RUTHFULLY YOURS

SCHIPHOL, the Netherlands—Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders went on trial for discrimination and inciting hatred, in a case that could have far-reaching consequences for the political discourse in the Netherlands ahead of general elections.

The weekslong trial, which formally began on Monday, comes as Mr. Wilders is expected to become a front-runner in the March vote amid a rise in populist movements across Europe. His trial will address a fundamental question: Is the right of free speech for politicians absolute, or should it be restricted to protect against discrimination?

Mr. Wilders is being charged over comments he made during local elections in 2014. At a party rally in The Hague, he asked supporters if they wanted more or fewer Moroccans in the country. The crowd responded by chanting: “Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!” Mr. Wilders replied: “Well, we’ll take care of it then.”

More than 6,400 people filed complaints with the police after the speech was broadcast on national television, including many citizens of Dutch-Moroccan origin who accused the politician of sowing hatred and fueling ethnic tensions.

“Parliamentarians have great freedom to say what they stand for,” Dutch prosecutors said. ”However, it does not exempt them from the responsibility of complying with the law.”

Mr. Wilders, who didn’t attend the opening of the trial, has argued that he was only talking about specific problems and that he didn’t want all Moroccans to leave the country.

“This trial is a farce,” he said according to a statement read out by his lawyer. “Political statements should be discussed in parliament and not in court.”

On the first day of the trial, which took place in a high-security courtroom close to Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, the court sought to establish the events surrounding the speeches and the validity of the complaints.

If he is convicted, Mr. Wilders could theoretically be sent to jail, although he is more likely to receive a fine or a community-service sentence. The trial will take more than three weeks and a ruling is expected in December.

Mr. Wilders, 53 years old, is one of Europe’s most prominent and controversial anti-Islam politicians. He has described the religion as a fascist ideology that should be removed from Dutch society.

In his one-page election manifesto he calls for a “de-Islamization” of the Netherlands. He wants to ban the Quran, shut mosques and close the borders to migrants from Islamic countries. An average of polls shows his Party for Freedom is slightly behind the center-right Liberal Party of Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

It is the second time Mr. Wilders has faced prosecution on hate-speech charges. In 2011, a court acquitted him on the grounds that freedom-of-speech laws protected such rhetoric in the Netherlands. Dutch prosecutors say the latest charges are different because this time “an entire population group is now lumped together.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Europe’s descent into a new kind of anti-Semitism hit a new low last week in, of all places, the Palace of Westminster. There, at an event in the House of Lords, Jews were blamed for the Holocaust, Israel was compared to Islamic State and Zionists were said to have power over Parliament.

Jenny Tonge, a baroness and former member of parliament who hosted this showcase of anti-Semitic lies on behalf of the Palestinian Return Center lobby group, was launching a campaign to press Britain to apologize for the Balfour Declaration. The centenary of this historic promise to create a home for the Jewish people in Palestine will be marked next year.

One unidentified speaker blamed the “heretic” American Rabbi Stephen Wise for having “antagonized Hitler over the edge” with calls for a boycott of Germany in 1935. He quoted Wise’s 1905 statement that there were “six million bleeding and suffering reasons to justify Zionism” and made special note of the number. This is a classic trope of Holocaust denial, suggesting the number of the Nazis’ victims has been fabricated to match this earlier number.
Not only did Ms. Tonge fail to interrupt or dispute this speaker: she responded by demanding a boycott of Israel. The baroness’s reputation as an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist has earned her notoriety but never ostracism. Six years ago she suggested that Israel’s humanitarian mission to Haiti was harvesting the organs of disaster victims. This modern version of the medieval blood libel was tolerated by her center-left party, the Liberal Democrats.

Even after last week’s event was publicized by the Israeli embassy in London, the baroness was merely suspended from the party. She has since resigned, blaming Israel for manipulating British politics: “They like to be in control of things.”

The precincts of Westminster ought never again be desecrated by anti-Semites acting on behalf of Islamist lobbyists. The Conservative floor leader of the House of Commons, David Lidington, has protested on behalf of the government. Free speech doesn’t require turning Parliament into a safe space for Holocaust denial. It is now for members of Britain’s upper chamber to put their house in order.

But an avalanche of such propaganda can be expected, as Palestinians and the left exploit next year’s anniversary to mobilize support for their delegitimization of Israel. The Balfour Declaration plays a crucial role in their mendacious narrative depicting Zionism as a form of imperialism.

