RUTHFULLY YOURS

Far from reminding girls of a world of opportunities, the hijab reminds them of all the things they cannot do in many Muslim countries. These include decisions about their own lives and bodies, such as not having their genitals mutilated, and generally not leading the free lives that women in the West — including the ones working at Mattel — probably take for granted.

Far from being a symbol of empowerment, the new Hijab Barbie is an example of a cultural and civilizational jihad — and the submission of a Western company, Mattel, to that jihad. Cultural jihad is the attempt to change and subvert Western culture from within, or more simply put: to Islamize it.

“The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…” The document then goes on to list the Muslim Brotherhood organizations and the organizations of its friends: organizations such as CAIR, ISNA, ICNA among others. — Muslim Brotherhood, 1991.

A new Barbie doll has been launched as part of Mattel’s “sheroes” line. It is a doll in full hijab modeled after American-Muslim Olympic fencer, Ibtihaj Muhammad, the first American athlete to compete in the Olympics wearing a headscarf, which — apparently — Mattel felt was something for little girls worldwide to emulate. That and the possibility of selling millions of toys in the burgeoning Muslim market, of course.According to a statement from Mattel:

“Barbie is celebrating Ibtihaj not only for her accolades as an Olympian, but for embracing what makes her stand out,” said Sejal Shah Miller, Vice President of Global Marketing for Barbie. “Ibtihaj is an inspiration to countless girls who never saw themselves represented, and by honoring her story, we hope this doll reminds them that they can be and do anything.”

The attempt to paint the new Hijab Barbie as a symbol of empowerment for girls is, however, quite disturbing. Girls “being and doing anything they want” is considerably different from what this hijab-clad doll represents. Hijab Barbie represents, on the contrary, the often violent oppression that Muslim girls and women experience throughout the Muslim world. It also represents the gender-apartheid the Quran mandates, which limits the freedoms of Muslim girls and women in the extreme.

Our democracies in the Western half of Europe have been subverted. Their goal is no longer to do what the people want. On the contrary, our political elites often do exactly the opposite. Our parliaments promote open-door policies that the majority of the people reject. Our governments sell out sovereignty to the EU against the will of the people. Our rulers welcome ever more Islam, although the majority of the people oppose it.

Our democracies have become fake democracies. They are multi-party dictatorships, ruled by groups of establishment parties…. The establishment parties control everything, not just the politicians in their pay, but also the top brass of the civil service, the mainstream media, even the courts…. They call us “populists” because we stand for what the people want. They even drag us to court.

We need to show that Europe’s streets are our streets, that we want to stay who and what we are, and do not want to be colonized by Islam. Europe belongs to us!

Next month, I will be visiting Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. I have been invited to speak to a group of Czech patriots. The Czechs are a freedom loving people. In 2011, on the occasion of the 100th birthday of Ronald Reagan, they named a street in Prague after this great American president and freedom fighter.

This fact reminded me of a shameful event in my home town of The Hague, the seat of the Dutch Parliament and the government of the Netherlands. Look for a Ronald Reagan Street in The Hague and you will find none. A proposal in 2011 to name a street in The Hague after Reagan ran into fierce political opposition. Leftist parties, such as Labor, the Greens and the liberal D66 party, argued that naming a street in honor of Reagan would “do the image of the city no good.” The whole affair ended in a disgraceful political compromise. Last year, a short stretch of a local bicycle path was named the “Reagan and Gorbachev Lane”.

This anecdote is indicative of the difference between East and West in Europe. We can see the same difference in the attitude of their ruling elites towards Islam, the new totalitarianism that is threatening Europe today. In the East, political leaders oppose Islam; in the West, they surrender.

Islam has already gained a strong foothold in Western Europe. Its streets have come to resemble the Middle East, with headscarves everywhere. Parts of Western Europe, such as the Schilderswijk district in The Hague, the Molenbeek borough in Brussels, the banlieues [suburbs] of Paris, Birmingham in Britain, the Rosengård area in Malmö, Sweden, and many other neighborhoods, have become hotbeds of Islamic subversion.

Islam’s totalitarian nature cannot be denied. The command to murder and terrorize non-Muslims is in the Koran. Islam’s prophet Muhammad was a mass murderer and a pedophile. Those who leave Islam supposedly deserve death. And everyone who criticizes Islam and exposes what it actually says, ends up like me: on an Islamic death list.

