RUTHFULLY YOURS

Like all zealots, those who peddle the notion of group identity as the paramount measure of the individual’s worth are determined to make everyone else talk and think as they do. As with communism, for which it is a posthumous surrogate, identity politics is underscored by the authoritarian urge.

They tramp in mateship side by side—
The Protestant and “Roman”—
They call no biped lord or “sir”
And touch their hats to no man!
—Henry Lawson, “The Shearers”, 1906

Almost from its beginnings in 1788, Australian society was marked by an absence of deference. This was long recognised as something that distinguished the Australian colonies from their parent culture in England, where deference from the lower classes to those above them was deeply rooted. In contrast, nineteenth-century Australia quickly became an egalitarian society. This did not mean that it dispensed with ranks and titles or that the pursuit of wealth was any less important. Rather, Australian egalitarianism originated in the many opportunities the country provided for those on the lowest rungs of society to rise in the world. At the same time, most colonials, whether they advanced their status or not, had a low opinion of those who inherited wealth rather than made it through their own efforts.

As a result, the first attempt to establish a closed system of privilege in our political system found popular opinion its most formidable opponent. In 1853, when William Charles Wentworth tried to emulate the British House of Lords by inserting clauses in the New South Wales constitution that would effectively create a hereditary political class, he was laughed out of the debate by Daniel Deniehy, who derided his proposal as an attempt to give Australia a “bunyip aristocracy”.

In the 1880s and 1890s, Henry Lawson and other bush poets helped create a popular form of Australian nationalism based on a romantic view of the common people, especially those who worked in the pastoral industry. Historian John Hirst has written that in this time, when employers and employees from the top to the bottom of the status hierarchy toiled in the same enterprise, English and Continental habits of status were quickly abandoned. In the pastoral industry:

Gentlemen worked with their hands; they worked alongside their men; and in pioneering days at least wore the same clothes as their men. An age-old inequality disappeared as employees took to horses and met their masters eye to eye.

Never missing an opportunity to confuse, disappoint, and demoralize the Catholic faithful, Pope Francis, according to the Latin American Herald Tribune, said on Good Friday that “Christians ought to express shame for the actions of those who are leaving future generations a world ‘fractured by divisions and wars.’”

Speaking to Jesus, the Pope said that “our gaze upon you is full of shame, repentance and hope. Before your supreme love, shame pervades us for having left you alone to suffer for our sins … shame for having chosen Barabbas and not you, power and not you, appearance and not you, the god of money and not you, worldliness and not eternity.”

The Pope added that Christians should also feel shame for those who “allowed themselves to be deceived by ambition and vainglory, losing sight of their dignity and first love,” leaving behind a world “fractured by divisions and wars” and “consumed by selfishness.”

In speaking of those who have left the world “fractured by divisions and wars,” Pope Francis doesn’t seem to have said a word about the religion that actually teaches that believers should wage war against and subjugate unbelievers. But of course, about that religion he has said, “Authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”

So it is the Christians who should feel shame for the strife in the world, not anyone else.

This is nothing new. Pope Francis last September met in the Vatican with Dr. Muhammad bin Abdul Karim Al-Issa, the secretary general of the Muslim World League (MWL), a group that has been linked to the financing of jihad terror. During the meeting, al-Issa thanked the Pope for his “fair positions” on what he called the “false claims that link extremism and violence to Islam.”

MARCHING IS STREET THEATER IN FRANCE…AFTER CHARLIE HEBDO AND THE BOMBING OF THE KOSHER DELI….THEY STRUTTED, ARMS CROSSED…POSEURS WHO THEN DO NOTHING …..RSK

PARIS—On April 4 of last year, a 67-year-old Jewish woman in Paris named Sarah Halimi was beaten to death and thrown off the balcony of her third-story apartment in a public housing complex by a neighbor who shouted “Allahu Akbar.” It took 10 months and a public outcry that began with France’s Jewish community, the largest in Europe, before prosecutors officially called the attack an anti-Semitic hate crime. Last Friday, Mireille Knoll, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, was stabbed 11 times and set alight by a neighbor and a homeless man. This time, authorities immediately, perhaps even prematurely, called it an anti-Semitic attack. Gérard Collomb, France’s interior minister, said this week that before killing Knoll, one of the two men arrested for the murder had told the other, “She is a Jew, she must have money.”

