RUTHFULLY YOURS

The third and final cycle of the French elections has concluded with a smiley.Error! Filename not specified. President Emmanuel Macron did indeed obtain the parliamentary majority he needed and now stands alone in majestic elevation. The Socialist party is ground to dust; the Front National’s pretention to be The Opposition amounts to 6 deputies, not even enough to form a parliamentary Group; FN Mayfly ally Nicolas Dupont-Aignan narrowly won re-election as deputy but his party Debout la France is flat out; Lider Maximo Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise is already bellowing promises to take the struggle to the street while sitting pretty in the Assemblée; the Greens are nowhere to be seen; Bayrou’s MoDem reaped the harvest of his devotion to candidate Macron before getting pushed aside (more below) ; and Les Républicains, having lost more than they should have and less than predicted, are further weakened by an internal split but remain the only credible Opposition…as things now stand.

Having won the presidency with the lowest score of the 5th République, Emmanuel Macron will govern with a majority of allegiance grasped by the skin of its teeth with an abstention of 57.36%. Still, the smiley Error! Filename not specified. punctuates every word and every phase of the new presidency. Some of this can be chalked up to the utter relief of deliverance from François Hollande whose absence shines upon us. After five years of a “normal president” who did a poor imitation of the Scandinavian model, we now have a slim trim elegant youthful très français head of state upgraded, in the first month of the presidency, from Bonaparte to Jupiter. What do the citizens want? Told that they were tired of the same old politicians from the same old Right and Left alternating power and getting nowhere fast, they chose, lo and behold, a new face without a party, just a movement, a Right Left and Center hybrid en marche on the go. Reminded that voters always give the newly elected president a legislative majority they managed by omission or commission to do just that. Leaving the predicted landslide to slide on its own, voters sat on their convictions and let it happen, though many key races were quite close. Le peuple de la droite, the Right wing nation, supposedly furious at being deprived of its rightful victory was diminished by individual lassitude and undermined by a split in the elected LR (Les Républicains) deputies into two distinct parliamentary groups, the “Constructives” and the others. The former are somehow committed to constructive cooperation with the ruling party, leaving the latter holding the Opposition bag. All of this is subject to change when the government starts passing measures.

Washed clean of their sins

Readers will remember that the LR candidate François Fillon, who started out with a huge lead over the other presidential candidates, was reduced to tatters by an indelible scandal. Accused of paying his wife Penelope a real salary for a fictitious job as his parliamentary assistant, he was further humiliated for accepting the gift of two very expensive bespoke suits from an old friend. This was the beginning of the current rift between elements that remained loyal to Fillon to the bitter end and those that argued for his replacement by Alain Juppé, the rival he had defeated hands down in the LR Primaries. It is not just a question of personalities: Fillon represents conservative values-free enterprise, frugal government spending, increased national sovereignty, and tough security-while Juppé the soft & lite Centrist leans toward compromise on all these issues. Many of his disciples hopped onto the Macron bandwagon. It didn’t earn them cabinet posts but they maintain their Macron-friendly stance. Is it true that the charming young François Baroin did not put any starch into the legislative campaign? If so, it would be a reflection of the consensus that François Fillon was not only tainted but also too tough & mean. He scared citizens by telling them their welfare state was going bankrupt, he frightened them by promising to reduce the obese civil service, and he scared them by saying we have to fight Islamic totalitarianism.

The Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) has seized control of at least 50 Syriac churches, monasteries, and cemeteries in Mardin province, report media sources from Turkey:

The Turkish-Armenian daily Agos reports:

After Mardin became a Metropolitan Municipality, its villages were officially turned into neighbourhoods as per the law and attached to the provincial administration. Following the legislative amendment introduced in late 2012, the Governorate of Mardin established a liquidation committee. The Liquidation Committee started to redistribute in the city, the property of institutions whose legal entity had expired. The transfer and liquidation procedures are still ongoing.

In 2016, the Transfer, Liquidation and Redistribution Committee of Mardin Governorate transferred to primarily the Treasury as well as other relevant public institutions numerous churches, monasteries, cemeteries and other assets of the Syriac community in the districts of Mardin.

The Mor Gabriel Monastery Foundation appealed to the decision yet the liquidation committee rejected their appeal last May. The churches, monasteries and cemeteries whose ownerships were given to the Treasury were then transferred to the Diyanet.

