RUTHFULLY YOURS

Big Feminism, fresh from fighting pitched battles against swimsuit posters in European subways and other phantoms of “rape culture”, failed the women who were attacked by violent Muslim migrant mobs in Cologne, Berlin and Hamburg who were the products of an actual rape culture dating back to Mohammed’s injunction to his men that Muslim women must wear burqas to avoid being “molested” while non-Muslim women captured in the House of War could be raped by Muslim Jihadis at will.

Big Feminism has a great deal of interest in rape as an abstract idea that can be unpacked to represent everything the left hates from Valentine’s Day to environmental degradation to the college frat, but it has little interest in rape as a crime or rape victims as people. Eve Ensler exploited the idea of rape to build up her brand while her PR was being handled by Trevor FitzGibbon, a progressive sexual predator who was also representing Julian Assange, another progressive rapist. Eve Ensler had a great deal of interest in rape as an ideological tool, but none in the women who were raped by her allies.

Feminism is only another of the many manipulative masks that the left wears. Its acolytes cannot see rape as a personal crime, only as an ideological one. To the left, rape, like racism, is a form of institutional oppression practiced by the stronger white male against everyone else. Sexual assaults that don’t fit this structural template won’t be acknowledged and when they become so public that they must be acknowledged, it will be only to change the conversation.

Many years ago I read a thought-provoking science-fiction short story about a sociologist who specialized in the important field of bureaucratic expansionism. I can’t recall the story’s title, and I haven’t found the story on the Web, but a colleague better schooled in sci-fi can probably identify it.

Through my hazy memories, however, it goes something like this. The sociologist is excited because he thinks he has gone farther than anyone else in discovering the sociological laws of organizational success. But how can he be sure? Inspired by a blend of scientific curiosity and a sense of fun, he makes friends with his mother’s sewing circle and persuades its members to reorganize it along his scientific lines.

At the close of the story the sewing circle has got three Senate seats, 55 House seats, and a credible contender for the presidency.

Which brings me not to Donald Trump but to the New Year’s riots in Cologne and two other German cities, in which one woman was raped, about 90 others grossly assaulted sexually, and New Year revelers of both sexes jostled, attacked, robbed, and threatened by an estimated 1,000 men of North African and Middle Eastern appearance in “organized” criminal gangs.

Whatever Mohammed’s virtues or defects as a prophet, he was one helluva practical sociologist.

When cultural relativism flowed from university campuses to the broader society and venturing unpopular or unfashionable opinions began to incur a certain risk, many found it easier to shrug, scoff and do nothing. That was a huge mistake, perhaps a fatal one
Western civilization is adrift in the world of ideas. Uncoupled from religion for over a century, the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition which endured—albeit, once it had been absorbed into a secular, modernist rationale—is under existential threat from within. The Twitter-lynching of Chris Gayle, the asylum seeker crisis in Europe and connected sexual violence in Cologne and other cities on New Year’s Eve, and the increasing frequency of attacks by Islam-inspired jihadists are all in their own and disparate ways symptoms of the same ailment.

Although perhaps well intentioned, the groupthink of Left orthodoxy is accelerating the demise of liberal values on which Western culture was built. While the Left may be more purposeful in severing the links that tie the West to its philosophical and religious past, the ‘right’ is not without fault. Its silence as liberal values become corrupted and discredited implies complicity; its retreat to behind the walls of neoliberal economics concedes defeat as fiscal short-termism is prioritised at the expense of reflecting on the the power and importance of ideas.

The dilution of Western values can be seen most prominently in the mainstream media and its role as a censor, rather than facilitator, of public debate. Pick any contentious topic — from gay-marriage and abortion to the role of Islam in terrorism or issues of race or gender — and you will hear only one side of the story, the politically correct angle. Dissenters beware, presenting an alternative view, or even questioning why the dominant view is dominant, will result in outrage and judgement. There is no such thing as truly free speech under such circumstances — no dialogue, no alternatives to the impulsive and dogmatic Left’s cause du jour, whatever its promoted crusade of the month might happen to be.

The Directorate for Religious Affairs, or Diyanet in Turkish, enjoys an annual budget bigger than those of more than 10 other ministries combined — and its president, a government-appointed cleric, enjoys a $400,000 chauffeur-driven car.

Turkey accuses those who protest lusting for one’s daughter of hating religiosity.

“[G]ossip and holding hands, not allowed in Islam.” — Fatwa from Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs.

Turkey has a government agency that regulates “religious affairs” [read: Sunni Muslim Affairs]. It is run by the country’s top Muslim cleric and reports to the prime minister. The Directorate for Religious Affairs, or Diyanet in Turkish, enjoys an annual budget bigger than those of more than 10 other ministries combined – and its president, a government-appointed cleric, enjoys a $400,000 chauffeur-driven car.

