming evidence-based care for transgender, gender diverse and nonbinary children, adolescents and adults” in response to recent efforts by US politicians to prevent children from being prescribed puberty-blocking drugs.
