RUTHFULLY YOURS

During the past week, Londoners have woken to the fact that for the first time in living memory the homicide rate in their capital city has overtaken that of New York. There were 15 homicides in London in February, compared with 14 in New York. In March, there were 22 in London, 21 in New York. In recent weeks in London there has been at least one gang-related stabbing almost every day: often fatal, sometimes not. At least 35 deaths since the start of this year have been gang-related. Doctors talk of the emergency wards in parts of London in the evenings resembling a warzone. Just one of the oddities is that most Londoners remain untouched by this. As Harry Mount wrote at The Spectator last month, it is perfectly possible for a killing to be going on near a smart north-London dinner party.

Nevertheless, given that, among Brits, New York still has a reputation for violence, the comparison has struck a nerve. Apart from focusing the national mind, it has also fired up one of the most subterranean and troubling calculations any political class has to make. How many lives are you willing to sacrifice in pursuit of a political position?

In recent years the subject of stop-and-search has been an exceptionally emotive one in the U.K., as it is in America. Because it was deemed to target young black men disproportionately, police and politicians alike found stop-and-search to be a useful tool — not for targeting those people who were thought most likely to be carrying weapons but for parading their own political virtues by objecting to the practice.

Recently, London’s murder rate caught up with New York City’s. Which is weird, because there shouldn’t be any murders in either city. After all, both NYC and the UK have very strict gun laws. As we’ve learned from our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters on the left, banning guns leads to fewer gun crimes. (That’s why the Secret Service doesn’t carry them!) So how is this happening? How can such a gun-free utopia be so dangerous? The answer will terrify you: scary, evil KNIVES.

Jason Douglas, WSJ:

A series of stabbings has put the number of murders in London this year on a par with New York, with police and lawmakers blaming the surge on drugs and gang-related violence…

Police said Friday there have been 53 murders in the British capital in the year through April 5, 16 more than the number recorded during the first four months of 2017…

A spokeswoman for the U.K. Home Office said the government is taking action to restrict young people’s access to knives and other offensive weapons, such as banning online stores from delivering knives to homes.

This is serious, people. Common-sense gun control has been such a huge success that now it’s time for the next step: common-sense knife control.

This is bad news for Jack the Ripper.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s knife-confiscation effort even has its own website, with a corresponding hashtag:

#Knifefree, eh? Let’s hope Londoners don’t think this means they’re getting bladed weapons without charge.

No offense to Mayor Khan, but I can think of a few good reasons to have a knife. It can come in handy when you need to:

Cut up a piece of food
Open a box
Perform an emergency tracheotomy
Spread some nice cream cheese on a bagel
Live in a crime-infested $#!+hole like London

If knives are outlawed, only outlaws will have knives.

Banning weapons has never made people safer, and it never will. Criminals don’t follow laws in the first place — that’s why they’re called criminals! — and law-abiding people are just rendered defenseless against attackers. If you ban guns, people will use knives. Or clubs. Or jars of acid. Or whatever else they can get their hands on. Hell, now we know that terrorists and white supremacists will even drive cars and trucks into crowds of people, if that’s what it takes. Bad people are always going to find ways to hurt and kill others. And they’re always going to prey on those they believe to be defenseless. CONTINUE AT SITE

Islam is filling the cultural vacuum of a society with no children and which believes — wrongly — it has no enemies.

In Sweden, by 2050, almost one in three people will be Muslim.

The European mainstream mindset now seems to believe that “evil” comes only from our own sins: racism, sexism, elitism, xenophobia, homophobia, the guilt of the heterosexual white Western male — and never from non-European cultures. Europe now postulates an infinite idealization of the “other”, above all the migrant.

A tiredness seems to be why these countries do not take meaningful measures to defeat jihadism, such as closing Salafist mosques or expelling radical imams.

Muslim extremists understand this advantage: so long as they avoid another enormous massacre like 9/11, they will be able to continue taking away human lives and undermining the West without awakening it from its inertia.

In a prophetic conference held in Vienna on May 7, 1935, the philosopher Edmund Husserl said, “The greatest danger to Europe is tiredness”. Eighty years later, the same fatigue and passivity still dominate Western European societies.

It is the sort of exhaustion that we see in Europeans’ falling birth rates, the mushrooming public debt, chaos in the streets, and Europe’s refusal to invest resources in its security and military might. Last month, in a Paris suburb, the Basilica of Saint Denis, where France’s Christian kings are buried, was occupied by 80 migrants and pro-illegal-immigration activists. The police had to intervene to free the site.

