RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/a_womans_murder_reignites_visions_of_frances_antisemitism.html

Kobili Traore, 29, a Muslim immigrant to France, killed Sarah Halim, 65, his Jewish neighbor, while armed French police stood outside her door, listened to her anguished screams, and did not respond until she was thrown off her balcony to her death.

Sarah Halim was the mother of three, a physician, and a kindergarten teacher.  She had long feared Traore.  Her death was a minor item in the French media.

The French government is refusing to prosecute Traore for his crime because he was high on cannabis and deemed not responsible for his actions.

If Traore had run over someone while drinking, he most certainly would be held responsible, for France has some of the strictest drunk driving laws in Europe.  Drinking does not mitigate one’s responsibility for vehicular homicide.

Whether that would apply if the driver were Muslim and the victim were Jewish, however, now seems a fair question.  Since 2003, twelve Jews have been killed in France for being Jews.  Their assailants were Muslims.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15234/turkey-fake-secularism

“Everyone is equal before the law regardless of his language, race, sex, color, political opinion, philosophy, religious belief, sect…” — Turkish Constitution, Article 10.

Why was the teacher suspended? Simple — even though Turkish officials cannot officially say what got unmasked as an open secret. The Conscious Teachers Association stated: “It is unacceptable that a teacher of religious culture in a country where 90% of the people are Muslim is not Muslim herself”.

If a Muslim Turkish teacher were suspended in Christian-majority Germany because he is Muslim, they would turn the world upside down. They would rush to the European Court of Human Rights decrying religious discrimination. But in Turkey, religious discrimination against non-Muslims is fine because Turkey is 90% Muslim.

A century ago, Christians made up 20% of Turkey’s population. Today they are at just 0.2%. But the Turkish mindset is still fearful of a handful of fellow citizens belonging to a different religion.

In theory, Turkey has a secular regime. Its constitution dictates the state and its institutions to be at equal distance to every faith, including no faith. In theory, discrimination based on religious belief is a criminal offense. Turkey’s Islamist strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said he is at equal distance to every faith, and that he is against “religious nationalism”, and he told the media at the White House on November 13 that Turkey would restore damaged churches in Syria.

In reality, however, Erdoğan and his Islamist governance stand as an excellent example to illustrate how political Islam cannot be secular.

The 2019 annual report by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) concluded that the Turkish government continues to discriminate against the minority Alevi community, and interfere in the affairs of what remains of the country’s historic Armenian and Greek Orthodox populations.

https://wp.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/

I attach four articles below (three from today, one from yesterday) on Iran, Iraq, Libya and China. There are extracts first for those who don’t have time to read them in full.

In the first piece, the New York Times finally reports that up to “450 people, and possibly more, were killed in four days of intense violence after the gasoline price increase was announced on Nov. 15, with at least 2,000 wounded and 7,000 detained.”

I attach this piece not because it is news to readers of this Middle East dispatch list, but to note that the New York Times is finally reporting that “Iran is experiencing its deadliest political unrest since the Islamic Revolution 40 years ago.”

The BBC has also finally begun to report that it is Iran, not Iraq, that has been coordinating the shooting dead of hundreds of pro-democracy protestors in neighboring Iraq these past weeks.

The failure of these two influential news organizations to report news in the Middle East accurately is part of a long-standing pattern of downplaying or appeasing the crimes of the Islamic regime.

In fact the New York Times, late as ever, is behind with the figures. At least 600 have been shot dead in Iran according to reliable reports.

