RUTHFULLY YOURS

There are an estimated six million Muslims living in Latin American cities, who provide a fertile terrorist recruiting environment.

“Iran has opened up more than 80 cultural centers in Latin America in order to export its toxic brand of political influence and serve its interest, focusing on partnering with nations well known for their anti-American rhetoric including Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua.” — US Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, in testimony for the House Sub-Committee on the Middle East and North Africa.

Amidst the unspeakable economic distress facing residents of Venezuela today, security experts have identified yet another major cause for concern emanating from this once prosperous, oil-rich nation: Iran is moving in, partnering with Venezuela’s prosperous drug traders and creating a foothold there, as well as in other “friendly” Latin American countries. Iran is laundering money in Latin America and presumably secretly plotting to accomplish a strategic long-term goal to penetrate the Western hemisphere.

Iran’s terrorist activities, its partnership with Venezuelan drug traffickers and the general criminal atmosphere affects the citizens of Caracas so much that people reportedly are fearful of even going to the store to wait in the endless lines for food.

In Venezuela, security analysts say, the corruption starts at the very top with President Nicolas Maduro himself, who is looking frantically for money in every crevasse to keep the nation and his presidency afloat. Reports estimate that in Venezuela one police officer dies every day and the number of homicides per capita in Caracas is the highest in the world.

National crime statistics, however, seem to be just the start: deeper and more alarming than the Venezuelan homicide toll, there appears to be an imminent threat to the entire Western hemisphere from partnerships between Venezuelan drug traffickers and terrorist networks like Hamas and Hezbollah, two groups that act a proxies for Iran.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks served as the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013
The new antisemitism has mutated so that any practitioner of it can deny that he or she is an anti-Semite. After all, they’ll say, I’m not a racist. I have no problem with Jews or Judaism. I only have a problem with the State of Israel. Have we forgotten how the hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews?

Below is a transcript of a speech by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks at “The Future of the Jewish Communities in Europe” Conference at The European Parliament on September 27, 2016, in Brussels.

The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews. That is what I want us to understand today. It wasn’t Jews alone who suffered under Hitler. It wasn’t Jews alone who suffered under Stalin. It isn’t Jews alone who suffer under ISIS or Al Qaeda or Islamic Jihad. We make a great mistake if we think antisemitism is a threat only to Jews. It is a threat, first and foremost, to Europe and to the freedoms it took centuries to achieve.

Antisemitism is not about Jews. It is about anti-Semites. It is about people who cannot accept responsibility for their own failures and have instead to blame someone else. Historically, if you were a Christian at the time of the Crusades, or a German after the First World War, and saw that the world hadn’t turned out the way you believed it would, you blamed the Jews. That is what is happening today. And I cannot begin to say how dangerous it is. Not just to Jews but to everyone who values freedom, compassion and humanity.The appearance of antisemitism in a culture is the first symptom of a disease, the early warning sign of collective breakdown. If Europe allows antisemitism to flourish, that will be the beginning of the end of Europe

And what I want to do in these brief remarks is simply to analyze a phenomenon full of vagueness and ambiguity, because we need precision and understanding to know what antisemitism is, why it happens, why anti-Semites are convinced that they are not anti-Semitic.First let me define antisemitism. Not liking Jews is not antisemitism. We all have people we don’t like. That’s OK; that’s human; it isn’t dangerous. Second, criticizing Israel is not antisemitism. I was recently talking to some schoolchildren and they asked me: is criticizing Israel antisemitism? I said No and I explained the difference. I asked them: Do you believe you have a right to criticize the British government? They all put up their hands. Then I asked, Which of you believes that Britain has no right to exist? No one put up their hands. Now you know the difference, I said, and they all did.

Antisemitism means denying the right of Jews to exist collectively as Jews with the same rights as everyone else. It takes different forms in different ages. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated because of their religion. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century they were hated because of their race. Today they are hated because of their nation state, the state of Israel. It takes different forms but it remains the same thing: the view that Jews have no right to exist as free and equal human beings.

If there is one thing I and my contemporaries did not expect, it was that antisemitism would reappear in Europe within living memory of the Holocaust. The reason we did not expect it was that Europe had undertaken the greatest collective effort in all of history to ensure that the virus of antisemitism would never again infect the body politic. It was a magnificent effort of anti-racist legislation, Holocaust education and interfaith dialogue. Yet antisemitism has returned despite everything.

On January 27, 2000, representatives of 46 governments from around the world gathered in Stockholm to issue a collective declaration of Holocaust remembrance and the continuing fight against antisemitism, racism and prejudice. Then came 9/11, and within days conspiracy theories were flooding the internet claiming it was the work of Israel and its secret service, the Mossad. In April, 2002, on Passover, I was in Florence with a Jewish couple from Paris when they received a phone call from their son, saying, “Mum, Dad, it’s time to leave France. It’s not safe for us here anymore.”

In May, 2007, in a private meeting here in Brussels, I told the three leaders of Europe at the time, Angela Merkel, President of the European Council, Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, and Hans-Gert Pöttering, President of the European Parliament, that the Jews of Europe were beginning to ask whether there was a future for Jews in Europe.

That was more than nine years ago. Since then, things have become worse. Already in 2013, before some of the worst incidents, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights found that almost a third of Europe’s Jews were considering emigrating because of anti-Semitism. In France the figure was 46%; in Hungary 48%.

