RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13186/europe-crisis-survival

In facing this existential challenge, a downward spiral in which Europeans seem to be slowly dying out by failing to reproduce, it seems that Europe has also lost all confidence in its hard-won Enlightenment values, such as personal freedoms, reason and science replacing superstition, and the separation of church and state. These are critical if Europe truly wishes to survive.

In Western Germany, 42% of children under the age of six now come from a migrant background, according to Germany’s Federal Statistical Office, as reported by Die Welt.

“[I]f you look through history, where the Church slept, got diverted away from the Gospel, Islam took the advantage and came in. This is what we are seeing in Europe, that the Church is sleeping, and Islam is creeping in… Europe is being Islamized, and it will affect Africa.” — Catholic Bishop Andrew Nkea Fuanya of Cameroon.

“The possibility that Europe will become a museum or a cultural amusement park for the nouveau riche of globalization is not completely out of the question.” This thought of Europe as a vast cultural theme park was presented by the late historian Walter Laqueur, who, for his far-sighted prognosis about Europe’s crisis, has been called “the indispensable pessimist.” Laqueur was one of the first to understand that the current deadlock in which the continent finds itself goes far beyond economics. The point is that the days of European strength are over. Because of low birth rates, Europe is dramatically shrinking. If current trends continue, Laqueur said, a hundred years from now Europe’s population “will be only a fraction of what it is today, and in two hundred, some countries may have disappeared.”

Sadly, the “death of Europe” is drawing nearer, is becoming more visible and is more frequently discussed by popular writers.

“At a time when literature is increasingly marginalized in public life, Michel Houellebecq offers a striking reminder that novelists can provide insights about society that pundits and experts miss,” the New York Times wrote about arguably the most important French author. Houellebecq “speaks” through his best-selling novels, such as Submission, as well as his public lectures. The last conference that Houellebecq attended in Brussels — on the occasion of the Oswald Spengler Prize, commemorating the author of The Decline of the West — was dedicated to that topic. “To sum up,” Houellebecq said, “the Western world as a whole is committing suicide.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/boko-haram-put-a-bounty-on-my-head-1540507593

I received a phone call several years ago saying that someone had found my wallet, and I could pick it up at an abandoned racetrack. I don’t carry a wallet. Shortly thereafter, while investigating a story about a massacre of Christians in the Middle Belt of Nigeria, I saw a charcoal message emblazoned on a wall: “Hassan, we know about you and will meet you one day.” A Muslim friend confirmed that Boko Haram had put a bounty of $700 on my head. Such is life for a pastor in modern Nigeria.

Nigerian Christianity is under siege from radical Islam. The country’s importance to Africa, and to Christianity as a whole, makes this siege particularly noteworthy. With a population of nearly 200 million—about 50% Christian, 40% Muslim and 10% animist—by 2050 Nigeria will become the third most populous country in the world, the United Nations estimates. No wonder Nigeria has been a strategic target for radical Islamists for several decades.

Boko Haram, a radical Islamic movement whose name roughly translates to “Western education is forbidden,” has ramped up attacks on Christians this year. Since 2009 when Boko Haram began its rampage, about 20,000 Nigerians have been hacked with machetes or shot. Two million have been displaced. Pastors and their families have been specifically targeted for death.

The government’s response has deepened Christian frustrations. President Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim, describes the violence as “clashes” between Fulani tribesmen and farmers, who are mostly Christian. But many Christians, who often become refugees, believe the government is telling the world what it wants to hear, that this has nothing to do with religion. Yet why are all the attackers Boko Haram? And why do they target Christians? We sense that Muslims generally are killed as collateral damage, not as primary targets.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271718/nobel-peace-prize-shines-year-hugh-fitzgerald

Of all the Nobel Prizes, the one that gives rise to the most doubts is the Peace Prize. Nobels in the sciences and in economics are for achievements recognized by others in the field. The Peace Prize is political and wildly subjective, sometimes given for work that has nothing to do with “peace,” or used to promote the political side that the Norwegian judges favor. Yassir Arafat, before bin Laden the world’s foremost terrorist, shared a prize (with Rabin and Peres) for promoting peace by signing the Oslo Accords, which accords represented a stunning diplomatic victory for the “Palestinians.” The left-wing Norwegians were eager to forget all the terrorist attacks by Arafat’s men and to honor him in order that he might continue “on the path of peace.” Barack Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” although his main diplomatic effort, that led to the Iran Nuclear Deal, also included, as is now known, all sorts of side deals favorable to Iran, that he made while keeping Congress largely in the dark.