Meanwhile (as not reported in the NY Times) the head of the feared Iranian Revolutionary Guards, General Qasem Soleimani, who controls large parts of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon on behalf of the Iranian regime, and also financed and directed last month’s Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket attacks on Israel, is ready to pick a new puppet prime minister for Iraq:

http://www.shafaaq.com/en/iraq-news/sheikh-ali-controllers-in-iraq-submitted-three-candidates-to-soleimani-waiting-for-his-approval/

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/iranian-koran-scholar-apply-koran-533-protesters-andrew-bostom/

Abolfazl Bahrampour, is a prominent Iranian Koran scholar, and author of the widely respected “One Volume Commentary on the Koran,” (in Farsi, Qom, 2007). Interviewed on Iran’s state run television network during its daily “Eastern Sun” program, Tuesday, November 26, 2019, Bahrampour condemned those protesting Iran’s oppressive theocratic regime, en masse, as “Moharabeh”—enemies of Allah, who sew “corruption” of an Islamic societal order. Moharabeh is a standard allegation leveled against Iranian protesters, who are then routinely sentenced to death. 

Bahrampour’s fulmination advocated (video) the protesters’ appropriate Koranic punishment—per Koran 5:33.

They should be tortured to death (i.e., crucified), not just simply killed. It is the exact meaning of the verse (Koran 5:33), Our Allamah (Muslim religious scholars and authorities) are good interpreters of the Koran…if they’ve (the protesters) been dealt with in such ways, they wouldn’t dare to protest again…And they should be punished and executed publicly and where the crime was actually committed…their hands a feet should be cut off on oppsote sides in the worst way possible…

Here is the verbatim translation of Koran 5:33:

“Indeed, the penalty for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] corruption is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land. That is for them a disgrace in this world; and for them in the Hereafter is a great punishment.”

Radio Farda reported that even an Iranian regime cleric, Ayatollah Kazem Qazizade, allegedly dissented from Bahrampour’s draconian, if Sharia-sanctioned punishment.

Notwithstanding Ayatollah Qazizade’s contention, Koran expert Bahrampour’s understanding of Koran 5:33, and its potential application to the recently arrested protesters, is entirely consistent with that of the most authoritative modern Shiite Koranic commentator, Allameh Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Tabatabai (d. 1981), and his gloss on this verse.

https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/politics-current-affairs/2019/12/the-moderates-who-turn-a-blind-eye-to-jeremy-corbyns-anti-semitism/

Last week, Richard Evans, the eminent historian of Nazi Germany whose testimony was a deciding factor in the trial of the Holocaust denier David Irving, announced on Twitter that he would be voting for Labor in the UK’s upcoming election. Evans offered the caveat that “the failure to deal with anti-Semitism in the party makes me very angry”—but wasn’t enough to change his vote. Since then, spurred in part by an open letter from the historian Anthony Julius, Evans has evidently changed his mind. But, writes Stephen Daisley, his original position is all too typical of many of Labor’s moderate supporters:

[T]he Corbyn moment, counterintuitively, is not the story of far-left anti-Semitism but of liberal collaboration, of those who know in their gut this is wrong but deploy a series of strategies to avoid, minimize, invert, excuse, and deny what is happening. Extremists have always believed these things, but liberals have made it acceptable to air them within the mainstream.

There is a nexus of complicity among anti-Semites, their defenders and amplifiers, and those who fail to resist [what Ruth Wisse has termed] “the organization of politics against the Jews.” It includes those who, though awake to the evils of anti-Semitism, will still vote, campaign, and stand for an institutionally anti-Semitic party. Some rationalize this as acting for the greater good—securing more money for the vulnerable or an end to cruel cuts in benefits. In doing so, they define the good as something greater than mere comfort and security for Jews and juxtapose, in telling ways, Jews’ welfare and that of the poor.

This nexus rests on two instincts: one fundamental to Labor politics and the other an import from progressive identity theory. The Labor impulse is home to a burning certainty that politics is a struggle between good and evil in which one side is the Elect and the other demonic. This is why Labor supporters have vilified Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis’s [wholly unprecedented decision to write an article condemning Labor]. Can’t he see Labor is on the side of the angels and the Tories are foot soldiers of wickedness? If not, it must be because he, too, is from the ranks of the reprobates.

