RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/28/how-ireland-became-a-cauldron-of-the-culture-war/

EXCERPT

This was Dublin on Saturday. There was a huge protest against the government’s immigration policy, and a counter-protest of self-styled radicals chanting ‘Refugees welcome here’. And it was about the most perfect distillation of the ‘culture war’ I’ve ever seen. Crowds of working people rallying behind the national flag as the virtuous of Dublin 4 flipped a collective middle finger at them and branded them fascist scum. There it was, in glorious technicolor, the great clash of our time: that between ordinary people worried about mass immigration, and an elevated class of high-status opinion-havers for whom borders are so 20th century.

The main protest was against the immigration policy overseen by both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in recent years. Immigration is the hottest topic in Ireland right now. Swarms of Irish people are both bemused and troubled that Ireland’s foreign-born population is heading towards a fifth of the whole population. They’ve watched as sleepy green towns have become 35 per cent foreign-born almost overnight. No, they’re not racist, just curious: curious to know how this happened, why it happened, and whether they get a say in it.

The other side, the counter-protesters, could not have been more different. They were rallied by United Against Racism, a leftish group backed by Sinn Fein, the Greens and others in Dublin’s noisy virtue-displaying class. They waved the trans flag rather than the tricolour, because apparently the right of men to shit next to women is more important than the right of nations to self-determination. The words ‘fascists fuck off’ were scrawled on one trans flag, beautifully capturing the seething animus these snobs disguised as radicals feel for Dubliners who’ve never darkened the door of a university and probably think there are only two genders.

Where the big demo was a sea of tricolours, the counter-demo was full of the accoutrements of the neo-religion of woke. People were adorned in the keffiyeh, the Arab garment appropriated by the bourgeois of the West to signal their moral fitness for polite society. The Pride flag fluttered, because to this new class of faux-progressive individual identity matters far more than national identity. It was a clash of two moral universes, the green, white and gold of the tricolour signalling an affinity with the nation, the multicolours of Pride signalling a preference for the neoliberal cult of self-regard.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/kenya-jihadists-target-majority-christian-country/

This month marks the ten-year anniversary of when Islamic terrorists stormed the Garissa University College in Kenya, murdering 148 Christian students and injuring at least 79.

On April 2, 2015, gunmen took over 700 students hostage at the university campus. According to the witnesses, the terrorists asked the victims about their religion and segregated the Muslims from the Christians, intending to execute those who identified as Christians.

Student Collins Wetangula told the Associated Press that when the militants stormed his dorm, he could hear them demanding if residents were Muslim or Christian.

“If you were a Christian, you were shot on the spot. With each blast of the gun, I thought I was going to die.”

“All I could hear were footsteps and gunshots; nobody was screaming because they thought this would lead the gunmen to know where they are,” he said. “The gunmen were saying sisi ni al-Shabab” (That is Swahili for “We are al-Shabaab.”)

The siege ended the same day, after all four of the attackers were killed.

The terrorist group al-Shabaab took responsibility for the attack. The group had also claimed responsibility for a deadly 2013 attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi. This incident left 67 people dead and over 150 wounded.

Since then, Islamic terrorist attacks in Kenya and many other African nations have remained ongoing. In the latest incident, on March 23, 2025, al-Shabaab killed six police personnel after assailants attacked a base near the Somali border.

A jihad group formed in the early 2000s, Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen, was quickly nicknamed al-Shabaab, which means “The Youth.” It seeks to establish an Islamic state in Somalia.

Al-Shabaab was created as a member of the Islamic Courts Union, a coalition of Sharia law courts united against the federal government of Somalia. In 2012, al-Shabaab pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda. Today, al- Shabaab controls parts of central and southern Somalia, where it enforces Sharia law.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, in the areas it controls, al-Shabaab prohibits “various types of entertainment, such as movies and music; the sale of khat, a narcotic plant that is often chewed; smoking; and the shaving of beards. Stonings and amputations have been meted out to suspected adulterers and thieves. At the same time, the group bans cooperation with humanitarian agencies, creating a harrowing challenge in the face of unprecedented droughts.”