RUTHFULLY YOURS

After last Wednesday’s deadly attack outside London’s Houses of Parliament, the left-wing British media expressed outrage – not at the appalling way in which Islam and Islamic terrorism have transformed life and sown death throughout the Western world, but at the purported moral depravity of those who dare to connect the dots.

In the Guardian, Jon Henley and Amber Jamiesen sneered at Marine Le Pen for “linking the London attack to migrant policy, despite the attacker being British.” (My emphasis.) They smeared as “xenophobic” Nigel Farage’s argument “that the London attacks proved Donald Trump’s hardline immigration and anti-Muslim policies were correct.” The Independent’s Maya Oppenheimer censured Farage’s comments, too, countering his critique of multiculturalism by saying he’d “failed to mention the fact many of the victims of the attack were in fact foreigners themselves.” (My emphasis again.) Needless to say, the issue wasn’t Britishness vs. foreignness; it was Islam. But to say so was verboten. As Theresa May said (in what already seems destined to become an immortal statement), “Islamist terror” has nothing do with Islam.

Islam is a religion of hate. But when that hate manifests itself in jihadist terror, the proper leftist move is to turn away from the reality of that hate – which last Wednesday sent several innocent people to a hospital or a morgue – to the purported “hate” of decent, law-abiding individuals who have had quite enough of murderous jihadist hate. Instead of acknowledging that a large minority (if not an outright majority) of British Muslims support sharia law in the U.K. (and that more than a few privately applaud terrorism), you’re supposed to invoke the fantasy of a Britain in which all citizens, infidel and Muslim, share the same values and live together in harmony – except, of course, for the horrid Islamophobes, who, simply by mentioning the Islamic roots of Islamic terror, are exploiting terrorism, dishonoring its victims, and subverting social harmony.

And so we had the Guardian editorial on the terrorist attack, which cast the reality-deniers as good guys who believe in “standing together” and the truth-tellers as voices of “cynicism.” While praising MPs for their readiness “to emphasise the need for solidarity,” the editorial deplored Farage and UKIP leader Paul Nuttall, who “renewed their baseless and disgraceful campaign to drive a wedge between Muslims and non-Muslims in Britain.” The paper’s Nesrine Malik agreed. When she first heard of the attack, she wrote, a “familiar knot” appeared in her stomach. Why? Because of the horror of mass slaughter? Because, yet again, innocent people had lost their lives to jihad? No. Because she realized that she’d once again have to brace herself “for a predictable battle to separate fact from hysteria, plead for a sense of proportionality and entreat the hurt and the angry not to generalise.” For Malik, as for her paper’s editors, the real bad guys aren’t the terrorists: they’re people like Tommy Robinson (who “was at the scene stirring hate while the shock was fresh”) and Nigel Farage (who was “spewing predictable bile”).

Would we be allowed to ask who ISIS are inspired by?

Would they be allowed to say that the perpetrator was a Muslim?

Would they be allowed to say that there is a tradition of violence within the Islamic religion which has sadly permitted just such actions for a rather long time. Or would they have to lie?

The Canadian government suffers from many things. Among them is bad timing.

On Thursday of last week, the Canadian Parliament voted through a blasphemy law specifically designed to protect Islam. As Al-Jazeera was happy to report on Friday, the previous day’s vote condemned “Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination.” The non-binding motion that the Parliament passed also requested that a Parliamentary committee should launch a study to look at how to “develop a whole-of-government approach to reducing or eliminating systemic racism and religious discrimination, including Islamophobia”. The motion passed by 201 votes to 91.

It is just as well for those 201 Canadian legislators that they were debating all this in their distinguished national Parliament rather than the mother of all Parliaments. For had these legislators been in the House of Commons in Westminster, their thoughts may have taken on a sharper focus.

For one day earlier, the British House of Commons lived through an example of rampant Islamism rather than “Islamophobia”. And although nobody in Westminster decided to turn into a crazy Muslim-hating bigot, they did manage to see what a hateful Muslim bigot could do when armed with the simple weapons of a knife and a motor vehicle.

The Canadian Liberal MP Iqra Khalid, who introduced the motion in Canada, proclaimed that the introduction of a de facto Islamic blasphemy law in Canada was needed because “We need to continue to build those bridges among Canadians, and this is just one way that we can do this.” Hours before she said that, one of Khalid’s co-religionists was using a bridge built more than a hundred and fifty years earlier for a very different purpose.

Khalid Masood of Birmingham chose to use an older bridge to drive at high speed into crowds of Londoners and tourists. On his rampage, he managed to injure people from 11 countries. He succeeded in killing Kurt Cochran, an American on holiday in London with his wife to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. He also killed Aysha Frade, a British national of Spanish and Cypriot descent who had been walking across Westminster Bridge to pick up her two young daughters from school. He also killed Leslie Rhodes, a 75-year old retired window-cleaner, described by a neighbour, who sat at his bedside in hospital as he died, as “the nicest man you ever met.”