It is vital to put the record straight: Israel is not and never has been a colonial enterprise, but—in the words of Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour in his “declaration,” which was actually a public letter to Baron Rothschild—a “national home for the Jewish people.” Zionism is the political expression of the legitimate aspiration of Jews to have their own state. CONTINUE AT SITE

If Abbas is unable to make peace inside his own Fatah faction, how will he ever be able to end the dispute with Hamas? And the more crucial question: How can Abbas ever be expected to make peace with Israel when he cannot even control his own Fatah loyalists? The Palestinian political situation, plagued with anarchy on all fronts, is deteriorating on a daily basis.

Israel and the rest of the world are currently facing two Palestinian camps: one (Hamas) that does not want to make peace with Israel because it believes Israel ought not to exist, and the second (Fatah) that cannot make peace with Israel because it is too weak to do so. The next US administration, whatever political persuasion it may be, would do well to mark this reality.

This has become predictable. Given two minutes of breath, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas resorts to the old tactic of courting Hamas as a way of hiding from the disaffection of his own Fatah faction. The overtures towards Hamas are a smokescreen for what many Palestinians are beginning to perceive as the beginning of a revolt against Abbas.

Last week, Abbas held a surprise meeting in Qatar with Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal. The meeting reportedly considered ways of ending the longstanding dispute between Fatah and Hamas and achieving “national reconciliation.”

Abbas aides said the meeting also dealt with the possibility of forming a Palestinian “national unity” government and holding long-overdue presidential, parliamentary and municipal elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The unexpected meeting was held under the auspices of the rulers of Qatar, a country that has long been the Number One sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood organization, of which Hamas is an offshoot.

“Idiots, since when have non-Muslims been wished to rest in peace?” — Tweet after the death of a Jewish businessman in Turkey.

All of this history and narrative makes one ask: What is a radical Muslim and what is a moderate Muslim? Is “being radical” only about being an armed militant? Can Muslims who do not engage in violent action but who have extremely hate-filled and murderous speech be considered “moderate”? Or would their supremacist or even genocidal speech be enough to name them as “radical?”

What then is the difference between armed Islamic State terrorists who threaten Jews with massacres, and unarmed Turkish Twitter users who celebrate Jewish deaths and call for massacring more Jews?

Two important Jew have lost their lives lately: Shimon Peres, the ninth President of Israel, and Ishak Alaton, a Jewish businessman from Turkey.

Upon receiving the news of the deaths of these two men, many Turks rushed to Twitter proudly and openly to show off their hatred of Jews, according to the Turkish news site, Avlaremoz, which covers Jewish affairs.

Some of the Tweets posted after Peres’s death on September 28 included:

“Shimon Peres died, there is now one fewer Jew. I wish the same for other Jews and their sperm…”
“Shimon Peres died. One fewer Jew. The world has got rid of one more piece of dirt.”
“Shimon Peres, you’ll get a nice tan there. May your hellfire be fierce. Jewish dog.”
“It would be great if we do salah [Islamic prayer] of thankfulness every time a Jew drops dead.”
“Hellfire is calling you, Jewish dog Shimon Peres.”

During the first six months of 2016, migrants committed 142,500 crimes, according to the Federal Criminal Police Office. This is equivalent to 780 crimes committed by migrants every day, an increase of nearly 40% over 2015. The data includes only those crimes in which a suspect has been caught.

Thousands of migrants who entered the country as “asylum seekers” or “refugees” have gone missing. They are, presumably, economic migrants who entered Germany on false pretenses. Many are thought to be engaging in robbery and criminal violence.

Local police in many parts of the country admit that they are stretched to the limit and are unable to maintain law and order.

“Drug trafficking takes place right before our eyes. If we intervene, we are threatened, spat on, insulted. Sometimes someone whips out a knife. They are always the same people. They are ruthless, fearless and have no problems with robbing even the elderly.” — Private security guard.

According to Freddi Lohse of the German Police Union in Hamburg, many migrant offenders view the leniency of the German justice system as a green light to continue delinquent behavior. “They are used to tougher consequences in their home countries,” he said. “They have no respect for us.”

“It cannot be that offenders continue to fill the police files, hurt us physically, insult us, whatever, and there are no consequences. Many cases are closed or offenders are released on probation or whatever. Yes, what is happening in the courts today is a joke.” — Tania Kambouri, German police officer.

The rape of a ten-year-old girl in Leipzig, the largest city in Saxony, has drawn renewed attention to the spiraling levels of violent crime perpetrated by migrants in cities and towns across Germany — and the lengths to which German officials and the media go to censor information about the perpetrators of those crimes.

The girl was riding her bicycle to school at seven o’clock in the morning on October 27 when a man ambushed her, threw her to the ground and raped her. The suspect is described as being in his mid-thirties with short brown hair and a stubble beard.

