RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/12/islams-useful-idiots-cowards-and-quislings/

An Islamist ‘known to police’ rampaged through Bourke Street and left a good man dead. Yesterday in Strasbourg one of his co-religionists did likewise and took many more lives. These outrages are now so common they flicker for a moment in the headlines then vanish and are gone. What do our leaders do? Frisk old ladies at airports and say nary a word against Islam.

It used to be called the Silly Season, now it has turned more into the season of foreboding with the inevitable bloody uptick. The threat of terror attacks across the Western world is the gift from fundamentalist Islam, feckless politicians and a Left intent on diversity at any cost. Today’s atrocity is the terror attack in Strasbourg, France, where three people are confirmed shot dead and numerous injured at a Christmas market. The city is in lockdown and the police are hunting the gunman who was, predictably and unsurprisingly, known to them and on a terrorist watch list. Yet nothing was done until he acted.

All too many people have become so blasé (to use a French word) about these events that Islamist atrocities are the expected, if not fully accepted, normal. The media don’t even report many of the more “minor incidents” such as the stabbing of three women at a train station in the French city of Mulhouse only two days ago. The attacker in that case was captured and, fortunately, none of the victims died. The official story, as is so often the situation now, is that the attacker was suffering from a “mental disorder”. Is anyone even surprised by that explanation anymore?

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/christmas-market-gunman-yelled-allahu-akbar-before-opening-fire/

The gunman who killed two and critically wounded seven Tuesday evening at a Christmas market in Strasbourg, France was motivated by Islamic extremism, officials announced Wednesday.

Rémy Heitz, the Paris prosecutor who specializes in terrorism cases, said Wednesday that multiple witnesses heard the man shout “Allahu Akbar” — an Arabic phrase meaning “God is Great” — before opening fire. The attacker, who remains at large, has a criminal record and has served time in prison, according to officials.

“He had been incarcerated multiple times and was known to the prison administration for his radicalization and his proselytizing attitude,” Heitz said of the gunman, a Strasbourg native who has been identified only as Chérif C., 29.

Chérif is one of more than 20,000 individuals identified by French authorities as a potential terror threat, Heitz said. The 29-year-old was flagged with a so-called “S-file,” which stands for La Sûreté de l’État, or security of the state — a designation that doesn’t indicate someone is an imminent threat, but rather that the individual should be monitored.

“The S File can target individuals who aren’t very dangerous, and it is used only to watch their movements and trips around the country,” Mr. Nuñez said. “It isn’t a criterion of dangerousness.”

Police raided Cherif’s home Tuesday morning, just hours before the attack, in an unrelated murder investigation and found a rifle, ammunition, several knives and a grenade. While he had never been convicted on terrorism-related charges, Cerif has an extensive criminal record comprised of 27 convictions for a number of crimes, including several assaults and robberies.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-46547246

Prime Minister Theresa May has won a vote of confidence in her leadership of the Conservative Party by 200 to 117.

Mrs May is now immune from a leadership challenge for a year.

But the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg said the result was “not at all comfortable” for the prime minister and a “real blow” to her authority.

Mrs May won the confidence vote with a majority of 83, with 63% of Conservative MPs backing her and 37% voting against her.

The confidence vote was triggered by 48 of her MPs angry at her Brexit policy, which they say betrays the 2016 referendum result.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, who led calls for the confidence vote, said it was a “terrible result for the prime minister” and called on her to resign.

The result was greeted by cheers and applause from Tory MPs as it was announced by backbench Tory chairman Sir Graham Brady.

The prime minister still faces a battle to get the Brexit deal she agreed with the EU through the UK Parliament, with all opposition parties and dozens of her own MPs against it.

Mrs May earlier vowed to fight on to deliver her Brexit deal, which she argues is the only option for leaving the EU in an orderly way on 29 March.

But in a last-minute pitch to her MPs before the vote she promised to stand down as leader before the next scheduled election in 2022.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13401/france-revolt-elites

Maybe this is it — the start of the Western European public’s pushback against the elites’ disastrous multicultural and globalist project.

For years, those of us who write and worry about the rise of Islam in Western Europe have known that eventually, if the governments of these countries did not change course dramatically, something had to give. So far, the natives had, for the most part, been remarkably tame. They had swallowed a lot. Their leaders had filled their countries with huge numbers of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, a disproportionate number of whom were making it clear that they had no intention of fully joining or contributing to their host societies but, rather, were content to take, to harm, to damage, and to destroy, and were determined, in the long run, to conquer and rule.

No one had ever asked the citizens of Western Europe whether they wanted their countries radically transformed in this manner. This transformation, moreover, was intensifying by the year. At some point, surely, the native peoples of Western Europe would react.

But what form would it take? Those of us who are professionally preoccupied with these topics spent untold hours pondering this question. We asked one another: what do you think will happen? Some prophesied Balkanization. Already there were no-go zones – enclaves in and around major cities where “infidels” were unwelcome and where police and fire personnel were routinely pelted with rocks if they dared to intrude. It was easy enough to imagine those areas expanding, their de facto sovereignty under sharia law officially recognized and some kind of relatively stability established. Other observers forecast riots by natives — not the elites whose personal lives were minimally affected by the Muslim presence in their countries, but the less privileged types whose neighborhoods and schools had become danger zones, whose taxes had been raised repeatedly to bankroll massive payouts to immigrant-group members, and whose doctors and hospitals had been so overburdened by the newcomers that vital treatments were increasingly rationed and waiting times increasingly long.

