RUTHFULLY YOURS

LONDON—The third terror attack in Britain in as many months laid bare a growing challenge to Europe’s police and intelligence agencies and prompted Prime Minister Theresa May to say tolerance of Islamist extremism in the country had gone too far.

The attack, which killed seven people and was claimed by Islamic State, interrupted the campaigning for national elections for a second time and shook confidence in the country’s counterterrorism strategy, which Mrs. May said would be reviewed.

“Since the emergence of the threat from Islamist-inspired terrorism, our country has made significant progress in disrupting plots and protecting the public. But it is time to say enough is enough,” Mrs. May said on Sunday.

Mrs. May warned that more must be done to stop people from becoming radicalized, pointing out that attackers have been inspired by those that have come before, often using unsophisticated means.

She added that in the U.K. there is “too much tolerance” of extremism and more must be done to stamp it out, saying the government will consider lengthier prison sentences for extremist-related offenses.

She took aim at internet companies for what she said was allowing extremism—a “perversion” of the Islamic faith—to flourish online.

“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,” Mrs. May said.

With voting set for Thursday, campaigning will resume on Monday, with security issues likely to take center stage. For Mrs. May, the issue is a double-edged sword: As a former Home Secretary from 2010 to 2016, she knows the issue inside out. But any lapses that emerge from investigations of possible failings by the police or security services could also be laid at her door.

Three knife-wielding men carried out the deadly rampage in the capital Saturday night, plowing a rented white van into pedestrians on London Bridge and then indiscriminately stabbing people in a lively area of pubs and restaurants nearby. In addition to those killed, dozens were injured, with 21 of them in critical condition on Sunday.

Police ended the violence by shooting and killing the assailants just eight minutes after they received the first reports of the bridge incident.

Islamic State on Sunday said on its official Amaq news agency that a “covert unit” had carried out the attack.

Police haven’t released the identities of the three men. At least one of the men was born in Pakistan, a Western security official said. It wasn’t clear when the man came to Britain or whether he had acquired British citizenship. CONTINUE AT SITE

Saturday’s terror attack in the heart of London, Britain’s third murderous assault in 72 days, poses a difficult choice for free societies: Do more to contain this internal Islamist insurgency now, or risk a political backlash that will result in even more draconian limits on civil liberties.

No group had taken responsibility by midday Sunday, but the operation that killed seven and wounded 48 bore the hallmarks of recent jihadist atrocities. The London Bridge area and nearby Borough Market are packed with bars and restaurants popular with tourists and young people. The three alleged perpetrators rammed a van into pedestrians, then began stabbing people before police shot them.

Prime Minister Theresa May said Saturday’s attack wasn’t directly linked to the suicide bombing committed by Salman Abedi at a pop concert in Manchester last month. But the three attacks in succession show why governments must target the threat at its roots, in self-isolating Muslim communities that reject mainstream values and create homegrown or Islamic State-inspired radicals like Abedi.

On this front, Mrs. May is well ahead of many of her European counterparts. The Prime Minister in a speech Sunday morning outlined a new counterterror strategy that puts ideology and Muslim integration at the forefront. The trio of recent attacks in Britain, she said, were “bound together by the single evil ideology of Islamist extremism.”

Mrs. May went on to call for a battle of ideas against Islamism and tough love for British Muslims who have failed to confront radicals in their mosques and community centers. Said the Prime Minister: “We need to live our lives not in a series of separated, segregated communities, but as one truly United Kingdom.”

Mrs. May suggested this would involve “difficult and often embarrassing conversations” with the Muslim community, and she is right. This has to include an end to political coddling of so-called soft Islamist groups and imams who treat candor about the Islamist threat as anti-Muslim or refuse to identify radicals in their midst.

The president of Venezuela, whose government shoots protesters in the street, recently thanked the international community for its “universal vote of confidence” in that country’s commitment to human rights.

The Cuban deputy foreign minister, whose government imprisons thousands of political opponents, once said Cuba has historic prestige “in the promotion and protection of all human rights.”
How can these people get away with saying such things? Because they have been elected to the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose members are — on paper — charged with “upholding the highest standards” of human rights.

