RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://bit.ly/2I6DRyp

Western policy makers and public opinion molders tend to oversimplify Middle East reality and subordinate the 1,400 year old unpredictable, violent and shifty intra-Arab and intra-Muslim non-Western environment to their own Western state-of-mind and well-intentioned wishful-thinking.

Middle East reality – as demonstrated, systematically, by the Arab walk – has frustrated Western misperceptions of the “Middle East conflict,” which has never been the Arab-Israeli conflict. Furthermore, and contrary to

Western conventional wisdom, Middle East reality has underlined the Palestinian issue as a non-core-cause of Middle East turbulence, not a crown jewel of Arab policy making, nor the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Moreover, Western peace initiatives tend to downplay the fact that Middle East reality has yet to experience long-term intra-Arab or intra-Muslim domestic and regional peaceful coexistence.

While Western observers tend to refer to the Arab-Israeli conflict as “the Middle East conflict,” in reality, the Middle East has been dominated by a multitude of intra-Arab and intra-Muslim conflicts, totally unrelated to Israel, neither directly nor indirectly.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/paris-weeps-as-notre-dame-burns/

April 15th, President Macron was scheduled to address the nation at 8 PM, to present a sort of executive summary of government policy, revised but not diverted by five months of weekly Gilet Jaune actions. I switched on the television 10 minutes before the hour, expecting to hear the usual quibbling: The Gilets Jaunes expect nothing and won’t be satisfied until the president resigns. What a surprise. Commentators, specialists, journalists and the man in the street don’t think any real problem will be really solved. That’s a safe bet. They will all, who knows why, entertain the confusion between the Gilets Jaunes, boiled down to some thirty thousand seditionists, and French voters that may or may not have joined in the great national debate. President Macron does not have to satisfy the Gilets Jaunes. We live in a democracy, not a tyranny of turbulent minorities.

I turn on the television.It’s Notre Dame in flames.

You don’t have to be Catholic, Christian, or a lover of cathedral architecture. You don’t have to be Parisian, French, or a citizen of the western world. Raging flames devouring Notre Dame can bring tears to your eyes. It is universally heartbreaking.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14064/germany-government-israel-iran

Supporting one-sided resolutions against Israel is not Germany’s only unfriendly act against the Jewish state. Chancellor Angela Merkel has put pressure on other European Union states so that they do not transfer their embassies to Israel’s capital. Stopping the murder of Israelis is also not on the German government’s agenda.

Last year the Palestinian Authority (PA) allocated $330 million to pay terrorists, and Germany paid $100 million to the PA. So it is fair to say that Germany pays the PA to reward the murder of Jews.

While Chancellor Angela Merkel talks about “Germany’s special historical responsibility for Israel’s security”, her government channels German taxpayer money to murderers of Jews, and President Steinmeier sends congratulatory telegrams to those who plan the annihilation of the Jewish state.

“We must no longer let Israel down at the UN. It is madness that we are constantly on the side of countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran or Yemen against Israel” — Frank Müller-Rosentritt, member of the German parliament’s committee on foreign relations for the opposition Free Democratic Party (FDP).

German Chancellor Angela Merkel likes to think of herself as a friend of Israel. In a speech she gave in the Knesset in Jerusalem in Mach 2008, she said:

“Here of all places I want to explicitly stress that every German government and every German chancellor before me has shouldered Germany’s special historical responsibility for Israel’s security. This historical responsibility is part of my country’s raison d’être. For me as German chancellor, therefore, Israel’s security will never be open to negotiation. And that being the case, we must do more than pay lip-service to this commitment …”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273504/holy-smoke-bruce-bawer

One thing that jumped out at me, as I watched Notre Dame burn in real time on BBC and Sky News, was the statement of some reporter or commentator or architectural expert that the cathedral could and would be rebuilt, although perhaps the new structure would be “more modern” than the old one. Later that evening, in his speech to the nation, President Macron vowed: “We will make the Cathedral of Notre Dame even more beautiful.”

More modern? More beautiful? My alarm bells went off, and they weren’t fire alarms.

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In November, Sir Roger Scruton was named to a government commission in Britain that, after at least a half century of ugly architecture, is tasked with ensuring that new public housing will be beautiful. Throughout his long and varied career, Sir Roger has had a lot to say about beauty. He has spoken wisely about the connection among the good, the true, and the beautiful, and has strongly opposed those who place beauty on a lower level of importance than goodness and truth. He is one of a relatively small and brave band of cultural critics who have linked the contemporary decline of beauty as a criterion, not just in architecture but also in art, music, and literature, and the accompanying ascent of what can only be called a cult of ugliness, to a broader rise in social and cultural decadence throughout the Western world. Emblematic of that cult of ugliness are such buildings as La Défense and the Pompidou Center. As one after another of these hideous creations went up in recent decades, blighting the skyline of the City of Light, the eight-centuries-old Cathedral of Notre Dame, in the very heart of the French capital, stood as an enduring rebuke to them and everything they represented.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/british-conservative-and-labour-parties-are-both-unfit-to-govern/

A great question looms over British politics. Should we smash the major parties? By “major parties” I obviously mean the Conservative and Labour parties. And when I say “we” I mean, of course, the British voting public. Since the government delayed Brexit once again this month, it seems that Britons will soon be asked to vote in this year’s European Parliament election. That will be three years after we voted to leave the European Union. With the Conservative government showing a monumental incompetence in matters great and small it looks as though we might also face a general election before this parliament comes to its purported end in 2022. Suddenly it looks as though the two-party system which was meant to be uncrackable could finally crack.

