Courts Got Wacky, Crime Exploded

That is the gist of this excellent article from the American Greatness blog.

An excerpt.

When the great Thomas Sowell retired from writing commentary in 2016, he wrapped up his farewell column this way:

With all the advances of blacks over the years, nothing so brought home to me the social degeneration in black ghettoes like a visit to a Harlem high school some years ago.

When I looked out the window at the park across the street, I mentioned that, as a child, I used to walk my dog in that park. Looks of horror came over the students’ faces, at the thought of a kid going into the hell hole which that park had become in their time.

When I have mentioned sleeping out on a fire escape in Harlem during hot summer nights, before most people could afford air-conditioning, young people have looked at me like I was a man from Mars. But blacks and whites alike had been sleeping out on fire escapes in New York since the 19th century. They did not have to contend with gunshots flying around during the night.

Sowell grew up in Harlem in the late 1930s and 1940s. I grew up in Houston in the late 1950s and 1960s. Like Sowell, I can tell of some carefree practices that would seem strange now.

Houston was a segregated city back then, but already a very large one. Yet my parents gave me the run of the town. They let me take the bus to the central library and the downtown movie palaces, and after I showed I could handle a bicycle safely in traffic, they let me ride it through all kinds of neighborhoods to distant record stores and hobby shops. It never occurred to them to be afraid of what some nogoodnik might do to me.

The only thing approaching violence I encountered was when a black kid pegged me with a BB gun from a half-block away. When the pellet bounced off my head, I just thought, “That’s pretty good shooting,” and kept on riding. Getting shot with a BB gun was no big deal; my brother had been shot in the belly, at close range, which really hurt, but the only repercussion was that we scratched the dumb redneck who shot him from our list of playmates.

What suburban family would let their boy run loose in a city the size of Houston today? This long-vanished nonchalance prevailed not only among Harlem’s poor and Houston’s middle class, but among the rich as well. Look at the older silk-stocking districts of any American city. What won’t you see surrounding them? Security gates. Rich, poor, or in-between, Americans once upon a time lived without fear of their neighbors.

Only a decade after I rambled around on a bicycle, Houston became a playground for one of the worst serial killers ever, a man who with two accomplices abducted, raped, tortured, and murdered at least 28 boys from 1970 until 1973.

Why are we not intent on undoing the social and legal changes that let such evil flourish?

Sowell’s column closed with these words:

We cannot return to the past, even if we wanted to, but let us hope that we can learn something from the past to make for a better present and future. Goodbye and good luck to all.

For many months now, I’ve been challenging Donald Trump to make good his promise that “the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon—and I mean very soon—come to an end.” So far, no chorus of readers, pundits, politicians and citizens has risen to press forward that cause, and the reason may be that most Americans today are too young to remember how things were before crime assumed its present dimensions. Let us therefore “learn something from the past to make for a better present and future.” Let us recall not only what we once had in the way of law and order, but how what we had was lost.

Consider just one aspect of the problem: the revolution in criminal justice imposed on us by the U.S. Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren.

When historian Stephen Ambrose asked former President Eisenhower to name his biggest mistake, Ike “replied heatedly, ‘The appointment of that S.O.B. Earl Warren.’ Shocked, I replied, ‘General, I always thought that was your best appointment.’ ‘Let’s not talk about it,’ he responded, and we did not.” Later, Ambrose read the “flattering and thoughtful references” to Warren in Eisenhower’s diary, and concluded that his anger at Warren resulted from the “criminal rights” cases of the 1960s, not the civil rights cases of the 1950s.

Eisenhower was hardly alone in his anger. The most controversial ruling of Warren’s tenure wasn’t Brown v. Board of Education, which the court decided on a unanimous vote in 1954. It wasn’t even the edicts against prayer and Bible readings in public school, although those raised quite a stink and in their own way may have contributed to the subsequent crime explosion. The Warren Court’s most controversial ruling, in fact, was Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the 5-4 decision that imposed on police a duty to inform a suspect of his rights before questioning him, and let the most red-handed culprit get away with the most heinous crimes if police didn’t follow procedure.

