RUTHFULLY YOURS

Like its police and the firefighters, France’s prison guards say they live in a permanent climate of violence and fear. And their exasperation is growing.

“Before, every morning, I was afraid to discover a guy hanging in his cell. You know what I’m dreading today? To be slaughtered, stripped, put a blade in my back. In the name of Islam and ISIS. Every day, on my way to work, this fear gnaws at my belly.” — ‘Bernard,’ a French prison guard.

“In the old days, aggressive behavior was linked to the difficulties of everyday life. Now hatred and violence are unleashed [by Islamists] against [our] authority, our society and its values.” — Joaquim Pueyo, MP, former director of Fleury-Mérogis prison

Instead of understanding that the famous deradicalization centers have not been useful because deradicalization did not take place, they persist in thinking that the solution to the war is appeasement. Their new experiments all go in the same direction: pursuing the fantasy that “if we are nice with jihadists, they will be nice to us.”

French prison guards are on strike. In a period of less than 10 days, a number of guards in various prisons were attacked and wounded, mainly by Islamists incarcerated for terrorist offenses or petty criminals apparently on their way to becoming radical Islamists. In reaction, the guards have blocked the normal functioning of the majority of prisons.

The wave of attacks began on January 11, 2018. Three guards of Vendin-le-Vieil’s prison, in the north of France, were lightly wounded in a knife attack committed by the Christian Gantzarski, a German convert to Islam who joined Al Qaeda and masterminded the bombing of a synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia, in 2002.

On January 15, 2018, seven guards were attacked and injured by a “radicalized” inmate at Mont-de-Marsan prison, in the south of France.

Jiri Valenta is a nonresident senior fellow at the BESA Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University, Israel and author of “Soviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia, 1968” (Johns Hopkins, 1990).

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11786/czech-elections-us-interests

Czech President Milos Zeman adamantly refuses to obey the European Union immigration quotas, even in the face of EU lawsuits.

As for the widely bruited charge that he is pro-Russian: In 1968, this writer, a former classmate of Zeman’s in the Prague School of Economics, together defended the Prague reforms before hostile academic audiences in Leningrad and Moscow just weeks before the Soviet invasion. Expelled from the Communist Party, for his opposition to the Soviets, Zeman was also thrice in two decades fired from his job. In contrast, his opponent in the run-off, Jiri Drahos, repeatedly traveled to West under the watchful supervision of the Czech secret police.

Zeman’s defeat would deprive Europe of a powerful voice against anti-Semitism and Islamo-fascism. Drahos, an inexperienced leader, is more likely to be malleable to Brussels’s demands on accepting quotas on Muslim immigration. The result of the Czech vote will reverberate through Europe. Consequently, Zeman’s reelection is in America’s national interest.

The significance of an upcoming, run-off, presidential election in Czech Republic is largely underestimated in Washington. But its prevalent view of it as a not too significant event in a small European country is dead wrong.

Contenders include the sitting President, outspoken and politically incorrect Milos Zeman, who garnered 39% of the vote in the first of a two-phase election. His rival is chemist Jiri Drahos, the correct, low key, former president of the Czech Academy of Sciences, who won 27%. A tight race is expected in the January 26-27 vote.

In America, Zeman’s foes are led by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, together with President Barack Obama’s State Department holdovers. They yearn for Zeman’s defeat at they do for the downfall of President Donald Trump, whom Zeman in some ways resembles.

As with Trump, one of key issues is whether Zeman is pro-Russian as maintained by his foes in U.S and Czech media. Yet even more crucial is Zeman’s hard line on Muslim immigration. He adamantly refuses to obey the European Union immigration quotas, even in the face of EU lawsuits.

A bit of Czech history is in order here. Curiously, the Prague events in last century on dates ending in the number 8, have often witnessed developments with major implications. In 1918, the founding of democratic Czechoslovakia by exiled Czech politician Tomas Masaryk intensified the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. In 1938, British and French appeasement of Adolf Hitler at Munich and the Nazi occupation of the Czech Sudetenland adumbrated the outbreak of World War II a year later. In 1948 a Communist coup in still democratic Prague was a key impetus for the creation of NATO a year later.