Among its duties is to issue “fatwas,” or to tell Muslim Turks what is religiously permissible and what is not. Its current president, the top cleric, also enjoys making long, doctrinaire speeches. Sometimes they sound reasonable, sometimes not.

Merkel once again exposed her seemingly incurable madness when she made a series of asinine, stupid, absurd, ridiculous, insulting, threatening, idiotic, dangerous, misguided, off-the-mark, lying, crazy remarks

More and more news is pouring out of Germany on the coordinated violence that Muslims perpetrated on New Year’s Eve, as the scale of what unfolded slowly comes to light. (For prior coverage see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

The number of cases that have been reported in Cologne has passed 500 and is climbing by the hour. Nearly half of the reports are for sexual assault. The police have confirmed the focus of their investigation is on people from North African countries and that the majority are “asylum seekers” and people who are in Germany illegally.

Information continues to emerge regarding the coordination of these attacks that brought colonizers from outside Germany to partake in the violence. Jihad Watch, reporting on an AFP article, writes:

Germany’s Justice Minister Heiko Maas said Sunday that the shocking spate of sexual assaults during New Year festivities in Cologne was organised.

“For such a horde of people to meet and commit such crimes, it has to have been planned somehow,” he told Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

“No one can tell me that this was not coordinated or planned. The suspicion is that a specific date and an expected crowd was picked,” he said, adding that if confirmed, that would “take on a new dimension”.

Quoting confidential police reports, Bild am Sonntag said some North Africans had sent out calls using social networks for people to gather in Cologne on New Year’s Eve.

Young men not only from Cologne, but as far as France and Belgium responded to the call to travel to the western German city, the newspaper said.

Among the hard lessons of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, surely one of them is that it’s foolish to expect that backward and often barbaric societies can be transformed into functioning liberal democracies. So why do liberals seem so surprised that so many people from these societies behave in barbaric ways after they’ve shoved their way into the West?

As I write, 516 criminal complaints have been filed in Germany against men of mainly North African or Arab origin who went on a New Year’s Eve sexual-assault rampage in the city of Cologne.

“Twenty or 30 men, foreign men, surrounded us and we couldn’t even move anymore,” a woman identified as Michelle told the BBC. “They just grabbed our arms and tried to tear us apart and pushed our clothes away and tried to get between our legs.”
Similar events also took place in Hamburg, Stuttgart and Berlin. In Sweden, a scandal erupted after it emerged that police had suppressed a report of mass groping by Middle East migrants at a festival last summer. In September, Soeren Kern of the Gatestone Institute chronicled some 30 cases of rape and sexual assault perpetrated by migrants against German and migrant women alike.

“In Bavaria, women and girls housed at a refugee shelter. . . are subject to rape and forced prostitution on a daily basis,” Mr. Kern writes, citing reports from women’s rights groups. “The price for sex with female asylum seekers is 10 euros.”

For anyone even minimally acquainted with Mideast mores, none of this is news. Mob sexual assaults in Egypt became notorious after the 2011 attack on reporter Lara Logan, but they have become a staple of Egyptian life. “Suddenly I was in the middle, surrounded by hundreds of men in a circle that was getting smaller and smaller around me,” one Egyptian woman wrote of a 2013 attack in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. “They were touching and groping me everywhere.”

“Progressive elites have accused those who condemn Muslim extremism of being extremists themselves – claiming that censure of radical Islam is an indiscriminate criticism of all Muslims. Here is an example of what progressives would call “Islamophobia,” dubbed appropriately by Andrew Cummins as a word “created by fascists, used by cowards, to manipulate morons.”

In accordance with a ten year plan of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to implement United Nations’ Resolution 16:18 which criminalizes all criticism of Islam worldwide, the U.S. House of Representatives issued H. Res. 569 condemning violence, bigotry and “hateful rhetoric” toward Muslims in the United States.

This proposal comes on the heels of Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s post San Bernardino promise to prosecute anyone guilty of anti-Muslim speech. It is clear that Ms. Lynch is firing a canon at a fly. According to FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report, there were 1014 hate crime incidents motivated by religious bias in 2014. Of those, 154 – 15.2 percent – were anti-Islamic. More than half were anti-Jewish incidents. Not only is this yet another example of the Obama administration exaggerating minor threats, but it suggests as well an ignorance or callous avoidance of the First Amendment.

The Saudi Arabian-Iranian crisis that has erupted with the former’s execution of prominent Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr could easily, but not quickly, lead to open war. That war may be inevitable because it is, at the same time, a religious struggle as well as a conflict for domination of the Middle East.