Bear in mind that Miranda didn’t create the right to remain silent. Decades before, the court had barred third-degree interrogation, the principal means of trampling that right, with no harmful effect on law enforcement. Miranda broke new ground, and its results were new, too. New, but not improved.

Writing for the court, Warren acknowledged, “the modern practice of in-custody interrogation is psychologically rather than physically oriented.” He took note of the methods prescribed by advanced police manuals and textbooks for getting around a suspect’s defenses. For example, interrogators would pretend to see things the suspect’s way. “The officers are instructed to minimize the moral seriousness of the offense, to cast blame on the victim or on society.”

Warren complained that if the suspect didn’t warm to such treatment and instead insisted on his constitutional right to say nothing at all, then the manuals advised the examiner to “concede him the right to remain silent” but to “point out the incriminating significance of the suspect’s refusal to talk.” Thus by “patience and persistence,” officers managed to draw many suspects out, eliciting alibis that wouldn’t hold up, to be followed by incriminating admissions hedged by excuses and understatement, with a complete confession frequently the end result.

Retrieved April 15, 2018 from https://amgreatness.com/2018/04/14/miranda-versus-america/

 

Life After Prison

A good photojournalist story about it with a focus on Stockton, California, from the New York Times.

An excerpt.

STOCKTON, Calif. — In California, known for decades as one of the nation’s most avid jailers, the trajectory of law and order is shifting. Through litigation, legislation and a series of ballot initiatives, the state’s prison population has dropped 25 percent over the past decade.

The photographer Joseph Rodriguez has been documenting crime and punishment in California for years and recently focused his gaze on the migration home, in Stockton — a barren outpost in California’s Central Valley.

Gretchen Newby, executive director of the Stockton-based nonprofit Friends Outside, which provides support to prisoners and their families, said the city was experiencing a “cluster effect”: Large-scale arrests two or three decades ago have combined with newly relaxed parole requirements, leading to the release of long-term prisoners back to the city. Those who have family tend to find their way. But long stretches behind bars leave many without support. “It’s common to come out with untreated illness, chronic conditions due to age and neglect,” Ms. Newby said. “How are they going to live?” Friends Outside case managers work to answer this question, lining up job interviews and transitional housing.

The roughly 600,000 men and women who leave incarceration nationwide each year are the long tail of the nation’s prison boom. Finding housing tops the list of challenges they face, followed by getting and keeping a job. These practical barriers are compounded by internal obstacles. Researchers report high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as histories of abuse and neglect among prisoners. These early wounds are compounded by the violence, humiliation and bone-deep isolation of the prison experience.

“It’s a lot of work to unravel the garbage I created,” said Jesse De La Cruz, who spent three decades in and out of California prisons. Former prisoners, he said, are expected to “change everything they’ve done all their lives in three months. It doesn’t work that way.”

David Eng was fortunate in this regard. He was sentenced to 17 years to life for second-degree murder for stabbing to death a man who he said had beaten and sexually assaulted his sister. After 28 years, he left prison with the support of a handful of family members and friends. A brother in Stockton offered him a place to stay. A year and half later, he has a car, a new wife and a job helping other returning prisoners get on their feet at Fathers and Families, a Stockton nonprofit.

Retrieved April 10, 2018 from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/07/opinion/sunday/life-after-17-to-life.html?emc=edit_ca_20180410&nl=california-today&nlid=2174538120180410&te=1

 

Pope Will Visit Prison

Always good news, as reported in the Catholic Herald.

An excerpt.

Pope Francis once again will celebrate the Holy Thursday Mass of the Lord’s Supper in a prison and will wash the feet of 12 inmates.

The Pope will celebrate the evening Mass on March 29 at Rome’s Regina Coeli prison.

Before Mass, the Pope will visit sick inmates in the prison infirmary, the Vatican said. He will celebrate the Mass and wash the feet of 12 inmates in the prison’s central rotunda and, afterward, will meet some inmates in the prison’s Section VIII, a protected section of the prison for inmates convicted of sexual crimes and other inmates who could be in danger in the general population.

A former convent built in the 1600s, Regina Coeli has operated as a prison since the 1890s. Although the government says the capacity is just over 600 inmates, the monthly census since March 2017 has been more than 900. More than half of the inmates are non-Italians.