In 1968 the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia aimed at quelling the infectious Prague Spring, became in the words of my mentor, Josef Korbel (Madeleine Albright’s father), “the inextinguishable spark” for future democratic revolutions. That happened in 1989 as playwright Vaclav Havel, “an outstanding dissident,” in Zeman’s words, became president of a new, democratic Czech Republic.

Amena Khan said she deeply regrets the 2014 tweets, including one in which she labeled Israel a “child murderer.”

L’Oréal made history last week when it became the first major cosmetics firm to feature a Muslim woman wearing a head covering in a mainstream international ad campaign for hair products.

The signing of Amena Khan, a British blogger on beauty, as the newest face of L’Oréal Paris generated a lot of positive publicity for the French firm, with CNN lauding the company for “breaking barriers” and “becoming more diverse” in an article that also flattered Khan for “empowering women.”

But the response was less enthusiastic in some French Jewish media like JSSNews, where Khan was denounced as “an anti-Semite of the worst kind” for her remarks on Twitter in 2014 calling Israel an “illegal and sinister state.” She also labeled Israel a “child murderer” that Allah will ultimately defeat.

According to the British government’s 2016 definition of anti-Semitism, “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards by requiring of it [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” are examples of the phenomenon.

On Monday, Khan said she is stepping down from the L’Oreal Paris Elvive World of Care campaign because “the current conversations surrounding it detract from the positive and inclusive sentiment that it set out to deliver.”

“I deeply regret the content of the tweets I made in 2014, and sincerely apologize for the upset and hurt they have caused,” she wrote on Instagram.

Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau touts himself as a leader who equality and rights for the LGBTQ community. At the same time, he also embraces and promotes the growing Islamist movement in Canada, which views homosexuality as a crime punishable by lashing and even death. And the Islamists make no secret of their views. They promote them in mosques, public lecturers, articles and books often distributed free in bookstores and on city street corners.

In November 2016, Trudeau has appointed a special advisor to develop and coordinate the Canadian government’s LGBTQ agenda within and without Canada. Trudeau’s government is also “funding and implementing LGBTQ-related projects abroad supporting violence-prevention programs, awareness-raising campaigns and advocacy efforts, including initiatives aimed to combat homophobia and transphobia in education systems.” Trudeau has spoken of the “great strides in securing legal rights for the LGBTQ community in Canada. But the fight to end discrimination is not over and a lot of hard work still needs to be done. Canadians know our country is made stronger because of our diversity, not in spite of it.”

The feminism of my youth professed to advocate equality for all, men and women alike. Today that objective lies in ruins, buried beneath policies, attitudes and hypocrisies that see men assailed for being men and the cultural outrages inflicted on Muslim women pointedly ignored.

I consider myself a feminist. But the word “feminist” has become so debased its meaning has been lost, not to mention deliberately distorted from what it was taken to mean in decades gone by. What it meant to me in the Seventies and Eighties, and what it remains today, is equal pay for equal work, equal access to tertiary education and the ability to get a bank loan. It may seem incredible that females once needed the signature of a father or husband but that was indeed the case. Go back a little further and women were generally expected to resign their jobs when they married. Those to whom this sanction was not applied nevertheless received their marching orders upon becoming pregnant. It was unfair, unjust and, sadly, the way things were, which is why it had to change.

I know about the issue of equality between the sexes, which I studied it at university as an elective unit before working for a time in the Office of the Status of Women (OSW) in Canberra. I know all the so-called arguments why women were denied equality and how this imbalance was to be redressed. And I know that some of the prescriptions for redressing inequality were objectionable then and are even more so today. For example, the OSW worked hard to give girls gender-partisan encouragement and advantage in the classrom. A worthy goal, you say, but it came at the cost of boys doing less well. Some 20 years later the results of policies and attitudes overtly favouring female academic performance can be seen in the feminisation of medicine and law. It can also be seen, I would argue, in the declining numbers of young men at universities.

