RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last Thursday, Dressed in battle fatigues and adopting a martial tone, Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi entered the remains of the historic al-Nuri Mosque in Mosul to announce the end of ISIS.

“The return of al-Nuri Mosque and al-Hadba minaret to the fold of the nation marks the end of the Daesh state of falsehood,” Abadi asserted.

The prime minister took part in a number of photo-ops, including several with the famous al-Hadba (The Hunchback), the 850-year old minaret as background.

Al-Hadba looked like an apt symbol for Iraq today, a nation bent down by decades of tyranny and war.

Iraqi Army commanders and soldiers in Mosul, Iraq on June 23, 2017. (Photo by Martyn Aim/Getty Images)

The question is: will the “hunchback” straighten up its back? In other words, are the Iraqi leaders capable of offering their people a chance to build a better future?

“The liberation of Mosul will be a new birth for Iraq,” Vice President Ayad Allawi told us in conversation last April. “A pluralist, non-sectarian Iraq is possible. We must all work together to make it a reality.”

Abadi’s triumphal speech in Mosul contained no hint of future moves apart from continuing to hunt down ISIS fighters and, presumably, sleeping cells across Iraq and, perhaps, even beyond in Syria.

Abadi is right in telling Iraqis that though the false caliphate is over, the fight against ISIS isn’t. Many Iraqis wonder what ISIS might do?

Citing reports by Iraqi Intelligence, Allawi says that ISIS has already opened “a dialogue” with its original “mother”, Qaeda, about a possible merger or at least coordination at tactical operational levels.

That view is partly shared by US and British intelligence analysts who report “intense debates” within the global Jihadi movement regarding future strategy.

However, though a child of Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS developed its own strategy. Qaeda was not interested in control of territory and had learned to live under the protection of others, the Turabi-dominated government in Sudan in the early 1990s, the Taliban emirate in Afghanistan until 2001, and tribal chiefdoms in South Waziristan after that Qaeda focused its energies on fighting the “distant enemy” including with spectacular attacks on the United States.

In contrast, ISIS, cast itself as a state with a distinct territory, an economy, an army and an administration. ISIS was focused on “eliminating” the “near enemy” including non-Muslim minorities or “deviant Muslims” who had to be massacred. The attacks made in ISIS’ name in Europe and the United Sates were ad-hoc operations, often prompted by copycats and endorsed by ISIS after the fact.

A 10-year-old girl from a former republic of the Soviet Union was raped by an asylum seeker from Ghana, but police and the local government allegedly suppressed information about the crime for more than two weeks.

A student sexually assaulted an 11-year-old girl and punched another boy in the face, breaking his glasses. At least six other students have been beaten bloody. The school’s leadership has refused to discipline the child, apparently because of his migrant background, and instead has lashed out at the parents for demanding a safe environment for their children.

Police in Lübeck suspect that refugees are taking over illegal drug trade in the city.

June 1. A Syrian migrant was stabbed to death in Oldenburg by another Syrian because he was eating ice cream during Ramadan. The murder, which occurred in broad daylight in a busy pedestrian shopping area, was just the latest example of Islamic law, Sharia, being enforced on German streets.

June 2. Around one million non-Europeans living in Germany are now on welfare, an increase of 124% in just one year, according to new statistics from the Federal Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit). The top welfare beneficiaries are from: Syria (509,696); Turkey (276,399); Iraq (110,529) and Afghanistan (65,443).

June 2. Police temporarily halted the annual Rock am Ring music festival in Nürburg because of a possible jihadist threat. Authorities asked the 90,000 visitors to leave the concert grounds in a “controlled and calm” manner. The move was based on “concrete leads which do not allow us to eliminate a possible terror threat,” the police said.

June 3. Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann called on Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence agency to begin surveilling minors suspected of being involved with Islamist groups:

“I would strongly urge for the age limit for surveillance to be lowered throughout Germany. Minors have already committed serious acts of violence. Normally, the domestic intelligence agency in Bavaria would not place children under surveillance. But if there is concrete evidence that a 12-year-old is with an Islamist group, we have to be able to monitor them, too.”