Last month, a U.S. Senate subcommittee met to consider whether the United States should remain a part of the council. Expert witnesses shared their viewpoints, not on the question of whether America supports human rights — of course we do, and very strongly. The question was whether the Human Rights Council actually supports human rights or is merely a showcase for dictatorships that use their membership to whitewash brutality.

When the council focuses on human rights instead of politics, it advances important causes. In North Korea, its attention has led to action on human rights abuses. In Syria, it has established a commission on the atrocities of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

All too often, however, the victims of the world’s most egregious human rights violations are ignored by the very organization that is supposed to protect them.

Venezuela is a member of the council despite the systematic destruction of civil society by the government of Nicolás Maduro through arbitrary detention, torture and blatant violations of freedom of the press and expression. Mothers are forced to dig through trash cans to feed their children. This is a crisis that has been 18 years in the making. And yet, not once has the Human Rights Council seen fit to condemn Venezuela.

Cuba’s government strictly controls the media and severely restricts the Cuban people’s access to the Internet. Thousands are arbitrarily detained each year, with some political prisoners serving long sentences. Yet Cuba has never been condemned by the council; it, too, is a member.In 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine and took over Crimea. This illegal occupation resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and injuries, as well as arbitrary detentions. No special meeting of the Human Rights Council was called, and the abuses continue to mount.

The council has been given a great responsibility. It has been charged with using the moral power of universal human rights to be the world’s advocate for the most vulnerable among us. The United Nations must reclaim the legitimacy of this organization.

For all of us, this is an urgent task. Human rights are central to the mission of the United Nations. Not only are they the right thing to promote, they are also the smart thing to promote. In April, I dedicated the U.S. presidency of the U.N. Security Council to making the connection between human rights and peace and security.

Next week, I will travel to Geneva to address the Human Rights Council about the United States’ concerns.

It’s 28 years since the Tiananmen uprising, in which China’s people peacefully took away control of their huge capital from China’s ruling Communist party, and asked for liberty, democracy, justice. And it was 28 years ago today — on June 4, 1989 –that the Communist Party of China took back control, sending in the People’s Liberation Army, with guns, armored personnel carriers and tanks, to retake Tiananmen Square, symbolic heart of the protests. China’s rulers followed up, nationwide, with arrests, executions, imprisonments, surveillance and censorship that continues to this day.

During the uprising, demonstrators propped a big poster against the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. In Chinese characters, it said: “1989, a year China will remember.”

I was there, reporting in Beijing for The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, and in a story I filed for the May 22 Asian edition, on “The Creed at Tiananmen Square,” the message on that poster figured in the lead. One of my editors, Seth Lipsky — who now runs The New York Sun — added a line that comes to mind today: “What’s happening in China right now is something the world will remember.”

We must remember. It is a matter not only of keeping faith with the heroes of Tiananmen, but with our own creed that liberty is an unalienable right. It is a matter of understanding something vital about the undercurrents in China, something that Beijing’s rulers would prefer we forget.

In the 28 years since June 4, 1989, China’s ruling Communist Party has done everything in its power to obliterate inside China the memory of the Tiananmen uprising. As far as China’s government alludes to it at all, Tiananmen’s haunting cry for freedom is recast as a “disturbance,” caused by a rabble. The lone man who on June 4 stopped a column of tanks has become an inspiring symbol abroad, but in China he has literally disappeared. It is by now routine to find in the news, on each anniversary of the June 4 slaughter in Beijing, articles such as today’s dispatch in the Financial Times, headlined “Support grows in China for 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.” The FT reports:

“The bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square nearly three decades ago saved China from a Russia-style meltdown, according to a strongly held view among the generation that will enjoy unprecedented international clout as it takes up the baton of power in Beijing.

…many in China’s political and economic elite and among the broader middle class believe the country’s recent economic success could never have been achieved if the ruling Communist party had not called in the army 28 years ago to maintain its monopoly on power.”

