Free Republic

When and why did American life become so coarse, amoral and ungovernable? In his classic 1993 essay, “Defining Deviancy Down”, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan offered a semantic explanation. He concluded that, as the amount of deviant behaviour increased beyond the levels the community can “afford to recognise”, we have been redefining deviancy so as to exempt conduct we used to stigmatise, while also quietly raising the “normal” level in categories where behaviour is now abnormal by any earlier standard. The reasons behind this, he said, were altruism, opportunism and denial — but the result was the same: an...

Way back in 2005, when I was an MP in the Netherlands, my party was strategising about the upcoming local elections. I belonged to the centre-right VVD, and we were particularly concerned about appealing to the nation’s growing migrant community. After much discussion, the leaders settled on Laetitia Griffith to represent us in Amsterdam. She was black and had roots in Suriname, a former Dutch colony in the Caribbean. She could pull in the city’s Creole vote. More importantly, the VVD’s strategists thought she could win over some of the city’s Muslim population. In the hope of making this task...

In another sign that people have had it with leftism, Geert Wilders’ has finally won the prime ministership. The Netherlands was, for decades, a bastion of Europe’s soft socialism. However, the disconnect leftist politicians had from the needs of their countrymen and the effects of a huge influx of Muslims have changed the country. Now, there’s a new sheriff in town. When my mother was a little girl in Holland in the 1920s and 1930s, it was a conservative country with self-controlled but still famously tolerant people who were required, if they lived in Amsterdam, to scrub the stairs and...

I was born a Muslim in Somalia. Then I became an atheist. But secular tools alone can’t equip us for civilizational war. In 2002, I discovered a 1927 lecture by Bertrand Russell entitled “Why I Am Not a Christian.” It did not cross my mind as I read it that one day, nearly a century after he delivered it to the South London branch of the National Secular Society, I would be compelled to write an essay with precisely the opposite title. The year before, I had publicly condemned the terrorist attacks of the 19 men who had hijacked passenger...

One of the most ardent and consistent voices revealing the horrors of Islam has been that of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. For more than two decades, she has warned the world how dangerous the religion in which she grew up is. Ali recalled in a recent column that the 9/11 attacks led her to rethink her Muslim faith."They had done it in the name of my religion, Islam," she wrote, referring to the 9/11 terrorists. "I was a Muslim then, although not a practising one. If I truly condemned their actions, then where did that leave me? The underlying principle that...

Atheism can't equip us for civilisational war... In 2002, I discovered a 1927 lecture by Bertrand Russell entitled “Why I am Not a Christian”. It did not cross my mind, as I read it, that one day, nearly a century after he delivered it to the South London branch of the National Secular Society, I would be compelled to write an essay with precisely the opposite title. The year before, I had publicly condemned the terrorist attacks of the 19 men who had hijacked passenger jets and crashed them into the twin towers in New York. They had done it...

All across the West, there is no shortage of people blaming the horrors in Israel on Israel itself — and openly supporting the perpetrators. The head of policy at the Community Security Trust, which monitors hate crimes committed against British Jews, has said: 'Anti-Semites are getting excited by the sight of dead Jews . . . Hamas murdering Israeli civilians has exhilarated them . . . We've had reports of people driving past synagogues shouting 'Kill the Jews'.' Anti-Semitic incidents in Britain are currently three times higher than they were this time last year, the charity adds.

There is an organized and growing effort to push back against the cancel culture on college campuses. Thousands of conservative and libertarian scholars and academics are standing up and issuing a ringing endorsement of academic freedom. It’s called “The Philadelphia Statement on Civil Discourse and the Strengthening of Liberal Democracy” and has been signed by such luminaries as Robert George, Christina Hoff Sommers, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and more. The statement embodies concepts that all can embrace — at least, those whose minds haven’t been poisoned by the radical left. Tragically, we are losing these defining features of our democracy. Common...

Just when it seemed as though the transgender movement was reaching a fever-pitch and it was becoming impossible to stand up to the zealous mob of trans-enthusiasts, it appears some celebrities may have found the secret to shutting them down and evading the dreaded “cancel culture” imposed on anyone who dares speak truth or reason. Perhaps this culture battle is not all but lost after all. Back in December, famed author J.K. Rowling tweeted her support for Maya Forstater, a former tax expert who lost her job at think tank Center for Global Development for declaring that men and women...

- I was born in Somalia and grew up amid pervasive Muslim anti-Semitism. Hate is hard to unlearn without coming to terms with how you learned it. - I once opened a speech by confessing to a crowd of Jews that I used to hate them. It was 2006 and I was a young native of Somalia who’d been elected to the Dutch Parliament. The American Jewish Committee was giving me its Moral Courage Award. I felt honored and humbled, but a little dishonest if I didn’t own up to my anti-Semitic past. So I told them how I’d learned...

