RUTHFULLY YOURS

Pope Francis fails to differentiate between violence motivated by religious faith and violence committed by followers of all religions, but motivated by reasons having nothing to do with religion.

Among the main duties of the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church is to protect the Church’s followers, be empathic and understanding of their needs, and not deceive them into a condition of subjugation.

In his prayer during the Good Friday, Via Crucis (“Way of the Cross”), at the Colosseum in Rome, Pope Francis said that for many reasons, Christians ought to express shame for choosing power and money over God, and for the actions of those who are leaving future generations “a world shattered by divisions and wars, a world devoured by selfishness.”

The Pope’s statement follows a pattern that consists of a steady, firm defense of Islam and Muslims, and accusations against Western civilization and Christians. Pope Francis persistently confuses his audience by claiming that violent people belong to all religions and that all religions are religions of peace. He fails to differentiate between violence motivated by religious faith and violence committed by followers of all religions, but motivated by reasons having nothing to do with religion. His goal in this intricate confusion appears to be to negate any connection between Islamic teachings and violence committed by Muslims who themselves proclaim that they had been motivated by their Islamic faith to kill and terrorize. “Islam is a religion of peace, one which is compatible with respect for human rights and favours peaceful coexistence,” wrote Francis in his letter to the Christians in the Middle East in 2014. “Authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence” said Francis in his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (2013).

Who are we? We are individuals dedicated to expose Islamic tyranny for what it is. There are not many of us. I am going to name just a few who have been on the front line to stop the incursion of the Islamic ideology in the West: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, Dr. Ali Sina, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Brigitte Gabriel, and Geert Wilders come to mind, along with many others who have sacrificed the comforts of life just to sound the alarm, only to be mercilessly attacked by elements of the global left.

All of us have to constantly look over our collective shoulder to make sure the knife of an Islamic zealot doesn’t slash our throats as he aims to secure a posh place for himself in Allah’s paradise. Not a good feeling to have to live with, is it?

The potential killers take all the advantages this benign society and culture offer to implement their dastardly schemes, while people like us are virtual prisoners.

We have been challenged. They say, “You want us to go to war with 1.5 billion Muslims? Is that what you’re proposing we do?”

Not at all. We are peaceful, non-violent individuals. We despise wars and killings – the favorite activities of Muslims the world over and ever since the birth of their faith.

What we are saying is that Islam is at war with us and the free people of the world. We are saying we shouldn’t surrender. We should reject in no uncertain terms their historical ultimatum of aslam taslam (surrender, become Muslim, and you will have peace). We refuse to become Muslims. And no, thank you, we don’t want your peace. We should do all we can to defeat this menace.

We no longer replace our numbers; instead we rely on immigration to compensate for the shortfall in births. This immigration is for the most part Muslim; the effect of our demographic decline is, therefore, the Islamization of Europe.

The response of members of the political class, at least in Italy, is to shrug their shoulders, and say, “So what?” European elites believe that religion is private. However, most Muslims do not believe that religion is private, and some are working hard to create a state in which Islamic law is the legal foundation for everyone. The effect of this is already being felt across the European continent. We have more Islamic veils and mosques, and fewer cartoons of Mohammed.

Without the courage to insist on safeguarding our values, and passing our inheritance on to our children, we Europeans will simply disappear — as many groups have before. With us, however, will disappear the most enlightened civilization the world has ever known.

“We have to decide if our ethnicity, if our white race, if our society continues to exist — or if it will be wiped out.” This observation was recently made by Attilio Fontana, a politician with the anti-immigrant Northern League, who is running to govern the Italy’s northern region of Lombardy. Fontana’s remarks sparked quite a political storm. He may not have chosen the most delicate words, but he was right in pointing out the potential suicide of Europe. Italy’s problem, in fact, is not the word “race”, but the empty cradles and the crowded boats which have brought in 500,000 African migrants in a relatively short time

In Milan, Italy’s financial district and second-biggest city, there are more dogs than newborns. The city has literally “lost” half its births in a mere ten years. From 2006 to 2016, the number of children born in Milan has declined from 17,000 a year to fewer than 10,000. By comparison, in 1880 Milan had a population of 350,000, and that year, 10,000 children were born. Today, Milan is inhabited by 1,362,000 people with fewer than 10,000 new births. So, relatively, 138 years ago Milan had proportionately four times as many children as today. That is how Europe’s indigenous population will die out.

We remember Nicaragua from the 1980’s, i.e. the “contras,” the “Sandinistas,” and other stories from the Reagan years.

Nicaragua is back in the news because of protests and the government’s reaction to them, as we see in news reports:

Nicaragua has been rocked by a week of protests in which over two dozen people have been killed.
The protests were triggered by tax hikes and benefit cuts meant to shore up the ailing social security system.

On Sunday, President Daniel Ortega said the government would withdraw the pension changes.
But he rejected demands to free detained protesters, withdraw the police and lift some censorship.

The U.S. embassy has moved some employees from Managua as a reaction to the violence. The State Department has also issued a travel warning.

