RUTHFULLY YOURS

Fifty years ago this month, the British conservative Enoch Powell gave his “Rivers of Blood” speech about immigration, which has become as legendary as it is infamous. A classics professor who once aspired to become viceroy of the British Raj, Powell was one of postwar Britain’s most intelligent conservatives. Romantic about British traditions and deeply skeptical of the emerging European superstate, he would become a mentor to the young Margaret Thatcher. But instead of forcing immigration onto the agenda and propelling Powell toward Conservative Party leadership, the Rivers of Blood speech pushed the issue to the fringe and Powell’s career into the ditch. Powell’s fall became a rallying cry for racists and immigration a wedge issue for Europe’s populist “new right” parties, thus preventing candid discussion of policy.

In April 1968, Britain’s Labour government enacted the Race Relations Act, making illegal racial or religious discrimination in housing, employment, or public services. In response, Powell attacked the cross-party postwar consensus, not just on race relations but also on broader questions of national identity. Two decades of mass immigration, he warned, had started a “total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.” British society was “on the verge of a change”—and risking the kind of inter-ethnic violence that had stymied Powell’s ambitions to run India.

“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding,” Powell said, and “like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood”—a classical allusion to the Sybil’s prophecy of civil war in the Aeneid. Less stylish was his description of immigrants’ children as “wide-grinning piccaninnies.” In response, the pro-European Conservative Party leader Edward Heath removed Powell from his position as Shadow Defence Secretary. In the East End of London, though, dockworkers marched under the slogan “Enoch was right.” Powell’s stance won working-class votes for Heath in the 1970 election. Many white Britons still mutter that “Enoch was right” behind closed doors whenever the subject of immigration comes up—which it does whenever people talk politics today.

For the first time in almost 60 years, Cuba has a head of state from outside the Castro family.

Raul Castro, 86, stepped down Thursday morning as president, handing the reins to his hand-picked successor, the much younger Miguel Diaz-Canel, who has been vice president since 2013.

Castro, 86, inherited the presidency from his brother, who had ruled the country with an iron fist for nearly 50 years, in 2008. Despite relinquishing the presidency, he is set to remain head of the Cuban Communist party and the country’s armed forces, which has led some observers to wonder how much freedom Diaz-Canel, 57, will have to exercise the powers of the office. At the same time, the move has touched off speculation about Cuba’s future as one of the last remaining Communist states, given its widespread poverty and need for structural reforms.

Diaz-Canel was born after the Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution, and has been curiously reluctant to share his opinion about it for someone who’s spent his life rising in the political system Castro created.

“I was born in 1960, after the revolution,” the future president told U.S. lawmakers in 2015. “I’m not the best person to answer your questions on the subject.”

He has a reputation for promoting more access between Cuba and the outside world, but he does not hesitate to censor and quash influences that run counter to the one-party state’s interests. In November, he said that “we continue to be open to relations” with the U.S. But last month, he complained that the Trump administration had “offended Cuba” and “attacked and threatened” the revolution.

Britain’s educational authorities also failed to note the underlying message of the Teacher Handbook: that jihadist violence is justified when committed by those who believe themselves to be victims. This is a crucial point: it accepts at face value what might only be many Muslims’ perception of “victimhood.”

Despite the Teacher Handbook’s questionable attempts to align Islam with secular, Western principles such as human rights, fundamental British values are undermined by the very content of theTeacher Handbook.

No amount of Western appeasement can counter jihad, which is, as openly admitted, a global expansionist project.

Many religious texts have violent verses, but in Islam people still live by them.

Sweeping reforms in Britain’s education system are having an unintended dangerous consequence: the infiltration of extremist Muslim influence on the teaching of Religious Studies.

This influence is visible in The Oxford Teacher Handbook for GCSE Islam, authored by a small team of educational specialists and Muslim community leaders. The purpose of the manual is to guide British teachers lacking in-depth knowledge of Islam to help their students pass the Religious Studies General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), the UK’s public examination for pupils at the end of Grade 11. This academic study of religions is an optional but relatively popular subject in British high schools — 322,910 students took the examination in 2017, out of a total GCSE cohort in all subjects of 3,694,771.

