RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hamas-howl-in-amsterdam/

For a while there it looked as though my semi-annual long weekend in Amsterdam would come to naught. Several days of massive snowfall made travel impossible in our part of Norway and closed down Oslo Airport for most of a day. Thanks to the snow, the usually reliable bus to Oslo pulled into the station a couple of hours behind schedule; and the airport express trains, which are never so much as a minute late, were delayed by an hour or so.

There was one surprise on the express train. In every car, they have these big video screens on which they give you a couple of the latest headlines, current temperatures in major European cities, stock market news, and flight departure times. Somewhere in there, there’s always an ad – invariably innocuous, instantly forgettable. Not this time. The ad – big blood-red letters on black backgrounds – was placed by Doctors without Borders, and it demanded an end to the “genocide” in Gaza.

Having allowed plenty of time because of the chaos, I got to the airport several hours early. I killed part of the time watching a couple of new YouTube videos in which the U.K. podcaster Konstantin Kisin interviewed participants in a pro-Palestinian rally in London. It wasn’t a particularly dense crowd, and it consisted mostly of young English people. They carried signs, distributed by the Socialist Workers Party, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and demanding that Palestine be free “from the river to the sea.”

A brief, polite questioning by Kisin established that they didn’t know what that meant, and that none of them really knew much of anything, for that matter, about Islam or Israel or the history of the Middle East. They’d spent four years learning that white is bad, darker shades good. They had yet to discover that there was more in heaven and earth than was dreamt of in the lyrics to “Imagine” and “Give Peace a Chance.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20322/persecution-of-christians-december

“About 37 [Christian] individuals, primarily women, children and the disabled, were burned to death in their homes…. ” — christianpost.com, December 30, 2023, Nigeria.

“Christian leaders in Nigeria have said they believe herdsmen attacks on Christian communities in the Middle Belt are inspired by their desire to forcefully take over Christians’ lands and impose Islam….” — morningstarnews.org, December 26, 2023, Nigeria.

“[I]t is also the existence of disbelief itself that is a ‘grievance’,” — Aymenn Jawad al Tamimi, December , 2023, Philippines.

[I]n Austria, on Dec. 9, Heiligenkreuz Abbey received a bomb threat by phone. Police later confirmed that it had an “Islamist overtone”. The caller had said “Convert to Islam, or I’ll bomb you away!”…. Father John Paul commented: “[I]t encourages us even more to pray and work for peace, healing and reconciliation.” — puls24.at, December 11, 2023.

“Reports include statements like, ‘We have to kill those who preach Christianity, and these Christians have no place in Mauritania.'” — persecution.org, December 13, 2023.

Two Christian evangelists, Joseph and Isaac, after Muslims beat them for quoting the Koran, spent Christmas Day in jail for “blasphemy.” The report does not indicate which verses were deemed so objectionable, or why. — morningstarnews.org, December 22, 2023, Uganda.

According to a January 2 report: “Three migrants who allegedly planned an attack on Cologne Cathedral are free again. A judge let them go after just one night in custody.” Pictured: Police conduct security checks on visitors at Cologne Cathedral on December 24, 2023 in Cologne, Germany, after indications of an Islamist terror threat. (Photo by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)

The following are among the abuses and murders inflicted on Christians by Muslims throughout the month of December 2023.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/20/the-myth-of-the-muslim-world/

This week, the idea of ‘the Muslim world’ took one hell of a beating. The notion of an ummah has been left in tatters. The fantasy of a global people with shared interests and experiences – almost an Islamic class – is now surely kaput. For while woke activists in the West might still speak of Muslims as a bloc, if not a blob, elsewhere in the world Muslims are at war. Two of the most powerful Muslim-majority nations, Iran and Pakistan, got dangerously close to all-out conflict this week. Tell me: who should the ‘Muslim community’ in Britain or the US or Canada support in this violent border skirmish?

For years, there’s been a gaping disconnect between the way Western observers speak about Muslims and the actual Muslim experience. Between our elites’ reduction of Muslims here in the West to a single entity, a throng that believes the same things and feels the same pain, and the growing Balkanisation of the Muslim-majority world. The West’s guardians of opinion often slam celebs for treating Africa as a single country, and yet they’re equally guilty of flattening out the religious, cultural and territorial complexities of the Muslim experience. Their rush to fashion a new oppressed class, a people they might marshal as part of their indictment of the wickedness of the West, has ironically denuded Muslims of their diversity, and even their humanity.

This disconnect has really come to life in recent weeks. All the talk in right-thinking circles in the West has been of Muslim unity. Both ‘the Muslim community’ over here and ‘the Muslim world’ more broadly are as one in their rage with Israel and love for Palestine, we’re told. Reuters used the sweeping term ‘Muslim animosity’ to describe the vibe in both the West and the East. Media outlets in the US and Europe frantically report that ‘Muslim voters’ might ditch Joe Biden over his support for Israel and turn against Labour in the UK, on the basis that Keir Starmer has been insufficiently pro-Palestine. That term, ‘Muslim voter’, conjures up an image of a samey, single-issue citizen, faithfully traipsing to the polling booth to register the uniform ‘animosity’ his kind feel.

