RUTHFULLY YOURS

The vast majority of these European courts — whether the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) or the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) — in their attempt to be moral and just, have dismissed the sovereign laws of Italy as irrelevant, and trampled the rights of the Italian state and ordinary Italians to approve who enters their country.

In Europe, Amnesty International and the like are, it seems, a new source of law.

Those who gave the Statue of Liberty to America in 1886 “to commemorate the perseverance of freedom and democracy in the United States” are willingly trampling their own people’s liberties today through courts of appointed, unelected, unaccountable ideologues. The danger is that, with the help of many doubtless well-intentioned, international NGOs, the EU will not stop at its shores.

Europe is the worst enemy of the US? You cannot be serious. Islamism, Russia, illegal immigrants… whatever, but surely not Europe! Are we not still together in NATO? Do we not conduct huge amounts of trade every day? Do we not share the same cultural roots, the same civilization, the same vision of the future? Did France not give the US her famous Statue of Liberty – “Liberty Enlightening the World?”

Not anymore. In a sense, Europe looks like a continent where American Democrats have been in power for 30 years, not only in the European states, but also at the level of the European Union.

In the US, the political spectrum still spans a vast range of views between Democrats and Republicans, globalists and nationalists, pro-lifers and pro-choicers, pro-government control and pro-individuals’ control, and pro-whatever. Even today with a president and a Supreme Court clearly on the political “Right” these divisions, and the all-important separation of powers, allow for and encourage vigorous debate. By contrast, in Europe, at the “official” level, such a spectrum of views no longer exists.

In Western Europe, politically speaking, in the press and in universities, either you are on the “Left,” or you are a pariah. If you are a pariah, you are most likely to be prosecuted for “Islamophobia”, “racism”, discrimination or some other “trumped up” charge.

There are several reasons for this imbalance. One is the difference in political maturity between Europeans and Americans. Whereas “ordinary” American voters (not just the “elites”) understand that their Supreme Court is key to ensuring that fundamental constitutional freedoms are maintained for all, the Europeans have done the opposite. In the US, the constitutional right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is derived from the people — “from the consent of the governed.”

Consequently, when Justice Antonin Scalia of the US Supreme Court died, the US press wrote about him for weeks. “Ordinary citizens” in the US are deeply aware of judicial roles and their effect on judgements and legal precedents.

By contrast, in Europe, we now have two Supreme Courts: the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Luxembourg, in addition to national courts. There is, however, not one citizen in a million who can name a single judge of either the ECHR or the CJEU. The reason is that the nomination of those judges is mostly opaque, purely governmental and, in the instance of the ECHR, with no public debate. With the CJEU, appointments are also essentially governmental, with the sanction of the European Parliament, which is ideologically dominated by the Left.

Good news from Poland: Democracy lives despite an uproar over the judiciary. That’s something to note for critics who see a threat to European values in the current ruckus in Warsaw.

The ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party has embroiled itself in efforts to rein in judges since winning 2015’s election. Its latest gambit is to try to fire all the Supreme Court justices, giving the Justice Minister authority to rehire its favorites. PiS also last week passed a law giving Parliament final say over membership of the National Judiciary Council (KRS), the independent body that nominates judges.

PiS says unaccountable judges thwart the will of voters by nixing laws passed by Parliament—including PiS initiatives the last time the party held power from 2005 to 2007. That’s debatable, but it doesn’t help that the departing Civic Platform leadership in 2015 tried to rush a series of lame-duck appointments to the Supreme Court, handing PiS an early opportunity to stir public frustration with the judiciary.

Such debates are as old as the hills—judicial power, appointments and tenure preoccupied America’s Founders—and some perspective would help. Foreign activists and the European Commission in Brussels fret that PiS is a threat to democracy. They’re right that the proposals are heavy-handed. Yet there’s no perfect method for balancing judicial independence and democratic sovereignty. Brussels doesn’t have a democratic mandate to impose its view, which leans more toward judicial independence than democratic oversight.

More important are the protests from thousands of Poles in Warsaw telling their government that PiS’s court plans don’t represent the balance those voters want. The uproar has caused President Andrzej Duda, a former PiS politician whose office is usually ceremonial, to threaten to veto the Judiciary Council law.