Inquiries of the Mor Gabriel Monastery Foundation revealed that dozens of churches and monasteries had been transferred to the Treasury first and then allocated to the Diyanet. And the cemeteries have been transferred to the Metropolitan Municipality of Mardin. The maintenance of some of the churches and monasteries are currently being provided by the Mor Gabriel Monastery Foundation and they are opened to worship on certain days. Similarly, the cemeteries are still actively used by the Syriac community who visits them and performs burial procedures. The Syriacs have appealed to the Court for the cancellation of the decision.

“We started to file lawsuits and in the meantime our enquiries continued” said Kuryakos Ergün, the Chairman of Mor Gabriel Monastery Foundation. Ergün said they would appeal to the court for the cancellation of nearly 30 title deed registries.

Included in the seizure is the 1600-year-old Mor Gabriel Monastery:

Foundation of Mor Gabriel Monastery, filed a court case at the Civil Court of First Instance in Mardin against the registration of title deed records in the name of Treasury.

In the petition filed to the court it has been noted that the properties subject to the court case had been, since ancient times, under the possession and ownership of the Foundation and the significance of Mor Gabriel Monastery has been underlined; “Its history dates back to the 4th century AD. The Monastery is one of the oldest monasteries in the world which is still active and is one of the most ancient religious centers of Syriacs and the entire world with its history of more than 1600 years.

Midyat Syriac Deyrulumur Mor Gabriel Monastery Foundation had been established on the basis of the imperial order of Sultan Abdülmecid Han during the Ottoman Empire in “1267 Islamic calendar (1851/1852 Gregorian calendar) and its status was redefined, became a legal entity, on the basis of the Foundations Law of 13.06.1935 with no 2762.

The Foundation had been recognised as “a religious community foundation” on the basis of a Regulation issued in 2002 by the Directorate General of Foundation and was included in the List of Religious Community Foundations drafted same year. Foundations that I’m not included in this list are in not recognised as religious community foundations.” CONTINUE AT SITE

South Korean President Moon Jae-in and U.S. President Donald Trump are set to meet in Washington on Thursday for the first time, a highly anticipated summit that will serve as an early test of the new leaders’ relationship following several differences over key policies.

The discussions between Messrs. Trump and Moon, who will have dinner Thursday night at the White House and meet again on Friday, come amid growing urgency about confronting the threat from North Korea. The two leaders have suggested dramatically different approaches to the issue.

Mr. Moon, South Korea’s first left-leaning president in nearly a decade, has called for closer ties with North Korea, primarily through economic cooperation, while the Trump administration has called for tougher sanctions, military pressure and diplomatic isolation.

White House officials said North Korea is likely to dominate the talks between Messrs. Trump and Moon. They played down differences in the two leaders’ approaches and said Mr. Trump will stress to Mr. Moon the need to coordinate their policies.

Mr. Trump’s policy is to apply pressure on North Korea “to change their calculus to have substantive talks with us once they show they are willing to reduce the threat,” a senior White House official said. The official said Mr. Trump sees nothing “problematic” with Mr. Moon’s positions.

The U.S. administration is seeking to ramp up sanctions on North Korea and apply new diplomatic pressure to Pyongyang, though the White House official said no new sanctions are imminent.

“The State Department has been talking to our friends and partners throughout the world really to address North Korea’s trade, to address many of their illegal activities sometimes conducted under the guise of diplomatic missions to raise capital, hard currency for their weapons programs,” the official said. “I think there’s plenty more pressure that could be brought to bear on North Korea in the form of U.N. Security Council resolutions and also unilateral sanctions by the United States.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Recently, Chinese, Japanese and other educators have found that rote learning and endless drills produce high achievers without creativity, originality, or the ability to think for themselves. Western academic standards of rationality and objectivity have been behind most of the West’s achievements.

“The campus has three mosques with a fourth one planned, but no bookstore. No Pakistani university, including QAU, allowed Abdus Salam to set foot on its campus, although he had received the Nobel Prize in 1979 for his role in formulating the standard model of particle physics.” — Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy, commenting on Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, the second-best university among the 57 Muslim states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

The very thought that “Islamic science” has to be different from “Western science” suggests the need for a radically different way of thinking. Scientific method is scientific method and rationality is rationality, regardless of the religion practiced by individual scientists.

In April this year, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Shaykh ‘Ali Gomaa, told an interviewer what he meant as a flat statement of fact: that there are no female heart surgeons, as such work required strength and other capabilities that no woman possesses. He put it this way:

“You may have noticed that there is not a single female heart surgeon in the world… It’s amazing. It’s peculiar. Why do you think that there are none? Because it requires great physical effort — beyond what a woman is capable of. That’s in general. Along comes a woman who challenges this, and she succeeds in becoming a surgeon. But she is one woman among several million male surgeons.”