June 4. Mostafa J., a 41-year-old asylum seeker from Afghanistan, stabbed to death a five-year-old Russian at a refugee shelter in Arnschwang. The Afghan, who had been arguing with the boy’s 47-year-old mother, was shot to death by police after a standoff. It later emerged that the man had a criminal history in Germany and should have been deported but was not. In October 2009, for example, a court in Munich sentenced Mostafa J. to six years in prison for arson. In July 2011, he received a deportation order, but in 2014 he fooled a judge into believing that he had converted to Christianity and would be killed if he were deported to Afghanistan.

June 5. A study conducted by the Hanns Seidel Foundation, a think tank affiliated with Bavaria’s Christian Social Union, found that half the asylum seekers in Bavaria subscribe to classic anti-Semitic views about Jewish power. Around 60% of Afghans, 53% of Iraqis and 52% of Syrians said Jews wield too much influence.

June 7. A 27-year-old migrant from Syria stabbed and killed a Red Cross mental health counselor in Saarbrücken. The attacker and the psychologist allegedly got into an argument during a therapy session at a counselling center for traumatized refugees.

June 9. A court in Cottbus sentenced a 32-year-old Chechen migrant named Rashid D. to 13 years in prison for slitting his wife’s throat and throwing her out of the second-floor window of their apartment. The couple’s five children now live in Chechnya with their grandparents. The man was charged with manslaughter rather than murder because, according to the court, the “honor killing” was done in the heat of passion: the man thought that his wife had been unfaithful.

Obama’s Cairo Address, June 4, 2009

About five months after the inauguration of Barack Obama, the president gave a strange address in Cairo. The speech was apparently designed to win over the Muslim world and set Obama apart from the supposed Western chauvinism of the prior and much caricatured George W. Bush administration.

Obama started off by framing past and present tensions between Muslims and the West largely in the context of explicit and implied Western culpability: past European colonialism, and the moral equivalence of the Cold War and disruptive Westernize globalization.

In a pattern that would become all too familiar in the next seven years, Obama reviewed his own familial Muslim pedigree. This was his attempt to persuade Islam that a president of the United States, no less, now uniquely stood astride the East–West divide with a proverbial foot in both America and the Middle East.

Obama nobly lied that Islam had been “paving the way” for the West’s Renaissance and Enlightenment (neither claim was remotely true). Equally fallacious was Obama’s additional yarn that Muslim Cordoba was a paragon of religious tolerance during the Spanish Inquisition (it had been liberated by the Reconquista Christian forces nearly 250 years before the beginning of the Inquisition, and by 1478 few Muslims were left in the city). The message — its veracity was irrelevant — was that a humble and multicultural Barack Hussein Obama alone had the historical insight and cultural background and authenticity that would allow him to serve as a bridge to peace between two morally equivalent rivals.

Obama then rattled off a series of relativist, on-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand, split-the-difference remedies to the current tensions with radical Islamism (all couched in vague euphemisms). The proposition was that the West should accept blame, and so should the sometimes culpable Islamic world. Only then would good compromises follow — given the assumption that conflict always arises out of ignorance and misunderstanding rather than that the guiltier side of a dispute knows precisely why it has chosen an aggressive and hostile path.

Seven years later, Obama’s outreach and his successive lengthy recitals of all the bad things America has done in the world and all the good America has done to encourage and placate Muslims (including redirecting NASA to the agenda of Muslim outreach) had come to nothing.

Indeed, the years of Obama’s presidency saw a sharp uptick in jihadists attacks against Europe and the United States, the rise of ISIS in Iraq, the genocide in Syria, and a series of appeasing gestures that spiked tensions, from the false red line in Syria to the bombing of and skedaddle from Libya to the disastrous and deliberate laxity in diplomatic security that culminated in the tragedy in Benghazi. Obama left office having alienated the moderate Sunni Arab nations, appeased an anti-Western Iran, and abdicated American power in the Middle East. Calm did not follow. For Middle Easterners, the Obama era meant that the United States was a lousy friend and a harmless foe, the common denominator being that one could ignore the pretensions of such a naive rhetorician.

A realist might have asked Obama, “If the president of the United State did not believe in the singularity of his nation, then why in the world would foreigners?” And if the nominal head of the West contextualized his culture when abroad, then why wouldn’t its autocratic enemies see that concession as weakness to be exploited rather than magnanimity to be reciprocated?