The application for judicial review made by IRFAN and Majid also attempts to distance themselves from the Muslim Brotherhood. This seems a bit difficult. Hamas itself was founded as the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to Article Two of the Hamas Charter.

This support for Hamas goes back to at least 1992.

The International Relief Fund for the Afflicted and Needy (IRFAN) has been listed as a terrorism entity in Canada since 2014. It was also identified as a Muslim Brotherhood front group during testimony to the Canadian Senate along with the Muslim Association of Canada, the National Council of Canadian Muslims and Islamic Relief Canada.

The listing as a terrorism entity followed the Canada Revenue Agency’s (CRA) 2011 revocation of their charitable status after a multi-year investigation showed that IRFAN had been funding Hamas, otherwise known as the Muslim Brotherhood in the Palestinian territories. The CRA also made it clear that IRFAN was the successor organization to the Jerusalem Fund for Human Services (JFHS) which had also been funding Hamas. The CRA also observed that IRFAN was deliberately constructed to circumvent the Government of Canada so that it could fund Hamas after the Government of Canada refused to grant the JFHS charitable status.

In December 2016, IRFAN found out that its appeal the Minister of Public Safety to have the terrorism listing lifted was rejected.

On February 24, 2017, IRFAN and its former manager, Rasem Abdel Majid applied to the Federal Court of Canada for a judicial review of the Minister’s decision to maintain the terrorist entity listing. IRFAN listed 27 different grounds for why its supporters believe the terrorist designation should be lifted. Extracts from the motion state that:

(16) IRFAN-Canada did not directly or indirectly assist HAMAS. (…)

(17) There is no evidence that IRFAN-Canada attempted to advance the goals of HAMAS or any other organization affiliated with HAMAS.

(19) The listing briefing makes various irrelevant references to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Union of Good. (…) There is no evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood controlled any of IRFAN’s partner organizations or beneficiaries.

Unindicted Co-conspirators in a US Based Terrorism Funding Trial

Jihadists seem to be leading an assault against freedom and against secular democracies.

Sunni Islam’s most prominent preacher, Yusuf al Qaradawi, declared that the day will come when, like Constantinople, Rome will be Islamized.

It is Islam, not Christianity, that now saturates Europe’s landscape and imagination.

According to US President Trump’s strategic advisor Steve Bannon, the “Judeo-Christian West is collapsing, it is imploding. And it’s imploding on our watch. And the blowback of that is going to be tremendous”.

The impotence and the fragility of our civilization is haunting many Europeans as well.

Europe, according to the historian David Engels will face the fate of the ancient Roman Republic: a civil war. Everywhere, Europeans see signs of fracture. Jihadists seem to be leading an assault against freedom and against secular democracies. Fears occupy the collective imagination of Europeans. A survey of more than 10,000 people from ten different European countries has revealed increasing public opposition to Muslim immigration. The Chatham House Royal Institute of International Affairs carried out a survey, asking online respondents their views on the statement that “all further migration from mainly Muslim countries should be stopped”. In the 10 European countries surveyed, an average of 55% agreed with the statement.

Mainstream media are now questioning if “Europe fears Muslims more than the United States”. The photograph used in the article was a recent Muslim mass prayer in front of Italy’s monument, the Coliseum. In echoes of the capture of the great Christian civilization of Byzantium in Constantinople, Sunni Islam’s most prominent preacher, Yusuf al Qaradawi, declared that the day will come when Rome will be Islamized.

Hundreds of Muslims engage in a mass prayer service next to the Coliseum in Rome, on October 21, 2016. (Image source: Ruptly video screenshot)

Do civilizations die from outside or inside? Is their disappearance the result of external aggression (war, natural disasters, epidemics) or of an internal erosion (decay, incompetence, disastrous choices)? Arnold Toynbee, in the last century, was adamant: “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder”.

“The contemporary historian of ancient Greece and ancient Rome saw their civilisations begin their decline and fall, both the Greeks and the Romans attributed it to falling birth rates because nobody wanted the responsibilities of bringing up children,” said Britain’s former chief rabbi, Lord Sacks.

MOSCOW—Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of cities across Russia on Sunday to protest official corruption in the most significant challenge to President Vladimir Putin in years.

Sunday’s marches were called by leading opposition figure Alexei Navalny, who was detained during the protest in Moscow, according to supporters and local media.

“There are things in life worth being detained for,” Mr. Navalny said on Twitter.

