RUTHFULLY YOURS

The “religious-freedom” plea unwittingly exposes the false claims made by prominent Muslims — such as Iranian-American religion scholar/TV host Reza Aslan and Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, who have insisted that female genital mutilation (FGM) is “not an Islamic practice.”

According to National Health Service statistics, at least one girl each hour is subjected to this excruciating procedure in the United Kingdom alone — and this is nearly 30 years after it was outlawed there.

FGM is no less appalling a crime than rape or slavery, yet self-described feminists in the West — including Muslims such as Linda Sarsour and non-Muslim activists on a crusade against “Islamophobia” — are either silent when it comes to barbaric practices or deny their connection to Islam. Does she also support slavery, another practice supported by Islam?

Attorneys for the defense of two Michigan doctors from India, and one of their wives, who were indicted by a grand jury on April 22 and charged with mutilating the genitals of two seven-year-old girls, intend to put forth a religious-freedom argument on behalf of their Muslim clients.

The defendants are members of Dawoodi Bohra, an Islamic sect based in their home country. In the federal case, the first of its kind since female genital mutilation (FGM) was banned in 1996, the defense team is claiming that the practice is a religious ritual and therefore should be protected by U.S. law.

Their plea unwittingly exposes the false claims made by prominent Muslims — such as Iranian-American religion scholar/TV host Reza Aslan and Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, who have insisted that FGM is “not an Islamic practice.”

Female genital mutilation, also known as female circumcision, is the cutting or removal of the clitoris and/or the labia, as a way of eliminating a girl’s sexual desire and pleasure, to guarantee that she be a virgin before marriage and remain faithful to her husband afterwards. According to the World Health Organization:

FGM has no health benefits, and it harms girls and women in many ways. It involves removing and damaging healthy and normal female genital tissue, and interferes with the natural functions of girls’ and women’s bodies. Generally speaking, risks increase with increasing severity of the procedure.

The family of a brave teen who tackled a suicide bomber who was trying to enter his school is imploring the Pakistani government for protection as terrorists have warned them they are targets.

The kin of Pakistani teenager Aitzaz Hassan called the 15-year-old “pehlwan” — or wrestler — because of his heavy-set frame. On Jan. 6, 2014, Aitzaz, who had talked about becoming a soldier one day, used his might to keep a suicide bomber from blowing up his classmates.

Aitzaz was standing outside his government school in the northwestern district of Hangu when the terrorist, claimed by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a group with ties to al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), tried to enter the gates and reach the morning assembly.

The teen quickly tackled the bomber, preventing him from entering the school and reaching some 1,000 students inside. Aitzaz died later at a hospital from injuries suffered in the bomb blast.

Aitzaz’s father, Mujahid Ali Bangash, was working in the United Arab Emirates at the time. He told Agence France-Presse he was “happy that my son has become a martyr by sacrificing his life for a noble cause.”

“Aitzaz has made us proud by valiantly intercepting the bomber and saving the lives of hundreds of his fellow students,” he said.

The teen was posthumously awarded the country’s Sitara-e-Shujaat, or Star of Bravery. The family has been lobbying to make Jan. 6 Aitzaz Day in Pakistan, so all will remember his ultimate sacrifice to stop terrorism.

This April, the family received a threat from Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan: “Aitzaz Hasan is not a hero nor a martyr,” the letter said. “If Aitzaz’s brother Mujtaba does not stop meeting media and officials of government institutions, he will be responsible for any loss.”

The TTP shot Malala Yousafzai, a teen advocate for girls’ education, in the head in an Oct. 9, 2012, assassination attempt. She survived and went on to become the youngest Nobel Peace Prize recipient in history.

Aitzaz’s brother Mujtaba went to local authorities shortly after receiving the threat to ask for government protection for the Hasan family. According to Pakistan’s The Nation, authorities are still mulling over the request.

“Despite my plea to the relevant security institutions informing them of the threat, I have not yet received a reply from any of them,” Mujtaba said. “Right now my family only has one guard for protection, provided by the district administration. It is a request to the authorities to give us the required security. My family is going through trauma and need their support.”

