RUTHFULLY YOURS

Amina al-Jeffrey was born in Swansea, UK, and taken at age 16 to Saudi Arabia by her father, who disapproved of her Western lifestyle.

Now 21, she is fighting a court battle in the High Court in London against her father to be allowed to return to the UK.

She alleges that her father, Mohammed al-Jeffrey, put “metal bars” on her bedroom and described being a “locked-up girl with a shaved head.”

Still a judge in the High Court, Justice Holman, has asserted, “We have to be careful about asserting the supremacy our cultural standards.”

Holman also said that it is unclear whether or not Britain had jurisdiction in the matter since al-Jeffrey was an adult with dual Saudi and UK citizenship.

Al-Jeffrey said her father hit her, deprived her of water and forced her to urinate in a cup.

Although “metal bars are no longer in her room” according to her lawyers, “she is still locked up in the house” and “not allowed to use the phone or internet.”

“Steps need to be taken to ensure Ms. Jeffery is returned to the UK where her safety can be guaranteed,” the Foreign Office Forced Marriage Unit said in a statement.

“Her treatment has extended to depriving her of food and water, depriving her of toilet facilities, physical assault and control of her ability to marry who she wishes and creating a situation in which she feels compelled to marry as a means of escape,” Henry Setright, a lawyer acting on behalf of al-Jeffrey said in a statement.

Fr Jacques Hamel, murdered today by Islamists in Normandy, was 84, and in his life would have seen his country transformed, from the Occupation to the Thirty Golden Years and through to this modern unhappy age. I can’t imagine that a young priest in the age of the Piuses would have expected to end his life in such a manner, near to where Joan of Arc was martyred, but then Europeans are getting used to things that a few decades ago would have been absurd.

After the war, Europeans thought they could escape history, and retire to a secular, progressive world in which historical conflicts of identity would be a thing of the past. But instead of fascism and communism, even older, more retrograde ideologies have sprung up, and history goes on.

Christianity might be dying of indifference in western Europe but elsewhere it remains a living part of history, and that story includes persecution. Being a priest or a religious remains a dangerous task – earlier this year four nuns in Yemen were murdered, while a number of priests and bishops have been killed in Syria; likewise in Iraq, where some 60 churches were bombed during the conflict, the worst incident being the 2010 Our Lady of Salvation massacre where 52 men, women and children were slaughtered by a then little known outfit called the Islamic State of Iraq. The survivors were given asylum in France, which has always been especially generous towards eastern Christians.

In recent years the most dangerous place to be a priest has been Mexico, where the endless drug wars have put different types of bad guys in positions of power; but there is no doubting that Islamic intolerance remains the greatest threat to churchmen worldwide, as it does to Christians. Islamists have previously concocted plots to attack churches in France, but now that it has finally happened the future seems daunting.

France has several thousand churches still functioning to some degree or other (it has 40,000 in total, but population decline and secularisation put pay to many long ago) so it would be physically impossible to guard them in the way synagogues are now sadly protected in that country.

It’s hard not to be extremely pessimistic about the situation in Europe, for identity-based violence has a momentum of its own, and it is difficult to imagine we’ll get through this summer without more horror in France or Germany.

The irony is that many angry young Islamists are especially hostile to Christianity, yet this new wave of violence is a product of the very openness that Christianity brought to Europe. As Tom Holland explained in this magnificent essay:

‘Even today, with pews across Europe increasingly empty, the attempt to fashion an inclusive and multi-faith future for the continent remains shadowed by a paradox: that it has patently been grounded in Christian doctrines. The inheritance of Christendom, even when most assertively repudiated, has proven a hard one to buck. The Bible, for all that it might be deployed to mandate the violence of warrior-kings and crusaders, was not only a tool of the mighty. It served as well to endow the weak, the poor, and the needy with a value that they had never before possessed. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, ‘Love your enemies . . .’” Such a command, like many that Jesus gave, might seem so counterintuitive as to appear impossible to fulfill; and yet for all that, and however little many may have paused to contemplate its ultimate derivation, it has provided elites across Europe, in their efforts to accommodate immigrants from outside the Christian tradition, with their moral lodestar.’

