RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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.