The two nations have been engaged in proxy wars for years, but the nature of the conflict and President Obama’s nuclear weapons agreement with Iran shorten the time before open war breaks out.

As I’ll get to in a moment, the proxy wars in Yemen and Syria — as well as Iran’s having turned Iraq into a virtual satellite — made the Saudis feel surrounded and isolated. Al-Nimr’s execution, however, is significant in ways the other parts of this conflict are not. Its implications reach beyond to the core of the Sunni-Shiite religious wars that are almost as old as Islam.

The immediate results of al-Nimr’s execution include an attack on the Saudi embassy in Tehran which resulted in its being partially burned. Two Sunni mosques in Iraq were similarly attacked. Accelerating the crisis were statements from Iran’s “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Khamenei, defending al-Nimr, and from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps accusing the Saudis of a “medieval act of savagery” that would result in the “downfall of the [Saudi] monarchy.”

Charles Lister, 28, is a specialist on Syria with the US think tank Brookings Institution and has been in regular contact with local opposition groups in Syria since the outbreak of the conflict in 2011. Within the framework of the Syria Track II Initiative, which is supported by Western governments, he has coordinated several hundred meetings in the last two years between leaders of more than 100 armed rebel groups and representatives of Syrian civil society. Most recently, Lister was based at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar. Recently, his new book appeared analyzing the development of the Syrian civil war and the rise of jihadist groups.

SPIEGEL: A surprising conclusion in your new book* is that while Islamic State (IS) and the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad are obvious obstacles to ending the Syrian war, in your view the biggest problem is Jabhat al-Nusra, which is allied with al-Qaida. Why is that?

Charles Lister: In the West, the threat posed by IS has become an understandable, but convenient obsession. However, Jabhat al-Nusra has embedded itself so successfully within the Syrian opposition — within the revolution for a long time — that in my view it has become an actor that will be much more difficult to uproot from Syria than IS. Islamic State is all about imposing its will on people, whereas al-Nusra has for the last five years been embedding itself in popular movements, sharing power in villages and cities, and giving to people rather than forcing them to do things. That has lent it a power IS just doesn’t have. The reason I call IS a convenient obsession is that I don’t think anybody in the West knows what to do about Jabhat al-Nusra. There was a period of time where it was relatively clear that al-Nusra had a foreign attack wing that was plotting attacks in the West. They have never let go of their foreign vision, they have explicitly said they want to establish Islamic emirates in Syria, and they belong to an organization, al-Qaida, whose avowed goal is to attack and destroy the West. Not to establish an “Islamic State” and gradually expand it like IS, but explicitly to destroy the West.

SPIEGEL: Yet it was IS that killed 130 people in Paris on Nov. 13, carrying out the bloodiest terrorist attack on foreign soil since 9/11. Are these attacks a sign of strength or a sign of them being under pressure in Syria?

Lister: If these attacks were indeed centrally planned by IS, they have to be a sign of strength. Islamic State certainly is not weakening in Syria and Iraq. Yes, it has lost territory, but as a movement it is in no weaker position than it was 18 months ago. It still has sustainable sources of income, it has large amounts of territory under its control, and now, for the first time it has demonstrated a real ability to carry out what one might call spectacular attacks in the West, with real geopolitical repercussions. It shows its ability to shape international affairs. That in itself is a sign of strength.

Islamic terrorism has dominated the history of Islam, as demonstrated by the murder of three of the first four Caliphs succeeding Muhammed: Umar ibn Abd al-Khattab (644 AD), Uthman Ibn Affan (656 AD) and Ali ibn Abi Talib (661 AD). Islamic terrorism has been one of the most active and dangerous volcanoes – domestically, regionally and globally – since the initial eruption of Islam in the 7th century. Historically, all Arab regimes have achieved, sustained and eventually lost power through domestic violence, subversion or terrorism.

Currently, irrespective of Israeli policies and the Palestinian issue, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Libya have become battlegrounds of rival Islamic terror organizations. All pro-US Arab regimes such as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE face clear and present lethal terror threats. Iran and Saudi Arabia – the two leading world bankers of Islamic terrorism – confront each other militarily, economically, ideologically and religiously. Intra-Muslim fragmentation, unpredictability, instability, intolerance, subversion, terrorism and the provisional nature of Islamic regimes, their policies and agreements have been recently intensified in an unprecedented manner.

The lava of Islamic terrorism has consumed mostly Muslims in the abode of Islam, but it is aiming to sweep the abode of the “infidel,” and is currently spreading into the streets of the USA, Europe, Russia, China, India, Africa, Asia and Australia.