RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you are a student of ancient military history — or actually an action movie buff — you know the significance of the number 300. It is a number associated with a brave stand made by Spartan warriors led by their king, Leonidas. They stood against a numerically superior force but wrought much violence and death against the invading Persian Army of Xerxes, until they were betrayed. Could it be a modern day episode of the brave 300 playing out before our eyes?

In case you haven’t heard, unlike the characterization of President Obama on Wednesday, ISIS is not on the defense and their morale is certainly not low. ISIS has taken a western Iraqi town of al-Baghdadi not far from Ramadi. Nearby al-Baghdadi is an Iraqi base, al-Asad, where 300 Marines are training Iraqi forces.

It’s an appealing delusion, the notion that the much vaunted, but little seen, Religion of Peace might transform itself from within. Alas, both history and contemporary context say all the West can do is smile at those who would coexist while standing ready to smite those who do not.

In a generally excellent article in The Spectator Theo Hobson tackled the jarring new tagline of the center-right: “Islam needs a Protestant Reformation.” Hobson is exactly right in pointing out that this narrative “implies that, once upon a time, Christianity was in conflict with healthy political values, but learned to change its ways,” and points out how “Christianity didn’t [in fact] adapt to modernity: it inadvertently made modernity, by trying to purify itself.”

But Mr. Hobson loses the plot when he expresses doubt that Islam could do the same:

… liberal values already exist, and are firmly seen as external, or alien, to Islam. To say that freedom of religion and freedom of speech are central principles of Islam just doesn’t ring true: we all know that they have been most fully formulated and institutionalized, over centuries, in the West.

Now hold on a minute. Are we saying that political liberalism was inherent in Christianity, and only in the process of reformation did that come to the fore? Unlike most American conservatives I don’t use the “L-word” as an insult – a habit I probably picked up in Australia, like wearing sunscreen in the middle of winter. But this reading is inextricably bound up with a Protestant interpretation of Christian history. As an Anglican, that doesn’t particularly irk me. But it doesn’t make for an objective exercise in comparative religions.

Israel-bashing conference is due to take place from 17-19 April, organised by the Law School at the University of Southampton.
The conference is entitled “International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism”.
A look at the Law School’s website here reveals that the organising committee of the conference includes Professor Oren Ben-Dor (an ex-pat Israeli who has a history of Israel-bashing pro-BDS activity), Professor Professor Suleiman Sharkh (whose speciality is evidently not law but electrical engineering), and Ms. Juman Asmail (a Palestinian student activist). American Professor George Bisharat is also seminally involved.

Announces the website:
‘This conference will be the first of its kind and constitutes a ground-breaking historical event on the road towards justice and enduring peace in historic Palestine. It is unique because it concerns the legitimacy in International Law of the Jewish state of Israel. Rather than focusing on Israeli actions in the 1967 Occupied Territories, the conference will focus on exploring themes of Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism; all of which are posed by Israel’s very nature. The conference aims to explore the relatedness of the suffering and injustice in Palestine to the foundation and protection of a state of such nature and asks what role International Law should play in the situation. It will take place over a whole weekend and will involve leading thinkers: scholars from law, politics, philosophy, theology, anthropology, cultural studies history and other connected disciplines Key speakers and various panels will diagnose the legal position with regard to the nature of Israel thus enabling a much needed platform for scholarly debate and disagreement.’

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2015/02/on-south-african-campus-evil-call-for.htmlWell might Cape Town author and columnist Max du Preez tweet the message at left.

Well might others share his outrage.
From the Durban University of Technology in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, comes a grotesque example of apartheid with a twist.
Reports a South African newspaper:

Jewish students at the Durban University of Technology (DUT) who supported the State of Israel should be kicked out, the Students Representative Council (SRC) has demanded.

And this applies to students who are sponsored by the Israeli government. The demands, sent to the DUT management, have shocked and angered Jewish organisations.