In the past decades, Islam has entered Western Europe with the millions of immigrants from Islamic countries. Now, the European Union wants to distribute third-world immigrants over all the 28 EU member states. The nations in Central and Eastern Europe reject the EU plans to impose permanent and mandatory relocation quotas for all EU member states. They warn about the dilution of their identity, which is not Islamic, but Judeo-Christian and humanist — rooted in the legacy of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome; not Mecca.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has denounced the EU’s pro-immigration agenda as a means to eradicate the culture and Christian identity of Hungary. Czech President Miloš Zeman is an outspoken opponent of immigration and the Islamification of the Czech Republic. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has said that “Islam has no place in Slovakia” and warns that “migrants change the character of our country.” Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydło staunchly defends Poland’s refusal to accept the EU-imposed immigration quotas. “We are not going to take part in this madness,” she says. In the Eastern part of Europe, anti-Islamification and anti-mass migration parties see a surge in popular support.

Islam did not trick Western nations; the West brought itself to the embrace of Islam.

The center of the original Islamic message seems to have been to convert, kill or drive away Christians and Jews, rather than to meet the spiritual needs of Muslims. To this day, the central preaching of Islam still appears to be an intolerance of non-Muslims.

What made America great is being discarded together with America’s imperfect past, without acknowledging that America has taken — and is still taking — steps to correct its injustices, as many Middle Eastern nations have not.

There is a good possibility that, with the impact of Islam — and the replacement of the active values of personal responsibility and “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps” by the passive values of victimhood for blackmailing, redistribution and abdication to “government” — the West’s humanistic values, which welcomed Islam in the first place, may not survive.

The famous expression “Never Again” was coined after the world, during World War II, almost exterminated its Jewish population. But instead of anti-Semitism being eradicated, a worldwide rebellion against the people who gave us the Ten Commandments continues today, and has now expanded to include other groups.

While the Jewish people are still at its center, there are now also violent protests, hatred and rejection cleverly camouflaged as demonstrations against supposed “bigots,” and “hate groups” — meaning not only those who support Israel and the Jewish people, but also against those who are patriots, who love God, family and country and who want to protect their nation’s sovereignty from the world’s hostile forces. These individuals are now often viewed as evil, mean-spirited or racist.

Anti-Semitism is a bit more complicated than just hating Jews. Much of the world seems always to have been challenged by the values of the Torah, the Gospel and the Ten Commandments. Living according to Biblical standards of good and evil, and treating one’s neighbors as oneself, is not easy for most people. There is a rebellious, dark side of human nature that every generation needs to conquer if we are to maintain a way of life based on the values set forth by the Ten Commandments and the Bible. But in the West’s secular, popular culture of today, generations are being brought up believing that these values stand in the way of “progress,” however that is variously defined.

Many people seem to think that the values of the Ten Commandments and the Bible are universal; that most people happily agree with them and are eager to adopt them. There seems, on the contrary, to be no shortage of individuals — largely in the worlds of politics, entertainment and academia — eager to find excuses to violate them while at the same time judging others by standards they would not dream of applying to themselves.

When Christian Lindner, leader of Germany’s market-minded Free Democrat party, walked out of the three-party negotiations intended to forge a new federal government from the fragmented political spectrum that emerged from the recent elections, he signaled the end of Germany’s post-war political settlement — one of almost astounding stability. As Josef Joffe has pointed out in Politico, for most of the last seven decades, almost all German governments were different combinations of three political parties: the center-right Christian Democrats, joined by their conservative Bavarian regional allies, the Christian Social Union, at a national level (thus the CDU-CSU); the center-left Social Democrats (SDP); and the aforementioned Free Democrats (FDP). On rare occasions the CDU-CSU alliance would join the SPD in a “grand coalition,” but most of the time the FDP would decide which of the two main parties would be its larger partner in a coalition. By and large this system gave Germany stable, moderate, sensible government that shifted slightly left or right as elections and the FDP dictated. It suited both Germany’s cautious post-war electorate and the country’s allies very well.

