RUTHFULLY YOURS

Children in this world do not dream about becoming doctors, pilots or engineers; an entire generation of Palestinians, particularly those in the Gaza Strip, has been raised on the glorification of suicide bombers and anyone who kills a Jew.

Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other radical groups see children as future “soldiers” in the war to eliminate Israel. They raise children to regard to suicide bombers and jihadis as role models.

This form of child abuse does not seem to bother human rights organizations or UNICEF, whose declared goal is to “work for a world in which every child has a fair chance in life and a right to survive, thrive and fulfill their potential…” UNICEF apparently does not believe its mandate extends to Palestinian children, who are exploited to serve the interests of Islamist groups.

In the view of human rights organizations, recruiting Palestinian children to the ranks of Islamist terror groups does not constitute child abuse.

What is the world prepared to do in order to combat this child abuse? UNICEF and other international bodies may not have time to deal with such issues at present, because they are too busy thinking about the next resolution to condemn Israel.

Children have long become an integral part of “military” parades held in the Gaza Strip by various Palestinian groups. But this form of child abuse does not seem to bother human rights organizations or the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), whose declared goal is to “work for a world in which every child has a fair chance in life and a right to survive, thrive and fulfill their potential — to the benefit of a better world.” It seems that UNICEF does not believe that its mandate extends to Palestinian children, who are exploited to serve the interests of Islamist groups.

In the Gaza Strip, children are taught not only to hate Israel, but also to prepare themselves for jihad (holy war) against the “Zionist enemy.” Hamas, the Islamic Jihad Movement, and other radical groups see children as future “soldiers” in the war to eliminate Israel. They raise children to regard suicide bombers and jihadis as role models.

Children in this world do not dream about becoming doctors, pilots or engineers. Rather, they dream of destroying Israel and “liberating Palestine.” In fact, an entire generation of Palestinians, particularly those in the Gaza Strip, has been raised on the glorification of suicide bombers and anyone who kills a Jew. With enough sacrifices, they are taught, the destruction of Israel is not a far-fetched dream. They alone embody the future hope of the Palestinians to see Israel removed from the face of the earth. Forget becoming a physician: their job is to continue what their fathers failed to achieve.

All the while, both local and international human rights organizations look the other way. In their view, recruiting Palestinian children to the ranks of Islamist terror groups does not constitute child abuse.

Yet not only human rights groups turn a blind eye to this child abuse. The Palestinian Authority (PA), which relies heavily on Western donors for its survival, has also chosen to bury its head in the sand regarding this disturbing practice, which has become widespread in the Gaza Strip in recent years.

Despite the mounting human toll, most of the crimes are still being downplayed by German authorities and the media, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiments.

“The police are not interested in stigmatizing but rather in educating the public. The impression that we are engaging in censorship is devastating to the public’s confidence in the police. Sharing information about suspects is also important for developing prevention strategies. We must be allowed to talk openly about the problems of this country.” — Arnold Plickert, director of the GdP Police Union in North Rhine-Westphalia.

“The Press Council believes that editorial offices in Germany should ultimately treat their readers like children by depriving them of relevant information. We think this is wrong because when people realize that something is being concealed from them, they react with mistrust. And this mistrust is a hazard.” — Tanit Koch, editor-in-chief of Bild, the most-read newspaper in Germany.

On October 24, a YouGov poll found that 68% of Germans believe that security in the country has deteriorated over the past two or three years. Also, 68% of respondents said they fear for their lives and property in German train stations and subways, while 63% feel unsafe at large public events.

A group of Serbian teenagers in the northern German city of Hamburg were handed suspended sentences for gang-raping a 14-year-old girl and leaving her for dead in sub-zero temperatures.

The judge said that although “the penalties may seem mild to the public,” the teens had all made confessions, appeared remorseful and longer posed a danger to society.

The October 24 ruling, which effectively allowed the rapists to walk free, provoked a rare moment of public outrage over the problem of migrant sex crimes in Germany. An online petition calling for the teens to see time in prison has garnered more than 80,000 signatures, and prosecutors are appealing the verdict.