On learning that 86-year-old Father Jacques Hamel had murdered in his own church in a village near Rouen by Islamist demons who stormed in during Mass and slit his throat, the president of the World Jewish Congress issued a heartfelt message of condolence:

“This morning, my thoughts and prayers are with the victims of yet another atrocious attack, and with the good people of France who sadly have become so familiar with the reality of terrorism in recent months.

Alas, there is no respite. Every day, these terrorists make it abundantly clear to the world that nothing is sacred to them, that they will not shy away from any execrable affront to the most basic values of our society.

Let’s be clear: this is not a war between religions, but between good and evil. We must stand as one in the face of this great threat. We must not be intimidated, but cherish our freedom, including the freedom to worship. We must speak out and not be silent. We must defend each other, and we must look after one another: one religious community after the other, one country after the other. This evil scourge won’t be defeated unless we are united in our resolve to defeat it.”

“Not a war between religions”.

Many might disagree.

Though perhaps not this chap Sutherland.
He’s one of the political elites who wants Europe to be ever more f*cked culturally enriched.

Remember this?:

And clearly not the Pope:

‘Pope Francis has warned that a recent wave of jihadist attacks in Europe is proof that “the world is at war”. However, he stressed he did not mean a war of religions, but rather a conflict over “interests, money, resources”. He was speaking ahead of his visit to Poland to reporters seeking his comments on the murder of a Catholic priest by French jihadists on Tuesday….’

He’s now at work on Polish youth, urging them to welcome “migrants”.

Or the repellent Merkel, who has dug her heels in regarding her asylum policy, despite conceding the other day what should have been obvious from the start:

On Tuesday morning, an 85-year-old man was forced to his knees while his throat was slit by Islamic fanatics. The murder of Father Jacques Hamel in the church at Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, near Rouen, has been recognised by western public opinion as an act of unspeakable barbarity. One could say that the facts speak for themselves. But for Catholics, this atrocity possesses a special horror.http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/07/islamic-fundamentalists-have-a-special-loathing-for-christianity/

Father Hamel was killed while re-enacting the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. That is the essence of the Catholic Mass, which — unlike Protestant commemorations of the Last Supper — is presented to the faithful as the same sacrifice offered by Jesus.

To kill a priest who is saying Mass is therefore an act of unique desecration. You do not need to be a believer to grasp this point. Enemies of the church have understood it since the beginning: an early pope, St Sixtus, was beheaded during Mass in 258 ad by agents of the Emperor Valerian.

Islamists, who reach back to the Dark Ages for so many of their actions, have rediscovered this crime. Their intense (and very successful) campaign to cleanse the Middle East of Christians reached its symbolic peak on 31 October 2010, when Father Thaer Abdal was shot dead at the altar of the Syrian Catholic church of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad. Fifty-seven other innocent people, many of them worshippers, died with him.

The gunmen who broke into the church during Sunday Mass were heard to scream: ‘All of you are infidels… we will go to paradise if we kill you and you will go to hell.’ They were members of an Iraqi faction of al-Qaeda that had declared war on churches, ‘dirty dens of idolatry’, and in particular ‘the hallucinating tyrant of the Vatican’.

The motives of Islamic terrorists are sometimes hard to disentangle from their personal biographies and factional infighting. But sometimes they are obvious, and the only thing obscuring them is the politically correct preciousness of the liberal western media and commentariat.

Many Islamic fundamentalists, including those who don’t participate directly in violence, loathe Christianity with a poisonous passion reminiscent of medieval Christian anti-Semitism. Its practice must be suppressed — either without violence, as in Saudi Arabia, or amid carefully staged scenes of bloodshed, as in Baghdad or Rouen.