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2017/06/16/jihadist-arrests-in-eu-doubled-last-year-rising-for-third-year-in-a-row/

A new Europol report today on terrorism in eight European Union member states finds that jihadist arrests doubled in 2016, rising for the third year in a row: SEE AT SITE

Among the many leaders who shaped modern Europe, few have been as consequential as Helmut Kohl, who died Friday at age 87. He saw his country through the death of the Cold War and the birth of a reunited Germany at the center of a more deeply integrated European Union.

Born in 1930, Kohl came of age amid the furies of a nihilistic German nationalism and then amid the wreckage of its defeat. He was compelled to join the Hitler Youth, as were all boys in that era, but was part of the first generation of Germany’s postwar leaders too young to have fought in the conflict. His parents instilled in him a devout Catholicism that shaped his later political outlook.

He entered politics in the Christian Democratic Union, which with its Bavarian sister party the CSU became Germany’s main center-right party. He rose to the Chancellorship of West Germany in 1982, a position he would hold for a postwar record of 16 years.

He took power after years of Social-Democratic Ostpolitik, or engagement with East Germany, and when the anticommunism of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II still faced considerable skepticism among putative foreign-policy experts. One of Kohl’s early contributions was to defend plans to deploy Pershing II missiles in West Germany against fierce protests across Europe.

Kohl also built on the work of his predecessors in reconciling Germany with the rest of Europe. His friendship with French President François Mitterrand was legendary, and that proved crucial in persuading other European leaders to accept a reunified Germany after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

That reunification—and the creation of the euro, which Kohl accepted as its price—remains controversial. Economists are right that the euro and many economic-policy decisions governing reunification created challenges that still dog the EU. Kohl was right that peaceful German integration was worth the price.

Europe’s first tasks after 1989 were political, not economic: to welcome the formerly subjugated people of Eastern Europe back into Western civilization, and to find a way for Germany to be a nation again without being a threat. Kohl, driven by his commitment to European unity, aided both projects with his policy of rapid reunification and the euro. The result was a Continent that weathered the collapse of a malign neighboring superpower while remaining at peace with itself.

Historians will remember that achievement more than the commonplace political scandals that engulfed Kohl later in his long career. Rarely does a leader change his nation as dramatically for the better as Helmut Kohl did.

At the moment, the bar for taking extremists out of circulation is set ridiculously high. People known for their own extremism that reaches pre-terrorist levels should not be walking the streets when they have expressed support for Islamic State (ISIS) or tried to head to Syria or called for the destruction of Britain and other democracies or allied themselves to people already in prison. Their demand for free speech or freedom of belief must never be elevated above the rights of citizens to live safely in their own towns and cities. It is essential for parliament to lower the bar.

Is this to be the political landscape for the future, where groups of people demanding death and destruction are given the freedom of the streets whilst those wishing to hold a peaceful celebration are prevented from doing so?

To see extremist Islam as a “perversion” of Islam misses an important point. The politically correct insistence that radical versions of Islam somehow pervert an essentially peaceful and tolerant faith forces policy-makers and legislators, church leaders, rabbis, interfaith workers and the public at large to leave to one side an important reality. Flatly, Islam in its original and classic forms has everything to do with today’s radicals and the violence they commit. The Qur’an is explicit in its hatred for pagans, Jews and Christians. It calls for the fighting of holy war (jihad) to conquer the non-Muslim world, subdue it, and gradually bring it into the fold of Islam. Islam has been at war with Europe since the seventh century.

On the Sunday morning after the terrorist attacks in London the night of June 3, British Prime Minister Theresa May addressed the nation in a powerful speech. It deserves to be read in full, but several points stand out and call for a response.

We cannot and must not pretend that things can continue as they are. Things need to change and they need to change in four important ways.