The understanding of Islam — absorbed by a significant proportion of each year’s 300,000+ Religious Studies students (whose school chooses to take the Islam module) — is sufficient to create a national climate of opinion, given that the GCSE is a near-essential first stepping-stone to higher education and influential professions in British public life. It is therefore alarming that a portion of such influence has been granted to the Islamic scholar and activist, Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra, a co-author of the Teacher Handbook, who oversaw his fellow authors’ contributions.

“Why hasn’t any ‘kind-hearted’ anti-Assad Arab state (e.g. Saudi) taken any Syrian refugees? Shouldn’t countries that spent billions on arming militants (including terrorists) in the name of ‘liberating’ Syrians take refugees in? The only Syrian refugees that got attention in the Gulf states are the vulnerable underage girls they bought in the name of marriage.” — Dr. Abbas Kadhim.

“Why not bring Christians and Yazidis from the Muslim world here first?… Finally, why not bring Muslim girls and women who are already in flight from honor-based violence, including from honor killing, here next — before we extend visas, green cards and asylum to Muslim boys and men?” — Professor Phyllis Chesler.

“It is ironic that millions of Muslims are trying… to reach the borders of a civilization they have historically blamed for all the world’s evils… is it ‘Islamophobic’ to point out that there is no war in Greece, Serbia, Hungary, or Austria?” — Burak Bekdil, BESA Center for Strategic Studies.

Last month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan slammed French President Emmanuel Macron for his recent offer to mediate between Turkey and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), saying he hopes Paris will not ask Ankara to help when terrorists fleeing Iraq and Syria arrive in France:

“With this attitude, France has no right to complain about any terrorist organization, any terrorist, any terrorist attack. Those who sleep with terrorists, welcome them in their palaces, will understand sooner or later the mistake that they made.”

On April 7, hours after a man ploughed his van into pedestrians in Münster, Germany, Erdogan threatened France again, referring to the incident: :

“France, [you are] being a stooge… providing support to the terrorism, you are hosting terrorists at the Elysée Palace… You are seeing what is happening in Germany, right? The same will happen in France. The West will not able to free itself from terror. The West will sink as it feeds these terrorists.”

Writing in Politico, Paulina Neuding returns to the topic of Sweden’s crime problem and the unwillingness of the Swedish elite to admit what has been going on:

In a period of two weeks earlier this year, five explosions took place in the country. It’s not unusual these days — Swedes have grown accustomed to headlines of violent crime, witness intimidation and gangland executions. In a country long renowned for its safety, voters cite “law and order” as the most important issue ahead of the general election in September.

The topic of crime is sensitive, however, and debate about the issue in the consensus-oriented Scandinavian society is restricted by taboos.

Indeed it is, although, to be fair, those taboos are fraying fairly rapidly. Nevertheless, Sweden remains a country where, whether by law or, even more so, social convention, free speech is not quite as free as it should be. There is, to borrow a useful Swedish term, an ‘opinion corridor’ (åsiktskorridor) beyond which people are not meant to stray. Again, that corridor has widened—the fact that someone has even defined it is a measure of that—but not yet by enough.

There is also something else. To admit that there was a connection between current crime rates and what was (until recently) an extraordinarily generous immigration policy would be to admit that much of the political and media class has messed up. That is not something that such prominenti are keen to do. Thus, for example, they emphasize the fall in the murder rates. Fair enough, you might think, but…

Neuding:

To understand crime in Sweden, it’s important to note that Sweden has benefited from the West’s broad decline in deadly violence, particularly when it comes to spontaneous violence and alcohol-related killings. The overall drop in homicides has been, however, far smaller in Sweden than in neighboring countries.

https://pjmedia.com/video/katie-hopkins-media-will-not-honest-migrant-violence-sweden/

If you are unfamiliar with Katie Hopkins you’re in for a real treat. There are many political pundits who don’t mind being brutally honest but few do it with the obvious glee that Hopkins exudes. Hopkins is discussing the migrant-related violence in Sweden and the media’s untruthful reporting. When President Trump first got into office he mentioned the problems that Sweden was having and was roundly mocked by the mainstream media. A couple of days later, an immigrant neighborhood in Stockholm was the scene of riots. After detailing the myriad problems in Sweden at the moment, Hopkins excoriates the media for whitewashing the issues, especially when they refer to the migrants as the “new Swedes.” She says, “you can’t take Mohammed, stick a blond wig on him,” then “turn him into a Swede.” And a lot more.