The violence in Nicaragua is related to President Ortega’s proposal to raise taxes to pay for social services & fund public pensions. President Ortega did promise new negotiations with the opposition but not much has happened yet.

The international media has been reporting the violence and the death of Angel Gahona, a journalist who was gunned down during his broadcast. The shooting was caught live on social media.

In a ground breaking new study, Austrian medical historian Herwig Czech, debunks the myth that Hans Asperger, who was the first to describe a group of children with distinctive psychological features as “autistic psychopaths,” had opposed the Nazis and defended his patients against the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ program.

The article entitled “Hans Asperger, National Socialism, and ‘race hygiene’ in Nazi-era Vienna, published in Molecular Autism reports that Asperger sent patients to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna, where almost 800 children were murdered by poisoning and other means from 1940 to 1945.

“The picture that emerges is that of a man who managed to further his career under the Nazi regime, despite his apparent political and ideological distance from it,” Czech concludes. “This was not least due to opportunities created by the political upheaval after Austria’s Anschluss (annexation) to Germany in 1938, including the expulsion of Jewish physicians from the profession.”

By making political compromises to Nazi dogma, Asperger advanced his career by cooperating with the race hygiene system, including the Nazis’ child “euthanasia” program.

The Evolution of Sterilization into Euthanasia Killing Centers

What is often overlooked, is that before the Nazis sent Jews to the gas chambers, where they were murdered with Zyklon-B or carbon monoxide, the Nazis created clandestine programs that systematically targeted certain groups of people for extermination.

The sterilization programs began in late 1933, as historian Henry Friedlander wrote in the Origins of Nazi Genocide. Within a year, 32,268 individuals were sterilized. In 1935 there were 73,174. Justification for this treatment included schizophrenia, epilepsy, alcoholism, deafness, blindness, manic-depression psychosis and feeblemindedness. Those deemed sex offenders were castrated.

In 2007, in a highly controversial move, Keith Hakim Ellison, the first Muslim congressman, swore his oath of office on a copy of the Koran. In effect, Ellison rejected the values that unify Americans and instead pledged to follow a religious text that commands Muslims to wage war against secular legal systems.

Today, swearing the oath of office on the Koran and even simultaneously praising Allah have become almost commonplace. In 2016, Minneapolis Park Board member and Somalian refugee, A.K. Hassan took his oath on a massively oversized Koran and proclaimed his commitment to serve “in the name of Allah.” In 2015, another Somali refugee, Ilhan Omar, elected to the Minnesota House of Representative, swore on the Koran, as did Carolyn Walker-Diallo, the first Muslim woman judge elected to Brooklyn’s 7th Municipal District, and Abdullah Hammoud, a Michigan state representative.

In “Muslim Brotherhood Political Infiltration on Steroids,” I described how as early as 1987, FBI information revealed that the Muslim Brotherhood – a Middle East political organization considered a terrorist organization by five Arab countries and Russia – was seeking to “peacefully get inside the United States Government” and accomplish “the ultimate goal of overthrowing all non-Islamic governments.” Several M.B. front groups, including Project Mobilize; the United States Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO); and Jetpac, Inc., had been created to politically exploit America’s Muslim community to achieve supremacist goals set forth in the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategic plan, the Explanatory Memorandum.

As if taking a cue from the memorandum, the executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), Nihad Awad, spoke in January 2016, at the 14th annual Muslim American Society-Islamic Circle of North America (MAS-ICNA) conference in Chicago. He urged Muslims to “[t]urn your centers, Islamic centers, mosques into registration centers for voters, into polling stations during election time.”

The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHCR) itself has become a prime motivator and enforcer of the rejection of human rights.

The other charters of human rights are to be found exclusively in the Muslim world. Anything that falls within Islamic shari’a law is a human right; anything that does not fall within shari’a is not a human right.

“For us the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is nothing but a collection of mumbo-jumbo by disciples of Satan”. — ‘Ali Khamene’i, Iran’s current Supreme Leader.

“The underlying thesis in all the Islamic human rights schemes is that the rights afforded in international law are too generous and only become acceptable when they are subjected to Islamic restrictions”. — Ann Elizabeth Mayer, Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics.

The history of human rights, albeit fragmented, is a long and often honourable expression of religious and civic endeavour. The scriptures of most religions refer to the ways in which we should treat our fellow man, from the Bible in antiquity to the broadly liberal Baha’i scriptures written in Persian and Arabic in the late nineteenth century. Religious precepts have served to protect human beings from arbitrary mistreatment in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other faiths.

Modern human rights declarations and legislation developed in a secular context, above all as an expression of democratic values, and informed by Judaeo-Christian ethics. The earliest formulations of secular human rights legislation are to be found in the 1789 French Declaration on the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the 1791 US Constitution, the first 10 amendments of which form the Bill of Rights.

It was not until after the Second World War, however, that an even wider formulation of human rights came into being. Like the French and American declarations, these fresh formulas had much to do with the notion of individual rights: rights that were lodged in the political and legislative strategies of modern democratic states. Prior to that, rights tended to be located in communities, with individuals being subject to the laws and pressures of the tribe – as in the limitation of rights for Jews and Christians within Muslim societies, or for Jews in Europe, notably in ghettoes. This new construction of rights — through religious or ethnic identity — has, for some decades now, found expression in democratic states in “multiculturalism”.

