RUTHFULLY YOURS

As the progressive publication Prospect asked, “if we are no longer a Christian country, what are we?”

Christians in the UK are on course to be in the minority by the middle of the century.

What defines Europe are its boundaries – not physical but cultural. Without its culture, Europe could not be distinguished from the rest of the world. And the pillar of this culture is based on the Judeo-Christian heritage and values.

British Christian publications have been wondering if we are witnessing the “extinction of Christianity in Egypt”, where the Christian faithful have suffered persecution and terror attacks at the hands of Islamic fundamentalists. Christian leaders also seem to be wondering if Christianity will be “extinct within a generation” in the UK, where religious people enjoy total freedom of worship and faith.

Last year, the Church of England began to formulate a religious revolution. Its canonical laws require that British churches hold their functions every Sunday. The dramatic crisis of Christianity in the UK, however, is pushing the Anglican church to rewrite those rules, in order not to officiate in empty and abandoned churches.

A quarter of the British rural parishes now have fewer than 10 regular members of the faithful on Sunday. There are no more children in 25% of the Church of England’s congregations, as new figures have just shown. On average, nine children attended each church service across all Anglican churches in 2016. Generally speaking, churchgoers have dwindled in the UK by 34,000 in just one year.

In late 1944, after the successful Allied D-Day invasion of Normandy, France, many thought that World War 2 in Europe was almost over. On December 16th the Germany launched a final offensive intended to turn the tide for Hiter and Germany. That morning 200,000 German troops and nearly 1,000 tanks attacked and surrounded four exhausted American divisions in the Ardennes Forest of Belgium, Northern France, and Luxembourg. Lt. General George Patton Jr. deployed his Third Army unit to counter attack and thwart the Nazi advance.

American troops slogged through ice and snow in bitter conditions defending crossroads, and sabotaging Nazi gasoline depots. They restored the front and began the final march to victory.On Tuesday, May 8th, 1945 the Germans surrendered.

In that final battle of the Bulge more than 19,000 Americans soldiers died. May God bless their memory.

A coalition between the anti-immigration Austrian People’s Party and the anti-establishment Austrian Freedom Party, which will be sworn into office on December 18, is poised to catapult Austria to the vanguard of Western Europe’s resistance to mass migration from the Muslim world.

The massive demographic and religious shift underway in Austria, traditionally a Roman Catholic country, appears irreversible. Austria has also emerged as a major base for radical Islam.

“We have a lot in common [with Israel]. I always say, if one defines the Judeo-Christian West, then Israel represents a kind of border. If Israel fails, Europe fails. And if Europe fails, Israel fails.” — Heinz-Christian Strache, leader of the Austrian Freedom Party.

The anti-immigration Austrian People’s Party and the anti-establishment Austrian Freedom Party have reached a deal, creating a new coalition to govern Austria for the next five years. The ground-breaking political alliance, which will be sworn into office on December 18, is poised to catapult Austria to the vanguard of Western Europe’s resistance to mass migration from the Muslim world.

Chancellor-elect Sebastian Kurz, 31, who won Austria’s national election on October 15 after campaigning on a promise to halt illegal immigration, will govern with Heinz-Christian Strache, 48, the Freedom Party leader, who has warned that mass migration is “Islamizing” Austria. Under the agreement, Strache will become the vice-chancellor; the Freedom Party will also take control of the ministries of defense, interior and foreign affairs.

Kurz has been a strong critic of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door migration policy, which has allowed more than a million mostly male migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East to enter the country during the past two years.

During his time as foreign minister, Kurz was instrumental in garnering parliamentary approval of a groundbreaking new law that regulates the integration of immigrants. The so-called Integration Law — which bans full-face Muslim veils in public spaces and prohibits Islamic radicals from distributing the Koran — establishes clear rules and responsibilities for recognized asylum seekers and refugees granted legal residence in the country.

The new law requires immigrants from non-EU countries to sign an “integration contract” which obligates them to learn written and spoken German and to enroll in courses about the “basic values of Austria’s legal and social order.” Immigrants are also required to “acquire knowledge of the democratic order and the basic principles derived from it.”

Previously, Kurz was instrumental in reforming Austria’s century-old Islam Law (Islamgesetz), governing the status of Muslims in the country. The new law, passed in February 2015, is aimed at integrating Muslims and fighting Islamic radicalism by promoting an “Islam with an Austrian character.” It also stresses that Austrian law must take precedence over Islamic Sharia law for Muslims living in the country.

STOCKHOLM — This past Saturday, a Hanukkah party at a synagogue in Goteborg, Sweden, was abruptly interrupted by Molotov cocktails. They were hurled by a gang of men in masks at the Jews, mostly teenagers, who had gathered to celebrate the holiday.https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/opinion/sweden-antisemitism-jews.html

Two days later, two fire bombs were discovered outside the Jewish burial chapel in the southern Swedish city of Malmo.

Who knows what tomorrow may bring?

For Sweden’s 18,000 Jews, sadly, none of this comes as a surprise. They are by now used to anti-Semitic threats and attacks — especially during periods of unrest in the Middle East, which provide cover to those whose actual goal has little to do with Israel and much to do with harming Jews.