The other conviction, born of the Jew-exclusionary theories of racism that took hold in the universities in the 1980s and on the broader left more recently, is that anti-Semitism is a lesser form of racism because Jews are beneficiaries of “white privilege.” . . . [I]ntersectionality only intersects with Jews on its own terms.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15201/islamic-state-europe

“I think that the practice of automatic, early release where you cut a sentence in half and let really serious, violent offenders out early simply isn’t working, and you’ve some very good evidence of how that isn’t working, I am afraid, with this case.” — UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson November 30, 2019, after the ISIS attack on London Bridge a day earlier.

At least 1,200 Islamic State fighters, including many from Western countries, are being held in Turkish prisons. Another 287 jihadis have been captured by Turkish forces since the start of an offensive that began on October 9 against the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northeastern Syria.

Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu announced that Turkey would begin repatriating captured Islamic State fighters back to their countries of origin — even if their citizenship had been revoked.

“We could soon be facing a second wave of other Islamic State linked or radicalized individuals that you might call Isis 2.0.” — Jürgen Stock, Secretary General, Interpol.

“From my point of view, it is better to know that these people are prosecuted in France rather than leaving them in the wilderness. How can we protect ourselves if we do not have them in custody? The best method is to judge and control them.” — David De Pas, French anti-terrorism judge.

The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the November 29 jihadi attack at London Bridge, where a Pakistani Islamist stabbed two people to death and injured three others. The suspect, 28-year-old Usman Khan, a convicted terrorist, was subsequently shot dead by police.

Khan, from Stoke-on-Trent, was convicted in February 2012 of plotting — on behalf of al-Qaeda — jihadi attacks against the London Stock Exchange and pubs in Stoke, in addition to setting up a jihadi training camp in Pakistan. He was sentenced to an “indeterminate sentence,” meaning that he could have been kept in prison beyond his original minimum term of eight years due to the danger he posed to national security.

In April 2013, however, the Court of Appeal revised that sentence with a fixed term of eight years. Khan, a student of the Islamist extremist Anjem Choudary, who co-founded the now banned Al-Muhajiroun group, was released from prison in December 2018, before the end of his sentence, after agreeing to wear an electronic tag.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15239/take-nato-seriously

The second major challenge the NATO summit will face is Turkey. Following the 2016 coup attempt, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan purged his army. As a result, many senior Turkish officers assigned to NATO asked for asylum in Belgium.

Turkey has the second-largest army in NATO, but it is no longer a fully democratic country, nor it is a reliable ally. As long as Erdogan’s Islamist AKP party dominates Turkish politics, the country will remain a significant problem for the Alliance.

It will be illuminating to see what the London Summit brings.

In May 2017, the new $1.23 billion NATO headquarters was inaugurated in Brussels, in the presence of US President Donald Trump. With its state-of-the-art facilities, it was supposed to be “an emblem of a strong, adaptable Alliance… a 21st century headquarters for a 21st century Alliance”, according to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

In November 2019, in an explosive interview with The Economist, French President Emmanuel Macron declared NATO to be “brain dead”, thereby triggering a flood of angry reactions.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-least-20-killed-in-mexico-gunbattle-near-texas-border-11575252949

MEXICO CITY—Dozens of cartel gunmen engaged in a two-day battle with Mexican security forces that left at least 20 people dead in a small town across the border from Texas, officials said Sunday.

The clash is the latest incident in a surge of violence hitting Mexico, exacerbating doubts about the ability of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to control organized crime groups.

Last week, President Trump said he planned to declare Mexico’s cartels foreign terrorist organizations. In November, gunmen ambushed and killed three mothers and six of their children, all U.S. citizens living in a fundamentalist Mormon community in northern Mexico. Mexico’s attorney general’s office said Sunday it had detained various suspects in the killings.

Mexican officials criticized Mr. Trump’s proposal as opening the door to U.S. interference in its domestic affairs. U.S. Attorney General William Barr is expected to meet with Mexico’s Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard to discuss security issues later this week.

On Saturday, a caravan of gunmen in trucks, many marked with the initials of the Northeast Cartel, drove into the small town of Villa Unión, about 44 miles from the city of Eagle Pass, Texas, according to officials. The gunmen shot up municipal offices and other buildings.