RUTHFULLY YOURS

Until a few years ago, the unique recipe for secularism adopted by the French seemed able to guarantee the assimilation of the country’s burgeoning number of Muslims, something now, by criminal and terrorist activity in the country, proven a resolute failure.

Next year’s election results might signal the beginning of the end for laïcité, the long-held French principle of strict prohibition against religious influence in the determination of state policies.

The remains of St. Denis, the patron saint of Paris, who was decapitated in the year 250 during the brutal pagan persecution of Christians, lie north of the French capital in the basilica that bears his name.

The church is historically noteworthy as the first proper work of Gothic architecture, a style influenced by the Crusades. The basilica is now a rarely visited Parisian landmark, lying as it does within the profoundly Islamized enclave of Seine-Saint-Denis.

“You Christians, you kill us,” were the words of the ISIS knifeman who slit the throat of 85-year old Father Jacques Hamel. The elderly priest officiating at the altar of the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray — a mere three kilometres from the centre of Rouen in Normandy — was slain on July 25, as the two terrorists also took nuns hostage. The terrorists were then shot by police.

On August 5, police swept down on a man shouting “Allahu Akbar” [“Allah is the Greatest”] on the Champs-Élysées, the famous central thoroughfare of the capital of France. Video of the arrest shows passers-by: veiled Muslims, tourists, and presumably indigenous French men and women.

Both of these incidents, when aligned with recent mass outrages across France, including the Bataclan Theatre slaughter on November 13, and the mass carnage caused by a jihadist plot in Nice on July 14, point to a startling reality.

Despite the rhetoric by the government of Prime Minister Manuel Valls on removing dual nationality from those guilty of terrorism offences and closing extremist mosques (20 of France’s 2,500 alleged mosques have been closed down to date), the violent consequences of jihadism are a daily reality and concern stalking the heart of most French metropolitan districts.

At 7.5% of the population, Muslims in France make up the highest concentration of Muslims of any country in Europe, according to Pew Research.

For decades, those warning of the inevitable consequences of mass Muslim immigration, during a time in history when Islamic fundamentalist doctrine was on the rise worldwide, have been maligned, prosecuted, imprisoned or assassinated.

With the security infrastructure now proving inadequate to cope with the sheer scale of enthusiasm for religious war amongst those Islamists born in France, and those able to enter the country — thanks to the open border policies of the EU — the threat continues to increase day by day.

Close to the Champs-Élysées, which runs between the Louvre museum and the Arc de Triomphe, lies the official residence of the president of France.

Presently occupied by the Socialist François Hollande, who closely courted the Muslim vote to gain power in 2012, many French people are looking towards the presidential elections scheduled for April and May 2017, to provide a new occupant of the Élysée Palace in the form of Marine Le Pen.

Patrick Dunleavy is the former Deputy Inspector General for New York State Department of Corrections. He is the author of “The Fertile Soil of Jihad: Terrorism’s Prison Connection,”which was reviewed here http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/interview-with-patrick-t-dunleavy

With the United Kingdom’s successful prosecution of noted radical Islamic preacher Anjem Choudary for providing material support to ISIS, British officials are now faced with the dilemma of what to with him when he is sentenced Sept. 6.

While he is sure to receive a lengthy period of incarceration, that may create even more problems for counter terrorism officials. In going to prison, he is not actually moving from the frying pan to the fire. A more appropriate analogy is akin to the fox in the hen house. Anjem Choudary has spent the better part of 20 years preaching, proselytizing, and recruiting individuals to a radical form of Islam that encourages jihad as a necessary tenet of the faith. He has done it on street corners, mosques, and in front of television cameras. And like a sly fox, he avoided prosecution in the past because no direct contact between him and a terrorist organization could be proven until now. British authorities uncovered a video of Choudary pledging allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.

When he goes into prison, Choudary will have the opportunity to continue his evil work in an environment that guarantees him a captive audience of people who already have a disdain for government and a predisposition for violence. It is fertile soil.