On Wednesday, June 19, the Pennsylvania Senate passed House Bill 315, which would classify Female Genital Mutilation as a first-degree felony in the Keystone State. The Pennsylvania House passed the legislation on April 9, and the bill’s primary sponsor, Rep. Thomas P. Murt, told CNSNews.com he is “very confident” that Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf will sign the legislation into law. ... Rep. Murt wrote, “This is a major victory for the women of Pennsylvania. I want to thank my colleagues in both the House and Senate for taking this strong and unified stand for the right to be safe from...

When I was growing up, organizations that expressed any views at all similar to those expressed by Communist groups were called “Communist fronts.” Anyone who defended on the grounds of civil liberties the right of communists to express their hateful ideology was labeled a “commie-symp.” All decent people railed against this coerced, “politically correct” guilt-by-association, because it endangered freedom of speech, freedom of association, basic fairness and, especially, truth. Today a similar tactic of defamatory character assassination against people with whom one disagrees, particularly conservatives, is being employed by elements of the left, including some in the mainstream media. Consider...

By bizarrely going after Sam Harris, Majid Nawaaz, and others, the once venerable organization has abandoned its core mission, focusing instead on dirty partisan politics Shortly after the election of Donald Trump in November of 2016, a lot of people I knew wrote biggish checks to the Southern Poverty Law Center. They weren’t alone: According to tax filings, the group took in $136 million last year alone, bringing its total assets to a whopping half-a-billion dollars.This surge in the organization’s popularity makes sense: The SPLC, after all, is the group that had once, nearly four decades ago, protected Vietnamese shrimpers...

There are dangerous hate groups in America. So a group called the Southern Poverty Law Center promises to warn us about them. They release an annual list of hate groups in America. The media cover it, but John Stossel says they shouldn't. It's a scam. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists Ayaan Hirsi Ali — who grew up Muslim in Somalia and suffered female genital mutilation — as an "anti-Muslim extremist." Just because she now speaks out against radical Islam. They also list the conservative Family Research Council as a "hate group." That listing led a man to go to...

Since the violence in Charlottesville, when white supremacists left one young woman dead and 19 others injured, the Southern Poverty Law Center has hit the jackpot. They [are] set to receive millions of dollars in donations from some of the nation’s deepest of pockets. Apple pledged $1 million. JP Morgan Chase & Co.: half a million. George and Amal Clooney even got in on the action, promising to donate another $1 million. But is donating money to the S.P.L.C. the best way to combat this[racist] poison? I think not. If Tim Cook and Jamie Dimon had done their due diligence,...

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was schedule to present a paper on radical Islamic terror at the National Security Counsel before being blocked by H.R. McMaster and his recently appointed Senior Director of Counter-Terrorism, Mustafa Javed Ali. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was in town to present her work to the Senate, was also prohibited from visiting the President during her White House visit, where she was allowed to meet with select members of the NSC in an informal setting. ... McMaster has refused to call out radical Islamic terrorism in the past, and tried to stop President Donald Trump from visiting the...

Ronald Reagan's major achievement in his long war against the Soviet Union: presenting communism as a joke -- exposing the lies of the Soviet regime, exposing the misery under which its people were living, and explaining why Western values were preferable to Communist ones. This is exactly what the West, Hirsi Ali explains, should be doing with radical Islam. Western civilization is a humanist vision in which Christianity integrated Jewish wisdom, Greek philosophy and Roman law, thereby giving Western culture its distinctive character: freedom of speech and of the press, equal justice under law, the primacy of the individual, separation...

Over the weekend, I swung by Judge Jeanine's show to talk about one of the most malign trends of our time: the ever more open refusal by one side to permit those on the other side to speak. As I always say, I don't care what side you pick on the great questions of the age - climate change, gay marriage, Islam, transgendered bathrooms, whatever - but, if you're on the side that says the other guy isn't entitled to a side, you're on the wrong side.

A Rutgers University professor who is under fire for saying that the U.S. is “more brutal” than ISIS has used racial slurs against white men, attacked a leading advocate against female genital mutilation and even led a successful protest last year to stop former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from speaking to students.Deepa Kumar, associate professor of journalism and media studies at New Jersey's main public university, made news recently by tweeting: “Yes ISIS is brutal, but US is more so, 1.3 million killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.” But that tweet, sent in March but only brought to prominent...

<p>It is striking to compare the words of a leader of America’s foreign policy establishment with those of a Muslim Brotherhood member-turned apostate—who today lives with a fatwa on her head for her heresies—when it comes to free speech versus Islamic supremacism.</p>