RUTHFULLY YOURS

Of course, shoehorning Koran verses into a Christmas event does nothing but cause misunderstanding.

The whole thing was pretty bizarre, given that (a) Christmas is not an Islamic holy day, and (b) thanks to such misguided innovations, a whole generation of Norwegian children will grow up thinking “that Allah and the Koran have something to do with Christmas.”

The Stigeråsen School’s Christmas plans provide yet another example of dhimmitude: craven European submission to Islam. This year, there might be a couple of Koran verses in a Christmas show; next year, a yuletide event at which both religions are celebrated on an even footing; and not too many years after that, perhaps, a children’s celebration at which there is no cross and no Christmas tree, only prayer rugs, benedictions in Arabic, and hijabs for the girls.

Compared to Americans, as everyone knows, people in the Nordic countries — and here I am speaking of the blond, blue-eyed natives who descend from generations of Christians (and, before that, followers of Thor and Odin) — are not big believers these days, and do not spend a lot of time in church. But that does not mean they are not devoted to their Christian heritage. At least in Norway, which is probably the most culturally conservative of the Nordic lands, Confirmation is still a universal rite of passage. Most of the official national holidays are Christian holy days, even if most people could not tell you exactly what Ascension Day and Pentecost commemorate. At Christmastime, the main streets are decked out with lights and wreaths, every home has a Christmas tree, and you cannot turn on the radio without hearing Christmas songs.

In some regards, the celebration of Christmas goes even further in Norway than it does in the U.S., or at least in some parts of the U.S. Because, until a generation or so ago, almost everybody in Norway was at least a nominal Christian, and because the separation of church and state is a relatively new concept in these parts. The Church of Norway was the nation’s established church until this past January, and continues to be fully funded by, and to have strong ties to, the government. Christmas events at public schools still tend to have a more religious tinge than they do in public schools in the U.S., at least in religiously diverse urban areas such as New York City and Los Angeles.

It drew national attention, then, when Document.no, an online outpost of honesty about Islam, reported on November 7 that the Stigeråsen School, an elementary school in Skien (Henrik Ibsen’s hometown), announced that this year that its Christmas festivities would include not only the usual reading by pupils of verses from the Bible but also a bonus — two verses from the Koran. All of the verses in question are about Jesus, whom Islam considers a prophet, although not, of course, the Son of God.

Breaking the news of these plans, reporter Hanne Tolg noted that some such change in traditional holiday programming was probably inevitable, given that 40% of the kids at the Stigeråsen School speak Norwegian as a second language (if they speak it at all). Still, added Tolg, the whole thing was pretty bizarre, given that (a) Christmas is not an Islamic holy day, and (b) thanks to such misguided innovations, a whole generation of Norwegian children will grow up thinking “that Allah and the Koran have something to do with Christmas.”

Never mind that the holy books of Islam quite clearly spell out the doctrine of jihad and the heavenly rewards that await jihadist martyrs. No, according to MSNBC “terrorism expert” Malcolm Nance, Manhattan attacker Sayfullo Saipov’s butchery was “anti-Islamic”.

According to Nance’s theory, every Islamic terrorist in our time somehow overlooked the real lessons of Islam and instead made exactly the same flub, mistaking Osama bin Laden’s bloodthirsty lesson of murderous violence for the thoroughly peaceful tidings of the Koran.

To fail to see a continuity between, on the one hand, the Islam of the terrorists, and, on the other, the Islam of forced marriages, honor killings, female genital mutilation (FGM) and the niqab is to engage in denial and a total whitewash. But then, whitewashing Islam is the true area of expertise of so many of these so-called terrorism experts.

Thank heaven for the “terrorism experts.” After Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov mowed down pedestrians and bicyclists in Manhattan on Halloween, murdering eight innocent people, what would we have done without Malcolm Nance, who, identified as an “MSNBC Terrorism Analyst,” assured viewers of that cable network that Saipov’s action was

“not Islam, whatsoever. None of this is condoned. Including the, you know, sacrificing and getting yourself killed at the end of a terrorist attack, none of that is Islamic, it’s anti-Islamic.”

Weirdly, Nance even chuckled partway through that last sentence, as if the idea that jihad is jihad were too absurd to take seriously.