Things are more complicated. They always are. Guardianistas might get a kick from reporting on the anti-Israel, anti-West fury of ‘the Muslim world’, but they’re rather more coy on the brazen failure of that world to offer assistance to civilians in Gaza. Egypt, for instance, which borders Gaza, is flat-out refusing to take refugees from the Israel-Hamas War. They’d pose a security threat, apparently. Countless lives could have been saved had Egypt permitted the construction of refugee camps in the Sinai. We hear little of Egypt’s complicity in Gazans’ suffering, however, because our activist class prefers the moral thrill of cheering on ‘Muslim animosity’ towards Israel and the West to the hard task of analysing Arab states’ fatal betrayal of the Palestinian people.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20318/pakistan-christian-death-sentence

“The superintendent of police stated in his report that neither he nor the eyewitness found any blasphemy in Shahzad’s conversation. His investigation also found that Shahzad was a minor, illiterate and did not have clear knowledge of any religion and only repeated words at the direction of Ishtiak Jalali.” — CeCe Heil, Senior Counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice, July 11, 2023.

“Based on this investigation the police literally said he was not guilty. He had not committed any blasphemy.” — CeCe Heil, July 11, 2023.

“[A]s a juvenile, Shahzad was entitled to be immediately released on bail and the judge obviously was not going to follow the law…. A much bigger plan seemed to be in place with the mob controlling the outcome….. This happens because Muslim fanatics pack courtrooms to intimidate the judges.” — CeCe Heil, July 11, 2023.

According to the organization Open Doors, the persecution of Christians in Pakistan is “extreme”…

It would be advisable for the US government to suspend all aid to Pakistan until its government takes concrete steps to free the many victims of its deadly blasphemy laws; persuade Pakistan to discontinue enforcing them altogether; improve minority rights, and, most importantly, stop enabling Islamist terrorism.

Shahzad Masih, a Pakistani Christian, was 16 years old and working in a hospital as a janitor in 2017, when Muslims falsely accused him of blasphemy. Since then, has spent more than five years in prison, and has been sentenced to death by hanging for statements he did not even make.

In 2017, authorities arrested Masih after a Muslim coworker and another man linked with the Islamic terrorist group, Tehreek-e-Taliban Islami Pakistan (TTIP), accused him of insulting Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. In 2022, a court sentenced Masih to death.

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/iran-and-pakistan-cross-fire-puts-the-world-on-edge/

On the menu today: We glance up from the Republican presidential-primary season’s coverage to notice that two heavily armed Muslim countries are now launching military strikes in each other’s territory. Taiwan has a new incoming president, and for that country to deter a Chinese invasion, promised U.S. arms sales must get delivered a lot faster. And one new poll shows a reason for Nikki Haley fans to feel optimistic about New Hampshire, while two other polls show Trump winning the Granite State primary comfortably.

Oh, Hey, No Big Deal, Just Iran and Pakistan Shooting at Each Other

On a regular basis, news comes across the wires that seems like it ought to make us sit up and take notice — like Iran, one of America’s preeminent foes and a country knocking on the door of developing a nuclear weapon, launching military strikes against targets within the territory of Pakistan, which is a complicated U.S. semi-ally that has an estimated 170 nuclear warheads.

Baluchistan is a region where the Iranian, Pakistani, and Afghan borders meet, stretching from the southernmost chunk of Afghanistan to the Arabian Sea, and encompassing the southwestern chunk of Pakistan and a southeastern chunk of Iran. Among the Baluchis are plenty of militant groups who want independence or just plain hate the Iranian or Pakistani government.

On Tuesday, the Iranian military launched missile and drone attacks against what it contended were targets in Pakistan associated with Jaish ul-Adl, a Sunni Muslim Baluch separatist organization. The Pakistani government contended the strikes killed two children and wounded three others and called them an “unprovoked violation” of its airspace. Pakistan recalled its ambassador to Iran and has blocked Tehran’s envoy from returning — less than ideal for the prospects of talking down either side from escalating the conflict further, or minimizing any confusion or misunderstanding. Sure, Iran thinks it’s only striking at Baluch separatists, but does the Pakistani military know that? How does the Pakistani military know that Iran isn’t directly attacking it?

https://www.nysun.com/article/argentinas-feisty-president-javier-milei-stuns-davos-with-attack-on-secret-socialist-agenda-of-moneyed-western-elites?lctg=1

Just when you thought it was safe to write off Davos as irremediably dull — think Antony Blinken with a side order of Tom Friedman — along comes the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” president of Argentina, Javier Milei, to shake up the Swiss town with a one-two punch to what he perceives to be the “socialist agenda” of various elites.

