RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13259/britain-multiculturalism-october

There were 140 new cases of female genital mutilation (FGM) in Birmingham between April and June 2018.

“There remains a huge problem with professionals viewing forced marriage as a cultural issue rather than a crime. Many aren’t even aware there is a law.” — Jasvinder Sanghera, attacking the government’s failure to tackle the problem of forced marriages.

The Ministry of Justice blocked plans for an academic study into why prisoners convert to Islam and how it can lead to radicalization. “They will have been concerned about what this proposed project will discover,” a source said.

October 1. So-called “cutters” are being flown into Britain to perform female genital mutilation (FGM) on young girls, according to The Independent. “The practicing community talk together, saying, ‘My girl needs to be cut,’ and pay the cutters to come into the UK and cut the girls here,” said Hoda Ali, an FGM activist who works in West London. She added: “The reality is we need to open our eyes. We don’t need to think just about faraway countries because right now we have girls who are in their late teens or even early twenties who were cut in this country. They are British girls who were born here and they were cut here.”

October 2. Women and girls who are coerced into marriage by their families will be allowed to give evidence in secret so they can object to their foreign spouses’ visas without fear of repercussions, according to legal changes announced by Home Secretary Sajid Javid. The changes come two months after The Times revealed that the Home Office was issuing visas to known abusers in forced marriage cases.

October 3. Zakaria Mohammed, a 21-year-old drug dealer from Aston, Birmingham, was sentenced to 14 years in prison after admitting to charges of modern slavery. Mohammed groomed his victims — a 14-year-old girl and two runaway 15-year-old boys — before making them sell class-A drugs from squalid flats a hundred miles from their homes. The teens, who were transported from Birmingham to Lincoln to work as “expendable workhorses” in drug dens, were found by police in a drug-infested apartment in Lincoln. The Telegraph reported it was the first time in British legal history that a drug-dealer has been convicted for breaching the Modern Slavery Act by trafficking children.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13238/germany-merkel-resignation

It was the policy of unchecked mass-immigration against which Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party finally revolted.

The race to succeed Merkel as the party’s chair is wide open, and these days, being a Merkel confidante is a liability rather than an asset.

The next party leader’s sole role will be to share the blame for any new election defeats, starting with the elections to the European Parliament in June 2019 — unless he distinguishes himself from Merkel and presents a set of convincing ideas for Germany’s future.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on October 29, 2018, announced her resignation, a day after her party, the Christian Democrats (CDU), suffered yet another crushing election defeat. Merkel said she would step down as leader of her party in December and would not seek re-election in 2021.

In the state election in Hesse, Germany’s two biggest parties received their worst results in more than half a century. The CDU dropped from 38% to 27%, the Social-Democrats (SPD) from 30% to less than 20%. Both parties continue a losing streak that shows no sign of reversal. Rather, the downturn seems to be accelerating. In last year’s general elections, Merkel’s party and its ally, the Social Democrats, recorded their worst results up to then in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. Throughout much of Germany’s postwar history, the CDU and SPD each used to achieve about 40% of the votes. In last autumn’s general elections, the CDU and SPD combined barely managed to surpass the 50% threshold to form a government. Recent polls see them combined at barely 40% (24% for the CDU and 15% for the SPD).

“The time has come to open a new chapter,” Merkel said. In a letter to the party, Merkel admitted mistakes that her government may have made “in recent weeks and months”. According to Merkel, the voters did not acknowledge the current government’s “decent” achievements due to the latter’s wrong “work culture” that “doesn’t meet” Merkel’s “personal standards” — apparently referring to the public feud between her and the CDU’s Bavarian sister-party CSU over immigration policy.

Merkel went on to say, “For the rest of the election period, I’m ready to continue to work as Chancellor,” meaning that she will step down as chancellor in 2021 at the latest, or maybe a bit earlier, if there is a chance to enthrone her protégée, CDU general secretary Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, before the next elections.

Kramp-Karrenbauer’s success, however, is far from guaranteed. The race to succeed Merkel as the party’s chair is wide open, and these days, being a Merkel confidante is a liability rather than an asset. For months, pundits in Germany and abroad had speculated about the “end of the Merkel era”, even more so after she had lost a key supporter in a party rebellion earlier this year. On September 25, in a surprising vote among members of the CDU and CSU parties, Merkel’s longtime ally Volker Kauder was ousted after 13 years as parliamentary group leader of the combined faction.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271861/louis-farrakhan-live-tehran-lloyd-billingsley

Monday November 5, one day before the election, marked the resumption of sanctions on the Islamic regime by the Trump administration. Nation of Islam boss Louis Farrakhan flew to Iran to speak out on behalf of the ruling mullahs.

As Fox News reported, Farrakhan told Mohsen Rezaei, Secretary of Iran’s Expediency Council: “Today, I warn the American government that sanctioning Iran is a big mistake.” The eager Farrakhan failed to flag any mistakes by the Iranian Islamic regime, the world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism. And Farrakhan took care to time his visit with an important event.

Thirty-nine years ago, in 1979, the Islamic regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini invaded the U.S. embassy in Tehran, took more than 50 American diplomats and civilians hostage, and held them for 444 days. Farrakhan marked the anniversary by telling law students at the University of Tehran, that “America has never been a democracy” and then led the students in a chants of “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!”

No one in America had ever seen a performance quite like that. On the other hand, in his live Tehran show the Nation of Islam boss was not advancing any new themes.

On October 14, the 23rd anniversary of the Million Man March, Farrakhan addressed a cheering audience in Detroit: “To the members of the Jewish community that don’t like me — thank you very much for putting my name all over the planet…I’m not mad at you, ‘cuz you’re so stupid.” The Nation of Islam leader also claimed “I’m not an anti-Semite. I’m anti-Termite,” and repeated that message in a tweet.

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz denounced the speech and called out presidents Obama and Clinton, along with former DNC boss Keith Ellison, for their ties to Farrakhan. Even so, prominent Democrats running for office were not swift to denounce Farrakhan for his Jews-are-termites speech. In fact, Farrakhan thrives on special treatment from high-profile Democrats.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/brazil-is-moving-its-embassy-to-jerusalem-1541464850

Shortly after Jair Bolsonaro’s decisive victory in the Brazilian presidential election last week, the populist leader said he would follow through on his campaign promise to move Brazil’s embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Like Donald Trump, Mr. Bolsonaro—himself a Catholic but married to an evangelical Protestant pastor—owes his political success in large part to support from evangelical voters. As recently as the 1970s, Brazil was almost uniformly Catholic. But in one of the greatest religious shifts of modern times, the largest country in Latin America is today nearly as evangelical as the U.S.: 25% of Brazilians identify as evangelical Christians, compared with 26% of Americans, according to the Joshua Project. As in the U.S., many evangelical and Pentecostal Christians instinctively support Israel and endorse a law-and-order agenda at home.

At a time of increased anxiety for many Jews in Europe and North America, the rise of evangelical and Pentecostal Christian support for Judaism and Israel in much of the world is a heartening sign. Based on a literal approach to the Bible and a covenantal theology that attributes a continuing religious significance to the Jewish people and their state, these two rapidly spreading forms of Protestant Christianity tend to promote a climate of respect for individual Jews as well as support for Zionism. They view the continued existence of the Jewish people as a mark of God’s faithfulness and believe the Jewish people have a special place in God’s plan as recipients of his favor.

Improved relations with Israel are a hallmark of evangelical political influence. Guatemala, another historically Catholic country, is now about 40% Protestant. It opened an embassy in Jerusalem two days after the U.S. did. Although Latin American countries have typically been hostile to Israel since the 1967 war, that’s changing rapidly.