RUTHFULLY YOURS

With his initiative for tighter gun laws, to prevent weapons getting into “the wrong hands,” Justice Minister Maas does not mean to target the Islamists who pose an existential threat to Germany, but an obscure German group called the “Reichsbürger.”

As the German newspaper Bild describes the law proposed by Maas, “a 13-year-old child bride would have to testify against her husband, saying that her well-being as a child is under threat. If neither the child nor the Child Welfare Service lodges a complaint, for all practical purposes the marriage would be declared legitimate.” This law clearly does not take into account the possibility of private coercion against a child, let alone the blinding likelihood of outright threats.

Justice Minister Maas evidently cares more about “gender image” than he cares about truly oppressed women and vulnerable children. In a recently drafted new law by his ministry, Mass refused to ban child marriage.

With both France and Germany going to polls next year, there is the possibility of a democratic, peaceful “European Spring.”

In her first message to President-elect Donald Trump, German Chancellor Angela Merkel lectured him on gender, racial and religious equality. As the New York Times put it, Merkel “named a price” for Germany’s cooperation with the Trump-led administration, namely the “respect for human dignity and for minorities from a man who has mocked both.”

If this was anything more than political posturing, and Chancellor Merkel truly cared about “human dignity” or the rights of those most vulnerable, she might have started closer at home.

After a year-long investigation into the mass-sexual attacks in Cologne, where an estimated 2,000 migrant men — mostly from Arab and Muslim countries — molested at least 1200 women, almost all the men have managed to walk free.

Excerpts from Srdja Trifkovic’s latest Sputnik Radio interview, in which he comments on the findings of a new poll which indicates that an increasing number of Europeans want their countries to leave the European Union. More than half (53%) of the respondents in Italy said they would like their government to hold a referendum on EU membership. Similar sentiments are felt in France, Germany, Spain and Poland. [Audio]
[…] We are witnessing an overall public backlash against the European Union. It is increasingly perceived not as an institution geared to facilitating the flow of goods, services and people, but as a means of political and ideological control by an elite that is alienated from ordinary people… In Italy’s case it is clear that the level of dissatisfaction with the political establishment is very high. If someone like Beppe Grillo, a comedian who has never conducted a serious campaign, gets as many votes as he did [25.5% in 2013], we are looking at a discredited establishment, where politics is seen as part joke and part tragedy.

In Poland the disenchantment is to a large extent due to the attempt by Brussels to impose immigration quotas on former Soviet bloc countries. They rebelled together, the Visegrad Group, starting with Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban, but including the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland’s [prime minister] Beata Szydlo. They simply do not want to submit a key element of their sovereignty—the decision on who will reside inside their frontiers—to the unelected Eurocrats in Brussels…

Europe has gotten tired of being anguished about Donald Trump and has now moved on to being anguished about itself. The question being asked by all the Big Think editorials and news magazine programs runs: “Is Europe going populist too?” It’s especially unavoidable this weekend because of the coincidence of three events:

French president François Hollande, facing the prospect of a humiliating defeat, announced on Thursday that he would not contest next year’s presidential elections, in which, as everyone knew, he would have run a poor third to the populist Right’s Marine Le Pen and the conservative Right’s new favorite, former prime minister François Fillon.

On Sunday there will be a referendum in Italy on constitutional reform that, if rejected, will lead to the resignation of the prime minister and new elections in which an anti-euro party, Beppe Grillo’s Five Star movement, would at least start out as the favorite.

Also on Sunday there will be a rerun of the Austrian presidential election, which – because the first, narrow victory of the establishment candidate was overturned owing to irregularities – could swing a victory for the candidate of the populist “far right” Freedom party.

As if this trifecta were not excitement enough, almost every news broadcast reminds us that next year we will have – in addition to the French presidential elections — a Dutch election in which the populist party of Geert Wilders (who is currently on trial for demanding fewer Moroccan immigrants in Holland) may end up as the largest single group in parliament, and a German election in which Angela Merkel will seek a fourth mandate in a contest in which, for the first time, a populist anti-migrant party, the AFD, may win a serious number of votes and seats and deprive the conservative Christian Democrats of office.

Something big is clearly going on. It fills the imaginations of the more excitable members of mainstream parties of Left and Right with dramatic fantasies of fighting neo-fascism alongside Paul Henreid and Ingrid Berman. Worse, it suggests that Donald Trump may inspire a new populist politics in Europe that will put them out of a job.

“Until religious leaders stand up and take responsibility for the actions of those who do things in the name of their religion, we will see no resolution.” — The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby.

“The Islamic State is a byproduct of Al Azhar’s programs… Al Azhar says there must be a caliphate and that it is an obligation for the Muslim world. Al Azhar teaches the law of apostasy and killing the apostate. Al Azhar is hostile towards religious minorities, and teaches things like not building churches… Al Azhar teaches stoning people. So can Al Azhar denounce itself as un-Islamic?” — Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah Nasr, a scholar of Islamic law and graduate of Egypt’s Al Azhar University.

The jihadists who carry out terrorist attacks in the service of ISIS, for example, are merely following the commands in the Quran, both 9:5, “Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them…” and Quran 8:39, “So fight them until there is no more fitna [strife] and all submit to the religion of Allah.”