Mr. Duda’s proposed compromise would require a two-thirds parliamentary majority to approve nominations to the commission, depriving PiS of its ability to stack the body with the simple majority it won in 2015 with less than 38% of the vote. Now Parliament, and voters, will decide.

It’s hard to find examples in history of independent judiciaries thwarting determined tyrants. What matters more is resistance from citizens demanding democratic rights. By that standard, this week’s peaceful protests—which led to Mr. Duda’s U-turn—show Polish democracy is resisting PiS’s overreach.

Although Europe claims to respect human rights and the rights of peoples, it has been a party to violating the most essential right of the Jewish people: the recognition of its existence for more than 3,000 years, and the anchoring of this existence to its sacred monuments. Worse, Europe does so in the name of a people fictitiously invented less than 50 years ago. No serious scholar can find any trace of a “Palestinian people” before the 1960s. Europe has apparently been all too happy to accept lies.

While claiming to fight terrorism, Europe complies with the demands of a terrorist movement that does not even bother to hide its terrorist nature. When Mahmoud Abbas speaks Arabic, he continually incites the murder of Jews. He recently repeated that he would not stop paying tried, convicted and imprisoned murderers of Jews, and still calls these murderers heroic “martyrs”. On all maps used by the Palestinian Authority and in Palestinian textbooks, Israel does not exist; it is called Palestine.

Europeans, imbued with a generic sense of guilt, began attributing all that is wrong in the world to Western civilization. Because they had colonized parts of the Muslim world, they failed to note that Muslim culture had, in fact, colonized Persia, the Byzantine Empire, the Middle East, Greece, Cyprus, the Balkans, North Africa, Southern Spain, and, more recently, northern Cyprus.

On July 7, UNESCO voted for a resolution defining the Old City of Hebron and the Cave of the Patriarchs as Palestinian heritage sites. Before that, in 2016, two resolutions making the same type of counterfactual assertions concerning the Old City of Jerusalem, the Temple Mount and the Western Wall were adopted. And the year before that, in 2015, UNESCO again upended history to rename two ancient biblical sites, Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs, Islamic holy sites — even though Islam did not even exist at that time.

Three days before this month’s Hebron resolution, still another resolution, reaffirming the Jerusalem resolutions, was passed.

The Israeli government reacted with indignation. It decided to stop cooperating with UNESCO. US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said she was shocked and that the decision would not be without consequences.

The rest of the world has remained silent. How come?

The July 7 resolution received the support of a large majority of the countries participating in the deliberations. Six countries abstained. Only three countries voted against the text. The resolutions concerning Jerusalem were adopted with equally significant majorities. The voting, tellingly, took place by secret ballot.

The purpose of UNESCO is supposedly to:

“contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among the nations through education, science and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, for the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms which are affirmed for the peoples of the world, without distinction of race, sex, language or religion, by the Charter of the United Nations.”

Sadly, UNESCO has become simply an anti-Semitic fraud, governed by fabrications rather than by facts. It betrays its mission, falsifies history, and wages a campaign of raw racism against the Jewish people and Judaism — and the world accepts that. UNESCO acts as an instrument for propaganda seeking to annihilate the legitimacy of the existence of Israel — and the world supports this behavior.

It is only a personal observation but it seems to me that the sympathy and sums governments are spending on deradicalisation programmes, Muslim sports and outreach campaigns just aren’t working. Indeed, the more indulgences granted, the more pronounced that separatism becomes

I love Australia. I’ve lived here all my life. But in the past decade a few things have had a negative impact on my enjoyment of this beautiful place. Let me list just a few.

