RUTHFULLY YOURS

As another Islamic terrorist attack occurred in Mali’s capital of Bamako, where Muslim gunmen attacked a luxury hotel full of foreigners, killing innocents and taking 170 people hostage (see update), reports confirm that the terrorists demanded that hostages recite the Shahada (the Muslim declaration of faith) and that those who were able to do so were allowed to leave the hotel.

The terrorists were also shouting “Allahu Akbar”, which media reports perpetually inform us means “God is great” in Arabic.

But does “Allahu Akbar” really mean “God is great”?

In response to the terrorists’ shouts of “Allahu Akbar” and the media’s “translation” of it for us, The Glazov Gang is running its feature interview with Daniel Greenfield in which he discussed The Real Meaning of ‘Allahu Akbar’, explaining why you should be suspicious of the meaning the media ascribes to the Arabic expression after every Jihadi attack.

Don’t miss it!

The Palestinian “victims” — victims of their own credulousness — are known as shuhadaa, martyrs for the sake of Allah, victims of the misconception that Allah wants us to die for him. But Allah forbids us to murder. Muhammad forbids us to murder. The Qur’an forbids us to murder.

Europeans, in general, obviously want the Jews dead — so long as the murder cannot be traced back to them. They seem to be hoping that their boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, combined with Arab and Iranian “hit men,” will do the job for them.

Also tragically, it has taken Mahmoud Abbas too long to realize that the ultimate objective of Hamas, the local representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, after killing Israelis, is to have this violence cost the Palestinian Authority its existence in the West Bank. There, they openly plan to set up another Islamic emirate, like the one in the Gaza Strip.

The knife-wielding Palestinian children — and the other young people who commit murder — are also not a spontaneous occurrence. They do not simply “spring” full-blown from “imperialism,” “Syrian bombings” or an “endangered Al-Aqsa.” They are the product of a careful, methodical, ongoing tactic of brainwashing about how glorious it is to become a shaheed [martyr] by murdering.

We do need to liberated, but not from the people you think. We do not need help being liberated from Israel, which, even if it is harsh, has always been fair to us, but from the self-satisfied diplomats even now — in our name — swanning down the glossy halls of Europe.

The Palestinians have taken it upon themselves to sacrifice our younger generation — on the altar of pointlessness — again.

Old habits are hard to break, and in Europe, it would seem, almost impossible. First, Swedish Foreign ‎Minister Margot Wallstrom said that “to counteract the radicalization, we must go back to the ‎situation such as the one in the Middle East, of which not least the Palestinians see that there is no future: We must either accept a desperate situation or resort to violence.”

Then Dutch ‎Socialist Party Chairman Jan Marijnissen did not hesitate to link the Islamic State terror attacks on Paris to the Palestinian ‎issue:‎ “Their behavior eventually is connected also to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The guys — I assume they were guys — who carried out the attacks probably come from a ‎group of outraged people from the French suburbs.” The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he added, “is ‎the growth medium for such an attack.”‎

Le Monde, a leading French newspaper, echoed this sentiment in its analysis, saying that it was necessary ‎that France demand that the international community immediately establish a Palestinian state and that ‎Israel return to the pre-1967 borders.‎

This is classic European scapegoating. While that strategy may have worked for Europe one way or an‎other in the past, this time it will not. Islamic State is targeting the very heart of European cities — their ‎transportation systems, bars, restaurants, concert halls, and sports stadiums — and the Europeans can try ‎all they want to run away from the reality of this, but the truth is that there is nowhere to hide. ‎Europe has pandered to the Arab world and tried to appease it for decades and all that it has brought ‎Europeans is carnage, bloodbaths and hell on earth. This hell did not begin on Friday, Nov. 13. It ‎began, on a truly large scale, with Madrid in 2004, when 191 people were murdered and 2,000 wounded ‎in terrorist attacks. Still, even now, Europeans are talking of meeting the seething hatred and ‎determination of Islamic State with love and understanding and — of course — a state for the Palestinians.‎

The bodies of slaughtered Parisians were still unburied when our president, the leader of the most powerful country in history, beclowned himself on the world stage. In Turkey Obama gave a speech that surpassed even his long record of narcissistic petulance and juvenile snark. What we are witnessing is a willful destruction of America’s prestige and authority unprecedented in our history. It’s a sad day when the President of the United States makes a milquetoast French socialist like François Hollande sound like George S. Patton.

A jihadist organization, the most prominent of a metastasizing global movement, had just murdered 129 Europeans in the worst attack since the Madrid train-bombings of 2005. But for Obama, this was a “setback.” This tin-eared word choice came from an alleged silver-tongued orator. But lack of oratorical skill is not the cause of his gaffe, but rather Obama’s need to maintain the narrative of success he had peddled for months. Rather than acknowledge the wages of his disastrous foreign policy of appeasement and retreat, he had tried to dismiss ISIS as a “jayvee” team that had been “contained.” Of course, ISIS was spawned by his precipitate withdrawal from Iraq, reliance on “redline” bluster in Syria, and groveling concessions to Iran.