I could be writing every week about Sweden. Every day. Every hour. For reasons that will be analyzed by historians for a long, long time – provided the Western world doesn’t become so thoroughly Islamized that the possibility of objective historical scrutiny is utterly obliterated – the Swedes have chosen a path of cultural and societal suicide that puts all other countries in the shade.

For anyone curious about self-destructive psychopathologies, it is a grimly fascinating phenomenon. Why, of all places, Sweden? How can a Swedish woman raped by an illegal Muslim immigrant be so bursting with racial guilt that she hesitates to report the crime to the police for fear that her report might lead to her rapist’s punishment or deportation? Or, more generally, because news of the offense might result in an increase in “Islamophobia?”

This is the kind of madness that’s going on in Sweden now. More than any other country in Europe, it has a government and a media that are in denial about the truth, a legal system that punishes those who dare to tell the truth, and a people who have been brainwashed for decades with the vile lie that they have a moral obligation to hand their country over to hostile, despotic strangers from far away.

No, Sweden isn’t North Korea. The ugly news does get out, one way or another. Some of it, anyway. It’s just that, with extremely rare exceptions, the important facts about the nation’s disastrous Islamization don’t find their way into the country’s own mainstream media. On the contrary, Sweden’s major TV, radio, and print outlets are notorious for the fidelity with which they parrot the government line and omit or whitewash uncomfortable news developments.

No, if you’re looking for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about most of the nasty stuff going on in Sweden these days, you’re better off checking out Swedish websites such as Avpixlat and Fria Tider, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and two Norwegian sites: document.no and rights.no, the latter being the site of the organization Human Rights Service.

I’ve previously quoted a March 11 Jyllands-Posten editorial that spelled out the Swedish situation quite frankly: what should “most worry Sweden’s neighbors,” the Danish editors wrote, is the Swedes’ “unwillingness to openly and honestly discuss the government-approved multicultural idyll. … In the long run, the mendacity that characterizes the Swedish debate cannot be maintained. The discrepancy between the official, idealized version of Sweden, ‘the people’s home,’ and the brutal reality that everyone can see has simply become too great.”
German Judge Says Turkish Man’s Forced Violent Sex Is “Culturally” Not Rape

Indeed. This is a country where rapes by Muslim men are systematically ignored by the authorities or responded to with minimal punishment. Routinely, Swedish courts refuse to return these monsters – some of whom have repeatedly subjected small boys and girls to violent sexual abuse – to their home countries for fear that they’ll be put in danger. In other words, Swedish judges care more about the safety of foreign rapists than that of Swedish children.

(No wonder U.S. News and World Report has just named Sweden the best country in the world to be an immigrant. Yet another cockeyed ranking. The proper question isn’t which country is best for immigrants, but which country has the most sensible immigration policy.)

It’s a country where even prominent Swedish feminists – fanatical boosters of multiculturalism – are now moving out of Muslim-heavy neighborhoods not only because of the Muslim rapists but because of the Muslim “morality police,” who are less concerned with monitoring rapists than with controlling women’s conduct. (One such feminist organized “coffee shop meetings” with Muslim male community leaders in an attempt to resolve the situation, but gave up.)

It’s a country where the government rolls out the red carpet for returning ISIS members, giving them special benefits, in hopes that they’ll see the light and put down their weapons.

It’s a country where, while Muslim rapists and terrorists are forgiven, critics of immigrant conduct are punished. In May, a 70-year-old woman in Dalarna, Sweden, was arrested for writing on Facebook in 2015 about immigrants who “set cars on fire and urinate and defecate in the streets.” (She faces up to four years in prison.)

No surprise, then, that on July 7, Jyllands-Posten reported that the Swedish government plans to alter the nation’s Constitution in such a way as to give itself the power to limit online free speech about precisely these ticklish matters. Among other things, wrote Jyllands-Posten, it will become illegal “for certain websites to publicize information about private persons’ ethnicity or conviction of crimes.”

Of course: the best way to address the ever-rising tide of Muslim criminality is to close down every last media outlet that reports honestly about it. The mainstream Swedish media are already playing ball; it’s just a few recalcitrant websites that need to be scrubbed clean. Presumably the next step will be to block access in Sweden to Jyllands-Posten and other foreign news sources that tell Swedes the truth about what’s going on within their own borders.

