RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

If it is considered ‘objectionable’ in the West to talk about the factual consequences of migration, in Sweden it is now viewed as a crime.

The kind of ‘integration’ that the mosque in Växjö is reportedly spreading to the local Muslim inhabitants is that Muslims are urged not to participate in the Christmas celebration of “kuffars” [a derogatory term for ‘disbelievers’], and Jews are, of course, mentioned as the enemies of Allah. The mosque’s school uses Saudi Arabian school curricula, and encourages women not to dress in ‘Western clothes’.

“Silence has become an established norm in certain groups of inhabitants” in these areas…. there is pressure from relatives and religious communities, not to contact authorities, but to use the local alternative systems, such as the mosque, instead. Sometimes, the local criminal gangs even tell the residents to call them, instead of the police, to minimize the presence of police in the area. — BRÅ, the Swedish Crime Prevention Council

It increasingly appears that it will be Sweden that integrates into Islamic culture.

In 2017, a Swedish police report, “Utsatta områden 2017”, (“Vulnerable Areas 2017”, commonly known as “no-go zones” or lawless areas) showed that there are 61 such areas in Sweden. They encompass 200 criminal networks, consisting of an estimated 5,000 criminals. Twenty-three of those areas were especially critical: children as young as 10 had been involved in serious crimes there, including ones involving weapons and drugs. Most of the inhabitants were non-Western, mainly Muslim, immigrants.

A new report “The Relationship with the Judiciary in Socially Vulnerable Areas” from BRÅ (Brottsförebyggande Rådet), the Swedish Crime Prevention Council, shows that more than half of the inhabitants of these areas — around 500,000 people — think that criminals affect people in the areas by scaring people from appearing as witnesses, from calling the police, from moving freely, and from intervening when witnessing vandalism. Residents fear repercussions from the local criminals, not only against themselves but also against family members.

U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley slammed the United Nations on Tuesday for pushing an investigation into the measures Israel took to secure its border during violent clashes with Hamas-backed insurgents earlier this week. After she concluded her speech, she walked out of the chamber when a Palestinian representative began to speak.

For months, Palestinians have been protesting along the Gaza-Israeli border in objection to Israel’s 70 years in existence. Protestors have been reportedly burning tires in order to create a thick black cloud of smoke that obfuscates them and enables them to carry out acts of violence. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) say Hamas insurgents used the U.S.’s embassy relocation to Jerusalem as an excuse to storm the border and plant explosives. At least 58 Palestinians were killed yesterday, spurring the U.N. to propose investigating the IDF to determine if their actions violated international law — a proposal Haley slammed as preposterous.

An Iranian student group known as the Iranian Justice Seeker Student Movement has been putting up posters offering a $100,000 bounty to anyone who will blow up the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem.

The Washington Free Beacon:

“The Student Justice Movement will support anybody who destroy the illegal American embassy in Jerusalem,” the poster states in Farsi, Arabic, and English, according to an independent translation of the propaganda poster provided to the Free Beacon.

There will be a “$100,000 dollar prize for the person who destroys the illegal American embassy in Jerusalem,” the poster states.

The call for an attack on the new embassy is just the latest escalation by hostile Islamic states and leaders who have lashed out at the United States and President Donald Trump for making good on a campaign promise to relocate the embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s declared capital city of Jerusalem.

News of the bomb threat was first reported by the University Student News Network, a regional Farsi-language site that aggregates relevant news briefs.

“The Student Movement for Justice declared, ‘Whoever bombs the embassy’s building will receive a $100,000 award,'” the report states. “It is necessary to mention that the steps by Trump to transfer the US Embassy to Holy Qods [Jerusalem] has led to the anger and hatred of Muslims and liberators throughout the world.'”

“We must revolutionize our religion,” — Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, December, 2014.