Now even a child could have carried out a simple Google search and realized that there are countless female surgeons and many female heart surgeons. It would not have taken long to find, for example, the US Association of Women Surgeons, which includes heart surgeons — and that would have settled his hash. But apparently deep-seated, pre-formed judgements about women’s abilities prevented Gomaa from using whatever powers of reasoning and intelligence he may possess.

Sadly, there often seems a profound absence of scientific probing within the Muslim world.

It seems reasonable to assume that levels of intelligence are pretty well the same around the world, regardless of race, gender, or religious affiliation. As human beings, we share the same brainpower, just as we share all other physical functions. Mercifully, earlier views of racial inequality have in most places been replaced by a more fact-based understanding of human characteristics. Today, theories put forward in the last two centuries of a supposed “racial supremacy” of white people have been happily discarded. In democratic societies, white supremacists are universally loathed.

In the OECD’s 2015 PISA science results, seven out of the top ten countries, based on achievements at school level, were in the Far East — including Japan and China, with Korea at eleven. The United States was number 25. In mathematics, the results were even more striking: the top seven countries ranged from Singapore to Korea, with the United States at 39, well below most European nations. While such results show that Asian students are indeed intelligent, there is a price to pay for those outstanding results. Students put in long school days and long school years, and live regimented lives. Recently, Chinese, Japanese and other educators have found that rote learning and endless drills produce high achievers without creativity, originality, or the ability to think for themselves. Often, as we shall see, rote learning in the Middle East seems to lead to poor educational outcomes.[1]

For all that, we are all aware that different nations, different cultures and different religions achieve varied and even conflicting levels of intellectual achievement. The Western democracies, including Israel, have for some time now been the highest achievers in fields such as science, technology, medicine, information technology, astronomy and the exploration of space, as well as in modern academic disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, critical history, economics, analytical politics, statistics, and unbiased religious studies, among others. Western academic standards of rationality and objectivity have been behind most of those achievements. Sadly, many scholars in Western countries, not least the US, have abandoned even a semblance of neutrality on and off campus, following a deep politicization of many humanities subjects, above all the Middle East and related studies.

The last (worst) rankings of the Global Gender Gap Index of the World Economic Forum, from 128th to 144th, are without exception overwhelmingly Muslim countries, including Turkey at the 130th place.

A 2016 study by Turkey’s Family and Social Policies Ministry revealed that no fewer than 86% of Turkish women have suffered physical or psychological violence at the hands of their partners or family.

So, tell us, Ms. Simonovic: Do Turkish men beat and sometimes kill their wives because of Israeli occupation? Is there “a clear link” between Turkey’s rising numbers indicating violence against women and “Israel’s prolonged occupation?”

The United Nations panels lovingly practice hypocrisy all the time. In 2016, a UN debate revolved around the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), which voted to blame Israel for Palestinian domestic violence. This year’s show was hardly different in the content of nonsense. The executive director of UN Watch, Hillel Neuer, asked Dubravka Simonovic, UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, at a session on June 12: “Ms. Simonovic, in other words, what you are saying is as follows: ‘When Palestinian men beat their wives, it’s Israel’s fault.'”

At first glance it sounds like dark humor, but it is not. Not just one but two reports presented before the UNHRC by Simonovic argue that Israel is to blame for Palestinian violence against women, through “a clear linkage between the prolonged occupation and violence”.

Where, Neuer asked Simonovic, is the data? There is data, but not the kind that Simonovic would prefer to believe exists.

According to the Global Gender Gap Index of the World Economic Forum, there is not a single overwhelmingly Muslim nation in the best 50 scoring list of countries. In contrast, the last (worst) rankings of the index, from 128th to 144th, are without exception overwhelmingly Muslim countries, including Turkey at the 130th place. Turkey’s case is important to note, as the increasing supremacy of Islamist politics in daily life in the country has boosted patriarchal behavior and worsened gender equality since 2002, when President (then Prime Minister) Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to power. In other words Turkey, the 17th biggest economy in the world, is the 15th-last country in terms of gender equality.

The United Nations Population Fund grimly observed in a report:

“… women and girls are still exposed to violence, being abused, trafficked, their access to education and political participation is refused and face with many other human rights violations … The fact of violence against women as a concept emerged through gender inequality is widespread in Turkey”.

A 2013 Hurriyet Daily News survey found that 34% of Turkish men think violence against women is “occasionally necessary,” while 28% say violence can be used to discipline women; a combined 62% approval of violence against women.

