RUTHFULLY YOURS

Liberation has wrought two problems. The lesser, as chivalry has died, is sexual harassment by those with power over someone they desire. The greater problem as the old restraints atrophy is that we don’t live in a world without rules but in one where they are unknown until broken.

It took less than two weeks before the Harvey Weinstein sex scandal and its impact on cultural politics spread from Hollywood and Broadway to the Westminster Parliament in London. “Sexminster” and “Kneegate” are the names of the scandal locally. It’s being treated by the media as an outbreak of sexual harassment among MPs so shocking that it may bring down Theresa May’s Tory government.

Yet one can’t help noticing that so far the total of all reported “offenses”—which range widely from one rape to two reports of Ministers touching knees surreptitiously over dinner—is only a small fraction of the rapes and serious assaults alleged against Weinstein alone. Whatever pretensions the House of Commons may still cherish, it’s very far from being Hollywood-on-the-Thames.

News and rumors of sex emerge with every twist of the 24-hour cycle, however. So, with that qualification, here is a quick summary of recent news from Babylon:

A dossier prepared by anonymous “researchers” alleged that forty Tory MPs were known to be guilty of sexual harassment of young aides and researchers. Some MPs and their harassed aides on the list, however, promptly stood up to identify themselves and to firmly deny the charges. Two of the MPs are taking actions for libel. The number of Tory MPs in the dossier has now been reduced to 25.
Though not mentioned in the dossier, a number of Labour figures were soon led into the dock. One MP was charged with aggressively vulgar sexual advances in a bar a decade ago; another with hinting broadly to a young Labour sympathizer that he nursed feelings that made her feel “uncomfortable” (he envied the young man who was her lover); and the third case, mentioned above, was that of a Labour apparatchik outside Parliament accused of rape by another young activist.
As the tumbrils began to roll, more names were outed. One former Tory Minister, married and once mentioned as a possible PM, was found to have sexted to a young woman after interviewing her for a job. (He decided not to offer her the job but risked texting her anyway.) Another Tory MP has been accused of putting his hands up the skirts of women MPs in the elevator—the only accusation so far that mimics the odd Hollywood stories of producers, writers, and actors masturbating in front of women they were hiring or working with. A third Tory, Charlie Elphicke, has in effect been expelled from the Tory benches by the Whips’ Office which also passed allegations involving him onto the police. He has not been told what the allegations are, however, and the police have not yet taken any action against him.

Istanbul’s new mayor had been one of the lawyers defending Islamist arsonists in what is known as the “Sivas case”.

They set the hotel alight, while policemen allegedly stood by and watched as 37 people were killed. The city’s Islamist mayor refused to send firefighters to put out the blaze. The assault took eight hours, without any intervention from the police, military or fire department.

Ankara, Turkey’s capital, has a population of about five million. Istanbul, the country’s biggest city and commercial capital, has more than 15 million inhabitants. Turkey’s top two cities have since 1994 been uninterruptedly run by elected mayors who feature various blends of religious conservatism, nationalism and Islamism. Recently, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan thought it was time for a changing of the guard in both cities; but the change looks more like old wine in a new bottle.

Melih Gokcek, the eccentric nationalist and Islamist mayor of Ankara, a loyal devotee of Erdogan, has run the capital for 23 years. During his reign, he did not miss a single opportunity to get into verbal fights with half the Turkish nation in addition to “Turkey’s foreign enemies.” In 2014, during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, when large crowds of Turks regularly attacked Israel’s diplomatic missions in Ankara and Istanbul — with hundreds of angry Turks throwing rocks and trying to break into the diplomatic compounds — Gokcek was quoted as saying: “We will conquer the despicable murderers’ consulate”.

In a television debate in 2015, Gokcek claimed that if he gets killed, Israel’s Mossad should be held responsible. In August 2016, he claimed that the United States had subcontracted Israel to perform seismic tests to cause earthquakes in and around Turkey. In October 2016, he once again claimed that the earthquakes in Turkey were the work of the U.S. and Israel — conspiracies plotted against Turkey by foreign powers.

In February 2017 Gokcek claimed that the mild earthquake off Canakkale province on Turkey’s northern Aegean coast was the work of foreign powers who wanted to topple Erdogan’s government. He called on the Turkish Armed Forces to take measures on the Aegean Sea. “At the moment,” he said, “The planned conspiracy against Turkey is to cause economic collapse by means of an earthquake in Istanbul”. Recently, in September, Gokcek, in his Twitter account, called on Muslim believers to pray that disasters worse “than the Irma and Harvey hurricanes” take place.

