RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mark Durie is a theologian, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and author of The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom.

President Obama was mistaken in his Christmas message: it is not true that church bells have been ringing in the Middle East for centuries.

Dear President Obama,

In your recent statement on persecuted Christians at Christmas you stated: In some areas of the Middle East where church bells have rung for centuries on Christmas Day, this year they will be silent; this silence bears tragic witness to the brutal atrocities committed against these communities by ISIL. When you say that ‘church bells have rung for centuries’ you are not speaking the truth. Bells have rung in Syria and Iraq for not much more than a hundred years, at most.

As determined by Islamic law, church bells did not sound throughout the Middle East for more than a thousand years from the 7th century conquests until modern times (except under the Crusaders). This was due to the conditions set by the Pact of the Caliph Umar, by which Christians of Syria surrendered to Islamic conquest in the 7th century AD. In this pact the Christians agreed that “We will not sound the bells in our churches.” Churches in regions controlled by Muslims used semantrons (also calls nakos) instead of the forbidden church bells. Examples of these are still visible in Jerusalem to this day, e.g. see here.

King Edward VIII was forced to abdicate in 1936, and soon took the title of the Duke of Windsor. He has always been known for his pro-Nazi sympathies. However, the extent of his betrayal could never be fully verified due to the secrecy of the Royal Archives.

The Royal Archives have always ensured that letters from German relatives of the royal family in the run up to World War II remain closed. Naturally, such censorship has led to endless conspiracy theories.

But over the past eight years I have accumulated damning evidence by sifting through 30 archives all over the world that are open. Intelligence reports and German, Spanish and Russian documents show members of the British royal family were indeed far closer to Nazi Germany than has previously been recognised. I present this in full in my new book Go-Betweens for HitlerExternal link .

One key to this Anglo-German network is Charles Edward Duke of Coburg (1884-1954). In a Channel 4 programmeExternal link on him in 2007, I called Coburg “a Nazi who got away with it”, but I had no idea about the magnitude of his crimes at the time.

’Twas two months before Christmas, October 25, 1965. Astronauts Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford sat in Gemini 6, their chic new two-man space capsule, which sat atop a Titan rocket, which sat atop a launch pad at Cape Canaveral.

One launch pad over, an Atlas rocket blasted off carrying an Agena “target vehicle.” If men were going to land on the moon and come home safely, they would have to rendezvous their lunar lander with an orbiting command module that would fly them home. Proving that a space rendezvous was possible was one of the principal objectives of the Gemini program. And a successful rendezvous would be no mean feat. Getting two spaceships together in orbit would be like hitting one bullet with another — except that your average bullet travels one-tenth the speed of an orbiting Gemini.

Gemini 6 would attempt the first-ever space rendezvous with the Agena, which was an unmanned spaceship. As Schirra and Stafford waited, the Agena was launched — and promptly exploded. Gemini 6 was canceled. The exploded Agena was the only one NASA had.

As 1965 drew to a close, there were just four years left till JFK’s end-of-the-decade moon-landing deadline. NASA knew it was falling behind schedule. Without a successful rendezvous under its belt by the end of the year, meeting JFK’s deadline would be impossible. And without an Agena, it looked as if that might be that — till one Agena engineer was struck by inspiration: What if, instead of rendezvousing with an unmanned target, Gemini 6 were to rendezvous with Gemini 7?

NICE, France—Valérie Aubry-Dumont got the news in a WhatsApp message from deep inside Islamic State territory. “Mom, you’re going to be a grandmother,” wrote her teenage daughter, Cléa.

When Ms. Aubry-Dumont last saw her daughter, Cléa was a 16-year-old girl attending Catholic school in a Paris suburb. After a breakup, Cléa met a young man online and within months the couple fled France to live in a stretch of northern Syria ruled by Islamic State.

“I wish Cléa never had children,” Ms. Aubry-Dumont, a child-care worker, says now that her grandson has been born. Her daughter talks some days of returning to France, Ms. Aubry-Dumont said, but is afraid of losing her baby if she tries to leave. “She is trapped.”

In France, the West’s biggest supplier of foreign fighters in Syria, the loss of sons, daughters and grandchildren to Islamic State has been a slow-motion tragedy. For some French families, the Paris attacks, while deepening the wedge between militants and the West, were a painful reminder of their ties to the enemy.

The French wife of Foued Mohamed-Aggad—who along with two others killed 90 people in Paris’s Bataclan concert hall on Nov. 13—is living in Islamic State territory and ready to give birth “any day now,” said Françoise Cotta, a lawyer Mr. Mohamed-Aggad’s mother approached in an attempt to bring the child back to France.

Jews, Christians and Muslims marked Christmas in the Holy Land with a happy-clappy service promoted by, of all people, Mahmoud Abbas — yes, the same Fatah chief who praises terrorists and insists Christians must surrender their holiest sites to Islamic control
We might be close to the end times; the end times of common sense, of common decency, of self-respect and of self-esteem. I have been pondering on the Christmas Eve editorial in The Australian – you know the right-wing rag. God knows what’s in the SMH or The Age or the Guardian, let alone in the Green Left Weekly.

