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January 2019

Apologists for Extremism in the West by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13468/apologists-extremism-west

Many apologists say that Islam is a religion of peace. What they do not say is that, according to Islam, “peace” is to come only after all the world has converted to Islam. Until then, all the world is divided in two: dar al-Islam (“the House of Islam”), made up those who already believe, and dar al-harb (“the House of War”), made up of those who have yet to “believe”. If one is to follow the conclusions of doctrines based on jihad and sharia, after all the disbelievers believe, then there will be peace.

What is odd, is that even after countless attacks in Europe just since 2001, when we have all seen and felt this House of War on our flesh, no one ever mentions its existence. How come we never hear more about this House of War?

What we are seeing, but may not wish to see, is — as Erdogan pointed out — mainstream Islam.

My message to apologists for Islamism is simple: Those who are whitewashing the purveyors of radical violence and extremism — by changing the subject or accusing others, often unjustly, of racism, discrimination, oppression, or “Islamophobia” — are contributing to their empowerment.

As someone who grew up in fundamentalist Muslim countries, the continuing spread in the West of apologists for sharia law is, to say the least, intriguing. It is, of course, good-hearted to wish people from other cultures to feel welcome. Many of these apologists, however, have no first-hand experience of how it feels actually to live in that part of the world or to be a victim of day-by-day radical Islam. What is painful is that although many of these apologists have never lived under Islamist rules, they often act as if they had.

First, as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan correctly said, “There is no moderate Islam; Islam is Islam.”

Islam, however, can be interpreted. Even Erdogan has said — although it is not clear what he meant by it — that, “Islam must be updated.”

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, also expressed similar views:

“We must revolutionize our religion… We must take a long, hard look at the current situation… It is inconceivable that the ideology we sanctify should make our entire nation a source of concern, danger, killing, and destruction all over the world. It is inconceivable that this ideology… I am referring not to ‘religion,’ but to ‘ideology’ — the body of ideas and texts that we have sanctified in the course of centuries, to the point that challenging them has become very difficult… It has reached the point that [this ideology] is hostile to the entire world…”

Such views are further echoed by other devout Muslims. Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser’s highly respected American-Islamic Forum for Democracy, in 2015, “convened and helped launch the Muslim Reform Movement… a coalition of over 15 Western Muslim Leaders (from the U.S., Canada, and Europe) whose goal is to actively fight radical Islam from inside by confronting the idea of Islamism at its roots.”

Its “Declaration for Muslim Reform” states, in part:

We reject interpretations of Islam that call for any violence, social injustice and politicized Islam… [W]e can transform our communities based on three principles: peace, human rights and secular governance…. We reject violent jihad…,We stand for the protection of all people of all faiths and non-faith who seek freedom from dictatorships, theocracies and Islamist extremists….. We support equal rights for women, including equal rights to inheritance, witness, work, mobility, personal law, education, and employment…. We are for secular governance, democracy and liberty. We are against political movements in the name of religion. We separate mosque and state…. We oppose institutionalized sharia. Sharia is manmade….We believe in life, joy, free speech… Every individual has the right to publicly express criticism of Islam. Ideas do not have rights. Human beings have rights. We reject blasphemy laws. They are a cover for the restriction of freedom of speech and religion. We affirm every individual’s right to participate equally in ijtihad, or critical thinking, and we seek a revival of ijtihad….Apostasy is not a crime. Our ummah–our community–is not just Muslims, but all of humanity….We stand for peace, human rights and secular governance. Please stand with us!

Targeting Hege Storhaug Norway’s government and “civil society” have now made it clear – they’re out to get her.Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272477/targeting-hege-storhaug-bruce-bawer

On December 19, I wrote here about my friend Hege Storhaug, whose 2015 book, a bestseller in her native Norway, is now available in English under the title Islam: Europe Invaded, America Warned. In an article that appeared on January 3, I noted that prosecutions for anti-Islam “hate speech” are on the rise in Western Europe – but that Norway, at least, is not racking up the convictions fast enough to suit the United Nations. At a December meeting in Geneva, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination charged Norwegian authorities with failing to tighten the screws sufficiently on people who dare to think that freedom of speech means freedom to offend Muslims.