Never mind that Saipov is an Uzbek Muslim; never mind that he shouted “Allahu Akbar” after his act of mass slaughter; never mind that the holy books of Islam quite clearly spell out the doctrine of jihad and the heavenly rewards that await jihadist martyrs. No, according to Nance, Saipov’s butchery was “anti-Islamic,” period. Nance explained: Osama bin Laden “corrupted Islam” and taught “multiple generations to follow what he believed.” The Islamic terrorists of our time, in Nance’s view, either have a “mental defect” or “some loss or vacuum in their world,” and chose to act upon bin Laden’s ideology because they believed their actions would “validate them once and for all in their life.”

So little practical consequence does the relationship between the Iranian government and al-Qaeda have that, had not the recently released “Bin Laden papers” revealed it, hardly anyone would notice it. Both sides are getting from it what reality allows.https://amgreatness.com/2017/11/08/reflections-on-terrorism-iran-and-bin-laden/
Iran looms large for al-Qaeda’s sequestered and largely impotent leadership. But as Iranian foreign policy deals with big issues to which bin Laden’s little band is marginal, it sets the price of its services. Some have expressed surprise that any relationship should exist between the center of Shia power and ultra-Sunni al-Qaeda. Yet it exists precisely to the extent of the coincidence between the two sides’ power and interests.

Comparing and contrasting al-Qaeda’s present relationship with Shia Iran and its past relationship with Sunni-led Iraq helps us understand the nature of the relationships that exist between the Muslim world’s governments and terrorist groups in general. Al-Qaeda is a prime example of the fact that these relationships are constantly shifting with circumstances, but that the states are always calling the shots.

The Bin Laden papers dispose summarily of the Sunni/Shia conflict: the Iranians are as much the enemies of unbelieving Westerners as are the Sunni Bin Laden followers. One can only imagine the Iranian side reciprocating. According to al-Qaeda’s headquarters, Iran’s practical importance is as a channel to the outside world—presumably because Sunni Pakistan, al-Qaeda’s headquarters, is not allowing the group to do business through its territory. But Iran’s contribution to AQ does not extend beyond transit of people and money. Some of that sustains AQ affiliates in Syria which are “frenemies” to groups fighting under Iranian leadership. No doubt Iran’s intimate acquaintance with this traffic gives it intelligence as well as the opportunity to “turn” these “frenemies.” It may well demand a cut of the money from the Gulf. Al-Qaeda seems to have little alternative.

Whatever grandiose ideas Bin Laden might have had during the 1980s of using contributions from friends in the Gulf to weld international Islamist recruits into military units to defeat the Muslim world’s bad guys evaporated fast. Unable to survive in the post-Soviet Afghan environment, he moved his band to Saudi Arabia. In 1990, King Fahd laughed when Bin Laden urged him not to call on the Americans to stop Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait because AQ’s troops could do it.

LONDON—The second minister in just over a week resigned from Prime Minister Theresa May’s government, as the British leader tried to regain command after a series of blunders by members of her cabinet.

Mrs. May summoned Priti Patel, the international development secretary, back to London from an official trip to Uganda after details emerged about unauthorized meetings Ms. Patel had in August and September with Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mrs. May said in a letter to Ms. Patel that work with Israel should be done “formally and through official channels.”

The development is the latest in a quick succession of challenges for Mrs. May, who has struggled to contain political fires and rein in ministers since losing her party’s majority in a June election gamble.

The British leader is also grappling with stalled talks on Brexit, the country’s greatest foreign-policy shift in decades, and a wave of sexual-misconduct allegations in Parliament. Defense Secretary Michael Fallon resigned last week following allegations of inappropriate conduct toward women, saying that his past behavior was below the “high standard” of the armed forces.

Ms. Patel, a rising star who was largely known for her strong Brexit support, apologized this week for not informing the prime minister and foreign secretary about her meetings in Israel, which she said occurred during an August family vacation.

Mrs. May wrote in a letter to Ms. Patel that she had been satisfied with the apology, but had to take action after information had surfaced that Ms. Patel had also met Israeli officials in September in London and New York. “Now that further details have come to light, it is right that you have decided to resign,” she said.

“While my actions were meant with the best intentions, my actions also fell below the standards of transparency and openness that I have promoted and advanced,” Ms. Patel wrote in her resignation letter. The international development department said the foreign office was aware of the Israel meetings while they were under way, but not in advance. CONTINUE AT SITE

Thieves broke into an immigration office in the Moabit district of Berlin and stole up to 20,000 blank passports and other immigration documents, as well as official stamps and seals

The Federal Prosecutor’s Office opened more than 900 terrorism cases during the first nine months of 2017. Of those cases, more than 800 involved Islamists.

