RUTHFULLY YOURS

The French government and the French justice system claim to treat all religions equally, but they treat Islam as if it were “more equal than others” — able to enjoy special privileges. Those who criticize Islam — or who just show the results of Islamic terrorism — are victims of fierce prosecution, while hate-filled, racist organizations are never touched.

“Who has the right to say that in thirty to forty years, France will not be a Muslim country? No one in this country has the right to extinguish our right to hope for a society that is globally faithful to Islam “. — Marwan Muhammad, spokesman of the “Collective against Islamophobia in France”.

President Macron recently said he wants a law against “fake news”. If the law is adopted, all online magazines in France that do not broadcast what the government defines as “true news” could be subject to immediate government suspension. If they are located outside France, access to them would be blocked. Islamic online magazines and websites are not on the list of “fake news” providers. What online magazines and websites top the list? Those that question Islam.

After the murders of much of the staff at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris on January 7, 2015, the hostage-taking and slaughter at a kosher supermarket two days later confirmed what was already obvious: France was a target of Islamic terrorism. A huge demonstration, organized in Paris on January 11, brought together a million and a half people, with politicians from around the world in attendance.

For a brief moment, France seemed to be the country where the multitudes were ready to stand up for freedom of speech, and the government was ready to fight for Western values.

Unfortunately, that impression did not last long.

For years, freedom of speech in France has been in the process of being crushed, particularly regarding Islam and Islamic terrorism. Journalists who said that Islam often did not look much like a religion of peace but more like a religion of war were systematically and harshly prosecuted. Charlie Hebdo’s new director and editor-in-chief were also not spared: they were sued as early as 2006, the year the magazine republished the Danish Mohammed cartoons. They were sued again in 2007, 2012 and 2013. The writer Michel Houellebecq was summoned to court in 2010 for saying that Islam is a “stupid” religion. The first judicial sentence against the polemist Éric Zemmour dates from 2011. The website Riposte Laïque was established in 2007 to fight censorship, defend secularism, and preserve the right to criticize Islam. Lawsuits against its founder, Pierre Cassen, immediately became overwhelming.

The assets his cronies have piled up in the West demand more scrutiny.

Vladimir Putin was reelected president of Russia today in an event as predictable as the sun’s rising. But his biggest asset hasn’t been his iron grip on Russian politics, it’s been the fecklessness and passivity of his Western counterparts in the face of his outrageous actions. Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion who has lived in exile in the West since 2013, wrote on Facebook that Putin, like most dictators, prefers playing poker to chess. “You can win at poker with a weak hand if your opponents play foolishly and keep folding their cards.”

It was to plan a better series of future moves against Putin that Kasparov and Thor Halvorssen, the leaders of the Human Rights Foundation, assembled a collection of 30 anti-Putin experts in New York last Friday. Called PutinCon, the event featured everyone from former intelligence officials to a former Red Army veteran to former U.S. attorney Preet Bharara to Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption crusader who was blocked from the presidential ballot in Sunday’s presidential election in Russia.

All of them agreed that the West should confront Putin and take serious measures to counter his increasingly brazen behavior. According to British foreign secretary Boris Johnson, this behavior now includes the stockpiling of the deadly nerve agent Novichok, recently used against Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy granted asylum in Britain, and his daughter Yulia.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an opponent of Putin’s who is exiled and now lives in Switzerland, says that Russia has become a gangster-run state. Speaking of the attack on the Skripals, he told the BBC, “Either Putin has given his consent to this operation, or he doesn’t control the secret service to such an extent they can do it without his approval.” The FSB, the successor to the Soviet Union’s old KGB secret police, has seized complete control over Russia’s security apparatus. The FSB is now more powerful than the KGB was at the time of Stalin — and much more independent from the Kremlin.

Despite a partially rigged popular vote and thanks to the Electoral College, America backed off a Hillary administration. Canada would have given her a heftier majority than it awarded the androgynous Justin Trudeau. We are heading pell-mell in the direction that would have sunk the United States. Business investment and industrial productivity are down, while taxes and real unemployment are up.

We live in a Trumpless country. Canadian supporters of Trump have been taken to task for it innumerable times by people who know nothing of Trump except what the media tell them. Academics, especially, whose salaries are guaranteed and have nothing to worry about, despise the American president as a boor. The intellectual class in general considers Trump the manifest inferior of Barack Obama, whose silver tongue – or golden teleprompter – masked his hatred of his own country and whose policies brought foreign debacles and economic ruin in their train. Under Trump’s administration, trade, industry, and employment numbers are flourishing in the U.S. Canadians, however, consider these gains an aberration that detracts from the social justice agenda that dominates the national temper.