Well, here we go. On January 6, Hege announced at the website of her organization, Human Rights Service, that she and her Islam book have been reported to that selfsame committee, which has been asked to demand of the Norwegian government that Hege be investigated and punished. In my January 3 article, I mentioned that the committee had been dissatisfied with Norway’s failure to prosecute “high-profile cases of hate speech.” Well, when it comes to dragging people into court for criticizing Islam, Hege is as high-profile a target as you could find in the whole country. Not only was her book a massive bestseller, but because of her participation in TV debates and radio interviews her face and voice are familiar to everyone in Norway. To many Norwegians she is a hero, and to many others – those who are determined to silence any negative commentary about Islam – she is the nation’s most prominent voice of hate.

Who is it, exactly, that has reported Hege to the UN? Well, the report in which she was fingered, which is known as a “shadow report” and which is supposed to represent the views of Norwegian civil society, was sponsored by the Norwegian Ministry of Children, Equality and Social Inclusion. Like all of the Norwegian ministries, this one is under the control of the so-called “blue-green” (i.e. non-socialist) government, which has employed Hege’s organization, Human Rights Service as a consultant on immigration and integration issues. The government, moreover, is a coalition of the Conservative, Liberal, and Progress parties, the latter of which is known primarily for its own criticism of Islamic immigration. Very odd.

Less odd is the fact that the report to the UN was prepared by a representative of the Norwegian Centre against Racism (Antirasistisk senter, or ARS). No surprise there: ARS, which is lavishly funded by the Norwegian government, exists primarily to whitewash Islam and smear its critics. A few years back, when he was an official at ARS, Shoaib Sultan, who is now a Green Party politician, notoriously refused to condemn the Islamic death penalty for gays, and ARS let him get away with it. That’s the kind of outfit ARS is.

Multiculturalism and the Transformation of Britain in 2018: Part II by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13513/britain-multiculturalism-transformation-ii

Not a single Christian was among the 1,112 Syrian refugees resettled in Britain in the first three months of 2018. The Home Office agreed to resettle only Muslims and rejected the four Christians recommended by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees — The Sunday Times.

Islamist groups are “weaponizing” Islamophobia and “cynically” using human rights to promote their ideology. Islamist groups accuse their critics of being anti-Muslim, in an attempt to shut down “legitimate debate” about Islamic extremism. The “use and abuse” of the language of human rights is “perhaps the most concerning” tactic employed by fundamentalist groups — Sara Khan, the UK government’s new counter-extremism tsar.

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 UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid.

JULY 2018

July 1. Mubarek Ali, a 35-year-old former ringleader of a Telford child sex abuse gang, was sent back to prison after breaching the terms of his parole. In 2012, Ali was sentenced to 22 years in prison for child prostitution offenses, but was automatically released in 2017 after serving only five years. Telford MP Lucy Allan said there are “many questions to be answered” about why Ali was released, and also about how the justice system treats so-called grooming cases:

“Now he is back in jail, justice demands that he must serve the remainder of his sentence in custody; anything less would show a casual disregard for the nature of his crimes and for the victims whose lives he changed forever.”

July 2. Abdul Rauf, a 51-year-old imam from Rochdale, was imprisoned for one year and five months after admitting to assaulting more than 20 children at a mosque. Inspector Phil Key, of Greater Manchester Police, said:

“Abdul Rauf is a nasty, bully of a man who beat the children in his classes until it became normalized. The children were left cowering and holding onto their ears, their arms and their legs after he repeatedly used violence as a punishment. The parents of the children had no idea that they were leaving their children in the care of a man who would leave them writhing in pain and covered in marks and bruises.”

SHARIA AND SOCIALISM: EDWARD CLINE GUEST COLUMN

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2019/01/sharia-and-socialism.html

The new Congress (the 116th): a socialist and a Muslim, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota). And there’s another Muslim , Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), whose foul, mother-rucking mouth has made her notorious. The trio represents the Marxist-Islamic wing of the Dems, loud anti-Semites and quiet ones. RINOs (Republicans in name only) have no rebuttal to the “radicals” but can be expected to remain mute and in the name of civility in political discourse move deferentially aside and let the Dems have their way with the country exercising their well-known “hands-off” policy of being conscientiously irrelevant.We would be remiss if we did not also mention the Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) movement, against Israel, supported by Omar , Ocasio-Cortez, and by foul-mouthed Tlaib, who advocates that Israel be erased from the map and replaced by the Gaza walkers (a pun to The Walking Dead), and all of its inhabitants marched to the sea to drown.