“A Muslim is to hate what Allah hates and love what Allah loves. Allah hates the Kafir, therefore, a Muslim is to act accordingly.” — Dr. Bill Warner, “Sharia Law for Non-Muslims,” a publication of the Center for the Study of Political Islam.

“The point is not that these things are written in Islamic scripture, but that people still live by them.” — Bruce Bawer, author.

On April 21, the French daily Le Parisien published a “Manifesto against the new anti-Semitism,” written by Philippe Val, a co-founder and former director of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, the target of the 2015 terrorist attack that left 12 employees dead.

The declaration — signed by more than 250 prominent French intellectuals, artists and politicians, among them former President Nicolas Sarkozy – calls on Islamic theologians to remove the verses of the Quran that call for the killing and punishment of Jews, Christians and Muslim non-believers.

The manifesto reads, in part:

“Anti-Semitism is not the business of the Jews. It’s the business of all of us. The French, who have demonstrated their democratic maturity after each Islamist attack, are living through a tragic paradox. Their country has become the arena for murderous anti-Semitism.

“We demand that the fight against this democratic failure that is anti-Semitism becomes a national cause before it’s too late. Before France is no longer France.

Palestinian human rights organizations such as Al-Mezan, along with their many supporters abroad and even within a substantial part of the Jewish diaspora, have turned the very concept of human rights on its head.

Although genuine and widely praised for their advocacy of human rights internationally, even Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, the International Federation for Human Rights and the humanitarian relief body Oxfam International have reputations of extreme bias against Israel.

What are any of these people doing actually to help the Palestinians — such as creating jobs, assuring good governance, establishing schools, hospitals, health care and dental clinics, safeguarding legal standards, stopping the arrests of journalists or others who dare to criticize the current governments and so on? Rather, the issues they address seem more a rationalization to destroy Israel.

We have seen in Part One of this article how far Western standards of human rights differ from those guaranteed by Islam. One obvious outcome of this disparity is, of course, that citizens of Muslim countries are accorded fewer rights than their counterparts in liberal democracies. Thus, women, girls, gays, members of religious minorities, “blasphemers”, bloggers (notably in Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia) reformers and others may be subjected to partial or total deprival of what the rest of the world considers to be unquestionable or God-given rights. Women may be forced to dress in all-encompassing clothing or hijabs. Minorities may be imprisoned or killed. Women even alleged to have committed adultery – but often just the victims of rape – may be flogged or else stoned to death. LGBT individuals may imprisoned or killed, while bloggers, reformist intellectuals, moderate Qur’an interpreters face flogging and murder by mobs.

How committed is the German government to protecting its Jewish citizens?

Last month’s anti-Semitic beating in Berlin of a yarmulke-wearing, 21-year-old Arab-Israeli student who was testing for himself whether hatred of Jews was rising in Germany prompts questions. Namely, 75 years after the Holocaust, are Jews safe in Deutschland, and how committed is the German government to protecting its Jewish citizens?

When Hitler rose to power in 1933, 500,000 Jews lived in Germany. Today, only 100,000 reside there, and Jewish leaders have warned Jews not to wear kippot to avoid being attacked. Felix Klein, recently appointed by Chancellor Angela Merkel to deal with the surge in anti-Semitism, admits that “Germany has a problem with hatred of Jews.” He adds that regardless of the refugee influx, “around 20% of Germans hold anti-Semitic views, a statistic that has remained stable for years and has never gone.”

Germany’s modern-day incarnation of anti-Semitism exists primarily, but not exclusively, in the demonization and delegitimization of the Jewish state. German organizations support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) of Israel despite official statements that condemn BDS as Jew-hatred. In November, NGO Monitor, a watchdog organization that analyzes and reports on NGO activities, discovered that the German government was donating millions of euros to groups promoting BDS, including some groups with ties to a designated terrorist group, the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Meanwhile, at the same time, the German organizations were providing generous entitlements to Muslim refugees, even though the refugees include ISIS-supporters and 13% of them believe that suicide bombings are justified, according to a Pew Research poll.