RUTHFULLY YOURS

Adventurers that we are, we decided this year that during fellesferie — the three weeks in July during which, by Norwegian government decree, virtually everybody in the country goes on vacation at the same time – we would travel not to Gran Canaria or the Caribbean or the Greek islands but, instead, to the next sizable town over from ours, where we spent one night at a budget hostel.

So it was that last weekend we could be found sitting outside at a bar in Kongsberg, famous (at least in Norway) for its silver mines and for being the location of the Norwegian mint, and, more recently, as the city that produces such impressive cutting-edge defense technology as the new Joint Strike Missile.

One thing we noticed while wandering around Kongsberg was that there seemed to be a lot fewer women in hijab (or worse) than in our own somewhat smaller burg twenty miles away. I wondered if the government, which owns 50.001 percent of the Kongsberg defense conglomerate, had deliberately chosen not to settle too many Muslims in the city because of its sensitivity as a hub of classified military intelligence. Just a guess.

In the evening – it was a Friday – we went to a bar and sat outside sipping our beers at a sidewalk table. We had only been there for a matter of moments when the woman at the next table, who was alone, began speaking to us. This is common in Norway. Most Norwegians won’t meet your eyes when you walk past them on the street, and if you smile at them they’ll assume you’re crazy or dangerous or both; but after they’ve had a beer or two on a weekend evening, they’ll think nothing of sitting down at your table with you and telling you their life stories.

This woman, who must’ve been around fifty or so, was eager to do precisely that. Until a couple of years ago, she told us, she’d worked as an instructor in a government school, teaching Norwegian to adult immigrants, mostly from the Muslim world. She complimented me on my Norwegian but said that most Americans are terrible at learning Norwegian – Afghans and Iraqis, she insisted, put them in the shade.

I decided not to argue with her. True, most Americans, however long they’ve been in Norway, still don’t get the pronunciation right, especially the “r” sound. But back in the Dark Ages, when I took my own Norwegian course in Oslo, in a class made up exclusively of people from Western countries, our teacher told us that we were the class that every faculty member in the school coveted, because we were, relatively speaking, a breeze to teach: the other several dozen classrooms in the building were packed with students from Africa and south Asia, who would take a lot longer time to learn Norwegian than we would.

One reason for this was that, to put it euphemistically, those students were not accustomed to the classroom experience and to the manners and mores appropriate thereto. Nor were most of them terribly motivated to learn Norwegian. Their attendance was spotty. Some of them were women who had to be accompanied by male chaperones from their families, and who tended to drop out after a few weeks at most.

Teaching those classes could be dicey because, for cultural reasons, certain topics had to be avoided. Another part of the reason why they were tough to teach was that the students’ grasp of their own native languages was so tenuous. Many of them were actually illiterate, or only minimally literate, in their own tongues: how do you teach a second language to somebody who barely has a first one? CONTINUE AT SITE

CARACAS, Venezuela—The cities of this economically distressed country largely came to a halt on Thursday, as the opposition staged a 24-hour general strike in a last-ditch attempt to force President Nicolás Maduro to abandon plans to rewrite the constitution.

Most residents of Caracas stayed home and businesses were closed, further depressing the country’s feeble economy. Members of opposition factions erected road barricades to block any remaining traffic, clashing in some neighborhoods with security forces.

“We have to make the government understand that people are dying of hunger and lack of medicines,” said Carlos Ramírez, an accountant who joined the strike in the eastern city of Puerto Ordaz.

The country’s biggest business and farming associations were among the groups that spoke in favor of the action, and the National Transport Federation told its 200,000 bus drivers to stay home.

“It’s obvious that today is not a normal day and that Nicolás Maduro doesn’t have a way to prevent Venezuelans from exercising their will,” said opposition lawmaker Juan Andrés Mejía.

“We accompany the citizens who are looking for a peaceful exit from this crisis,” said Carlos Larrazabal, who is head of Fedecámeras, an umbrella organization for Venezuela’s chambers of commerce. He added that many of its members have been effectively idled anyway because of the economic depression.