How successful will he be? We already know of his effectiveness with ex-cons such as shoe bomber Richard Reid, who attended the Finsbury Mosque after his release from prison. Finsbury was one of the places that Choudary was allowed to preach his message of hatred and intolerance to all things non-Muslim. Many of his converts are already in prison for committing terrorist acts.

One of them is Michael Adebolajo, convicted in the brutal murder of 25-year-old Lee Rigby, a Fusilier in the British Army as he was returning to barracks. Since his incarceration, prison officials have had to transfer Adebolajo from the general prison population in Belmarsh because of his attempts to influence and radicalize other inmates. Another Choudary protégé, Richard Dart, was sentenced to six years in prison in 2013 for his part in a plot to bomb a memorial service for British soldiers at Royal Wooten Basset. Also in prison is Junead Khan, convicted last spring for conspiring to kill U.S. servicemen stationed at the RAF Lakenheath Base.

http://www.investigativeproject.org/5595/anti-israel-double-standards-enable-assad

Syria’s civil war claimed 470,000 lives since it started in March 2011, the Syrian Centre for Policy Research announced in February. That’s an average of about 262 deaths per day and 7,860 per month. The carnage has continued unabated, so, applying the same death rate nearly 200 days after the February estimate, the death toll is over 520,000.

Such numbers are staggering, even by Middle East standards. However, the violence has become so routine that it only occasionally captures global attention, usually when a particularly poignant moment of human suffering is documented. The most recent example is Omran Daqneesh, a 5-year old Syrian boy who was filmed shell-shocked, bloody, and covered in dust after the airstrike bombing of his Aleppo apartment block.

The tragic image of Omran caused outrage around the world, as did the image of Aylan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian boy whose body washed up last September on a beach in Turkey. Yet Omran’s plight demonstrates that, nearly a year after the last child victim of Syrian horrors captured global sympathy, nothing has changed.

If anything, the violence in this multi-party proxy war seems to be getting worse. Since Aylan Kurdi’s drowning, Russia began blitz-bombing Syria in support of the Assad regime. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) estimates that nine months of Russian airstrikes have killed 3,089 civilians – a toll that is greater, by some estimates, than the number of civilians killed by ISIS. By contrast, Syrian civilian deaths caused by U.S. airstrikes are probably in the hundreds (over roughly twice as much time, since U.S. airstrikes began in the summer of 2015).

This post by Rowan Jacobsen was originally published on Ensia.com, a magazine that highlights international environmental solutions in action, and is republished here as part of a content-sharing agreement.

Ten miles south of Tel Aviv, I stand on a catwalk over two concrete reservoirs the size of football fields and watch water pour into them from a massive pipe emerging from the sand. The pipe is so large I could walk through it standing upright, were it not full of Mediterranean seawater pumped from an intake a mile offshore.

“Now, that’s a pump!” Edo Bar-Zeev shouts to me over the din of the motors, grinning with undisguised awe at the scene before us. The reservoirs beneath us contain several feet of sand through which the seawater filters before making its way to a vast metal hangar, where it is transformed into enough drinking water to supply 1.5 million people.

We are standing above the new Sorek desalination plant, the largest reverse-osmosis desal facility in the world, and we are staring at Israel’s salvation. Just a few years ago, in the depths of its worst drought in at least 900 years, Israel was running out of water. Now it has a surplus. That remarkable turnaround was accomplished throughnational campaigns to conserve and reuse Israel’s meager water resources, but the biggest impact came from a new wave of desalination plants.

Israel now gets 55 percent of its domestic water from desalination, and that has helped to turn one of the world’s driest countries into the unlikeliest of water giants.

Bar-Zeev, who recently joined Israel’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research after completing his postdoc work at Yale University, is an expert on biofouling, which has always been an Achilles’ heel of desalination and one of the reasons it has been considered a last resort. Desal works by pushing saltwater into membranes containing microscopic pores. The water gets through, while the larger salt molecules are left behind. But microorganisms in seawater quickly colonize the membranes and block the pores, and controlling them requires periodic costly and chemical-intensive cleaning. But Bar-Zeev and colleagues developed a chemical-free system using porous lava stone to capture the microorganisms before they reach the membranes. It’s just one of many breakthroughs in membrane technology that have made desalination much more efficient. Israel now gets 55 percent of its domestic water from desalination, and that has helped to turn one of the world’s driest countries into the unlikeliest of water giants.

