RUTHFULLY YOURS

By the calculations of the social scientists at the World Economic Forum, the United States’ gender-equality ranking has slipped from 20th place to 28th since 2014. WEF’s Global Gender Gap Index 2015 found that the U.S. is outranked not only by such leftist Valhallas as Iceland (first) and Sweden (fourth), but also, among others, by Mozambique (27th), Namibia (16th), Rwanda (sixth), and Burundi (23rd).

Yes, according to this report, American women who want to enjoy greater gender equality should move to Burundi — a small East African country whose president held a sham election to garner an unconstitutional third term and who is currently threatening to commit genocide against his own people in order to keep power. Burundi also has a continuing history of widespread rape committed by both private citizens and government officials.

Or there’s Burundi’s neighbor Rwanda, whose government recently recruited Burundian refugees, apparently to wage an armed insurgency within Burundi.

Also outranking the U.S. are the Philippines (seventh), where human-rights abuses such as extrajudicial killing are normal; Bolivia (22nd), where corruption and gender-based violence prevail; and Nicaragua (twelfth), where property rights are tenuous and the press faces judicial and legal harassment from the Ortega administration.

The murder of 27 hotel guests in Mali’s capital city by Boko Haram, now an al Qaeda franchisee, highlights yet again the delusional futility of asserting that, as Hillary Clinton put it in a tweet, “Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” Like Obama, Hillary also vigorously condemns the use of a phrase like “Islamist radicalism.”

These evasions are contrary to the history and doctrines of Islam consistent over 14 centuries, and contradict the professed motives for the continuing violence perpetrated across the globe––27,295 deadly attacks just since 9/11–– by Islamic terrorist groups who emulate the Prophet and take seriously his injunction to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captive and besiege them, and lie in wait for them in every ambush” (9.5), one of 109 verses––the direct commands of Allah–– that order war against infidels.

Moreover, that most Muslims do not engage directly in such violence, or may even condemn it, does not change the fundamental doctrines that justify it, no more than the millions of Catholic women who use birth control invalidate the church’s doctrine against contraception. The doctrine of jihad has been part of Islam from its beginning, enjoined by the Koran and Hadith, and confirmed and celebrated by the most eminent Islamic historians, jurisprudents, and theologians. One of the most famous, the late-14th century writer Ibn Khaldun, wrote in the Muqaddimah, “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” When we see Muslims in the 21st century killing and dying in service to this traditional religious imperative created in the 7th century, it is perverse blindness to claim that there is no connection between Islam and Islamic terrorism.

Stockholm opened what is believed to be the world’s first rape clinic for men. More and more men are being subjected to homosexual rape in multicultural Sweden. 370 sex crimes against boys and men were registered in 2014, although the actual number of incidents is thought to be significantly higher.

Sweden’s strategy seems to be to keep the borders open and then redistribute the asylum seekers to EU countries that have an immigration policy completely different from Sweden’s open borders and generous welfare benefits. Whether other EU countries want to relieve Sweden’s burden remains to be seen.

Police documents show that 70% asylum seekers whose applications are rejected ignore the decision and stay illegally in Sweden.

The councilman argued that one should be able to talk about everything, so long as it is true. Two days later, he was forced to apologize and stress that he is not a racist.

Swedish authorities care more about the murderer’s future in his native Eritrea than they do about the risk that he will kill more Swedes.

Weapons smugglers have figured out a way to drive through customs checkpoints without being pulled over. The customs officers have orders never to stop cars with more passengers than there are customs officers present, according to the Lokaltidningen weekly newspaper.

And so now we have the considered position of Kerry, Clinton and Obama: Terrorism is to do with everything except Islam.
The British Home Secretary, Theresa May, was a little behind the curve when she reacted to the bloodbath in Paris by insisting that “the attacks have nothing to do with Islam”. This is the old spin that, although some terrorists might claim to be Muslim, there’s nothing inherently Muslim about their terrorism.

But why be so modest? In the United States, the most senior members of the Democrat establishment are taking it to the next level. Secretary of State John Kerry:

It has nothing to do with Islam; it has everything to do with criminality, with terror, with abuse, with psychopathism – I mean, you name it.

As my friend Douglas Murray remarked:

So long as you don’t name it ‘Islam’.

Quite. Secretary Kerry doesn’t care what you name it as long as you don’t name it “Islam”. Because the not-naming of Islam is more important than the actual naming of whatever it is. Even the qualification that many have been careful to make over the years – of course, most Muslims aren’t terrorists but an awful lot of terrorists unfortunately happen to be Muslim – will no longer suffice. As President-in-waiting Hillary Clinton assures us:

Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.

So not only is terrorism nothing to do with Islam, but Muslims have “nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism”. She said this a few hours before yet another US citizen was killed by terrorists shouting “Allahu Akbar!” – this time in a mass slaughter at the Radisson Hotel in Bamako, Mali. Hostages were given a stark choice: if they could recite from the Koran, they would live; if they were incapable of reciting from the Koran, they would die. So whoever these terrorists were – “you name it” – they knew enough about Islam to be able to recognize quotations from the Koran. Yet they can’t be Muslims because Muslims have “nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism”.