Let me ask you this. Whether you are Jewish or Christian, Muslim: would you stay in a country where you need armed police to guard you while you prayed? Where your children need armed guards to protect them at school? Where, if you wear a sign of your faith in public, you risk being abused or attacked? Where, when your children go to university, they are insulted and intimidated because of what is happening in some other part of the world? Where, when they present their own view of the situation they are howled down and silenced?

This is happening to Jews throughout Europe. In every single country of Europe, without exception, Jews are fearful for their or their children’s future. If this continues, Jews will continue to leave Europe, until, barring the frail and the elderly, Europe will finally have become Judenrein.

On the evening July 14, citizens and tourists gathered on the promenade in Nice, France, to celebrate Bastille Day, but the night would end in horror as the celebrations turned into the largest terrorist attack during 2016’s ‘Summer of Terror.’

The Nice attack, which took place just 90 days ago, would mark the midpoint of a near-constant stream of terror attacks in the West that began with the June 12 mass shooting at The Pulse night club in Orlando by Omar Mateen.

Since the Nice attack at least 20 terror attacks in Western countries have been committed—one nearly every 100 hours.

That pace is just slightly off from how this year’s “Summer of Terror” began. Two weeks after the Nice attack I noted that the pace was nearly one every 84 hours:

ISIS inspired or directed attacks outside Syria/Iraq occurring once every 84 hours since June 8 https://t.co/0Lh5LgphhF

— Patrick Poole (@pspoole) July 26, 2016

That statistic ended up widely circulated in the media, and the attacks would continue up through this past weekend, with this year’s recently concluded summer earning its moniker.

The fall of German Christianity leaves an emptiness that seems likely to be filled by a more multicultural and Islamic society. Germany today houses Europe’s largest Muslim community.

Christians in Germany, Die Welt reports, will become a minority in 20 years.

The falling birth rate will remove a piece of Germany larger than the former communist East Germany. It will result in a demographic loss equivalent to the population of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne and Frankfurt combined.

The German army just spent 428 million euros on various operations relating to migrants during the past year. It has been the costliest mission within German borders that the army of the Federal Republic of Germany has ever undertaken.

In the decades after WWII, Germans have turned into hard-core pacifists, enjoying their role on the sidelines of global conflicts. The army was then turned into a humanitarian organization.

“Contemporary historians … right now, have failed to find a single historical example of a society that became secularised and maintained its birth rate over subsequent centuries,” the former UK chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, recently argued.

“Falling fertility has coincided so closely with massive secularization that we must at least ask whether the two phenomena are related, even if not in a neat one-to-one relationship”, the scholar Philip Jenkins also said.

Jordan King: ‘Outlaws of Islam’ are ‘Less Than a Drop in the Ocean of Good Muslim Citizens’ Bridget Johnson
THE KINGLET OF JORDAN, NOT “PLUCKY” AS HIS LATE FATHER WAS DESCRIBED COULD NOT SURVIVE A WEEK WITHOUT THE HELP OF ISRAELI INTEL. THE PALARABS HAVE HAD THEIR SIGHTS ON JORDAN SINCE HIS FATHER KILLED THOUSANDS OF PLO UPSTARTS AND EXPELLED AN EQUAL NUMBER IN THE INCIDENT KNOWN AS “BLACK SEPTEMBER.”…RSK

In Germany on Saturday to accept the Westphalian Peace Prize, Jordanian King Abdullah II told Chancellor Angela Merkel and the German people that “without all of you the world would not be where we are today and we would be in a much worse position.”

“I see, unfortunately, too often, among western officials and opinion leaders, a dangerous lack of understanding of the true nature of Islam. Extremists – on all sides – use that lack of knowledge to polarize societies and drive us apart,: the monarch said. “Far from benefiting a country or community, this division harms us all.”

Abdullah asked to audience to “imagine what the future would look like if we don’t take a stand for each other.”

“If we ignore distant violence and poverty, as if it has nothing to do with our lives, our countries, our economies? If we close our eyes to the worst global refugee crisis in human history, and let a ‘lost generation’, millions of young people, come of age without hope?” he said. “If we let the future belong, not to law, but to outlaws: mass murder, persecution, the abuse of children, the enslavement of women, videoed executions of those who disagree? No. To such a future, we must say no.”

Jordan has absorbed about 1.4 million Syrian refugees, while Germany has taken in more than 600,000.

The king called for “collective action” to “end the regional crises and vulnerabilities that terrorists exploit.”

“Muslim-majority countries in the Balkans need to be integrated into an inclusive Europe, and supported in keeping the door shut against terrorist groups. They are your family, your frontline,” Abdullah argued.

He called for a peace process “that engages all components of the Syrian people, upholds Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, ends suffering, and brings hope.”

Abdullah also advocated “a Peace and Stability Pact for the Levant – a pact that will encompass not only a code of conduct, but enhanced regional cooperation, and a regional fund for cohesion to address the serious socioeconomic challenges our people face.”

The king admitted that the influx of Syrian refugees in his country “has put unprecedented pressures on the essentials of life: jobs, energy, housing, even water” and “is draining a quarter of our entire national budget.” Adding in Palestinians, Iraqis, Libyans, Yemenis, etc., “makes Jordan the biggest host of refugees in the world.”

“It is wrong for Jordanians to be asked to carry such a refugee burden,” he said, stressing the crisis “demands global, collective action, to share the burden and support host communities and refugees alike.”

On fighting terror groups, Abudllah said “the Golden Commandment, to love our neighbor, guides our global responsibilities – and it must guide interfaith relationships as well.” CONTINUE AT SITE