RUTHFULLY YOURS

Quite likely you don’t spend a lot of time following the doings of Andrew J. Schofer, a career State Department officer who is currently the Charge d’Affaires at the U.S. Mission to International Organizations in Vienna (UNVIE). Nor was Schofer anywhere high on my radar until this week, when he delivered a statement on North Korea that seemed to me slightly at odds with what Ambassador Nikki Haley was saying at the United Nations in New York. Which sent me to the web site for his legation in Vienna … but before I get ahead of myself on that, here’s a bit more background.

Haley, at a UN press stakeout in New York, following a Security Council meeting this Wednesday on North Korea, said that while the U.S. reevaluates how to handle North Korea, “all options are on the table.” But Haley also went out of her way to imply that the Trump administration is far from eager to accede to pressures, such as those from China, to default to talks or deals with North Korea. Referring to North Korea’s tyrant, Kim Jong Un, Haley told reporters:

I appreciate all of my counterparts wanting to talk about talks and negotiations. We are not dealing with a rational person.

To my mind, Haley may be wrong in her assessment of Kim Jong Un as irrational. We can debate whether Kim is actually a madman incapable of rational calculation, or a wily thug, who in the interest of maintaining his hereditary totalitarian throne has been proving adept, like his forebears, at calibrating what he can get away with in the way of threats, hostage-taking, assassinations, executions, extortion rackets, and nuclear missile projects — all in the interest of consolidating his grip on power and expanding his reach.

But wherever one comes down on the crazy-Kim question, Haley deserves applause for deflecting the pressures to start bargaining with Kim. Deals with North Korea do not work, and will not work while Kim remains in power. The long record of U.S. talks, deals and attempted talks with North Korea is one of humiliation and failure for the U.S., as North Korea’s dynastic Kim regime has repeatedly pocketed any gains, milked every concession, cheated on every agreement, and carried on with its atrocities and its nuclear missile projects.

BERLIN—A 36-year-old man who police said had “apparent psychological problems” injured seven people with an ax Thursday evening at the main train station in the German city of Düsseldorf.

Three of the people were seriously injured, the police said. Police described the suspect, who was detained after he was injured while trying to flee the scene, as a man from the former Yugoslavia who lived in the nearby city of Wuppertal.

A police spokeswoman said the incident wasn’t being considered a terrorist or otherwise ideologically motivated attack. The suspect first attacked at least one passenger aboard a local train at the station and then injured others on the platform and in the station hall, the police said.

“This was someone who didn’t have all his wits about him who ran through the area and indiscriminately injured people,” the spokeswoman said.

She said the man was believed to have originated from Kosovo and that it wasn’t clear how long he had lived in Germany or what his residency status was.

The New York Times reports that a local prosecutor in Denmark has brought a blasphemy charge against a forty-two-year-old man who burned a copy of the Quran in his backyard and posted a video of the act on his Facebook page. The Danish penal code makes blasphemy, defined as “publicly insulting the tenets of faith or worship” of a recognized religious community, a crime punishable by a fine or up to four months’ imprisonment. This prosecution, which the country’s attorney general had to approve, is the first of its kind in decades. The last successful blasphemy prosecution in Denmark occurred in 1946.

This is a truly singular occurrence. Many European countries, including Denmark, have hate-speech laws that prohibit speech that denigrates or threatens persons on the basis of certain characteristics, including religion. (Here in the U.S., courts consistently have ruled hate-speech laws unconstitutional.) But this is not a hate-speech prosecution. The defendant in this case evidently did not insult or threaten Muslims as people. Instead, he publicly insulted Muslim belief, especially Muslim belief in the sanctity of the Quran. And that, according to the prosecutor, merits punishment under Danish law.

The ironies abound. Blasphemy prosecutions are not so unusual in Muslim-majority countries, where they often serve as pretexts for the persecution of Christians and other religious minorities. In fact, this month marks the sixth anniversary of the murder of Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian Pakistani politician who had criticized that country’s blasphemy laws; his murderers called Bhatti “a known blasphemer.” But blasphemy prosecutions are vanishingly rare in the West. In America, the Supreme Court ruled blasphemy laws unconstitutional in 1952. Most European countries have abolished their blasphemy laws; where such laws continue to exist, they are dead letters.