But, first, according to the apocalyptic trio, Donald Trump must first be impeached. The trio represents the Democratic Party now in control of the House. And here is Mr. Jones’s column.
Military History Book Reviews , a guest column by Grant Jones

The Democratic controlled House of Representatives looks like the cantina scene from Star Wars. It is a hive of villainy, scum, evil and treason. The Democrats’ avowed purpose is to destroy what’s left of the USA. Their method is demonstrated by what they are fighting for most vociferously. For example, to continue uncontrolled “immigration” by refusing to fund the Wall while providing “sanctuary” for murdering invaders. America’s death-spiral is encapsulated in this picture:

Appropriately, on the left is Puerto-Rican Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her economy and soul destroying “Green New Deal” is already being touted by an equally evil media. The headbag on the right is Somali invader IIhan Omar. The picture is an excellent illustration of the Left-Islamic alliance to destroy America. Occasional-Cortex’s non-American constituents voted for her because she promises to fundamentally transform America into Venezuela as quickly as inhumanly possible. They are also excellent representatives of the anti-American fifth-column the left, and Republican turncoats, have imported for this very purpose. If the American people won’t vote for their own immolation, the left will replace them with those who will.

While a nation may survive external enemies, and may even survive imported enemies, it cannot long survive traitors within the wall. Sadly, “traitors” is the best word to describe the voters of Minnesota’s fifth congressional district who support Omar. This district, and the last election, demonstrates that the domestic left is America’s greatest enemy. They seek the nation’s death. That their own death may soon follow is not any of their concern. They are just driven to murder the object of their all consuming hate: American (and Western) traditions and freedom.

Hyperbole? No. Ayn Rand made the nihilistic motives of such haters clear in her seminal essay “The Age of Envy” in 1971.

UNKOSHER BAN-BELGIUM

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Unkosher-ban-576528
There seems to be a contradiction between the guarantee of human rights and fundamental freedoms in Europe and the new bans on kosher slaughter.

Last week, a new law went into effect in Flanders, the northern region of Belgium, banning shechita, kosher slaughter. A similar law will go into effect in southern region of Wallonia in September, covering the entire country.

The law states that animals must be stunned before slaughter. Jewish law stipulates that meat can only be kosher if the animal was healthy before being slaughtered, and stunning constitutes an injury rendering the meat no longer kosher. The law also in effect bans on slaughter according to Islamic law, as well as the Hindu and Sikh methods of meat production.
Antwerp, in Flanders, is home to Europe’s largest Orthodox Jewish community, which will now have to import its meat from countries that have not yet banned shechita. Neighboring France, home to Europe’s largest – but dwindling – Jewish population, will likely experience a boom in its kosher businesses.

The impact of the Belgian kosher ban will go far beyond its local Jewish communities. Swedish journalist Annika Hernroth-Rothstein took to social media last week to lament that she can no longer have meat shipped in from her usual source: “I’m looking for a new kosher butcher/supermarket that delivers to Sweden,” she tweeted, calling herself “a Jew in Europe who LITERALLY just wants to live a Jewish life, but Europe seems to have other plans.”

Many other Jews around Europe will be similarly impacted.

Brazil’s Bolsonaro Is 2018’s Biggest Winner Also: Italy’s Salvini, Turkey’s Erdogan, Syria’s Assad, and Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed. By Walter Russell Mead

https://www.wsj.com/articles/brazils-bolsonaro-is-2018s-biggest-winner-11546909119

Twenty eighteen was a disquieting year. Although capitalism continued to raise living standards almost everywhere, the geopolitical outlook dimmed. An antimarket backlash gained strength in many countries, and relations between the U.S. and China continued on a downward trajectory even as global defense spending hit a record high.

Some leaders thrived in this environment—either despite the geopolitical headwinds or because of them. Here are the five men who, for better in some cases and worse in others, were the biggest winners in world politics in 2018.