All that usual “more royalist than the royals” behavior did not help him keep his seat. Erdogan pressed for the resignation of a number of mayors in his party, including the mayors of Ankara and Istanbul, and Gokcek grudgingly had to step down. Who ideally should replace the man loved by religious fanatics but hated by liberals and seculars?

“My homeland is the French language,” author Albert Camus once wrote—and many French people would agree. That’s why any attempt at changing the language is often met with suspicion. So the uproar was almost instantaneous when, this fall, the first-ever school textbook promoting a gender-neutral version of French was released.

It was a victory for a subset of French feminists who had argued that the gendered nature of the language promotes sexist outcomes, and that shifting to a gender-neutral version would improve women’s status in society. Educating the next generation in a gender-inclusive way, they claimed, would yield concrete positive changes, like professional environments that are more welcoming to women.

Many others found this idea outrageous. They complained that implementing it would badly complicate education, and that there’s not enough evidence that changing a language can really change social realities. Clearly in the second camp, the office of Prime Minister Edouard Philippe announced this week that it’s banning the use of gender-neutral French in all official government documents.

In French, pronouns, nouns, and adjectives reflect the gender of the object to which they refer. So, le policier is a policeman; la policière is a policewoman. The language has no neutral grammatical gender. And there are many nouns (including those referring to professions) that don’t have feminine versions. So, a male minister is le ministre and a female minister is la ministre. What’s more, French students are taught that “the masculine dominates over the feminine,” meaning that if you have a room full of ten women and just one man, you have to describe the whole group in the masculine.

Feminists who believe that these features of the French language put women at a disadvantage disagree about how best to remedy them. Most recommend creating feminine versions of all professional nouns and/or using neutral nouns whenever possible. Many also recommend a grammatical tool that consists of adding a “median-period” at the end of masculine nouns, followed by the feminine ending, thus indicating both gendered versions of every noun (like musicien·ne·s, which would read as “male musicians and female musicians”). Some have even recommended creating a gender-neutral pronoun (the equivalent of how “they” is sometimes used in English, or “hen” in Sweden). These and other recommendations have collectively become known as “inclusive writing.”

Many linguists I spoke to stressed that changing a language doesn’t guarantee a change in perception; this leads some of them to say that inclusive writing just isn’t worth the trouble. But at least one major school of linguistic thought concludes that language and perception are intimately related.

Back in August after the terror attack in Barcelona that killed 15 people and injured 131 more in the La Rambla downtown tourist area, I noted here at PJ Media that Islamic vehicle-ramming terror attacks were literally remaking the face of Europe and America.

#NEWSGRAPHIC Fatal vehicle-ramming attacks in Europe since July 2016 @AFP pic.twitter.com/DF9BQMqE3J
— AFP news agency (@AFP) August 18, 2017

Now with ISIS fanboy channels buzzing with calls for similar terror attacks during the Christmas season, European authorities are increasing security for holiday-related events across the continent.

If you’re celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ this holiday season, they fantasize about killing you: https://t.co/U5XNjUSdNT #Christmas
— #PJMedia (@PJMedia_com) November 15, 2017

Here in the U.S., just a month after the terror attack in Manhattan that killed 8 and injured 11, and nearly a year after the vehicle-ramming attack at Ohio State University that injured 11, homeland security officials are also preparing for possible terror attacks.

But gift-wrapping traffic bollards and painting concrete barriers to look like Legos barely conceal the new grim reality.

In Germany, which saw an attack last year on the Berlin Christmas market that killed 12 and injured 40 by an illegal Tunisian immigrant who was scheduled for deportation and who was already known to intelligence officials, traffic bollards are going up everywhere.

+ Bochum verpackt Terrorsperren als Geschenke https://t.co/CEtEO0QiYf #DerTag pic.twitter.com/XWfnQP1F2J
— ntv (@ntvde) November 23, 2017

Weihnachtsmarkt: Hier werden Terrorsperren liebevoll in Geschenkpapier eingewickelt https://t.co/rmZNRD7lv5 pic.twitter.com/cVwQ7kmS2V
— WELT (@welt) November 24, 2017

Deutsche Welle reports:

Bochum authorities placed a string of 1.2 ton pellet bags in the downtown area to avert potential terror attacks ahead of the seasonal opening of the local Christmas market.

On Thursday morning, however, the bags took on a holiday look, with the city’s official marketing service turning them into novelty Christmas presents.

“For us it was very important to fit in those ugly barriers into the beautiful overall atmosphere,” said the head of Bochum Marketing Mario Schiefelbein.