People being stabbed in the name of a religion.
People being held hostage – same motivation.
Plans laid to blow people up.
Fortunes spent each year by governments to keep a lid on zealotry.
‘Experts’ telling us people who do these things are mentally unstable, marginalised or poorly educated, even when that is clearly not the case.
Needing to be ‘alert’ but not ‘alarmed’ to potentially catastrophic threats.
People who refuse to stand in court.
Special treatment and dedicated religious amenities for some at public facilities.
Women shrouded in garments testifying to their status as mere possessions.
Being called upon to know the difference between a burqa and a niqab, when each is equally offensive.
Watching a publicly funded broadcaster accept and implicitly endorse arranged and consanguineous marriages.
Being distressed by bollards sprouting in public places.
Having to pay extra for everyday food because manufacturers are held to ransom.
My taxes being given to a specific community to encourage participation in a sport.
Having my bag and person searched at public events.
‘Honour’ killings.
The unlawful practice of female genital mutilation.
A welfare system that indulges the practice of polygamy.
Witnessing the subjugation of women and a veritable Stockholm Syndrome among oppression’s defenders.
Watching my government fete a minority community, but only one minority community.
Taxi drivers who decline to carry guide dogs for religious reasons.
People seeking to advance the secular authority of their religious laws, rather than accepting the law of the land.
Being told that Islam is basically the same as Christianity when it is the diametric opposite.
Being told by ‘experts’, especially those seeking further grants, that deradicalisation works when it obviously does not.

I don’t want to accept these things. I don’t want to accept that a small, noisy, discordant minority is changing the way I live, and changing it for the worse. And I particularly will not accept that a concern for women’s rights and being appalled by clerics who call for the death of homosexuals makes me “intolerant” or consumed by bigotry.

Saudi Arabia’s police detained a woman for appearing in public wearing a short skirt and a cropped top, a violation of the country’s strict dress code, state media said on Tuesday.

A video of the woman walking around the historic town of Ushayqir, which first surfaced on Snapchat, went viral on Saudi social media over the weekend, sparking a fierce debate in the kingdom, with some speaking out in her defense and others calling for her swift punishment.

The woman, who hasn’t been officially named, was detained by police in Riyadh for wearing “immodest clothing” and the case was referred to the public prosecutor, state television said.

Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and a key U.S. ally in the battle against religious extremism, enforces one of the world’s strictest interpretations of the religion, largely the product of the ruling monarchy’s longstanding alliance with the powerful Sunni Muslim clerical establishment.

Women must wear loose, head-to-toe gowns known as abayas in public, though exceptions are made for foreign officials and their spouses. Most women wear all-black abayas and choose to wear face-covering veils known as niqabs.

Translation: “Had she been a foreigner, they would’ve raved over the beauty of her waistline and the attractiveness of her eyes. But because she’s Saudi, they’re after her prosecution.”

“The law must apply to her,” said a tweet from the account of Aisha Al Otaibi, ahead of the woman’s detention. “Europe forces women to remove their veils. In our country law is based on Islamic Shariah, and it must be respected. She insulted it and must be punished to teach a lesson.” The Twitter user’s profile said she is based in Jeddah.

There is no written penal code in Saudi Arabia, where judges issue verdicts based on interpretations of Islamic law, or Shariah.

The reaction to the video reflects internal tensions over the future of the kingdom, with those who are pushing for change pitted against those resisting it.

“A woman wanders in the heritage town of Ushayqir. The world has not come to an end—it’s a pleasant sight. There is no insult in it. She’s a human, she is a person,” said a tweet from the account of Waleed Al Nasser.CONTINUE AT SITE

Late last week, before and after President Donald Trump marched through Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron to celebrate Bastille Day on Friday, nearly 900 cars were burned across Paris suburbs.

A total of 897 cars were put to the torch, and 368 people were held in police custody for the crimes on the evenings of July 13 and 14, the French Interior Ministry reported, according to French news channel BFM TV.

Torching vehicles has become a Bastille Day tradition in France, with 855 cars burned in 2016 and 577 people arrested last year. In 2015, 951 cars were burned.

“In the course of several episodes of urban violence, our security forces have been subjected to intolerable attacks, the perpetrators of which will have to be answered in court, just like the perpetrators of vehicle fires, of course always too many,” Pierre-Henry Brandet, the Interior Ministry spokesman, said in a statement.

Thirteen officials and soldiers were wounded in the attacks, Brandet added. According to the ministry’s count, 631 vehicles were set on fire and 266 were hit by spreading flames.

Pamela Geller immediately tied the violence to “Muslim immigrants,” but a Swiss American suggested such a view oversimplified the issue.

“These people are told they are French, they are French on the passport, but French society doesn’t view them as French,” the source explained. “It’s a conflict between the French state doctrine which says that French identity is based on common values of the republic and regular folks who say that French culture is linked to heritage.”

