Re the accelerating Islamization of Europe, Bob Belvedere over at the Camp of the Saints has an interesting aside:
People like the Koch Brothers should really be forming paramilitary units for the purposes of rescuing what European Treasures they can, such as the aforementioned Throne [of Charlemagne], the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo's David and Pieta, Magna Carta, etc.
Put Magna Carta to one side for the moment, since the document is a mere souvenir of the idea, and it's the idea that matters, which is why some of us are still writing books on the subject (personally autographed copies exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore).
But the notion of commando teams rescuing what's left of western art from the Eurabian night struck me a year or so back as I was watching a rather undernourished George Clooney flick, The Monuments Men, about art experts rescuing great paintings marooned behind enemy lines during World War Two. In the first chapter of his very prescient book The West's Last Chance, written before the Mohammed cartoon eruptions, the late Tony Blankley contemplates a European future in which firebreathing imams incite art wars on whatever's to hand - Michelangelo's "Little David" gets blown up in Florence, Albrecht Dürer's Adam and Eve are attacked with acid, a car bomb explodes outside the Rodin museum... More and more of the surviving works are carted off to "secure" storage facilities, never to be seen in public again.
Meanwhile, back in the real world:
Islamic State militants have killed three captives in Syria's ancient city of Palmyra by tying them to columns and blowing them up, activists say.
The identities of those reportedly killed on Sunday have yet to be given.
But they are thought to be the first to have been killed in that way since the jihadist group seized the ruins in May.
IS has destroyed two 2,000-year-old temples, an arch and funerary towers at Palmyra, one of the most important cultural centres of the ancient world.
The group believes that such structures are idolatrous. The UN cultural agency, Unesco, has condemned the destruction as a war crime.
Given the number of actual flesh-and-blood people being slaughtered by ISIS, some folks say they can't see the point of complaining about the destruction of architectural and artistic treasures. But there is method to the Islamic State's madness. As part of its cultural totalitarianism, Islam has a long track record, wherever it sets foot, of obliterating the pre-Islamic past. Why? To ensure there's nothing to go back to. There can be no return to greatness, because there is no longer any record of that greatness - only a void that Mohammed filled. In the past, there is desert. In the present, there is only Islam. And so, in the future, for want of any alternative, there can only be Islam.
~In September and October, under Chancellor Merkel's Islamic blitzkrieg, a third of a million "migrants" (officially) entered the German state of Bavaria, home of the aforementioned Albrecht Dürer and much else those "migrants" will not care for. Aside from anything else, Bavaria's Christian Social Union and Frau Merkel's Christian Democratic Union will have to change their names pretty quickly - because, in a Germany where ten per cent of the electorate is Muslim, a party with the word "Christian" in its name will lose every election.
The good news is that, in a present-tense Eutopia severed from its own past, everyone is seventeen years old:
PASSAU, Germany — Newly arrived migrants were lining up at the train station in this border town for their first registration one recent evening. In a group of young Afghans traveling on their own, Matin, from Kabul, said he was 17 years old.
A police officer laughed. "Yes, you and all your friends are 17," he said. "You know how often I hear that every day?"
One of the hardest challenges in processing unaccompanied teenage migrants is to determine whether they are still minors. Their legal situation changes radically on their 18th birthday.
Migrants under 18 are considered "children first and refugees second," giving them the same rights as German children, said Johanna Karpenstein of B-UMF, a Berlin-based charity focused on unaccompanied minor refugees across Germany.
As the aging child star in Gypsy says when asked how old she is:
BABY JUNE: Nine, going on ten.
CRATCHITT: How long has that been going on?
Likewise, hundreds of thousands of tall, butch Muslim men flooding across the Austrian border into Bavaria are eternally seventeen going on eighteen, like refugees from the world's biggest Sound of Music audition. And the-ey'll take ca-are of you, as Frau Merkel has promised.
If you're wondering how many 17-year-olds Syria could possibly have, what are you? Culturally insensitive or something?
If a migrant is deemed over 18, he or she has four weeks to appeal. A medical examination may follow to settle the dispute. Mohammed Jouni of the charity Youth Without Borders — himself a refugee and now a medical student — said that for young Arab or Afghan boys who had never been naked in front of anyone, these examinations could be distressing.
And so, in order to reverse the deathbed demography I wrote about in America Alone, the childless Angela Merkel has adopted every young male in the Muslim world, and overnight Germany's median age has, magically, fallen to ...seventeen.
~Back on this side of the Atlantic, it's Republican debate night yet again, this time on CNBC. I'll be scoring the performances tomorrow, Thursday, with the great Bill Bennett on the radio, live coast to coast at 8.30am Eastern/5.30am Pacific.