In 2014, Turkey’s Family and Social Policies Ministry reported that its domestic violence hotline received over 100,000 calls, and estimated that the number of unreported cases is three to five times that number.

A 2016 study by the same ministry revealed that no fewer than 86% of Turkish women have suffered physical or psychological violence at the hands of their partners or family. According to the ministry’s findings, physical violence is the most common form of abuse, as 70% of women reported they were physically assaulted.

Al-Shabaab issued a lengthy slam against a report that the group decried as fake news, laying out a Sharia case against using anonymous sourcing and trying to shore up their defense with a list of terror leaders who think they’re great.

The terror group is taking issue with “Why My Wife and I Left Shabab in Somalia,” a two-part Skype interview featuring two Europeans, unnamed and with their faces covered and voices altered, who described life with the terror group and their imprisonment upon attempting to flee Al-Shabaab. The interviews were posted by New Yorker Bilal Abdul Kareem, who runs a video channel called On the Ground News.

Shabaab expresses “dismay” that the lengthy interviews were “nothing more than unsubstantiated allegations and sweeping statements that sought to delegitimize the Mujahideen of East Africa by portraying them as an oppressive band of crooks and criminals,” and accused “brother Bilal” of deviation from “the expected journalistic integrity and Islamic etiquettes required from a Muslim reporter.”

In a document penned earlier this month by Abu Muhammad Al-Muhajir — he says he came from another country and has fought with Al-Shabaab for nearly a decade — and distributed online by al-Qaeda’s Global Islamic Media Front, the group then lays out what they believe to be those journalistic standards.

“Entertaining allegations and presenting them as facts without double-checking their veracity is something unjustified, both from a Shari’ah as well as from a journalistic perspective,” the document states, accusing the video site of giving the couple “a platform to spread a one-sided, gloomy depiction of the Jihad in East Africa.”

Al-Shabaab’s second piece of advice says it’s against Islamic law to use anonymous or obscured sourcing.

“Of course, one might argue that hiding their identities was done out of concern for their safety. The rules, however, are binding considering the harmful effects of accepting disparaging testimonies from anonymous sources,” Al-Muhajir writes.

“For argument’s sake, even if the identities of these individuals were known to the reporter, then that still would not justify accepting their version of events to be true without verifying them, for that would be great injustice and bias,” the document continues. “Furthermore, it is imperative to ask ourselves, is the disparagement of these two unknown individuals enough to discredit an established Jihadi organization that has been recognized, recommended and respected by the senior leadership of all the Jihadi groups worldwide?”

“This is a group that has been praised by the likes of Shaikh Osama ibn Laden, Shaikh Abu Basir Nasir Al-Wuhayshi, Shaikh Abu Umar al-Baghdadi, Shaikh Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, Shaikh Abu Yahya Al-Libi, Shaikh Anwar Al-Awlaki, Shaikh Mustafa Abu Yazid, Shaikh Ayman Ad-Dhawahiri and others. Is it therefore logical or acceptable from a Shari’ah standpoint, for brother Bilal to cast away the praise and recommendations of such revered Islamic leaders based on the accusations of two anonymous individuals?”

Al-Muhajir also questioned whether the couple were “coerced by the apostate intelligence agencies” after leaving Al-Shabaab and whether they were part of a “new media strategy” against jihadists.

“Taking into consideration the gravity of the allegations and the damaging consequences they may cause, it would have been befitting for brother Bilal to carefully scrutinize the profile of Abdurahman ‘Doe’ and Saffiyah ‘Doe’ to know whether these anonymous individuals were trustworthy sources of information before disseminating their narratives to the world as facts,” the document adds.

Later on, the author admits that Al-Shabaab, as in “every Jihadi arena,” acknowledges “mistakes which have occurred and will continue to occur because error is something innate in human nature,” but insists mistakes — “if we were to hypothetically say that innocent people were killed during some of [Al-Shabaab’s] military operations” — don’t “render their Jihad illegitimate.”

The group claims that the couple were detained because the terror organization was trying to find a safe route by which they could go home. Al-Muhajir then complains that the couple didn’t talk about crimes against Muslims by “Crusaders” during their hourlong interview, “as if the couples’ personal dilemma is more important than the greater struggle” of jihad.

“In Islam, there is absolutely no room for entertaining unfounded accusations and merely claiming that ‘everyone knows’ will never hold water in the court of Shari’ah,” adds the rebuttal.CONTINUE AT SITE