So who does have something to do with terrorism? Republicans mainly. Republicans are the greatest recruiting tool for terrorism that has ever been devised – far more effective than jihadist snuff videos on social media. Just ask President Obama:

MANILA, Philippines — President Obama on Wednesday angrily accused Republicans of feeding into the Islamic State’s strategy of casting the United States as waging war on Muslims, saying the GOP’s rhetoric has become the most “potent recruitment tool” for the militant group…

Stonewalled in his efforts to grasp how US scientists turned an 18-year pause into a temperature increase, a powerful congressman is on the warpath. Even as the climate-change establishment heads to Paris, its scam is much closer to surfacing than the heat they now insist is hiding in the deep ocean
A grandiose United Nations Climate Change conference is to be held in Paris at the end of the month. It has been extensively billed as the last chance for world leaders to sign up to the massive expenditure supposedly necessary to save the world from the global warming disaster. A previous effort of this sort in Copenhagen six years ago went horribly wrong, so it is not surprising that the propaganda associated with the lead-up to the Paris conference has been vastly more intrusive and hysterical. As a consequence, the apparently coherent scientific story behind the politics is beginning to fall apart.

Senior U.S. intelligence officials now say they’re almost sure—one of them calls it “99.9% certain”—that a Russian plane that crashed into the northern Sinai Peninsula on October 31 was brought down by a bomb. (Update: Russia now confirms it.)Although the attacks in Paris on Saturday, November 14, which killed about 130, have gotten far more media attention, the Russian crash exacted a considerably higher toll with 224 people killed, mostly Russian holidaymakers returning from the Sharm al-Sheikh resort in Sinai.

One of the reasons the Paris attacks had a greater impact is that ISIS was clearly behind them. But U.S., British, and Israeli intelligence officials are now saying it was apparently behind the Sinai crash, too.

That assessment is based on chatter that was picked up after the crash between Sinai Province—an ISIS affiliate in Sinai that claims credit for the atrocity—and ISIS Central.

Investigators also say the plane’s cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder indicate that the crash was no accident and an explosion was involved.

DUBAI (Reuters) – An Iranian court has sentenced Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian to a prison term, the state news agency said on Sunday quoting the judiciary spokesman, a case that is a sensitive issue in contentious U.S.-Iranian relations.

The length of the prison term was not specified. “Serving a jail term is in Jason Rezaian’s sentence but I cannot give details,” judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei told a weekly news conference in Tehran, according to IRNA.

In Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters he was aware of the IRNA report but could not independently confirm it. It was not immediately clear why Iran has not given details of the ruling against the 39-year-old Rezaian, who Iranian prosecutors accused of espionage.

On Oct. 11, Ejei said Rezaian, the paper’s Tehran bureau chief who has both U.S. and Iranian citizenship, had been convicted, without elaborating. He said then that Rezaian had 20 days to appeal against the verdict.

The Washington Post said last month that the verdict, issued soon after Iran raised hopes of a thaw in its relations with the West by striking a nuclear deal with world powers including Washington, was “vague and puzzling”.

Friday: Steady cold rain is falling as the truth starts to sink in. Rain extinguishes the memorial candles and flattens the bouquets in front of the grieving restaurants and the horrified Bataclan and piled in terraces around the Marianne at Place de la République. The streets of Paris are forlorn, the boutiques are empty, there’s no line waiting for a seat at the falafel joints, Christmas merchandise lies on the shelves, dumbstruck.

There was a brief moment of satisfaction at the news that the “mastermind” of last week’s attacks was indeed dead several times over and beyond recognition after the 7-hour siege of his last hideout. DNA or some other tracer was matched to some shreds or drippings of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, junior Daesh executive in charge of planning jihad attacks in France and the Benelux countries. The so-called mastermind was caught by CCTV at the Croix de Chavaux métro station in Montreuil last Friday night at around 10 PM. The black Seat used by the easy riders who had finished executing people on restaurant and café terraces had been abandoned less than two blocks away. And the Big Chief ducked into the metro and jumped the turnstile. Punk!

In the midst of double-digit inflation and a stagnant economy, Argentines on Sunday handed victory in the presidential runoff election to 56-year-old Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri of the Cambiemos (Let’s Change) coalition.

With 76% of the vote counted as we went to press, Mr. Macri led with 52.87% against 47.13% for President Cristina Kirchner’s Peronist Front for Victory (FPV) candidate, Daniel Scioli.

The 58-year-old Mr. Scioli—the Peronist governor of Provincia de Buenos Aires—ought to have coasted to an easy victory. But his association with Mrs. Kirchner was a liability he couldn’t overcome. After 12 years of the Kirchners’ socialist economics, eight under this president and four before that under her late husband Néstor, Argentines want change.

Mrs. Kirchner’s uncivil rants against her political opponents, and a substantial loss of judicial independence and press freedom during kirchnerismo also contributed to Mr. Scioli’s defeat.

Sweden’s immigration catastrophe is hardly news, but, writing in the New York Times, Benjamin Teitelbaum underlines how much of the responsibility for it lies with the refusal of ‘establishment’ parties of the left, far left (well, it’s Sweden we’re talking about), center and center-right to accept that dissent could be rooted in anything other than xenophobia, racism and all the rest. That’s something that might be expected from the left, but that this was also the position taken by the Moderaterna (the largest party on the center right) under the leadership of Fredrik Reinfeldt, still—even now—remains startling. The Moderaterna, who led two successive governments between 2006-2014, have quite a bit to be proud of, but about this, not so much. In the end, I suspect that Reinfeldt, an open borders man, pur et dur, will be remembered very poorly indeed.