We in the Free World would do well to ask a basic question: Do the people of China have any real choice but to toe that official line? They live under a ruling party that wields its monopoly on power to stifle, isolate, immiserate and imprison those who pursue democratic dissent. They live under a ruling party that in 1989 demonstrated its willingness to kill China’s own people in the streets. This is a government that today keeps its country’s Nobel Peace laureate, democratic dissident Liu Xiaobo, in jail, and his wife under house arrest.

New York-based Human Rights Watch, in its review of China for 2016, reports:

“Under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, who will remain in power until 2022 and possibly beyond, the outlook for fundamental human rights, including freedom of expression, assembly, association and religion remains dire.”

Washington-based Freedom House, in its 2017 review of China, reports:

“The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has tightened its control over the media, religious groups, and civil society associations in recent years … The state president and CCP leader, Xi Jinping, is consolidating personal power to a degree not seen in China for decades.

Freedom House also notes that China’s ruling party tries to justify its despotic ways by casting Western democracies as the enemy:

Faced with a slowing economy, the leadership continues to cultivate nationalism, including hostile anti-Western rhetoric, as a pillar of legitimacy.”

Naturally, China’s government would like to credit its chokehold on China’s more than 1.3 billion people as a vital element in China’s economic rise. CONTINUE AT SITE

Thanks to dear friend and e-pal Joan S….

https://tapferimnirgendwo.com/2017/06/04/a-public-television-debacle/

The article is about a documentary „Selected and Excluded – Jew Hatred in Europe“ by Joachim Schroeder and Sophie Hafner in German. The article is English translated. A warning to Jews wherever they are. This is a MUST READ. The movie must be brought to US, subtitled and shown, at least, in PBS. Holocaust centers have to acquire the movie for daily showings. Isaac Barr MD For Michigan Forum, Forwarded to 426 contacts.

German public television commissions a documentary film about anti-Semitism, and then refuses to include it in their programming. The reasons are scandalous!

Today I saw the film documentary „Selected and Excluded – Jew Hatred in Europe“ by Joachim Schroeder and Sophie Hafner. Never before have I seen such a comprehensive documentary detailing the roots of current Jew hatred in Europe. It’s scandalous that the public broadcasters ARTE and WDR („West German Broadcasting“) refuse to broadcast the documentary. Their silence is supporting the hatred.

„I am convinced that the Arabs in France would never have been violent towards the Jews, had they not been convinced that it was their duty to show solidarity with their brothers in faith in Palestine. They would never have done this. But they have been told that solidarity is necessary, while some of those in power let it happen by justifying and supporting the attacks.“

Those are the closing words in the documentary „Chosen and Excluded – Jew Hatred in Europe“ by Joachim Schroeder and Sophie Hafner. In the film one can hear demonstrators in Berlin shouting the following epitaphs in public:

„Jew, Jew, coward swine, come out and fight alone.“
„Jews to the gas chambers!“
„Adolf Hitler!“
„Death to the Jews!“

Among other incidents, the following anti-Semitic attacks are dealt with in the documentation:

On January 21, 2006, Ilan Hamimi was abducted in France by a group of Muslim men and tortured to death during a period of three weeks because he was a Jew. While he was still alive they cut off his penis.

On March 19, 2012, three children and one adult were murdered in front of a Jewish school in Toulouse by a self-proclaimed Islamic fighter because they were Jews.

On May 24, 2014, two Israelis and one French woman were shot at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.

On December 3, 2014, a Jewish couple in Paris was brutally attacked. The attackers stormed into their apartment and shouted, „You are Jews, so you must be rich!“ They robbed jewelry and money. They raped the woman in front of her friend. Weeks before, the same perpetrators had beaten a seventy-year-old Jew.

On January 9, 2015, a self-proclaimed fighter of the Islamic state took several hostages at a Jewish supermarket and killed four Jews.

On November 13, 2015, the Bataclan Theater in Paris was the target of an attack whereby ninety people were slaughtered. The theater was not coincidently chosen. For many years the Jewish owners of the Theater had organized charity galas for Israel. The theater was under threat since 2008 and escaped a terrorist attack for the first time in 2011.