Moreover, Western countries have made opposing blasphemy laws a major international human rights cause. At the U.N. Human Rights Council, America and its European allies have objected strenuously to so-called “Defamation of Religion” resolutions introduced in recent years by Muslim-majority countries, on the ground that such resolutions encourage local blasphemy laws and stifle free expression. Since 2011, American and European diplomats have convinced proponents to accept a compromise resolution, one that condemns discrimination and the incitement of violence against persons on the basis of religion—a resolution protecting believers, rather than beliefs as such.

WHY HAS IRAQ BEEN REMOVED FROM THE TRAVEL BAN? IT IS A HOT BED OF TERRORISM…RSK

At least 26 people have been killed in suicide bomb explosions at a wedding party in a village near the Iraqi city of Tikrit, medical and security sources have told Al Jazeera.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Wednesday’s attack in Hajjaj village, located 20km north of Tikrit.

Security forces cordoned off the area and imposed a wider curfew for fear of more attackers.

A police source told Reuters that two blasts hit the wedding and two more targeted security forces at the scene shortly afterwards. There were ongoing clashes between security forces and fighters in the area, he said.

Iraqi security forces retook Tikrit from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – ISIL, also known as ISIS – in April 2015.

In November, ISIL bomb attacks hit Tikrit, north of the capital, Baghdad, in an apparent diversionary assault as Iraqi forces drove back the armed group’s fighters in their stronghold of Mosul.

JAKARTA (Reuters) – An Indonesian court has jailed three leaders of a group that Islamic clerics had called a deviant religious organization for up to five years for blasphemy, sparking condemnation from human rights groups over the targeting of minorities.

The now disbanded Gafatar hit the headlines after dozens of people, who had been reported missing by relatives, were believed to have joined. Last year, hundreds of members had to be evacuated from their West Kalimantan base after being attacked by residents who opposed their beliefs.

Gafatar was labelled by Indonesia’s Ulema Council a deviant sect and authorities had described its teachings as “dangerous”. People associated with the group say it is a social organization, not religious.

A panel of judges at the East Jakarta court on Tuesday jailed Mahful Muis Tumanurung and Ahmad Mussadeq for five years and Andry Cahya for three years for blasphemy. The men were cleared of treason charges.

A lawyer for the men, Yudhistira, described it as a “malicious prosecution” that had tainted Indonesia’s justice system and said would consider whether to appeal.

Indonesia’s blasphemy laws have come under greater scrutiny since Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, Jakarta’s Christian governor, was put on trial for allegedly insulting the Koran. He has denied wrongdoing but his trial has inflamed religious tensions. Almost all blasphemy cases in recent years have ended in conviction.

Indonesia has the world’s largest population of Muslims, the majority of whom adhere to moderate Sunni beliefs, and it recognizes six religions including Hinduism, Catholicism and Buddhism, but minorities, even within Islam, have faced rising intolerance in recent years.

Since Bensoussan rejected “any idea of destiny or essentialization,” the judges denied any possibility that he could “be accused of having aroused or wished to arouse a feeling of hostility or rejection against a group of people [Muslims]”.

The Islamist CCIF said it would appeal the decision.

It is becoming more and more difficult in France to hide the fact that hate speech and anti-Semitic statements are coming mainly not from non-Muslims, but from French Muslims.

March 7, 2017, the 17th Chamber of the Tribunal Correctionel of Paris acquitted Georges Bensoussan, a Jewish Moroccan-born historian, of any “incitement of racial hatred” (“provocation à la haine raciale”).

On January 25, 2017, all of France’s “anti-racist” organizations — even the Jewish International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA) — joined the Islamist Collective Against Islamophobia (CCIF) in court against Bensoussan. He was prosecuted for remarks he made in October 2015, during a debate on radio station France Culture about anti-Semitism among French Arabs. Benoussan said:

“An Algerian sociologist, Smaïn Laacher, with great courage, just said in a documentary aired on Channel 3: It is a shame to deny this taboo, namely that in the Arab families in France, and everyone knows it but nobody wants to say it, anti-Semitism is sucked with mother’s milk.”