The prison is just over a mile from St Peter’s Square.

From the beginning of his pontificate, Pope Francis has celebrated the annual Holy Thursday evening liturgy at a place of particular suffering. His immediate predecessors celebrated the Mass either in St Peter’s Basilica or the Basilica of St John Lateran.

Retrieved March 20, 2018 from http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2018/03/20/pope-to-celebrate-holy-thursday-mass-in-rome-prison/

Mass Incarceration

The deceptive narrative is unveiled in this superb article by Heather Mac Donald (one of the best criminal justice policy leaders in the country) from City Journal.

An excerpt.

In July 2015, President Obama paid a press-saturated visit to a federal penitentiary in Oklahoma. The cell blocks that Obama toured had been evacuated in anticipation of his arrival, but after talking to six carefully prescreened inmates, he drew some conclusions about the path to prison. “These are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different than the mistakes I made and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made,” the president told the waiting reporters.

The New York Times seconded this observation in its front-page coverage of Obama’s prison excursion. There is but a “fine line between president and prisoner,” the paper noted. Anyone who “smoked marijuana and tried cocaine,” as the president had as a young man, could end up in the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution, according to the Times.

This conceit was preposterous. It takes a lot more than marijuana or cocaine use to end up in federal prison. But the truth didn’t matter. Obama’s prison tour came in the midst of the biggest delegitimation of law enforcement in recent memory. Activists, politicians, and the media have spent the last year broadcasting a daily message that the criminal-justice system is biased against blacks and insanely draconian. The immediate trigger for that movement, known as Black Lives Matter, has been a series of highly publicized deaths of black males at the hands of the police. But the movement also builds on a long-standing discourse from the academic Left about “mass incarceration,” policing, and race.

Now that discourse is going mainstream. As the press never tires of pointing out, some high-profile figures on the right are joining the chorus on the left for deincarceration and decriminalization. Newt Gingrich is pairing with left-wing activist Van Jones, and the Koch brothers have teamed up with the ACLU, for example, to call for lowered prison counts and less law enforcement. Republican leaders on Capitol Hill support reducing or eliminating mandatory sentences for federal drug-trafficking crimes, in the name of racial equity.

At the state and city levels, hardly a single criminal-justice practice exists that is not under fire for oppressing blacks. Traffic monitoring, antitheft statutes, drug patrols, public-order policing, trespass arrests, pedestrian stops, bail, warrant enforcement, fines for absconding from court, parole revocations, probation oversight, sentences for repeat felony offenders—all have been criticized as part of a de facto system for locking away black men and destroying black communities.

There may be good reasons for radically reducing the prison census and the enforcement of criminal laws. But so far, the arguments advanced in favor of that agenda have been as deceptive as the claim that prisons are filled with casual drug users. It is worth examining the gap between the reality of law enforcement and the current campaign against it, since policy based on fiction is unlikely to yield positive results.

Retrieved March 20, 2018 from https://www.city-journal.org/html/decriminalization-delusion-14037.html

Self-Taught

This is a charming essay from Aeon with resonating tidbits for those engaged in prison ministry.

In the second paragraph of this excerpt the author notes how she mispronounces words often because she learned primarily from books; exactly the case for me and many other criminals who read deeply in prison, and who are outsiders; the title of the essay being The Outsider.

An excerpt.

When I was in graduate school, a professor came upon me listening to music on my headphones. The piece had stunned me and it must have shown in my face, for he asked if something was wrong. I told him no, but explained that I’d just heard the ‘Ode to Joy’. I can’t recall exactly what I said next, but I enthused about what a wonderful ‘song’ it was, and asked if he had ever heard it. He had. And his response alerted me to the fact that it was unusual to call it a ‘song’. The professor’s manner was kind but it was impossible not to notice his shock: here was a creature seeking a PhD, who had never before heard the ‘Ode to Joy’. This was one of my earliest signals that I lacked the standard cultural and class equipage of academe.