Thousands of women and children have been raped or sexually assaulted in Germany since Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed into the country more than one million mostly male migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Erdogan fights anyone and anything outside the sphere of his understanding of Sunni Islamism. His arguments typically reflect an Islamist’s angry inner thoughts, feelings of “defeat against the non-Muslim West” and a “powerful urge to reverse the world order in favor of political Islam.”

Erdogan is not honest even when he insists on a Muslim contingent in the UN Security Council. He would be angry if the UN, as he passionately suggests, agreed on a Muslim seat and gave it to Shiite Iran. No, he wants a Sunni seat.

That is at the core of Erdogan’s not-so-silent (and never-ending) war with the West: (Sunni) Muslim nations should be deciding on matters shaping world politics, not others.

Erdogan’s Turkey is a solitary nation. It does not belong to Europe, hence its failure to join the EU. Theoretically it is a NATO ally and a “strategic partner” of the US. In reality, it is hostile to Western civilization and the US is only a tactical partner — as long as it helps Islamists advance their political ambitions, not a partner with shared democratic values.

It is true that the worst enemy of Turkey’s Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is another Islamist who was Erdogan’s best political ally for several years. It is also true that Erdogan, publicly or privately, feels hostility against a number of Muslim communities in the Middle East, including secular and Alevi Muslims in Turkey, the Nusairi (Alawites) in Syria and the Shiite in Iran, Lebanon and Bahrain.

It is not a secret, either, that Erdogan does not admire Jews, to put it mildly. But essentially, his strict adherence to political Islam often reveals his war of domination with non-Muslim Western civilization in a broader context. Erdogan fights anyone and anything outside the sphere of his understanding of Sunni Islamism.

Tunisia has arrested two American brothers on charges that they were planning a terror attack while in the Mediterranean country.

According to TunisiaLive, the unnamed brothers are from Michigan, are 32 and 33 years old and were renting a house in Jendouba, a city on the northwest side of the country near the Algerian border. Local residents became suspicious of the pair and contacted authorities, the news site said.

A spokesman for Tunisia’s Ministry of Interior said the brothers told police they were studying computer science at the University of Jendouba, but that was doubted as they “were heavily bearded, unwashed and living in poor conditions.”

One is said to have entered into an urfi, or Islamic union not registered with the state, with a Tunisian girl, who was arrested in Tunis today. A security official told Reuters that she had traveled to Syria.

MosaiqueFM reported that the brothers were recent converts to Islam and admitted to investigators that they wanted to “apply the Sharia.” Jihadist materials and plans were reportedly discovered when cops raided their home. Nessma TV reported that those plans outlined intentions to “blow up a number of institutions.” An official told Reuters that the jihadist materials included videos and photos praising ISIS.

Tube workers in London found a bomb on an underground train Thursday, prompting the government to raise the threat level in the city to “severe.” The device didn’t detonate and no one was injured, but the incident is a reminder that Britain’s vulnerability to terrorism is increasing even as—or because—Islamic State now finds itself on the defensive in Iraq and Syria.

Police the next day detained a 19-year-old man on suspicion of plotting terrorism, although he hasn’t been charged. A search of a house in Devon in connection with the case turned up a second improvised explosive device on Saturday. Police later determined it would have been a dud, which is hardly cause for reassurance.

The heightened threat climate prompted International Development Minister Rory Stewart to warn on Sunday that Britain could face fresh attacks from Islamic State if the group tries to take revenge in Europe for its setbacks in Mosul and elsewhere. Islamic State has encouraged such retaliatory attacks in the past, targeting France in particular over its participation in air strikes. The U.K. is among the Western nations backing the Iraqi effort to liberate Mosul.

Britain has been fortunate to avoid a mass-casualty attack since the 7/7 bombings of 2005, but Theresa May can’t afford complacency.

The Prime Minister developed a good track record on antiterror policing and surveillance as David Cameron’s Home Secretary. She could enhance that record by insisting that immigrants assimilate British values, and by further enhancing the surveillance capabilities of the police and domestic intelligence service. More defense spending will also be necessary to revive the U.K.’s atrophied expeditionary capabilities for counterinsurgency and counterterror missions. CONTINUE AT SITE

The perpetrators of Islamist attacks in London, Nice, Orlando and Sydney underline the problem that no matter how small the percentage of radical Muslims, we can hardly tell who they are among the broader population of their co-religionists.
The High Court of Australia has consistently recognised that the right to religious freedom is not absolute in this country. That being so, not every interference with religion is a breach of section 116 of the Constitution, only those that are considered an “undue infringement of religious freedom”. As former Chief Justice Anthony Mason and Justice Gerard Brennan pointed out, “general laws to preserve and protect society are not defeated by a plea of religious obligation to breach them”.

