RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13464/free-speech-west

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation’s “Media Strategy in Countering Islamophobia and its Implementation Mechanisms” describes one part of its strategy as: “To call media professionals to develop, articulate and implement voluntary codes of conduct to counter Islamophobia. The OIC and its Member States should be vocal in calling media professionals to use the power they have with responsibly through accurate reporting.” What, however, if those two requirements — accurate reporting and countering Islamophobia — conflict with each other?

“Free expression is the base of human rights, the root of human nature and the mother of truth. To kill free speech is to insult human rights, to stifle human nature and to suppress truth.” — Liu Xiaobo, Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, author of Charter 08.

“Man… does not have to accept a lie.” — Václav Havel, in his 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless”.

“… if you lived, as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and then 20 years in communist totalitarianism, you would certainly realize how precious freedom is, and how easy it is to lose your freedom.” — Miloš Forman, Czech-American film director.

The freedom to express oneself without fear and the tolerance for opposing viewpoints are what binds otherwise diverse, democratic societies. In the United States, this freedom is protected by the Constitution, with only very specific limits, the key one of which was imposed in 1969, following a landmark Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brandenburg v. Ohio. According to that ruling, inflammatory speech cannot be penalized unless it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”

https://spectator.us/terror-changed-europes-christmas-markets/

The traditional Christmas market is one of the great sights in any European capital at this time of year. But as with all traditions it evolves over time. A few evenings ago, I went to visit the Duomo in Milan and walked through the beautiful Christmas market in the square surrounding it. It was all there: the Christmas lights, the chalet-like huts selling warm food and drink, the fake snow. And, of course, the crash barriers. For since December 2016, when Anis Amri hijacked a truck in Berlin, shot the driver and then plowed the vehicle into the local Christmas market (killing 11 more people) crash barriers have become a necessary feature of any European Christmas market.

I was in Milan two days after Cherif Chekatt shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ and started shooting at people enjoying the Christmas market in the city of Strasbourg. And so Milan’s Christmas market, like every other in similar cities, was on high alert. Which furthers yet another new tradition at Europe’s Christmas markets, which is the presence of army vehicles and police and military standing around with heavy duty weapons at the ready.

It all brought to mind a point that Mark Steyn has made a number of times in recent years, which is the phenomenon one might call the ‘bollard-ization’ of public life. Earlier this year in Norway I noticed that even Oslo has a strange set of massive steel devices on both sides of the street on the popular thoroughfare of cafes, restaurants and hotels that leads up to the country’s Parliament. They began to sprout one day and after a dose of negative public comment the local authorities decided to plant flowers on the devices, making them probably the world’s most ungainly flower-pots. What could have made these huge flower-carrying vessels so necessary? Who is to say.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/12/31/swedens-parallel-society/

I don’t go to those places without security,” a Swedish journalist tells me when I ask whether she would accompany me to some of her country’s “especially vulnerable” areas. The label is given by police to neighborhoods where crime is rampant and parallel social structures compete for authority with the state. To the politically incorrect, these are also known as “immigrant ghettos.”

While much attention was focused on Germany during the 2015 refugee crisis, in which more than a million migrants from the Middle East and Africa entered the continent at the behest of Angela Merkel, the country that admitted the most migrants per capita was Sweden. In one year alone, the northern European nation of 10 million added nearly 2 percent to its population. Most of those arrivals were young men. Tens of thousands more have continued to arrive since then.

It is too early to see the long-term impact of the 2015 migrant crisis, but if the past is any indication of Sweden’s future, the answer may be found in its “vulnerable” neighborhoods. In recent years, the Nordic state known for scoring among the highest among all nations in quality-of-life indexes has also gained a reputation for gang shootings, grenade attacks, and sexual crimes.

Days before I was due to arrive in Sweden last summer, the country was rocked by mass car burnings across its west coast. Authorities faulted “youth gangs” for the fires, a euphemism for criminal young men of migrant backgrounds. My first visit was to Rosengård, Seved, and Nydala, immigrant neighborhoods in the southern city of Malmö and among the 23 “especially vulnerable” areas across Sweden. At times, ambulances and fire trucks will enter only with police protection. Desperate police have appealed to imams and clan leaders for help when they cannot contain the violence.

From Malmö’s central train station, I began walking alone to Rosengård, an area rocked by some of the country’s most violent riots in 2008 after a mosque was denied a new lease. Halfway through my journey, I stopped outside the Malmö Synagogue. I was greeted by a metal security fence and closed-circuit cameras. In 2010, the synagogue was attacked with explosives. And in December 2017, hundreds of protesters in the city chanted for an intifada and promised to “shoot the Jews” after President Trump announced the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. One of the consequences of mass migration to Europe that no one had predicted was the importation of a different strain of anti-Semitism.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272332/murder-morocco-bruce-bawer

It was only last July 29 that Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, a young American couple who had spent the previous year bicycling across much of Africa, Europe, and southern Asia, were murdered by ISIS members in Tajikistan. The story made international headlines. What added to the widespread interest in their fate was the fact that they had kept a blog of their journey, complete with photos and philosophical reflections. Repeatedly they denied the reality of evil and expressed the view that people are basically good. Reader comments on a New York Times article about the couple that appeared after their deaths celebrated them as “heroic,” “authentic,” “idealistic,” “inspiring,” “a Beautiful example of Purity and Light,” and so on. I disagreed. “Their naivete,” I noted in a piece I wrote about them, “is nothing less than breathtaking.”

Now comes the story of Maren Ueland and Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, which captured the interest of people in Norway and Denmark all last week. Ueland (28) was Norwegian; Jespersen (24) was Danish. They were students together at the campus of the University of South-Eastern Norway in Bø, a small Telemark mountain town (pop. 6,000) that happens to be in my own neck of the woods. Both Ueland and Jespersen were majoring in something called friluftsliv og kultur- og naturveiledning, a combination of words that defines precise translation; suffice it to say that the subject is designed for students who want to work in the outdoors, to lead guided tours in the woods, and to point out items of cultural interest to hikers – that sort of thing.

No field of study could be more archetypically Norwegian. Until recently, the official state religion of Norway was Lutheranism, but the country’s real religion is nature – specifically, going for a walk in the mountains: fresh air, quiet, serenity, a sense of being in touch with the eternal and divine. This activity even has its own standard set of rituals, among them the practice of taking along a couple of oranges, a Kvikk Lunsj (that’s a brand name) chocolate bar, a Thermos of hot chocolate and another Thermos containing boiled hot dogs. A common expression here is “Ut på tur, aldri sur” – take a walk in the wood and you’ll always feel good!