RUTHFULLY YOURS

Egyptian intellectual Dr. Khaled Montaser referred to the “scientific-miraculous” nature of the Quran (i’jaz) as a “great delusion” and “an anesthetic or a nice sedative” for the Arabs and the Muslims.

“Where does extremism come from? People, we must admit — as our president has often said — that there are elements in our books of heritage that incite to this. We must admit this.” — Dr. Khaled Montaser.

Montaser’s harsh criticism should be understood as a call, similar to that of other caring Muslims “trying to fix this,” not to abandon Islam, but to modernize or risk remaining “at the tail end of all the nations.”

In an interview with Sky News Arabia on April 20, Egyptian intellectual Dr. Khaled Montaser referred to the “scientific-miraculous” nature of the Quran (i’jaz) as a “great delusion” and “an anesthetic or a nice sedative” for the Arabs and the Muslims, making them feel superior: “we are superior,” “we are the best,” “we are the greatest.”

Montaser, head of the Dermatology Department of the Suez Canal Authority, linked this “delusion” to the prevalence of Islamic terrorists. “As Muslims,” he said, “we pay a steep price for this. We are at the tail end of all the nations.”

“Among the names of all those who detonated explosive belts in Europe or America,” he went on, “one cannot find a single Hindu or Buddhist name. They always have Muslim names. Furthermore, how come Muslims always oppose modernity?”

“Our interpretation,” he went on, “is in conflict with modernity…”

“They insist on screaming their religion out loud: ‘I am a Muslim!’ They are always screaming that they are the only ones in possession of the truth, that they are the best, the only ones to be spared the Hellfire. They carry these notions with them wherever they go… Where does extremism come from? People, we must admit — as our president has often said — that there are elements in our books of heritage that incite to this. We must admit this… As a thinker trying to fix this, I must find this shocking. The reality is bitter. As Muslims, we pay a steep price for this. We are at the tail end of all the nations.”

Germany’s Federal Office for Refugees and Migration (BAMF) will review more than 25,000 asylum decisions after allegations of corruption at its regional office in the northern city of Bremen.

Some of those granted asylum were considered by German authorities to be potential security risks, according to the news magazine Der Spiegel. They include Syrian intelligence operatives, human smugglers and other hard-core criminals — as well as potential Islamic State jihadists.

BAMF currently rejects almost all asylum requests from converts from Islam to Christianity, according to Thomas Schirrmacher, president of the International Society for Human Rights. He said that when undergoing “belief tests,” BAMF often relies on Muslim translators who deliberately mistranslate at the expense of Christians or converts.

Germany’s Federal Office for Refugees and Migration (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, BAMF) will review more than 25,000 asylum decisions after allegations of corruption at its regional office in the northern city of Bremen.

Interior Minister Horst Seehofer announced the audit after it emerged that a former official at BAMF’s Bremen branch allegedly accepted cash bribes in exchange for granting asylum to at least 1,200 refugees who did not meet the necessary criteria. Five others, including three lawyers, an interpreter and an intermediary, are also being investigated.

The three lawyers allegedly received cash payments from “refugees” across Germany and submitted their asylum applications to the Bremen office. The interpreter then “interpreted” asylum interviews in such a way that the answers supposedly given by refugees matched the requirements for successful asylum applications. He reportedly received €500 ($680) per asylum seeker.

Anni Cyrus is a former child bride from Iran who suffered terribly under Sharia Law and was able to miraculously escape Islam’s totalitarian clutches. Today she is a human rights activist who tours our nation in an effort to raise awareness about Sharia; she runs her own website, LiveUpToFreedom.com, and produces this writer’s web-tv show, The Glazov Gang, which aims to tell the truth about the Leftist-Islamic Unholy Alliance.

Anni’s brave and noble fight on behalf of Muslims and non-Muslims who suffer at the hands of Jihad and Islamic Law has made her all the right enemies. The hate group, Southern Poverty Law Center, for example, is now targeting Anni, as is the Muslim-Brotherhood front-group CAIR, which is doing its best to try to silence the former child bride. Anni should take pride, of course, in these kind of attacks by these vile forces, since they confirm that she is doing something very right and humane — and effectively so.