After having seen the documentary I am surprised by the reasoning behind the WDR social media team’s refusal to include the documentary in its programming:

„The film had only partially fulfilled the job requirements which were to highlight „anti-Semitism in Europe „. The WDR seconds ARTE’s criticism that the film doesn’t deliver what it was commissioned to cover.“

The latest issue of the Islamic State’s weekly newspaper al-Naba released two days ago warned that another terrorist attack in Britain was “definitely coming.”

Al-Naba, a 16-page color newsletter, is distributed within ISIS territory but is also posted and distributed online via the usual ISIS mediums such as Telegram and social media.

Britain, said an article within the newsletter titled “Blessed Battle of Manchester: A new lesson for tyrants, Crusader States,” thought it “was safe from the wounds of the Mujahideen.”

“Protected by the sea they have long relied on isolating themselves” and thought “their exit from the European Union would save them.”

“A soldier from the Islamic State” in Manchester, the article continued, “has unleashed terror throughout their country, they rushed to spread the army in the cities, mobilizing police and security in the streets for fear of a new attack,” which “is inevitable, God willing.”

ISIS branded British security and vigilance across cities and towns a “costly, exhausting situation.”

ISIS also needled the UK for “their abandonment of John Cantlie,” a British war correspondent who was kidnapped in Syria in 2012 and has been forced to write propaganda pieces and film video segments for his ISIS captors. Cantlie was last seen in December ISIS videos reporting from Mosul.

Though Al-Naba usually focuses on events within ISIS territory, Ohio State terrorist Abdul Razak Ali Artan was featured in a December article calling the first-year student “one of the Mujahideen of the Islamic State” who “attacked a gathering” at the school, causing “serious injuries.”

British authorities are treating tonight’s ramming of pedestrians on London Bridge by a white van speeding at about 50 mph and a stabbing at nearby Borough Market as terrorist incidents.

Last month in Rumiyah magazine, which is published in several languages including English, ISIS published a remedial step-by-step pictorial for lone jihadists on how to use a heavy vehicle to kill, walking would-be terrorists through how to acquire a vehicle and which targets to strike.

“The ideal vehicle,” said ISIS, has a “slightly raised chassis and bumper,” is a “double-wheeled, load-bearing truck” that “large in size, heavy in weight” and is “fast in speed or rate of acceleration.”

The suggestions for ideal targets also illustrated examples. Corresponding to “large outdoor festivals, conventions, celebrations, and parades” was a photo of an LGBT event. As during the Pulse nightclub attack last summer, Ramadan is currently overlapping with LGBT Pride Month. CONTINUE AT SITE

LONDON—Terrorism struck Britain anew on Saturday night as three knife-wielding men led a deadly rampage through the capital, plowing a van into pedestrians on London Bridge and stabbing multiple people nearby, before being shot dead by police.

Seven people were killed and at least 48 were hospitalized, some in critical condition, in what authorities quickly called terrorism—marking the third attack in the U.K. this year. No group claimed responsibility.

Just eight minutes after police responded to reports of the bridge incident, they confronted the attackers in Borough Market—an upscale bar and restaurant zone near the bridge—killing them in a hail of gunfire. That ended what witnesses described as a short but horrific few minutes in which the three men indiscriminately stabbed diners, pedestrians and revelers.

Police believe the three men were the only ones involved, but cautioned the probe was ongoing. London Mayor Sadiq Khan said police will bolster their presence in London on Sunday.

“This is a fast-moving investigation,” London’s Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick said at a press conference, adding that “a very high priority for us is to identify” the attackers.

“We will be seeking to establish whether anyone else was working with, or assisting in any way, or helping in the planning of this attack,” she said.

Britain’s Conservative and Labor parties temporarily suspended campaigning for the nation’s general election on Thursday. Prime Minister Theresa May also called an emergency meeting on Sunday with senior officials. CONTINUE AT SITE

Only when groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir tremble to make themselves known in public for fear of a confident citizenry showering them with virulent and open contempt will Australia finally have grasped that it need pay no more heed to opinion-page scolds and social engineers.