Stephen Bullivant, a professor of theology and the sociology of religion at St Mary’s University in London, recently published a report, “Europe’s Young Adults and Religion”:

“Christianity as a default, as a norm, is gone, and probably gone for good – or at least for the next 100 years,” Bullivant said.

According to Bullivant, many young Europeans “will have been baptised and then never darken the door of a church again. Cultural religious identities just aren’t being passed on from parents to children. It just washes straight off them… “And we know the Muslim birthrate is higher than the general population, and they have much higher [religious] retention rates.”

Richard Dawkins, an atheist and the author of The God Delusion, responded to the study’s release by tweeting to his millions of Twitter followers:

Before we rejoice at the death throes of the relatively benign Christian religion, let’s not forget Hilaire Belloc’s menacing rhyme:
“Always keep a-hold of nurse
For fear of finding something worse.”

Dawkins is apparently concerned that that after the demise of Christianity in Europe, there will not be an atheistic utopia, but a rising Islam.

To read Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch website regularly is to get an unsettling daily dose of real-life Islam-related horrors. But on April 4, Robert posted a half-hour audio that was even more disturbing than the bulk of his usual offerings. The audio records the visit by a couple of British police officers to the home of a British subject who had apparently been reported to the authorities for posting anti-Islam comments on social media. The householder in question greeted the cops with surprising – perhaps nervous? – cheeriness, and for a half hour he earnestly, willingly, and good-humoredly answered their indefensibly intrusive and insulting questions about his opinions. Among them: What were his political beliefs? What did he think of Islam? Did he hate Muslims? Was he a racist? Was he a Nazi?

It quickly became clear that this man – whose name we never learn, unless I missed something – is anything but a racist or Nazi or hater of any kind. On the contrary, he is a thoughtful citizen who, after considerable study, has come to some sensible conclusions about Islam. He made it clear that, unlike his visitors, he had read the Koran, had acquainted himself with the major specifics of the life of Muhammed, and knew the basics of Islamic theology. He was, it emerged, a strong opponent of Islam for precisely the right reasons, including (as he mentioned) the fact that it commands believers to do harm to infidels, Jews, and gays.

Yet even as he spelled out these indisputable truths about Islam, the police officers responded as if he was imagining it all. They suggested that he might want to sit down for a conversation with an Islamic scholar, who could clear up what they seemed determined to view as his misunderstandings. They insisted, moreover, that they were not the Thought Police – even though there is no other word for police officers who show up at the home of an innocent citizen to interrogate him about his personal opinions.

A couple of reader comments on the Jihad Watch audio suggested it was fake, on the grounds that police officers in a free country would surely never do such a thing. Wrong. For me, the audio brought back vivid memories – for I’ve had my own very similar encounter with European policemen. My experience was slightly different in that instead of being visited at home, I was summoned to a local police station in Norway, where I live. But the encounter itself, which took place in January 2014, was strikingly similar to the one recorded on the Jihad Watch audio. My interrogators even assured me, as their British colleagues assured the fellow in the audio, that they were not the Thought Police. When I heard that statement on the audio, I couldn’t help wondering: are cops around Europe, even in different countries, working off of the same script?

Immediately after returning home from my visit to the police station back in January 2014, I sat down and typed up everything I could remember about the exchange I’d had with my new uniformed friends. The conversation had been in Norwegian, and I wrote it out in Norwegian. I sent copies to a few friends of mine, including Hans Rustad, editor of the vitally important Norwegian website document.no, who, in response, told me that he had heard similar, and equally disturbing, accounts from other people living in Norway. He actually took a copy of my testimony with him to a meeting at the Norwegian Ministry of Justice, where he confronted officials with this example of thoroughly inappropriate police conduct.

My bet: Orban and his party will not manage a landslide but will hang on.

Today, Sunday, April 8, sees Viktor Orban’s attempt to win a third successive term for his party, Fidesz, and for himself as prime minister, put to the test by the country’s eighth election since the end of Communism. Hungarians have become used to elections since 1989 and to power changing hands as a result. Governing parties lost elections in 1994, 1998, 2002, and 2010.

Usually an election in a small Central European country with this democratic record would struggle to get into the news at all, let alone into the headlines. Yet the restless caravan of the world’s media has for the last week been bidding up the prices of Budapest’s best restaurants and hotels (which, incidentally, are very good indeed — as a glimpse at the travel pages of the same media would disclose) to cover the result.