Anni was recently invited to the Henry Monsky Lodge of B’nai B’rith in Omaha, Nebraska, to talk about Sharia Law and how she survived it. At the end of her talk, a leftist by the name of Steve, who described himself as a “lawyer,” attacked Anni with the preferred Jihad Denial slanders and accused her of preaching “hatred.” His intriguing performance was caught on video — which can be seen here. As it quickly became evident, Anni takes no prisoners when confronted with ignorance and she wiped the floor with Steve — just as she recently did with an Antifa “feminist.”

The exchange between Steve and Anni is crucial for us to highlight and examine, because the accusations and slanders that Steve hurled at Anni are the key falsehoods and smears that hate groups like CAIR and SPLC hurl at her and at other truth-tellers and freedom fighters. These malicious libels and slanders are at the core of the Jihad Denial that is now controlling our culture and its boundaries of discourse. And it is precisely this denial that clouds the threat we face in the terror war — and pushes what propels it into invisibility.

In his 2008 book titled Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad, Andrew C. McCarthy sounded the alarm when he described a “zealous international network of warriors dead certain that history and Allah are on their side.” Since then, this network has not diminished; it seems to metastasize in every part of the world.

Violent jihad by its nature makes headlines and causes grief and anger. It also gives resolve to those who would fight back. Law enforcement will track down the perpetrators and bring them to court or kill them outright. But a far more dangerous and insidious undermining of America continues unabated. It seeks to ultimately destroy the foundations of American values.

It is important to see the larger picture of what the Islamic jihadists assiduously work to achieve in this country. Connecting the dots irrefutably proves their game plan.

It begins with immigration, or hijra. I have often wondered why a group of people accustomed to very warm climates continues to settle in extremely cold geographical areas. Consider that the Nordic countries now boast a growing Muslim population, and Minnesota is now host to Somali Muslims. In war lingo, this could be construed as a siege, whereby a country’s borders are sealed off by the enemy…with the aim of compelling the surrender of those inside.

Hijra is immigration by jihadists who seek to populate and dominate new lands. They have absolutely no intention of assimilating peacefully in a new host nation. In fact, they scorn the host nation’s traditions and legal systems. Rather, hijrah is a means to “colonize and then transform non-Muslim target societies since the ultimate goal is global submission to sharia law.” So Sweden, under the much vaunted multicultural umbrella, opened its borders to Muslim immigration. Today, it is the rape capital of the West.

Among the real-life Norwegian phenomena made gentle fun of in the 2012-14 Netflix series Lilyhammer, starring Steven Van Zandt as a New York mobster who has moved to Norway under the Witness Protection Program, were natteravnene — the “night ravens,” groups of unarmed citizen volunteers, including little old ladies, who patrol the night streets to talk wayward youths out of breaking the law. The concept is a quaint one, originating in a time when virtually all crimes committed in the middle of the Norwegian night were petty misdemeanors and when the perpetrators were Norwegian kids who, if confronted on the verge of a transgression by somebody their parents’ or grandparents’ age, could be expected to hang their heads in shame and go home.

No more: last Saturday night, a gang of “youths” in the Groruddalen area of Oslo, the physical descriptions of whom in the media made it clear that they were not ethnic Norwegians, threw rocks at a group of Natteravner. The next night, a youth gang roamed around Tøyen, another Muslim neighborhood of Oslo, and threw rocks at passersby. Minor crimes, perhaps — but, in the Norwegian context, marks of a sea change. I’ve written my share of pieces about the consequences of the Islamization of European cities, Oslo among them; not long ago, in a longish piece for City Journal, I chronicled the decline and fall of Muslim-heavy Groruddalen over the past couple of decades.

Don’t believe my reports? Fine — listen to what Yuri Snegirev has to say. Snegirov, a reporter for Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the Russian government’s newspaper of record, visited Norway recently and recorded his observations in a three-part series of articles. (Though I was alerted to their existence by an Aftenposten headline, that paper’s summary of Snegirev’s pieces was behind a paywall, so I hunted down the original texts, which, to my surprise, were made almost entirely comprehensible by Google Translate.)