Under the heading of “The Christmas message of hope in challenging times,” the editor reports on a Mass held in St Catherine’s church in Bethlehem for victims of terrorist attacks. It was presided over by the Catholic auxiliary bishop of Jerusalem and attended by Jews, Christians and Muslims. “The event was permeated with peace and goodwill,” apparently. But wait on; no other than Mahmoud Abbas reportedly instigated this kumbaya event.

Pardon me for being discordant at Christmas time, but isn’t this the same Abbas who in September announced that Jews had no right to defile Al Asqua mosque with their “filthy feet” and who claimed Muslim ownership of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre? Will some Catholics and Jews invite anyone home to share supper these days?

Here is a man who celebrates the lives of terrorists who randomly kill Israeli citizens, yet he is feted by his putative victims. And, the only mainstream Australian newspaper of any worth can’t spot the bitter irony. Incredibly, The Australian contrasts the faux bonhomie in Bethlehem with the crass words of Islamic activist Zaky Mallah of Q&A infamy. It got me thinking the way The Australian evidently thinks. If only Zaky were more like Mahmoud what a wonderful world this would be. Whoever wrote this editorial evidently comes straight from la-la land.

As long as we in the West are not prepared to take Muslims at their word when they claim to be waging bloody jihad because it is their religious obligation, we have no chance of repelling the current onslaught on the West.

First to go will be the welfare states. Shrinking native populations cannot generate enough taxes to accommodate masses of immigrants with so few skills as to be effectively unemployable, or who do not want to contribute to “infidel” societies. Well before mid-century, the number of Muslims in Denmark will be large enough irreversibly to have changed the composition and character of the country.

In the United States, a House of Representatives bill, H. Res. 569, has been sponsored that would censor one of the few countries left with freedom of speech. The bill, in accordance with the 10-year plan of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), would criminalize all criticism of Islam, worldwide.

Will Muslim non-integration spell the end of the secular state as we have known it? Probably. Religion – or more accurately, Islamic ideology, which knows no distinction between religion and politics – is on the ascendant.

Justice is in short supply in northern Nigeria.

In 2013, there were over 200 Christian churches in the thriving Gwoza area. By the middle of 2014, there were almost none left.

The orphans have nothing, but surrounded by the warm and disciplined Christian love of the Kwashis, they have everything.

In Jos, in the middle-belt of Nigeria. despite the proliferating Christmas decorations in homes and churches, peace on earth and goodwill between communities continues to be in short supply. Across northern Nigeria, the church is facing an existential threat from the violence and intimidation of Islam in its various forms.

In the school of Gloria Kwashi, wife of the Anglican Archbishop, Ben Kwashi, which serves 400 orphans, the lunchtime bowl of mixed rice and beans with added nutrients is, for many of these children, the only meal of the day. The education of these orphans is taken seriously by Gloria Kwashi and her dedicated staff of seven, not only as a Christian imperative but also as a vital route out of poverty.

“Often in these cases the police take no action or, worse, side with the rapists. Christian families or witnesses are pressured to withdraw complaints.” — Sardar Mushtaq Gill, Pakistani lawyer and human rights activist.

Asia Bibi, a Christian mother of five, has been on death row since 2010 because a Muslim woman, apparently with a personal vendetta against Bibi, accused her of speaking blasphemy against the prophet of Islam, Muhammad. “She could be killed by any inmate or even a prison guard,” said an official. “She was vomiting blood last month and was having difficulty walking.”

Saddique Azam, a Catholic teacher and headmaster at a primary school in a small village, was beaten and tortured by a group of Muslim teachers who resented being under the authority of an “infidel.”

Nabila Bibi, a Christian woman who was engaged to a Christian man, was abducted, forcibly converted to Islam, and forcibly married to a Muslim man.

The U.S. State Department lists only nine nations as “Countries of Particular Concern” (CPC) — a designation for those nations considered to be the worst violators of religious freedom. These include governments that “engage in or tolerate” systematic, ongoing, and unspeakable violations of religious freedom.

BRUSSELS—Belgian authorities have charged a ninth person in connection with last month’s terrorist attacks in Paris, as they continue to hunt for a key suspect in the atrocity, the federal prosecutor’s office said Thursday.

Abdoullah C., a Belgian national, was arrested in Brussels on Tuesday and charged by an investigating judge with terrorist murders and participation in the activities of a terrorist organization, the prosecutor said.

The man, born in 1985, is suspected of having had “several contacts” with Hasna Ait Boulahcen, niece of the ringleader of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud. Those contacts allegedly took place between the attacks and a subsequent police shootout in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, in which both Mr. Abaaoud and his niece died, the prosecutor’s office said.

Belgian authorities will decide later today whether to extend Abdoullah C.’s detention.

The latest arrest was the result of a house raid close to the Brussels district of Molenbeek, where at least three of the alleged Paris attackers lived, said Eric Van der Sypt, a spokesman for the federal prosecutor.