RUTHFULLY YOURS

As the European Union continues its absurd push for the hasty relocation of Syrian migrants, one member nation is facing unprecedented perils.http://constitution.com/swedish-no-go-zones-rise-police-chief-crying-help/

In Sweden, the Syrian refugee crisis has been an absolute nightmare. Lawlessness and violence are the new norms in areas that are heavily populated with these middle eastern migrants, and the Swedish police are having difficulties maintaining law and order in the otherwise tranquil nation. These areas, colloquially known as “no-go” zones have turned increasingly chaotic in recent weeks, and now even the police assigned to these areas are asking for assistance.

“Swedish National Police Commissioner Dan Eliasson has begged the government for help as the number of no-go zones has risen from 55 to 61 in only one year.

“’Help us, help us,’ Eliasson said at a press conference on the subject of the rising levels of crime and criminal networks in Sweden. Eliasson said there were at least 5,000 criminals divided into around 200 networks in Sweden operating in the now 61 no-go zones, many of which are heavily migrant-populated, Göteborgs-Posten reports.

“Police have said that they are monitoring 61 ‘no-go zones’ but say that 23 of them are particularly vulnerable. Tynnered, a suburb in Gothenburg, is a new addition to the list after cases of car burnings and shootings, the most recent of which occurred earlier this month.

“Eliasson warned if the trend persists and crime continues to increase then the social contract could break down in Sweden – though he does not believe Sweden was beyond repair. ‘Should we want the social contract to hold, people will have to want to pay taxes and participate in society. It must not go any further, we must reverse the trend.’

“Though the Swedish interior ministry has promised to hire more police officers, many Swedish police departments are facing an exodus of officers, especially in no-go areas.”

As though these 61 areas of complete anarchy and lawlessness weren’t enough, a staggering 80% of Swedish police tasked with patrolling these areas have threatened to quit due to the endemic chaos.

These areas have sprung up as a direct result of the EU’s ridiculous and dangerous migrant quotas, in which the globalist-style organization has mandated that member nations receive these potentially dangerous refugees despite the continued admission of terror groups such as ISIS that they are indeed exploiting the programs to move their jihadists around the globe. In Europe, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia have all refused the EU’s demands, citing a concern for national security.

The United States has finally enacted their own anti-refugee actions with a partial and temporary ban on travel into the U.S. from countries with high rates of terror. This necessary security measure had been previously held up by meddling leftist judges who were opposing President Donald Trump on purely partisan reasoning.

In a one hour video Douglas Murray discusses his book “The Strange Death of Europe”

We’re proud to present a brand new edition of The Mark Steyn Show. These programs, along withSteynPosts, Tales for Our Time and much else at SteynOnline, are made possible through the support of members of The Mark Steyn Club, for which we are extremely grateful.

In this episode, Mark talks to Douglas Murray, with whom he last appeared on the tenth anniversary of the Mohammed cartoons in the Danish Parliament. Douglas was much in the news this last week. In the wake of the attack on the Finsbury Park mosque, he was denounced on the BBC as a “hate preacher” – an outrageous defamation which the broadcaster has now walked back. You can see Reeta Chakrabarti’s apology on behalf of the Corporation here.

Steyn does not regard Murray as a “hate preacher” but as a humane and clear-eyed observer of the existential tragedy unfolding across the west. In this program, Douglas discusses his new book The Strange of Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, published in America this week and which Mark describes as “profound”. Steyn and Murray survey a continent in unprecedented demographic transformation, and roam far and wide in their analysis from the East End of London to the Mediterranean refugee camps, from far northern Sweden to the tomb of Charles Martel. We think you’ll find this show worth your time. Click below to watch:

According to Greek myth, the Athenian hero Theseus sailed to Crete to stop the tribute of seven Athenian men and seven women sent every nine years to the distant carnivorous Minotaur in his haunt within the labyrinth beneath the palace of Knossos on Crete.

In various versions of the prehistorical myth, the Athenian King Aegeus had conceded earlier to the attacking Cretan King Minos to surrender the youths as tribute to prevent a wider war. Then his heroic son Theseus came of age and volunteered to stop the scripted slaughter, sailing to Crete, where he slew the Minotaur. And that was that.

The idea of harvesting people as part of some strange protocol to preclude a wider, far more destructive war is to not unknown in both history and popular myth.

Many of the thousands of human victims sacrificed to the various hungry gods of the Aztecs such as Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca often were delivered as a sort of human tribute forced from neighboring conquered cities and tribes. The subdued assumed that paying the smaller human toll was cheaper than waging a far bloodier and likely futile revolt against the Aztec Empire—at least until the arrival of Hernan Cortes and his conquistadors in 1519, who found restive conquered peoples eager for revolt, largely on promises to overthrow the Aztecs and stop their collection of human tribute.

A half-century ago, in the 1967 Star Trek episode “A Taste of Armageddon,” the starship Enterprise visits an imaginary planet Eminiar II, that was engaged in an existential—but virtual—war with the neighboring planet Vendikar. To avoid full-scale Armageddon, both sides far earlier had agreed to wage a computer-simulated war, in which electronically projected losses were reified by ordering selected “fatalities” to report to “disintegration” chambers—TV-land’s version of the Minotaur myth—to avoid a larger (and real) war. Captain Kirk plays a role somewhat analogous to Theseus and puts an end to the nightmarish nonsense.

Something akin to this trope is occurring in Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States. From Fort Hood to Manchester, we are witnessing such human harvests around the Western world. The script goes like this: A Middle-Eastern Muslim resident alien of a Western country, or a second-generation citizen or subject of Middle Eastern descent, is “radicalized”—either by the local Islamist immigrant community or through Internet sermonizing. Then, out his own sense of failure or unhappiness in the West, the failed youth seeks some sort of Islamist transcendence in terrorizing the very hosts who had welcomed his parents or himself.

“We are kidding ourselves if we think we yet live in a tolerant, liberal society” — UK Liberal Democrats party leader Tim Farron, who resigned after giving “politically incorrect” answers on homosexual sex and abortion.

Wherever he went, Jeremy Corbyn seemed as if he were a voluntary collaborator with an Iranian regime that executes gays. But Corbyn was never questioned about this affiliation the way the media obsessively questioned Farron.

Muslim supremacists murder gays in Orlando? Instead of being proud of an open society, defending it from Islamic jihadists, and accepting the freedom to be homosexual as a positive difference between the West and Islam, our liberals make it a case for more “inclusion”.

After the recent terror attacks in Britain, The Spectator wrote: “After five centuries, religious war has returned to England”. The reference is to 1535, when Thomas More was executed for his Catholic beliefs. Tim Farron, a British MP and party leader of the Liberal Democrats who, after refusing for several days to state whether he considers homosexual sex a sin, and gave ambiguous answers on abortion, was not brought to the Tower of London for a public execution. However, almost 500 years after More, Farron saw his political career sacrificed on an almost identical ideological altar as More.

Farron resigned his position as party leader with a dramatic speech. The Daily Mail condemned the “liberal fascism” of the “moral pygmies”. The progressive New Statesman headlined its story on Farron’s resignation as the “decline of liberalism”. Farron said: “We are kidding ourselves if we think we yet live in a tolerant, liberal society”.

It does not matter that Farron had, on gay rights, a 90.4% “positive score”, according to the Public Whip. Or that he repeatedly defended the right to abortion. What was intolerable was that Farron could have nourished, in his Christian conscience, even a minimal doubt.

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