How is your Merkelsommer going? For now, Britain seems to be missing the worst. True, a couple of men of Middle Eastern appearance tried to abduct a soldier near his base in Norfolk for what was unlikely to have been an interfaith dialogue session. But Britain’s geographical good fortune, relative success in limiting weapons and our justified scepticism of the undiscriminating ‘open borders’ brigade mean that we have so far been spared the delights of what Angela Merkel’s growing army of critics refer to as her summer of terror.It is now a fortnight since Mohammed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ploughed a truck along the Nice seafront, killing 84 people. The following Monday Mohammed Riyad, who said he was from Afghanistan but almost certainly came from Pakistan, screamed ‘Allahu Akbar’ while hacking with an axe at his fellow passengers on a Bavarian train. The next day another Mohammed, this time Mohamed Boufarkouch, shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ and stabbed a Frenchwoman and her three daughters (aged eight, 12 and 14) near Montpelier. Mixing things up a little, that Friday’s shooter in Munich was a child of Iranians called Ali David Sonboly. Skip forward a couple of days and a ‘-Syrian asylum seeker’ with a machete was hacking a pregnant woman to death in Stuttgart. The next day another ‘Syrian asylum seeker’, Mohammad Daleel, carried out a suicide bombing outside a bar in Ansbach, Bavaria. And a little over 24 hours later two men shouting the name of Isis entered a church in Rouen during Mass, took the nuns and congregation hostage and slaughtered the priest with a knife.

Although the public know what is going on, the media seems loath to find any connection between these events. Indeed, the same papers that blame an exaggerated spike in ‘hate crime’ on everyone who voted for Brexit seem unwilling to put the blame for these real and violent attacks on the individuals carrying them out. ‘Syrian man denied asylum killed in German blast’ was the Reuters headline on the Ansbach story, neatly turning the suicide bomber into the victim and the German asylum system into the perpetrator. As Reuters went on: ‘A 27-year-old Syrian man who had been denied asylum in Germany a year ago died on Sunday when a bomb he was carrying exploded outside a music festival.’ How terrible for him to lose his bomb in such a way.

The point is that the US aid deal is really a deal for Lockheed Martin, not for Israel. And we need to say no.On Monday, acting head of the National Security Council Yaakov Nagel will sit down with his US counterpart, Susan Rice, and try to conclude negotiations about a new, multi-year defense assistance package.

We must all hope that he fails.On Monday, acting head of the National Security Council Yaakov Nagel will sit down with his US counterpart, Susan Rice, and try to conclude negotiations about a new, multi-year defense assistance package.

We must all hope that he fails.No clear Israeli interest will be advanced by concluding the aid deal presently on the table.

Indeed, the deal now being discussed will cause Israel massive, long-term economic and strategic damage. This is true for a number of reasons.

First, there is the issue of the deal’s impact on Israel’s military industries, which are the backbone of Israel’s strategic independence.

Under the current defense package, which is set to expire next year, a quarter of the US aid Israel receives is converted to shekels and spent domestically.

Reportedly, the deal now under negotiation will bar Israel from using any of the funds domestically.

The implications for our military industries are dire. Not only will thousands of Israelis lose their jobs. Israel’s capacity to develop its own weapons systems will be dangerously diminished.

Then there is the problem of joint projects.

Today, Israel receives additional US funds to develop joint projects, including the Iron Dome and David’s Sling short range missile and rocket defense programs. These programs were undertaken in response to threats that weren’t foreseen when the current deal was negotiated a decade ago.

According to reports, the deal now being negotiated denies Israel and the US the ability to fund jointly new projects or to provide supplemental funding for existing projects. All funding for all projects will be covered by the lump sum that is currently being negotiated.

Not only does this preclude new projects, it prevents Congress from exercising oversight over administration funding of existing joint projects with Israel. President Barack Obama has consistently tried to slash funding of missile defense programs, only to be overridden by Congress. Under the deal now on the table, Congress will be denied the power to override a hostile administration.

Programed as they are in feminist myth-making, journalists, young and old, often ask incredulously, “Why would western girls travel to join ISIS fighters?” “ISIS men don’t believe in equality between the sexes.”