What I hear in modern feminists’ rhetoric is that no longer do these professional women want equality. Rather, they want to be more than equal, having adopted the strange idea that there should be some kind of payback or penalty for past male wrongs — the sins of the fathers being visited upon their sons, so to speak. Your ever-ready-with-a-quote-and-grievance modern feminist want to be compensated for men having had a better a deal than women in the past. The stupidity of this idea manifests itself in the utterances of women who claim to speak for all women when they are the chief recipients and beneficiaries of the attention they demand and attract. On an individual level, the likes of Germaine Greer and Anne Summers did enormously well out of feminism. It made their careers and, in the case of Greer, a lot of money from sales of The Female Eunuch.

This idea of being “more equal” extends to quotas in the workforce which see second-rate candidates — indeed, in some cases incompetent candidates – employed and promoted ahead of competent men solely by virtue of their gender. Clearly, the merit principle is dead and Australia is much the poorer for that.

This push for affirmative action against men is abhorrent, denying as it does the very idea and principle of gender equality for which women of my generation fought. More than that, it is a philosophy that tilts the playing field in favour of ‘’professional women’’ motivated by self-interest and agendas of personal advancement.

The most pressing issue for true feminists should be the inenviable position of Muslim women, whose value is reckoned to be half the value of men. Why is female genital mutilation so often glossed over? We have clinics for the treatment of mutilated women and girls, yet we see very few prosecutions. Why must women cover their bodies outside the home while men don’t? Sharia law, which derives its authority from the Koran, completely controls woman’s lives.

Over the weekend, the killing began in earnest.

Turkey used its U.S.-supplied fighter jets to bomb more than one hundred targets in the predominantly Kurdish province of Afrin in Northern Syria on Saturday, killing civilians and YPG fighters alike.

On Sunday, Turkish ground troops crossed the border, invading Syria.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made his intentions abundantly clear, vowing repeatedly to crush the Kurdish-led democratic government in Afrin, on Turkey’s southern border.

But it was Erdogan’s threats last week to U.S. troops serving as advisors to Kurdish fighters in northern Syria that were the real show stopper.

“This is what we have to say to all our allies: don’t get in between us and terrorist organizations, or we will not be responsible for the unwanted consequences,” Erdogan said in a speech in Ankara.

“Either you take off your flags on those terrorist organizations, or we will have to hand those flags over to you, Don’t force us to bury in the ground those who are with terrorists,” he said.

In other words, Get out of the way, or you die.

Erdogan was ostensibly responding to a statement from a U.S. military spokesman a few days earlier, who revealed that the U.S. was working with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) “to establish and train the new Syrian Border Security Force.”

On this special edition of The Glazov Gang, we are featuring our 2-part series with Dr. Hammond, the founder of Frontline Fellowship, on Islam’s Hatred of Dogs and Cruelty to Animals, in which Dr. Hammond examines the Islamic theological foundations that inspire a hatred of and sadism toward animals.

See both Parts I and II below: http://jamieglazov.com/2018/01/22/glazov-gang-islams-hatred-of-dogs-and-cruelty-to-a

Part I: Islam’s Hatred of Dogs and Cruelty to Animals.

In short, the overwhelming majority of persecution that these 215 million Christians experience around the world — especially the worst forms, such as rape and murder — occurs at the hands of Muslims.

If time is on the side of Christians living under Communist regimes, it is not on the side of Christians living under Islam. The center of the great Christian Byzantine Empire is now an increasingly intolerant, rapidly Islamizing Turkey. Carthage, once a bastion of Christianity — where one of Christendom’s greatest theologians, St. Augustine, was born and where the New Testament canon was confirmed in 397 — is today 99% Muslim-majority Tunisia.

