RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2019/03/16/after-christchurch

The terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand—the largest terror event in Australasian history—carried out against a migrant community in a place of worship has left us all in shock. The Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Arden, has described this attack as an attack on all New Zealanders.

Part of the shock comes from the feeling that these types of events don’t happen here. Not in Australia, not in New Zealand. We are small, quiet countries, where people feel safe. Random violence is not a feature of everyday life, let alone on this scale.

People deal with shock and grief in different ways. Some people mourn. Others get angry. Many of the early reactions to the event have expressed legitimate anger about the lack of action taken over violent, right-wing extremism. Observers have been warning about the toxicity of online echo-chambers and their potential to foment hatred and motivate people to commit violence for some time now.

Much of the anger is directed at big tech companies who are seen as making a profit via the “rabbit hole” algorithm, which prompts people to consume more extreme content with each click. It is noteworthy that the Christchurch attack was live-streamed on Facebook, reposted on YouTube and discussed on Reddit before any of these platforms had a chance to react. The incentive structure which grants a psychopath instantaneous worldwide fame is powerful and real. And this will not be the last time that it is exploited.

https://www.city-journal.org/new-zealand-massacre

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik killed eight adults at a government office complex in Oslo with a truck bomb and then gunned down 69 people, mostly members of the youth division of the Norwegian Labor Party, at a summer camp on the nearby island of Utøya. Before setting out on his murder spree, Breivik posted online a “manifesto”—consisting largely of cut-and-pasted material from other sources—in which he accused the Labor Party of abetting the West’s cultural suicide by encouraging mass Muslim immigration.

It hardly needs to be said that Breivik’s actions were deplorable, monstrous, sheer evil. Yet they did not suddenly negate the reality of the previous decade—major jihadist attacks on New York and Washington, Bali, Madrid, Beslan, London, Mumbai; growing Muslim enclaves in Western cities, whose residents, to an alarming extent, maintained the primitive practices (forced marriage, honor killing, female genital mutilation) associated with their faith, despised the core values of their host cultures, refused to assimilate into them but did not hesitate to exploit their welfare systems, and raised sons who commit violent crimes against non-Muslims, including gay-bashing, the tormenting of Jews, and the mass rape of children. In one Western country after another, surveys of Muslims showed that a terrifying proportion of them wanted to see the countries in which they had settled—many of them as refugees from Islamic tyranny—subjected to sharia law, under which apostasy from Islam, homosexuality, adultery, and many other offenses against totalitarian Koranic strictures would be punishable by death.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13907/three-crises

The last century witnessed a plethora of ideology-based regimes: The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the People’s Republic of China, the United Arab Republic and the Buddhist Socialist State of Myanmar among others. The pretension behind all those labels was that rather than being the art of solving the people’s problems, politics was a means of advancing the real or imagined goals of an ideology.

Another thing the three crisis-struck regimes (Iran, Algeria, Venezuela) have in common is that they are all oil-and-gas states, which means that because they don’t depend on income from taxation, they can regard their people as expensive and bothersome extras.

In all three countries, the traditional military holds the balance of power between the ruling elite of which their own top brass is part and the mass of the rebellious citizenry.

Three crises in three continents: Iran in Asia, Algeria in Africa and Venezuela in Latin America. Do they have anything in common?

The obvious thing they have in common is that all three crises are rooted in a sharp disconnect between a discontented but combative people thirsty for change and a tired but arrogant ruling elite hell-bent on hanging onto power.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13908/ireland-anti-israel

Ireland, as a European Union member state, is subject to the EU’s commercial rules. EU trade rules may prohibit Ireland’s unilateral action as an EU treaty requires common commercial policy for all EU member states. The proposed law “could force US companies with Irish subsidiaries to choose between violating the Irish law or violating US Export Administration Regulations.” — Orde Kittrie, Professor of Law, Arizona State University.

Worst, there is no evidence that Ireland’s “pro-Palestinian” activities are in any way helping Palestinians, who continue to be arrested, tortured and deprived of any viable future by their own corrupt leaders. Most European activities seem actually focused on trying to destroy Israel.

