RUTHFULLY YOURS

Pope Francis spoke to reporters on board the papal plane again — and that never leads to anything good. His latest comments about Islamic terrorism were doubleplusungood.

Via NBC News:

Pope Francis said he doesn’t like singling out violence carried out by Muslims because people of all religions are guilty of deadly crimes.

He told reporters the situation was like “a mixed fruit salad” and that there were “violent people in all religions.”

“I do not like to talk about Islamic violence because every day when I skim the papers … I read about violence in Italy: this one who killed the girlfriend, another killed the mother-in-law … and they are all baptized Catholics,” he said aboard a Rome-bound flight from Poland on Sunday.

“If I talk about Islamic violence, then I also have to talk of Catholic violence. Not all Muslims are violent, just like not all Catholics are violent,” the pontiff added. “It’s like a mixed fruit salad. There is a bit of everything. There are violent people in all religions.”

Yes, the pope just compared domestic violence to Islamic terror — as if a Catholic dirtbag murdering his girlfriend is the same thing as an Islamic jihadist in a truck mowing down a hundred people watching fireworks in Nice. Or Islamic State jihadists beheading 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya. Or Kenyan jihadists killing 68 people at a shopping mall. Or an Islamic terrorist gunning down dozens of people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino or a gay nightclub in Orlando. I can go on and on, obviously, because Islamic terror attacks around the world happen on a daily basis. But you get the idea — murderous Catholic boyfriends may be bad, but the damage they do is limited to one or two people and their impact on society as a whole is minimal. Islamic jihad is a threat to us all.

But stop the presses — Pope Francis had another pearl of papal wisdom for us with the stunning revelation that there are violent people in all religions. Has anyone ever suggested otherwise? The problem is there is currently only one religion where a significant number of the faithful are finding justification for murder and mayhem against unbelievers in their sacred texts. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi understands this and has called for a religious reformation of the Muslim faith. “We need to revolutionize our religion,” he proclaimed on News Year’s Day of 2015 to an audience of Muslim clerics and scholars.

We shouldn’t be surprised when an intractable ideologue like Barack Obama — the worst president in American history — ignores much-needed calls for the reform of Islam. And we’ve come to expect him to make morally and intellectually vacuous comparisons. But it is beyond disturbing to hear it coming from a pope.

The media and effete powers-that-be have been twisting themselves into Halal pretzels Islamsplainin’, rationalizing how a given Muslim terrorist attack isn’t really “Islamic” or isn’t significant. These contortions can become quite ridiculous, such as suggesting that recent Allahu Akbar-shouting Munich shooter Ali Sonboly might somehow have had “right-wing” motives because, among his violent passions, was an interest in Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik.

A more common (un)intellectual contortion is the minimizing tactic of claiming, as is politically correct authorities’ wont, that a given jihadist attacker “has no ties to IS” (the Islamic State), as if there’s nothing to see here if a man doesn’t provide notarized evidence of allegiance to the boogeyman du jour. Yet this is much as if we’d claimed during the Cold War that a Marxist terrorist attack wasn’t really a Marxist™ terrorist attack because we couldn’t find a connection to the Soviet Union. The issue and problem wasn’t primarily the Soviet Union but communism (Marxism birthed the USSR, not the other way around), an evil ideology that wreaks havoc wherever it takes hold. Likewise, the IS didn’t birth Islam; Islam birthed the IS.

Nonetheless, moderns will often use the misdirection of focusing inordinately on national or group associations when discussing terrorism. This is a dodge, one designed to help us avoid uncomfortable truths, and which relegates us to playing an eternal game of whack-a-mole. The USSR is gone but communism is still a problem (witness North Korea and Cuba), and insofar as it’s less of a threat, it’s largely because its ideas have been discredited. Bad ideas’ standard bearers will change. But as long as the bad ideas remain tolerated and credible, they’ll always win converts.

In fact, the reality that today’s terrorists are diverse makes the point. They may be Iranian, Afghani, American, Albanian, German or from any nation whatsoever; they may be part of Hamas, IS, al Qaeda, the U.S. Army (Maj. Hassan), some other organization or no organization; they may be of any race or ethnicity, be rich or poor, and male or (occasionally) female. They only have one truly common thread: being Muslim.

The point is that, ultimately, this is a battle not of nations or organizations but of ideas, and ideas are powerful. Beliefs matter. Every action begins with a thought — or, at least, with a reflex response reflecting a worldview that has shaped one’s thoughts and emotions.

Jihadis, trained and armed by Pakistan, are purging Kashmir of its native Hindu and Sikh population, and waging a terrorist campaign to carve out a separate Islamic country in that part of India.

What New York Times did not say is that these ‘boys with guns’ are members of Hizbul Mujahideen, a group designated as terrorist organisation by both the European Union and the United States.