The areas of violence did indeed have higher migrant populations, but these are mostly second- and even third-generation immigrants who have not yet assimilated into French culture, the source noted. The underlying cause might be more cultural than religious.

It is possible the influx of immigrants from the Middle East in the wake of the Syrian Civil War may have exacerbated these tensions, but they predate that struggle and are independent of it. France has agreed to accept 30,000 refugees from Syria.

Similar attacks occurred on New Year’s Eve. This year, nearly 1,000 vehicles were burned, and the Interior Ministry reportedly planned on publishing a lower number, arguing that the violence was “contained.” In 2014, the department claimed victory in that “only” 1,067 cars had been burned, a 10 percent decrease from 2013.

According to Britain’s The Telegraph, “The custom of setting vehicles alight on New Year’s Eve is set to have kicked off around Strasbourg, eastern France in the 1990s, in the city’s deprived, high-immigrant districts.” CONTINUE AT SITE

ISIS has been defeated. That’s the official word out of Iraq. But don’t count it out just yet.

We beat ISIS twice before. Once in its previous incarnation as Al Qaeda in Iraq and in its even earlier incarnation as Saddam Hussein’s regime whose Sunni Baathists went on to play a crucial role in ISIS.

Each time it was reborn as another murderous monstrosity.

We don’t know what the next incarnation will look like, but considering Saddam Hussein’s rape rooms, Al Qaeda in Iraq’s love of suicide bombings and ISIS taking public torture to a new level, it will be bad.

We beat Saddam, Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic State. But it keeps coming back because we don’t understand what it is. And we don’t get it because we don’t understand what Islamic terrorism is.

Islamic terrorists are not a “tiny minority of extremists” who “pervert Islam”. They are Islam.

ISIS keeps coming back because it’s rooted in the local Sunni Islamic Arab population and the religion of Islam. The Sunni link is why ISIS keeps popping back up. Bush suppressed Al Qaeda in Iraq by allying with Sunni tribes. Obama made a deal with Iran and let its Shiites dominate Iraq. Sunnis flocked to ISIS’ ex-Baathists who promised to bring back the good old days of Saddam’s supremacy for Sunnis.

As long as the Sunni-Shiite tensions in Iraq and Syria, not to mention those between Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen continue to play out, ISIS will stick around in some form waiting to make a comeback. The cycle of Sunnis turning to Al Qaeda/ISIS to beat the Shiites and then to the US to beat ISIS will continue.

Critics who accuse the US of creating ISIS by bombing Iraq miss the point. ISIS is the latest embodiment of Sunni supremacism and historical nostalgia for the Abbasid Caliphate. Both Saddam and the Caliph of ISIS capitalized on that nostalgia the way that Hitler did on Charlemagne. We didn’t create it. And it isn’t going anywhere. We can’t defeat it without breaking the historical aspirations of the Sunni population. That is what we are up against.

We’re not just fighting a bunch of ragged terrorists. We’re fighting against the sense of manifest destiny of a large Muslim population, not just in Iraq and Syria, but in London, Paris and every state in America.

The Islamic terrorist groups of the Middle East are especially dangerous because, as ISIS did with its Caliphate, they can closely link

themselves to crucial epochs in Islam. Al Qaeda leveraged its Saudi face to form a visceral connection with Muslims worldwide. ISIS repeated the same trick with its Iraqi link. And large numbers of non-Arabs and converts to Islam rallied from around the world to the Jihad. ISIS is now the new Al Qaeda. It may not be able to run Mosul, but it has become an international terrorist organization that is even more dangerous than Al Qaeda. And that may be what it wanted.

Like the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups, the Islamic State was never very good at running things. The PA won’t make peace with Israel for the same reason that Hamas won’t make peace with the PA: statehood is a compelling imperative, but requires hard work in reality. It’s much easier to send off a few useful idiots to blow themselves up and then collect the Qatari checks.

Civilizations manage societies. Barbarians have more fun destroying things than taking out the garbage or cleaning the streets. That is why ISIS lost and why the Jihad will finally succeed only if civilization implodes too badly to resist its incursions or through the unstoppable force of brute demographics.