Early in my career, I regularly mispronounced words. The vocabulary of academia was one I had encountered only in books – its language was emphatically not the stuff people I knew said out loud. I was once congratulated on my ‘bravery’ for not training out my ‘rustic accent’ – never mind that I didn’t know, until then, that I had one. More recently, I was asked to develop a seminar on class bias. I am a philosopher, and since I do not study class bias, the request surprised me. I later discovered that I was chosen for my ‘unique’ life experience, my perceived lower-class origins. Even now, people casually ask me at conferences where I am from, in a way that suggests they are struggling to place the unusual. A student once marvelled that I ‘talk like Faulkner’. Another, prompted by a course evaluation to ‘describe this instructor in one word’, recorded: ‘y’all’.

Before entering academia, I wasn’t terribly aware of my class. My family had made out pretty well, relative to many of our neighbours and even kin. But judgments of ‘doing pretty well’ depend, of course, on your point of comparison. At any rate, the cultural capital of my upbringing involved a very different currency to the one that’s spent in academe. In academia, people carry Beethoven in their pockets like so much loose change. My pockets weren’t empty, sure, but they were mostly stuffed with commercial jingles. So I often felt broke in a land of the wealthy, a cultural pauper among the aristocracy. To use the coin of the realm, you could say I had ‘impostor syndrome’ – that perception that one is not adapted for one’s role, that one does not really belong or pass muster.

I still lack the cultural stuff to pass in academic environments. Yet even as I often feel ill-fitted, using the archetype of an ‘impostor’ to explain myself to myself has never offered me much value. ‘Impostor syndrome’ is a conceptual construct rendered in the language and sensibility of the very thing I feel ill-fitted for. It is an academic term, after all, and seems like an affliction for the higher orders, a malady you have to come up a bit in the world to develop. Most importantly, I can imagine the withering look my grandmother would offer if someone dared to suggest that she suffered from ‘impostor syndrome’.

Retrieved March 9, 2018 from https://aeon.co/essays/how-useful-is-impostor-syndrome-in-academia

 

Deincarceration Advocacy

It is a dangerous narrative, as this article from City Journal points out.

An excerpt.

Last November, a deranged 26-year-old man, Devin Patrick Kelley, opened fire on worshipers inside a church in Sutherland, Texas, killing 26. High-casualty mass shootings are tragic in human terms but anomalous statistically, at least in terms of the portion of total U.S. homicides that they represent. The vast majority of murders, which take place disproportionately in America’s low-income and minority neighborhoods, don’t get nearly the same attention. The Texas church shooting does have an important point of commonality with the majority of American murders, however: its perpetrator had a troubling criminal record. The deincarceration movement, which would return thousands of convicts to American streets, presents a threat to public safety. Repeat offenders already commit a substantial portion of the nation’s violent crime—according to one study, 53 percent of killers have at least one prior felony conviction. They will be walking the streets in greater numbers if deincarceration advocates have their way.

Consider a few examples. In October 2017, Radee Prince shot and killed three people in Maryland. Prince, it turns out, had 42 prior arrests and 15 prior felony convictions. About a month earlier, a police officer in Yonkers was shot in the face by an 18-year-old assailant not unknown to police. He had recently been sentenced to probation and classified as a “youthful offender,” despite being caught with an illegal firearm, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, a machete, and brass knuckles. Earlier in 2017, Baltimore police named Cortez Wall, an 18-year-old murder suspect, “Public Enemy No. 1.” Wall had already been convicted of a gun charge, for which he was on probation. That didn’t stop a Maryland judge from releasing him on bail on a drug charge; he had allegedly murdered someone before his release, though police did not yet suspect him. Had bail been denied, Wall would have been in custody when he became the prime suspect in the deadly shooting.

Most recently, on February 13, a Chicago Police Department Commander, Paul Bauer, was shot and killed while off-duty. Bauer was responding to a radio call that he overheard regarding a suspicious-person report in a downtown Chicago office building. The alleged shooter is 44-year-old Shomari Legghette. “It should come as no surprise” that this was not Legghette’s first run-in with the law, Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said at a press conference held the day after Bauer’s murder. Legghette has an “extensive criminal history” that includes charges for drugs, armed robbery, and gun possession. Johnson called the tragedy “a devastating reminder of repeat gun offenders who are out on the streets of Chicago and need to be held accountable.”