Then everything will be just perfect, no? And what are the chances that no matter how much Sweden tightens its already alarming (if currently tacit) limits on freedom of speech, Reporters without Borders will keep Sweden at its ridiculous #2 spot on the World Press Freedom Index? CONTINUE AT SITE

Anti-Semitism should always be condemned. But it is somewhat ironic that leaders of Hungary’s Jewish community and Israel’s Ambassador in Budapest are rallying on behalf of a man who demeans Jews and gives millions to anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian organizations. That man who is Jewish by birth, but proud for growing up in an “anti-Semitic home,” is George Soros. http://acdemocracy.org/soros-is-no-dreyfus/

The Hungarian government is fighting Soros, who is campaigning against the Hungarian government’s immigration policies in the effort to force it to open its borders to illegal immigrants. As part of this fight, the Hungarians are attempting to curb the billionaire’s funding of opposition groups, as well as his Budapest-based Central European University by legislating education reforms that would close the institution, unless it complies with the country’s laws.

Soros, dubbed as the “only private citizen who had his foreign policy,” whose efforts to change Hungary’s domestic policies and reverse the law that would shut down the CEU has failed, addressed the European Commission’s annual economic meeting last June. He denounces the “the deception and corruption of the mafia state the Orban regime has established,” and led the European Union to take legal action against the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Orban responded with a billboard campaign featuring a smirking Soros with the caption: Let’s not allow Soros to have the last laugh”. It didn’t take long before Soros, and his supporters evoked his Jewishness and accused the government of anti-Semitism. Orban’s spokesperson responded: “The Hungarian government’s goal is to stop Soros’s migrant campaign, which is supporting the migration of illegal migrants into our country. The government is not criticizing George Soros for his Jewish origin, but for his supporting the growing number of migrants entering in uncontrolled crowds into Europe.” And Hungary is not alone in limiting the number of illegal, mostly Muslim immigrants who pose a great economic and security threat. Other European nations are also taking steps to stem the seemingly endless tide.

As for anti-Semitism, in November 2003, as Operation Iraqi Freedom was underway and anti-American and anti-Israeli/anti-Semitic demonstrations spread throughout Europe, Soros spoke at a meeting of the Jewish Funders Network in New York. Soros claimed that “The policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration contribute” to the rise of anti-Semitism. He assured his audience that once Bush and Sharon are removed from office, the world will go back to not hating Jews. “If we change that direction, then anti-Semitism also will diminish. I can’t see how one could confront it directly,” he said. On December 4, 2003, Ira Stoll reported in the New York Sun that Soros declared “Israel “likely” was a big but secret reason for America’s war in Iraq.”

Soros has rewritten Middle Eastern history to better jive with his idea of the “poignant and difficult case” of “victims turning perpetrators.” Soros, much like the virulent anti-Semitic graphic daily propaganda in Arab, Palestinian and Iranian newspapers, has been comparing Israel’s self-defense against repeated attempts of annihilation by the Islamist/Arab terrorists to Nazi atrocities. The successful defense against terrorism, especially preemptive actions, is never appropriate in Soros’ book.

The goal of this trial is to create judicial precedent: to ensure that in the future, any criticism or insult against Islamism must be considered “racism”.

Valentina Colombo, a professor at the European University in Rome, warned early on about jihad by court. In 2009, she wrote that, “The lawsuit that was initiated by The Union of the Islamic Organizations of France and the Great Mosque of Paris against the satirical magazine ‘Charlie Hebdo’ for republishing the Danish cartoons about Muhammad is one of the most recent examples of this kind of jihad.” But nobody paid attention to the warning. And when jihadists came in 2015 to murder eight journalists and cartoonists, nobody understood that “jihad by court” is only the first step.

“Legal action has become a mainstay of radical Islamist organizations seeking to intimidate and silence their critics.” — Steven Emerson, Founder and President of The Investigative Project on Terrorism.

A silent jihad is under way in France. Spread by a constellation of Muslim organizations allied to powerful (non-Muslim) “anti-racist” associations, “jihad by court” is attacking freedom of press, and freedom of speech. Any journalist, politician, lawyer or intellectual who talks or writes either about Islam or some of its representatives in a critical way, is at risk of being taken to court for “racism” or “outraging a group of people because of their religion.”

