RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/islams-greatest-university-lies-about-islams-raymond-ibrahim/

Al Azhar, the Muslim world’s most prestigious if not authoritative Islamic university, recently blasted Jerome, the archbishop of Athens and all Greece, for saying during a January 14 interview that: “Islam, its people, is not a religion but a political party” — that Muslims are “the people of war … who seek expansion,” which is a “characteristic of Islam.”

Instead of replying with outrage and accusations of “Islamophobia” — as Turkey and other nations did—on January 19, the Observatory, a branch of Al Azhar, denounced “these irresponsible statements by the archbishop of Athens,” adding that they are “merely farcical and empty claims — trivialities unworthy of responding to or discussing.”

Why?  Because, continued Al Azhar, “Islam is the final, heavenly message that Allah Almighty sent to our master Muhammad, the seal of the prophets and apostles, to bring humanity from out of the darkness and clutches of ignorance and into the light of truth and the sun of guidance.”

To anyone unconvinced by this hagiographic explanation, Al Azhar continued:

Accusing Muslims of being people of war and expansion is a pure lie — a fraud and falsification of Muslim history, which is replete with forgiveness and pardon[.] … The Prophet’s invasions were either in defense of Muslims or to discipline those who reneged on their pacts[.] … [Islamic history] is inconsistent with the claim that Muslims want to expand!

Indeed, the only thing not inconsistent here is Al Azhar’s denial of the militant, expansionist history of Islam.  For example, on April 30, 2020, during his televised program, which is watched by millions in Egypt and the Arab world, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb — Al Azhar’s grand imam and Pope Francis’s close ally — declared that “Islam doesn’t seek war or bloodshed, and Muslims only fight back to defend themselves.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/trip-vietnam-reconfirmed-my-hatred-communism-dennis-prager/

Ten years ago, I wrote a column reflecting on my reactions to visiting Vietnam. Given the lack of revulsion to, and even flirtation with, communism (or its more mildly named version, socialism) among many young Americans, it is worth revisiting.

It was difficult to control my emotions — specifically, my anger — during my visit to Vietnam. The more I came to admire the Vietnamese people — their intelligence, love of life, dignity and hard work — the more rage I felt toward the communists who brought them (and, of course, us Americans) so much suffering in the second half of the 20th century.

Unfortunately, communists still rule the country. Yet, Vietnam has embraced the only way that exists to escape poverty, let alone to produce prosperity: capitalism and the free market. So, then, what exactly did the 2 million Vietnamese who died in the Vietnam War die for? I would like to pose that question to some of Vietnam’s communist rulers. “Comrade, you have disowned everything your Communist Party stood for: communal property, collectivized agriculture, central planning and militarism, among other things. Looking back, then, for what precisely did your beloved Ho Chi Minh and your party sacrifice millions of your fellow Vietnamese?”

There is no good answer. There are only lies and truths, and the truths are not good.

The lie is the response offered by the Vietnamese communists, repeated by the world’s noncommunist left, taught (until today) in virtually every Western university, and spread by virtually every news medium on the planet: The Vietnam communists, i.e., the North Vietnamese regime and the Viet Cong in South Vietnam, were merely fighting for national independence against imperialism, i.e., foreign control of their country. First, they fought the Japanese, then the French and then the Americans. American baby boomers will remember being told over and over that Ho Chi Minh was Vietnam’s George Washington, that he loved the American Constitution, after which he modeled his own, and that he wanted nothing more than Vietnamese independence.

https://dianebederman.com/end-jew-hatred-stop-ajax-from-keeping-a-street-named

In Germany no streets or squares are named after Hans Langsdorff and there has been no official military representation at the annual ceremonies at his grave.

Seventy six years after the end of World War II and the revelation of the Holocaust; the deliberate extermination of 6 million Jews for the crime of being Jewish, a small town in Ontario is debating whether or not to keep a street named for Hans Langsdorff, the captain of the German ship, Graf Spee. Now, keep in mind, the town of Ajax took its name from the HMS Ajax and most of the streets in the Town are named for veterans of the Ajax. The HMS Ajax was one of three Allied vessels involved in the fight against the Graf Spee!