The vice-chancellor of the university, Professor Ahmed Bawa, said the demand by the SRC and the Progressive Youth Alliance that the DUT deregister all Jewish students “is totally unacceptable”.

The Secretary of the SRC, Mqondisi Duma, said: “As the SRC, we had a meeting and analysed international politics. We took the decision that Jewish students, especially those who do not support the Palestinian struggle, should deregister.”

We live in a free country and cherish the free press. And yes it’s OK for the media to ask whatever they want, unless your name is Obama and then you get a pass on all of those tricky questions from your past.

Governor Scott Walker was in London on some Wisconsin trade mission. It’s the kind of trip that a lot of governors make, especially when you are running a state that is suddenly very appealing to investors.

During the trip, Gov Walker got a question about “evolution” and everyone seems to have an opinion about it.

This is what Byron York wrote about it:

“Up until that moment, the story of the London trip might have been Walker’s deference to Obama.

Instead, it became, in the words of an Associated Press headline, “Wisconsin Gov. Walker Refuses to Answer Evolution Question.”

Walker’s political team back home scrambled to fix things, releasing a statement saying he believes “faith and science are compatible.” But remarkably, for a man who has run for high office, Walker didn’t have a ready-to-repeat answer on evolution. His staff didn’t even know his views before drafting the statement.

WASHINGTON—Iran’s paramount political figure, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has responded to overtures from President Barack Obama seeking better relations by sending secret communications of his own to the White House.

The Iranian cleric wrote to Mr. Obama in recent weeks in response to an October presidential letter that raised the possibility of U.S.-Iranian cooperation in fighting Islamic State if a nuclear deal is secured, according to an Iranian diplomat. The supreme leader’s response was “respectful” but noncommittal, the diplomat said.

A senior White House official declined to confirm the existence of that letter. But it comes as the first details emerge about another letter Mr. Khamenei sent to the president early in his first term.

That letter outlined a string of abuses that in the supreme leader’s view the U.S. had committed against the Iranian people over the past 60 years, according to current and former U.S. officials who viewed the correspondence.

The White House official confirmed that the president received that letter in 2009, but declined to comment on the content of any presidential correspondence.

Neither the White House nor the Iranian government has officially confirmed any correspondence between the two. Iranian officials, in recent months, though, have told Tehran’s state media that some of Mr. Obama’s letters were answered, without specifying by whom.

DJERBA, Tunisia—By the hundreds, they gathered for a pre-wedding party on a resort island in Tunisia. Here, in the heart of the Muslim world, the crowds were speaking Arabic. The band was Arab too, playing boisterous Arabic melodies.
But the revelers were Orthodox Jews—as devout as they come.

Per custom, the bride-to-be, Oshrit Uzan, had quit her job running her own beauty salon to prepare for her new life. She might return to work, she mused, but her husband must approve: “I will need permission,” she said.

Isolated on a small niche of North Africa’s largest island, the Jews of Djerba have been called the last Arab Jews—and it is hardly an exaggeration. Across the rest of the Middle East, Jewish communities have been vanishing over the past half century, since the creation of Israel. Before then, there were more than 850,000 Jews living in the Arab world. Today, there are between 4,000 to 4,500, according to Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Some countries, such as Algeria and Libya, which once had sizable Jewish populations, have virtually no Jews within their borders. Egypt, which through the late 1940s had 75,000 Jews active in the country’s economic and social life, is down to a few dozen. Only Morocco, once home to 265,000 Jews, has a community of 2,500 left. Many are elderly or middle-aged.

Last week, at Washington’s annual National Prayer Breakfast, US President Barak Obama admonished us all lest “we get on our high horse and think that this [religious fanaticism] is unique to some other place – remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ … So, it is not unique to one group or one religion.”

This presidential platitude looks innocuous enough except that it’s deceptively simplistic. For one thing it casually glosses over the fact that the crimes it alludes to aren’t contemporaneous.