A lot took place between the death of Halimi and the death of Knoll. It may seem cynical to point it out, but one of them is an election, whose winners and losers seem freer to call out anti-Semitism when they’re not trying to win the support of Muslim voters in the banlieues, or the working-class suburbs that are home to generations of France’s immigrant underclass. Another is a growing sense, one that has been compounded by every terrorist attack here in recent years, that something has gone wrong in France, and its institutions are struggling to keep pace. While there have been concerns about new strains of anti-Semitism in Sweden and Britain, to say nothing of Poland and Hungary, France’s challenges are unique. It is a nation founded on deeply held universalist republican ideals, on the notion that citizens are citizens, not members of individual ethnic or religious groups—no intersectionality, no American-style identity politics, no interest groups—and it has struggled to develop a vocabulary for religiously motivated violence, let alone a solution. The problem defies Cartesian logic and transcends traditional divisions between left and right.

The murder of a woman who had narrowly escaped deportation as a child in Nazi-occupied France at the hands of a young Muslim neighbor unlocked something here, a sense of public outrage that seemed to transcend even the horrible facts of the case. On Wednesday evening, thousands of people, including French political leaders, held in a march through eastern Paris to Knoll’s public housing complex. I went to see for myself. Some held signs that read, “In France, we kill grandmothers because they’re Jewish.” Others wore buttons with Knoll’s picture. It had been an intense day. That morning, President Emmanuel Macron delivered a eulogy at the state funeral of Colonel Arnaud Beltrame, a gendarme who had served in Iraq and was hailed as a national hero after he took the place of a hostage in a jihadist attack in southwest France last Friday, the same day as Knoll’s death.

As people began gathering at the start of the march, I ran into Alain Finkielkraut, one of France’s most prominent public intellectuals, a philosophy professor who had participated in the French student uprisings in 1968 but shifted rightward over the years and whose 2013 book, L’Identité Malheureuse, or The Unhappy Identity, is about immigration and its discontents. “It wasn’t even a question for me to come and express my fear and my anger,” Finkielkraut told me. In 2006, there had been a large demonstration after a Jewish man named Ilan Halimi (no relation to Sarah) was tortured and killed by a violent band in what French authorities were loath to call an anti-Semitic attack. “Only Jews came to the demonstration in memory of Ilan Halimi’s barbarous assassination. They had been abandoned by the international community,” Finkielkraut told me. Today, he said, things were changing. “I think the denial is slowly disappearing, the denial about a new anti-Semitism,” he told me. “For a long time, we didn’t want to stigmatize fragile youth from bad neighborhoods, so we minimized the effect. We looked for excuses—in exclusion, in discrimination, in segregation, in all the ‘-ations’ you can find. I think this narrative is in the process of extinction, and I think, in this sad moment we’re living, that that’s good news.” CONTINUE AT SITE

March came in like a lion and maintained its “Big Cat” status for most of the month – four Nor’ Easters here in Connecticut! Only in its last few days did the month begin to resemble a member of the ovine race, and then more of a ram than a lamb. The month saw persistent, unprecedented attacks on Mr. Trump, like Joe Biden who threatened to beat him up (imagine two septuagenarians going at it!); andJohn Brennan who alluded to Trump’s venality and moral turpitude (talk of the pot calling the kettle black!).And then there were the gale-force winds of a morally deficient porn star “Stormy” Daniels, a temptress, certainly, but more a squall than a tempest, in her claim of being defamed.

It was not only gusty weather and blustery verbiage from Washington that made the month roar like a lion. Wall Street’s bears, who had emerged from hibernation in February, continued their selling in March. Islamic terrorists persisted in the killing and maiming of civilians in Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Pakistan, India, Yemen, Niger, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Egypt and France. Gun violence at home and deadly fires overseas found their way into the month.

Kim Jong-un, President of North Korea announced his desire to meet with President Trump. The President accepted the invitation. An hysterical Left expressed disbelief. How could the loud-mouthed braggart in the White House succeed where pin-striped savants from “Foggy Bottom” had failed? Should the meeting come off, it would be reminiscent of the anti-Communist Richard Nixon going to China in 1972. For Trump is a hard-liner when it comes to North Korea. He believes in negotiating from strength. Keep in mind, the ironic motto of the former Strategic Air Command (SAC): “Peace is Our Profession.” Mr. Kim met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, which was likely a command performance. It is stability in the Korean peninsula that the Chinese want, and the mercurial Mr. Kim’s antics have made them nervous. The mandarins in Beijing do not want a nuclearized Korean Peninsula. Two consequences of Mr. Kim’s parley with Mr. Xi: the announced visit of Kim Jong-un to South Korea and an overture made to Japan.

