RUTHFULLY YOURS

“They are driving us out of the Middle East,” declared Pope Francis on returning from Turkey.

“[I]t would be beautiful if all Islamic leaders, whether they are political, religious or academic leaders, would speak out clearly and condemn this because this would help the majority of Muslim people.” — Pope Francis, counseling Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

While this welcoming stance is in keeping with the fundamental beliefs of the Catholic faith, the Pope as the “Good Shepherd” has an obligation to protect his flock from the militants among the refugees.

Within the Catholic Church, there also exists a sub-dominant counter-melody that warns about Islamic hostility to the values of Judeo-Christian civilization.

Cardinal Sarah targets what he refers to as “Islam’s pseudo-family values which legitimize polygamy, female subservience, sexual slavery, and child marriage.”

At some point, the Catholic Church might raise the issue of persecution of Christian minorities in Muslim-majority countries at international fora such as the United Nations. The Church also could publicly ask Muslims of good will to express their solidarity with the persecuted and request international organizations to intervene to protect Christians.

Given the centuries of hostility between Christendom and dar-al-Islam (the World of Islam), the Vatican’s caution may be understandable, but is ill-advised and no longer tenable.

Perhaps, in the light of the harm dhimmitude can do to both civic life and faith, the Catholic Church might re-assess its stance toward Islam from one of friendly engagement to cautionary disengagement. As radical jihadists continue to martyr Christians throughout the world, such a re-evaluation of Islam by the Vatican seems appropriate.

These hate crimes against Christians are occurring against a backdrop of fifteen centuries of hostile, relations between Christianity and Islam — from the Islamic takeover of Persia, the great Christian Byzantine Empire in Turkey, North Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Greece and Southern Spain.

As Catholics comprise more than half of the globe’s two billion Christians, a sober reassessment of Islam by Rome could be of great import and attract more people to Christianity when, as with Brexit, they see that the Church is aligned with a reality they see every day with their eyes.

A decision by the Vatican to distance itself from trying to please Muslims, many of whom would presumably only be pleased by converting Christians to Islam, might even evolve into a more realistic understanding of the Islamic faith by the Catholic hierarchy. If the Church, on the other hand, is hoping to convert Muslims to Christianity, then we have two proselytizing religions, each trying to convert the other, but by different means.

From the perspective of a poor migrant, the cash Sweden gives to all who come seems a lot of money, without working a single day to get it. This makes Sweden a paradise for the migrants of the world who do not want to work. The Swedish taxpayer pays for this party.

Recently, the city of Malmö bought 268 apartments, so newly arrived migrants would have a roof over their head. But at the same time, Swedish citizens in Malmö have to wait more than three years in line to rent an apartment.

While Swedish taxpayers are forced to fund all these benefits for migrants, the migrants do not have to adapt to the Swedish way of living.

In 2015, the proportion of rapes where the police actually found the suspect was 14%. In 86% of the rapes, the rapist got away.

It needs to become clear that the responsibility for becoming integrated into Swedish society rests entirely on the newly-arrived migrants. Migrants who do not receive a residence permit must go home or somewhere else.

In 2016, Sweden received 28,939 asylum seekers. Sweden is a predominantly Christian country in northern Europe, and yet most asylum seekers to Sweden came from three Muslim countries in the Middle East: Syria (5,459), Afghanistan (2,969) and Iraq (2,758). Why is it that people from these three Muslim countries choose to cross Europe to come to Sweden? What is it that Sweden offers that attracts people from the other side of the world?

It is not the major metropolises in Sweden that attract these people. 56% of Sweden’s land area is covered by forest. Besides the Swedish capital Stockholm, there is no Swedish city with more than 1 million inhabitants. Sweden’s average annual temperature is around 3°C (37.4°F), so it is not the weather that attracts tens of thousands of people from Muslim countries to Sweden.

What Sweden provides is economic and social benefits for all who come. Sweden is a country where the state pays newly-arrived migrants to encourage them to enter the community and seek jobs. If you receive a residence permit as a refugee, quota refugee or person with “subsidiary protection,” you get up to $35 (308 SEK) a day, five days a week, if you participate in a so-called “establishment plan.” So, the newly arrived migrant does not even have to work to get this money; the only thing he or she needs to do is to accept the help that the Public Employment Service provides. The newly-arrived migrant receives an “establishment allowance” (etableringsersättning) during his first two years in Sweden. After two years, the migrant is still entitled to all the benefits of the Swedish welfare state.

The migrants who receive this kind of establishment allowance can also get a supplementary establishment allowance (etableringstillägg) if they have children. They will get $91 a month (800 SEK) for each child under the age of 11, and $170 (1500 SEK) for each child who has reached the age of 11. A newly-arrived immigrant can get this supplementary establishment allowance for three children at most. If a newly-arrived immigrant has more than three children, then only the three oldest children count. The newly arrived immigrant can receive a maximum of $509 dollars (4500 SEK) a month through this supplementary establishment allowance.

MUNICH—Vice President Mike Pence said the U.S. would be unwavering in its commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but demanded that Europe step up its military spending, marking one of the Trump administration’s most full-throated efforts yet to reassure nervous partners.