• Abiy Ahmed. The new prime minister of Ethiopia took office in April and almost immediately launched a stunning series of political and economic reforms. In his first 100 days, the new prime minister released thousands of political prisoners, ended a state of emergency, began liberalizing the economy, and moved to implement a controversial peace agreement with Eritrea. Ethiopian institutions remain weak, and the country faces a tangle of ethnic and security issues that guarantee trouble ahead, but in 2018 Mr. Abiy gave hope to a country that desperately wants to put decades of civil conflict and authoritarian rule behind it.

• Bashar Assad. The Syrian strongman’s forces achieved a series of decisive victories in the bloodiest civil war in Middle East history. A host of morally vainglorious Western leaders demanded for years that Mr. Assad step down; with Russian and Iranian backing, he has had the last laugh. The country he rules is a ruin, but he occupies a palace in Damascus rather than a prison cell in The Hague.

Gender, Likability and Opportunity Are reporters too busy telling tales about female politicians to notice female non-politicians? By James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gender-likability-and-opportunity-1154688864

Did you notice Friday’s news that the American jobs boom is proving especially beneficial to U.S. females? For some reason media folk seem focused only on two particular job seekers who tend to look for work in Washington, D.C.

Nationwide, conditions are highly encouraging. “Women have been driving this year’s improvements in labor force participation,” notes the Journal’s Lev Borodovsky. “Participation among women aged 25-34 years hit a multi-year high.”

Whether young or old, U.S. women are not just entering the labor market; they are gaining jobs. In the last 12 months, the number of employed U.S. women age 20 years and older has increased by more than 1.6 million, according to the Department of Labor’s household survey.

Labor’s separate establishment survey of employers shows more good news for female job seekers, with women rising as a percentage of the U.S. workforce. At the margin, as America approached the end of year two of the Trump era, it appears the U.S. economy was becoming more hospitable to women relative to men. This doesn’t easily fit into the popular media narrative about our times, so it may soon be lost in a flood of politicized analysis.

Money isn’t everything and not every new job represents a happy story. Some new hires are working by necessity more than by choice. But the overall picture is one of expanding opportunity and the robust job market for women surely exerts a positive impact on many more lives than most politicians will.

Though the latest economic news is particularly good for the gals, the guys also have a lot to celebrate given what can only be considered a blowout month of job creation and rising wages. Outside of government, both sexes seem to be waging a war on the post-2008 new normal.

But of course it’s what happens inside government that fascinates most of the press corps. Therefore many reporters have lately been most concerned about the opportunities available to two particular members of the U.S. labor force who, respectively, attended Yale’s law school and taught at Harvard’s.

Despite their expensive skills, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) are, in a popular media telling, not well liked because of sexism. Annie Linskey and David Weigel recently wrote in the Washington Post:

Just hours after Elizabeth Warren announced her plans to run for president, a question began surfacing about a possible weakness. It wasn’t derived from opposition research into some facet of her life. It had nothing to do with her policy ideas.

The Gamble of Israel’s ‘New Right’ BY: David Isaac

https://freebeacon.com/blog/the-gamble-of-israels-new-right/

“Boom!” read the headline of a supplement in Israeli weekly Makor Rishon, after two leading politicians, Education Minister Naftali Bennett and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, announced on December 29 that they were jumping ship from the Jewish Home Party to create the New Right Party. The question Israeli pundits are trying to answer now is whether that boom—or “blast” as most of the press characterizes it—is an explosion or an implosion. Will it strengthen the national camp or will it bring it to its knees?

The ruling Likud Party wasted little time in slamming the New Right as a threat to the entire right. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “It will break the right into slivers of slivers. Parties won’t make it past the electoral threshold.” Netanyahu referred to the 3.25 percent of the vote a party must win in order to enter the Knesset. Passing that threshold gives a party four seats. Failing to pass means the loss of all the votes that had gone to that party.

Netanyahu counts on those slivers to build his government. In Israel’s parliamentary system, a government must have a majority of at least 61 votes in the 120-seat Knesset. How does Likud fare in the polls? Much better than the others, but still with only 30 seats.

Netanyahu has repeatedly raised the specter of 1992, when a plethora of right-wing parties caused two of them to fail to make it into the Knesset, wasting their votes. The result was a Labor government led by Yitzhak Rabin, which brought about the Oslo Accords, long viewed as a disaster by the right. (It’s a view now held by most of Israel’s electorate, judging from the fact that no party outside of the extreme Meretz wants to be identified with it.)