There was Anwar Sadat, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for graciously agreeing to receive back the entire Sinai from Israel as part of a peace settlement. Sadat was later murdered by a Muslim fanatic who failed to realize what a diplomatic coup Sadat had pulled off as a veritable Prince of Peace. There was Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian female activist, who has worked for women’s rights in Iran, where Islamic misogyny is in full flower. Her Nobel hasn’t protected her; she now lives in London where, she now insists, she was wrong: she used to push for reform from within Iran, but has concluded that no reform is possible with the current regime, and women will continue to suffer in Iran until the regime is overthrown.

There was Malala Yousefzai, who worked for the right of girls in Pakistan to get an education, not something many Muslim males in that country favor, including the one who shot her through the head (she survived). There was a Nobel Peace Prize shared by Mohammed Yunus for his attempts to spread microloans, in order to help the poor start businesses. Mohammed el Baradei won for his efforts, as Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which shared the prize with him, “to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that the Agency’s monitoring of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes in order to make sure it is used in the safest possible way.” Some American officials believed he was engaged in communications with the Iranians who were suspect. Of course, although he was dealing mostly with weapons programs in Iran and Iraq, two very aggressive states, El Baradei has accused Israel of being the biggest threat to the Middle East because of its nuclear weapons. Israel has repeatedly said it would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to any conflict, but that’s not good enough for El Baradei. He would like to force Israel to rid itself of nuclear weapons, but Israel, unsurprisingly, is not impressed with his suggestion and is not about to commit suicide to please the likes of Mohamed el Baradei.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13169/britain-grooming-gangs-part-3

This reformist activity in the migrant community needs to be encouraged and backed by government resources.

“On one level, most imams in the UK are simply using their puritanical sermons to promote the wearing of the hijab and even the burka among their female adherents. But the dire result can be the brutish misogyny we see in the Oxford sex ring.” — Taj Hargey, imam of the Oxford Islamic Congregation.

There are decent Muslims everywhere who work hard to counter all the anti-social and criminal activities in which so many of their co-religionists engage and the theological positions through which they try to justify what they do. But terrorist attacks, anti-Semitic hate speech, and sexual harassment of young white women are real crimes committed by a different kind of Muslim and must be addressed as such.

“Women in some communities are facing a double onslaught of gender inequality, combined with religious, cultural and social barriers preventing them from accessing even their basic rights as British residents. And violence against women remains all too prevalent….” — Dame Louise Casey, The Casey Review, 2016.

Not all Muslims remained silent about the grooming gang problem. We have already seen how the new Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, a Muslim of Pakistani origin, took rapid action to open an enquiry into the crimes. A number of Muslim organizations and individuals have spoken out against the gangs, and condemned them for bringing their faith into disrepute. The integrative Islamic Society of Britain (ISB), for one, has spoken out strongly about grooming culture.

In May 2013, Julie Siddiqi, chief executive of the ISB, coordinated a Muslim-led coalition to campaign against offenders, known as The Community Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, which, in turn, was launched in Bradford with the backing of the Bradford Council of Mosques. The following month, a Muslim group called Together Against Grooming (TAG) declared that a Friday prayer sermon (khutba) would be read out in around 500 mosques across the country to draw attention to the grooming issue. The sermon was written by Alyas Karmani, an imam who has a background in psychology and serves at several mosques around Bradford. Karmani specializes in sexual counselling from a non-fundamentalist perspective and has worked on a PhD entitled, “The Crises of Masculinity and Urban Male Violence”. His detailed understanding of the grooming gangs and their various motivations are perhaps the most sophisticated yet advanced by a Muslim expert and should be taken into account by any present or future investigation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/zero-hour-for-the-islamic-republic-1540422152

Iran has long been a subject of intense discussion during the United Nations General Assembly. But in years past the world lacked the leadership and political will to confront Tehran over its nuclear ambitions and support for terrorism. This year is different. With the regime facing political unrest at home and escalating sanctions from abroad, the international community can block its expansionist and dangerous designs.

The Iranian leadership is beleaguered. It faces protests that directly challenge its legitimacy. Iranians are outraged that their leaders have funneled the billions of dollars their government received from the nuclear agreement to support terrorist proxies. Protesters are shouting “Death to Palestine”—repudiating the regime’s anti-Israel eliminationism—and “Leave Syria and think of us.”

Financial pressure from U.S. sanctions has compounded this domestic turmoil, as companies around the world end their commercial dealings with Iran. The value of the Iranian rial has plummeted, while Iran’s oil exports have fallen 25% since June. In November a second round of sanctions will target the backbone of Iran’s economy, its oil and gas sectors.