Yet proponents of deincarceration want to make it easier for hardened criminals to sidestep prison and roam the streets. The ACLU, an outspoken supporter of bail reform, cheered the fact that, in New Jersey, judges required defendants to post bail in just three of 3,382 cases processed in January 2017. In an article for Time, two scholars at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice criticized harsh sentences, not just for “nonviolent” drug offenders but also for those committing more serious offenses, calling mass incarceration “the greatest moral and racial injustice of our time.” Citing a report showing that “longer sentences do not reduce recidivism more than shorter sentences,” the authors called for the immediate release of nearly 40 percent of America’s prison population.

Do crime statistics support the claim that such a high percentage of America’s prison population wouldn’t pose a danger to the public—particularly in high-crime neighborhoods of cities like Chicago, which have driven a national increase in violent crime rates? To answer this question, I consulted Chicago Police Department records of the last 200 people arrested for actual or attempted first-degree murder, as of November 21, 2017. That someone has been arrested does not mean that he is guilty, of course, though arrests suggest probable cause. I found that an outsize number of the most serious violent crimes were allegedly committed by individuals who used to be, and perhaps should have remained, behind bars. Of the 200 individuals arrested for murder in the period examined, the vast majority were people of color, particularly black males, with previous arrests. The CPD had arrested two-thirds (133) at least once before; the average number of prior CPD arrests was more than two, and some individuals had as many as 20 “priors.” Seventy-four (37 percent) of the 200 had at least one prior CPD arrest for a violent or weapon-related offense.

These numbers don’t include arrests made by agencies other than the CPD—such as police departments in other states and in neighboring counties—or federal or juvenile arrests. Indeed, for ten of the 200 individuals arrested in the examined time frame, the first listed arrest is for violation of parole conditions, or for possession of a weapon as a felon—meaning that those individuals had been convicted of felonies not listed by the CPD, likely because the offenses occurred in another jurisdiction or before the individuals were legal adults.

According to a recent University of Chicago study, of those arrested for a homicide or shooting in Chicago in 2015 and 2016, “around 90 percent had at least one prior arrest, approximately 50 percent had a prior arrest for a violent crime specifically, and almost 40 percent had a prior gun arrest.” On average, someone arrested for a homicide or shooting had “nearly 12 prior arrests, with almost 45 percent having had more than 10 prior arrests, and almost 20 percent having had more than 20 prior arrests.”

The CPD’s 2011 report on murders in Chicago found that over 87 percent of suspects arrested for murder that year had prior arrest histories. That proportion remains consistent, going back at least 20 years. And the trend isn’t limited to Chicago. In a study of the 75 most populous American counties, conducted from 1990 to 2002, the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics found that “more than half of murderers (53%) had a [felony] conviction record.”

These numbers belie the notion that the criminal-justice system in cities like Chicago is systematically denying people of color second chances—a potent talking point for deincarceration advocates. Fifteen percent of the 200 suspects whose records I examined had at least five prior arrests before they were arrested for murder. Further, these numbers seriously—if not wholly—undermine the claim that the public does not benefit from the incapacitation of violent or chronic criminals.

Retrieved February 21, 2018 from https://www.city-journal.org/html/second-third-and-fourth-chances-at-what-price-15657.html

Skull and Bones & Carceral World Culture

There is very little accurate information about carceral world culture out there, for good reason; but one important fact is to know that the elite criminal/carceral world cultural members are the Skull and Bones Society—in its traditional sense—of the criminal/carceral world, and in the process of providing an effective criminal reformation ministry, not understanding this makes your work much more difficult.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about Skull and Bones.

Skull and Bones is an undergraduate senior secret society at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. It is the oldest senior class landed society. … The society is known informally as “Bones”, and members are known as “Bonesmen”.

Skull and Bones was founded in 1832…. William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft co-founded …. The first senior members included Russell, Taft, and twelve other members.

