RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

In Islamic symbolism, Córdoba is the lost Caliphate. Political authorities in Córdoba dealt a blow to the Catholic Church’s claim of ownership of cathedral by declaring that “religious consecration is not the way to acquire property”. But this is how history works, especially in the lands where Christianity and Islam fought hard for dominion. Why are secularists not pressing Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to give Christians back the Hagia Sophia? No one has raised an eyebrow that “Christendom’s greatest cathedral has become a mosque”.

The Spanish left, governing the region, would like to convert the church into “a place for the meeting of faiths”. Nice ecumenical words, but a death trap for the Islamic domination over other faiths. If these Islamists, supported by the militant secularists, will be able to bring Allah back inside the Cathedral of Córdoba, a tsunami of Islamic supremacism will submerge Europe’s decaying Christianity. There are thousands of empty churches just waiting to be filled by the voices of muezzins.

The Western attempt to free Jerusalem in the Middle Ages has been condemned as Christian imperialism, while the Muslim campaigns to colonize and Islamize the Byzantine Empire, North Africa, the Balkans, Egypt, the Middle East and most of Spain, to name but a few, are celebrated as a season of enlightenment.

Muslim supremacists seem to have fantasies — as well as a long history — of converting Christian sites to Islamic ones. Take, for example, Saint-Denis, the Gothic cathedral named for the first Christian bishop of Paris who was buried there in 250, and the burial place of Charles Martel, whose victory stopped the Muslim invasion of France in 732. Now, according to the scholar Gilles Kepel, this burial place of most of France’s kings and queens is “the Mecca in Islam of France”. The French Islamists are dreaming of taking it over and replacing the church bells with the call of the muezzin.

In Turkey’s greatest cathedral, Hagia Sophia, a muezzin’s call recently reverberated inside the sixth-century church for the first time in 85 years.

In France, Muslim leaders called for converting abandoned churches into mosques. thereby echoing The late writer Emile Cioran once predicted of Europe: “The French will not wake up until Notre Dame becomes a mosque”.

Now it is the turn of Spain’s greatest Catholic site, the Cathedral of Córdoba. Spanish “leftists” and secularists would now, it seems, like to convert to Islam the cathedral of Córdoba, the symbol of a time when “Islam was on the verge of turning the Mediterranean into a Muslim lake”. Now that Islam is again conquering large swaths of the Middle East and Africa, is it not a coincidence that this campaign is gaining ground?

In 550 the Cathedral of Córdoba was a Christian basilica, dedicated to a saint; then, in 714, it was occupied by the Muslims, who destroyed it and converted it into the Great Mosque of Córdoba during the reign of Caliph Abd al Rahman I. The site was returned to Catholic worship by King Ferdinand III in 1523 and became the current great Cathedral of Córdoba, one of the most important sites of Western Christianity. Now an alliance of secularists and Islamists are trying to turn the church back to Islamic worship.

The Wall Street Journal called it deconquista, playing with the word reconquista, the time when Spain was returned from Islam to Catholicism. “The Great Mosque of Córdoba” is what UNESCO — also torturing, upending and turning history on its head to rewrite the past of Jerusalem and Hebron — calls it. In the last six centuries, however, only Catholic mass and confessions have been officiated there. The WSJ charges “left-wing Spanish intellectuals” with trying to “de-Christianize” the site.

As an ex-Muslim, one intimately versed in the Koran and the mindset of so many who take literally its arrogant and intolerant admonitions, few things distress me more than seeing every latest massacre followed by the warm and fuzzy pieties of those in the West who find it convenient not to understand.

The normalisation of the Western response to Islamic terrorism has arrived at such a state of cognitive dissonance and muddled morality that we expect and see automatic messages of solidarity after every latest terror attack — sympathy not for the victims but for Islam. Think #illridewithyou, for example. As an ex-Muslim who fiercely advocated for the Religion of Peace while trying to absolve my beloved Islam of all responsibility, let me admit that I also hid behind this veil of obfuscation.

Know that I have opposed bigotry and baseless hate towards the Muslims community my entire life, and that I will always do so. As a law student, protecting the rights of individuals is of paramount importance to me, and I cannot stress this enough. However, this does not equate to the automatic and mindless defence of Islamic doctrine.

The political correctness movement, which dominates and restricts “acceptable” Western public responses to terror, has produced a dangerous and delusional conflation: the belief that protecting Muslims and protecting Islam are inherently the same thing. The generic “not all Muslims are terrorists” is a staple of social media posts and mainstream media commentary after every latest replay of 9/11, 7/7, Nice, Paris, Manchester, London….

Asserting the obvious, that only a relative few Muslims are prepared to visit terror and death upon unbelievers, tells us nothing of value. A more useful response would be “only idiots think all Muslims are terrorists, but it requires a much bigger idiot to believe there is no link between Islam and terrorism.”

