RUTHFULLY YOURS

When Donald Trump made good this month on his campaign promise to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, it changed almost nothing on the ground: The reality is that Jerusalem has been Israel’s capital for decades.

Likewise for the United Nations’ vote Thursday to condemn the U.S. for the move. It changes nothing, because the U.N. doesn’t get to decide which capitals America recognizes and where it puts its embassies. But the resolution is a reminder of how deep anti-American and anti-Israel sentiment runs at Turtle Bay.

Only seven countries—Guatemala, Honduras, Togo, Nauru, Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands—were willing to stand with Uncle Sam and Israel and vote against the resolution. Thirty-five nations abstained, including Canada and the Czech Republic, which is at least better than outright condemnation. But 128 countries voted yes, with Britain, France, Japan and Germany joining Iran, Russia, China and North Korea to condemn the U.S.

The question is what comes next. Before the measure passed, Nikki Haley, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., delivered a speech reminiscent of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s rebuttal in 1975 when he was the American Ambassador and the U.N. passed a resolution declaring Zionism a form of racism.

“We will remember [this vote],” Ms. Haley said, “when we are called upon to once again make the world’s largest contribution to the United Nations. And we will remember it when so many countries come calling on us, as they so often do, to pay even more and to use our influence for their benefit.” President Trump said something similar at his cabinet meeting, that “we’ll save a lot” by cutting aid to countries that went against us.

These are welcome reminders to an assembly that has long been an embarrassment to its founding principles. Ms. Haley was joined in her reaction to this insult by some members of Congress. Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) also said the U.S. ought to reconsider the money the U.S. pays to keep the U.N. going.

The feeling is understandable, and we hope the Trump Administration finds ways to make clear its displeasure to the friends who abandoned the U.S. A complete pullout from the U.N. is unlikely, if only because the U.S. is a member to serve America’s interests, not the U.N.’s. Without the U.S. as a check, the United Nations would allow the Palestinians and others to write their own terms for the Middle East, and denunciations of America would be as common as denunciations of Israel. This is the reason Israel remains in the body, notwithstanding the routine insults from countries with obscene human-rights violations.

The best way for America to show the hollowness of this U.N. stunt is by proceeding with its plans to build an Embassy in Jerusalem—and demonstrate to the U.N. that America is one nation that stands by its friends.

“Yves Mamou, author and journalist, based in France, worked for two decades as a journalist for Le Monde. He is finishing a book about “Collaborators and Useful Idiots of Islamism in France,” to be published in 2018.”

In France, all the circumlocutions for the word “terrorist” appear to have the same goal: to deny that Islamist terrorism is a coordinated movement and that Islamist warriors are mainly French citizens engaged in a war against their own country.

If you deny that terrorism is a war, you also logically have to deny that terrorists are supported, sheltered, transported and financed by a grey zone of supposedly peaceful French citizens.

In France today, the result of the denial of war is the “anti-racism” movement. Anyone who dares to question Islam or Islamism in its relation to violence and terrorism risks being hauled into court and tried as a “racist.”

When members of a small French far-right nationalist group, Génération Identitaire, occupied a mosque under construction in Poitiers in 2012 and said they were celebrating the anniversary of the battle of Poitiers (732 AD), in which Charles Martel defeated the army of the Ummayad Caliphate, thereby routing the Arab invasion of France, the prosecutor of the Republic of France launched an immediate investigation for “incitement to racial hatred.” Five of the activists were arrested, indicted, and this month, sentenced to one-year suspended prison sentences. The court sentenced four of them to deprivation of their civic rights (such as the right to vote in elections) for the next five years. In addition, the Génération Identitaire organization had to pay a fine of 10,000 euros, and the four activists had to pay a fine of 24,000 euros to the organization “Muslims of France” (“Musulmans de France”), which is the owner of the mosque and the legal representative in France of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood movement. If the fine is not paid, the activists will go to jail.

The lawyer for Génération Identitaire, Frederic Pichon, said he was “flabbergasted by the severity of the sentence” and that the decision was “political”. “I cannot help comparing it with the incredible impunity that… Femen received when it burst into the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris,” he said.

Pichon was referring to a 2013 incident, in which members of the feminist group Femen had burst topless into Notre Dame Cathedral, were accused of damaging a bell, and in 2015, were acquitted by the Paris court of appeals. Two of the security officers who drove the perpetrators received fines.

