RUTHFULLY YOURS

Those rotten Papists http://quadrant.org.au/

Kristina Keneally headline “CATHOLICISM HAS DIONE MORE HARM TO AUSTRALIA THAN ISLAM.WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?”

The way it works is like this:

First, a favoured or indulged representative of some not-quite-mainstream group or organisation says something offensive or, just as likely, irredeemably stupid.

Second, the first enablers and apologists poke their heads out of whichever university faculty, rights commission or assembly of scolds in which they have found a roost, usually a taxpayer-funded one, and insist that there is nothing wrong with whatever utterance has incited criticism. Most likely these first responders will assert the remarks were taken out of context and this happens because critics’ are shamefully eager to parade their prejudice/racism/intolerance/whatever.

Third, the professional dissemblers — those masters of the misleading analogy, the schleppers of advanced sophistry — gird themselves in militant righteousness and go on the attack.

This very process notably began two weeks ago, when Yassmin Abdel-Magied swore blind on Q&A that there could be no creed more aligned with feminist sentiment than that of the mosque and minaret. How sharia is just, you know, a really, really beaut thing.

First out of the gate in Ms Abdel-Magied’s defence was the Australian Islamic Mission, which raised a petition objecting to her treatment as a Muslim. She should never have been placed in such position, allowed to make a spectacle of herself, because it is offensive for Muslims to be called upon for explanation of themselves and their views.

Two weeks later, your more accomplished spinners and dissemblers are on the job, with former NSW premier Kristine Keneally setting the gold standard for dross. Here she is in the Guardian, putting Abdel-Magied’s inanity into the preferred perspective (emphasis added):

…every Australian Muslim who pokes their head up in public is expected to own, explain and condemn any terrorist act carried out by any extremist Muslim anywhere in the world. The outrage machine demands it, and then that same machine judges if the words are sufficient.

Why isn’t this same outrage applied to Australian Catholics? If we are going on a body count the Catholic clergy has done more harm to more Australians than extremist Muslims.

At last count no Australian Catholic, a religion in which Ms Keneally lists herself a believer, had stabbed two policeman, schemed to blow up the Holsworthy army base and the MCG, held a coffee shop hostage, shot a computer programmer on a Parramatta street or … [insert the next outrage here]

Keneally’s departure point for this flight of fancy and fantasy is the evidence of priestly abuse laid before the ongoing royal commission. Well she would cite that, wouldn’t she?

To appreciate the Guardian’s place as Australia’s intellectual S-bend — the spot where grubby muck briefly settles — follow the link below.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/berlin-bans-muslim-group-accused-of-supporting-terrorism-1488302106

BERLIN—Local authorities on Tuesday banned a Muslim group accused of supporting terrorism, offering a fresh sign of Germany’s increased efforts to combat Islamist extremists in the wake of December’s deadly Christmas-market attack.

Officials in Berlin, which is governed as a city-state, moved quickly through the arduous legal process of banning the Muslim group Fussilet 33 e.V. They did so after learning that Anis Amri, who attacked the market, was a frequent visitor at the group’s mosque, including on the day he rammed a truck into a Christmas market.

Berlin’s interior ministry said Fussilet 33, which also hosted religious lectures and seminars in the working-class Moabit neighborhood, supported terrorist organizations such as Islamic State and Junud al-Sham by collecting funds and recruiting people to fight in Syria and Iraq. Representatives from Fussilet 33 couldn’t be reached for comment.

The group and its members “hailed the armed jihad and religiously motivated terrorism,” said State Secretary Torsten Akmann.

German authorities face pressure to show they are aggressively fighting radical Islamism at home. They came under criticism for failing to stop Mr. Amri in the months before his attack.

Mr. Amri’s case drew attention to radical Muslim groups that German security authorities say pose an increasing challenge in the fight against violent Islamist ideology and terrorism but that are hard to ban because of laws protecting religious groups. Berlin had considered banning Fussilet 33 in 2015 but abandoned the idea for lack of proof.

“Inflammatory ideologues aren’t welcome in Berlin,” said Andreas Geisel, the city-state’s senator for domestic affairs. “Whoever thinks that they can call for violence or support others (who do) in our city needs to know: We are watching you, and we will take care of you the exact same way we’re taking care of the Fussilet 33 association.”

Mr. Amri also had ties to another known radical group in Germany affiliated with prominent radical preacher Abu Walaa, who was arrested last year on suspicion of recruiting fighters for Islamic State, prompting intelligence officials to monitor him. But his connection to Fussilet 33 only emerged after the attack, sparking calls for a sharper monitoring of known meeting spots for radicals.