The so-called “jihad by court” began in an experimental way in France at the beginning of the century. In 2002, the famous French writer Michel Houellebecq was sued for “incitement to hatred” by Islamic organizations allied to the Ligue des droits de l’Homme, (“Human Rights League”), a prestigious “anti-racist” organization. Houellebecq was sued for having said in an interview with Lire magazine that, “of all existing religions, Islam is the dumbest. We read the Coran, we all collapse.” Houellebecq was acquitted.

In 2007, a similar lawsuit was initiated by the Union of the Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF) and the Great Mosque of Paris against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, because it republished the Danish Muhammad cartoons. The plaintiffs accused Charlie Hebdo of “racism”. Charlie Hebdo was acquitted. In 2011, unknown arsonists burned Charlie Hebdo’s offices. The magazine was sued again in 2012 and in 2013. Each time, the plaintiffs were different Muslim organizations claiming different instances of “racism” or “blasphemy”. January 7, 2015, two Muslim terrorists stormed into the offices of Charlie Hebdo and murdered 12 people.

Two years after that, jihad by court is everywhere.
Against Intellectuals and Journalists

Éric Zemmour, a writer and journalist, was sued in February 2011 for “racial incitement”. He said on television that “most dealers are blacks and Arabs. That is a fact”. He was fined €2,000. In May 2012, Zemmour was sued for defamation by Patrick Lozes, president of Council of Black Associations (CRAN). Zemmour had written in 2008: “Patrick Lozes said ‘Obama is our president’, which proves that for him, racial solidarity is superior in his enamored eyes than national solidarity”. Zemmour was acquitted.

In 2014, Zemmour was sued again because he said, “The Normans, the Huns, Arabs, the great invasions after the fall of Rome are now replaced by gangs of Chechens, Roma, Kosovars, North Africans, Africans, who rob, abuse or strip your belongings.” He was released in September 2015. The appeals court reconfirmed his release in 2016.

In December 2015, Zemmour was again fined €3,000 because he had declared to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera that the “deportation” of five million French Muslim seems “unrealistic”, but is comparable to “the five or six million Germans who had to leave eastern Europe after World War II”. Zemmour succeeded in proving that the word “deportation” was added by Corriere della Sera, but the judge did not take that into consideration, and Zemmour’s conviction was reaffirmed after an appeal in November 2016.

In June 2017, Zemmour was fined €5,000 after saying on television in September 2016, that “jihadists were considered by all Muslims, good Muslims.” The plaintiff was a pro-Palestinian association, CAPJPO-EuroPa­les­tine.

Pascal Bruckner, an author and essayist, was sued in December 2015, by the Islamic, “left-wing” associations, Les Indivisibles and Les Indigenes de la République. Bruckner had said on television that the plaintiffs had “ideologically justified the murder of Charlie Hebdo’s journalists”. Bruckner was acquitted in 2016.

In January 2017, all “anti-racist” associations and the Islamist CCIF (Collective Against Islamophobia) sued Georges Bensoussan — an award-winning Jewish French historian, born and raised in Morocco — for racism. He had said on the radio that “in France, in Arab families… anti-Semitism is imbibed with one’s mother’s milk.” He was acquitted, but the prosecutor has filed an appeal.
Against the “Fachosphère”

The fachosphère (combination of “fascist” and “sphere”) is the term that the mainstream media are now calling a collection of websites — such as the Riposte Laïque, Resistance Republicaine and many others — that warn of the dangers of being overrun by radical Islam. Between 2012 and 2017, Riposte Laïque alone was sued “no fewer than 43 times” its editor-in-chief, Pierre Cassen, told Gatestone. This time, the plaintiffs were not only “anti-racist” associations (LDH, SOS-Racisme, le MRAP, la LICRA and Islamist CCIF) — but also the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo; former Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, and various Islamic associations such as L’Aube du Savoir (“Sunrise of Knowledge”), journalists from the mainstream media (Libération, Le Monde), the Ligue de Défense Judiciaire des Musulmans (“Muslim Judicial Defense League”). These libel and racism suits asked for fines from €5,000 to €40,000.
Against Officials

On March 30, 2016, Laurence Rossignol, then Minister of Families, Children and Women’s Rights and known to be a fierce critic of the omnipresence of the Islamic veil in public places, was interviewed by the radio station RMC. She compared veiled women to “American negroes [“nègres américains”] who supported slavery”. Rossignol apologized for using “negroes”, but possibly too late. The Islamist Collectif Contre L’islamophobie en France (CCIF) and the Frantz Fanon Foundation launched a class action suit for “insult of a racial nature” and announced their intention to submit a complaint to the Cour de Justice de la République, a court empowered to adjudicate lawsuits against members of the government. The plaintiffs also threatened to sue the minister appointed to the Correctional Court and the Administrative Court of Paris.