Case in point: Canada’s ongoing NAFTA trade negotiations with the U.S. tell an “it was a dark and stormy night” story that puts Canada’s economic adventure under the Trudeau administration into dismal perspective. Trudeau has assigned his minister of foreign affairs, the ineffable Chrystia Freeland (of “100 years ago pretty much all women were beaten by their husbands” fame), to represent the country vis-à-vis Donald Trump. NAFTA is crucial to Canada’s economic prosperity, given that Canada enjoys a massive trade surplus with the U.S. Yet, as John Mueller of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS) remarks regarding Freeland, “I thought the first time I saw her that she would singlehandedly sink the NAFTA discussions” (personal communication).

It is in Nigeria that the balance between Islam and Christianity in Africa will be decided, according to Philip Jenkins, a leading expert of Christianity. That is why the Islamists have been killing the Christians en masse.

“If the Islamists should overrun Nigeria, it will be a steppingstone [sic] to conquering smaller countries. If Nigeria falls to Islamic extremists, all of Africa will be at risk”. — Catholic Bishop Hyacinth Egbebo, Nigeria.

Wole Soyinka’s “horde” will not be confined to the Nigerian borders, but will try to strike Western Europe as well. We are lucky to have survived as many attacks as we have in Madrid, London, Paris and Berlin, to recall just a few. But how many more? And for how long?

Usually, Africa only breaks through to the West when Western targets are attacked by terrorists. First, two US Black Hawk helicopters were shot down in Somalia in 1993. Then Al Qaeda attacked US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Then, only a few days ago, Islamic State published a video purporting to show an ambush in Niger in which four US soldiers were killed last October. The West was silent. The West does not seem to care about the ongoing Islamic terrorist genocide on Africa’s biggest Christian population in Nigeria.

A few days ago, the Coliseum in Rome was lit up red to protest the persecution of Christians. Italy’s most famous landmark was illuminated at the behest of “Aid to the Church in Need” to draw attention to the intense and enormous massacres Christians are suffering.

Writing for The Spectator, Douglas Murray rightly asked: “Who will protect Nigeria’s northern Christians?”. In the last attack, 15 Christian villages were ethnically and religious “cleansed”. First, extremist Muslims ransacked Christian towns and cleared them of Christian religious symbols, and then murdered 19 Christians . In just one month, more than 80 Christians have been murdered, often hacked to death with machetes.

Apparently for Turkey’s extremist Muslims, this is a war between “us good Muslims” and “those infidels.”

First, Turkey is running a military show in Arab Syria: targeting Muslim Kurds who it claims are terrorists. Erdogan has vowed that after Syria, the military campaign will target northern Iraq.

In the meantime, Erdogan’s “Arab friends” are showing signs of hostility, one after the other.

The events in the last couple of weeks seem to confirm that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ambitions for a Turkey-led ummah (Muslim community) are not welcome in the Arab world. This emerging divide among Sunni Islamists — Turkey, Saudi Arabia et al — is important for the West.

In Turkey, a hysteria has set in. It appears a national competition of patriotism that has captured the Turkish imagination. Screams of martyrdom and jihad can be heard echoing across the country. Even children are not spared from the ugly “death talk.”

There is a story behind this jihadist euphoria. In 2016, Turkey’s Religious Affairs General Directorate (Diyanet), the ultimate religious authority in the country, issued comic books to the nation’s children telling them how glorious it is to become an Islamic martyr. One cartoon was a dialogue between a father and his son. “How marvelous it is to become a martyr,” the father says. Unconvinced, the son asks: “Would anyone want to become a martyr?” “Yes” the father replies, “one would. Who doesn’t want to win heaven?”

Students, including kindergarteners, have been asked to conduct military marches and recite ultranationalist poems at schools . Some state schools have replaced their recess bells with Ottoman military marches.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s disastrous decision to throw open an essentially defenseless western Europe to hordes of military-age males from the Islamic ummah will go down in history as one of Christendom’s greatest blunders, either a triumph of wishful childless-feminist thinking or a malevolent act of epic proportions. So this statement by new Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, while welcome, is way too little, and far too late:

New Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said Islam does not belong to Germany, and set out hardline immigration policies in his first major interview since being sworn in this week, as he sought to see off rising far-right challengers.

Note that in the European media — and soon enough in the American — any conservative defender of tradition is now labeled “far-right.” As I’ve often said on Twitter (@dkahanerules), on the Left, “treason is the highest form of patriotism.”

His comments put him on a collision course with Chancellor Angela Merkel, who on Friday reiterated her long-held view that Islam was a part of Germany, even if the country was traditionally characterized by Christianity and Judaism.

“Islam does not belong to Germany,” Seehofer, a member of Merkel’s CSU Bavarian allies who are further to the right than her own Christian Democrats (CDU), told Bild newspaper in an interview published on Friday. Seehofer said he would push through a “master plan for quicker deportations” and classify more states as ‘safe’ countries of origin, which would make it easier to deport failed asylum seekers.

