RUTHFULLY YOURS

“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Pope Francis declared on his flight back to Rome last week.The political implications of his statement have been considered in some detail in recent days, but his assertion also needs to be examined in the light of history.

Had it not been for the walls, strongly built and staunchly defended, Christendom would not have survived the onslaught of Islam in its thousand-year-long period of military expansion. Two prominent examples come from the final two centuries of that period: the sieges of Vienna in 1529 and 1683. The first marked an important early check on Turkish advances, after a century of conquest in the Balkans and Central Europe. The second saved Europe and finally turned the tide. German, Hungarian, Polish, and other defenders of the walls of Vienna were Christian warriors par excellence. During the second siege the city was saved thanks to an alliance between the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Poland, which was brokered at the last minute by Pope Innocent XI. In thanksgiving for the victory at Vienna on September 12, 1683, Pope Innocent fixed that date as the Feast of the Holy Name of Mary.

Over two centuries earlier, in July 1456, some 6,000 Christian soldiers successfully defended the walls of Belgrade from Sultan Mehmed’s army of 50,000. During the siege Pope Callixtus III ordered the bells of all churches to be rung every day at noon, as a call for believers to pray for Belgrade’s defenders; that practice has continued to this day, even though not many people know its origins. An old Franciscan monk and preacher, John of Capistrano, played a key role in the battle and personally led a detachment of troops. For his valor and burning faith Pope Alexander canonized “the soldier priest” in 1690.

Considering what European Union policies have done to Europe, it seems all too apt for its capital to be a hive of Islamic terror and on the road to becoming a majority Muslim city.

Then turn to Brussels, some parts of which host large communities of Moroccan and Turkish immigrants, mostly from religiously conservative regions of those countries. Among respondents in the city, practising Catholics amounted to 12% and non-practising ones to 28%. Some 19% were active Muslims and another 4% were of Muslim identity without practising the faith. The atheist/agnostic camp came to 30%.

Among people who actually practice a religion, Muslims are a majority. And as usual, with Islamic indoctrination and birth rates, the news becomes more troubling in the lower age groups.

Thus among respondents aged 55 and over, practising Catholics amounted to 30% and practising Muslims to less than 1%; but among those aged between 18 and 34, active adherence to Islam (14%) exceeded the practice of Catholicism (12%). Admittedly the sample (600 people in all) is small. But if this trend continues, practitioners of Islam may soon comfortably exceed devout Catholics not just in cosmopolitan Brussels, as is the case already, but across the whole of Belgium’s southern half.

Here’s how demographics sneak up on you. And they have a hell of a bite. Now you can understand why Brussels has become such a terror hub.

The greater Brussels area has long been considered to be a hotbed for radical Islamists. Troubled neighborhoods like Molenbeek and Anderlecht are known as being homes to secluded communities of immigrants in which radicals can easily go underground. So has Belgium become the center of terror in Europe and a security risk for the entire Continent?

These people who are firing their weapons and blowing themselves up don’t appear out of nowhere,” respected Belgian sociologist Felice Dassetto wrote on his blog after the Paris attacks. “They were not born yesterday, in the last months or solely in the context of Daesh (editors: the pejorative Arabic term for Islamic State). They are the children and grandchildren of 50 years of radical ideology and jihadists.” And whereas it has taken a half-century to create this jihadi culture, it will take many more (than 50) to convince Muslims that the culture of jihad has led Islam to its current moral and intellectual disaster, “but it is never too late to start.”

Originally posted on Jihad Watch.

“In October 2010, Merkel told a meeting of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party at Potsdam that attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany had ‘utterly failed,’ stating that: ‘The concept that we are now living side by side and are happy about it’ does not work and ‘we feel attached to the Christian concept of mankind, that is what defines us. Anyone who doesn’t accept that is in the wrong place here.’” — from the Wikipedia entry for Angela Merkel

The announcement by Angela Merkel’s government that Germany will take in another 500,000 Muslim “refugees” in 2016, on top of the 1.1. million Germany took in in 2015, should fill any well-informed German, or European, with bewilderment and dread. After all, throwing open the doors of Europe to what is in effect an invasion by Muslims (an invasion that needs no weapons, and that is accomplishing its conquests through demography), represents a complete and astonishing break with the West’s long history of resisting Islamic imperialism, a resistance bolstered by Western Christendom’s historic memory of the subjugation, through violence, of non-Muslims by Muslims from North Africa to India. This expansion of Dar al-Islam – the Domain of Islam — at the expense of non-Muslims was recognized as being a natural and essential part of Islam, to which statesmen as various as John Quincy Adams, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Winston Churchill have all testified. When the great mass of Christians thought about Muslims at all, they never doubted that they had been well-informed by those who had studied Islam or by those who had observed Muslims in their own lands: Islam was an all-encompassing and fanatical faith, deeply hostile to the two monotheisms – Judaism and Christianity – that preceded it.