Despite various social tensions in his country, Morocco’s King Mohammed VI called for reform of Islam similar to the contention of Egyptian president al Sisi on New Year’s Day 2015.The pro-American Moroccan monarch said he wants to rein in the pernicious Islamic doctrine of Jihad.

According to Moroccan authorities more than 1600 Moroccans have joined jihadists in Syria, Libya and Iraq and 200 to 240 of that number have returned either to Morocco or European countries. So alarming is the trend that the Kingdom has embarked on a special education program aimed at neutralizing extremist interpretations of the Koran, specifically mention of jihad.

The fact is radical groups in the northern part of the Kingdom have increased tension and unrest and the regime seems unable to control the situation. Some analysts have compared the situation to the southern Tunisian town where a false claim was made against a vender selling fruits and vegetables. Ultimately this street peddler poured kerosene on himself setting himself ablaze. This was the beginning of what was termed “the Arab Spring.” Surely history never reproduces itself exactly, but Morocco’s leadership has taken notice nonetheless.

Morocco survived the political tsunami by adopting a series of liberal laws designed to neutralize unrest while pursuing a hard policy against Muslim extremists. Nevertheless, an unemployed telephone technician, Nasser Zefzafi has led a protest movement called “Hirak” against the central government that has gained traction. Moroccan authorities maintain Zefzafi and his followers have been manipulated by jihadist activists to destabilize the government. Since his arrest, protests have been held around the country and even in European capitals.

Morocco has had a history of challenges in its northern region invariably curtailed with merciless repression. The challenges have only increased since the millennium with jihadists, ISIS and al Qaeda all trying to destabilize the government. There are at least 132 terrorist cells in the country according to the Moroccan secret police and 2720 terrorists arrested.

According to King Mohammed in his most recent public commentary: “Those who incite murder and who use the Koran and the Sunna for their goals are but generating lies… All Muslims, Christians and Jews should create a joint front to stand against fanaticism, hatred and the proliferation of ignorance spread in the name of religion.”

It is clear King Mohammed cannot and will not yield to the threat of Islamic extremism. He is obliged to subdue the radical elements and take whatever measures are necessary to prevent the interaction between jihadist organizations within the country and radical forces outside his national borders.

Calling for reforms is one thing – and a desirable thing – but adopting those measures needed to destroy the enemy are something else again, something indispensable in the war against jihadism.

Pope Francis is one of the gabbiest popes in recent decades. The pontiff has not been shy about commenting on issues that he obviously knows little or nothing about — especially climate change, about which he gets his talking points directly from the far left.

So I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised when the pope calls in an Italian reporter on a whim to heavily criticize the U.S. for its immigration and refugee policies.

The Daily Wire reports:

“I worry about very dangerous alliances among powers that have a distorted vision of the world: America and Russia, China and North Korea, Putin and Assad in the war in Syria,” he said in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

Directing his comments toward world leaders gathered in Germany for the G20 summit, Francis said the meeting of the world’s top economies worries him.

“Our main and unfortunately growing problem in the world today is that of the poor, the weak, the excluded, which includes migrants,” said Francis, the first pope in 1,300 years to come from a nation outside Europe. “This is why the G20 worries me: It mainly hits immigrants.”

Francis told world leaders that Europe is the “richest continent in the whole world” and that leaders there should not close borders. Conflict across the Middle East and Africa have forced millions to flee their homes, making them refugees. But few problems were solved at the G20 — while leaders agreed to support free trade, there was no consensus on how to deal with the refugee problem.

I’ve said this before when the pope has criticized the refugee policies of other nations. Unless the Vatican flings open its gates and takes in a few thousand refugees itself, the pope has no standing whatsoever to criticize others. CONTINUE AT SITE