The street naming for Hans Langsdorff took place in a lovely ceremony in 2007. Why?  Apparently, Langsdorff was a “remarkable leader” a “true naval officer;”  a kind and gentle man, not a Nazi; after all, not all Germans were Nazis.  Now Langsdorff lauded Adolf Hitler as “a prophet, not a politician.” Less than a year before Langsdorff made that comment, the Nazi dictator had infamously prophesized that if another world war broke out, “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe” would inevitably follow. Jew hatred promoted by the Germans began long before the actual murder of the Jews in Europe.

Granted he scuttled his ship rather than follow Hitler’s orders to fight to the last man when facing impossible odds against a superior force. As a result, Langsdorff saved many lives and prevented the ship’s modern and secret technology from falling into the hands of the British. Three days later, he committed suicide (as did Hitler, Himmler, Goering and Goebbels), shooting himself in the head in a Buenos Aires hotel room.  In his suicide note he wrote:

“I shall face my fate with firm faith in the cause and the future of the nation and of my Führer.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-u-n-refugee-agency-with-few-actual-refugees-

Lost amid President Trump’s unceremonious send-off were a pair of Jan. 14 tweets from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo : Of the more than five million people identified as “Palestinian refugees” by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, fewer than 200,000 meet the criteria for refugee status.

This is a breach of trust by a U.N. agency, but Unrwa is not the only one to blame. One administration after another, Democrat and Republican, enabled Unrwa to perpetuate its fiction. It’s time for a new U.S. policy that promotes regional peace, advances Palestinian human rights and defends the U.S. taxpayer.

History can explain, in part, how this mess was created. In 1948, five Arab armies invaded the fledgling state of Israel but lost. Unrwa was established to care for Arab residents displaced by that conflict. The organization was dedicated solely to Palestinian Arabs—independent of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which took responsibility for all other world refugee populations.

Unrwa became part of a new Arab narrative: Millions of Palestinians were trapped as refugees, living in destitution and yearning for home. Until these people achieved their “right of return,” the Arab world insisted, the Middle East would never see peace. Meanwhile, Israel absorbed 800,000 Jewish refugees who were exiled from Arab states.

Over time, America somehow allowed itself to become Unrwa’s leading donor. From 1950 to 2018, American taxpayers contributed more than $6 billion, even as legislators from both parties raised concerns about the agency. Employees moonlighted as terrorists. Schools were used to store weapons and launch rockets against Israel. Concerns in Congress mounted over waste, fraud and abuse.

https://asiatimes.com/2021/02/a-pax-sinica-takes-shape-in-the-middle-east/

The emerging Sinocentric bloc of Turkey, Iran and Pakistan could leave America’s ally India isolated and weak

A “Pax Sinica” is emerging in the Middle East and Central Asia in plain sight, albeit unnoticed by American planners. The main brace of the strategic architecture is an emerging alliance between Pakistan, a Chinese economic dependency, and Turkey, which relies increasingly on China for financing and trade. Chinese media reported the Turkish foreign minister’s visit to Pakistan Jan. 12 to 13th as a key step towards such an alliance.  And if Turkey and Pakistan ally, “Iran has no choice but to find a way to join the Turkish-Pakistan camp,” in the view of a Chinese military site reposted by NetEase.

I first raised the prospect of a “Pax Sinica” in the Middle East in 2013, and noted last year that a much-discussed (but so far only discussed) Sino-Iranian investment deal of up to $400 billion was “a move on a global game board in response to American efforts to hinder China’s breakout as a technological superpower.” The Turkey-Pakistan rapprochement of the past several months adds a new dimension to China’s ambitions in the region.

While America focused on the peace agreements between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan, China maneuvered among the only three Muslim states with significant military capacity and economic potential. The $2 trillion Belt and Road Initiative will provide the economic foundation for Chinese hegemony from the Indian Ocean to the Black Sea. The emerging Sinocentric bloc of Turkey, Iran and Pakistan will leave America’s ally India isolated and weak, Chinese planners believe. It’s geopolitics played on the principles of Go, whose object is to encircle and isolate the opposing pieces.