In a 2016 fatwa, the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), Turkey’s highest religious authority, ruled that it was not forbidden in Islam if a father felt lust for his own daughter “on condition that the daughter is older than nine.”

According to celebrity Islamist scholar Nureddin Yıldız, Allah allows men to beat their wives not to torture them or hurt them but only to relax.

Yıldız’s sermon on “what would the ummah lose if women work” is a must-read piece to understand the typical Islamist thinking on gender equality, family and tribal ambitions to grow still more numerous.

The word ulama in its Arabic context denotes scholars of almost all disciplines. In the context of Sunni Islam, however, ulama are regarded as “the guardians, transmitters and interpreters of religious knowledge.” With the rise of Islamism as the dominant, state-sponsored ideology, the Turkish ulama have gained prominence: talk shows, books, newspaper columns, sermons and fatwas come in abundance. Devout Turks take them seriously. Secular Turks often mock them. Yet the Turkish ulama provide a rich context for those who want to understand Islamic piety as interpreted by religious scholars.

Now, according to the Global Gender Gap Report published by the World Economic Forum, Turkey ranks 130th among 144 countries measured. This embarrassing score does not go without good reason. Ironically, women’s rights marchers in Ankara were met with tear gas and arrests on March 5 as they gathered for a protest ahead of International Women’s Day (March 8). After the marchers ignored calls to disperse, Turkish riot police fired tear gas and detained about 15 women. That was how Turkish women “celebrated” Women’s Day.

Child abuse is also increasingly visible in Muslim Turkey. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute, the number of child sexual abuse cases–- just those actually reported to law enforcement — rose from over 11,000 in 2014 to nearly 17,000 in 2016. Experts say of course that many more cases are not reported.

It was either very brave or very foolish to adopt the “Mission Accomplished” slogan that hung behind President George W. Bush as he stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in the early days of the Iraq war. Although President Bush ​never used those words, they were indelibly linked to the fortunes of the United States in the course of the Iraq war. For President Donald Trump to have tweeted it is a poke at the very principle of conventional wisdom.

The US/UK/FR strike on Syria’s Him Shinshar (both the bunker and the storage depot) and the Barzeh “scientific research center,” (the location of chemical weapons research) was a resounding success. Not designed for “regime change” or to end the Syrian civil war, the raid was intended to punish the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime, its protector Russia and its banker Iran. It was to make it harder to do it again. It was to uphold one of the few areas of international consensus in warfare – that CW use is forbidden. That mission was indeed accomplished, but the expected chorus of naysayers would have you believe that it was:
​ a military failure​,​​a​ political failure, or both.

On the military side, as usual, the Russians were out of the gate first, claiming the chemical attack on Duma – for which the allied raid was retaliation – had been staged by the British, and then that Syrian air defenses had destroyed 71 of 103 missiles the allies launched. The Pentagon warned on Saturday, “The Russian disinformation campaign has already begun…There has been a 2,000% increase in Russian trolls in the last 24 hours.”

The Guardian (UK) reported:

Col. Gen. Sergei Rudskoi of the Russian military said the strikes had not caused any casualties and that Syrian military facilities suffered only minor damage… Russia said its advisers had spent the last 18 months completely rebuilding the Syrian air defence system, and said the high number of intercepted rockets spoke to “the high effectiveness of the weaponry in Syria and the excellent training of Syrian servicemen prepared by our specialists.”

Canadian diplomatic families are being recalled from Cuba after new research suggested a mysterious illness that afflicted some embassy staff was a “possible acquired brain injury.”

The decision to turn the Canadian embassy in Havana into an “unaccompanied post” comes just four months after the federal government said it wouldn’t pull diplomatic staff from the Caribbean country following reported but unproven “sonic attacks.” Other unaccompanied posts include Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and South Sudan.

“Canadian diplomats posted to Cuba will not be accompanied by their dependants. Arrangements will be made to support our diplomatic staff and their families returning to Canada in the coming weeks, as well as for those families who had expected to be posted to Cuba this summer,” wrote Global Affairs Canada in a statement released April 16.

This is the latest in a saga that began in late 2016, when American diplomats stationed in Cuba began complaining of headaches, dizziness, nosebleeds, vision and hearing problems, and a lack of concentration. They reported hearing “buzzing,” “grinding,” and “piercing squeals,” according to the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Brain Injury and Repair.