RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/faith/in-a-coptic-monastery-murder-most-foul/

The death of Bishop Epiphanius, the abbot of the fourth century Monastery of St. Macarius, last month has set off an ecclesiastical murder mystery worthy of a Dan Brown novel. More than a simple whodunit, the case has exposed simmering tensions of a theological, if not personal, nature in an influential corner of the Coptic Orthodox Church.

A scholar of ancient manuscripts with a frizzy beard typical of Orthodox clerics, Bishop Epiphanius, 64, was found at dawn on July 29, lying in a pool of blood outside his monastic cell. Injuries to his skull indicated he had been hit on the head with a blunt object, possibly a pipe, the police said.

The intrigue deepened days later when the Coptic authorities defrocked a younger monk, Isaiah, who had clashed with the bishop in the weeks before his death. Soon after that, another monk, Faltaous, 33, slashed his wrists and tried to throw himself from a four-story building. Faltaous was hospitalized and treated for his injuries. On Aug. 11, Egyptian prosecutors said Isaiah had been charged with the murder of Bishop Epiphanius after confessing to the crime. Two days later they said that they had detained Faltaous for questioning.

Beyond that, not much more is known. The police have sealed off the monastery to interview 150 people, including staff members, monks and bishops. The Coptic patriarch, Pope Tawadros II, has issued orders apparently aimed at tightening discipline among the country’s 2,000 monks.

New admissions to the monasteries have been suspended for a year; monks require permission to travel outside; and they have been given a month to close their Facebook and Twitter accounts. “In the light of what has happened, we need to give the monks their space and let them return to a focus on monastic life,” said Archbishop Angaelos of London, a prominent Coptic leader, speaking by phone. “They do not need social media accounts.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12847/iran-dancing-crime

To people in the West, it may seem impossible for dancing to become a crime. But as sharia laws get imposed, before you know it, any innocent act of “fun” can suddenly become a crime.

Maedeh Hojabri posted video clips of herself dancing on Instagram. For this “crime,” the 19-year-old woman was arrested, jailed without due process and without an opportunity to defend herself, and publicly shamed with a televised confession of her “crime.”

Who will the morality police come for next?

A Muslim mother in the sharia-ruled country of Iran, was talking about her 10-year-old daughter: “She asked me, ‘Why can’t I dance? We dance because we are happy. How can being happy be wrong? Why is dancing a crime?'” She spoke about the confusion in her daughter’s eyes. “It is a question I don’t know how to answer.”

Her daughter’s life had changed, she said, when she heard that a 19-year-old woman named Maedeh Hojabri had become the target of the Iran’s Islamist “morality” police. Her crime? Posting video clips of herself dancing on popular worldwide social media sites, like Instagram. The consequences for an act like that are severe. As has happened to other young women who posted video clips of themselves dancing, Hojabri was arrested, jailed without due process and without an opportunity to defend herself, and publicly shamed with a televised confession of her “crime.”

Hojabri’s dancing videos on Instagram made her a popular figure on Instagram in Iran, and gained her hundreds of thousands of followers on the social media platform. Imagine, if she were living in the West, how she would be treated. She would likely have been considered talented, have had opportunities thrown at her, been invited on popular shows and be sponsored for radio and television programs.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/18/beware-jeremy-corbyn

Donating £3 to the campaign of Jeremy Corbyn for Labour Party leader was, at the time, the best money I had ever spent.

Fresh from their second election loss in a row, Labour’s mild ineptitude was about to translate into hilarious farce. One which I, and many other conservatives, were all too keen to cement into a laughing stock sure to punctuate the decades ahead with regular dizzying mirth.

For the princely sum of £3 (less than the price of a pint) one could ensure the new Labour leader would be Corbyn, a bedraggled know-nothing backbencher whose terrific dullness would condemn his party to decades of nothing.

Back then, in 2015, Corbyn managed to squeeze onto the leadership ballot via charitable Labour MPs naively hoping to “widen the debate.” It went terribly wrong.

Getting wind of Corbyn’s glittering Marxist résumé, left-wing activists deserted the likes of Great Britain’s Communist party to stump up that tiny sum for a say in the future of the only other party with a chance of meaningful power.

Corbyn won in a near 60 percent landslide. (And increased that figure in a re-do). His supporters were muted only by raucous #ToriesForCorbyn then giddily convinced Labour was castrated.

The victor, after all, was everything that made Labour unelectable for what their party’s sensible and shrinking sect billed the “wilderness years”—18 years of irrelevance as Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher raged on.

NO COMMENT….RSK HE DID LOOK GREAT IN A TUXEDO

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/burmas-rohingya-muslims-need-trump-administrations-help/

President Obama stood idly by as the Burmese government slaughtered the Rohingya. President Trump can and must do better.

Throughout its second term, the Obama administration downplayed mounting evidence that Burma’s Rohingya community was being deliberately eradicated by the country’s military. Genocide was an inconvenient fact for an administration eager to claim a foreign-policy achievement in Burma’s democratic transition. With U.S. help, in 2015–16, Burma had been transformed from a pariah military dictatorship into a democracy headed by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, an international human-rights icon. But Burma’s deplorable religious-freedom record was hardly a secret.

Since 1999, Burma has been designated a severe and systematic religious persecutor under the U.S. International Religious Freedom Act. Its ethnic Rohingya Muslim and Kachin, Chin, and Karen Christian minorities have been regularly oppressed and subjected to brutal attempts of forcible conversion by its Buddhist majority. Violent conflict between them and a military bent on “Burmanization” has raged on and off since the country’s 1948 independence from Britain.