Berlin’s interior ministry said Tuesday that prominent Fussilet 33 members have been convicted or are facing trial for supporting a foreign terror organization or planning an attack. Its assets have been seized and the association is now barred from any activity, including online or reorganizing under a new name. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-china-block-u-n-sanctions-over-syria-chemical-weapons-use-1488315139

UNITED NATIONS—Russia and the U.S. clashed openly at the Security Council over a Syria sanctions resolution, a confrontation signaling Washington and Moscow don’t see eye to eye on some of the world’s top security crises.

The U.S. on Tuesday accused Russia of covering for Syria’s use of chemical weapons, and Russia accused the U.S. of using false pretenses to impose sanctions to try to topple Syria’s government.

The tense exchange mirrored those between Russia and previous U.S. administrations, offering a telling look at deep divisions that remain even as President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, President Vladimir Putin, have vowed to improve ties.

New U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who arrived in late January, has held close to core American policies when it comes to differences with Russia on Ukraine and Syria. On two previous occasions, in early February and last week, Ms. Haley assailed Russia at the Security Council for what she called its “aggressive actions” and “destabilizing” role in Ukraine.

On Tuesday, Ms. Haley went a step further, directly confronting Russia and China over their positions, saying they were taking an indefensible stance by putting the protection of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime ahead of global security.

“It is a sad day on the Security Council when member states start making excuses for other member states killing their own people,” Ms. Haley said. She added the vote signaled to the world that allies of Russia and China would be protected even if they kill their own people.

U.S. allies at the U.N. welcomed the comments, having feared that even the smallest U.S. policy shift toward Russia would have significant impact on issues such as Syria, Europe, counterterrorism and Iran.

But it further dimmed any likelihood of an early rapprochement between Moscow and Washington. The U.S. on Tuesday also countered a Russian assertion that a summit is being planned between Messrs. Trump and Putin, amid growing questions in Washington about contacts between associates of the president and the Kremlin.

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said practical preparations have started for a meeting between the two leaders, but added there was “no agreement yet as to the time and place,” Russian news agencies reported.

A senior U.S. official, however, said no preparations are under way.

Mr. Trump’s election had raised hopes in Moscow that the U.S. government would move to roll back sanctions imposed after the Russian government annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in 2014 and gave support to separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Mr. Putin said in a congratulatory note he hoped Russia and the U.S. could work as equals following years of strained ties with President Barack Obama’s White House. Mr. Trump—who has long expressed admiration for the Russian leader—enjoyed overwhelmingly positive coverage on Russian state-controlled television. CONTINUE AT SITE

Once again, an American has pointed to a failing in European society, and instead of focusing on the problem identified or even admitting that there is a problem, the European response has been to point at the American and blame him for creating the problem he has in fact merely identified.

We are being given an accurate representation of a serious problem.

If the response to every problem is denial, and the response to anyone pointing to the problem is opprobrium, legal threats or hilarity, it suggests that Europe is not going to make the softer-landing it could yet give itself in addressing these issues.

It might make us feel better, but every time we attack or laugh at the messenger, rather than addressing the message, we ensure that our own future will be less funny.

How can one excavate the minds of so many European officials and the extraordinary mental gymnastics of denial to which they have become prone?

One of the finest demonstrations of this trend occurred in January 2015, after France was assailed by Islamist gunmen in the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and then in a Jewish supermarket. In the days after those attacks, Fox News in the U.S. ran an interview with a guest who said that Paris, and France, as a whole, had “no-go zones” where the authorities — including emergency services — did not dare to go. In the wake of these comments, the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, chose to make a stand. She announced that she was suing Fox News because the “honour of Paris” was at stake.

It appeared that Mayor Hidalgo was rightly concerned about the image of her city around the world, presumably worrying in particular about the potential effects on tourism.

Of course, Mayor Hidalgo’s priorities were all wrong. The reason Paris’s public relations suffered a dent was not because of what a pundit said on Fox News one evening, but because of the mass murder of journalists and Jews on the streets of the “City of Light.” Any potential tourist would be much more concerned about getting caught up in a terrorist firefight than a war of words. Mayor Hidalgo’s manoeuvre, however, turned out not to be a rarity, but a symptom of a wider problem.