The heavy sentence against far-right activists of the Génération Identitaire, however, should not have come as a surprise. The French judicial system is simply applying a policy which claims that the new enemy of the society is not Islamism, but the traditional fascism of the extreme right. This policy, elaborated by the Ministry of Justice and applied by prosecutors, is based on two assumptions. The first is that — despite the fact that since 2012 more than 250 people have been murdered in France by Islamic terrorism — there is supposedly no Islamist war against France or any other non-Muslim country. Islamists killers are presumably only “lone wolves” or “mentally ill”. The second assumption is that if there is no Islamist war against non-Muslims, all critics of Islam and Islamism are not exercising freedom of speech but expressing racism.

Saleh Ali was one of 64,000 Syrian refugees living in the Netherlands. The vast majority, like Ali, are young men. And the largest number of these migrants spend their days idling in Amsterdam.

On Thursday morning, Saleh Ali took a walk to trendy Amstelveenseweg while wearing a keffiyah and waving a terrorist PLO flag. He stopped in front of a Jewish restaurant, shouted “Allahu Akbar” and began smashing the windows. The Amsterdam police stood by and watched quizzically until he was done. Then when he entered the restaurant, they finally called him out and arrested him.

And in two days he was back on the street.

Amsterdam is a very tolerant place. Not just of drugs or prostitution, but of Islamic violence.

Saleh Ali had lied about his past to get his temporary residence permit while claiming to be a refugee. He had combat training and had fought with Jihadists in and out of Syria. He told the police that he had been prepared to die in the attack on the restaurant and that he will continue engaging in violence.

But this information was kept secret until an anonymous source in the police department leaked it. The lawyer for HaCarmel, the restaurant that had been assaulted by the Islamic terrorist, issued a statement expressing outrage that the attacker who had pledged to commit more attacks was back on the street.

“It is incomprehensible and shocking that this man with a terrorist background, who claims to be prepared to commit violence, has been released,” wrote Herman Loonstein, a lawyer and Jewish civil rights activist. He warned that the attacker poses “a serious danger to society.”

And the prosecutor’s office took immediate action by filing a complaint against the restaurant’s lawyer. The Chief Officer of the Public Prosecution Service objected that, “sharing of information from the police interrogation report is ’inappropriate’”. It’s inappropriate because it revealed that Saleh Ali should never have been in the Netherlands and that the authorities had stood around watching while a trained terrorist attacked a Jewish restaurant and then let him go even after he vowed to launch further attacks.

While the prosecutors went after the restaurant for exposing the terrorist past of the attacker, the attacker was headed back to court for an appearance before a three judge panel.

Saleh Ali wore camouflage to court. According to Matthys van Raalten, a conservative commentator, he told the court that, “he feels like a volcano that is waiting to erupt”. He had already informed an officer that “the attack on the kosher restaurant was only the “first step” and that a next step would come.

He refused to discuss what the next step would be.

So of course they let him go a second time.

The current government seems not to believe that Islamic terrorism in Canada even exists.

The RCMP guide is premised on the belief that radicalization occurs because of perceptions of “injustice” (not because of perceptions of jihad). Islamic groups are not mentioned. The message is that terrorism is “diverse” and has nothing to do with Islam. However, Public Safety Canada’s list of terrorist entities contains 54 terrorist groups, 46 of which are Islamic terrorist groups.

Meanwhile, the war on free speech in Canada grinds on: Ottawa Public Library cancelled the screening of “Killing Europe”, a documentary about, ironically, among other things, the death of free speech in Europe. Ottawa Public Library deemed this content not suitable for Canadians — apparently snowflakes, not allowed to know about the rise of migrant rape crime, anti-Semitism, far-leftist violence and other irritants in Europe.

While worried about graffiti, Canadian authorities appear far less concerned about deterring Canadian imams from preaching jihad, Jew-hatred and the murder of Jews to their Muslim congregations, despite Jews being approximately twelve times more likely to be targeted for hate crimes than Muslims are. For anti-Muslim graffiti, you go to jail for five months, but inciting an entire congregation to kill Jewish citizens does not even merit prosecution.

In September, the Canadian parliament began its study on how to combat “Islamophobia” as decided upon in the M-103 motion. A parliamentary committee, the M-103 committee, was established for that very purpose. Although motion M-103 was not binding, Samer Majzoub, a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate of the Canadian Muslim Forum, tellingly advertised:

“Now that Islamophobia has been condemned, this is not the end, but rather the beginning… so that condemnation is followed by comprehensive policies.”