Driven by necessity, Israel is learning to squeeze more out of a drop of water than any country on Earth, and much of that learning is happening at the Zuckerberg Institute, where researchers have pioneered new techniques in drip irrigation, water treatment and desalination. They have developed resilient well systems for African villages and biological digesters than can halve the water usage of most homes.

The institute’s original mission was to improve life in Israel’s bone-dry Negev Desert, but the lessons look increasingly applicable to the entire Fertile Crescent. “The Middle East is drying up,” says Osnat Gillor, a professor at the Zuckerberg Institute who studies the use of recycled wastewater on crops. “The only country that isn’t suffering acute water stress is Israel.”

Those who wear compassion on their sleeves have no monopoly on concern for the poor. The only contention is about how best they can be helped. And whatever help is provided must be detached from any illusion that society can be rid of poverty.
A little enquiry shows that though a great many people are dissatisfied with the existing pattern of distribution, none of them has really any clear idea of what pattern he would regard as just. —Friedrich Hayek, “The Atavism of Social Justice”

Prosperity and poverty do not sit well together. The contrast is confronting. Take this comment for example:

Everywhere in the world there are gross inequities of income and wealth. They offend most of us. Few can fail to be moved by the contrast between the luxury enjoyed by some and the grinding poverty suffered by others.

You are probably wrong about its provenance. It is neither from a papal encyclical nor an utterance of Justin Welby, Thomas Piketty, Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn. It is from Free to Choose (1980) by Milton and Rose Friedman.

Those who wear compassion on their sleeves have no monopoly on concern for the poor. The only contention is about how best they can be helped. And whatever help is provided must be detached from any illusion of ever ridding society of poverty. It will always be around, confirmed for those biblically minded by Deuteronomy 15:11 and Matthew 26:11. Moreover, there will always be wide disparities between the rich and the poor. Anything approaching equality of income or wealth is unachievable. Even those on the fringe of the distant Left who might extol its desirability will admit of that. As explicitly does the Catholic Church: “unequal distribution [‘in physical and mental abilities, wealth, etc.’] is part of God’s plan, so that man can share his blessings with those in need” (from the “Simplified” version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 1936 and 1937).

There is no question. Inequality is an inherent characteristic of all complex human societies. This means that claims of there being excessive inequality is a judgment call. It is based, presumably, on the prevailing economic system, whatever it is, being flawed or broken in one way or another. This has to be the argument.

Unsurprisingly, as the system underlying all successful economies, capitalism is in the firing line. Inequality in, say, socialist Venezuela is not a headline issue. Inequality is just one of many problems in a typical socialist society and not the major one when the lights go out. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The question I intend addressing is how the values inherent in capitalism bear on “distributive justice” compared with Christian values and, as a subsidiary reference point, with those inherent in socialism. I am squarely in the First World. At root, the Third World’s problems have nothing to do with economics. They have everything to do with dysfunctional cultures and can only be solved though political and social reform by the societies concerned.

John O’Sullivan, in The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister (2006), points out that papal encyclicals “rightly warn against greed and materialism as dangerous sins”. The latest encyclical, issued on May 24, 2015, Laudato Si’ (On Care for Our Common Home) carries on the theme. Capitalism is again the culprit, as it must be. No other system, whether it was feudal or mercantilist before the rise of capitalism at the beginning of the nineteenth century, or the experiments with socialism-cum-communism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has produced enough material goods to sustain widespread materialism.

Greed and materialism, to which can be added “individualism” (interpreted as meaning a lack of solidarity with others), underscore the Catholic Church’s discomfort with capitalism. Other Christian denominations undoubtedly share this discomfort. And, certainly, it is difficult to see how greed, materialism and individualism, which undoubtedly at times characterise capitalism in practice, are reconcilable with Christian values.