Archbishop Welby — and Egypt’s extraordinary President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi — has finally had the courage to say in public that if one insists on remaining “religiously illiterate,” it is impossible to solve the problem of religiously motivated violence.

For the first time, a European establishment figure from the Church has spoken out against an argument exonerating ISIS and frequently peddled by Western political and cultural elites. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, speaking in France on November 17, said that dealing with the religiously-motivated violence in Europe

“requires a move away from the argument that has become increasingly popular, which is to say that ISIS is ‘nothing to do with Islam’… Until religious leaders stand up and take responsibility for the actions of those who do things in the name of their religion, we will see no resolution.”

Archbishop Welby also said that, “It’s very difficult to understand the things that impel people to some of the dreadful actions that we have seen over the last few years unless you have some sense of religious literacy”.

“Religious literacy” has indeed been in short supply, especially on the European continent. Nevertheless, all over the West, people with little-to-no knowledge of Islam, including political leaders, journalists and opinion makers, have all suddenly become “experts” on Islam and the Quran, assuring everybody that ISIS and other similarly genocidal terrorist groups have nothing to do with the purported “religion of peace,” Islam.

Since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election last month, Israelis have been engaged in a heated debate about how the victory of the billionaire businessman who gets into fights on Twitter will affect the Jewish state.

The Left, which has been fawning over Barack Obama for eight years, has been attributing all the ills of his country and the world during this period to a combination of piggish capitalism and racism ostensibly so indigenous to America that even the Great Black Hope was unable to stomp them out. Members of this very vocal sector of the Israeli media and academia are naturally appalled by Trump, but point to his success as evidence that their analysis of the character of the United States is accurate.

According to this position, it was not the failures of the Democratic Party that led to its defeat, but rather the very nature of the voting public. The holders of this view went as far as to claim that a country with such a number of yahoos and evangelical Christians was simply not ready for a woman president.

This is exactly how these same Israelis interpret the fact that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has just broken David Ben-Gurion’s record for the length of tenure in the office of the premiership, though the primitive and religious voters whom they put down are Orthodox Jews and those of North African descent. Different culture, same snobbery. And a virtually identical — delusional — outlook on peacemaking in the Middle East.

In contrast, the Israeli Right has been celebrating Trump’s win, highlighting two causes for optimism. One is the assumption that the president-elect is sympathetic to the settler enterprise — since he does not consider it to be at fault for a lack of peace with the Palestinians — and therefore will not respond to every additional Jewish apartment built in the West Bank with the apoplexy exhibited by the Obama administration.

The other is the hope and even belief that the Trump administration might finally be the one to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thereby providing an ideological stamp of legitimacy to the sovereignty of the Jewish people over their holy city, the capital of the State of Israel.

“The drama and the tragedy is that the only ones to win are the jihadists.” — Flemming Rose, who published the Mohammed cartoons in 2005, as cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten newspaper.

“Why the f*ck did you say yes to appear on stage with this terrorist target, are you stupid? Do you have a secret death wish? You have grandchildren now. Are you completely out of your mind? It’s okay if you want to die yourself, but why are you taking the company though all this?” — The managers of Jyllands-Posten, to Flemming Rose.

“We are also aware that we therefore bow to violence and intimidation.” — Editorial, Jyllands-Posten.

“I do not blame them that they care about the safety of employees. I have bodyguards 24 hours a day. However, I believe that we must stand firm. If Flemming shuts his mouth, democracy will be lost.” — Naser Khader, a liberal Muslim of Syrian origin who lives in Denmark.

In the summer of 2005, the Danish artist Kåre Bluitgen, when he met a journalist from the Ritzaus Bureau news agency, said he was unable to find anyone willing to illustrate his book on Mohammed, the prophet of Islam. Three illustrators he contacted, Bluitgen said, were too scared. A few months later, Bluitgen reported that he had found someone willing to illustrate his book, but only on the condition of anonymity.

Like most Danish newspapers, Jyllands-Posten decided to publish an article about Bluitgen’s case. To test the state of freedom of expression, Flemming Rose, Jyllands-Posten’s cultural editor at the time, called twelve cartoonists, and offered them $160 each to draw a caricature of Mohammed. What then happened is a well-known, chilling story.

In the wave of Islamist violence against the cartoons, at least two hundred people were killed. Danish products vanished from shelves in Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen, Oman, the UAE and Lebanon. Masked gunmen stormed the offices of the European Union in Gaza and warned Danes and Norwegians to leave within 48 hours. In the Libyan city of Benghazi, protesters set fire to the Italian consulate. Political Islam understood what was being achieved and raised the stakes; the West did not.

An Islamic fatwa also forever changed Flemming Rose’s life. In an Islamic caricature, his head was put on a pike. The Taliban offered a bounty to anyone who would kill him. Rose’s office at the newspaper was repeatedly evacuated for bomb threats. And Rose’s name and face entered ISIS’s blacklist, along with that of the murdered editor of Charlie Hebdo, Stéphane Charbonnier.

Less known is the “white fatwa” that the journalistic class imposed on Rose. This brave Danish journalist reveals it in a recently published book, “De Besatte” (“The Obsessed”). “It is the story of how fear devours souls, friendships and the professional community,” says Rose. The book reveals how his own newspaper forced Rose to surrender.