Majzoub’s statement presumably meant that the next steps would be to make M-103 binding.

Part of the problem, however, with any study of “Islamophobia”, as with any motions about it, is that it is never clearly defined.

Now fresh statistics released at the end of November 2017, showed that in Canada, hate crimes against Muslims actually fell in 2016, but those against Jews increased:

Hate crimes against Muslims:

2015, there were 159
2016, there were 139

Hate crimes against Jews:

2015, there were 178
2016, there were 221

In Canada, with a population of 36 million people, approximately 330,000 are Jews and slightly more than 1,000,000 are Muslims.

London, Paris, Rome—cities that are familiar to most Americans. And even if you can’t find them on the map, you know that it only takes a few clicks to learn all you need to know about them. (Buckingham Palace, where the Queen lives. The Eiffel Tower, completed in 1889. Three coins in the Trevi Fountain.)https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/20/jerusalem-is-the-capital-of-israel/

If you do look at the map—Siri has probably found one for you by now—you’ll notice that all three cities are the capitals of their respective countries.

You may wonder how cities get to be capitals. Stop. Don’t ask Siri. It’s very simple. The countries just pick a city, and the word out gets out. That’s it. No ifs, ands, or buts.

Unless the city is Jerusalem. Yes, Jerusalem is Israel’s capital city. It’s not something new, and it has nothing to with anything President Trump said. Remember the rule: A country gets to name its capital. No other country or individual has any say in the matter. Pretty simple, right?

But if you find it surprising, you’re in good company. Israel chose Jerusalem as its capital almost 70 years ago. Yet most of the press and political leaders worldwide are just now getting up to speed.

To his great credit, President Trump was not constrained by whatever handicap prevented so many others from stating the obvious. “Israel is a sovereign nation with the right like every other sovereign nation to determine its own capital,” said Trump

In May 1948, the State of Israel declared its independence, and Israel’s founding fathers chose Jerusalem to be the fledgling state’s capital. It was an easy choice. In fact, it was a fait accompli. When you have a city that was good enough to be the capital for King David some 3,000 years earlier, and that city is where Solomon chose to build the Holy Temple, you don’t need to look elsewhere.

As clear a choice as this was for Israel, it didn’t go over well with most countries, including the United States. They had their reasons: bad ones. But, of course, nothing really mattered. The choice was Israel’s to make, and Israel would not be deterred.

And the United States and other nations, what did they do? They took a very diplomatic approach: they punted . . . all the way to Tel Aviv. Nice city—restaurants, beaches. But it wasn’t Israel’s capital.

That’s why, just the past week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a “read my lips” moment, had to state the obvious to the visiting French President Emmanuel Macron: “Paris is the capital of France. Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.”

According to a 2007 study by the Rockwool Foundation, after ten years in the Danish school system, two-thirds of students with an Arabic background remain functionally illiterate. In Bradford, Yorkshire, 75 per cent of Pakistani Britons are married to their first cousins, many of whom are themselves the children of first cousins. In the new west, why even bother worrying about IQ? Professor Bates says he wants to get to the bottom of the “why” and the “what”. But as I wrote eleven years ago in America Alone:

Stick a pin almost anywhere in the map, near or far: The “who” is the best indicator of the what-where-when-why.

Which is why a gay bathhouse got nixed in Luton: The mosque has more muscle.

And the more demographic transformation transforms, the more ill-advised it becomes to mention it. Before 9/11, even the BBC was happy to discuss whether the resurgence of rickets in the United Kingdom is due to Muslim dress. Sixteen years later, when UKIP bring it up, it’s cited as proof they’re a laughingstock. A question for Professor Bates and his colleagues is whether a society in which more and more subjects are ruled out of public discourse should expect its measures of intelligence to do anything other than head south – for native and non-native alike. Thus:

The quality of what we called the student “clientele” had deteriorated so dramatically over the years that the classroom struck me as a barn full of ruminants and the curriculum as a stack of winter ensilage… The level of interest in and attention to the subjects was about as flat as a fallen arch. The ability to write a coherent English sentence was practically nonexistent; ordinary grammar was a traumatic ordeal. In fact, many native English-speakers could not produce a lucid verbal analysis of a text, let alone carry on an intelligible conversation, and some were even unable to properly pronounce common English words.