RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271776/after-pittsburgh-synagogue-massacre-anti-semites-ari-lieberman

Sabbath for me represents a day of rest and time to spend with my family. I do not access the internet, listen to radio or watch TV. For one day of the week, I take it upon myself to completely distance myself from the problems of the world. As a result, I did not hear of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre until after sunset.

Aside from the horrific magnitude of the attack, two things immediately jumped out at me. The first was the advanced age of the victims, which included 97-year-old Rose Mallinger. This aspect of the dreadful slaughter reminded me of the Park Hotel Massacre when on the evening of March 27, 2002, during the start of the Jewish holiday of Passover, a Palestinian terrorist entered the dining area of the Park Hotel located in the resort city of Netanya, and detonated his shrapnel-laced bomb. The massive explosion killed thirty holiday-goers most of whom, like in Pittsburgh, were elderly.

The second thing that struck me was the sheer disingenuousness and hypocrisy of well-known anti-Semitic leaders and groups looking to score political points on the backs of dead Jewish victims. The Hamas terrorist organization, which has the blood of thousands of Jewish victims on its hands contemptibly said it was, “sorry to hear about the terror attack,” and then outrageously linked the attack to legitimate efforts undertaken by Israel to defend her citizenry.

Hamas’s enablers like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan joined in on the action and issued faux condolences. Erdoğan is an anti-Semite to his core. He has dabbled with Holocaust revisionism, has compared Israel to Nazi Germany, claimed that Israel committed “genocide” against the Palestinians, alleged that Israel along with Jewish intellectual Bernard Henri Levy engineered the coup that saw the overthrow of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader, Mohammed Morsi, and linked Jews to the fomenting of the 2013 Gezi Park riots.

Joining the chorus of fake expressions of sympathy was the Palestinian Authority, whose noxious octogenarian leader Mahmoud Abbas, is a confirmed Holocaust denier. On April 30, 2018 he publicly stated in a rambling televised address that the Holocaust was not the result of inherent German anti-Semitism but was rather brought upon by the Jews themselves due to their “social behavior” and alleged usurious conduct. Some other gems of his longwinded speech included the claim that Hitler was a Zionist sympathizer (a claim that has been regurgitated in British Labour Party circles), that Ashkenazi Jews are fake and descendants of the Khazars, and that Jews are not indigenous to Israel but are rather a foreign colonialist implant. In his 1982 dissertation Abbas alleged that gas chambers were never used to asphyxiate Jews and dismissed as a “fantastic lie” that six million Jews perished in the Holocaust. He claimed that the figure was less than 1,000,000.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271763/now-its-official-europeans-cant-criticize-islam-bruce-bawer

Founded in 1949 and headquartered in Strasbourg, the Council of Europe – which today counts every European state except Belarus and Vatican City as a member – is supposed to be a guardian of democracy and human rights. That’s its official raison d’être. It is separate from the European Union, and its court, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), whose judges are elected by the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly (a legislative body whose 324 members are drawn from Europe’s national parliaments), should not be confused with the EU’s European Court of Justice (ECJ). It began hearing cases and handing down verdicts in 1959.

How many Europeans are even aware of the Council of Europe’s existence – or, if they are, could explain what it does? How many know the difference between the ECHR and the ECJ? Relatively few, I suspect. But this is par for the course in Europe, where the elected governments, in the decades since World War II, have built up a network of international bodies that wield considerable power while operating in the shadows with little or no accountability to the people. Guardian of democracy, indeed.

All of this dry information is by way of prefacing news of a sensational and sobering verdict that was handed down by the ECHR last week. Although the full name of the petitioner is not mentioned – she is identified only as an Austrian woman with the initials “E.S.” – the case, as Robert Spencer has noted, is obviously that of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, who in 2011 was convicted in her native country of “disparaging religious doctrines” for having stated, in seminars entitled “Basic Information on Islam” that she held in October and November 2009, that Muhammed, the prophet of Islam, was a pedophile. Of course, any minimally knowledgeable student of that religion knows that, according to the canonical records of Muhammed’s life that are known as hadith, he wed his wife Aisha when she was a child of six and (perfect male role model that he was) waited until she was nine to consummate the marriage.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13204/european-court-human-rights-sharia

The European Court of Human Rights — which has jurisdiction over 47 European countries, and whose rulings are legally binding on all 28 member states of the European Union — has effectively legitimized an Islamic blasphemy code in the interests of “preserving religious peace” in Europe.

The ruling effectively establishes a dangerous legal precedent, one that authorizes European states to curtail the right to free speech if such speech is deemed to be offensive to Muslims and thus pose a threat to religious peace.

“In other words, my right to speak freely is less important than protecting the religious feelings of others.” – Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that criticism of Mohammed, the founder of Islam, constitutes incitement to hatred and therefore is not protected free speech.

With its unprecedented decision, the Strasbourg-based court — which has jurisdiction over 47 European countries, and whose rulings are legally binding on all 28 member states of the European Union — has effectively legitimized an Islamic blasphemy code in the interests of “preserving religious peace” in Europe.

The case involves Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, an Austrian woman who in 2011 was convicted of “denigrating religious beliefs” after giving a series of lectures about the dangers of fundamentalist Islam.

Sabaditsch-Wolff’s legal problems began in November 2009, when she presented a three-part seminar about Islam to the Freedom Education Institute, a political academy linked to the Austrian Freedom Party — which today forms part of the Austrian government. A left-leaning weekly magazine, News, planted a journalist in the audience to secretly record the lectures. Lawyers for the publication then handed the transcripts over to the Viennese public prosecutor’s office as evidence of hate speech against Islam, according to Section 283 of the Austrian Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch, StGB).

The offending speech was an offhand comment by Sabaditsch-Wolff that Mohammed was a pedophile because he married his wife Aisha when she was just six or seven years old. Sabaditsch-Wolff’s actual words were, “A 56-year-old and a six-year-old? What do we call it, if it is not pedophilia?”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bolsonaro-takes-brazil-1540768718

Sunday’s runoff presidential election in Brazil pitted Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain who has spent 27 years in Brazil’s Congress, against Fernando Haddad, a former one-term mayor of the city of São Paulo. On Sunday evening with 97% of the vote in, Mr. Bolsonaro was handily beating Mr. Haddad, 55.4% to 44.6%.

Much was made during the campaign of Mr. Bolsonaro’s history of rude comments about women and minorities and about his pledge to use an iron fist to fight crime in poor neighborhoods.

He was labeled a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, a fascist, an advocate of torture and an aspiring dictator. His opponents gathered in the streets to denounce him and wrote withering diatribes against him in the press. The proudly “progressive” international media joined the fray, declaring him a threat to the environment and democracy.

It ought to have been enough to sink the Bolsonaro candidacy. Yet he prevailed, and it isn’t hard to see why: Brazilians are in the midst of a national awakening in which socialism—the alternative to a Bolsonaro presidency—has been put on trial. The resounding victory of Novo Party’s classical-liberal gubernatorial candidate Romeu Zema in the large state of Minas Gerais confirms that theory.

Mr. Haddad was the candidate of Brazil’s gigantic left-wing populist Workers’ Party, known as PT. He was also the handpicked successor to former two-term President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is in jail on a bribery conviction but remains popular with his supporters. Against Mr. Bolsonaro’s small Social Liberal Party, Mr. Haddad should have won walking away.

How Mr. Bolsonaro triumphed is worth examining because it suggests that something changed in this election. It can always change back, and it probably will. But for now the momentum is on the side of reform, and policy makers have a unique opportunity to advance liberty and prosperity in South America’s largest economy. CONTINUE AT SITE