At heart, neither do women. Not when hormones rage.

Islamic State projects strength. Strength is an aphrodisiac. Women are biologically programmed to be attracted to powerful men. That’s one reason some girls willingly put on black nose bags and flock to become ISIS brides.

Brainwashed to think biology is incidental, and that men and women are essentially interchangeable; younger readers will likely find it harder to grasp something as primordial and important as the male-female biological category.

Sheikh Muhammad Ayed has no such problem. Speaking in a deep, sonorous voice; in what sounds like classical Arabic, this imam can be observed on YouTube delivering a sermon from East Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque. The object of Sheikh Ayed’s coruscating derision is the emasculated West. It is primed for a muscular, Muslim takeover, he argues.

Said Ayed (as translated by The Middle East Media Research Institute):

“But they have lost their fertility, so they look for fertility in their midst. We will give them fertility! We will breed children with them, because we shall conquer their countries—whether you like it or not, oh Germans, oh Americans, oh French, oh Italians, and all those like you. Take the refugees! We shall soon collect them in the name of the coming Caliphate. We will say to you: These are our sons. Send them, or we will send our armies to you.”

On its side, Islam has ascetic evangelists such as Ayed, who bow to no one.

On our side we have Father Michael Pfleger! He’s the too-hideous-to-behold, standard issue, Western preacher-cum-Obama idolater.

Pray tell: Who looks and sounds more impressive to the young and the impressionable? The impassioned, unapologetic, manly imam in flowing, Lawrence-of-Arabia robes, who channels the Word of his Prophet? Or, Father Pfleger, the soft face of the West’s ultra-liberal faith; a tool of liberal public administration; a man more eager to prostrate himself to Caesar than to serve a higher authority?

Pfleger’s ilk—the West’s priesthood—are in the four corners of the earth preaching hate for their own kind. Thus, in a week in which fifteen blacks wielding Kalashnikovs killed two white farmers in KwaZulu-Natal; another excuse-for-a-man—man-of-the-cloth Michael Vorster—was at a South-African pulpit puling about the controlling ways of “whiteness.”

Chancellor Merkel said she knows that Germans are worried about their personal safety: “We are doing everything humanly possible to ensure security in Germany,” she noted, but added, “Anxiety and fear cannot guide our political decisions.”

“The chancellor remains committed to her current course of action. A classic Merkel refrain follows: ‘There must be a thorough analysis.'” — Thomas Vitzthum, political editor of Die Welt.

“The country is split, its citizens deeply insecure? ‘We can do it!’ Sexual assaults on women in swimming pools and at festivals? ‘We can do it!’ Terrorist attacks by Islamists in Germany? ‘We can do it!’ Growing frustration and rising political apathy among the population? ‘We can do it!’ But who are the ‘we’? … Not a word to the citizens who for a year have had to deal with the consequences of the asylum onslaught. Not a word to the local communities that are unable to cope with the financial and burdens of accommodating asylum seekers.” — Editorial in the newspaper, Junge Freiheit.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has rejected criticism of her decision to allow more than a million mostly Muslim migrants to enter Germany last year.

Speaking at an annual summer press conference in Berlin on July 28, a defiant Merkel ignored critics of her refugee policies and insisted there would be no change to her open-door migration stance. She also said she bears no responsibility for a recent spate of violent attacks in Germany.

Germany has been rattled by an axe attack on a train in Würzburg, a mass shooting in Munich, a machete attack in Reutlingen and a suicide bomb in Ansbach — all within a week.

The attacks, which left 13 dead, were all carried out by Muslims: Three of the attacks were carried out by asylum seekers and one by a German-Iranian who harbored a hatred of Arabs and Turks.

Merkel, who interrupted her summer holiday to attend the 90-minute press conference, which was pushed forward by a month, reiterated her credo: “We can do it!” (“Wir schaffen das!”). She has repeated the phrase over and over since Germany’s migration crisis exploded on September 4, 2015, when she opened up the German border to tens of thousands of migrants stranded in Hungary. She said:

“We decided to fulfill our humanitarian obligations. I did not say it would be easy. I said back then, and I will say it again now, that we can manage our historic task — and this is a historic test in times of globalization — just as we have managed so much already, we can do it. Germany is a strong country.”