No Westerner prior to the present age would have employed that soothing and misleading phrase about “the three great Abrahamic faiths” that has gained such foolish currency, serving to conceal a great many differences at the very moment when Muslims are managing to enter the West in large numbers. In the Western world, even if they could not cite sura and ayat by number, non-Muslims in Europe for more than a millennium had a much better understanding of Islam than we do now, and instead of that “three Abrahamic faiths” nostrum, they knew, though perhaps not literally, the Muslim injunction to “take not Christians and Jews as friends, for they are friends only with each other.” This understanding did not depend on Europeans studying the contents of Sura 9 and a hundred other jihad verses in the Qur’an, or many hundreds of anti-Infidel hadiths. The inhabitants of Europe learned about Islam by coming into contact with Muslim raiders up and down their coasts, and with Muslim privateers attacking Christian shipping in the Mediterranean, seizing seamen as well as goods and the ships themselves.

They fled religious hatred, rape and violence in their homelands for the “safe” haven of Germany — only to encounter the same, brutal conditions in their new accommodations: the refugee hostel.

Violence in refugee centers became a national topic in Germany last October, only weeks after Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel invited into Europe one million, mainly Muslim, refugees. But exposure of this disgraceful situation appears to have had little effect, as German newspapers are reporting this month that conditions remain unchanged.

In fact, life in German refugee hostels has now become so unbearable thatreligious minorities, women traveling alone or with children, and homosexuals are fleeing their accommodations. For them, according to one paper, the word “hostel” has become synonymous with ‘”defenselessness”.

The constant harassment and mistreatment at the hands of Muslim male refugees is not only becoming intolerable and dangerous, but, for some, life-threatening.

“Torn bibles and insults, ripped off crosses and even blows to the face, the complaints about violence in the refugee centers do not let up,” the German newspaper, Die Welt, stated recently.

According to Rainer Wendt, chairman of the German Police Union, outbreaks of violence in German refugee centers were occurring before last August. In the first six months of 2015, police were called out 1,288 times to refugee asylums and registered 499 crimes. One problem is definitely the overcrowding, Wendt said, but there are also “knallharte” (very brutal) criminal structures among the refugees.

At dawn on February 16, 2016, Belgian authorities launched nine counter-terrorism raids throughout the City of Brussels. In the months following the Paris attacks and more revelations of the growing jihadist problem in Brussels, authorities unleashed a measure to crack down on Islamic State (IS) recruitment cells.

The police raids included suburban areas of Brussels including Kuechenberg, Schaerbeek, Etterbeck, and Molenbeek, which was where many of November’s Paris attacks resided. Molenbeek has the home of individuals linked to terrorism since the 1990s. One of the 2004 Madrid train bombers had ties to the area, as did the Jewish museum shooter Mehdi Nemmouche, and Paris hostage taker Amedy Coulibaly.

Prosecutors said the raids were not related to the Paris attacks, but rather to locate and dismantle recruitment centers. Information collected by authorities showed many of those arrested had gone to Syria to join IS.

Belgian police are still holding nine people in question over the November Paris attacks as more evidence points to the plot being completely hatched in Belgium.

Earlier this month authorities discovered three safe houses that were used for suspects of the Paris attacks. One in Brussels, another in Charleroi, an hour south of the capital, and Auvelais a village near the French border.

If only President Obama were as tough on America’s enemies as he’s been on his own domestic rivals. Recall his statement, during the 2008 presidential campaign, on how to deal with Republicans: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” Unfortunately, no such creed seems to apply in Obama’s dealings with North Korea (or, for that matter, with Iran, or Russia, or Cuba…). Instead, while Pyongyang prepares a nuclear test, Obama brings neither a gun nor a knife to the showdown. Rather, in apparent hope of yet another “historic” bargain to cap the rotten nuclear deal with Iran and the feckless embrace of Cuba’s Castro regime, he extends his hand to Pyongyang.