The “Abraham Accords” between Israel and several Arab states have symbolic importance, and expose the Arab-Israeli conflict as the least interesting fault line in Western Asia, as former Israeli ambassador Michael Oren wrote Jan. 12. They are the result of American weakness rather than strength; Trump’s declared intention to remove American boots from the region’s ground left the Gulf States to fend for themselves against Iran and Turkey. The Gulf monarchies decided that Israel was less objectionable than Iranian Shi’ites or the Turkish-backed Muslim Brotherhood. But Israel and the Gulf States cannot quite fill the gap left by the strategic withdrawal from the United States. China means to fill it by working with Turkey, Iran and Pakistan.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/burmas-coup-and-bidens-choice-11612222727?mod=opinion_major_pos1

From protests in Moscow to Chinese air incursions over Taiwan, the world is wasting no time testing Joe Biden’s foreign policy team of liberal internationalists. On Monday Americans woke up to news of a swift and (so far) bloodless coup in Burma, whose transition to democratic government was touted by the Obama Administration as one of its major achievements.

Now the country’s generals are moving to reassert control after their party was walloped in November elections. Aung San Suu Kyi, the top elected leader of Burma (also called Myanmar), wanted to use her mandate to change the constitution to limit the generals’ power. That looks like the trigger for the military’s forced suspension of civilian government and communications blackout.

The Biden Administration is rightly denouncing the move, but the U.S. has limited leverage acting alone. The West has used market access as a carrot to urge Burma’s military rulers to cede power to Ms. Suu Kyi. Yet the extent that a power transition actually occurred was exaggerated. A return to economically isolating the country of 54 million on China’s southern border could hurt the Burmese people and play into Beijing’s hands.

As our Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2019, “Western fecklessness has made China look to Myanmar like a more stable and reliable partner.” President Trump’s great-power diplomacy was sometimes crudely transactional. Yet the Biden team might be tempted to pivot too far in the opposite direction, stressing liberal values at the expense of core American interests.

The top U.S. priority in Asia is limiting Beijing’s ability to control independent states like Burma, which is strategically situated in the Indo-Pacific. China is holding back from condemning the coup, likely in hopes of making diplomatic inroads with a military government.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/alexei-navalnys-cause-11612309007?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

We would have liked to have been in the room when Vladimir Putin confronted whoever came up with the idea to poison Alexei Navalny last year. The opposition politician nearly died, but the assassination attempt by Russian spooks has made him an even more prominent threat to the Russian dictator’s rule.

The Kremlin had Mr. Navalny arrested upon his return to Russia in January after several months of treatment in Germany, and on Tuesday a Russian court sentenced him to three-and-a-half years in prison (reduced by one year for time served). The charges of violating his parole from a previous conviction are a farce. This is a political arrest and sentence.

One lesson is that Mr. Putin and his gang must feel threatened. Protests in support of Mr. Navalny have been growing in major Russian cities. Mr. Putin has survived protests before, notably in 2012, but his popularity has sagged amid an economy weakened by lower oil prices and Western sanctions.

“[Putin’s] only method is killing people,” Mr. Navalny said in court. “For as much as he pretends to be a great geopolitician, he’ll go down in history as a poisoner.”

https://markdurie.com/a-new-law-to-contain-islamic-radicalism-threatens-french-protestants/

Six years ago, when I was serving as the pastor of an Anglican church, the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission wrote to the parish requesting that it implement measures to stop our church from funding terrorists.

Warning a quiet suburban Anglican parish against funding terrorism seems more than faintly ridiculous, but for some types of charities it could be entirely reasonable. For example, during the 1990’s the Islamic Council of Victoria was administering a “mujihadeen” account, to raise funds for jihad in Afghanistan, although representatives of the Council later stated that the ICV never funded any jihadis who were ‘extremist’.

The ICV’s mujahideen campaign had a religious basis in Islam. One of the obligatory five pillars of the faith is to make financial contributions, known as zakat. According to the Qur’an, these ‘alms’ can be used for various purposes, not all of which would meet the conventional Christian understanding of ‘charity’. One of the permitted uses is to fund jihadis. The Qur’an calls this ‘alms … in the path of Allah’. This phrase was explained by the renowned Muslim commentator Ibn Kathir as “‘in the path of Allah’ is exclusive for the benefit of fighters in jihad.”