I am the last who’d seek to whitewash the Christian record. I hazard a guess that my family line was affected way more by Christian brutality than were any of Barack Obama’s ancestors. (Even if we accept his thesis that slavery in the American South and its Jim Crow laws were imposed in the name of Christ, none of Obama’s forebears suffered therefrom).

But one quick glance at my uniquely long genealogical chart will show many names accompanied by the notation “killed for Kiddush Hashem” – the sanctification of the Holy Name – Jewish euphemism for martyrdom.

Forty years after the Swedish parliament unanimously decided to change the formerly homogenous Sweden into a multicultural country, violent crime has increased by 300% and rapes by 700%. Sweden is now number on the list of rape countries, surpassed only by Lesotho in Southern Africa.

Significantly, the report does not touch on the background of the rapists. One should, however, keep in mind that in statistics, second-generation immigrants are counted as Swedes.

In an astounding number of cases, the Swedish courts have demonstrated sympathy for the rapists, and have acquitted suspects who have claimed that the girl wanted to have sex with six, seven or eight men.

The internet radio station Granskning Sverige called the mainstream newspapers Aftonposten and Expressen to ask why they had described the perpetrators as “Swedish men” when they actually were Somalis without Swedish citizenship. They were hugely offended when asked if they felt any responsibility to warn Swedish women to stay away from certain men. One journalist asked why that should be their responsibility.

Earlier this week, I participated in the Center for Security Policy’s Defeat Jihad Summit.

I find that the several hours of speeches and discussion have distilled into some salient recollections and comments.

1) There remains a chasm between American “messaging” and that of some of our European friends who were invited to speak, including the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, who contributed a taped message, and Lars Hedegaard, who addressed the conference via Skype from Denmark.

American participants in the main demand, even a little truculently, that we now, finally, break the bonds of “political correctness” and speak frankly about “radical Islam,” “Islamism,” “ideas of ISIS,” etc.

Wilders, whose Party for Freedom is No. 1 in the Dutch polls, and Dispatch International editor Hedegaard both speak, and have always spoken about “Islam” — pure and very simple.

Indeed, Wilders has encapsulated everything you need to know about Islam and the West thus: “The more Islam there is in a society, the less freedom there is.”

Not “Islamism.”

This difference is more than semantic.

The primary mechanism of control that Islam exerts over people is Islamic slander law, Islamic blasphemy law. This is the institutional means by which Islam protects itself against criticism, even objective facts about Islam that might be construed critically. The penalty is death. Not for nothing did Yusef Qaradawi state that Islam wouldn’t even exist without the death penalty for “apostasy.” We have seen innumerable instances, particularly since the 1989 publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, where Muslims have executed, or tried to execute this death sentence even against non-Muslims, from Europe to Japan, in efforts to extend the rule of Islam.

When American lawmakers, generals and security experts omit “Islam” from their debates and war councils, focusing instead on what they have dubbed “radical Islam,” “Islamism” and the like, they are succombing to this same control mechanism. They are protecting Islam. They are themselves sheltering Islam against the cold light of analysis. By extension, they are also preventing their own Western societies from devising means of defense against Islamization. They are accepting and carrying out what is probably the most important Islamic law.

There is concrete danger in this. Unless we can come to an understanding that it is the teachings of Islam — not the teachings of some peculiar strain called “Islamism,” or of an organization such as the Muslim Brotherhood or ISIS — that directly undermine our constitutional liberties, we cannot protect our way of life from these teachings, whose popularity grows with the increasing Islamic demographic. This is what the advanced Islamization of Europe shows us. A nominally sensible US immigration policy would immediately halt Islamic immigration to prevent a sharia-demographic from gaining more critical mass in the USA, democratically.

Then again, we don’t have a national border, much less a sensible immigration policy. That means many of these questions are moot.

2) Still, it bears noting: The Left has responded to the current cycle of Islamic jihad — a recurring blight on civilization, as Andrew Bostom’s Legacy of Jihad amply documents — by inventing a foe called “violent extremism.” The Right, scoffing at this euphemism, “pinpoints” the threat of “radical Islamism.”