Almost everything about the Turkish Republic is a lie or, at best, a half-truth, starting with its name. As the secular state is progressively dismantled the Islamic revivalism of the current regime is no mere nostalgia for the Ottoman heritage. It is something far more sinister.

The imminent demise of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s “caliphate” must be counted as a clear win in the Long War or the War of Freedom and yet, to borrow from Churchill, we are a long way from final victory: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Even that may be overly optimistic. Still incapable of identifying our mortal enemy, we remain stuck in 1938. This major peril confronting us is yet another incarnation of Islamic revivalism, one more manifestation of the hydra-like Global Jihad at war with Dar al-Garb (House of the West). The danger posed to the world by the burgeoning Islamic state of Turkey remains hidden in plain sight.

Almost everything about the Turkish Republic is a lie or, at the very best, a half-truth, starting with its name. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secular Turkish Republic is being dismantled piecemeal by a modern-day demagogue, President Erdoğan. If the Tribune of Anatolia, who possesses the second-largest army in NATO, holds onto power until October 29, 2023—the centenary of the proclamation of the republic—his suzerainty is no doubt going to be reconstituted as the Islamic Republic of Turkey. This development will denote something more than modern-day Turks revisiting their Ottoman heritage. Ottoman-style Islam, as demanding and controlling as it was, might be counted as mild-mannered and easy-going compared with the fanatical millennialism of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The rise and rise of Erdoğan, whose Freedom and Justice Party (AKP) won the 2002 parliamentary elections and has stayed in power ever since, did not occur in a vacuum. Erdoğan, as Soner Cagaptay points out in The New Sultan: Erdoğan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey (2017), was an acolyte of Necmettin Erbakan, a Turkish version of historic members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. The reason Erbakan’s vision of Islamic revivalism began to resonate in Turkey during the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century would probably require an investigation rooted in psychiatric anthropology. To make it brief, many Turks, especially in the Anatolian hinterland, were left feeling uncomfortable, dissatisfied and straight-out confused by Atatürk’s experiment in Western-style modernity.

Samuel P. Huntington, in The Clash of Civilisations?, encapsulated the problem as well as anyone. Turkey is a quintessential “torn country”, caught between the House of Freedom to its immediate north and Islamic rectitude to its south:

[Kemalists] allied Turkey with the West in NATO and in the Gulf War; they applied for membership in the European community. At the same time, however, elements in Turkish society have supported an Islamic revival and have argued that Turkey is basically a Middle Eastern society.

Dropping barrels of dynamite on houses and hospitals in a Palestinian refugee camp is apparently of no interest to those who pretend to champion Palestinians around the world. Nor does the issue seem to move the UN Security Council.

UNRWA said that of the estimated 438,000 Palestine refugees remaining inside Syria, more than 95% (418,000) are in critical need of sustained humanitarian assistance.

As for the leaders of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip? They are otherwise occupied. Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority and Hamas are too busy lunging at each other’s throats and trying to take down Israel to pay much attention to their people’s suffering in Syria.

While all eyes are set on the weekly demonstrations organized by Hamas and other Palestinian factions along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel, as part of the so-called March of Return, a Palestinian refugee camp near Damascus is facing a wide-scale military offensive and ethnic cleansing by the Syrian army and its allies.

The war crimes committed against the Palestinians in Yarmouk camp have so far failed to prompt an ounce of outrage, much less the sort of outcry emerging from the international community over the events of the past four weeks along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel.

The international community seems to differentiate between a Palestinian shot by an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian shot by a Syrian soldier.

In the first case, Hamas and several Palestinian groups have been encouraging Palestinians to march towards the border with Israel, with some even trying to destroy the security fence and hurling stones and petrol bombs at Israeli troops. The organizers of the Gaza demonstrations say their real goal is to “achieve the right of return and return to all of Palestine.”

Each time an anti-Semitic attack in Europe receives media attention, politicians rush to condemn it. But verbal condemnations alone change nothing. Anti-Semitism just gets bigger.

The European Union has adopted anti-Israel policies out of fear of upsetting Muslims, but this fear of upsetting Muslims has been fueling Muslim anti-Semitism.

When European governments refuse to accept Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and when they urge “restraint” instead of affirming that Israel has the right to defend itself, they are indulging in appeasement. On one side, they condemn anti-Semitism but on other, they are just whipping it up.

On April 18, 2018, two young men, both wearing Jewish skullcaps, were insulted by a group of Muslims and whipped with a belt in a clearly anti-Semitic attack in Prenzlauer Berg, one Berlin’s most fashionable neighborhoods. The violent assault, partly filmed by one of the victims, sparked national indignation in Germany. One of the attackers can be heard on the video clearly shouting “Yahudi” (Arabic for “Jew”).

“It is intolerable for young men to be attacked here just because they are wearing a kippah,” said Heiko Maas, the German Foreign Minister. “Jews must never again feel threatened here. It is our responsibility to protect Jewish life.”