Both of these recent attacks followed days of incitement against Jews. Last Friday, 200 people protested in Malmo against President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The protesters called for an intifada and promised “we will shoot the Jews.” A day later, during a demonstration in Stockholm, a speaker called Jews “apes and pigs.” There were promises of martyrdom.

Malmo’s sole Hasidic rabbi has reported being the victim of more than 100 incidents of hostility ranging from hate speech to physical assault. In response to such attacks, the Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a travel warning in 2010 advising “extreme caution when visiting southern Sweden” because of officials’ failure to act against the “serial harassment” of Jews in Malmo.

Today, entering a synagogue anywhere in Sweden usually requires going through security checks, including airport-like questioning. At times of high alert, police officers with machine guns guard Jewish schools. Children at the Jewish kindergarten in Malmo play behind bulletproof glass. Not even funerals are safe from harassment.

Jewish schoolteachers have reported hiding their identity. A teacher who wouldn’t even share the city where she teaches for fear of her safety told a Swedish news outlet: “I hear students shouting in the hallway about killing Jews.” Henryk Grynfeld, a teacher at a high school in a mostly immigrant neighborhood in Malmo, was told by a student: “We’re going to kill all Jews.” He said other students yell “yahoud,” the Arabic word for Jew, at him.

A spokesman for Malmo’s Jewish community put the situation starkly. You “don’t want to display the Star of David around your neck,” he said. Or as spokesman for the Goteborg synagogue put it, “It’s a constant battle to live a normal life, and not to give in to the threats, but still be able to feel safe.”

The question that has dogged Jews throughout the centuries is now an urgent one for Sweden’s Jewish community. Is it time to leave?

Some are answering yes. One reason is the nature of the current threat.

Historically, anti-Semitism in Sweden could mainly be attributed to right-wing extremists. While this problem persists, a study from 2013 showed that 51 percent of anti-Semitic incidents in Sweden were attributed to Muslim extremists. Only 5 percent were carried out by right-wing extremists; 25 percent were perpetrated by left-wing extremists.

Much has been written and said about the antiestablishment, antiglobalization populist surge sweeping the West over the last several years. The most prominent manifestation of this phenomenon, of course, came in November 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidency, the most stunning electoral feat in American history; earlier in 2016, Trump’s victory was foreshadowed by Britain’s “Brexit” vote to leave the European Union, an outcome pushed for years by the country’s nationalist U.K. Independence Party (UKIP). But the United States and Britain are far from alone. Seemingly every major Western nation now has a populist movement and an anointed leader: Marine Le Pen and the Front National in France; Geert Wilders and the Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands, which has become the main opposition party in parliament; Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ), founded by nostalgic ex-Nazi officers, which missed electing the country’s president by a whisker; and Italy’s Five Star Movement, led, literally, by a clown, Beppe Grillo, suitably called the clown prince. Even in Denmark, the model of a tolerant liberal democracy, the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party is now the second party in parliament. Farther east, Hungary and Poland are today governed by openly nationalist governments.

National differences notwithstanding, election results show that support for and opposition to populist parties break along similar lines. Supporters tend to be older, less educated, blue-collar, white, male, and living predominantly in small towns or rural areas. Everywhere, the voting geography reveals a split between big cities and the rest of the nation. Manhattan voted massively against Trump, London against Brexit, Vienna against the FPÖ, and Paris against Le Pen; the small-town heartland in each case voted for them. It does not require a sociologist to understand that a similar social divide and mix of concerns are driving populism on both sides of the Atlantic.

One major outlier exists in this Western dynamic, though: Canada. A Western nation by any measure, a child of Britain and France, Canada has so far produced no evident equivalent of Trump, Wilders, or Le Pen, or of the political parties that back them. The revived Conservative Party of Canada, though it has its share of anti-immigrant supporters, has not veered into the kind of angry nativist oratory heard elsewhere. Political discourse in Canada has remained civilized, on the whole.

The U.S. has never joined the International Criminal Court in the Hague, and the court’s strange attack on Jordan this week explains why. The court said it will refer Jordan to the United Nations Security Council for failing to arrest Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir after years of giving other countries a pass.

Jordan is one of 123 countries that have joined the ICC since it came into force 15 years ago, and the Hashemite Kingdom may now regret it. Parties grant the court jurisdiction over war crimes, genocide or crimes against humanity, and members are obligated to act on its international arrest warrants. Sudan isn’t a party, but the Security Council can ask the court to investigate crimes there. In 2009 the ICC issued an arrest warrant for the Sudanese president for his manifest depredations in the country’s Darfur region.

This was mostly grandstanding, since the U.N. has done nothing to enforce its warrant. Bashir was traveling in the Middle East within months of the warrant, and he has flown across Africa in recent years without ICC intervention. No other country has earned a referral from the ICC over Bashir.

Yet suddenly the court has decided to make an example of Jordan, which in March hosted an Arab League summit that Bashir attended. This is a strange way to treat a country that has absorbed and cared for millions of Syrian refugees and punched above its weight in the fight against Islamic State. Jordan has a law that protects visiting heads of state on its soil, and its National Assembly is already crafting a legal challenge to the ICC’s decision.

