RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271855/mosul-and-true-face-islam-kenneth-r-timmerman

I have lived and worked in the Muslim Middle East for the past thirty-five years, and have many dear friends who are Muslims. Most recently, I prayed with a 38-year old Muslim man in the ruins of his house in the old city of Mosul, as he told me his story of surviving the ISIS occupation.

I stumbled upon Azam Nejim Abdallah by accident, while inspecting the devastation wrought upon the magnificent 4th and 5th century churches of West Mosul with an Iraqi police brigadier general and activists from the Hammurabi Human Rights Organization, a local group dedicated to protecting Iraqi minorities.

Azam and an older neighbor, Abu Ibrahim Mohsen, were among the hardy few who had returned to the ruins and were attempting to rebuild. Their problem on this particular day was that they had no water, and no electricity. “People just three blocks down the street have water,” they complained to the brigadier general. Why not us?”

To us, the answer was obvious. The fact that Azam and his neighbors were alive was nothing short of miraculous. One neighbor’s house was just a pile of rubble. Bomb squads were still combing through the neighborhood, more than a year after the liberation, for ISIS booby-traps and unexploded ordinance. There was not a single house left standing in the neighborhood. Water? Electricity? Really?

When Azam saw me, he wanted to tell me the story of how his four-year son and father were killed in the final days of the ISIS occupation. He kept pointing to an alleyway, and in the end, I let him take me by the hand to his house a bit further away. He had already started to rebuild the walls, but that wasn’t what he wanted to show me: it was a picture of his four-year old son, Omar, and the jagged hole a coalition bomb had torn through a metal door. “I was crouching, right there,” he pointed. “Omar was crouching here, with my father. They were both killed,” he wept. All I could do as he showed me a photograph of his son was to pray with him.

I am reminded of this story by an encounter with a pastor in an Anglican church in Europe recently, who commented that ISIS and all their barbarity were “such a distortion of true Islam.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-european-digital-retreat-1541635377

As impressive as Emmanuel Macron’s reform successes have been, this week brings word of a failure by the French President that’s worth cheering. There are growing signs that the Europe-wide digital tax cherished by Paris is falling by the wayside.

Finance ministers from Ireland, Sweden and Denmark this week rebuffed the European Commission’s digital tax proposal, released earlier this year, and Berlin now appears to have reservations as well. All signs are that at least some of these governments will exercise their veto over the plan at the next finance ministers’ summit in December, or kick the plan into the long grass by delaying further action until 2021 or later.

Mr. Macron and Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire have aggressively advocated such a tax, which the Commission would set as a 3% charge on revenues (not profits), to be paid to the EU state where the revenue is earned rather than where a European subsidiary is headquartered. This is an attack on U.S. tech giants such as Facebook, Amazon and Google parent Alphabet, since few European companies would hit the thresholds of €750 million in annual global revenue and €50 million in EU revenue above which the tax kicks in.

The plan also is a policy assault on low-tax EU states such as Ireland, which has attracted the European headquarters of many global tech companies by imposing a 12.5% tax rate on corporate profits. Tax-happy EU members such as France and Germany have complained about this competition for decades, and Messrs. Macron and Le Maire may have thought that public irritation at American tech companies over privacy would provide political cover for another attack on Dublin.

But Dublin is stubbornly defending its fiscal sovereignty. Sweden is worried about the implications for its own tech economy, including music-streaming service Spotify. Other leaders are concerned about potential retaliation from President Trump. Berlin now says it would prefer to wait for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s plan for digital taxation—which may be a very long wait—despite Chancellor Angela Merkel signaling her support for the French plan earlier this year.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271837/uks-muslim-rape-gangs-and-maajid-nawazs-hypocrisy-joshua-winston

The media’s go-to Muslim darling and ex-terrorist self-promoter, Maajid Nawaz, is currently having a Twitter spat with Lily Allen (that virtuous pop singer who has promised and failed to give a room to even one single asylum seeker in any of her several properties, in spite of breaking down in tears on TV at Calais and apologizing to the world on behalf of the UK).

Maajid is using the usual buzzwords that keep the cash flowing in his direction: “the regressive left,” “Muslim fundamentalists,” and then he ends their debate by stating that Lily is discrediting the work of the three million British Pakistanis who are trying to address and improve the situation of the over-representation of Pakistanis in grooming gangs in the UK. In reality, however, the entire Pakistani community knew, and still knows, about the rape of white British girls. They are a close-knit community. They would have seen gangs of girls hanging around kebab shops. At no point did anyone try on-street intervention. They would have heard their friends bragging about who and how many non-Muslim girls they had raped last night. They would have heard about the rape parties where non-Muslim girls were drugged and passed around the men to be raped. The wives, too, would have heard these conversations on the telephone, in the next room, or in the shops where their husbands work. The taxi drivers who shuttled the non-Muslims girls back and forth to houses and hotels to be raped were also aware of what was going on.

