RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14125/sri-lanka-easter-attacks

“We are a peace-loving community in this small city, we had never hurt anyone, but we don’t know from where this amount of hate is coming. This city has become a grave with blood and bodies lying around…. Since the past three years, we don’t know why, but we see an extremist’s mindset developing among the Muslims. I know many good Muslims, but there are also a lot who hate us, and they have never been so before. It is in these three years that we see a difference.” — A Christian man who survived the bombing of St. Sebastian’s Church in Sri Lanka.

In 2017, in Egypt, Islamic terrorists bombed two Coptic Christian churches during Palm Sunday mass, which inaugurates Easter week, murdering 50 people and wounding 120. On Easter Sunday 2016 in Pakistan, an Islamic suicide bomber detonated near the children’s rides of a public park where Christians were known to be congregated and celebrating; over 70 people — mostly women and children — were murdered and nearly 400 wounded. On Easter Sunday 2012 in Nigeria, Islamic terrorists bombed a church, murdering at least 50 worshippers.

The Easter Sunday terror attack in Sri Lanka — which in its death toll eclipses all previous Muslim attacks on Christians during Easter — is a reminder that if the Islamic State is on the retreat in the Middle East, the hate-filled ideology to which it and like-minded Muslims adhere continues to spread, finding new recruits and new victims around the globe.

On Easter Sunday, April 21, Islamic terrorists launched a bombing campaign on Christians in Sri Lanka; the current death toll is 359, with hundreds more people wounded.

Eight separate explosions took place, at least two of which were suicide bombings: three targeted churches celebrating Easter Sunday Mass; four targeted hotels frequented by Western tourists in connection with Easter holiday; and one blast in a house, which killed three police officers during a security operation.

https://quillette.com/2019/04/22/denmarks-blaspheming-mother/

“This is a nightmare. We’re in shock,” Jaleh Tavakoli says. Last month, the 36-year-old Iranian-Danish critic of Islam received notification from Danish social services that she is no longer fit to care for the 8-year-old child she’s fostered since birth. Why? Tavakoli, a columnist and author, says it is because of her politically incorrect views on Islam. Social services maintains it is looking out for the best interest of a potentially vulnerable child. Tavakoli lives under security precautions, has been threatened on the streets of Copenhagen, and even survived a jihadist attack in 2015. As she prepares for the most difficult challenge of her life, Danish society must contend with the unprecedented challenge of where to draw the line when radical Islam intersects with free speech and children’s rights.

Denmark, a kingdom of just 5.7 million people, consistently ranks among the top countries in the world in quality-of-life indexes. The small Nordic state is envied for its strong universal healthcare system, high levels of trust and extremely generous welfare benefits. In 2018, it ranked third in the world for having the happiest citizens according to the UN World Happiness Report (it has topped the list three times since the report began in 2012).

Denmark has also settled hundreds of thousands of immigrants, primarily from the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Today, around 10 percent of its population are immigrants—a rapid demographic change that only started in the last decades. And yet, beneath the façade of happiness surveys and the welfare state, Denmark has been unable to escape the social and political tensions now afflicting the body politic of nearly every country on the continent. Immigration, Islamism and integration are salient issues even in the happiest place on earth.

https://quadrant.org.au/

For want, as yet, of Waleed Aly laying out with his customary attention to nuance how Australians, at least those of the ABC-watching and Age-reading demographic, must regard the recent “irritations” in Sri Lanka, readers might care to consult the writings of another and somewhat less prominent Muslim thinker, young Jake Bilardi.

The Melbourne teenager, as some might recall, departed from Iraq for an imagined Paradise after failing to take any enemies of Allah with him when he detonated himself and an explosive-laden truck. That was in 2015 and, as is Facebook’s custom, his posts were taken down straight away.

Quadrant Online managed to grab and copy those disturbing screeds before they vanished forever,all of them preserved here. To read them again today, with 300-plus funerals underway in Colombo and other of the island’s Christian parishes, is to gain an insight into why, whenever and whatever Waleed Aly might eventually have to contribute, the problem is and always will be Islam, most particularly its salafist stream.

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/440348-china-russia-iran-rise-in-latin-america-as-us-retreats

In Latin America, a U.S. retreat that began under President Barack Obama has accelerated under President Donald Trump, creating a vacuum that China, Russia, and Iran are moving to fill.

The most fruitful opportunity for those U.S. adversaries lies in the socialism-ravaged state of Venezuela, where each of them is jockeying for position, but opportunities abound elsewhere as well.

It’s just one more example – though a particularly noteworthy one, coming in America’s own backyard – of how the U.S. withdrawal from its post-war global leadership is creating opportunities for authoritarian powers with anti-American designs to expand their influence far and wide.

“The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over,” Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, declared in late 2013, renouncing a doctrine of 190 years through which the United States made clear that it would not tolerate interference by outside powers in the Western Hemisphere.

Kerry’s words reflected Obama’s refusal to address outside inference in Latin America, by (1) Iran, as it nourished economic and military ties to the anti-American “Bolivarian alliance” of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua and (2) Hezbollah, Iran’s key terrorist client, as it conducted activities from its regional headquarters at the crossroads of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil.

It was a far cry from the spirit of President Kennedy’s inaugural address in which, after promoting his Alliance for Progress for the region, he renewed the Monroe Doctrine with this clarion call: “[L]et every other power know that this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/un_human_rights_council_member_beheads_37.html

While Vermont’s independent senator and Democratic presidential wannabe Bernie Sanders supports allowing all jailed individuals the right to vote, including the terrorist Boston Marathon bomber, longtime U.N. Human Rights Council member Saudi Arabia has a different opinion.  The Saudis behead those they deem terrorists.  In public.  In mass executions.  And pin the heads to poles.

Yesterday, they did it again, whacking off the heads of 37 of their citizens, mostly from a minority Islamic branch, for alleged terrorism, an act they justified with Islamic law.  Saudi Arabia on Tuesday beheaded 37 Saudi citizens, most of them minority Shiites, in a mass execution across the country for alleged terrorism-related crimes.  It also publicly pinned the executed body and severed head of a convicted Sunni extremist to a pole as a warning to others. …

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sri-lanka-bombings-linked-to-new-zealand-mosque-shootings-government-says-11556009023

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka—Islamic State claimed responsibility for the Easter bombings that killed more than 300 people in Sri Lanka, and posted a video that it said showed the suicide bombers, dressed in black robes, declaring their loyalty to the group.

“The executors of the attack that targeted citizens of coalition states and Christians in Sri Lanka two days ago were Islamic State fighters,” Islamic State said, according to SITE, a security consulting firm that tracks militant groups.

Hours earlier, Sri Lanka’s defense minister said the government had information indicating the plotters were reacting to last month’s terrorist attack in New Zealand, but the prime minister later Tuesday made clear no direct link had been established.

“It’s possible it could have been because of Christchurch,” said Sri Lanka Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. “We don’t know.”

The prime minister said there could be additional attackers still at large, some armed with explosives.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/isis-claims-responsibility-sri-lanka-easter-bombings-killed/story?id=

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for a wave of coordinated bombings at churches and high-end hotels across Sri Lanka.

The terrorist organization offered no evidence to support that assertion, which was initially announced in a statement in Arabic published by its Amaq news agency on Tuesday, saying the attackers were “among the fighters of the Islamic State,” according to a translation by SITE Intelligence Group, a company that tracks extremist groups.

ISIS later issued a longer, formal statement identifying the seven suicide bombers who detonated explosive-laden vests at the churches and hotels and a housing complex on Sunday.