Consider the almost precise replay of that 2015 episode after U.S. President Donald Trump referred in a speech to “what’s happening last night in Sweden.” Much of the press immediately seized the opportunity to claim that Trump had asserted that a terrorist attack had occurred the night before in Sweden. This allowed them to laugh at the alleged ignorance of the president and the alleged concoction of what has become known as “fake news.” Except that it swiftly became obvious to anyone who cared that what the president was referring to — a documentary film about the situation in Sweden that had aired the night before on Fox News — showed the extent of the lawlessness in parts of Sweden. While every authority in Sweden was laughing at Donald Trump, a day after his comments. residents of Rinkeby, a suburb of Stockholm, obligingly had a car-burning riot and attacked police.

According to a 2016 investigation by Balkan journalists Marko Vesovic, Vladimir Otasevic and Hasan Haydar Diyab, the Montenegrin government is indirectly involved in the funding of Islamic terrorism.

Charges were dropped due to former PM and President Milo Đukanović’s diplomatic immunity, but not before he admitted his involvement in the criminal enterprise. In other words, while Đukanović was signing the accession protocol with NATO, boatloads of illegal cigarettes from Montenegro were apparently making their way into ISIS-controlled areas.

For all his talk of rethinking America’s foreign commitments, it appears that President Donald Trump has also made the decision to endorse Montenegro’s membership bid.

While Đukanović stepped down in October in favor of Duško Marković, a former intelligence chief and a close ally, he is widely believed to be the power behind the throne and to be planning a comeback in the 2018 presidential elections.

Between its apparent links to the funding Islamic terrorism, its flawed democracy, and its still-insufficiently developed army, Montenegro is not yet a reliable partner for the West.

Does a country involved in financing Islamic terrorism deserve to be invited to join the world’s biggest military alliance, and receive all the perks that come with it? Many may argue this is the case with the small Balkan state of Montenegro, whose NATO membership will soon be taken up for consideration by the U.S. Senate.

According to a 2016 investigation by Balkan journalists Marko Vesovic, Vladimir Otasevic and Hasan Haydar Diyab, the Montenegrin government is indirectly involved in the funding of Islamic terrorism. More precisely, between 2013 and 2015, 3.5 million kilograms of cigarettes were illegally delivered from the Montenegrin port of Bar to Libyan areas under the control of terrorists close to al-Qaeda and ISIS. And such a movement of cargo would not have been possible, they claim, without the explicit endorsement of high-ranking Montenegrin officials. According to Vesovic, in an interview with Sputnik News, the former Montenegrin prime minister and president Milo Đukanović, who kept himself in power for the past quarter of a century (until 2016), would be himself a case in point.[1]

As revealed by Italian prosecutors in 2001, it seems that Đukanović was involved in the smuggling of cigarettes around the Adriatic by Italian crime syndicates in the 1990s. Charges were dropped due to Đukanović’s diplomatic immunity, but not before he admitted his involvement in the criminal enterprise. According to Vesovic:

“The same Montenegrin elite is (now) involved in a very complex system of organized crime, based on the smuggling of cigarettes to North Africa. In the 1990s they were smuggled to Italy…. Now, as we see, they found a new market.”

In every Muslim-majority country, especially in the Middle East, the Islamic terrorist genie came out from under the ashes, built the Islamic state and threatened the West — both with terrorist operations and from inside, in a more surreptitious, seemingly peaceful manner, as the Muslim Brotherhood does.

It is important to understand that Islam is a religion that includes, in its structure, political power that governs and controls and spreads the force of arms.

US President Donald J. Trump has succeeded in naming a jihadi problem, political Islam, but it is hard to single out defective products from the factory without closing the factory — if one does not want them to appear again.

This does not mean that what Trump intends to do is not important; on the contrary, we need him after most Western politicians faced Islamic terrorism awkwardly, if they faced it at all. Sometimes they even cooperated with these terrorist organizations, invited their members to the White House; to Iftar dinners during Ramadan, and hugging what they falsely call “moderate Islam” — especially the Muslim Brotherhood, the incubator that most terrorist organizations come out of — instead of the true “moderate Muslims” who have been struggling to be heard above the crush of “influence,” infiltration and petro-dollars.

We can say that so far “Trumps’s recipe” for facing radical Islam had been tried before and failed. Dictatorships and military regimes in the Middle East, such as the presidents of Egypt Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak, and now el-Sisi, faced political and radical Islam. Russia did, and Saddam did in Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya, Bourguiba in Tunisia and others.

