RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the wake of the attack in Nice, there should have been a fulsome public discussion over what if anything can be done to ensure that people who have been in France for many years — in some cases their entire lives — are not indoctrinated to hate the country so much that they drive a truck through a crowded sea-front on Bastille Day.

Or there could have been a wide public debate over whether, with so many radicalised Muslims already in France, it was a wise or foolish idea to continue to import large numbers of Muslims into this already simmering situation.

Merkel seems to hope that with this raising of a burka ban the German public will forgive or forget the fact that here is a political leader so devoid of foresight that she unilaterally chose to allow an extra 1-2% of the population to be added to her country in a single year, mainly Muslim, mainly male and mainly young.

The burka and burkini, like the headscarf, are only issues because millions of people have been allowed, unchecked, into Europe for years. The garment is merely the simplest issue at which to take aim. Far harder are the issues of immigration and integration. It is possible that Europe’s politicians cannot answer these questions, because any and all answers would point the finger at their own failings.

The European publics might get fed up with the distraction tactics of talking about garments and instead seek answers to the challenge we now face, as well as retribution at the polls for the politicians who brought us here.

2016 was a fine year for Islamist terrorism and an even finer year for Western political distraction. While Islamic terrorists repeatedly succeeded in carrying out mass-casualty terrorist attacks, as well as a constant run of smaller-scale strikes, the political leadership of the free world continued to try to divert their public.

The most striking example of the year came in the summer with the French debate over whether or not to ban the “burkini” from the beaches of France. The row erupted in the days after another 86 people were murdered in a jihadist terrorist assault — this time in Nice, France. With no one sure how to prevent access to vehicles or any idea how many French Muslims might want to follow suit, the French media and authorities chose to debate an item of beachwear. The carefully staged decision by an Australian Muslim woman to have herself filmed while wearing a burkini on a French beach ignited the row, which was eagerly seized upon by politicians.

At the local and national level, the decision to discuss the burkini allowed all the larger political issues behind Europe’s growing security problem to be ignored. In the wake of Nice, there should have been a fulsome public discussion over what if anything can be done to ensure that people who have been in France for many years — in some cases their entire lives — are not indoctrinated to hate the country so much that they drive a truck through a crowded sea-front on Bastille Day. Or there could have been a wide public debate over whether, with so many radicalised Muslims already in France, it was a wise or foolish idea to continue to import large numbers of Muslims into this already simmering situation.

As it was, neither of these debates did occur, and no meaningful political action was taken. Instead, the issue of the burkini sucked all the oxygen out of the debate, leaving no room to discuss anything more serious or longer term than beachwear.

Last July, for the first time during a Mass in Italy, a verse of the Koran was recited from the altar.

A priest in the south of Italy enraged parishioners by dressing the Virgin Mary in a Muslim burqa for his church’s Christmas Nativity scene. These interfaith initiatives are based on the gradual elimination of the Western-Christian heritage in favor of Islam.

The Catholic clergy is probably disoriented by Pope Francis himself; he was the first to allow the reading of Islamic prayers and Koran readings from the Vatican.

The Pope embraced religious relativism when it comes with Islam. He repeated that Islamist violence is the work of “a small group of fundamentalists” who, according to him, have nothing to do with Islam.

Church of England Bishop Harries suggested that Prince Charles’s coronation service should be opened with a Koran reading. In the US, more than 50 churches, including the Washington National Cathedral, hold Koran readings. Is there any reading of the Christian liturgy in mosques?

How is it that so few Christian leaders have raised their voices against this unprecedented attack on a Christian monument? Have they organized so many Koran readings in their own churches so that they now view it as normal to convert a church into a mosque?

Would it not be better for the Catholic Church to establish a real dialogue with the Islamic communities based on principles such as reciprocity (if you build mosques in Europe, we build churches in the Middle East), protection of Christian minorities in the Crescent and theological repudiation of jihad against “infidels”?

There is a disturbing and growing trend in Italy and Europe.

http://jamieglazov.com/2017/01/04/ingrid-carlqvist-moment-how-sweden-became-absurdistan/
This special edition of the Glazov Gang presents the Ingrid Carlqvist Moment hosted by Ingrid Carlqvist, journalist and author.

Ingrid discussed How Sweden Became Absurdistan, sharing her fear that her country could become the first Sharia state in Europe.

Don’t miss it!

Just three weeks after a suicide bomber killed 27 people, mostly women and children, in an attack on the main Coptic cathedral near Cairo comes a new attack in Alexandria.

According to Tahrir News, a Christian businessman was murdered by an Islamist earlier today for selling alcohol in his shop. The arrested suspect came up behind the victim and slashed his throat while he was smoking shisha in front of the store.