But things started to change after the Cold War and German reunification. First the Greens moved their politics away from Peace Movement leftism to a more centrist progressivism stressing environmentalism and open borders. Next some voters in the former East Germany, nostalgic for the meager but comforting security of Communism, helped to midwife the birth of a welfarist party to the left of the SDP, namely the Linke. And, finally, Chancellor Merkel’s “welcome politics” offering sanctuary to Middle Eastern refugees without limit provoked the rise of a “populist” party, Alternative for Germany, which joined Euro-skepticism to anti-immigration politics. In the last election these new parties achieved a surprise result: a completely fragmented political spectrum of six parties of which two — the Linke and the AFD — are treated by the other four as only dubiously democratic and therefore unacceptable as coalition partners. When the SPD decided not to enter a new coalition, the parliamentary arithmetic thus required a “Jamaica coalition” of the CDU-CSU, the Greens, and the FDP.

Lindner’s walk-out made that impossible.

For the first time since it began operating in 2002, the International Criminal Court has put the U.S. in its sights. On Nov. 3, ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda initiated an investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Afghanistan since mid-2003. This raises the alarming possibility that the court will seek to assert jurisdiction over American citizens.

Located in The Hague (alongside such dinosaurs as the International Court of Justice, which decides state-versus-state disputes), the ICC constitutes a direct assault on the concept of national sovereignty, especially that of constitutional, representative governments like the United States. The Trump administration should not respond to Ms. Bensouda in any way that acknowledges the ICC’s legitimacy. Even merely contesting its jurisdiction risks drawing the U.S. deeper into the quicksand.The left will try to intimidate the White House by insisting that any resistance to the ICC aligns the U.S. with human-rights violators. But the administration’s real alignment should be with the U.S. Constitution, not the global elite. It would not be “pragmatic” to accept the ICC; it would be toxic to democratic sovereignty.

The U.S. is not party to the Rome Statute, the treaty establishing the ICC’s authority. Bill Clinton signed it in 2000, when he was a lame duck. But fearing certain rejection, he did not submit it to the Senate. The Bush administration formally “unsigned” in 2002 before the Rome Statute entered into force. That same year, Congress passed supportive legislation protecting U.S. servicemembers from the ICC, a law that was decried by hysterical opponents as the “Hague Invasion Act.” The U.S. then entered into more than 100 bilateral agreements committing other nations not to deliver Americans into the ICC’s custody.

Her name is Faten Mahdi Al-Hussaini. She’s twenty-two years old, she lives in Oslo, she wears a hijab, she’s praised the Ayatollah Khomeini and blamed Jews for all the world’s travails – and she’s the newest star on the state-owned, public-funded Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK).

In the run-up to the recent parliamentary elections, Faten was tapped to be the host for a four-episode TV series about the campaign. The show, aimed largely at young people, was called Faten Tar Valget. The title is a play on words: since valg can mean both “election” and choice,” the title can be translated both as “Faten Takes on the Election” and “Faten Makes the Decision.” The premise was that after talking to political experts and representatives of all the major political parties, she would figure out which of the parties she wanted to support. “Faten is a strong young voice in the Norwegian public square,” said NRK official Håkon Moslet. “She is unusually brave and has demonstrated the ability both to confront and to build bridges.”

Faten’s election series wasn’t her introduction to the limelight. She first made headlines three years ago, when, addressing a demonstration in Oslo, she served up a full-throated condemnation of ISIS. You might consider criticizing ISIS a no-brainer, but when it’s done by a hijab-clad girl in Norway she becomes a superstar – instant proof that European Muslims are overwhelmingly on the side of the angels. Alas, Faten’s debut on the media stage didn’t go off without a hitch: after her ISIS speech, people began looking into her background, and a few dicey details turned up. For one thing, she belonged to a Shia mosque whose Iranian-trained imams preach hatred of the West and support Tehran-backed terrorism. At a debate following the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in Paris, she’d expressed sympathy for them – kind of – but had also argued that they’d “paid the price for expressing themselves too coarsely.” That wasn’t all: on her Facebook page, she had called Khomeini “a legend” and had shared a friend’s suggestion that ISIS carry out its jihad in “Palestine” (i.e., Israel). Also, she had a record of open Jew-hatred.

But none of that, apparently, bothered the NRK bigwigs overmuch. They professed to be shocked when their decision to let Faten host a TV show – and in hijab, no less – caused a massive public backlash. The government-appointed Broadcasting Council, whose job it is to pass judgment on controversial actions by NRK, received thousands of complaints. Many of the complainants were Christians who pointed out that NRK had previously refused to let another on-camera host wear a tiny cross around her neck. But the Christians weren’t alone. Mahmoud Farahmand, a Conservative politician with a Muslim background, also complained. Farahmand, who as a child fled revolutionary Iran with his parents and who supports a hijab ban, charged (correctly) that the Norwegian media and government are always treating the most fanatically pious Muslims as representatives and spokespeople for their co-religionists. Another Iranian-Norwegian politician, the Progress Party’s Mazyar Keshvari, noted that Faten had been the director of Stand 4 Hussain, a group that supports brutal punishment of those who violate sharia law.