Perhaps the saddest failure is the Turkish model. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk built a dictatorship-state on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. He decisively confronted all forms of political Islam, and destroyed the military wing of the army that dreamed of restoring that Empire. Atatürk founded a dictatorship guarded by the army’s broad powers, but within a constitutional and legal framework, to deter Islamists who might want to change his modernist structure. It was also meant to stop any move to Islamic rule that might want to change the relatively open and pro-Western ideas of the Kemalist Republic.

In September, I met with Ami Horowitz for an interview about Sweden and immigration, for a documentary he was making on the topic. Horowitz had heard of the work I had done on the issue, such as my reports in the Washington Examiner on the recent mass sexual attacks at music festivals in Sweden that the media and police covered up, as well as my essays on Sweden’s growing problem of jihadi tourism.

Horowitz and I met up in a sleepy Swedish town and spoke for almost half an hour, of which four minutes ended up in the final cut of his documentary, Stockholm Syndrome. The film also includes an interview with two Swedish policemen and the director’s own running commentary. The documentary received some attention at the time it was released, but not much more than the occasional link appearing in my newsfeed. But — as we now know — that has since changed.

President Trump mentioned Sweden in a speech in Florida on February 18. I first learned about it from my father, who called me early the next morning to ask whether I was perhaps involved in an international incident. As soon as I went on Twitter and saw the outrage, I started to connect the dots. After sifting through the many angry tweets, I could conclude that not only had the international media severely misconstrued what Donald Trump had said about Sweden but also that the newly elected president had put his finger on exactly what ails Sweden as well as the entire European continent.

For the past week, I have been under tremendous pressure to rescind my statements and to swear off not only Amy Horowitz but also the entire premise that Sweden has problems relating to its immigration policies. Trump’s statement, however confusing, highlighted the most taboo topic in Swedish society and the well-oiled apparatus that does its utmost to keep it under wraps. And now that the world has its collective eye fixed on our country, the Swedish establishment is fighting hard to convey the party line.

Part of the reason for the outrage is that Sweden has a long-standing, complicated, love-hate relationship with the United States, defined by an equal mix of envy and distain — the U.S. being both that place we are better than and the country we secretly long to be. Sweden’s self-image is that of a country with solid liberal values, institutionalized equality, and social justice. Having an American president question that is a direct affront to the one thing we had going for us: our carefully cultivated sense of moral and intellectual superiority. The solution to this conundrum is to belittle and mock President Trump, making him seem ignorant and racist, poking fun at his statements through a barrage of colorful memes. But what all of these methods fail to address is the underlying issue and the truth at the heart of the president’s words.

As Swedish-Iranian economist Tino Sanandaji observed at NRO last week, we see a remarkable lack of statistics showing a correlation between immigration and crime in Sweden — not because there is no such correlation, but because there are no statistics. There are no statistics because the government has consistently chosen not to release them or bring the issue to light. This secrecy has sparked the rise of a populist right in Sweden, and it has also failed the most vulnerable — the immigrants subjected to extremism and crime in urban neighborhoods where the pundits and politicians never go — sacrificing them on the altar of political correctness.

SYDNEY—Australia has arrested a man it says offered to help Islamic State develop a long-range guided missile and a detection system for incoming bombs.

“Police will allege that the man arrested has sought to advise ISIL on how to develop high-tech weapons capability,” Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Tuesday. He said the man was arrested in the rural town of Young, northwest of the capital Canberra, after an 18-month investigation, and that the operation wasn’t related to any planned attack in Australia.

The man—an Australian-born citizen, according to Andrew Colvin, commissioner of the Australian Federal Police—was identified in local press reports as Haisem Zahab. He appeared in court later Tuesday where he was charged with two foreign-incursion offenses that carry a maximum penalty of life in prison.

He wasn’t available for comment and it is unclear whether he has a lawyer.

Australia has stepped up security in recent years, giving police and intelligence agencies more power against homegrown militants. It has also sent troops and warplanes to combat Islamic State as part of the U.S.-led coalition, as well as supporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The country’s five-tier terrorism-threat system has been set at “probable,” the third-highest level, since September 2014. That December, a gunman, later identified as Iranian immigrant Man Haron Monisj, took hostages in a Sydney cafe and held them for 16 hours before being killed by police. The cafe’s manager and a female customer also died.

Since then there have been four attacks and 12 others have been disrupted, most recently in December—an Islamic State-inspired plot to set off bombs in central Melbourne. More than 50 people have been arrested on terrorism offenses. CONTINUE AT SITE