After being at the forefront of gun control campaign in U.S. for decades, the New York Times finally supports ‘open carry’ – but only for terrorists waging Jihad against “infidels”.

India is not ‘occupying’ Kashmir, which is already part of India. India is waging a war against Islamic terrorism which has claimed the lives of more than 4,800 Indian civilians and more than 2400 Indian security personnel.

The mainstream media, quick to blame India for the ongoing unrest, will not tell its readers how the province of Kashmir became the Islamist hellhole that it is today.

The minarets of the mosques, reserved in times of peace for prayer calls, were proclaiming armed jihad against Hindus in towns and cities across the province. Kashmiri Hindus were given three option; either to convert to Islam, leave their ancestral homes, or face certain death.

“We order you to leave Kashmir immediately, otherwise your children will be harmed — we are not scaring you but this land is only for Muslims, and is the land of Allah. Sikhs and Hindus cannot stay here. If you do not obey, we will start with your children”. – Notice to Hindu Sikhs in Kashmir

In an ultimate act of humiliation, Hindu men were told to move out of Kashmir without taking their property or women.

Arming the police with BB guns — regardless to how dangerous the BBC or the New York Times editorial staff might consider them — is not going to put an end the aspiration of turning Kashmir into another ‘Islamic State’.

Indian security forces are again waging pitched battles with violent Islamists on the streets of the Muslim-majority province of Kashmir. Mobs began congregating in towns on July 9, after the customary Friday prayers to protest the killing the previous day by Indian security forces of a prominent Islamic terrorist, Burhan Wani. The protestors waved black ISIS flags and pelted stones at riot police. The riots have so far claimed 49 people, including 2 policeman.

UPDATE AUGUST 1

Why does it matter to get things straight, even seemingly small details? Why does it matter to say, again, that Abdelmalik Petitjean was not a flagged security risk when he got hired, through an interim employment agency, as a baggage handler at the Chambery airport? It was not a full-time job. He worked weekends. He was finishing his studies. It matters because he is not an example of flagrant negligence in the hiring of airport personnel; he’s an example of a nearly undetectable risk that was to all intents and purposes smoothly integrated into French society. He’s one more element of proof against the sociological argument about discrimination breeding resentment and sharpening the slaughterer’s knife. So, if you don’t think the free world will live or die on the toss of a coin, then you might agree that we are in the early stages of a process. And it matters how we present the facts. Democracies will learn, improve, and defend themselves. There is no reason for despair.

Abdelmalik Petitjean wasn’t an ex nihilo jihadist with nothing but the Net for inspiration His cousin, identified as 30 year-old Farid K., has been charged and imprisoned; preliminary investigations have concluded that he knew a murderous attack was imminent. Jean-Philippe J. a twenty year-old who had tried to reach the caliphate with Petitjean in June has also been charged and jailed.

Charitable Christianity

We didn’t get news this weekend, we got preached at: We will not answer hatred with hatred and violence with violence. They wish to divide us, we will stick closer together than ever. We always loved, respected, admired and hung out with our fellow men of the cloth. Now we are inseparable. The media surfed on giant waves of peace & love. We drowned in it, suffocated, strangled, choked and nothing could stop it. We were like geese stuffed to make foie gras. You would think the entire French population that would normally be reeling from an unending series of attacks and atrocities (I don’t have time or space to list the “minor” incidents that have occurred over the past month) has only one wish in its collective mind: Christian-Muslim communion. Correspondents stood in front of little churches, big mosques, majestic cathedrals, swooning over fraternity in the pulpit, in the congregation, on the doorsteps, and in the churchyards. Muslim and Christian spokesmen stood shoulder to shoulder, outdoing each other in interfaith devotion, overflowing with kindness in their hearts and in their places of worship. Some Catholic clergy went as far as merciful forgiveness for the executioners.

Methinks the lady doth protest too much. Turtle dove reporters cooed over the presence of “many” Muslims in the cathedral but the camera didn’t find the right angle to prove the point. A bit of truth slipped into an article in the Journal du Dimanche: the Christians at Ste. Thérèse Church in St. Etienne du Vouvray didn’t quite make it into the neighboring Yahya mosque for Friday prayers as planned. They were put off by “all those women in long black robes and the men with long beards.” The service was led by Abdellatif Hmito, the imam from Oissel, known for his eloquence in French, in the absence of the mosque’s regularly officiating imam, who does not speak French at all.

Adel Kermiche was the black sheep of a respectable family. His older sister is a surgeon, all his siblings have degrees and successful careers. His mother is a teacher. There has been no mention of a father. Though the family does not worship at the mosque, the mother sought help for her radicalized son. Mosque president, Mohammed Karabila, regrets that he had to curtail his deradicalization efforts because of a lack of subsidies.