Contrary to Maajid’s claims, none of these three million Pakistani Muslims chose to speak up. A handful of Ahmadiyyas protested on the streets, and the UK media were in a frenzy to let us know that Muslims oppose violence and rape. The media, as usual, neglected to note that Ahmadiyyas are not considered by mainstream Sunni Muslims to be real Muslims. They are considered apostates, who have every chance of being beaten and killed, just the same as any other non-Muslim does. Literature in the Muslim Council of Britain and Kennington mosque declare this sect to be apostates, and essentially fair game.

I remember a radio conversation in which a Muslima was being interviewed and she said that the entire Pakistani communities knew and still know what is going on. She was so sickened and appalled by what her community was doing to non-Muslim girls that she took her infant child and fled, for her safety, and in order that she could speak about it, from the South to the North of England. What a brave soul. A single mother, on her own, running into poverty and uncertainty in order that she could do one single radio interview.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13259/britain-multiculturalism-october

There were 140 new cases of female genital mutilation (FGM) in Birmingham between April and June 2018.

“There remains a huge problem with professionals viewing forced marriage as a cultural issue rather than a crime. Many aren’t even aware there is a law.” — Jasvinder Sanghera, attacking the government’s failure to tackle the problem of forced marriages.

The Ministry of Justice blocked plans for an academic study into why prisoners convert to Islam and how it can lead to radicalization. “They will have been concerned about what this proposed project will discover,” a source said.

October 1. So-called “cutters” are being flown into Britain to perform female genital mutilation (FGM) on young girls, according to The Independent. “The practicing community talk together, saying, ‘My girl needs to be cut,’ and pay the cutters to come into the UK and cut the girls here,” said Hoda Ali, an FGM activist who works in West London. She added: “The reality is we need to open our eyes. We don’t need to think just about faraway countries because right now we have girls who are in their late teens or even early twenties who were cut in this country. They are British girls who were born here and they were cut here.”

October 2. Women and girls who are coerced into marriage by their families will be allowed to give evidence in secret so they can object to their foreign spouses’ visas without fear of repercussions, according to legal changes announced by Home Secretary Sajid Javid. The changes come two months after The Times revealed that the Home Office was issuing visas to known abusers in forced marriage cases.

October 3. Zakaria Mohammed, a 21-year-old drug dealer from Aston, Birmingham, was sentenced to 14 years in prison after admitting to charges of modern slavery. Mohammed groomed his victims — a 14-year-old girl and two runaway 15-year-old boys — before making them sell class-A drugs from squalid flats a hundred miles from their homes. The teens, who were transported from Birmingham to Lincoln to work as “expendable workhorses” in drug dens, were found by police in a drug-infested apartment in Lincoln. The Telegraph reported it was the first time in British legal history that a drug-dealer has been convicted for breaching the Modern Slavery Act by trafficking children.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13238/germany-merkel-resignation

It was the policy of unchecked mass-immigration against which Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party finally revolted.

The race to succeed Merkel as the party’s chair is wide open, and these days, being a Merkel confidante is a liability rather than an asset.

The next party leader’s sole role will be to share the blame for any new election defeats, starting with the elections to the European Parliament in June 2019 — unless he distinguishes himself from Merkel and presents a set of convincing ideas for Germany’s future.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on October 29, 2018, announced her resignation, a day after her party, the Christian Democrats (CDU), suffered yet another crushing election defeat. Merkel said she would step down as leader of her party in December and would not seek re-election in 2021.

In the state election in Hesse, Germany’s two biggest parties received their worst results in more than half a century. The CDU dropped from 38% to 27%, the Social-Democrats (SPD) from 30% to less than 20%. Both parties continue a losing streak that shows no sign of reversal. Rather, the downturn seems to be accelerating. In last year’s general elections, Merkel’s party and its ally, the Social Democrats, recorded their worst results up to then in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. Throughout much of Germany’s postwar history, the CDU and SPD each used to achieve about 40% of the votes. In last autumn’s general elections, the CDU and SPD combined barely managed to surpass the 50% threshold to form a government. Recent polls see them combined at barely 40% (24% for the CDU and 15% for the SPD).