Retrieved January 22, 2018 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_Bones

An excellent movie with Skull and Bones playing center stage is The Good Shepherd and one of my favorite lines in there is when the protagonist—a CIA counter-intelligence executive and a Bonesman—is speaking with a Mafia Don who tells him that all of the nationalities that have come to the United States have something they call their own, but you have nothing; to which the protagonist responds: (paraphrasing) “We have the country, the rest of you are just tourists.”; a sentiment concerning the carceral world that could be made by the elite prison gangs.

Of course, the major difference between the secret society of the carceral and that of the free, is that the criminal/carceral world elite, has nothing to lose and will accept death to pursue their aims; whereas the free elite secret societies have everything to lose and will risk death more haltingly.

Within ministry, a couple things related in this way are important to remember.

One is comparing the existential power of the acceptance of death with the spiritual power of saints and martyrs who accept death can be a powerful argument.

Two, as can the world of absolutes each lives in, for it is absolutes that can convert criminals, not maybes.

 

Prison Radicalization

This is not a new problem, including in the United States, but it is highlighted in this story from Breitbart.

An excerpt.

One of the terrorists who murdered Fusilier Lee Rigby is radicalising other prison inmates who vow to become jihadists when they are released, prison sources have revealed.

Sources at Her Majesty’s Prison Frankland have told The Mirror that Michael Adebolajo, who along with fellow Islamist Michael Adebowale, murdered and attempted to behead Fusilier Lee Rigby near Woolwich Barracks in 2014, has already radicalised dozens of prisoners.

Non-Muslim prisoners are said to have converted under the influence of the terrorist and have sworn allegiance to Islamic State. His recruits have vowed to commit acts of terror when released, the paper reveals.

One prison official said: “Adebolajo spends most of his waking hours preaching his distorted form of Islam to anyone who will listen. He sees every inmate as a potential Islamic State soldier whether they are Muslims or not.

“He has a big personality and is very charismatic and some of the more vulnerable prisoners will fall under his spell. He is a very dangerous individual.”

The source told The Mirror that Adebolajo sees his role in life to recruit as many Jihadis as possible.

He added: “If he is suspected of trying to radicalise other inmates we step in and move him… But even in prison Adebolajo cannot be watched all the time. We don’t have the staff or the resources.”

Adebolajo was given a whole-life order excluding the possibility of parole, and Adebowale was given a minimum term of 45 years in prison.

In August 2016, a report found that political correctness was to blame for the flourishing of Islamic extremism in prisons, with guards reluctant to confront Muslim inmates for fear of being branded ‘Islamophobic’.

Christianity Failing in Europe?

A troubling scenario–especially considering the presence of Islamic recruiting within prisons–examined in this story from Crisis Magazine.

An excerpt.

On May 22, an Islamic suicide bomber detonated himself outside a pop concert in Manchester, England, killing and wounding dozens, many of them young children.

The terrorist was a 22-year-old named Salman Abedi. A few days after the attack, I was reading an article about the mosque he attended—the Didsbury Mosque. “That’s funny,” I thought looking at the accompanying photo, “that doesn’t look like a mosque, it looks like a church.”

Sure enough, as I discovered, the Didsbury Mosque was once the Albert Park Methodist Chapel. It had been bought by the local Syrian Muslim community and transformed into a Muslim place of worship.

Similar transformations have been taking place in other parts of the UK. St. Mark’s Church in London is now the New Peckham Mosque, St. Peter’s Church in Cobridge was sold to the Madina Mosque. The Brick Lane Mosque in London was originally a Methodist church. But church-to-mosque conversions are only part of a larger story. There are now 423 mosques in London, and the number is expected to grow. Meanwhile, 500 London churches have closed since 2001, and in all of England 10,000 churches have closed since 1960.

The transformation of the Albert Park Methodist Church to the Didsbury Mosque is emblematic of one of the most significant shifts in history: the transformation of Europe from a largely Christian continent to a largely Islamic one. The transformation is far from complete, and there’s an outside chance the process can be reversed, but time and demographics favor Islam.