The move surprised both local residents and the police, as the service reportedly giftwrapped up all of the 20 bags overnight without forewarning […]

Bochum is not the only city to put a bow on new security measures. In the Bavarian city of Augsburg, for example, authorities will use decorated trucks belonging to Christmas market stall owners as car barriers. Munich officials plan to block the streets with planters containing season-appropriate evergreen plants.

The first Christmas market in Berlin was opened earlier this month and is surrounded by concrete bollards and armed police:

Potsdamer Platz: Berlins erster #Weihnachtsmarkt eröffnet – hinter Betonpollern https://t.co/E1kngQsGR6 pic.twitter.com/0hcCmjE9X4
— Berliner Zeitung (@berlinerzeitung) November 3, 2017

And the site of the last year’s terror attack in Berlin is also receiving new decorations: CONTINUE AT SITE

Just once I’d like to visit a museum, hear a symphony or watch the ABC without being subjected to a tacked-on politically correct sermon because, well, the creatures of the Gramscian Left have colonised those institutions and are devoted to ramming their effluvia down all our throats.

Australians are all undergoing an immersion experience, washed over by a sea of taxpayer-funded “progressive” propaganda. It is so pervasive that we may hardly notice it. For young people, the Left memes are as self-evident as gravity. What follows are a few samples. I’m sure Quadrant subscribers, who all enjoy online posting rights at this site, can add their own to the comments thread below.

ABCTV 7pm News Victoria– Monday’s show (20/11) had an item on a counter-terrorism report by ex-Police Commissioner Ken Lay and former Supreme Court Judge David Harper. The footage focused on Bourke Street Mall, where Demetrious Gargasoulas is accused of driving at reckless and breakneck speed on January 20. Six were killed and dozens injured. His trial is in progress.

ABCTV reporter Melissa Brown said the new counter-terror report “makes 26 recommendations to better protect Victoria and respond to religious and right-wing extremism.” Gargasoulas doesn’t fit the ‘right-wing’ bill. Indeed, he told a magistrate last April, “Your Honour, did you know the Muslim faith is the correct faith according to the whole world?” Police say he has a history of drug use, family violence and mental health problems.

In reporter Brown’s reference to “religious and right-wing extremism”, we once again see the ABC’s near-total inability to utter “Islam” in any context other than the most laudatory. Inside the ABC’s green-left bubble, there is also inability to mention left-wing extremism, of which there is plenty in Victoria, with Antifa’s thugs to the fore.

Indeed, the ABCTV report shamelessly distorts the Lay-Harper report which says on its second page (emphasis added),

Terrorist organisations continue to develop and distribute violent extremist propaganda to influence people that may be vulnerable to radicalisation – whether it be from the far-right, far-left extremism or extremist Islamist ideologies.

Those were the report’s only references to Left and Right ideologies. What’s up, Ms ABC Reporter Brown, can’t you read?

Australian Story: Up next on ABCTV was Australian Story, which covered the tragic death in July of Australian expat Justine Damond Ruszczyk, who was shot by a Minneapolis cop firing across his partner from the front passenger seat of the police car which responded to her call for help about suspicious noises.

It is 20 minutes into the 30-minute program before the ABC lets us know the cop’s name was Mohamed Noor, and its two references to Somali-born Noor involve all of ten seconds (20.20 minutes to 20.30). The program showed total lack of interest in Noor’s background – which would definitely not be the case if the shooter were, say, a Trump flag-waver, or an evangelical pastor.

Founded in 1889 in British India, Ahmadiyya is an Islamic sect that actually preaches everything that Islam as a whole pretends to stand for: love, peace, forgiveness, and the brotherhood of all humankind. It rejects terrorism, violent jihad, and the concept of “abrogation” whereby later, nastier passages of the Koran are considered to trump earlier, nicer bits.

That’s the good news about Ahmadiyya Muslims – or Ahmadis, for short. The bad news is that they make up only about 1% of the world’s Muslims. Almost all of the other 99% regard them as infidels. In India they’re officially categorized as Muslims and allowed to worship freely, but that’s an exception: in Pakistan, which has the largest Ahmadi population on earth, they’re considered non-Muslims, they’re not allowed to call themselves Muslims, and they’re banned from non-Ahmadi mosques. In Saudi Arabia, in the Palestinian territories, and in several other countries in the Islamic world, Ahmadis are brutally persecuted both by authorities and by their non-Ahmadi neighbors.

A wildly disproportionate number of the Muslims in North America and Europe who have organized anti-terrorism rallies have been Ahmadis. At these events, they routinely give speeches declaring fervently that terrorism is un-Islamic; that jihad, properly understood, means inner struggle and good works; and that Islam teaches sexual equality, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the separation of church and state. Again, Ahmadi Islam does teach all these things. But mainstream Islam doesn’t. Indeed, a big part of the reason why mainstream Islam abhors Ahmadi Islam is that the sect’s beliefs are utterly at odds with the tenets of Sunni and Shia Islam.