And this level of interest is itself a story — and a changing one.

Until a month ago, the international media consensus was that the election was a formality, or at best a foregone conclusion, because Orban was the authoritarian strongman of a nation that had ceased to be a real democracy. Fidesz had ensured its victory by gerrymandering the election system, suppressing opposition media, buying votes with EU money, and swamping the country with posters appealing to the nationalist and ethnic prejudices of the electorate. The conditions for genuine democratic elections were therefore no longer in place, and Orban’s victory would confirm the fact. To be sure, the media would still turn up in large contingents for the burial, but the story they wrote would be the end of democracy.

And then in Hodmezovasarehely, a town in the southeast of Hungary (pop., 47,019, local attractions: thermal bathing), there was a small political earthquake. An independent candidate for the local mayoralty, but one supported by all the opposition parties, easily defeated the front-runner Fidesz candidate by a healthy margin of 16 points.

That was genuinely a big surprise since the town had been a Fidesz stronghold. At once there was an outburst of optimism among the opposition parties along the lines of . . . a Fidesz election triumph wasn’t a foregone conclusion . . . if only the opposition parties united as they had done in Hodmezovasarehely . . . the mathematics for an opposition victory were there in the result . . . And so on and so forth. That response may have overinterpreted one small-town election result — we’ll know later tonight — but it made the result look less certain and gave the opposition a real fillip.

“Erdoğan has cynically referred to these students as ‘terrorists,’ vowed to expel them from Boğaziçi University, and to deny them the right to study at any other university. We have heard this kind of verbal attack from Erdoğan before and it was followed by the detention of thousands of academics, journalists, artists, and human rights advocates.” — Open Letter signed by over 1,800 renowned academics from around the world, including Nobel and Pulitzer Prize laureates.

Ankara does nothing to prevent ISIS from selling Yazidi women and children in Turkey; allows unspecified numbers of people to use Turkish territory as a point of entrance into Syria and Iraq to join ISIS or other jihadist groups; hosts and aids Hamas, a terrorist organization that proudly targets civilians and vows to obliterate Israel; and enables jihadi terrorism through the oil trade.

Turkey, a NATO ally that considers itself a worthy candidate for EU membership, warmly welcomes and assists terrorists who commit genocidal crimes against humanity, yet persecutes non-violent academics and journalists whose opinions differ from those propagated by the regime.

On March 19, a group of students at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University, Turkey’s leading institute of higher education, demonstrated against an event on campus. The event against which they were demonstrating, organized by the Society for Islamic Research, was to champion the Turkish soldiers who had participated in the Afrin invasion. While the pro-government students distributed Turkish delight sweets, the counter-demonstrators unfolded a banner reading: “Invasions and massacres are not [to be celebrated] with delights.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan responded by having the anti-war students arrested for spreading “terrorist” propaganda. On April 3, a Turkish court jailed nine of them and freed the other six, pending their trial.

(CNN)Here is some background information on terror attacks involving vehicles used as deadly weapons by radicalized individuals or terror groups.
Facts:
Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch encouraged its Western recruits to use trucks as weapons. A 2010 webzine article, “The Ultimate Mowing Machine,” called for deploying a pickup truck as a “mowing machine, not to mow grass but mow down the enemies of Allah.”
In September 2014, ISIS spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani called for lone wolf attacks using improvised weaponry, “If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock or slaughter him with a knife or run him over with your car or throw him down from a high place or choke him or poison him.”
Timeline:
March 3, 2006 – Mohammed Taheri-azar, an Iranian-American, drives an SUV into an area crowded with students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Nine people sustain minor injuries during the attack, which Teheri-azar later says is retribution for the killing of Muslims overseas. He is convicted of attempted murder in 2008 and is sentenced to 33 years in prison.

October 22, 2014 – A three-month old girl and an Ecuadorian tourist are killed when a driver swerves into a crowd at a light rail station in Jerusalem. The driver, Abdel Rahman al-Shaludi is shot and killed by police. Israeli media reported he published militant writing on Facebook and supported Hamas, a fundamentalist Islamic group that has conducted attacks in Gaza and the West Bank, but his family denied he supported Hamas or any terror organization.
July 14, 2016 – After a Bastille Day fireworks display in Nice, France, a man drives a 20-ton rental truck into the crowd, striking and killing 86 people. The attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, a Tunisian national, drives nearly a mile on the beachfront promenade before he is shot and killed by authorities. French officials say Bouhlel seemed to become radicalized “very quickly” by ISIS propaganda before the attack. He also suffered from mental illness, according to his father.
November 28, 2016 – At Ohio State University, 11 people are injured when a student, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, 18, carries out a car and knife attack. A campus police officer shoots and kills Artan, whom police believe was inspired by ISIS and the radical cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki.