Mr. Pence, speaking at the Munich Security Conference to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and scores of other leaders and senior officials from around the world, said he was bringing to Europe a message from President Donald Trump about the importance of the trans-Atlantic bond. He promised Europe that the U.S. would be “your greatest ally.”

“We will stand with Europe,” Mr. Pence said.

It was the broadest speech on foreign policy that a member of the Trump administration has delivered abroad. Mr. Pence also promised the U.S. would continue to “hold Russia accountable” for its military intervention in Ukraine. But Mr. Pence didn’t address many of European allies’ broader concerns, particularly on how the new administration views the European Union.

Ms. Merkel, speaking before him, refrained from criticizing Mr. Trump directly but delivered a defense of multilateral institutions, including NATO, the United Nations and the EU. She said Germany would continue increasing its military spending until it reaches 2% of gross domestic product, as NATO calls for. But she cautioned against believing that “security is only ensured by raising one’s defense spending.”

“Security is ensured just as much by increasing one’s development spending,” Ms. Merkel said, and promised Germany would increase its development budget, as well.

Mr. Pence promised the U.S. would continue to support its contribution to the NATO deterrent force in Poland and the Baltic states. And he said the Trump administration would boost its military spending to strengthen its forces, and better protect NATO allies.

“Peace only comes through strength,” Mr. Pence said. “President Trump believes we must be strong in our military might.”

But he was careful to add that Mr. Trump was clear that the alliance would be weakened if European allies didn’t do their part by increasing spending.

Mr. Pence speech is part of a barrage of speeches by top administration officials aimed at reassuring allies, rattled by Mr. Trump’s comments that NATO was obsolete.

In his remarks, Mr. Pence spoke of the shared values of Europe and the U.S. and the common commitment to fighting global terrorism following the Sept. 11 attacks. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hate for Israel has become a real obsession in Scandinavia, which revived the glorious partnership between the liberal “useful idiots” — the ones concerned about equality and minorities — and the Islamists, the ones concerned about submission and killing “infidels”.

Despite the fact that Jews in Norway are only 0.003 percent of the total population, Oslo is now world’s capital of European anti-Semitism. Norwegian newspapers are full of classic anti-Semitic tropes.

A festival in Oslo also rejected a documentary, “The Other Dreamers,” about the lives of disabled children, simply because it was Israeli. “We support the academic and cultural boycott of Israel,” wrote Ketil Magnussen, the founder of the festival.

The same racism exists in Sweden. Dagens Nyheter, the most sophisticated Swedish newspaper, published a violently anti-Semitic op-ed entitled, “It is allowed to hate the Jews”.

Does Sweden’s Foreign Minister Margot Wallström really mean that to defeat Islamic aggression, Israel must surrender? The Palestinians’ situation is indeed desperate, but as they have had full autonomy for decades, their desperate situation is caused by their own corrupt leaders who appear deliberately to keep their people in misery try to blame it on Israel, in the same way that people maim children to make them “better” beggars.

The Nazi daily Der Stürmer could not have drawn it better.

On January 12, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten published an article about Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and his senior adviser: “The Jew Kushner reportedly pushed for David M. Friedman as the new ambassador to Israel”, Aftenposten wrote. The newspaper had later to apologize for calling Kushner “the Jew”.

A few weeks earlier, the city council of Trondheim, Norway’s third-largest city, passed a motion calling on its residents to boycott Israeli goods — a city aspiring to be “Israel-free”. Then it was the turn of another Norwegian city, Tromso, population 72,000, whose city council approved a similar motion. More than 40% of Norwegians are already boycotting Israeli products or are in favor of doing so, according to a poll.

What hell is happening in Scandinavia, whose countries, Norway and Sweden, are bastions of political correctness, champions of multiculturalism and, according to the Global Peace Index, the most “peaceful” countries in the world? “The most successful society the world has ever known”, however, as The Guardian labelled Sweden, has a dark side: Israel-slandering and anti-Semitism.

Sweden and Norway are manipulating public opinion in the way immortalized by George Orwell in his novel “1984” as the “Two Minutes Hate”. These countries have seen the creation of a public opinion according to which Israel is a merciless enemy of humanity that ought to be dismantled forthwith.

So here’s twenty-first-century Western feminism in a nutshell. Earlier this month, after the White House released a photograph of Donald Trump signing a presidential order in the presence of several male appointees, Isabella Lovin, the Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, put out a picture of herself signing a climate-change law in the company of other top female officials. Plainly, the photo was meant as a defiant statement of proud womanhood in the face of the world’s leading threat to female equality and dignity – the new man in the Oval Office. Indeed, the current Swedish government, in which the cabinet consists of twelve men and twelve women, has proclaimed itself to be “the world’s first feminist government.” Buzzfeed’s article about this triumphant moment carried the headline: “Did The Swedish Government Just Epically Troll Donald Trump With This All-Woman Photo?”