Snegirev’s account of his visit focused largely on such dry matters as the competition between Russia and Norway over oil drilling and fishing in the Bering Sea. Far more interesting were his social and cultural observations, such as his shock at the price of beer (and, even more, the price of a bottle of water, even though Norwegian tap water is exceptional). Snegirov marveled at the range of accommodations on the short train trip into Oslo — the first- and second-class compartments, the quiet car, the family car (noisy kiddies). He was appalled by how costly it is to travel by car, given the high tax on imported cars, the hefty tolls (and the extra charge to drive into Oslo), and the staggering price of gas (the world’s highest). He highlighted one thing that I’ve griped about every winter since moving to Norway two decades ago: nobody shovels snow, so that the city sidewalks, except where underlaid with heating pipes, are covered for months at a time with deadly sheets of ice. CONTINUE AT SITE

Neither the Right nor the Left is doing a good job of defending, representing or embodying the values of our civilisation. Meanwhile, our public opinion is seduced by the dream of a world without enemies, by the pathologies of relativism—cultural, moral and epistemological.

The future of Western civilisation will depend on how well the present can mobilise the intellectual resources of the past to meet the challenges of the future. Today, we are threatened by an unprecedented array of external adversaries and dangers, ranging from Islamist terror and Russian or Chinese aggression to the fall-out from failed states. We also face internal threats—above all the collapse of confidence in Judeo-Christian values and democratic capitalism. Can either the Left or the Right rise to the challenge of the present crisis? Or are both political traditions mired in self-destructive mind-sets that prevent them from grasping the scale of the task, let alone reversing the decline?

I want to begin with the Right, because the crisis of conservatism in Europe, America and here in Australia seems too deep to be explained by the vagaries of individual personalities or parties. Most leaders of the centre-Right in the Western democracies appear to be the prisoners of their own anxieties: the fear of proscription by the self-appointed guardians of self-righteousness; the fear of humiliation for failure to flatter those who parade their status as victims; and the fear of oblivion for simply ignoring the clamour to do something when there is nothing useful to be done. The watchword of many a conservative statesman used to be masterly inactivity; now it is miserly depravity. There seems no place for the old-fashioned conservative who steers a steady course, is frugal and firm yet decent and honest; who, rather than pick people’s pockets, leaves their money to fructify there—in short, the John Howards of this world. When Theresa May, a strong prime minister in this tradition, took office two months ago after the vote for Brexit, she felt the need to make gestures to the nanny state: an “industrial policy” and an “equality audit”. Why does she think the British state, whose record of central planning and social engineering is lamentable, should repeat the follies of the past? Could it be that Mrs May still feels the need to appease the gods of socialism, in which nobody, least of all she, still believes? It seems scarcely credible. Yet the same phenomenon is observable everywhere. Conservatism as a living tradition, a coherent conceptual framework for freedom under the law, has been hollowed out and filled with the detritus of defunct ideologies.

This past week in Indonesia, several entire families of suicide bombers attacked Christian worshippers. Normally it is Jews who are on the sharp end of Islam’s enmity for all other creeds, yet somehow, unlike Hitler’s very few latter day disciples, Muslim hatred goes largely unremarked

Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers—already, you see, the world had fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing was Christianity!—then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies heroism and which opens the seventh heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so.
—Adolf Hitler

jew hate IIIn The Australian last year Julie Nathan of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry wrote an article headed in the ink-and-paper edition, “Attack on Jews a threat to all society”. I agreed with that. An attack on Jews is a threat to all society. But I found very little to agree with in the emphasis of the body of the article, which focused almost entirely on right-wing and neo-Nazi groups. There was just one passing reference to leftism and Islam: “Jeremy Corbyn also has shamefully tolerated and been accused of condoning anti-Semitism among the far-left and Islamist groups he has courted.” That’s all.

This is firing the guns in the wrong direction. It all but ignores the most powerful, well-financed and murderous anti-Semitic force in the world today.