So we learn from a Feb. 21 Wall Street Journal scoop, headlined: “U.S. Agreed to North Korea Peace Talks Before Latest Nuclear Test.” The Journal article, by Alastair Gale and Carol E. Lee, broke the news that “days before North Korea’s latest nuclear-bomb test, the Obama administration secretly agreed to talks to try to formally end the Korean War, dropping a longstanding condition that Pyongyang first take steps to curtail its nuclear arsenal.”

In other words, while North Korea was readying its fourth nuclear test, the Obama administration was quietly offering concessions to North Korea’s tyrant Kim Jong Un. Make no mistake, for America to talk with North Korea at all is, in itself, a concession — dignifying the world’s most horrific rogue regime, while setting the stage for yet another round of North Korean cheating and nuclear extortion. For the American superpower, erstwhile leader of the Free World, to furtively offer sweeteners — and this one was a whopper — in hope of opening official talks with Kim is even worse. Concessions that the State Department may regard as carrots are viewed by North Korea as capitulation.

In settlement talks with the German auto maker Volkswagen over their cheating on emissions tests by including a gadget that could fool the government, the EPA is trying to force the company to subsidize the American electric car industry to “atone” for its sins.

Washington Times:

According to the report Sunday, the EPA wants VW, the world’s largest automaker by some measures, to produce electric cars at its U.S. manufacturing plant in Chattanooga, Tenn. It also is using settlement talks with the German giant, to get help in building a network of charging stations throughout the U.S. — the main practical problem with electric cars, given their short range.

The German report did not specify its sources, according to multiple accounts in the English-language press.

“Talks with the EPA are ongoing and we are not commenting on the contents and state of the negotiations,” a spokesman for Volkswagen said. EPA refused to comment to Welt am Sonntag.

Whether the report is accurate or not isn’t the point. The point is, it’s entirely believable. Perhaps more than any other agency in government besides the IRS, the EPA loves to throw its weight around, threatening and bullying companies large and small. How many individual lives have been ruined by this agency’s arrogance and disregard for procedures and the law?

No doubt, what Volkswagen did is despicable. It sought an unfair competitive advantage over its rivals by thumbing its nose at the law. Punishment should be severe, and the company should be forced to make changes to the engines in every auto and truck that is in violation of emissions standards.

But the EPA has no business forcing the company to subsidize the American electric car industry, which can’t sell the American people on its underpowered, overpriced lemons.

The Paris Accord (PA) on global warming, concluded in December 2015, had been viewed as an enhancement of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (KP). But only some weeks later, the Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) effectively “killed” EPA’s “Clean Power Plan (CPP),” the centerpiece of the US commitment to the PA.

The CPP’s carbon regulation had been challenged by 27 states and an array of utilities, coal producers and business groups. A SCOTUS’ February 9 “stay” overturned a DC Court of Appeals panel’s decision to allow the EPA plan to go forward. Although the appeals panel had not stayed CPP, it had established an expedited hearing schedule for the case, which is scheduled to begin on June 2. After the plaintiffs lost their case in the Court of Appeals, they petitioned SCOTUS to issue a “stay,” citing the danger of “irreparable harm.”

Will this now lead to the unraveling of the PA?

The PA may survive after all: If the Appeals Court again upholds EPA, and SCOTUS votes 4-4 (after Justice Scalia’s untimely death), then CPP may proceed. It all depends on the outcome of the November elections. Conversely, however, the fight about CPP, involving 27 states, may affect the outcome of the election. The next few months should prove quite interesting.

The PA is mainly about money transfers, designed to provide a legacy for president Obama. Unlike the KP, the PA has little to do with climate. Although it talks bravely about keeping global warming below 2degC, it never explains how to define and measure this (alleged) “critical” threshold. I recently referred to it as a big “nothing-burger” — borrowing a term used by the late Anne Gorsuch, EPA chief under president Reagan.

Legal Status – Not a Treaty?

As compared with Kyoto, the PA includes both industrialized and developing nations, but its legal status is not well defined: Some nations have considered it a protocol to the (Rio de Janeiro) Global Climate Treaty, the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), and have ratified it as an international treaty. On the other hand, the White House (WH) does not label it a formal treaty and has not submitted it to the US Senate for ratification, fearing it will turn the PA down. [Even after nearly 20 years, everyone still remembers the unanimous Senate vote for the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (of July 1997) against such a treaty.] Instead, the WH planned to meet US commitments though Executive Orders and by relying on its own interpretations of relevant laws – mainly the Clean Air Act (CAA) and its Amendments.