I thought Australians didn’t like us. We were always taught that Islam is all about temptation and being tested to prove your faith is unshakeable. Outsiders were to be kept away, because they were only coming to test us or try to change us, so we shouldn’t talk or engage with them.
Gabrielle Lord: In 2014, I published a novel titled Dishonour, about an Iraqi girl in Australia who is desperate to avoid a forced marriage to a cousin back in Iraq and the female police officer who tries to help her. The fictitious 18 year old Rana fears she will be taken out of the country against her will and forced to marry a man who is almost twice her age and who is “traditional” in his religious observance. This means that the intended fiancé lives his life under sharia law, and that Rana’s position back in Iraq would be that of a subservient, second-class human being, a servant subject to the domination and sanctioned violence of her husband and his family, relegated to childbearing and endless cooking. Rana rejects this; she wants that most basic of all human rights: the right to self-determination. She wants to complete her pharmacy degree, as well as follow her heart. She has become attracted to Christianity, is in the process of converting, and is in love with a young Copt who wants to marry her. In other words, she wants the freedoms that other Australian women take for granted, but which are prohibited to her by sharia law.

In the course of researching this novel, it was necessary to interview several women of Muslim background who had converted. This wasn’t easy and I was shocked to hear that they live in fear of their own communities and that if their families ever discovered that they were “losing their religion,” they would be shunned, their entire extended families shamed and they themselves possibly exposed to retributive violence. What I was writing as fiction in a novel, was the lived experience of women and girls living in Australia. I had to operate with a go-between, a trusted clergyman, in order to gain access and their confidence.

Recently, I was fortunate enough to meet “Asiya”, a highly intelligent Iraqi girl, in her early twenties, smart, elegant and insightful, who was willing to speak frankly about her childhood and her observations of family life as a young Muslima in Sydney’s western suburbs. Asiya is very concerned about the isolation of girls such as she was, growing up in Australia and yet completely unable to access the wider community of Australians, or “the Europeans”, one of the words her family used to refer to the rest of us.

As she spoke, I thought she was talking about her experiences back in Iraq, but no, her story is one which takes place in the western suburbs of Sydney. She believes there are thousands of young girls trapped as she once was.

_________________________________________

Asiya: We were kept locked up at home. We never went anywhere except to [Islamic] school. Even when our parents went shopping, we were not allowed to go. I didn’t know what a shopping mall was. I didn’t even know where I lived—apart from the name of the suburb—but I had no idea where that was. Sometimes, when the parents were out, my brother would disconnect the satellite dish and we could watch ordinary television. That was the only time I saw anything of the outside world.

My father was very devout, but he was an educated man and ran a very successful business. My mother was emotionally unstable and had a lot of issues. We were beaten for everything and the beatings were accompanied with threats about how we were going to hell where we would burn for eternity. I think my mother suffered from postpartum depression; a lot of the women do, because they’re forced to marry men they don’t want and then have children that they don’t want and so they take it out on the kids who are just another chore for them. They’re suffering because they’re “living beyond their own choice”. I honestly think that I would have died of neglect except for my older sister who cared for me. In fact, my mother used to openly say that I would have died except for my sister’s intervention. She wasn’t upset about saying that. She hated me.

According to my mother, I was a rebellious child, and was always being beaten. There were no bedtime stories, just the endless threats of hellfire because we were disobeying Allah. There were nine of us and the house was ruled by fear. If anything was broken or damaged in the house, we were lined up and interrogated, one by one.

In Year 5, I read Robin Klein’s novel People Might Hear You, which made a deep impression on me. (GL: It is the story of Helen, who tries to escape from an overwhelming religious cult, in which the girls are kept as servants, submissive and silent, in a regime imposed by her stepfather.) It was a turning point for me. I realised that what was happening in our house was actually strange, and not the norm. Then from about age ten to thirteen I became very religious and started to wear the hijab. But around thirteen to fourteen, I started to question my religion. I had a massive obsession with astronomy and as I studied science, I came to see that the planets and the galaxies move according to their own laws and that Allah has nothing to do with it. I was always in trouble at school because we are Shia and the school was Sunni. My answers were always wrong. The Sunnis say there’s only one person worse than a Jew and that’s a Shia. It’s twice the honour for killing a Shia than for killing a Jew. That’s what they say. At school, teachers saw the bruises on us from the beatings but they didn’t do anything. Even the Australian teachers. They’d try to make it up to us by being extra-sweet to us, or giving us better marks, but they never reported the abuse.