In 2016, the British shocked the world by voting for Brexit, and later the same year Americans pulled off an even bigger stunner by electing Donald Trump to the presidency. Some commentators expected that elections in France, Sweden, and the Netherlands would also yield sensational results, but although there were advances for parties that favor immigration controls, such as Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly National Front), the Sweden Democrats, and Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party and Thierry Baudet’s Forum for Democracy, both in the Netherlands, those gains were smaller than expected. On the other hand, last year the Austrians elected as their Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, a vocal opponent of EU-imposed asylum quotas, and this year the Italian premiership went to Giuseppe Conte, who takes a strong stance against illegal immigrants and has barred migrant ships from Italian ports.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272217/jihad-strasbourg-robert-spencer

Emmanuel Macron, France’s youthful wunderkind, Europe’s poster child for globalism and socialism, has been absorbed lately with furious protests and riots over a confiscatory new tax he placed on gasoline in order to fight what he thinks of as the greatest threat France and the world face today: climate change. But on Tuesday in Strasbourg, a Muslim named Cherif Chekatt reminded Macron that France faces another threat, one that could prove to be immensely more serious: jihad. Chekatt opened fire at a Christmas market in his native Strasbourg, murdering four and injuring eleven.

As of this writing, Chekatt is on the run, and in a departure from the recent tendency to wave away all such attacks as manifestations of “mental illness” and insist that they’re not terrorism, much less jihad, French authorities are, according to the Telegraph, “treating the attack as a terrorist act. Anti-terrorist prosecutors have opened an investigation.”

In fact, Chekatt was “on a list of ‘security threats,’” France’s “Fiche S” list of people who pose a serious terror threat. RT reported that the regional prefecture announced: “The author of these acts, listed as a security threat, had been sought by police” on Tuesday, but they hadn’t been able to catch up with him before he opened fire. A former London police inspector, Peter Kirkham, explained to RT: “There are so many people that are involved around the edges of this sort of terrorism if this is what it turns out to be, that you can’t keep any sort of meaningful surveillance on them. Even just monitoring the use of communications and social media would be too much.”

And that’s especially true when, like Macron, you don’t want to admit that there is any significant threat at all.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/anti-zionism-threatens-europes-jews-11544573627

‘Anti-Zionism isn’t the same as anti-Semitism,” we keep hearing. A new study suggests that for Jewish Europeans, the distinction is without a difference.

The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights polled some 16,500 Jews in 12 countries that account for 90% of the EU’s Jewish population. Eighty-five percent say anti-Semitism is a problem in their country, and 28% report having experienced anti-Semitic harassment in the preceding 12 months—including 37% of those “who wear, carry or display items in public that could identify them as Jewish.” As a result, 34% avoid visiting Jewish events or sites, and 38% have considered emigrating.

Those who reported being harassed were asked to describe the perpetrator of the most serious incident. Only 13% said it was “someone with a right-wing political view,” compared with 30% who cited extremist Muslim views and 21% left-wing political views.

Respondents were asked about anti-Semitic statements they heard online, in other media and at political events. The most common one, which 51% said they hear “frequently” or “all the time,” was “Israelis behave ‘like Nazis’ towards the Palestinians”—a claim that demonizes the Jewish state while diminishing the crimes of real Nazis.

The leftist counterargument is that anti-Zionism is a legitimate political position that has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. But anti-Zionists discriminate against the Jews alone among the peoples of the world and call for the Jewish state’s economic, cultural and academic boycott. What sense would it make to say: “I don’t think Ireland has a right to exist, but I’m not anti-Irish”?

Anti-Semitism has been likened to a virus that adapts to changes in society. What may have started with the accusation of “Christ-killer” morphed to socioeconomic “justifications” for Jew-hatred. In the late 19th century, racial theories provided pseudoscientific “evidence” of Jewish inferiority. The medieval libel of “Jews poisoning the wells” turned into “Zionists poison Palestinian water.” The 19th-century German politician Heinrich von Treitschke said “the Jews are our misfortune,” which the Nazis later picked up. The sentiment finds its modern equivalent in, “The world would be a better a better place without Israel.” A third of the respondents in the EU poll said they hear that frequently or all the time. CONTINUE AT SITE

http://standpointmag.co.uk/text-lecture-december-2018-daniel-johnson-corbyn-anti-semitism

Jews in Britain, and more widely across Europe, are confronted by a new mutation of the oldest hatred: the anti-Semitic alliance of the Left and radical Islam. As Dave Rich argues in his new book The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism (Biteback, £12.99), the impact of the Leftist and Islamist nexus on the Labour Party during the three years of Corbyn’s leadership has been toxic.

It was Standpoint, the magazine of which I am the founding editor, that brought the Labour Party’s “Jewish problem” to wider attention in 2014, when the well-known actress Maureen Lipman, a lifelong Labour supporter, declared that she could no longer vote for the party because of its extreme hostility to Israel and its intolerance of any other views. She castigated the then leader of the party, Ed Miliband, as a secular Jew for ignoring the problem and, indeed, being part of it. Her protest had a wide resonance, but the scale of the Left’s Jewish problem emerged only after Corbyn came to office in 2015 following Miliband’s defeat in the general election.

I too come from a family for whom this problem is personal. My father, Paul Johnson, was the editor of the New Statesman from 1965 to 1970 and one of the Left’s strongest voices in support of Israel. I still recall our jubilation at the outcome of the Six Day War and the boxes of Jaffa oranges that would arrive from the Israeli embassy when my father had written a particularly trenchant essay in Israel’s defence. (I suppose those oranges would be enough to land us in trouble under a future Prime Minister Corbyn, or even be used as evidence of the imaginary Israeli conspiracy to control British politics that he regularly demands should be investigated.) My father left the Labour Party to join Margaret Thatcher in 1977 while I was in Israel; I vividly remember the front-page news item about him in The Times and wondering where this bold move, fraught with professional risk, would lead.