First, while the recent attacks are not connected by common networks, they are connected in one important sense. They are bound together by the single evil ideology of Islamist extremism that preaches hatred, sows division and promotes sectarianism.

It is an ideology that claims our Western values of freedom, democracy and human rights are incompatible with the religion of Islam.

Lower down, she enhances that by saying:

Second, we cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed. Yet that is precisely what the internet, and the big companies that provide internet-based services provide.

No one who has watched the endless stream of radical Muslim preachers who appear on YouTube or who post extremist, anti-Western, anti-democratic, or anti-Semitic opinions on Facebook would object to May’s stricture. But given earlier attempts to rein in the providers of so many internet spaces in a demand for better scrutiny and the removal of radicalizing material from their sites, we must remain pessimistic about how far May or any other Western leader can bring effective pressure to bear. Without strong financial disincentives, these rulers of the internet will pay little heed to the concerns of the wider public and our security services.

“These are not our values. These are toxins. If you wish to live among civilised folk, be one of us. If not, we will help you to leave. It is that simple, or should be.”

Those who fled the Borough Market massacre with hands on heads were victims of our culture’s inherent decency and respect for laws and tolerance –prisoners, if you will, of an invasive strategy that exploits the oxymoronic commandment that we, as a society, must tolerate the intolerant.

It was a perfect summer Saturday, as far as London’s notoriously fickle weather goes – sunny, warm, even balmy if you wish to stretch the definition. Seldom spoiled by Nature’s generosity, relaxed Londoners took to the parks, the markets and open-air bars in their tens of thousands. The city’s heart was on display that day, generously opened to any and all wishing to enjoy it. Tourists and locals, young and old, men, women and children were everywhere, coming and going amid centuries of history. I was among them, as it happens, taking a drink with friends in a wine cellar that has been doing business since the Guy Fawkes trial, admiring the replica of Francis Drake’s Golden Hind in its ferocious livery of black and gold, plus the changing of Her Majesty’s guard, of course, and stopping in at Churchill’s bunker to be reminded of Britain’s magnificent obstinacy. There are not enough hours in a tourist’s day to enjoy all of London. Perhaps not even those who call this city their home can ever have enough time to fully appreciate the city on the Thames.

But please, forgive me as I cut short the reverie, for I write not a tourist brochure but an accounting of envy and hatred. I write, in other words, of Islamic killers’ implacable determination to destroy everything we love, to destroy our freedom and our children’s futures. None of us has a future in their ideal world.

My wife and I, our son and his fiancée just happened to have passed through Borough Market on that most recent of terrible days. That day — Saturday, June 3, 2017 — saw three murderers kill at random, stabbing passersby as they strolled or lingered to enjoy a beer of coffee, taking in the sights, smells and bonhomie that blossom when people are free of fear and can savour the fruits of liberty and prosperity. Those who died weren’t combatants in any political quarrel, not that they understood as much, at any rate. All were unarmed and unable to protect themselves, other than with plastic chairs and pint-handled beer glasses.

We four were never in immediate danger, and for that I must thank a quirk of fate and timing. Had we stayed at the market just a bit longer we would have been in the thick of it. Luckily, feeling the effects of a jet lag, we decided to call it a day and get an early sleep.

There was no sleep, though, not that night as we watched the TV in our Kensington hotel. Dumbfounded, we recognized the very places in Borough Market we had left not an hour before. We saw people, obviously terrified, walking fast and trying hard not to run. They held their hands atop their heads, as instructed by the armed police, looking for all the wold like newly captured prisoners of war. They were demonstrating for all to see that they were helpless and unarmed, no threat to anyone, least of all those whose goal it was to kill them.