Violent crime, including murder, rape and physical assault, is running rampant in German asylum shelters, according to an intelligence report leaked to the newspaper Bild. German authorities, who appear powerless to stem the rising tide of violence, justified their failure to inform the public about the scale of the problem by citing the privacy rights of the criminal offenders.

October 1. The Network Enforcement Act (Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, NetzDG) — also known as the Facebook law — entered into force. The measure requires social media platforms with more than two million users to remove “blatantly illegal” hate speech within 24 hours, and less obviously illegal content within seven days, or face fines of up to €50 million ($58 million). Critics argue that the definition of hate speech is ambiguous and subjective and that the new law is a threat to online free speech. The German government plans to apply the law more widely — including to content on social media networks of any size, according to Der Spiegel.

October 2. Germany’s partial ban on face coverings “must be expanded” to include a full ban on the burqa in public, said Andreas Scheuer, the secretary general of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU). “A ban is possible and necessary,” he said a day after a burqa ban went into effect in neighboring Austria. “We will not give up our identity, we are ready to fight for it, the burqa does not belong to Germany,” he said. The deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, Stephan Harbarth, said that the partial ban “goes to the limit” of what is constitutionally possible: “I fear that a more far-reaching ban would not be compatible with the Basic Law.”

October 3. Beatrix von Storch, the deputy leader of the anti-immigration party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), said that political Islam has no place in Germany. “Islam does not belong to Germany,” she told the BBC. “We are in favor of religious freedom of course, but Islam is claiming political power, and this is what we oppose.”

October 3. Approximately 1,000 mosques in Germany opened their doors to visitors as part of the 20th annual “Day of Open Mosques.” The event, which has been held since 1997 on Germany’s national holiday, the Day of German Unity, was conducted under the slogan “Good Neighborhood – Better Society,” and aimed at creating transparency and reducing prejudice.

October 4. A 47-year-old migrant from Kazakhstan at a refugee shelter in Eggenfelden castrated a 28-year-old Ukrainian migrant, who bled to death at the scene. It later emerged that the Kazakh man had been raped by the Ukrainian man, who was aided and abetted by a group of migrants from Chechnya. The case drew attention to runaway crime in German refugee shelters.

One hundred years ago today, November 7, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin overthrew the newly established Russian republic and its provisional government with the help of disaffected soldiers from the Petrograd garrison and sailors from the nearby Kronstadt naval base. The next day, November 8, Lenin installed himself and his Marxist Bolshevik cronies as the new government of Russia, dubbed the Council of People’s Commissars. Barely a shot had been fired; the number of people killed in the Bolshevik coup in the Russian capital would hardly fill a Cadillac Escalade. But from that day until today, Lenin’s legacy would be the single most lethal political system ever devised.

A year after seizing power Lenin would change this system’s name from Bolshevism to Communism, and as we reflect on the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the salient fact to remember is that it has been 100 years of hell — of revolution, oppression, starvation, mass murder, genocide, and terror without historical parallel.

It’s quite simple, really: From the Soviet Union and Mao’s China to Mengistu’s Ethiopia, Castro’s Cuba, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, untold millions were shot or killed by the agents of an oppressive totalitarian system aiming at total control and the elimination of “class enemies” or any form or even thought of opposition. Many millions more were slowly starved to death in Communist-generated mass famines that were either the result of deliberate engineering (Stalin’s Great Famine in Ukraine) or spectacular mismanagement of the food supply (Mao’s Great Leap Forward and modern-day North Korea). Tens of millions more survived, forced to live under the thumb of a vicious and unrelenting police state in a state of perpetual psychological fear and material poverty. They’re still suffering today.

This is not to even mention those who have spent the last century fighting to keep their countries free from Communism, in places like Vietnam, Korea, Malaysia, Greece, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola, and Russia itself. Nor does it account for the tens of thousands of military men and women of the free world — Americans chief among them — who would suffer and die in the jungles of Vietnam and on the frozen mountain slopes of Korea to halt Communism’s advance.

And that is just the system’s quantifiable human toll. For nearly five decades during the Cold War, Americans and Europeans had to live in the shadow of nuclear holocaust, as our leaders were forced to confront the possibility that the only way to defeat Communism and the Soviet Union might be unleashing the most unimaginably destructive weapons ever created, and reducing civilization to a burned-out pile of ashes in which, as the saying went, “the living would envy the dead.” For those decades we all had to live with the thought of the unthinkable, in a tense nuclear stand-off that managed to keep the Soviet Union at bay until it finally collapsed in 1992.