On November 11th 1965 the Union Jack came down in Harare Rhodesia one of the saddest tales of decolonization in Africa. Africa’s breadbasket and most thriving nation disintegrated under the rule of Mugabe. Famine, epidemic, and the systematic government seizure and destruction of productive farms led to the chaos that reigns today. The apathy and disinterest of the Congressional Black caucus and prominent Americans proved that African Black lives don’t matter. It is a tragedy and failure of monumental proportions…..rsk

Zimbabwe, one of Africa’s most resource-rich nations, suffered a steep economic decline under the decadeslong rule of Robert Mugabe, and his successor will face an arduous task in reviving it.

Unlike most other sub-Saharan Africans, Zimbabweans are considerably poorer today than they were some three decades ago, according to the World Bank and other agencies, with fewer people employed and more people going hungry.

Once considered Africa’s breadbasket for its productive agricultural sector, Zimbabwe is now the 22nd poorest nation in the world, according to International Monetary Fund data. Millions of its citizens have emigrated in search of work after a cycle of crises stoked an inflation rate that peaked in 2008 at 79.6 billion percent.

The country’s economy is again on a precipice. With the budget deficit ballooning to 10% of gross domestic product, U.S. dollars—Zimbabwe’s effective currency—are in such scarce circulation that people have begun sleeping outside banks.

“Macroeconomic stability is threatened by high government spending, the foreign-exchange regime is untenable, and the pace of reform inadequate,” said Gene Leon, the IMF’s Zimbabwe mission chief.

The country’s stubborn state of economic emergency marks a spectacular decline from when Robert Mugabe took its helm in 1980, ending white-minority rule after years of armed struggle amid widespread jubilation. His first 15 years in power were broadly reformist, characterized by consensus building and large investments in education and infrastructure. In those years the economy continued to expand.

BERLIN—The fate of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, reeling from the collapse of coalition talks, could hinge on a party that has shed almost half its voters and lost every single general election over the past 15 years.

Ms. Merkel’s attempt to forge a disparate alliance of conservatives, free-marketers and environmentalists collapsed on Sunday, putting a spotlight on the Social Democratic Party, which suffered a searing September defeat at the polls.

The country’s president, conservative allies of Ms. Merkel and even prominent opposition figures this week called on the venerable center-left party to help solve the political crisis by joining Ms. Merkel in reassembling their “grand coalition” of ideological rivals.

SPD Chairman Martin Schulz, the party’s eighth leader in 18 years, has so far rejected the overtures. Andrea Nahles, the recently appointed parliamentary leader, said this week that her party wouldn’t act as Ms. Merkel’s “power-political reserve.”

But some experts say the SPD may not have a better option. Should it refuse to be wooed, the result could be snap elections, for which it is woefully unprepared.

“The SPD finds itself in a dilemma…it got caught on the wrong foot,” said Thorsten Faas, a political-science professor at Berlin’s Free University.
Little LeftThe Social Democratic Party, Germany’s largestmainstream left-of-center party, has lost about halfits voters in the past 15 years.SPD general-election vote shareTHE WALL STREET JOURNALSource: Germany’s Federal Returning Officer*Last SPD general-election victory
%2002*’05’09’13’17010203040

After delivering the party’s worst postwar election result, Mr. Schulz has lost authority. Two opinion polls released this week suggest the SPD wouldn’t do any better at the ballot box today.

As with other social-democratic parties in Europe, the 142-year-old SPD has yet to find a solution to the gradual loss of its old audience of blue-collar workers, civil servants and trade unionists.

In Germany, the demographic problem was compounded by the unpopular economic overhauls of Gerhard Schröder, which alienated the party’s left-wing base when he served as the latest Social Democratic chancellor from 1998-2005. Ms. Merkel’s embrace of center-left policies, including a minimum wage and same-sex marriage, also eroded support.

After the poor September election results, SPD leaders had hoped a four-year spell in opposition would re-energize the party and give it a good shot at the chancellery in 2021.