A few weeks ago, 3000 Muslims outside the US embassy in London (video below) chanted the anti-Semitic cry, “Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa yahud!” This translates as: “Jews, remember Khaybar! The army of Muhammad is returning!” This is a reference to the battle, constantly caressed in Muslim historical memory, when the last flourishing Jewish communities in Arabia, survivors of the Roman diaspora and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, were wiped out by Islamic warriors in 629.

More than 250 French public figures — elected officials from all sides of the political aisle, representatives of different religions, intellectuals and artists — signed a manifesto against “the new anti-Semitism” brought to France by mass immigration from the Muslim world.

The manifesto, published by Le Parisien, sounded the alarm against a “low-level ethnic cleansing” of Jews in Paris and demanded that the verses of the Koran which call for the killing and punishment of Jews, Christians and other non-Muslims “be obsoleted” by theological authorities. In a counter-manifesto published by Le Monde, a group of 30 French imams insisted that Islam is not anti-Semitic.

“Anti-Semitism in Europe, in France, in Toulouse is no longer just by the far-right, but from political Islam.” — Aviv Zonabend, Deputy Mayor of Toulouse.

An estimated six million people — around one-tenth of France’s population — live in 1,500 neighborhoods classified by the government as Sensitive Urban Zones (zones urbaines sensibles, ZUS).

April 1. Interior Minister Gérard Collomb, in an interview with the newspaper Ouest-France, said that French authorities had foiled 20 jihadi attacks in 2017 and two in 2018. He also revealed that of the 26,000 known jihadis in France with S-files (fiche “S,” those considered highly dangerous), only 20 were deported during 2017.

April 4. French prosecutors called for Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, an MP for Essone (Île-de-France), to be given a suspended fine of €5,000 ($6,000) for “provocation to hatred or discrimination” for using the words “migratory invasion.” While running as a candidate for president in the 2017 elections, he tweeted: “In 2016, the Socialists compensated for the declining birth rate with the migratory invasion.” Dupont-Aignan said that his remarks were aimed at the Socialist Party rather than immigration and that, in any event, as an MP he is immune from prosecution. The public prosecutor disagreed: “We have a leading politician, a declared candidate in the presidential election, who publicly promotes, on his personal account, a conspiracy and racist theory born in the depths of the French far right…the thesis of ‘the great replacement’ by [French writer] Renaud Camus. A failure to condemn him would open the floodgates of uninhibited racist speech…against all those who do not belong to the national community, including migrants and immigrants.” The court will decide the matter on June 6.

The archipelago of political Islam in Europe, from Tariq Ramadan to the Muslim Brotherhood, revolves around the orbit of the Qatar-Iran axis. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood openly sided with Khomeini’s revolutionaries as they overthrew the Shah, and now threatens Saudi Arabia and the UAE and others in the region.

After the revolution, for the first time, the Iranians declared war on their own cultural life: theaters were closed, concerts were banned, entertainers fled the country, cinemas were confiscated, broadcasting was forbidden.

Will Europe – the cradle of Western culture and civilization – open its eyes and stop regularly taking the side of the Iran’s tyrannical ayatollahs?

The United States just withdrew from the Iranian nuclear deal. The move is fully justified not only on the grounds security, but primarily because Iran’s Iranian Khomeinist revolution is a deadly and propulsive ideology that the West cannot allow to become a nuclearized one.

At the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, everything changed when Said and Sharif Kouachi murdered 11 people in its Paris office. Among the texts recovered on the Kouachi brothers’ laptop was the Iranian call for death against the novelist Salman Rushdie, calling it “fully justified”. The killers were inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini’s deadly edict against Rushdie. The bloodbath at Charlie Hebdo is one of the poisoned fruits of the Islamic Republic. The Iranian ayatollahs fear the allure of Western culture. That is why, since 1979, they are at war with it.

Never, before Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise to power, was a writer forced to live under the threat of deliberate murder, with a bounty on his head, for criticizing Islam. Before the Iranian Revolution, no Arab was marked for death. Since Khomeini, murdering literary dissidents has become a routine: the Algerian writer Tahar Djaout, the Egyptian intellectual Farag Foda, Turkish writers murdered in Sivas, and recently butchered bloggers from Bangladesh. The fatwa against Rushdie was one of Iran’s most successful attacks on Western civilization and efforts to intimidate the West.