Pierre Manent must rank among our greatest living political philosophers. A professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, a one-time student of Raymond Aron, and a prolific author of books on the theme—more often than not—of what he calls “the political form,” Manent has been aptly described as a “Catholic Straussian,”[1] a designation which points to what must be about the most necessary, intriguing, and promising intellectual synthesis imaginable in our times. In facing the problems of our world—from the ongoing crisis of liberal democracy, to the threat of Islamic nihilism, and the erosion of sovereignty in an age of globalisation—it helps to have reflected on Manent’s presentation of the contemporary significance of the nation-state, in his Democracy without Nations?, or his poetic and rigorous exegesis of political forms more generally, in Metamorphoses of the City.

At first glance, Manent’s willingness to defend and honour the European nation-state in and of itself, as a civilised and liberal political form—he has written that “[t]he nation-state is to modern Europe what the city-state was to ancient Greece”[2]—should place him squarely in the camp of the Right. Yet his latest work, Beyond Radical Secularism, does not conform at all to the template popularised by right-wingers—men like Éric Zemmour, say—who denounce the dilution of French Republican culture in the wake of paramarxian politicking and heavy immigration from the Islamic world. Indeed, there is nothing Napoleonic about Manent; his works are too nuanced to please the Front National. If anything, in its pessimism, Manent’s argument in Beyond Radical Secularism comes closer to the Houellebecqian dilemma facing serious French conservatives who see that, in many cases, they may actually have more in common with traditional-minded Muslim newcomers than with the native-born chauvinists with their loud-mouthed nostalgia and militant secularism. Manent’s is a book of regimes and rapprochement.

Still, it is impossible to ignore the reality that an increasingly violent, menacing series of outbursts, perpetrated by individuals who have settled in France from predominantly Muslim nations, has marred the country’s journey towards a de facto demographic Eurabia in recent times, and Manent is nothing if not clear-eyed as to the nature of the problem confronting his country. In Beyond Radical Secularism, he makes explicit reference to the underlying politico-theological crisis:

The rights of man, as these have come to be understood throughout the course of the history of European nations, will be of little help in bringing Muslims to see their moral practices reasonably from a certain distance; as we now understand them, human rights imply the pure and simple disappearance of Islam as a form of common life. Muslims are too attached to their moral practices and to their religion to give into the temptation to become ‘modern individuals’ by disappearing as Muslims.[3]

Modernity issues its edict to all to give up their archaic attachments and embrace the “neutrality” of modern life. But this edict, as any student of the twentieth-century well knows, can just as often inspire a nihilistic response. Among Muslims, this response has come from that small minority of emasculated men who make a point of growing their beards long, reciting the Qur’an, and mixing explosives. Manent’s response to all this, however, is not to enjoin Islam to adapt, à la Ayaan Hirsi Ali. For if anything, such injunctions merely exhibit a doubling-down on the original error. Exasperated by the politics of fact-value distinctions, Manent bemoans that “when we are asked to adhere to the values of the Republic, nothing is asked of us.”[4] “The result,” in a depoliticised state, “is that everyone likes to proclaim these values, a money that may buy nothing, but at least costs nothing to print.”[5]

These empty “values” are but the common currency of centrism—in both its centre-Left and centre-Right varieties—and have no purchase on the loyalties of a political community. But what sets Manent apart from so many on the contemporary French Right is his adamant refusal to re-write his nation’s recent history or, in light of which, to play the unsuspecting victim. In reflecting upon the influx of North Africans and Middle Easterners, he dares to stress an unwelcome truth:

We did not impose conditions upon their settling here, and so they have not violated them. Having been accepted as equals, they thus have every right to think that they were accepted “as they were.” We cannot reverse this acceptance without breaking the tacit contract that has accompanied immigration over the last forty years.[6]

This is exactly what Western populations, having placidly accepted the political status quo for decades now, do not want to hear. They would prefer it if the vivid demonstrations of the incompatibility of post-Christian liberal democracy with a younger, energetic religious-group, were something utterly unforeseeable and simply perverse. But they are neither. And now the West suffers for it, unsettled and agitated by recent developments—developments which Manent is well-positioned to observe: he began writing his book in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo murders in January 2015, and published just before the bloodbath in November 2015.[7]

An open letter to the new French Interior Minister, Gérard Collomb

Mr. Minister,

A 65-year old Jewish woman, a doctor, is attacked while asleep in her
home and tortured horrifically for more than an hour. She lives in a
modest apartment on Rue Vaucouleurs in Paris’s densely populated 11th
arrondissement. The murderer, who climbed into her apartment via the
balcony, attacks with incredible violence, resulting in about twenty
fractures all over her face and body.