In 2012, the attacks against the Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s northern Rakhine state became particularly intense. That year, Genocide Watch issued an emergency alert that these Rohingya were being slaughtered and driven from their homes. On May 20, 2013, noted human-rights advocates Jose Ramos Horta, Muhammad Yunus, and Benedict Rogers wrote of these early warning signs of genocide in the New York Times:

The Rohingyas were recognized until the 1982 Citizenship Law stripped them of their citizenship and rendered them stateless. Since then, they have faced a slow-burning campaign of persecution, which exploded last June and again in October, resulting in the deaths of at least 1,000 and the displacement of at least 130,000. . . . Human Rights Watch has published evidence of mass graves and a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/180817

Since March 30, when Hamas launched its first “return march” with thousands storming Israel’s border, Israel’s media pundits have said neither side wants escalation. They had it right. What’s being termed “the small arrangement” looks like a big win for Hamas, whose strategy most resembles that of North Korea.

In 1999, North Korea was in a similar situation to Hamas now. Its economy was in tatters. State rations hadn’t been distributed for five years. Control of its population was slipping. Today, Hamas can’t make payroll or provide basic services and faces staggering unemployment. One of the generally agreed reasons why Hamas whipped its people up in the first place was to distract them from their economic problems.

According to the agreement, which sources say will be signed Friday in Cairo, Hamas will accept a yearlong ceasefire in exchange for a sea lane to Cyprus, extension of its fishing waters, the opening of border crossings on the Israel and Egyptian sides of the Gaza Strip, and humanitarian projects and funding from Egypt and Qatar to pay the salaries of its public servants. Qatar will also pay Gaza’s electric bills.

Curiously, despite the nearness of a deal, Khalil al-Haya, Hamas’s deputy head, called on Gazan residents to march en masse to the border. Terrorists continue floating fire bombs into Israel. One was spotted above the skies of Netivot on Thursday. This continued aggression, too, follows North Korean strategy.

The North Korean Model

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/180817

In the marvelous science fiction story, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, the blond haired Eloi who exuded beauty and kindness, but who were frail minded, became victims of cruel and brutal creatures called Morlocks. The story took the time traveler to a place thousands of years into the future.

But back in the second decade of the 21st century, and in the reality that now confronts us, I found myself making a disturbing comparison between the fate of the Eloi with what is happening in Sweden. As the Muslim migration – some would characterize it as an invasion – predictably has turned violent, cruel and brutal rioting is now roiling Swedish cities and towns.

Sweden was the first European country to fully embrace the ‘diversity’ myth, which posits that nation-states are unquestionably improved by a huge influx of non-native cultural aliens. It was also once one of the most peaceful countries in the world, then they welcomed in 600,000 Muslim migrants and the country is getting worse and worse, filled with Muslim violence and intolerance.

Many Swedes were horrified in early 2017 when U.S. President Donald Trump linked such immigration to rising crime in Sweden, but an increasing number now agree with him.

As I have written before, the vogue for ‘multiculturalism’ – along with its pernicious and suicidal handmaiden of ‘political correctness,’ – is effectively a process by which the native culture is supplanted and replaced by a foreign one. It is otherwise known as invasion and conquest and has since spread to other nations, to the manifest detriment of each of them.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12633/being-pro-muslim

No doubt those who ignore or cover up abuses such as beatings, female genital mutilation or general repression do so out of cultural sensitivity, deferring to traditionalist leaders and self-appointed representatives of various communities, including Muslim bodies. Their sensitivity, however, can end up gravely impairing the lives of literally hundreds of millions of Muslim women in allowing harmful practices to be perpetuated.

Genuine humanitarian concerns about injustice to Muslims, however, have been mingled with a political and religious attitude that condemns anyone who expresses even the mildest questioning of Islam — so much so, in fact, that many well-intentioned Western politicians, human rights advocates, church leaders and journalists have turned Islam into the one and only ideology that must never be criticized, and have called anyone who so much as comments on some of the precepts of Islam as “racist.”

The view that Islam should not be questioned, seems to have led to a lack of reciprocity: radical Islamic individuals and bodies are often permitted to preach hatred for the West in mosques, centres, and university campuses, but non-Muslims commenting on genuine concerns are frequently the objects of public abuse and even criminal prosecution.

What is needed are more organizations that stand out as pro-Muslim in support of bettering the lives of Muslims; many are often too fearful of retribution to speak out.

My, how the world changes. When, in late 1978, your humble correspondent presented the first translations into English of passages from Ayatollah Khomeini’s book, Velayat-e Faqih (“Governance of the Jurist”), bought in Tehran in 1977, I knew the religious extremists would challenge the shah’s rule, but I was certain they had no chance against his army, police, and security services.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271029/death-france-stephen-brown

If radical Islamic clerics thought they were immune to terror threats themselves, then they have now been disabused of that notion. Last month in France, instead of the predictable pattern of arrests of Islamic jihadists plotting deadly terrorist attacks; this time, the jihadists were apparently the targets themselves. This turn of events signals France’s accelerated spiral into lawless violence.
The French newspaper Le Figaro reported that police in June took ten people into custody for allegedly targeting for attack “radical imams, veiled women and convicted jihadists released from prison.” (There are currently 512 people convicted on terrorism charges in French prisons.) The arrests were made in the Paris region, Corsica, and in Charante-Maritime.

“This group was aiming for ‘targets presumed in connection with radical Islam,’ ” a source told Le Figaro.

Raids on several homes turned up “rifles, pistols, and homemade grenades” and police reported this “groupuscule” (small group) “trained regularly at sport shooting clubs and had prepared arms caches and food supplies in case of a major crisis.” (Which makes one wonder whether they were “ultra-right” terrorists or simply survivalists.)