As what began in the seventh century comes closer to fruition and the entire world becomes more Islamic and “infidel” free, as in Iraq, confronting these uncomfortable facts is at least a welcome first step in countering the problem.

“215 million Christians experience high levels of persecution” around the world, according to Open Doors, a human rights organization. On its recently released World Watch List 2018, which ranks the world’s 50 worst nations wherein to be Christian, 3,066 Christians were killed, 1,252 abducted, and 1,020 raped or sexually harassed on account of their faith; and 793 churches were attacked or destroyed.

The Islamic world had the lion’s share of this persecution; 38 of the 50 worst nations are Muslim-majority. The report further cites “Islamic oppression” behind the “extreme persecution” that prevails in eight of the 10 worst nations. In short, the overwhelming majority of persecution that these 215 million Christians experience around the world — especially the worst forms, such as rape and murder — occurs at the hands of Muslims.

These Muslims come from all walks of life and reflect a variety of races, nationalities, languages, socio-economic and political circumstances. They include Muslims from among America’s closest allies (Saudi Arabia #12 worst persecutor) and Muslims from its opponents (Iran #10); Muslims from rich nations (Qatar #27 and Kuwait #34) and Muslims from poor nations (Afghanistan #2, Somalia #3, and Yemen #9); Muslims from widely recognized “radical” nations (Pakistan #5), and Muslims from “moderate” nations (Malaysia #23 and Indonesia #38).

But if the World Watch List ranks North Korea — non-Islamic, communist — as the number one worst persecutor of Christians, why belabor the religious identity of Muslims? Surely North Korea’s top spot suggests that Christian persecution is not intrinsic to the Islamic world but is rather a byproduct of repressive regimes and other socio-economic factors that proliferate throughout the Muslim world?

Christians, members of the largest religion in the world, have become the most persecuted faith group but lack a political voice.

The White House urgently needs to develop a clear vision of how to help Christianity survive — let alone thrive — in its homeland. At the moment, there seems to be no foreign policy based on this vision.

Without urgent action on the part of the United States, Christianity in biblically historic lands, such as Iraq, Syria and Turkey, will be clinically dead before the year 2030. The current administration in Washington has expressed, in words, that this situation cannot be tolerated. It is time now for deeds, as well, to reverse the previous administrations’ virtual abandonment of Christians in the Middle East to the fate of persecution at the hands of Islamists.

In September 2007, then-Senator Obama wrote a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, expressing “concern for Iraq’s Christian and other non-Muslim religious minorities, including Catholic Chaldeans, Syriac Orthodox, Assyrian, Armenian and Protestant Christians, as well as smaller Yazidi and Sabean Mandaean communities.”

Obama warned:

“These communities appear to be targeted by Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish militants… And according to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, ‘violence against members of Iraq’s Christian community occurs throughout the country’… Such violence bespeaks a humanitarian crisis of grave proportions. The severe violations of religious freedom faced by members of these indigenous communities, and their potential extinction from their ancient homeland, is deeply alarming… and demand an urgent response from our government.”

In spite of Senator Obama’s having addressed the growing threat to Christians and other ethno-religious minorities in Iraq, their situation would only deteriorate during the eight years of his presidency. While President George W. Bush may have opened the gates of hell for Iraq’s Christians, President Obama not only widened them, but unleashed the demons on Syria. The following give some idea of this downward spiral:

Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, after earlier underreported exoduses of Christians from the country, there were 1.4 million Christians in Iraq, making up 5.4% of its overall population of 26 million. Today, 15 years later, Iraq’s Christian population stands at less than 250,000, a drop of 82%, and a mere 0.65% of Iraq’s general and much larger population of 38 million.

In 2011, there were 1.8 – 2 million Christians in Syria, who made up 8% of the country’s total population of 23 million. Today, less than seven years later, no more than 500,000 Christians, out of a total population of 18.2 million can be found in their war-torn homeland — a drop of more than 72%.