“The time has come to open a new chapter,” Merkel said. In a letter to the party, Merkel admitted mistakes that her government may have made “in recent weeks and months”. According to Merkel, the voters did not acknowledge the current government’s “decent” achievements due to the latter’s wrong “work culture” that “doesn’t meet” Merkel’s “personal standards” — apparently referring to the public feud between her and the CDU’s Bavarian sister-party CSU over immigration policy.

Merkel went on to say, “For the rest of the election period, I’m ready to continue to work as Chancellor,” meaning that she will step down as chancellor in 2021 at the latest, or maybe a bit earlier, if there is a chance to enthrone her protégée, CDU general secretary Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, before the next elections.

Kramp-Karrenbauer’s success, however, is far from guaranteed. The race to succeed Merkel as the party’s chair is wide open, and these days, being a Merkel confidante is a liability rather than an asset. For months, pundits in Germany and abroad had speculated about the “end of the Merkel era”, even more so after she had lost a key supporter in a party rebellion earlier this year. On September 25, in a surprising vote among members of the CDU and CSU parties, Merkel’s longtime ally Volker Kauder was ousted after 13 years as parliamentary group leader of the combined faction.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271861/louis-farrakhan-live-tehran-lloyd-billingsley

Monday November 5, one day before the election, marked the resumption of sanctions on the Islamic regime by the Trump administration. Nation of Islam boss Louis Farrakhan flew to Iran to speak out on behalf of the ruling mullahs.

As Fox News reported, Farrakhan told Mohsen Rezaei, Secretary of Iran’s Expediency Council: “Today, I warn the American government that sanctioning Iran is a big mistake.” The eager Farrakhan failed to flag any mistakes by the Iranian Islamic regime, the world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism. And Farrakhan took care to time his visit with an important event.

Thirty-nine years ago, in 1979, the Islamic regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini invaded the U.S. embassy in Tehran, took more than 50 American diplomats and civilians hostage, and held them for 444 days. Farrakhan marked the anniversary by telling law students at the University of Tehran, that “America has never been a democracy” and then led the students in a chants of “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!”

No one in America had ever seen a performance quite like that. On the other hand, in his live Tehran show the Nation of Islam boss was not advancing any new themes.

On October 14, the 23rd anniversary of the Million Man March, Farrakhan addressed a cheering audience in Detroit: “To the members of the Jewish community that don’t like me — thank you very much for putting my name all over the planet…I’m not mad at you, ‘cuz you’re so stupid.” The Nation of Islam leader also claimed “I’m not an anti-Semite. I’m anti-Termite,” and repeated that message in a tweet.

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz denounced the speech and called out presidents Obama and Clinton, along with former DNC boss Keith Ellison, for their ties to Farrakhan. Even so, prominent Democrats running for office were not swift to denounce Farrakhan for his Jews-are-termites speech. In fact, Farrakhan thrives on special treatment from high-profile Democrats.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/brazil-is-moving-its-embassy-to-jerusalem-1541464850

Shortly after Jair Bolsonaro’s decisive victory in the Brazilian presidential election last week, the populist leader said he would follow through on his campaign promise to move Brazil’s embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Like Donald Trump, Mr. Bolsonaro—himself a Catholic but married to an evangelical Protestant pastor—owes his political success in large part to support from evangelical voters. As recently as the 1970s, Brazil was almost uniformly Catholic. But in one of the greatest religious shifts of modern times, the largest country in Latin America is today nearly as evangelical as the U.S.: 25% of Brazilians identify as evangelical Christians, compared with 26% of Americans, according to the Joshua Project. As in the U.S., many evangelical and Pentecostal Christians instinctively support Israel and endorse a law-and-order agenda at home.

At a time of increased anxiety for many Jews in Europe and North America, the rise of evangelical and Pentecostal Christian support for Judaism and Israel in much of the world is a heartening sign. Based on a literal approach to the Bible and a covenantal theology that attributes a continuing religious significance to the Jewish people and their state, these two rapidly spreading forms of Protestant Christianity tend to promote a climate of respect for individual Jews as well as support for Zionism. They view the continued existence of the Jewish people as a mark of God’s faithfulness and believe the Jewish people have a special place in God’s plan as recipients of his favor.

Improved relations with Israel are a hallmark of evangelical political influence. Guatemala, another historically Catholic country, is now about 40% Protestant. It opened an embassy in Jerusalem two days after the U.S. did. Although Latin American countries have typically been hostile to Israel since the 1967 war, that’s changing rapidly.