“For unto us, a child is born. Unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called wonderful counselor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the prince of peace.”

That's what the great prophet Isaiah promised centuries before the birth of Christ.

The fulfillment of that promise is what we celebrate at Christmas. It happened in Little Bethlehem and the angel declared to the shepherds, “I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a savior, which is Christ the Lord.”

And so that baby was born, history was riven in two, and salvation came as the angelic host declared “glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.”

Now you and those you love, celebrate a wonderful Christmas filled with the glory of Christ.

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.If they would rather die, perhaps they had better do so and decrease the surplus population.

With that quote, Ebenezer Scrooge makes perfectly clear the true political message of A Christmas Carol.

Dickens was writing amidst a wave of hysteria about population growth triggered by Thomas Malfus, who argued that reproduction would exceed growth in food.

Scrooge was both anti procreation and anti-marriage.

Of course, Scrooge and Malfus who inspired him turned out to be wrong.

His nephew, Fred, and the ghost of Christmas present turned out to be right.

But the lessons from A Christmas Carol ought to give us strength today as well, as we press back against a message of outright hostility to family so prevalent among the woke left.

There is no such thing as surplus population.

God bless us everyone.

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Over the last few weeks, Donald Trump has ratcheted up pressure on Nicholas Maduro to leave Venezuela.

The US has plenty of good reasons to force the Marxist dictator from power, narco trafficking, human rights violations, and flooding the US with transnational criminal gang members among them.

Perhaps the biggest threat Maduro poses, is his partnership with Hezbollah in Iran. Those ties go back to 1999 and Hugo Chavez, and Hezbollah is involved in every aspect of Maduro's criminal enterprises.

Iran's proxy army has established its own network in Venezuela and serves the Iranian regime's ambitions to destroy what its mullahs call the great Satan.

The mainstream media in the US have rarely reported on this partnership, but others have sent up warnings. The Atlantic Council warned five years ago that Hezbollah is equal to the cartels in organized crime and terror in the Western hemisphere.

That threat extends across Latin America, but Maduro's regime is its nexus in the region.

Donald Trump understands this threat and that America has to act now to stop it.

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Norman Podhoretz died last week at the age of 95.

A long-time editor of Commentary magazine was, simply put, one of the conservative intellectual giants of the last three-quarters of a century.

For me, Commentary magazine was added to National Review as my Christmas list “asks” when I was in college.

Since then, Commentary has never not been a part of my intellectual life.

It was Podhoretz’s memoir “Breaking Ranks,” that put the intellectual puzzle together for me—and how much the intellectual battles of post-World War II America mattered.

He spelled out the ideas and the fact that they had to be fought for: Communism was evil and could be contained and even defeated.

It may, or may not, be true that "No Podhoretz, no President Reagan," but that very well might be the case. He was a giant.

I never met him.

I was fortunate enough to interview him.

And I know firsthand what a great American Norman Podhoretz was.

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The murderous, premeditated attack at Bondi Beach in Australia forces us to look at two undeniable patterns.

The first is the pattern of anti-Semitic violence.

The second is the larger pattern of terror tied to immigration and Islam.

This was not just a targeted terrorist attack on Jewish Australians, it was also a dagger thrust in the heart of Western civilization. Freedom of assembly means nothing if citizens are too afraid to assemble.

Some people recoil at the suggestion that immigration and Islamic terrorism had anything to do with this and other recent attacks, but the facts are plain to see. Western civilization now faces a direct threat to both liberty and civilizational survival.

Simply put: The vast majority of Muslims around the world do not want to join the civilizational project of the West, including the national project of the United States—we know it because they say it out loud.

Folks, we need an honest conversation—and we need it now.

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Just after 9/11, there was a good deal of introspection within the Muslim community living in the West—there was even more good will toward the Muslim community from non-Muslim Westerners. The good will has stayed the same, perhaps even accelerated into encouragement; the self-introspection has now become self-expression.

Whether we are talking of the October 7th bloodbath that received countenance all over the West, the recent attack in Bondi Beach, the thwarted upcoming New Year’s Eve bombings, we could not spend enough time detailing the examples. Toleration for all of this and more must end. In his autobiography, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote: “In the mindset that is modern Islam, there is one spectrum, not several…. including too many who buy into bits of their [extremist] world-view.”

If ten percent of the Muslim world population is near this point of view, we who want to preserve the West had better awaken from our lethal slumber. Too much tolerance is already devastating Judeo-Christian values, and Jews, and Christians.

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People of good will around the world were rightfully horrified by the terrorist attack on an outdoor Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Australia. The attackers reportedly pledged allegiance to ISIS, the Islamist extremist group.

For Australia’s Jewish community, open-air, a beachside religious observance may now be a thing of the past.

And this is hardly an isolated case. Across Europe, public celebrations are being cancelled. Many of Germany’s Christmas markets are not opening this year. And Paris has canceled its iconic open-air New Year’s Eve celebration over similar concerns.

The political left has been vocal in opposing President Trump’s immigration policies. But events like these make something increasingly clear: border security is also terrorism security.

A society unwilling to protect its way of life will eventually discover it has no way of life left to protect.

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When pro-Palestinian activists chant “globalize the intifada,” Bondi Beach is what they want. A father-son Islamist terror team has massacred 15 Australian Jews celebrating Hannukah.

Australia’s Prime Minister went on television to address his nation about the lessons of this terrorist attack. He promised to increase gun restrictions in a country that had already effectively disarmed its population. Anthony Albanese also declared that the biggest threat to Australians is “right wing extremism.”

This is utter nonsense. The terrorists had a license to own and carry the weapons they used to slaughter Jews on the beach. At least one of them had come to the attention of Australian counter-terrorism agents for contact with radical Islamist terrorists. The Australians not only chose to do nothing about that, they refused to disarm them.

The greatest threat to Western security is not “right wing extremism.” It is radical Islamist terrorism and the globalized intifada.

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