The tirade came in the form of a half-hour long speech to a full house of policy wonks and boldfaced names in the business world who were advised by Mr. Milei to choose freedom over socialist-style state control, “dammit.”

With a late-career Elvis-style haircut that makes Boris Johnson’s unruly locks look tame, and his dim view of taxes — Jesus didn’t pay them, he says — Mr. Milei had all of Davos buzzing even before he touched down in Switzerland on Tuesday. 

His mission, he said before departing Argentina, was to “plant the idea of ​​freedom in a forum polluted by the socialist 2030 agenda.” He elaborated on that to a packed conference room Wednesday afternoon, declaring that “socialism is an impoverishing phenomenon and a failure whenever it has been attempted.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20301/islam-overtaking-europe

What seems to have created the current chaos is the well-meaning but calamitously unthinking jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), combined with the disastrous “Wir schaffen das” (“We can manage this”) of Germany’s then Chancellor, Angela Merkel. The ECHR’s extreme interpretation of “open borders” hinders the development of a workable asylum policy.

Immigration is not a natural disaster that befalls Europe, like a plague of locusts or a drought. The migration chaos we are experiencing in Europe is purely a human catastrophe, caused by dreamy policies and faceless judges who are accountable to no one.

[F]urther mass influxes of migrants, such as many countries are experiencing, can be stopped the day after tomorrow by neutralizing the ECHR — simply by opting out of it.

To think now that Brussels, London, Paris, Berlin, Antwerp will inevitably become Islamic is to promise victory in advance. It is defeatist thinking, which Winston Churchill, in his six-volume series, The Second World War, described as more threatening than all the Nazi divisions put together.

A moratorium on immigration might be a good place to start.

In New York, as in the Belgian parliament, you can meet more and more people who are convinced that the Islamization of Brussels — and London and other capitals, they often add — is now inevitable and only a matter of time.

The growth of the Muslim population in Brussels has been both enormous and meteoric. Over the past 50 years, the number of Muslims has grown steadily, and given the erasure of Europe’s borders, thanks to the 1985 Schengen Agreement, there seems to be no end in sight.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20302/taiwan-voters-just-cut-china-xi-jinping-down-to

The Taiwanese, especially after seeing how Beijing suffocated Hong Kong in the past four years, do not want to be ruled by the Chinese regime.

Xi Jinping at the moment must be fuming. In his 2024 New Year’s message, he signaled he is soon going to annex Taiwan. “China will surely be reunified, and all Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be bound by a common sense of purpose and share in the glory of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” the Chinese leader declared in a paragraph that appears to list what will happen this year.

The people of the small island of Taiwan are not afraid of large China. They are an inspiration to free people everywhere.

The results are in. Taiwan’s voters stood up to China and all its war talk of recent weeks.

Vice President Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party won the presidency on Saturday in a three-way race with 40.1% of the vote. Hsiao Bi-khim, recently Taipei’s representative in Washington, was elected vice president.

New Taipei City Mayor Hou Yu-ih, of the opposition Kuomintang received 33.5%, and Ko Wen-je of the new Taiwan People’s Party came in third with 26.5%.

The election was historic. For the first time since 1996, when the island republic held its first democratic presidential election, a party has won a third straight presidential term.

Previously, the DPP, as the governing party is known, and the Kuomintang or KMT, traded the presidency every eight years.

https://www.ft.com/content/bc1b9521-8381-4fb8-aebd-80846a18085d?segmentId=b385c2ad-87ed-d8ff-aaec-0f8435cd42d9

Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive party won an unprecedented third term in office on Saturday as voters defied China’s warnings against electing presidential candidate Lai Ching-te, whom Beijing called a dangerous separatist. With more than 90 per cent of votes counted, Lai had won 40 per cent, according to the Central Election Commission. Hou Yu-ih from the Kuomintang, the largest opposition party, had 33.5 per cent of the vote and Ko Wen-je from the smaller Taiwan People’s party had attracted 26.5 per cent.

Although the DPP lost its parliamentary majority and Lai’s vote was more than 17 percentage points lower than President Tsai Ing-wen’s when she was re-elected in 2020, the party won a higher share of votes for its nationwide list of legislators-at-large than expected. It is the first time since Taiwan began holding free and direct presidential elections in 1996 that any party has held power beyond two four-year terms.

In a reference to Lai’s failure to win an absolute majority and his party’s loss of its majority in parliament, China said the result “shows that the DPP does not represent majority public opinion on the island”. The Taiwan Affairs Office, the Chinese government department implementing Taiwan policy, said: “We will work with relevant political parties, groups and people from all walks of life in Taiwan to promote cross-Strait exchanges and co-operation, deepen cross-Strait integrated development and jointly promote China culture, promote the peaceful development of cross-Strait relations and promote the great cause of the reunification of the motherland.”