Elsewhere, in the Syrian city of East Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascus, rebels were forced out after months of combatting Assad’s troops and their Russian allies. Over a thousand civilians have become casualties in fighting that is reminiscent of Aleppo. Nerve gas was responsible for the near-deaths of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the English city of Salisbury. Without doubt, Vladimir Putin was responsible, even though he denied Russian complicity. Great Britain expelled 23 Russian diplomats. President Trump ordered the Russian consulate in Seattle closed and told 60 Russian intelligence officers they had seven days to leave the U.S. By last Monday, more than 25 countries had acted in solidarity with Great Britain, in the largest collective expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history. Russia retaliated, expelling diplomats and shuttering the U.S. consulate in St. Petersburg.

“Levi Salomon, head of the Jewish Forum for Democracy against Anti-Semitism, a Berlin-based organization that documents hate crimes against Jews, says most violent incidents these days come from Muslim perpetrators.”

BERLIN— Solomon Michalski loved going to his new school on a leafy Berlin street because it was vibrant and diverse, with most students from migrant families. But when the teenage grandson of Holocaust survivors let it slip that he was Jewish, former friends started hissing insults at him in class, he says. Last year some of them brandishing what looked like a gun took him aside and said they would execute him.

It was no isolated occurrence. The police registered 1,453 anti-Semitic incidents in Germany last year, more than in five of the previous seven years, and organizations including the American Jewish Congress say fewer than a third of such incidents get reported. Their stubborn persistence in the country where the Holocaust was plotted and executed is raising concern that decades of work to eradicate anti-Semitism are slowly being undone as prejudice against Jews spreads beyond its traditional home in the far right.

“I fear that a new generation of anti-Semites is coming of age in Germany,” Josef Schuster, head of the country’s chief Jewish organization, told journalists on Wednesday.

German police attribute more than 90% of cases nationwide to far-right offenders. But Jewish activists and victim representatives say the data are misleading because police automatically label any incident where the perpetrators aren’t known as coming from the far right.

The problem goes beyond Germany. The murder of an elderly Holocaust survivor in Paris in March in what prosecutors said was an anti-Semitic attack has fueled a perception that anti-Jewish acts—from casual insults to brutal violence—are on the rise across Europe and that governments appear unable to do much about it.

Levi Salomon, head of the Jewish Forum for Democracy against Anti-Semitism, a Berlin-based organization that documents hate crimes against Jews, says most violent incidents these days come from Muslim perpetrators. CONTINUE AT SITE

Tragically, Christians living in lands formerly under the control of the “Caliphate” have been betrayed by many in the West. Governments ignored their tragic fate. Bishops were often too aloof to denounce their persecution. The media acted as if they considered these Christians to be agents of colonialism who deserved to be purged from the Middle East. And the so-called “human rights” organizations abandoned them.

The West was not willing to give sanctuary to these Christians when ISIS murdered 1,131 of them and destroyed or damaged 125 of their churches.

We must now help Christians rebuild in the lands where their people were martyred by Islamic fundamentalists.

Persecution of Christians is worse today “than at any time in history”, a recent report by the organization Aid to the Church in Need revealed. Iraq happens to be “ground zero” for the “elimination” of Christians from the pages of history.

Iraqi Christian clergymen recently wore a black sign as a symbol of national mourning for the last victims of the anti-Christian violence: a young worker and a whole family of three. “This means that there is no place for Christians,” said Father Biyos Qasha of the Church of Maryos in Baghdad. “We are seen as a lamb to be killed at any time”.

A few days earlier, Shiite militiamen discovered a mass grave with the bodies of 40 Christians near Mosul, the former stronghold of the Islamic State and the capital of Iraqi Christianity. The bodies, including those of women and children, seemed to belong to Christians kidnapped and killed by ISIS. Many had crosses with them in the mass grave. Not a single article in the Western mainstream media wrote about this ethnic cleansing.

French Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia made an urgent plea to Europe and the West to defend non-Muslims in the Middle East, whom he likened to Holocaust victims. “As our parents wore the yellow star, Christians are made to wear the scarlet letter of nun” Korsia said. The Hebrew letter “nun” is the same sound as the beginning of Nazareen, an Arabic term signifying people from Nazareth, or Christians, and used by the Islamic State to mark the Christian houses in Mosul.

Now a new report by the Iraqi Human Rights Society also just revealed that Iraqi minorities, such as Christians, Yazidis and Shabaks, are now victims of a “slow genocide”, which is shattering those ancient communities to the point of their disappearance. The numbers are significant.