But what a difference a couple of weeks can make. The other day a four-man, eleven-woman Swedish delegation traveled to Tehran to ink a trade deal with the mullahs. Throughout the visit, the women, led by Trade Minister Ann Linde, wore hijabs, plus long, shapeless coats obviously selected for maximum “modesty.” One photograph, which shows the female members of the Swedish delegation striding past Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, is wonderfully illuminating: in their postures, in their facial expressions, these women’s defiance in response to big, bad, evil Trump is nowhere in evidence. They’re all wearing dark pants. The woman whose face we can see the best is the very picture of meekness and obeisance. The look on her face might well be that of a humble, pious, provincial nun about to be introduced to the Pope. Her right hand is on her chest, a signal that Rouhani need not worry that she might try to shake his hand. Another picture shows Linde herself clearly bowing to an Iranian official. The “world’s first feminist government,” which “epically troll[ed]” Trump, thus effectively communicated to Iran – and the entire Muslim world – a message of submission that could hardly have been improved upon. UN Watch quite rightly dubbed it a “walk of shame.”

In Sweden, of course, every properly brought up man or woman knows that it’s virtuous to thumb your nose at the U.S. president and equally virtuous to bow and scrape to terrorism-supporting imams. But a picture says a thousand words, and the images of those female officials sporting hijabs in Iran proved to be too much even for a lot of otherwise hardy Swedish stomachs. The leader of the Liberal Party worried aloud that the pictures would empower “conservative forces in our suburbs” (in other words, religious Muslims). Linde offered the “excuse” that the hijabs worn by her delegation were actually designed in Sweden. Get it? While signing a trade deal, they were modeling Swedish products intended for use by docile females! As Norway’s document.no website commented: “We see the contours of a new Swedish export success: Feminist government facilitates the export of hijabs to Iran.” (By the way, it turns out that when a female Norway official, Ingvil Smines Tybring-Gjedde, was scheduled to visit Iran in December and was told she’d have to wear a hijab, she refused – and canceled the trip.)

Abdel-Magied’s claim that ‘Islam is the most feminist religion’ rests on the no less ridiculous notion that it was first in allowing women to own property. If only the Wife of Bath, entrepreneur and lusty, well-heeled legatee of five husbands, could have taken Jacqui Lambie’s place and set her straight.
Remind me to pick up a hat on my way to work, preferably a rather ostentatious one. You see, I feel like asking my boss to swap his salary for mine, and in my opinion this is the best way to get away with what on a normal day would be regarded as a shocking impudence. Heavens, you know what? The more I think about it, I reckon I’m in with a shot. After all, if Monday night’s Q&A episode is a guide, it seems you can get away with spouting utter absurdity provided you wear a quaint and colourful headpiece.

This is, of course, in reference to Senator Jacqui Lambie and media commentator Yassmin Abdel-Magied getting into a shouting match when the former asserted that proponents of sharia law need to be deported from Australia. There was also the matter of enacting a measure similar to Trump’s stalled Executive Order, which attempted to ban arrivals from seven failed and overwhelmingly Muslim states where it is impossible to adequately check the backgrounds of visa applicants.

Whilst Lambie did make some salient points, albeit already established ones, arguing the interests of Australians must be put first before we look after those overseas, as is the way with most panellists on the program she failed to argue her points with any epistemic control or, for that matter, self-control. Instead, she fulminated in a manner the ABC’s admirers routinely paint as typifying those nasty conservatives. We’re actually rather measured, us conservativs, but Quadrant readers know that already. Lambie at times carried herself like a quarrelsome fool, her lesser moments were eclipsed by Abdel-Magied’s own ear-assaulting rejoinders; the latter shouting the most incoherent rant since Mohammed dictated the Quran. “Islam to me…is the most feminist religion,” was one of her paste gems.

In a video subsequently posted on Junkee, Abdel-Magied attempted to clarify the position she had taken on Q&A — and with a straight face, mind you. Sharia “is about justice and equality”, she said. Then, as can be expected of any accomplished rhetorician of the Left who is forced to address female oppression in the Middle East, Abdel-Magied suggested that it was the “conservative and patriarchal nature” of certain Islamic nations’, rather than Koranic example and injunction which sees stonings, child marriages and honour killings. That these abominations occur in lands where Islam holds sway is, apparently, no more than unfortunate coincidence.

Abdel-Magied’s claim that “Islam is the most feminist religion” rests on her notion that Islamic women “were given the right to own land” and “got equal rights well before the Europeans”. Truth hides in the shadow of Abdel-Magied’s contention; one need only consider the Wife of Bath, who Chaucer tells us was wealthy, owned a cloth business and had done very nicely as the legatee of five husbands.

Whilst Islamic women do have the right to own land, if a dispute over that land arises in an Islamic nation where sharia informs the judicial system, Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan for example, and if the dispute is with a man, because certain interpretations of the Quran promulgate that a women’s testimony counts as only half that of a man’s, under the auspices of sharia the disputed land could come under the man’s ownership. Think of it as a game of he said/she said with the male’s testimony and claim being awarded greater weight.
In Australia, or any Western country for that matter, both parties would be afforded afforded equal standing before the court. Need it be said that, ideally, any verdict will hang on the credibility of evidence, not gender. A quick aside: if that land was left to a brother and sister, more often than not the brother would be entitled to double of what his sister inherits.