So, yes, hurrah for Ahmadi Muslims. If they were the 99% and Sunni and Shia Muslims were the 1%, we could stop worrying so much about Islam. But alas, that’s not the case. Hence, even though Ahmadi Muslims’ beliefs are admirable, it’s problematic when they step in front of crowds of Westerners and present their own version of Islam as if it were the Islam of the majority. Sure, one assumes that when they do this sort of thing, they see themselves as fighting against what they consider the misinterpretations of Islam that are spread by the 99%. But what they’re actually doing, whether they intend it or not, is whitewashing mainstream Islam.

At the end of his eminently important and succinct book, titled Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, author Dr. Sebastian Gorka includes the original secret telegram written in 1946 at the onset of the Cold War, wherein the American diplomat and Russia expert George Kennan explains “how the behavior of the Soviet Union cannot be understood unless an individual understands the totalitarian ideology that drives it. This ‘fanatical’ ideology of communism is absolutist and global and will not countenance peaceful coexistence with America or any democracy.” Keenan describes how “Democratic-progressive” elements abroad are to be utilized to maximum to bring pressure to bear on capitalist governments along lines agreeable to Soviet interests.”

In a book purchased in the USSR in the early 1960s, titled Face to Face: The Story of N.S. Khrushchov’s Visit to the U.S.A., a young American, who later became my husband, came face to face with the propaganda of communism when he read “that with great patience and persistence, the head of the Soviet Government continued to discharge the great mission he had undertaken, to remove the ice piled up by the ‘cold war,’ to open the eyes of people deluded by malicious [American] propaganda, to explain to them the essence of the idea of peaceful coexistence to blaze the trail to peace and friendship among all peoples irrespective of what social system they live under.” Only one problem: the book neglected to mention the 50 million people who would perish under communism or this so-called peaceful coexistence. Just ask the Victims of Communism.

And almost sixty years later, as American leftists align themselves with communist ideology, we can see that they act, not in the interests of America, but in the interest of an ideology that has always sought to destroy America.

And, horrifyingly, as W. August Mayer has written in Islamic Jihad, Cultural Marxism and the Transformation of the West, “the morphing of the Democrat party over the last century from the conservative, traditional liberalism of President Grover Cleveland to the statism of Barack Hussein Obama” is a “downward slope to totalitarian rule towards which political gravity irresistibly draws us ever nearer.”

Russia’s state owned nuclear energy organization, Rosatom, of Uranium One celebrity, has been trying to develop nuclear cooperation with most of the Middle East countries.

Russia would undertake building and operating the nuclear power plants – then start influencing the foreign policy decisions of the country supposedly to “protect” the nuclear power plants from terrorists, and from there to project military influence in the region as it has done in Syria. Russia has already strengthened its defense and military cooperation with Iran and Turkey.

Middle Eastern countries seem as eager to partner with a great power such as Russia as Russia does to partner with them. That way, “everyone” in the region could enjoy greater influence, militarily and otherwise.

Russia has been trying to relieve itself of the economic slowdown it has faced ever since the West imposed sanctions on it for invading the Ukraine. To that end, Russia’s state owned nuclear energy organization, Rosatom, of Uranium One stardom, has been attempting to develop nuclear cooperation with most of the countries in the Middle East. Russia apparently considers the Middle East and North Africa two of the most lucrative markets; countries in the Middle East have already expressed interest in building 90 nuclear power plants at twenty-six sites across the region by 2030.

The Russian government has strongly supported the success of a company globally. Rosatom, for instance, already opened a regional office in Dubai, even though the United Arab Emirates does not have nuclear cooperation with Russia and cooperates with South Korea instead.

Russia, active during the “Iran deal” negotiations as a mediator between the E3 (Britain, Germany, France) with the United States on one side and Iran on the other, was one of the countries to gain from the Iranian nuclear deal – as was Rosatom. Russia, in 2015, signed nuclear cooperation agreements with both Iran and Jordan.

One the strategies Rosatom developed was the Build Own Operate (BOO) plan. Under it, Russia would undertake building and operating the nuclear power plants – then start influencing the foreign policy decisions of the country supposedly to “protect” the nuclear power plants from supposed terrorists, and from there to project military influence in the region as it has done in Syria, with its naval base at Tartus and its air base at Latakia.

Russia has already strengthened its defense and military cooperation with Iran and Turkey.