The Islamic sharia presents many unique and specific regulative challenges for secular governments. In addressing these challenges the authorities are understandably loath to discriminate between religions, so when they set out to impose legislative boundaries around Islamic radicalism, there is a risk that the freedoms of other religions will be damaged.  Freedoms and privileges currently enjoyed by Christian charities could be wound back, as collateral damage of a scattergun response to Islamic radicalism.

https://asiatimes.com/author/david-p-goldman/

Persians have good reason to worry. In the Persian home provinces, total fertility rates last year fell to close to 1 (only one child per female). 

Iran will decide sometime in the next few months whether it will risk war in the hope of becoming the dominant regional power, or whether it will accept national decline in the hope of a modest degree of prosperity.  It is running out of people slowly, but it is running out of Persians at an alarming rate: The fertility rate in ethnically Persian provinces including Tehran is barely above 1 child per female, a formula for demographic implosion within a single generation. I have warned since 2006 in this publication (and in a 2011 book) that Iran’s declinist mood makes it dangerous, but Iran now has to make an existential choice.

Iran will gauge carefully the likely response to its decision from Washington, Jerusalem as well as Beijing, weighing the costs and benefits of a war whose outcome almost certainly would be disastrous for the countries of the Persian Gulf. How damaging such a war would be to Israel depends on a set of unknowns, including the effectiveness of Israel’s three-tier layered missile defense system, the number and accuracy of Iran’s medium-range missiles, and the willingness of Hezbollah to deploy its 130,000 missiles in southern Lebanon under the threat of an annihilating Israeli retaliation.

The Persians are in the kind of panic about their future that impelled France and Germany toward war respectively in 1914 and 1939. I do not agree with much of Harvard Prof. Graham Allison’s “Thucydides Trap” thesis, which views the 5th-century B.C.E. Spartan-Athenian war as a template for the response of a declining established power to a challenger, but there is an unsettling parallel between ancient Sparta and modern Iran. Sparta already had entered irreversible demographic decline when it warred with Athens, and Iran’s leaders are so possessed by fear of population shrinkage that they arrest academic demographers for publishing the wrong data.

A use-it-or-lose-it mood may push Iran towards an early attempted breakout as a nuclear power. On Jan. 2 Iran announced that it would enrich uranium up to 20% at its underground Fordo nuclear plant “as soon as possible.” The Biden Administration’s determination to revive the Iran nuclear deal that Trump eschewed may persuade Tehran that the costs of a nuclear breakout would be manageable. Meanwhile prominent Israeli analysts warn that this would mean war.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17025/denmark-asylum-seekers

“Our goal is zero asylum seekers. We cannot promise zero asylum seekers, but we can establish the vision for a new asylum system, and then do what we can to implement it. We must be careful that not too many people come to our country, otherwise our social cohesion cannot exist. It is already being challenged.” — Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen.

“Unfortunately, I believe that the easing will result in an increase in the number of asylum seekers in Denmark once the Covid-19 crisis is over. We can only look at the Canary Islands, which is now being flooded with refugees. The question is whether we will experience a new migration crisis, similar to the one in 2015, when the corona crisis is over.” — Pia Kjærsgaard, MP, Danish People’s Party.

“The fight against Islamism is about the survival of the welfare state. Denmark must not adapt to Islam. Islam must adapt to Denmark.” — Danish Immigration Minister Mattias Tesfaye.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has announced that her government intends to significantly limit the number of people seeking asylum in Denmark. The aim, she said, is to preserve “social cohesion” in the country.

Frederiksen’s comments, which many have welcomed, and others have dismissed as empty promises, are the latest salvo in a long-running debate about multiculturalism and the role of Islam in Danish society.

Denmark, which has a population of 5.8 million, received approximately 40,000 asylum applications during the past five years, according to data compiled by Statista. Most of the applications received by Denmark, a predominately Lutheran country, were from migrants from Muslim countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

In recent years, Denmark has also permitted significant non-asylum immigration, especially from non-Western countries. Denmark is now home to sizeable immigrant communities from Syria (35,536); Turkey (33,111); Iraq (21,840); Iran (17,195); Pakistan (14,471); Afghanistan (13,864); Lebanon (12,990) and Somalia (11,282), according to Statista.