Yet a centenary review of Lenin’s legacy is still not complete. Lenin’s whole rationale for seizing power that day, and for creating the Soviet police state over the next year, was that through terror and violence he could force a new, better order to emerge. He lived by the same maxim that Karl Marx did, the quotation from Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust: “Everything [that] exists deserves to be destroyed.” Today, it’s the de facto motto of those groups whose commitment to terror and violence is, like Lenin’s was, rooted in that dark corner of the human psyche where totalitarianism merges into nihilism: ISIS, al-Qaeda, and their brethren.

There is currently a real Asian pivot as the president completes one of the longest presidential tours of Asia in memory. Three carrier battle groups are in the West Pacific.

America at home is in one of its periodic frenzies — did Ben Affleck grab the behinds of actresses, and is Kevin Spacey a pedophile or a pederast, or both? — as it snores through existential crises like $20 trillion in debt, or the sale to the Russians of 20 percent of its quite limited domestic uranium reserves.

In contrast, Americans lately have gladly almost forgotten about the Middle East, except for occasional updates on the systematic destruction of the once “jayvee” ISIS.

They are certainly relieved that Fallujah is no longer in the news much. It is a relief that no one catches any more Al Jazeera clips of ISIS cowards burning, drowning, decapitating, blowing up, and hanging women and children. More likely, ISIS jihadists are bedraggled, soiled, and drifting about asking for clemency from their betters.

There is no more official American talking head assuring us that the jihad is a personal journey, that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular, that the red line took care of all of Assad’s WMD, that terrorism is mostly a right-wing, returning-American-vet thing, that man-caused disasters and workplace violence are scarier than a young mass murderer from the Middle East screaming “Allahu Akbar” as he runs down, shoots, or stabs unarmed Westerners.

There are no more U.S. troops in a supposedly “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq” — and hardly an Iraq at all. So much for Vice President Joe Biden’s pre-pullout boast that a post-surge, consensual Iraqi government was likely to be the Obama administration’s “greatest achievement”.

After Barack Obama was embarrassed by his faux-red-line in Syria, then–secretary of state John Kerry sought to address a loss of face by fobbing off the region to the Russians after their 40-year ostracism from the Middle East. The last few years, Vladimir Putin seems more the arbiter of peace and war than does an American president.

Few liberals now defend the Obama-Clinton-Rice-Power bombing of Libya and the mess that followed. After Benghazi and the failed-state terrorist sanctuaries, who could?

As far as Egypt, the Obama administration managed to be despised all at once by the old Mubarak kleptocracy, by the administration’s once-favored Muslim Brotherhood “one-election, one time” cabal led by USC grad Mohamed Morsi, and by the junta of General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Who can keep track?

Armed Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace in Petrograd—now St. Petersburg—100 years ago this week and arrested ministers of Russia’s provisional government. They set in motion a chain of events that would kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western civilization.

The revolutionaries’ capture of train stations, post offices and telegraphs took place as the city slept and resembled a changing of the guard. But when residents of the Russian capital awoke, they found they were living in a different universe.

Although the Bolsheviks called for the abolition of private property, their real goal was spiritual: to translate Marxist- Lenin ist ideology into reality. For the first time, a state was created that was based explicitly on atheism and claimed infallibility. This was totally incompatible with Western civilization, which presumes the existence of a higher power over and above society and the state.

The Bolshevik coup had two consequences. In countries where communism came to hold sway, it hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to all but eliminate the value of life and to destroy the individual conscience in survivors.

But the Bolsheviks’ influence was not limited to these countries. In the West, communism inverted society’s understanding of the source of its values, creating political confusion that persists to this day.

In a 1920 speech to the Komsomol, Lenin said that communists subordinate morality to the class struggle. Good was anything that destroyed “the old exploiting society” and helped to build a “new communist society.”

This approach separated guilt from responsibility. Martyn Latsis, an official of the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, in a 1918 instruction to interrogators, wrote: “We are not waging war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. . . . Do not look for evidence that the accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first question should be to what class does he belong. . . . It is this that should determine his fate.”

Such convictions set the stage for decades of murder on an industrial scale. In total, no fewer than 20 million Soviet citizens were put to death by the regime or died as a direct result of its repressive policies. This does not include the millions who died in the wars, epidemics and famines that were predictable consequences of Bolshevik policies, if not directly caused by them.

The victims include 200,000 killed during the Red Terror (1918-22); 11 million dead from famine and dekulakization; 700,000 executed during the Great Terror (1937-38); 400,000 more executed between 1929 and 1953; 1.6 million dead during forced population transfers; and a minimum 2.7 million dead in the Gulag, labor colonies and special settlements.