What is most notable, of course, is that there is no commensurate hostility toward any other country. Ireland’s rancid vote also needs to be contrasted to its virtual silence regarding countries that are daily committing hair-raising crimes against humanity, such as Iran, China, Turkey, Syria, North Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Mauritania, Cuba, Venezuela or Sudan, for instance. Why only Israel? What is now on display is simply a hypocritical condemnation by Ireland of the only democracy in in the Middle East with equal rights for all its citizens.

What is essential is that this double standard — one set of rules for Israel and a whole other set of rules for countries actually committing atrocities — must stop.

Ireland’s legislative lower house (Dáil) on January 29 approved a bill that would make it a crime for Irish citizens to import or sell any product produced by Israelis in areas located beyond the 1949 armistice lines, most of which, such as Jerusalem, were actually liberated by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War from their illegal occupation by Jordan in 1948-49, after Israel was attacked by five Arab armies who were literally hoping to crush it the day of its birth. In 1967, Egypt, presumably hoping to finish the job it had started in 1948, created a casus belli (cause for war under international law) by announcing a blockade of Israel’s access to the Red Sea via the Straits of Tiran.

Ireland’s legislative lower house (Dáil) on January 29 approved a bill that would make it a crime for Irish citizens to import or sell any product produced by Israelis in areas located beyond the 1949 armistice lines, most of which, such as Jerusalem, were actually liberated by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War from their illegal occupation by Jordan in 1948-49, after Israel was attacked by five Arab armies who were literally hoping to crush it the day of its birth. In 1967, Egypt, presumably hoping to finish the job it had started in 1948, created a casus belli (cause for war under international law) by announcing a blockade of Israel’s access to the Red Sea via the Straits of Tiran.

https://twitter.com/andrewbostom/status/1106913024517070849
https://courtnews.co.nz/2018/02/15/youth

A Christchurch teenager who converted to Islam planned to ram a car into a group of people and then stab them until the police killed him, the Christchurch District Court was told at his sentencing.The teen has now told a psychologist that when the violent incident began he “decided not to hurt anybody because he did not have the means to kill enough people”, Crown prosecutor Chris Lange told the court.“The reason no-one was hurt was that he did not have access to knives,” Mr Lange said. But there was significant premeditation, and hostility towards non-Muslims.The teen harboured thoughts for five months of killing multiple people, and expected to be killed by the police. He had written a goodbye note to his mother.

After his arrest, the youth told police he was angry and had “done it for Allah”.The court has adopted a rehabilitative approach to the teen’s sentencing, with Judge Stephen O’Driscoll releasing him on intensive supervision with a list of conditions and a warning that if he breaches the conditions or reoffends, he will likely be sent to prison.Among the conditions – which will apply for two years while the judge monitors his progress – is counselling by a member of the local Muslim community.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/15/from-brexit

Not long ago, to support Great Britain’s departure from the European Union remained the hoppy heady preserve of the corduroyed English fruitcake.

Only the niche, and utterly mental clung to such opinions. Those trifling oddities, blimpish and better suited to reliving colonial exploits in faraway lands, were not of polite society. To be a Euroskeptic invited the label of weirdo, or, if they liked you—“eccentric.”

That argument was settled. Britain, and indeed the world, owed and pinned its future not to outdated concepts such as nationhood, borders, or common culture­­—oddities, pined for by oddities. To be British was embarrassing, and old hat.

David Cameron, our ex-prime minister, an alleged conservative, pretended himself to share this turbulence of brain. That Euroskepticism. Until he won his leadership election. Then he called such people, “fruitcakes, loonies, and closet racists.”

Then he called for a European referendum. To settle the issue for generations. To smite, finally, those surely dwindling numbers of decaying old white men who still believed in that fatuous list of oddities they held so pathetically dear.

Of course, the weirdos won. And ever since, the Camerons of this world have worked tirelessly to overturn our decision.