Religious freedom is therefore a properly qualified freedom. This is the understanding that in 1898 led many of the Australian framers to resist any idea of absolute freedom of religion as posing unacceptable risks to the community. During the convention debates that ultimately led to the draft of the Constitution, there was a suggestion that the federal Parliament should have power to prohibit religious “practices which have been regarded by large numbers of people as essentially evil and wicked”. Edward Braddon, though eventually supporting Henry Higgins’s proposal that ultimately led to the final wording in section 116, had initially sought to amend it by adding the words: “But shall prevent the performance of any such religious rites as are of a cruel and demoralizing character or contrary to the law of the Commonwealth”. Similarly, Edmund Barton, who hesitated over Higgins’s proposal but finally voted against it, was troubled by the difficulty of drafting a satisfactory formula to ensure that the constitutional protection would be limited to practices that are not inhuman or barbaric. As Barton pointed out:

The trouble arises when you try to insert a proviso modifying this prohibition. For instance, if it were desired to prevent the application of the clause to any fiendish or demoralizing rite, that might be done by inserting the words “so long as these observances are inconsistent with the criminal laws of the state”, [but even] if there were no criminal law in existence at the time with which these observances are inconsistent, it would be possible for the state to pass such a law, and so, to use a common expression, euchre the whole business.

Against the background of qualified affirmation of religious freedom, Justice Latham, in the Jehovah’s Witnesses case during the Second World War, turned to a catalogue of the evils and horrors sometimes practised in the name of religion that should not be tolerated at all. Latham fell back on a variation of the classical liberal formula which permits limitations on freedom only in the interests of freedom itself. The particular version of this formula quoted in Latham’s judgment was taken directly from John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty: “The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any or their number, is self-protection.” This statement in Mill’s book was taken in the sense of society’s self-preservation. But in fact, as law professor Tony Blackshield explains:

what [Latham] seemed rather to have in mind was the Kantian version, according to which freedom may be restricted only so far as is necessary to ensure an equal freedom for others, or to ensure the underlying preconditions of freedom for all.

Elements of the British establishment in Whitehall think their own soldiers are “bad,” and terrorists are “freedom fighters,” according to General Lord Richards, former Chief of the Defence Staff and the UK’s most senior military officer.

Over several years these ministers, permanent secretaries, generals, admirals and air marshals have been swept aside in pursuit of a corrosive drive to discredit our troops. It is the first time in history that any government has turned on its own armed forces in such a way.

The overwhelming majority are motivated by a combination of greed and anti-British vindictiveness by the Iraqi and Afghan accusers and by their British lawyers, using taxpayers’ money.

This can only further undermine our national will to engage in future conflict in defence of our people or to support our allies, including the US, thus weakening the Western world. That of course is the main objective of the politically driven lawyers and others involved in hounding our troops.

We can be sure that their motive for favouring enemy “freedom fighters” over our own forces is a desire to appease radical Muslims both at home and abroad, which infects so much of Europe’s political elite and mainstream media.

It is vital for our country and the world that the Prime Minister ends this cowardly and dangerous cult of appeasement, stands up for our Western Judeo-Christian values above all others, and defends our soldiers with as much courage as they show in defending us. To achieve this, it is vital that the conspirators General Richards has named are identified and purged from power and influence.

Last week General Lord Richards, former Chief of the Defence Staff and the UK’s most senior military officer, made an extraordinary allegation. Speaking on the BBC, he said that elements of the British establishment in Whitehall think their own soldiers are “bad,” and terrorists are “freedom fighters.”

Lord Richards’s assertions have far-reaching significance both within the UK and more widely, affecting the US, the prosecution by the West of the war on terror, and British relations with the State of Israel. Yet they have gone largely unnoticed.