The distinction between protecting people (Muslims) and protecting Islam (an ideology) must be made and addressed by politicians and commentators if there is to be any resistance to Islamism. Instead we see the coddling of Islam which plagues all discussion and dominates the West’s public stage. Rather than protecting Muslims this attitude serves only to shield Islamist doctrine from the scrutiny and response it deserves.

The depiction of a terrorist is a peculiar thing. The media, Muslims, apologists and politicians alike approach terrorism as some offshoot ideology, as if terrorists are spawned in a vacuum. I say this not to tarnish the image of the general Muslim community but to illustrate how the West scrambles to divorce terrorism from a religious motivation, the considerate goal being to ensuring Muslim feelings aren’t hurt. Rather than venturing to uncover the truth about Islamic teachings, the regressive left instead treats Islam as a cultural construct in which extremist elements can be eradicated by cradling and coddling.

The unrecognised truth — a truth those comfortable nostrums will not permit to be recognised — is that Islam does not subscribe to the same moral principles which shaped and govern Western civilisation and, therefore, is non-responsive to such an approach. Vital to bear in mind is that Islam differs fundamentally from most religions in that it does not call for the peaceful interaction of diverse and tolerant humanity; rather, it is a political ideology whose advocacy of “peace” translates as global domination. When the world submits, then peace will reign and not before.

A five-minute reading of the Koran should suffice to illustrate the Islam’s supremacist philosophy and ambitions, yet we are told to dismiss those violent, sexist, homophobic and anti-Semitic sentiments as misinterpretations. This stifling of dialogue and any proper critique of the doctrines results in a viciously self-enforcing cycle of denial and the subverting of any productive approach to tackling the issue. The pronounced and deeply disturbing depiction of non-believers in the Quran — the kuffar — is freighted with supremacist connotations, not least in the repeated emphasis on non-Muslims’ perversion of the truth and their distance from the “true” morality as outlined by Muhammad. This dangerous concoction of ideas is reinforced by the precept that all humans are in fact born Muslims (even if they don’t know it), and non-believers are simply those who have strayed from Allah’s word, never been exposed to it or mulishly reject it. Can there be any surprise in noting how these dangerous undertones facilitate extremist interpretations that animate so many terrorists?

The civilized world wants to end the carnage in Venezuela, but Cuba is the author of the barbarism. Restoring Venezuelan peace will require taking a hard line with Havana.

Step one is a full-throated international denunciation of the Castro regime. Any attempt to avoid that with an “engagement” strategy, like the one Barack Obama introduced, will fail. The result will be more Venezuelas rippling through the hemisphere.

The Venezuelan opposition held its own nationwide referendum on Sunday in an effort to document support for regularly scheduled elections that have been canceled and widespread disapproval of strongman Nicolás Maduro’s plan to rewrite the constitution.

The regime was not worried. It said it was using the day as a trial run to prepare for the July 30 elections to choose the assembly that will draft the new constitution.

The referendum was an act of national bravery. Yet like the rest of the opposition’s strategy—which aims at dislodging the dictatorship with peaceful acts of civil disobedience—it’s not likely to work. That’s because Cubans, not Venezuelans, control the levers of power.

Havana doesn’t care about Venezuelan poverty or famine or whether the regime is unpopular. It has spent a half-century sowing its ideological “revolution” in South America. It needs Venezuela as a corridor to run Colombian cocaine to the U.S. and to Africa to supply Europe. It also relies heavily on cut-rate Venezuelan petroleum.

To keep its hold on Venezuela, Cuba has embedded a Soviet-style security apparatus. In a July 13 column, titled “Cubazuela” for the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba website, Roberto Álvarez Quiñones reported that in Venezuela today there are almost 50 high-ranking Cuban military officers, 4,500 Cuban soldiers in nine battalions, and “34,000 doctors and health professionals with orders to defend the tyranny with arms.” Cuba’s interior ministry provides Mr. Maduro’s personal security. “Thousands of other Cubans hold key positions of the State, Government, military and repressive Venezuelan forces, in particular intelligence and counterintelligence services.”

Every Venezuelan armed-forces commander has at least one Cuban minder, if not more, a source close to the military told me. Soldiers complain that if they so much as mention regime shortcomings over a beer at a bar, their superiors know about it the next day. On July 6 Reuters reported that since the beginning of April “nearly 30 members of the military have been detained for deserting or abandoning their post and almost 40 for rebellion, treason, or insubordination.”

The idea of using civilian thugs to beat up Venezuelan protesters comes from Havana, as Cuban-born author Carlos Alberto Montaner explained in a recent El Nuevo Herald column, “Venezuela at the Edge of the Abyss.” Castro used them in the 1950s, when he was opposing Batista, to intimidate his allies who didn’t agree with his strategy. Today in Cuba they remain standard fare to carry out “acts of repudiation” against dissidents.

The July 8 decision to move political prisoner Leopoldo López from the Ramo Verde military prison to house arrest was classic Castro. Far from being a sign of regime weakness, it demonstrates Havana’s mastery of misdirection to defuse criticism. CONTINUE AT SITE