We saw the faces of ordinary people contorted by fear. They came to London from all over the world, as we did, to enjoy the freedom of travel and were suddenly caught in the murderous self-deceit of suicidal losers. Their killers were manipulated by Koran-quoting puppeteers, those who told them it was a religious observation to spill blood by way of revenge for non-existent grievances, to kill in the name of the long-dead wretch who married a mere child. This desert warlord cheated those who believed him to be a conduit of Divine revelation, which ordained that all who did not share his views must die or, short of that, pay protection in order to keep themselves alive, their women safe and children not taken into slavery. This illiterate, rapacious warlord, the London Market killers believed, was the perfect man

We watched the scared humans who did not know what to do, nor how to protect themselves and their loved ones. We watched what was the second horrific assault on civilisation in as many weeks. We saw fear and confusion, the submission of the free to the violently deluded.

We watched the head of Special Branch declare the killers were exterminated within the eight minutes of the first call for help. To my eyes the policeman appeared to be taking pride in such a quick and effective response. Really? Eight minutes? Effective? I beg to differ.

Eight minutes was all it took to kill seven people and leave 48 grievously wounded. What was he proud of? That it took eight minutes to kill three specimens of animated scum? Can we really call it a quick response? In terms of action and reaction, of covering a specified distance, of cocking weapons and squeezing triggers, yes, I suppose you might say it was speedy. But it was no “quick response” to the long-festering and malignant tumour of radical Islam’s war on freedom and the UK’s fading, former way of life? There was no comfort in that policeman’s words.

China’s efforts to separate the U.S. from its Taiwanese ally is often seen as China’s leaders’ bid to consolidate power. In reality, it’s the winds of war.

There are currently three communiques that have guided U.S.-China relations for the last 45 years. These joint statements by the U.S. and Chinese governments were signed in 1972, 1979, and 1982. Among other things, the second communique states that, “Neither should seek hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region or in any other region of the world”.

China has recently been attempting to have the U.S. sign onto a Fourth Communique under which the U.S. would no longer consider Taiwan as an ally or deal with it in any military or diplomatic terms. In effect, the U.S. would peacefully decline and leave the Western Pacific to China. The White House rejected it prior to the meeting of the U.S. and Chinese presidents on April 6-7 at Mar-a-Lago. It was raised again by Henry Kissinger, now in the pay of the Chinese government, at his meeting with President Trump on May 10.

It has been said that President Xi wants the Fourth Communique to crown his consolidation of power at the national congress of Communist Party of China in autumn this year. But he is likely indifferent. If the U.S. could be talked into abandoning the Western Pacific and all its allies in Asia, that would be a bonus. It is more likely that he is making a casus belli for the war that he wants and thus head off intra-party criticism for military adventurism with its attendant horrors. China expects to win a short, sharp, glorious war.

China, the U.S., Japan and Vietnam are all expecting war. China may have claimed all of the South China Sea but Vietnam still has 17 island bases there. These are a major long-term embarrassment to China. Vietnam will not give them up voluntarily so China will attempt to remove them by force – thus the current buildup of China’s amphibious warfare capability. China would also attack Vietnam along their land border to put maximum pressure on Hanoi.

Satellite imagery suggests preparations are being made to that end. For example at 22° 24’ N, 106° 42’ E, there are 12 large warehouses across the road from an army base that is six miles from the border with Vietnam. We can tell it’s an army base because it has a running track. China’s three major bases in the South China Sea and all have running tracks and 24 hardened shelters for fighter aircraft. The warehouses have red roofs when almost all the industrial buildings in the region have blue roofs, suggesting a central directive for their construction. The purpose of the warehouses would be to hide an armored force buildup prior to the invasion of Vietnam.

The signs are mounting that the Philippines is now a primary target for Islamic State.

The southern reaches of the mostly Roman Catholic country have long been home to Muslim insurgents seeking to carve out an independent state. Until now, counterterrorism officials and experts have largely viewed local declarations of loyalty to Islamic State founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as little more than pleas for attention. That is changing.

One of the newest insurgent groups shocked the country three weeks ago by marching into Marawi City and waving black Islamic State flags; they are still holding around 20% of the town along with hundreds of hostages. The standoff with the Philippine military so far has claimed the lives of at least 58 security forces, nearly 200 rebels, and dozens of civilians.