Images from a surveillance video show the attack.

Some reports indicate that the victim had previously agreed to not sell alcohol during Ramadan, which ran from the beginning of June to the beginning of July last year.

It should be noted that there are several liquor store chains that operate in Egypt, including goCheers and Drinkies, and beer is widely available at most restaurants in Cairo and Alexandria.

This incident appears to be an act of “hisba,” or enforcement of Islamic law.

As a report by Lorenzo Vidino on incidents of “hisba” in Europe shows, some interpretations allow any Muslim to enforce Islamic prohibitions, not just police.

I noted here at PJ Media following the Cairo cathedral bombing last month that attacks targeting the Coptic Christian community in Egypt — the largest population of Christians in the Middle East — are a fairly common occurrence.

But many of these sectarian attacks take place in Upper Egypt, where millions of Coptic Christians live, and less so in the more Western-influenced Cairo and Alexandria.

Back in August I reported on my April 2014 trip into Upper Egypt to inspect some of the 70+ churches and monasteries torched by the Muslim Brotherhood in August 2013 following the dispersal of the protests in support of ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, a former spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood.

“It is best to wait outside. There are men in here… In this café, there is no diversity.” — Male customer in a café in Sevran, on France 2 television.

“In this café, there is no mixing. We are in Sevran, not Paris. Here there is a different mentality. It is like back home.” ­ — Another male customer in a café in Sevran, on France 2 television.

Women seem “to have been erased”, from the cafés and the streets. “So now to avoid threats, and being put under pressure, they censor themselves and keep quiet.” — Caroline Sinz, journalist, France 2 television.

This Islamization has been fueled and strengthened by Qatar’s heavy investments — particularly in mosques — in France, which currently stand at around $22 billion.

“There is a misplaced form of morality, often exercised by minority groups over a majority, which leads to the fact that the public space, supposedly belonging to both men and women, is restricted from women.” — Pascale Boistard, former French Minister for Women’s Rights

French ministers feign surprise and outrage that women in these suburbs have finally succumbed to the incessant terror against them and are disappearing from the streets.

Women have literally disappeared from cafés and bars in certain predominantly Muslim suburbs in France, according to recently aired undercover footage from the France 2 television channel. The footage featured two women activists, Nadia Remadna and Aziza Sayah, from the women’s rights campaign group, La Brigade des Mères (Brigade of Mothers), entering a café in the Paris suburb of Sevran, where they were met with surprise and hostility from the all-male customers. One told them: “It is best to wait outside. There are men in here… In this café, there is no diversity.”

Another customer told them: “In this café, there is no mixing. We are in Sevran, not Paris. Here there is a different mentality. It is like back home.”

Over the years we have often lamented the absence of grand-strategic thinking within the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. For the past quarter-century, successive administrations have displayed a chronic inability to deploy America’s political, military, economic, and moral resources in a balanced and proportionate manner, in order to protect and enhance the country’s rationally defined security and economic interests. Washington’s bipartisan, ideologically-driven obsession with global primacy (aka full-spectrum-dominance) has resulted in a series of diplomatic, military and moral disasters, costly in blood and treasure and detrimental to the American interest.

Donald Trump and his team have a historic opportunity to make a fresh start. The moment is somewhat comparable to the advent of Ronald Reagan’s first administration in January 1981: the global context is different, but the challenge of reestablishing a national-interest-based paradigm is not. Reagan used grandiloquent phrases at times (the Evil Empire), but in practice he was an instinctive foreign policy realist.

Likewise, Trump’s “America First” is not a triumphal slogan of exceptionalist grandomania jointly practiced by the Duopoly for the past quarter-century. It is a call for the return to realism based on the awareness that the United States needs to rediscover the value of transactional diplomacy aimed at promoting its security, prosperity, and cohesion in a Hobbesian world. In terms of any traditionally understood calculus of national security, America is the most invulnerable major power in the world: sheltered by oceans, and supremely capable to project her power to the distant shores. Unlike Russia, China, and India, America has no territorial disputes with her neighbors and her integrity is not threatened by ethnic or religious separatist forces. As I wrote in last month’s Chronicles,

Today’s America has the potential to be a satiated power, like Rome under the Five Good Emperors, Britain for many decades after Napoleon, or the German Kaiserreich until the 1890’s. That status did not imply those powers’ withdrawal from world affairs. Trajan, Castlereagh, and Bismarck were not isolationists; they were prudent fine-tuners of their external environment, always cognizant of proportionate costs in pursuit of limited objectives.