RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

This week marks the 60th anniversary of the start of the Hungarian Revolution on Oct. 23, 1956. I was 16 years old.

On that day I helped pull down a massive bronze statue of the Russian tyrant Joseph Stalin in my home city of Budapest. The gigantic hollow bronze had been placed in one of the prominent parts of the city, where a chapel used to stand. Tyranny crumbled that day. I grabbed a small scrap of bronze from the fallen statue.

Two weeks later, in the early morning of Nov. 4, under orders from another Russian tyrant, 3,000 tanks crushed our fight for freedom. Hungarian freedom fighters’ radio broadcast Lincoln’s Gettysburg address pleading for help for their cause.

Soviet tank fire crumbled buildings. My family’s home collapsed above as we took shelter in the cellar. I climbed out of that rubble, wiping dust from my temple. Two days later and thousands of miles away, the U.S. voted to elect Dwight D. Eisenhower as president. Eisenhower voted that morning in his hometown of Gettysburg.

I fled Budapest, leaving my home carrying only what fit in my pockets—including that scrap of metal. I crossed the Hungarian frontier, running past a wall of barbed wire and watchtowers into Austria. I was now a refugee—one of 200,000. In the months that followed, Eisenhower’s administration welcomed 40,000 of us to the U.S. Eisenhower stated that: “All free nations share to the extent of their capabilities in the responsibility of granting asylum to victims of Communist persecution.”

Once in America I learned English by reading the words of the greatest president— Abraham Lincoln. I made my life’s work as a scholar of the Civil War and Lincoln, celebrating his belief in every American’s right to rise.

For nearly three decades I taught Civil War history at Gettysburg College. I married, raised a family and settled on a farm in Gettysburg that had served as a stop on the Underground Railroad and later as a Confederate battle hospital. It is near Eisenhower’s home and the cemetery where Lincoln spoke.

The voice of an angry populace will be heard. Recent elections in Germany, Austria, and Spain suggest the migration of displaced Syrians across the continent is leading to political convulsions rarely seen since World War II. Some will describe it as the radicalization of conventional politics. Others will describe these convulsions as a safety valve for the Europeans obliged to deal with the migration issue. For many, any party willing to say “stop” will receive a hearing.

It is not coincidental that in the U.S. that Donald Trump has ridden this horse to the nomination. There are many Americans fed up with uncontrolled immigration and its effect on the criminal justice system, the schools and the quality of city life. Trump may be a maladroit as a spokesman for a movement, but he has a remarkable instinct for unleashing the pent up frustration of a class of people left behind in the race for success.

This populism is a Western wide phenomenon that will reach the Asian shores at some point. In Japan, this political condition will translate into a demographic concern as the population decline affects everything from tax revenue to retail sales. China’s disruption isn’t far off either. When the government pulls the plug on inefficient state subsidized businesses and unemployment soars, a dramatic political effect is inexorable.

Later in the fall, Italy faces a constitutional referendum seen as an up-or-down vote on Premier Matteo Renzi’s pro European government. In each case, a vote represents a persistent sense of fragmentation, an antiestablishment sentiment dogging most of Europe. Clearly the possibility of the EU unravelling is real. Each populist success seems to engender the next in what detractors would describe as the “populist contagion”. French nationalist leader Marine Le Pen is likely to make it into the second round of French voting for the presidency next spring, a prediction that would have seemed far-fetched three years ago.

To some degree the political turbulence is a function of the challenges weighing on Europe’s economies. It is instructive that the Brexit vote did not have the catastrophic effect on the United Kingdom as was predicted. But, interestingly the EU has suffered from the British vote. The precise contours of the political debate vary from one place to the next, but the disaffection with the so-called establishment echoes across the continent and to the other side of the Atlantic.

Clearly the major point of contention that accounted for the Brexit vote and the emergence of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate is the refugee policy. Merkel’s German rivals use slogans such as “Politics for our own people” and Trump contends “we must be a country again”. The meaning is clear. Many people have a diffuse feeling the government no longer has this refugee challenge under control.