Crowds chanting “Russia without Putin” and carrying placards decrying official corruption converged on Pushkin Square in the Russian capital, where they faced off with ranks of Interior Ministry police in riot gear.

Police officials told news agency Interfax that 7,000 to 8,000 people participated and around 500 were arrested. The radio station Echo of Moscow, drawing on unofficial estimates, put the number of participants in Moscow much higher.

The demonstrations are a sign of public dissatisfaction in Russia despite the consistently high approval ratings Mr. Putin receives in opinion surveys.

In Washington, the State Department sharply condemned the Russian crackdown, including the arrest of Mr. Navalny, other protesters, human rights observers and journalists.

“The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve a government that supports an open marketplace of ideas, transparent and accountable governance, equal treatment under the law, and the ability to exercise their rights without fear of retribution,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said. CONTINUE AT SITE

Video#38: http://bit.ly/2lSMHoS; Entire online seminar: http://bit.ly/1ze66dS

Irrespective of – and unrelated to – the Palestinian issue, the Middle East is boiling, firing the 14-century-old Sunni-Shia intra-Muslim confrontation, exacerbating intra-Arab violence in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and threatening to explode in every Arab country. The Arab Tsunami, which has erupted independent of the Palestinian issue, has been leveraged by Iran’s Ayatollahs, in order to advance their supremacist, megalomaniacal goal of dominating the Persian Gulf, the Middle East and beyond, notwithstanding the Palestinian issue, which has never played a substantial role in shaping the stormy intra-Arab and intra-Muslim relations and the Middle East agenda.

2. Contrary to Western preoccupation with the Palestinian issue, the Middle Eastern agenda dramatically transcends the Palestinian issue, which is neither the cruxof the Arab-Israeli conflict, nor a crown-jewel of Arab policy-making and nor a core cause of the 1,400-year-old turbulence, violent intolerance, instability, unpredictability, subversion and terrorism in the Middle East. The Palestinian issue is completely irrelevant to the tectonic Arab Tsunami, which has engulfed the Middle East from the Persian Gulf to Northwestern Africa.

3. The intensifying Arab Tsunami, which erupted in 2010, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands people, the dislocation of millions, and threatens to topple every sitting Arab regime, has exposed the myth of the supposed centrality of the Arab-Israeli conflict, in general, and the Palestinian issue, in particular. None of the recent – as well as past – domestic and regional upheavals in the Middle East has been directly, or indirectly, related to the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Palestinian issue. Contrary to conventional “wisdom,” the Palestinian issue has always been a side – and not a main – dish on the tectonic Middle East menu, which has been dominated by intra-Muslim and intra-Arab explosive ingredients.

4. No Arab country has ever considered the Palestinian issue a top priority, warranting shedding blood, sweat or tears. Arab policy-makers have always talked the talk on behalf the Palestinian issue – in order to divert attention away from critical domestic and regional failures – but have never walked the walk, financially or militarily. They adhere to the Arab saying: “On words one does not pay custom.”

5. The top priority for Arab leaders, personally and nationally, is homeland security and countering-terrorism, in the face of intensifying, clear and present domestic and regional lethal threats. Therefore, they are preoccupied with the Muslim Brotherhood – the largest transnational Islamic terror organization – and additional Islamic terror organizations. The Muslim Brotherhood – not the Palestinian issue – has plagued Egypt since 1928. The Muslim Brotherhood, and its ideology, nurtured the Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISIS and other Islamic terror organizations.

6. Therefore, President Al-Sisi has followed in the footsteps of President Sadat, who resisted President Carter’s pressure to place the Palestinian issue at the center of the 1977-79 Israel-Egypt peace process. Sadat was concerned about the destabilizing impact of a Palestinian entity, as evidenced by the subversive track record of Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas in Egypt (1950s), Syria (1966), Jordan (1970), Lebanon (1970-1983) and, worst of all, in Kuwait (1990).

7. Moreover, in 2016, President Al-Sisi – just like all pro-US Arab leaders in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States – expands intelligence, counter-terrorism and overall geo-strategic cooperation, operationally and technologically with Israel, a global role-model of counter-terrorism, in defiance of Palestinian opposition. They believe that when smothered by the lethal sandstorms of Islamic terrorism and Iran, one must leverage the mutually-beneficial ties with Israel, rather than be preoccupied with the Palestinian tumbleweed.

8. Iran’s policy of megalomaniacal supremacy, terrorism, subversion and hate-education, and its determination to become a nuclear power, are driven by the 2,000-year-old ambition to dominate the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, Middle East and beyond, and not by the Palestinian issue.

9. The disintegration of the Arab Middle East, especially Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, is a derivative of the endemic, tribal, religious, ethnic, geographic and ideological intra-Muslim fragmentation, not the Palestinian issue.

10. The next video will connect the Middle East dots.