When the General Assembly convened in September, President Trump advised the international community to join the U.S. in isolating the regime. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed the existence of a new nuclear site constructed in violation of the nuclear agreement. He invited the International Atomic Energy Agency, or anyone with a smartphone, to inspect the site: latitude 35.5022, longitude 51.2997.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/violence-against-gays-on-the-rise-in-europe/

On October 22, about three thousand people rallied in central Paris “to denounce assaults on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people and demand urgent action from the government.” Among the many recent incidents that had sparked the protest, noted Reuters, were “the beating of a gay couple by their cab driver” the previous week and the murder in August, in the Bois de Boulogne, of a “transgender sex worker.” Another report on the rally mentioned two additional, and particularly high-profile, incidents: in September, an actor named Arnaud Gagnoud was beaten up after giving his boyfriend a hug outside a theater in Paris’s 20th arrondissement; on October 16, Guillaume Mélanie, founder of the gay-rights group Urgence, was gay-bashed in a Paris street.

I looked at several news stories (in several languages) about these incidents – and about that October 22 rally. None of them included the words Muslim or Islam, even though the Religion of Peace is, to put it mildly, a major part of the problem – not just in Paris, of course, but all over Western Europe. Everybody knows this, even though virtually nobody feels comfortable talking about it. In most media reports of such incidents, indeed, the Islamic factor can only be discerned through exceeding careful reading.

Take a German paper’s report last May on a series of violent assaults on gays in Berlin’s Neukölln district. One of the victims reported that he’d been “singing and dancing” in a subway station late at night when “a group of young men aggressively confronted him, claiming they felt insulted by his extravagant behaviour.” Quick quiz: what’s the key word here? That’s right: “insulted.” Gay-bashers of Western origin don’t feel “insulted” by gay people’s behavior, and even if they do, they don’t bother prefacing a homophobic beat-down by saying so; they just start punching away. The “insult” thing is totally Islamic.

That German paper recounted several recent Berlin gay-bashings in detail, noting that while such attacks in that city are nothing new, they’ve undergone a notable increase in levels of brutality. But there was no explicit mention of Islam.

Sometimes the role of Islam is hinted at, but only obliquely. Consider a piece about gay-bashings in Berlin that appeared last June in the Irish Times. There was no mention of Muslims in the first several paragraphs, which, on the contrary, attributed gay-bashings in Berlin to a “backlash” against gay rights by “straight men who have problems with their own sexuality.” Only if you made it all the way to the end of the piece did you encounter a curiously phrased reference to – get this – “the threat to the gay community, real or perceived, from conservative Turkish and Arab men, and criminal gangs from Romania and Bulgaria.” Note the artful use of the words “perceived” and “conservative” (National Review subscribers, apparently) and the determined avoidance, again, of the words Islam or Muslim. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/24/it-doesnt-matter-if

The operating assumption from many on both sides of the political aisle has been that Iran is a rational actor. Former President Barack Obama clearly adhered to this notion and it explains his signature on that terrible Iran deal. What few will tell you, however, is that operating behind Obama’s theory on Iran was the assumption that if Tehran was allowed to develop nuclear arms—and if the United States stepped back from the Mideast, leaving only Israel, the Sunni Arab states, and Iran—these powers would balance each other, creating relative peace.

As with so many of Obama’s ideas, this assumption was entirely theoretical and painfully naïve. Fact is, had the Obama Administration’s deal with Iran been continued, the Saudis inevitably would have bought nukes from Pakistan. While the Saudis may have reasons to be an ostensible ally of the United States, Saudi Arabia is home to some of the most ardent Sunni Islamist groups in the world.

What’s more, the ruling Saudi royal family maintains power through brutal autocratic practices. If the Saudi people were left to their own devices, it is more than likely that they would depose the Saudi royal family and replace them with a Sunni Muslim regime that mirrored Iran’s Shiite Muslim regime. And, if that Islamist Saudi regime had nuclear weapons—even if they remained nominally aligned with the United States against a nuclear-armed Iran—such a situation would hardly be peaceful.

In such a scenario, a nuclear-armed Israel, nuclear-armed Saudi Arabia, and nuclear-armed Iran would square off against each other. It would be a tripolar balance of power. Yet, tripolar orders are rarely stable; no grouping of three powers is likely to be evenly balanced against each other. Because of the inevitable imbalance of power, conflict becomes all but certain. In such a Mideast tripolar scenario, that conflict would be nuclear. Once started, a regional nuclear war, surely would expand into a world war, sucking in other powers, such as the United States, Russia, and China.