I was only a baby during the time the whole family fled to Saudi Arabia to avoid the war. My sisters told me about it later. It’s the most awful place in the world. The Sunnis despise the Shia so we were badly treated and forbidden to leave the camp which was in the middle of the desert. The religious police were on the alert for any breach of the rules, enforcing strict Wahhabism/sharia. If a woman stepped outside her tent without her scarf, she could be arrested and whipped.

One-third of Australians, according to the latest poll, oppose Muslim immigration — down on an earlier survey which put the figure at around fifty per cent. Whatever the actual number, it is heartening to note that good sense continues to defy the elites’ favoured narrative
I was (pleasantly) taken aback by the recent Essential Research survey which found that half of those polled favoured a ban on Muslim immigration. Apparently half of my fellow citizens have a deep concern about the threat that Islam poses to our way of life. Alas, and unsurprisingly, this is a stretch. Another survey points to fewer Australians having this level of concern. Roy Morgan research (26 October) reports as follows:

In a special Roy Morgan survey conducted over three nights last week, clear majorities of Australians signalled their support of Muslim immigration (58% cf. 33% oppose) and Asylum-seeker immigration (66% cf. 25% oppose). This applies to the majority of all major political parties’ supporters (including L-NP voters). These results are in stark contrast to Essential Research’s recent poll, which claimed that half of the population would support a ban on Muslim immigration.

The report went on to criticise surveys based on internet soundings – which I assume refers to the competitor poll. There it is then. Sixty per cent or thereabouts of Australians are quite happy to welcome Muslim immigrants; only one third are opposed. Hold on, only one third? This ain’t bad.

Despite determined and concerted efforts to sanitise the problem on the part of the political and media class, and on the part of many ‘wets’ among Christian church leaders, one third of Australians have seen through the BS. This is striking as only a handful of people know anything at all about Islam. At a guess, 99.99 per cent would not have been within cooee of a Koran. And the BS would make Goebbels proud.
See also ‘People Can Hear You‘

First, Islam is described as religion of peace by the great and good Western political leaders; particularly (and gallingly to those not taken in) after each barbaric Islamic terrorist attack. Second, the welter of Islamic hate speech and barbarities are ascribed ad nauseam, by politicians and the MSM, to those who have a perverted their religion, in contrast to the overwhelming moderate majority. It doesn’t matter what Pew poll comes out vouchsafing the fundamentalism of vast swathes of Muslim populations worldwide. These are all ignored in favour of the moderate-Muslim narrative.

King Solomon built the First Temple here around 1000 BC. The Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar tore it down 400 years later. In the first century BC, King Herod refurbished a Second Temple. It is here that Jesus Christ lashed out against the money-changers. The Roman General Titus exacted revenge against Jewish rebels, sacking and burning the Temple in 70 AD.

UNESCO seeks to erase this history of faiths and replace it with a jihadi narrative that would deny both Christians and Jews their age-old access to the symbols of their faiths. If they are not stopped, the Islamist backers of the UNESCO resolution will be emboldened eventually to back Islamist elements in India to question its Hindu historical and religious sites.

After so many recent votes at UNESCO erasing Judeo-Christian history in favour of Islamist misrepresentation one thing is clear: the sooner democracies leave the UN, the better. Consider the UN’s oil-for-food scandal of 2004-2005 and its growing sex-for-food scandal that is still ongoing. Now, with the UN’s wholesale erasure of Biblical history, the only intelligent response is to head for the exits. The UN seems nothing more than a bloated, corrupt jobs program of champagne for diplomats. It does far more harm than good. Nothing worth having can come from such a degraded place.

One wonders what India’s Permanent Delegation to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is doing in Paris today. India joined it way back on November 4, 1946. Given the potential of this cultural agency in spreading enlightenment derived from scientific education and fostering development throughout the world, New Delhi sent to the organization internationally acclaimed philosopher and future President, S. Radhakrishnan as a member. He rose to become its chairman during 1948-49. New Delhi’s abstention from voting on the October 18 resolution in UNESCO’s Executive Board, however, indicates the Indian delegation now in Paris is absolutely ineffective.

In a 24-6 vote, the Executive Board ratified a resolution that refers to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and its adjoining Western Wall solely by their Muslim names of Al-Haram Al-Sharif and the “Buraq Wall.” The nations that voted for it included: Brazil, China, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Morocco, Mexico, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Oman, Russia, South Africa, and Vietnam.

The six countries that voted “no” were Estonia, Germany, Lithuania, Netherlands, United Kingdom and United States.

Those that abstained included: Albania, Argentina, Cameroon, El Salvador, France, Ghana, Greece, Guinea, Haiti, India, Italy, Ivory Coast, Japan, Kenya, Nepal, Paraguay, Saint Vincent and Nevis, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda and Ukraine.