Gunmen took 170 people hostage on Friday morning at a hotel in Bamako, the capital of Mali, a West African nation where French troops are at war with al Qaeda militants.

Soldiers and police surrounded the Radisson Blu hotel in a standoff, said Capt. Baba Cissé, an army spokesman. The Brussels-based Rezidor Hotel Group, which operates the hotel, said two gunmen were holding 30 of its workers and 140 of its guests inside.

The U.S. embassy asked its citizens to stay indoors.

Mali is a somewhat forgotten front in the West’s war on Islamist insurgencies. Al Qaeda allies took control of the country’s desert north, including the fabled city of Timbuktu, in 2012. In 2013, French troops and United Nations peacekeepers arrived to combat those terrorists.

When no one is out there to protect freedom and democracy, groups masquerading as democratic forces move in to serve the designs of their masters.

Anyone questioning the authorities’ interpretation of Islam is dealt with in a barbaric fashion, from the 2am “knock on the door” to sham trials, public floggings, protracted imprisonment, rape, beatings, torture and extrajudicial murder. In some countries, the lawyers who represent such clients are also murdered.

Mauritania passed a new anti-slavery law this year, but has yet to start jailing slave-owners instead of anti-slavery activists. The government has yet to release award winning anti-slavery activist Biram Dah Abeid, arrested last year for organizing a peaceful demonstration against slavery.

Many theocracies have little-to-no respect for law; freedom of expression; equal justice under the law; freedom of (or from) religion; for women’s rights; tolerance of homosexuals or other sexual preferences — but they condone the sexual assault of children.

The targets in all the Paris attacks were not chosen “randomly.” Charlie Hebdo stood for the Enlightenment value of free speech, for the right to challenge, even to make fun of figures who deem themselves above criticism: politicians, religious leaders, the rich and famous. It stood for the right to be secular: for refusing to fence off religion, or award believers greater respect than non-believers.

Like the attempts to shut down all criticism of Islam — whether in novels such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, cartoons such as those of Muhammad drawn and published in Denmark, or debates between academics — the Charlie Hebdo killings were intended to instil fear and silence all honest discussion of Islam and its values.

Through bold criticism in a secular manner, European states have been able to create a more pluralistic, tolerant, and humane culture. For devout Muslims (not just radicals), this is blasphemy of the worst sort: democracy, made by man and not by Allah, is evil, and tolerance for all beliefs is a path to hell.

This ongoing failure to admit that the law of jihad is explicitly cited by spokesmen for Islamic State is the root cause of our inability to fight this war. The ancestors of today’s Europeans knew how to fight against Islamic encroachment, but today, hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants, some of them devoted to waging jihad, are being given free access to enter Europe.

Before we’re confronted with an AK-47 killer or suicide bomber, we must confront those who claim that our lives aren’t precious enough to defend.

Readers may be surprised to learn that I watch – but am not a fan of – the apocalyptic series, The Walking Dead (TWD). Of course I dismiss the notion of zombies as pure nonsense, just as I dismiss much past and current science fiction as nonsense. However, the series fascinates me because it presents, in spite of its ludicrous premise, moral dilemmas and issues related to emergency ethics. I can’t stand the graphic comic books on which the series is based. And in this culture, with its too visible protective and insular cloak of moral relativism and multiculturalism, there isn’t much else to watch on TV.

So I’m left with a series in which zombie craniums are disabled with a squelch of a knife or by a bullet or by decapitation, and in which still-living human predators are gunned down without mercy. It says a lot about our culture that virtually the only place one might find interesting and challenging moral conflicts and compelling characterizations is in a TV horror series.

Yes, this column is connected to the Islamic raid on Paris on November 13th, and it’s about an element of “mercy” that has been introduced in the series.

In one of the very first episodes of Season One of TWD we are introduced to Morgan Jones (played by British actor, Lennie James), who saves deputy sheriff Rick Grimes (played by another Brit, Andrew Lincoln; James and Lincoln’s Georgia accents, characters, and on-screen persona are so convincing you’d hardly believe these actors are British) after the latter awakens from a coma to find the world gone to hell. He was shot by a criminal after a car chase through the Georgia countryside before the apocalypse.

Mike Lee represents Utah in the U.S. Senate. Mike Kelly represents Pennsylvania’s third district in the U.S. House of Representatives.

‘What will it take to get an agreement in Paris?”

That’s the question on the minds of environmental activists, U.S. State Department officials, and foreign bureaucrats as we approach the latest round of United Nations climate-change negotiations in France’s capital city.

It was also the question asked of Sam Kutesa, the president of the United Nations General Assembly, at an event on April 17, 2015, according to an e-mail obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The author of the e-mail — subject line: “Best answer of night” — was President Obama’s chief climate-change negotiator, Todd Stern. Stern was writing to a colleague to recount how President Kutesa responded to this all-important question.

His answer? One word: “Money.”