BERLIN — Authorities say a van crashed into a crowd Saturday outside a popular bar in the German city of Muenster, killing two people and injuring 20 others. The driver of the vehicle shot and killed himself after the crash, local police said. Six of the injured are listed in critical condition.

It’s not yet clear who the suspect is or what the motive is. Police said they are examining reports that other suspects may have fled the crash scene.

The incident is being treated as terrorism, but the suspect’s identification has not yet been transferred to the U.S., a U.S. intelligence source told CBS News.

Herbert Reul, the interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia state, said the driver was a German citizen. Reul stressed the investigation is at an early stage but said “at the moment, nothing speaks for there being any Islamist background.”

“We are investigating in all directions,” he explained, according to the Associated Press. Reul said two people were killed in the crash, lowering the previous figure provided by police.

Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reports that the suspect’s apartment was being searched for possible explosives.

On Twitter, local police warned residents to “avoid the area near the Kiepenkerl pub” in the city’s historic downtown area where a large-scale police operation was underway.

Police said a suspicious object was found in the van and they’re still examining it to see if it is dangerous. They told German news agency dpa that the object was the reason why a large area around the scene was sealed off after the crash.

Residents said they were enjoying the first warm afternoon in the area that features many shops and cafés, CBS News correspondent Roxana Saberi said on CBSN. People were outside enjoying themselves, many of them college students, enjoying the weather.

Today, France is the only country in the Western world where Jews are murdered simply for being Jews.

Jews may be the main victims, but they are not the only ones. In just five years, 250 people in France have been murdered by Islamic terrorists.

The main problem is the spread of hatred against Jews, France and the Western world. Many Muslim extremists incite murder; and more and more often, murders occur.

A year ago, in Paris, on April 4, 2017, Sarah Halimi, an elderly Jew, was horribly tortured and murdered in her home in Paris, then thrown from her window by a man shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the greatest”) . She had reported to the police several times that she was the victim of anti-Semitic threats — in vain.

Less than a year later in Paris, another elderly — and disabled — Jew, Mireille Knoll, was raped, tortured and murdered in her apartment by another Muslim extremist. Mrs. Knoll, a Holocaust survivor, had also contacted the police to say that she had been threatened. Again, the police did nothing.

For months, the French justice system tried to cover-up the anti-Semitic nature of Sarah Halimi’s murder; the judge in charge of Mireille Knoll’s case at least recognized the anti-Semitic nature of her murder at once.

Both women were victims of an anti-Semitic hatred that is rising quickly in France.

French Jews live in constant insecurity. The men who murder them evidently do not hesitate to break into homes and attack elderly women; they seem to know they can threaten their future victims without fear of arrest. More often than not, the police do not even record the complaints of Jews who go to the police station, but simply note in the daybook that a Jew claiming threats came and went.

The cultural-Marxist Left’s war on Western civilization and American society is conducted on many fronts, including the courts and the streets, but also on a daily basis in the arena of public opinion, via the language. One prominent example has been their transformation of the two human sexes, male and female, first into “genders” (a term drawn from English grammar, and of which there are three, including neuter) and then into multiple genders. This of course demands a new set of pronouns which promptly are given “identity” characteristics, the better to tribalize and thus weaponize these hitherto unknown species of human beings.

Another example is the transformation of the words “immigrants” and “asylum,” which in the space of a decade or so have now acquired a host of subtextual signifiers of race and class in order to change their meaning. To those of us who are the descendants of the last great wave of genuine immigration, which ended around 1920, the words have a sentimental patina about them, recalling the great-grandparents from the old countries of Europe still glimpsed in sepia-toned photographs—the folks who arrived with nothing, worked hard, married either within or without their ethnic group, built houses, started families, moved up and moved out into the mainstream of American society and disappeared into history.

They are our familial heroes who arrived with no entitlement chips on their shoulders, and asked for nothing but an opportunity to work hard and do well. And in exchange, they promised allegiance to their new land, swore to put aside, insofar as possible, the old ways, customs, and conflicts, endure nativist tribulations, and subsume themselves into something larger called the United States of America. None of them arrived with a “right” to enter the country, none expected either a handout or the immediate right to vote, and all understood they were here at the sufferance of the American people.