Since the May 23 attack, Islamic State has taken a stronger interest in the Philippines, profiling some of the militants in its propaganda magazine Rumiyah and falsely claiming responsibility for the burning of a Manila casino that left 37 people dead; police say it was in fact a botched robbery by a heavily indebted gambler.

On Sunday, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said “it appears that al-Baghdadi himself, the leader of ISIS, has specifically ordered terrorist activities here in the Philippines.” Mr. Duterte didn’t say how he knew about Mr. Baghdadi’s instructions.

Islamic State’s spokesman, in an audio recording circulated on Tuesday, appeared to single out the Philippines for further attacks and praised the assault on Marawi.

The battle for Marawi is being waged by one of the region’s most powerful militias, and its aftermath could determine whether Islamic State can lay down a marker in the Philippines.

Some intelligence officials now worry that the Philippines’ growing profile in jihadist circles could bring more foreign fighters to its shores as Islamic State loses ground in Syria and Iraq. Amid the losses in the Middle East, Islamic State has said it was behind an array of attacks around the world, in a bid to sustain its power.

Governments across Southeast Asia and Australia already are watching the Philippines with concern as militants from Indonesia, Malaysia, Yemen and Saudi Arabia join the fight. The U.S. is getting involved: U.S. Special Operations Forces are providing support for the Philippine military in Marawi. CONTINUE AT SITE

It’s Ramadan, and Beijing is again restricting the peaceful practice of Islam in its western territory of Xinjiang. This year government employees are required to ensure that friends and family aren’t fasting or otherwise observing the Muslim holy month. Under the “Together in Five Things” campaign, cadres are even living in the homes of the Uighur minority, according to the World Uyghur Congress.

This escalation may be due to the arrival of Chen Quanguo, who took over as Xinjiang’s Communist Party secretary in August after running Tibet for five years. He has introduced the system of “grid-style social management” he pioneered in Tibet that allows the government to closely monitor households.

According to state media, Xinjiang’s security budget increased 19.3% in 2016 to more than $4.4 billion, and 30,000 new officers were hired. In February Mr. Chen described security as “grim” and urged the People’s Armed Police to “bury the corpses of terrorists and terror gangs in the vast sea of the people’s war.” So much for winning hearts and minds.

New “Regulations on Anti-Extremism” that came into effect in April outlawed veils or “abnormal” beards. Parents can’t give children “overly religious” names such as Muhammad or encourage them to follow the Muslim faith. All Xinjiang residents were forced to turn in their passports late last year and must give a DNA sample when they apply for a new one.

Other measures include antiterror drills, shows of force by the security services and the installation of satellite tracking devices in cars. Mandatory activities for students are deliberately scheduled on Fridays to prevent them from attending mosque services, and rewards are offered for reporting men who wear a beard or women who wear a veil.

Control over the Uighur population goes far beyond religion. The use of their native language is discouraged in schools, and economic opportunities are limited. The best jobs go to Han Chinese settlers, who are given incentives to move to Xinjiang. Peaceful dissent is not tolerated. The Uighurs’ most articulate spokesman, Minzu University Professor Ilham Tohti, was sentenced to life in prison in 2014 for promoting separatism.

Sporadic attacks by Uighurs on Han Chinese have continued since riots in the capital Urumqi killed almost 200 people in 2009. In the city of Hotan, three men ran amok with knives and killed five people in February after a family was punished for praying at home. Most attacks appear to be spontaneous and poorly planned, despite Beijing’s claims that overseas terrorist groups are directing the violence.

Yet China’s fears of a Uighur terrorist movement may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Uighurs flee the country and some become radicalized, Islamic State issued a video in February in which a Uighur fighter threatened China with “rivers of blood.” The government’s anti-Islamic policies are also causing anger among Muslim nations such as Indonesia.

Chinese officials continue to respond to every outbreak of violence in Xinjiang with greater repression. By restricting even the peaceful practice of Islam by historically moderate Uighurs, Beijing is traveling a dangerous path that threatens domestic stability.