The Islamist CCIF send the quote to the public prosecutor, who opened a case against Bensoussan. The charge was simple: “mother’s milk” was not a metaphor for cultural anti-Semitism transmitted through education, but a genetic and “essentialist” accusation. “Mother’s milk”, they claimed, means: “all Arabs are anti-Semitic” — in other words, that Bensoussan supposedly a racist.

The decision of the court to acquit of Bensoussan is a key moment for freedom of speech in France in general, and for the freedom to speak about Muslim anti-Semitism in France.

Skirting the issue by Roger Franklin

Ah, the joys of living in Melbourne, where the constant quest to cement the City on the Yarra’s reputation as ‘the world’s most liveable city’ invokes an exquisite sensitivity to the needs and yearnings of all our many demographic categories and sub-categories. Hence the new pedestrian ‘walk’ signs featuring the silhouette of a women striding boldly into traffic. Apparently, or so one gathers, legions of baffled ladies have been stranded on the kerb, unable to cross the street because they did not relate to the outline of a male pedestrian that formerly directed their footsteps.

Now that this shockingly sexist presumption has been remedied, what next next? In a word, trouble.

Consider the plight of transsexuals, who have been instructed by the Safe Schools curriculum to explore gender fluidity to the point where it may soon be necessary to re-name tuck shops, lest they be mistaken for centres of guidance in the art of genital obscuratanism. Where are the transsexual traffic signs, eh? No doubt they will be introduced in the near future, as the quest for social justice is a never-ending crusade.

And Presbyterians, what of their cultural needs? Surely we could adopt signs urging pedestrians to walk but never dance.

On Southbank, where the local ABC office makes its home, we will need to introduce walk signs that are not green but red. At the corner of Collins and Spencer streets, where the un-subbed Age is headquartered, the signs will need to say ‘WLAK’.

Clearly, the expense of meeting the needs and preferences of pedestrians of all varieties will be a costly exercise, so what to do?

Here is a modest proposal that advocates of multiculturalism, feminists and tokenists of all stripes are bound to endorse, as it will further encourage the cultural enrichment on which they are so keen. Atop this post is a pedestrian-crossing sign from Qatar that would be perfect for Melbourne.

Muslims will recognise one of their own and be happy. Women will construe the long robe as a dress and be no less satisfied. The figure’s short hair will please lesbians of the butch variety and, for that matter, short-back-and-sides crossdressers. What we will have is a simple, cost-effective palliative for the grievances of one and all.

ISIS Warns of ‘Lack of Manliness’ in Marriage in Relationship Advice Column By Bridget Johnson
https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2017/03/08/isis-warns-of-lack-of-manliness-in-marriage-in-relationship-advice-column/

The latest issue of ISIS’ Rumiyah magazine, which in the past has included how-to articles on terror tactics and calls to attack Western sites, wades into relationship advice with a new article warning husbands and wives against talking about their marriage behind their spouse’s back.

“Some spouses – be they men or women – are not careful when it comes to exposing their homes to gossip and idle talk. We often find husbands talking about the problems that happen between them and their wives in both private and public gatherings, and also find that wives do so as well. Each of them might mention the other, in the latter’s absence, with displeasing terms,” states the article titled “The Flesh of Your Spouse Is Poisonous.”

“Backbiting is a disease of the tongue that only incurs ruin and loss,” argues the terror group, adding that neither spouse “is allowed to backbite the other – even when one is right concerning his claims.”

The ISIS advice heaps particular scorn upon women backbiting “their husband and their co-wife” and wistfully noted “if some of them were to only limit themselves to listening!”

“When one woman complains against her husband, some of her friends react with incitement and provocation. Worse still, some women even guide their sister to the court and explain the procedure for divorce,” the terror group continued.

“…The same applies regarding one’s co-wife. Many women do not refrain from speaking ill of their co-wives. Instead, among them is she who would go as far as to insult her co-wife and curse her in her absence due to excessive jealousy. This happens during a meeting of women or in the presence of the husband, who often has no clue as to what he can do! Should he fight off the hostility of this sharp-tongued woman against himself or against his absent wife? Indeed, Allah’s help must be sought!”