In several of Europe’s cities, the Muslim population now hovers around the thirty percent mark. In ten years’ time, that will be forty percent. Of course that doesn’t mean 40 percent of highly committed Muslims facing 60 percent of deeply devout Christians. Both faiths have their share of half-hearted “nominals” for whom religion is more a cultural inheritance than a deeply held conviction. Still, the “nominal” problem is a much greater problem for European Christians than for European Muslims. In many European countries, Sunday church attendance is the 5-10 percent range whereas mosque attendance is very high in relation to the size of the Muslim population. In England, there are already more Muslims attending Friday prayers than there are Christians attending Anglican services on Sundays. A study by Christian Research predicts that by 2020 the number of Muslims attending prayer service in England and Wales will exceed the number of Catholics attending weekly Mass.

It’s also noteworthy that the expanding Muslim population in Europe is relatively young, whereas the declining “Christian” population is an aging one. Sixty-forty seems like good odds until you realize that the average age of the 60 percenters will be around 55 while the average age of the 40 percenters will be around 25.

You may object that if there is any fighting to be done, most of the fighting on the “Christian” side will be done by the army, not by citizens in walkers and wheelchairs. But keep in mind that the military draws its recruits from the ranks of the young. As the population of the people that Islamists refer to as “crusaders” ages, European governments will be forced to draw more of their new recruits from the Muslim population. The same goes for the police forces. Many Muslims will serve their country or their city faithfully, but many will have divided loyalties, and some will have signed up in the first place with mutiny in mind.

Most likely, however, the transformation will be effected without major battles. It won’t be a matter of numbers or of military strength, but of strength of belief. Those with the strongest beliefs will prevail. Those who are not sure what to believe will submit without a fight.

Dawa, a Strategy to Understand

This is an important article from The Catholic Thing, especially so for those doing Catholic prison ministry.

An excerpt.

So, what do you know about dawa? You know what jihad is, and what sharia is. That is Islamic vocabulary 101.

At the more advanced end of the lexicon are terms such as taqiyya (a form of lying specifically permitted to advance the cause of Islam). Or the formerly obscure taharrush, which might sound familiar inasmuch as it – the practice of groups of men surrounding and sexually assaulting women in public – rudely materialized in several European cities recently. That there is a name for it suggests it is a frequent enough occurrence. Charming.

These are all terms with which we were happily ignorant not so long ago. But how many of you are familiar with dawa? That is the question Ayaan Hirsi Ali posed last year to a crowd of admirers who had come to honor her for contributions to culture and civilization. Yet few of even her highly educated and engaged audience could answer.

And so she took them to task. In a way, obviously, that can only be done among friends: “You are honoring me and I am thankful, but I almost want to say to all of you who do not know what dawa is, ‘Shame on you.’”

That’s not what you’d expect at such a banquet, making it all the more effective as a way of seizing the audience’s attention. Not a bad idea. But she wants the attention of the wider public and so has elaborated upon the concept in a new report accessible through the Hoover Institution. Dawa can be likened to proselytizing, but it is much more than that. It might be summed up as the insidious project to Islamize the world – as cultural imperialism bent on corroding Western liberties and ultimately imposing sharia law. It is an all-encompassing precursor to jihad, a summons to conquer non-violently, and utilizes any number of mechanisms to achieve that end.

Some – too many – will say: that sounds like paranoia. Pope Francis can lament the cultural imperialism of today’s degenerate West. But to the extent that the exportation of stifling, dehumanizing ideas is critically acknowledged in the “progressive” West at all, it can only be self-directed – and confined to the past.

Dawa is nothing short of the effort to subvert from within. It is “to the Islamists of today what the ‘long march through the institutions’ was to twentieth-century Marxists.” We have a hard time imagining the immutable designs of Islam, even though Islamic leaders themselves forthrightly say they will conquer Europe and America though dawa, not the sword.

It would be hard to find this more explicitly spelled out than in the Strategic Plan of the Muslim Brotherhood for North America – a land they see as territory to be settled:

The [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

To bring this about, alas, they are to become masters in the art of cooperation and coalition building. Authorities happened to stumble upon that document back in 2004, making their partners in “dialogue”– however much they want to seek common ground – all the more willfully credulous today.

Here Islamic actors have their (frequently Catholic) “partners” right where they want them – for now. Hirsi Ali pleads that we should be able to see – in our supposed “information age” – where the road of dawa leads: to subjugation.