The strike is part of the opposition’s “Zero Hour” protest campaign to prevent Mr. Maduro from staging a vote on July 30 for the Constituent Assembly, which is to be tasked with overhauling the country’s political system. The opposition, which controls congress, and ruling party dissidents are boycotting the vote and calling it illegal.

On Sunday, the opposition said it collected 7.6 million signatures, more than a third of all registered voters, in support of scrapping the vote. U.S. President Donald Trump promised “swift economic actions” if Mr. Maduro goes ahead with elections.

Mr. Maduro has responded by doubling down on the election campaign and accusing Mr. Trump of imperialism.

On Thursday, Mr. Maduro danced and sang at a youth rally in Caracas, playing the strike down as a failed effort by a few detractors. He threatened jail for the strike’s organizers. CONTINUE AT SITE

About a year ago, Donald Trump Jr. met with a mysterious Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya. Trump Jr. was purportedly eager to receive information that could damage Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Veselnitskaya denies that she was working for the Kremlin to lobby for favorable Russian treatment. But in the past, Veselnitskaya has been connected with a number of Russian-related lobbying groups.

Trump Jr., for his part, proved naïve and foolish to gobble such possible setup bait. The Russians proved eager to confuse, confound, and embarrass everyone involved in the 2016 election.

This latest Trump family imbroglio piggybacks on six months of Russian collusion charges. National Security Adviser Michael Flynn resigned less than a month into his job after being less than candid about his contacts with the Russians. Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s erstwhile campaign manager, had some questionable Russian business interests and resigned well before the election.

All these stories were luridly headlined in the press.

Yet several intelligence officials from the Obama administration — former CIA director John Brennan, former FBI director James Comey, and former director of national intelligence James Clapper — asserted that they had found no evidence of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign to rig the election.

Former FBI head Robert Mueller is now overseeing the probe into possible Russian meddling as a special counsel. There are also several other Russia-related investigations being conducted by various agencies and congressional committees.

Some members of Congress are asking why Obama-administration officials such as Brennan, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice requested surveillance files on Trump-campaign officials, may have unmasked names, and may have allowed those names to be illegally leaked to the press.

Earlier, some Republican anti-Trump operators (and later some Clinton campaign operatives) hired former British spy and opposition researcher Christopher Steele to compile a dossier on Donald Trump that would include some ludicrous Russia-related allegations. Weirder still, Steele’s firm may have had some contacts with none other than Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Senator John McCain, a former target of candidate Trump’s invective, acquired the anti-Trump dossier and made sure that the FBI investigated the phony dirt. Comey did just that.

In no time, the so-called Steele dossier was leaked. The website BuzzFeed admitted it could not verify any of the accusations but published the entire sordid file anyway.

One of the principals of the Clinton campaign, John Podesta, was a board member of a green-energy firm that suddenly saw an infusion of Russian cash — purportedly in an attempt to sway Podesta.

It is not a club that anyone would willingly want to join, and Austria certainly didn’t apply for membership.

However the Danube state, which had been spared until now, recently joined the growing fraternity of European countries to experience a murderous jihad attack, whose depth of savagery and hatred has left the country deeply shaken.

The latest “victory” for the establishment of the worldwide caliphate took place June 30 in Linz, the country’s third largest city. Besides being Austria’s first such killings, the double murder stood out for its incredible cruelty, the victims’ age, and possible political motivation.

The jihadist-killer, a 54-year-old Tunisian immigrant identified only as Mohamed H., a resident of Austria since 1989, first slit the throat of Hildegard Sch., 85, and then stabbed and beat her husband, Siegfried, 87, to death in their home.

Before leaving, the “holy warrior” then burned the dead couple’s residence down over them. Firemen discovered the murder victims’ bodies when extinguishing the blaze.