Israel’s growing diplomatic, military, and economic ties across the Middle East, Africa and Asia should shatter an enduring myth: that the Israel-Palestinian conflict will make Israel an international pariah.

These ties reflect not only the foresight of Israel’s leaders, the doggedness of its diplomacy and the strength of its economy, but also the rise of Iran in the region and the spread of terrorism beyond it.

Consider the irony. Israel’s ties to the United States and Europe are strained over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, particularly with Washington, the Iranian nuclear deal – even though Israel is the lone nation in the turbulent Middle East that shares the West’s values of freedom and democracy.

Meanwhile, Israel’s ties to regional states, African nations and Russia and China are growing due to shared military challenges or economic opportunities – even though Israel has little in common with them.

To be sure, the U.S.-Israeli relationship remains a paramount concern in Jerusalem. Israel relies heavily on U.S. aid as well as America’s backing at the United Nations and other global bodies. The two nations share intelligence and work together on mutual concerns in the region and beyond.

Nevertheless, Israel’s growing global network is enhancing its flexibility on the world stage and reducing Washington’s leverage over Jerusalem. That’s good for Israel at a time of strained U.S.-Israeli relations, and it leaves America and Europe looking obsessed with an issue of reduced global concern.

Consider the contrast. Early this month, the Quartet (the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations) warned that Israeli settlements threaten the viability of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, echoing the repeated warnings of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. Meanwhile, French President Francois Hollande, who hosted 28 nations in Paris last month as a “first step” toward organizing an international conference to restart peace talks, told Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas last week that he’s committed to leading global efforts to find peace.

Hervé Morin said it’s time to Israelize the French security apparatus. Justice Minister Jean-Jacques Urvoas accuses Nicolas Sarkozy of trying to Guantanomo-ize it. In the July 29th update, I will give a brief outline of the range of debate in France, touching on the secular “high ground,” marked by exquisite concern for democratic principles and the sensitivities of the Muslim community; the Catholic position of pardon and pacifism; opposition proposals for increased security, represented by an interview with the former and potentially future President Sarkozy.

In a condescending article about “bleeding heart France,” Stephen Brown [http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/263652/frances-bleeding-heart-stephen-brown] assures us “the only French leader who appears not to have surrendered is Marine Le Pen.” Confusing the president of the Front National with her niece, Marion Maréchal Le Pen—who has indeed announced she will join the National Guard —he blithely delivers us into the hands of the Le Pen party. There is much to be said on this subject, but I already said it in 2014. [Dispatch International, NER]. And, by the way, the Daesh soldiers did not “do a sort of sermon around the altar in Arabic.” They swore an oath [serment]. It matters. At least to me, it matters to get things straight.

And now, two days after the atrocity committed in the St. Etienne du Vouvray church, the answers keep turning into questions. I do not have boots on the ground. I sift through the widest range of secondary sources, doing my utmost to sift out nuggets of reality from the sludge of approximations.

For example: the longwinded centrist François Bayrou (who supported François Hollande in 2012) is outraged at the absence of protection of the targeted church, situated, he says, right near a Salafist mosque. But, objects a journalist reporting on the affair, Professor Bayrou is mistaken: the mosque near this church is not Salafist. It’s another mosque near another church in the town that, sadly, had donated a piece of its land for construction of the mosque. God’s little acre? So there are two churches and two mosques for a population of 30,000? Latifa ibn Zlaten whose son Imad was executed by Mohamed Merah in 2012, lives nearby, the memorial service for her son was held in that mosque, built on land donated by the churchand, she says, it’s not extremist. Christians and Muslims get along beautifully. Mohammed Karabila, president of the mosque is absolutely disgusted by these accusations. Everything is done in his mosque, he says, to encourage worshippers to be good citizens, good neighbors, respectful and diligent..