He then throws her, dying, out of the third floor window. During the
entire time, the police, three armed officers present in the building
just outside the apartment door, do nothing. The neighbors (several
dozen) can hear the victim’s yells: they too do nothing. The French
media are alerted. They make no queries and do not report the murder.

Her name was Sarah. Sarah Halimi.

Sarah Halimi (Courtesy)

This horrific scene did not take place in 1942, before or after the
“Rafle du Veld’hiv” that rounded up Jews to be handed to the Nazis,
but rather on the night of April 3rd, 2017, in a tiny apartment close
to the “Bataclan” where an Islamist murdered more than 100 French
people. Cries of “Allahu Akbar” accompanied the scene. The following
Sunday, a silent march took place in the area. Youngsters from the
nearby quarters countered it with yells of “death to the Jews” and “we
own kalachnikovs.”

The Paris public prosecutor immediately cautioned against drawing
conclusions about the nature of the crime until the results of the
enquiry were made public. Who knows? An elderly Jewish lady savagely
slaughtered by a 27-year-old Islamist with many priors (drug
trafficking, assault): this could just be a dispute between neighbors…
Nevermind that the murderer, Kada Taore, from Mali, insulted the
victim on a regular basis, and that she had reported to neighbors how
frightened she was of him. “We are at war,” former Prime Minister
Manuel Valls proclaimed, “so that Muslims will no longer feel ashamed
and Jews will no longer be frightened.” Brilliant.

Mr. Minister, you have just taken up your position in a country where
it is once again possible to murder Jews without eliciting much
concern from our fellow Frenchmen and women. By the way, the men who
were in charge before you, both on the left and the right, preferred
not to look any further than the end of the broom with which they
swept the problem under the carpet. None were up to this challenge.
Will you be? On Sunday May 21, on i24NEWS,Sarah Halimi’s brother,
speaking with extraordinary dignity, said, “I have waited seven weeks
before saying anything. The absolute silence surrounding my sister’s
assassination has become unbearable.”

Islamist groups in Britain are undermining the fight against terrorism by peddling “myths” about the government’s key anti-radicalisation policy, according to the country’s most prominent Muslim lawyer.

Nazir Afzal, a former chief crown prosecutor, warned that an “industry” of Muslim groups was spreading misinformation about the Prevent strategy.

Mr Afzal, who prosecuted the Rochdale sex-grooming gang, also condemned “self-appointed” community leaders whose sole agenda was to present Muslims “as victims and not as those who are potentially becoming radicals”.

He singled out the Islamist-dominated Muslim Council of Britain, saying he was staggered that in the agenda for its annual general meeting last year there was “nothing about radicalisation and nothing about the threat of people going to Syria”.

“We all have a responsibility to stand…

He also took aim at “self-appointed” community leaders whose sole agenda was to present Muslims “as victims and not as those who are potentially becoming radicals,” singling out Britain’s largest Muslim umbrella group — the Islamist dominated Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) as an example.

The 54 year old, who resigned last week as chief executive of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, said he was shocked that the agenda at the group’s annual general meeting last year contained “nothing about radicalisation and nothing about the threat of people going to Syria”.

Among groups Afzal accused of lying about Prevent to discredit the counter-radicalisation programme are Islamist support group Cage, which has been described as a “terrorism advocacy group” by veteran journalist Andrew Gilligan, and Prevent Watch, a “community-based initiative” that supports “communities impacted by Prevent”.

Cage’s outreach director Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who signed a confession admitting to having been an al-Qaeda recruiter, likened Islamic extremists to the Suffragettes at a 2015 event opposing the Prevent programme.

“Sadly, there’s an industry which is trying to undermine Prevent. Some of them don’t like anything that’s state-sponsored and some of them are Islamists”, Afzal said.