All of which points to the ICC’s arbitrary power, which answers to no political authority beyond its own legal whim. It can pursue its cases without regard for larger security or political interests, such as Jordan’s crucial role as a moderating force in the region. Bashir is a bad dude, but he has improved his behavior in recent years and cooperated with the U.S. in fighting terrorism. Presidents Obama and Trump both loosened sanctions on Sudan.

Absent Security Council action, the referral will go nowhere. But it presents an opportunity for the U.S. to do a favor for a Middle East ally by vowing to veto any punishment against Jordan. If the ICC can arbitrarily harass Jordan, the U.S. and Israel will surely become targets.

Pew’s baseline estimate of the number of Muslims currently in Europe — the estimate upon which its future projections are calculated — has been undercounted by at least five million Muslims.

The UCIDE figures — which posit that there are roughly 750,000 more Muslims in Spain today than the estimate proffered by Pew — are widely recognized in Spain as the most accurate assessment of the Muslim population in that country. It remains unclear why Pew failed to mention the UCIDE report in its source appendix.

In Germany, Pew “decided not to count” the one million plus Muslim asylum seekers who arrived in the country in 2015/2016 because “they are not expected to receive refugee status.”

The Pew report entirely ignores the key issue of how Europe will integrate tens of millions of Muslim migrants whose values — including anti-Semitism, polygamy, female genital mutilation and honor violence — cannot be reconciled with those of Europe’s Judeo-Christian and liberal-democratic heritage.

Europe’s Muslim population is set to double — and possibly triple — between now and 2050, according to new projections by the Pew Research Center.

The projections, contained in a report, “Europe’s Growing Muslim Population,” confirm what has long been common knowledge: decades of declining European birthrates, coupled with mass migration from the Muslim world, are fast-tracking the Islamization of Europe.

The demographic calamity facing Europe, however, is even worse than the Pew report lets on. A critical analysis of the data shows that Pew’s calculations of the current Muslim population in key European countries are partial and incomplete — and in some instances inaccurate. As a result, Pew’s baseline estimate of the number of Muslims currently in Europe — the estimate upon which its future projections are calculated — has been undercounted by at least five million Muslims, whose presence in Europe will significantly increase the future size of the continent’s Muslim population.

The Pew report offers three projections based on three different scenarios involving migration during the next three decades. The baseline for all three scenarios is the Muslim population in Europe (defined by Pew as the 28 countries presently in the European Union, plus Norway and Switzerland), estimated at 25.8 million (4.9% of the overall population) as of mid-2016 — up from 19.5 million (3.8%) in 2010.

The first scenario envisions a complete halt to Muslim immigration between now and 2050. This scenario will not occur, of course, but was modeled to determine what the future might look like with migration removed from the equation.

In this scenario, Europe’s Muslim population is projected to increase by about 10 million people, from an estimated 25.8 million Muslims in 2016 to 35.8 million in 2050. In percentage terms, the Muslim population would rise from about 5% of Europe’s overall population today to 7.4% at midcentury — not only because Muslims are growing in absolute numbers, but because the non-Muslim population in Europe is expected to decline by roughly 10%.

Religion (in this instance, Islam) plays a smaller part in what makes terrorists tick than “the [human] need for… personal significance… Especially when it comes to violence that is shunned by most religions and most cultures, you need validation from a group of people that would then become your reference group. So the group component is very important, particularly when it comes to antisocial activities that are forbidden or shunned….” — Arie W. Kruglanski, distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Maryland and former co-director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism

It seems as if many analysts gloss over the role of Islamic teachings — the Quran, the Sunna, and fatwas — by minimizing them while highlighting matters such as the need for personal significance and validation. By minimizing the content of the Islamic literature, what they overlook is that Islamic teachings actually justify many activities that they would label antisocial.

The validation jihadists get from their reference group is mainly Islamic in words and meanings and that reference group has no significance without referring to the Islamic texts. What seems a universal dismissal or whitewashing — intentionally or not — of what is written in the texts, has become so prevalent, that it undermines our ability to recognize, let alone rectify, it.

Even relatively “moderate” Muslims, as hard as it is for a Westerner to comprehend it, deeply believe that we are here just for an insignificant instant, and that the really important life is yet to come in the afterlife.

Responding to findings of a recent study on what motivates both ISIS fighters and those who combat them, Arie W. Kruglanski — distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Maryland and former co-director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism — said:

“The ideology component addresses individuals’ need to matter and feel significant. … It tells people what to do, such as fight and make sacrifices, in order to gain respect and admiration from others.”

Kruglanski, whose 2014 article, “Psychology Not Theology: Overcoming ISIS’ Secret Appeal,” argues that religion (in this instance, Islam) plays a smaller part in what makes terrorists tick than “the [human] need for … personal significance.” He added:

“Especially when it comes to violence that is shunned by most religions and most cultures, you need validation from a group of people that would then become your reference group. So the group component is very important, particularly when it comes to antisocial activities that are forbidden or shunned.”