A YouGov poll carried out last week showed Labour coming top of the forthcoming EU elections (24 percent) and the Conservatives down 8 percent to only 16 percent. Only just behind them are Nigel Farage’s new Brexit party (15 percent) and Nigel Farage’s old Brexit party, UKIP (14 percent). So in the EU Parliament elections the Conservatives could well be beaten by a party that didn’t exist until last week. Some Conservatives appear to think, “Well that’s just the European elections: the public were always badly behaved during those.” Except that the British public’s ill-discipline no longer appears to be limiting itself to European elections. A YouGov poll on voting intentions in a general (domestic) election shows the Conservatives four points behind Labour at just 28 percent. For such an election the Brexit party and UKIP poll 8 percent and 6 percent respectively. And so we see the possibility here not just of a Labour government but of the Conservative party being destroyed.

Like a lot of Conservative voters, I no longer abhor the prospect. Not because we relish a Corbyn government — very far from it. A Corbyn government would put Britain on a road to national decline that would make the 1970s look like our heydays. But the Corbyn Labour party has its own problems. It is fighting against its own parliamentary party and in the country as a whole there is now a clear divide between the pro-EU Labour party that dominates in metropolitan areas like Islington (Corbyn’s own constituency) and the vast swathes of the north of England who voted to leave the European Union and are the Labour party’s only remaining base.

https://aclj.org/persecuted-church/telling-the-stories-of-persecuted-christians-in-iraq-egypt-iran-bolivia-and-kazakhstan-at-the-un

Recently, through our international affiliate, the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), we submitted reports detailing religious persecution in Iraq, Egypt, Iran, Bolivia, and Kazakhstan as part of the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) Universal Periodic Review (UPR). As we have told you previously, the UPR is an important function of the HRC and its purpose is to remind U.N. Member States “of their responsibility to fully respect and implement all human rights and fundamental freedoms” through assessing the status of human rights in a particular Member State.

At each session, the UPR working group assesses the human rights of select Member States. Prior to these assessments, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) – such as our affiliate the ECLJ – have the ability to file written reports on the particular Member States up for review. In our reports, we detail the persecution Christians face in any offending Member States, which will hopefully lead to meaningful change to allow for greater protection of religious freedom around the world.

We have long told you about the persecution and struggles that Christians and other religious minorities face in Iraq as a result of the genocide perpetrated by ISIS. In our report on Iraq, we detailed how these atrocities have resulted in a massive humanitarian crisis, and that if Christians and other religious minorities are to have a future in Iraq action must be taken now to provide them with the aid and assistance they so desperately need to rebuild their lives.

https://aclj.org/jihad/jihad-strikes-notre-dame

It’s one of Europe’s most classic locations – and earlier today, it became the latest target of jihadist terror.Mere days after the latest coordinated terrorist attacks in London and Manchester that left dozens killed and even more injured, a jihadist struck again outside the Notre Dame Cathedral in a tourist-filled part of Paris.FoxNews.com has more details:A man with a hammer cried “This is for Syria” before bashing a police officer in the head outside Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris Tuesday, a top official revealed, as a terror investigation was under way.The hammer-wielding man also had two kitchen knives and “other unsophisticated weapons” with him before charging toward officers patrolling the esplanade in front of the cathedral, French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said. The wounded officer fired at the unnamed suspect twice, injuring the attacker who was later hospitalized, French police confirmed to Fox News. The specific conditions of both men were unclear. …Paris has been under high security after a string of Islamic extremist attacks in recent years. In February, a man attacked soldiers outside a shopping mall near the Louvre. He was heard yelling “Allahu Akbar” before soldiers shot and injured him. Another attacker opened fire on a police van on Paris’ Champs Elysees in April, killing one and seriously wounding two others. Police shot and killed the attacker in that situation. 

https://quadrant.org

It was one purpose of those who dotted Europe with soaring, vaulted spaces to inspire awe and banish with gospel and creed the lingering animism of the peasantry, the belief in the omens and portents of earlier pagan creeds.

Today those monuments to vanished faith draw little but the tour-bus reverence of tourists and their Nikons, plus advocates of a new barbarism. Six years ago, historian and Marine Le Pen supporter Dominique Venner splattered the altar with his brains in a bizarre protest against France’s legalisation of same-sex marriage. In 2017 it was an angry Muslim crying ‘Alahu Akbar’ and ‘this is for Syria’ who bludgeoned the cathedral’s security guards with a hammer before being felled by a bullet.

Now comes fire and the certain knowledge that while the immediately promised rebuilding might faithfully replicate all that was and has now been lost, the end result will be but a facsimile of what is today ash and rubble — a building to be revived for the tourist magnet it became, not for what once inspired it.