“The SPD has to be careful about its election results. If it falls below 20%, people will get nervous there,” said Tilman Mayer, politics professor at Bonn University. “To simply steal away and say we will only do opposition, that’s simply not enough. And I’m not sure this would be rewarded in snap elections.” CONTINUE AT SITE

The Palestinians have made up their mind: The Trump peace plan is bad for us and we will not accept it. The plan is bad because it does not force Israel to give the Palestinians everything.

If and when the Trump administration makes public its peace plan, the Palestinians will be the first to reject it, simply because it does not meet all their demands.

Trump will soon learn that for Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinians, 99% is just not enough.

The Palestinians are once again angry — this time because the Trump administration does not seem to have endorsed their position regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinians are also angry because they believe that the Trump administration does not want to force Israel to comply with all their demands.

Here is how the Palestinians see it: If you are not with us, then you must be against us. If you do not accept all our demands, then you must be our enemy and we cannot trust you to play the role of an “honest” broker in the conflict with Israel.

Last week, unconfirmed reports once again suggested that the Trump administration has been working on a comprehensive plan for peace in the Middle East. The full details of the plan remain unknown at this time.

However, what is certain — according to the reports — is that the plan does not meet all of the Palestinians’ demands. In fact, no peace plan — by Americans or any other party — would be able to provide the Palestinians with everything for which they are asking.

Palestinian requirements remain as unrealistic as ever. They include, among other things, the demand that millions of Palestinian “refugees” be allowed to enter Israel. Also, the Palestinians want Israel to withdraw to indefensible borders that would bring Hamas and other groups closer to Tel Aviv.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) and its leader, 82-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, now in the twelfth year of his four-year term, continue to insist that they will accept nothing less than a sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with east Jerusalem as its capital, on the entire lands captured by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War.

Most dangerous is that even in the unlikely event that Abbas would sign some deal, another leader can come along later and legitimately say that Abbas had no authority to sign anything as his term had long since expired.

Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist terror group controlling the Gaza Strip, maintains that it will never accept the presence of Israel on “Muslim-owned” land. Hamas wants all the land Israel supposedly “took” in 1948. Translation: Hamas wants the destruction of Israel in order to establish an Islamic Caliphate where non-Muslims would be granted the status of dhimmi (“protected person”).

From the Punic Wars (264–146 b.c.) and the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) to the Arab–Israeli wars (1947–) and the so-called War on Terror (2001–), some wars never seem to end.

The dilemma is raised frequently given America’s long wars (Vietnam 1955–75) that either ended badly (Iraq 2003–11) or in some ways never quite ended at all (Korea 1950–53 and 2017–?; Afghanistan 2001–).

So what prevents strategic resolution? Among many reasons, two throughout history stand out.

One, such bella interrupta involve belligerents who are roughly equally matched. Neither side had enough of a material or spiritual edge (or sometimes the desire) to defeat, humiliate, and dictate terms to the beaten enemy. Think Rome and Carthage from 264 to 146. For 118 years, they fought three Punic Wars until greater Roman growth and vitality finally allowed it to dominate the Mediterranean and dictate terms on the North African coast, which finally resulted in the destruction of the Carthaginian Empire rather than another defeat of it. There was no fourth Punic War.

Certainly over the length of the Hundred Years’ War, England and France were often either too equally matched, or both lacked the necessary military clout to destroy their adversary’s army, march on the respective enemy capital, occupy it, and end both the material and political ability of the losing side to make war.

In contrast, there was not another American Civil War, because after the invasions of Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan between 1864 and 1865, the Confederacy lost the ability to resist, and Union armies forced an unconditional surrender and a mandated reentry into the Union. The same sort of resolution was true of the Second World War, in which the victorious Allies agreed that they should and could destroy the political regimes — at whatever cost — of Germany, Italy, and Japan. The combined manpower, GDP, and munitions of Britain, the USSR, and the United States allowed them to crush the Axis — once they had the willingness to pay a high price in blood and treasure to avoid a World War I–like armistice that they believed would have led to World War III.

In the post-war nuclear age, America’s enemies having roughly equal military power was never the reason that America failed to achieve victory in conventional wars. Rather, for a variety of reasons — political, cultural, social, economic — the U.S., at times, both wisely and foolishly, chose not to apply its full strength to pursue the unconditional surrender of its enemies.