It’s no rare thing for the Israeli prime minister to enrage the Jews of the diaspora. But three years ago, Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech that won him near-universal condemnation.

In the aftermath of several deadly attacks in European cities like Paris and Copenhagen, Mr. Netanyahu called on Jews to leave Europe. “Of course, Jews deserve protection in every country. But we say to Jews, to our brothers and sisters: Israel is your home,” he said, echoing comments he had made more subtly the month before at Paris’s Grand Synagogue.

Mr. Netanyahu’s suggestion of “mass immigration” was “unacceptable,” said Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the head of the European Jewish Association. Abraham Foxman, then head of the Anti-Defamation League, suggested such a policy would “grant Hitler a posthumous victory.” Denmark’s chief rabbi, Jair Melchior, said he was “disappointed.” Smadar Bar-Akiva, the executive director of JCC Global, said “the calls for French Jews to pack their bags” and move were “disturbing and self-defeating.”

François Hollande, then president, echoing a chorus of European leaders, pushed back hard, appealing to his country’s Jews: “Your place is here, in your home. France is your country.”

Is it?

This is a question worth seriously asking following the barbaric murder last week of Mireille Knoll.

Ms. Knoll, 85, believed Mr. Hollande. France was her place, her home, her country. And Paris was her city.

She believed this despite the fact that it was also the city where, when she was 9 years old, the police rounded up 13,000 of the city’s Jews, 4,000 of them children, and crammed them into Vélodrome d’Hiver, a cycling stadium, before shipping them to their deaths at Auschwitz. Ms. Knoll narrowly escaped this largest French deportation of Jews during the Holocaust and fled to Portugal with her mother.

Our story begins with two Swedish government agencies. The job of the National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) is “to ensure good health, social welfare and high-quality health and social care on equal terms for the whole Swedish population.” It is part of the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs. The Swedish Migration Agency (Migrationsverket) is “the authority that considers applications from people who want to take up permanent residence in Sweden, come for a visit, seek protection from persecution or become Swedish citizens.”

On March 24, the two agencies released a four-page brochure. It was entitled “Information for Those who Are Married to Children.” Yes, you read that right. Its cover featured a cheery drawing of a very dark-skinned girl in hijab and a somewhat dark-skinned boy and girl in more Western-looking garb. The style of illustration was recognizable from a thousand children’s books. But this wasn’t a children’s book. It was a brochure for adults living in Sweden whose “spouses” are minors.

The brochure started off by stating: “Child marriages are prohibited in Sweden.” Well, yes, technically. But the very existence of the brochure is a reflection of the fact that such marriages exist and are officially tolerated. The brochure explained the reason for the prohibition: “Children have the right to be children and not to have the responsibility that a marriage involves.” Also, children need schooling; marriage can lead a child to experience physical and psychological problems; and if a child gets pregnant, that, too, can lead to problems.

There followed a list of some of the rights that children supposedly enjoy in Sweden, among them the right to divorce, to refuse sex (even with a spouse), and to obtain an abortion. The brochure stated that having sex with a child is illegal, even if you are married to her. Again, all this is technically true. But in practice, nobody is arrested or imprisoned for being “married” to a child.

While this country is embroiled in a shouting match over gun violence, Germany finds itself in an internal debate about the rise in knife violence. Unlike this country, though, many in Germany seem to be focused on finding the root cause and, hence, the solution. As The Local reports of Germany, “police statistics [show] that refugees and asylum seekers are significantly over-represented in violent crime statistics.”

Titled “String of knife attacks further fuels debate over refugees and violence,” the article begins by listing a series of violent knife attacks. Almost all of the attacks were done by male teenage refugees. The listed knife attacks are disturbing and the article concludes with the statement, “At least seven knife attacks were recorded last weekend alone.” The article then adds, “the prevalence of asylum seekers as suspects in these crimes has given voice to those who say the government’s liberal refugee policies have made the country less safe.”

While there are undoubtedly leftists in Germany pushing back on ascribing the rising knife violence to refugees, it is refreshing that a country is seemingly interested in finding the actual problem instead of blaming knives—something that leftists in America would do well to imitate.

In an earlier article, I wrote about how guns have been around for as long as there have been schools in this country. In fact, previous generations openly carried guns to school. That fact means that the rise in gun violence in schools is not due to the presence of guns. In the article, I then explained that “when looking for solutions to problems, you need to first deal with variables that were introduced around the time the problem began. Guns are not the actual problem, and treating them as the actual problem will help ensure that the problem will never be solved.”