Seehofer is particularly keen to show his party is tackling immigration ahead of Bavaria’s October regional election, when the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is expected to enter that state assembly. “Of course the Muslims living here do belong to Germany,” Seehofer told Bild, but added that Germany should not give up its own traditions or customs, which have Christianity at their heart. CONTINUE AT SITE

“Islam does not belong to Germany. Germany is shaped by Christianity. This tradition includes work-free Sundays and church holidays and rituals such as Easter, Pentecost and Christmas…. My message is that Muslims have to live with us, not next to or against us.” — Horst Seehofer, Germany’s new interior minister

“Many Muslims belong to Germany, but Islam does not belong to Germany. Islam is at base a political ideology that is not compatible with the German Constitution.” — Beatrix von Storch, Alternative for Germany (AfD)

“The state must ensure that people feel safe whenever they are in the public realm. People have a right to security. This is our top responsibility. It means that there should not be any no-go areas — areas where no one dares to go. Such areas do exist. We must call them by name. We must do something about it.” — German Chancellor Angela Merkel, RTL television, February 26, 2018

Germany’s new interior minister, Horst Seehofer, in his first interview since being sworn in on March 14, has said that “Islam does not belong to Germany.” He has also vowed to pursue hardline immigration policies, including the implementation of a “master plan” for speedier deportations.

Seehofer’s remarks prompted an immediate firestorm of criticism from the self-appointed guardians of German multiculturalism, including from Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has repeatedly insisted that “Islam belongs to Germany.”

The backlash will raise questions about how much Seehofer — a former minister-president of Bavaria and a vocal critic of Merkel’s open-door migration policies — will be able to accomplish during his tenure.

In a March 16 interview with Bild, Germany’s largest daily newspaper, Seehofer was asked if Islam belongs to Germany. He responded: “No. Islam does not belong to Germany. Germany is shaped by Christianity. This tradition includes work-free Sundays and church holidays and rituals such as Easter, Pentecost and Christmas.”

Seehofer added that Muslims living in Germany are “of course” part of Germany. But that does not mean, he said, “that we therefore, out of false deference, give up our country’s traditions and customs.” He added: “My message is that Muslims have to live with us, not next to or against us. To achieve that, we need mutual understanding and consideration, which is only achieved by talking to one another.”

Seehofer’s commonsensical remarks opened yet another chapter in the decade-long debate over the phrase, “Islam belongs to Germany.” The words were first uttered in September 2006 — at the time there were 3.5 million Muslims in Germany, compared to more than six million today — by then Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble.

Speaking ahead of the first-ever German-Islam Conference, an institutionalized dialogue between representatives of the German government and of Muslims in Germany, Schäuble said:

“Islam is a part of Germany and a part of Europe. Islam is a part of our present and a part of our future. Muslims are welcome in Germany.”

The government of Australia is offering to fast track visas for white South African farmers who are under siege on their own land.

It’s a story that’s not getting much play in the US – for obvious reasons. A group representing Afrikanners, the white minority claims that 82 white farmers were murdered just last year with 432 incidents of violence. The government is challenging those numbers and even whites admit that white farmers are not the only victims of violent crime in rural areas.

But at least some white farmers are living in fear and they are blaming the bill passed by parliament last month that will allow the government to sieze white owned land without compensation. Many white farmers are choosing to leave and Australia is trying to expedite “humanitarian” visas.

This has outraged the government who claim things are not as bad for white South African farmers as is being portrayed.

Guardian:

South Africa has criticised Australian home affairs minister Peter Dutton’s offer to fast-track the visas of its white African farmers, saying his comments on the supposed threat to their lives and land were “sad” and “regrettable”.

A spokesperson for international relations minister Lindiwe Sisulu, said: “There is no need to fear … we want to say to the world that we are engaged in a process of land redistribution which is very important to address the imbalances of the past. But it is going to be done legally, and with due consideration of the economic impact and impact on individuals.”

On Wednesday, Dutton said white farmers deserved “special attention” due to the “horrific circumstances” of land seizures and violence. It follows recent reports in Australian media of “numerous and increasing cases of rape and torture carried out on white farmers” and “a white minority in South Africa being murdered and tortured off their farms.

However, Gareth Newham at the Institute for Security Studies, one of South Africa’s leading authorities on crime statistics, said there was no evidence to support the notion that white farmers were targeted more than anyone else in the country.

“In fact, young black males living in poor urban areas like Khayelitsha and Lange face a far greater risk of being murdered. The murder rate there is between 200 and 300 murders per 100,000 people,” he said. Even the highest estimates of farm murders stand at 133 per 100,000 people, and that includes both black and white murder victims.

Estimates of the rate of white farm murders are fiercely contested. “It’s a difficult question to answer because we don’t really know exactly how many white South Africa farmers there are,” said Newham.