Likud fears are more than mere scare-mongering. Polls place two to three right-wing parties perilously close to the abyss, and some analysts estimate that even the loss of one right-wing party is enough to hand the reins of government to a center-left coalition.

New ISIS Threat Tells Jihadists to Bomb Electrical Infrastructure By Bridget Johnson

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/new-isis-threat-tells-jihadists-to-bomb-electrical-infrastructure/

A new online threat from ISIS supporters encourages jihadists to target critical infrastructure, with the suggestion of bombing power stations.

The image shows a faceless figure in a black hoodie with the Islamic State flag holding a bomb with a lit fuse with transmission towers and lines in the background. Along the power lines is the phrase “Just Terror” — the ISIS slogan for lone jihadist operations — and blood-spattered ground.

The poster directs jihadists to “make a surprise for the Crusaders.”

The infrastructure threat is uncommon in ISIS propaganda, which has focused more on knife, vehicle or gun attacks in crowded areas such as festivals or music venues. Suggested targets have ranged from well-fortified locations, such as the U.S. Capitol or UN Security Council, to soft targets with little symbolic significance.

At the end of last month, another ISIS-allied media group encouraged jihadists to “kill the infidels in ways which no one else ever used” including “electricity” among methods such as snakes, poison gas, poisoned arrows, and wild animals.

A December report from the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, a panel established by President Bush after the 9/11 attacks composed of industry executives along with state and local government officials, warned that “increasing threats — whether severe natural disasters, cyber-physical attacks, electromagnetic events, or some combination — present new challenges for protecting the national power grid and recovering quickly from a catastrophic power outage.”

The report also noted that America’s foes could take advantage of chaos after a natural disaster to attack energy systems. Attacks on critical infrastructure could also be a combination of cyber attack and physical attack, further complicating the response and expanding the damage.

“The United States should respond to this problem in two overarching ways: 1) design a national approach to prepare for, respond to, and recover from catastrophic power outages that provides the federal guidance, resources, and incentives needed to take action across all levels of government and industry and down to communities and individuals; and 2) improve our understanding of how cascading failures across critical infrastructure will affect restoration and survival,” the panel said, requesting the National Security Council join with lead agencies to prepare a report on steps being taken to address the threat. CONTINUE AT SITE

President Trump Calls for America to Recruit ‘the Smartest People in the World’ By David P. Goldman

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/president-trump-calls-for-america-to-recruit-the-smartest-people-in-the-world/

Not a word appeared in the mainstream media about President Trump’s call for more legal immigrants to build America’s talent pool. The liberal media is so anxious to portray the president as a jingoist xenophobe that it ignored a key policy statement on immigration. Trump declared in his Jan. 4 press conference on the government shutdown that the U.S. should convince the hundreds of thousands of foreign students who attend our universities to stay here and contribute to the U.S. economy. He’s been listening to U.S. tech companies, who need the talent. And he’s exactly right:

At the same time, [people] can apply to come into our country legally, like so many people have done. And we need people, Major. We have to have people. Because we have all these companies coming in. We need great people. But we want them to come in on a merit basis, and they have to come in on a merit basis. They can’t come in the way they’ve been coming in for years.

I get calls from the great tech companies, and they’re saying we don’t allow people at the top of their class, at the best schools in the country, we don’t allow them to stay in our country. So they end up going back to China and Japan and so many other countries all over the world, and we don’t keep them. They get educated at our finest schools, and then we don’t allow them, through a various set of circumstances, to have any guarantees of staying. So we lose out on great minds. We can’t do that.

We have companies that, if we don’t change that — and we’re working on that, and we discussed that with the Democrats, and I think they agree. We’re working on that. But we don’t want to lose our great companies because we have a ridiculous policy that we won’t accept smart people. So, call it politically correct or not, but we have to let these great, brilliant companies have the smartest people in the world.

Only 7% of U.S. undergraduates major in engineering, compared to a third in China. Russia, with roughly a third of our population, graduates as many engineers. We need more opportunities in STEM for Americans. We should subsidize engineers, mathematicians, and scientists and starve the resentment-studies programs that pollute American universities. To train more engineers and scientists, though, we would have to recruit more teachers from overseas, as Edward Dougherty, distinguished professor of engineering at Texas A&M University, explained in a recent essay in Asia Times. CONTINUE AT SITE