“This man caused a bloodbath in the apartment – this was obviously a proxy war,” said the couple’s son, who was not identified.

After the killings, Mohamed H. told police he considered drowning himself in the Danube but decided to give himself up instead. He then went to the police station where he said he waited his turn to report the double murder.

Mohamed H. gained entrance to the old couple’s home because he regularly delivered groceries there from his wife’s vegetable store.

The Tunisian was so well known to the elderly Austrians, and relations so friendly, that the couple had given Mohamed’s daughter, and only child, $225 as a high school graduation present.

But on the day of their deaths, the couple’s friendly deliveryman arrived not only with their groceries, but also with “a belt, a wooden stick, a knife, as well as a can of gas” hidden under his apron. Police called the murders “carefully planned.”

Tragically, what the elderly couple did not know was that behind Mohamed M.’s familiar, amiable smile now lurked a jihadist killer who had sworn loyalty to the Islamic State (IS) and its leader, al-Baghdadi. The Tunisian had “praised… diverse IS horrors” on social media, exhibiting a radicalization trend “right up to the last entry,” although there is no evidence he ever fought for the terrorist entity.

One newspaper report states residents in his neighborhood remember him wearing a head covering, kaftan and beard before he went back to Tunisia in 2014, where, authorities believe, he was radicalized. He returned in 2015, clean-shaven and wearing Western clothes but noticeably more “difficult and aggressive.”

Several reasons have been offered as to why Mohamed M. chose the elderly couple as his target in Europe’s latest jihad attack.

Evolution will no longer be taught in Turkish secondary schools, after being described as a “controversial subject” by the government.

So, the question naturally arises what exactly will Turkish schoolchildren be taught instead. The answer is “jihad.” Turkey is in the process of including the concept of jihad in compulsory school curricula. In eighth grade, jihad will also be taught under the title “Struggling on the Path to Allah: Jihad,” under a chapter called “Worshipping Allah.”

The Ministry of National Education has also increased class hours for the mandatory course in “religion, culture and morality,” and decreased art and philosophy classes to one hour per week.

Turkey has recently been in the news for various developments that include, among other matters, its record number of jailed journalists, the destruction of Kurdish towns and forced displacement of thousands of Kurds, the dismissal or suspension of thousands of government employees for political reasons, the arrest of thousands of citizens for allegedly “organizing” last year’s failed coup, the creeping conversion of the Hagia Sophia Basilica-museum into a mosque, and the seizure of Assyrian Christian lands, churches and cemeteries by the government.

One additional trend begging the media’s attention is the determined Islamization of the Turkish educational system.

Here is a short list of some of the latest developments in Turkish schools and their curricula:

Turkey to stop teaching evolution in secondary schools as part of new national curriculum

Evolution will no longer be taught in Turkish secondary schools after being described as a “controversial subject” by the government. The head of the education ministry’s curriculum board, Alpaslan Durmuş, said a section on Darwinism would be cut from biology classes from 2019.

“We have excluded controversial subjects for students at an age unable yet to understand the issues’ scientific background,” he told a seminar in Ankara, according to Hurriyet Daily News.

“Jihad” in compulsory school curricula

So the question naturally arises what exactly will Turkish schoolchildren be taught instead. The answer is “jihad.” Turkey is in the process of including the concept of jihad in compulsory school curricula. According to a statement issued in January by the Turkish Ministry of National Education, Turkish textbooks will be teaching “jihad” as a “value” in classes at Imam Hatip middle schools (schools that offer an Islamic curriculum to pupils).

At a press conference, Ismet Yilmaz, the minister of national education, explained the details of the new curricula to the press. According to the newspaper Cumhuriyet, jihad will be taught in seventh grade while pupils study the fundamentals of “tawhid” (oneness of God) and wahdat (Islamic unity) civilization.”

In eighth grade, jihad will also be taught under the title “Struggling on the Path to Allah: Jihad” under the chapter called “Worshipping Allah.”

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.