Like Cameron, those who would overturn us only expressed their real opinions of us within the confines of their circle of tony friends at their tony parties, safe in distance of ear and eye, from the troglodytes whom cannot be taken seriously.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13893/iran-wipe-israel-off-map

As Iran’s theocratic establishment believes that the Supreme Leader is Allah’s representative on earth, whatever words or desires the Supreme Leader utters are considered Allah’s wishes, which must be brought to life by Allah’s true believers.

Iran has built, or is in the process of building, more than 10 military bases in Syria, some of which are near the Israeli border.

When will the international community begin to take the Iranian’s government clear verbal threats and physical aggression seriously? Or would the international community secretly like to see Israel destroyed, under Europe’s Orwellian inversion of words: “the peace process”?

Iran’s military activities and clear public threats to annihilate Israel continue to grow in frequency and intensity. These moves not only instill fear, as they are doubtless meant to do; they also threaten to disrupt the international community. With such dire promises of conflict, it would be expected that the international news media and politicians throughout the world would have something to say about this situation. Instead, Iran’s continued abusive behavior continues to be cozied up to at worst, or at best, ignored.

One of the core pillars and revolutionary ideals of the Islamic Republic is destroying the Jewish state. It is also one of the religious prophecies of the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and his successor, the current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that Israel will be eventually erased from the face of the earth. As Iran’s theocratic establishment believes that the Supreme Leader is Allah’s representative on earth, whatever words or desires the Supreme Leader utters are considered wishes, which must be brought to life by Allah’s true believers.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273159/netherlands-ex-muslims-get-threatened-every-single-robert-spencer

Three converts from Islam to Christianity who live in the Netherlands recently spoke about their experiences, and it’s clear that they’re not exactly finding diversity, in the form of mass Muslim migration into Europe, to be their strength.

An ex-Muslim from Kurdistan named Faraidoun Fouad recounted: “I converted in 1999. In 2002 God called me to reach out to my own people. Directly after my conversion to Christianity I received the first threats. People who I thought were my friends, became my enemies.”

Nor were his former friends all jihadis: “Even Muslims who are not very conservative told my wife that they would kill me.”

Fouad converted twenty years ago, but his Muslim ex-friends have never gotten used to the fact: “I receive threats every day. When I post something on Facebook, I often receive hateful reactions.”

Fouad’s experience was similar to that of another convert, a woman named Esther Mulder who fled Somalia in 1992. Though they had left the homeland, they brought its mores to the Netherlands; when Esther was 14, they told her she was about to be married off. What she wanted had nothing to do with it, so she ran away from home and lived in shelters. Finally she married a Dutchman and converted to Christianity.

The first time she entered a church, she was frightened: “I constantly looked around thinking: ‘What if one of my family members comes in or someone from Somalia?’”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13864/eu-media-literacy

The above initiatives, of course, exist in addition to all the other measures that the EU has put in place to “guide” Europeans onto the path of proper thinking… which the untransparent and unaccountable online tech giants — Facebook, Google, Twitter and Mozilla — signed in October 2018, and their 2019 “Code of Conduct on countering illegal online hate speech online.”

In the same vein as China’s “reeducation camps” or the former Soviet Union’s “rehabilitation centers” that abused psychiatry for political purposes, Marine Le Pen in September was ordered to undergo psychiatric tests for tweeting the pictures, ostensibly to establish whether she “is capable of understanding remarks and answering questions”.

It is probably safe to say that the first victims of the EU’s media literacy policies will be diversity of opinion and free speech.

The first European Media Literacy Week, an initiative of the European Union, will take place March 18-22 in various European cities. The week is a new initiative by the European Commission, putatively “to underline the societal importance of media literacy and promote media literacy initiatives and projects across the EU”. The European Commission explains its policy of strengthening ‘media literacy’ within the EU — which could have been a noble and useful initiative — the following way:

“With the rapid rise of digital technology and its increasing use in business, education and culture, it is important to ensure everyone can understand and engage with digital media.

“Media literacy is vital for economic growth and job creation. Digital technologies are a key driver of competitiveness and innovation in the media, information, and communication technology sectors.”