RUTHFULLY YOURS

Popular democratic revolutions are all the rage, until they aren’t.

Remember the (inherently) progressive Establishment’s glee around the globe at the prospect of the Arab Spring?

Contrast its favorable reaction to the “democratic” jihadist takeover of the Middle East with the chaos and cringing that has ensued in the wake of Brexit.

What is clear is that regardless of the substantive impact of Great Britain’s referendum, its symbolic effect has been extraordinary.

Irrespective of #Leave’s implications on economics, immigration and national security, #Brexit is a direct rebuke to the bipartisan Establishment’s most cherished values and principles, and an indictment of its rule.

Too, by challenging the progressive status quo, Brexit has exposed some delicious double standards.

Here are just a few of them:
National Sovereignty and Self-Determination

As mentioned, recall that the Arab Spring was viewed by the global political class as an unalloyed good. Further, the political class always claims to be against meddling in the affairs of other nations, lest the West creates a 21st century wave of neo-colonialist blowback. And anyway, we are supposed to be non-judgmental. Who are we to tell others what is right and wrong?

The angered reaction of Western elites to #Brexit shows that the above is a farce. The Establishment believes in forcing its values and principles on others when it is in its political interest, in particular when it gives the Establishment more power and control. It is highly judgmental of those who do not toe its line and submit, as reflected in the stern warnings of Democrats and Republicans who lobbied for Brexit, and the talking heads exploding today.

Britain’s “Leave” camp argues that the deciding issue in the Brexit vote was sovereignty, not immigration. The two issues, though, inevitably will become linked. The continental members of the European Community, especially Germany, are on a slippery slope which will lead to mass absorption of migrants and eventually the free movement of many of those migrants within the European Community. Britain’s interests in the matter of migration differ markedly from Germany’s, and that divergence is the most pressing reason for Britain to leave the EC.

There are many differences between the UK and Germany, but the most important difference is that at present fertility rates the UK will be there at the end of the present century and Germany will not. That does not mean that Germany will disappear: it means that Germany requires many millions of immigrants to compensate for the fact that German women average 1.3 to 1.4 births over their lifetime. The chart below (from UN Population Program data) shows that during the present century, the number of German women in their childbearing years will fall by half to two-thirds, while the number of British women of childbearing age will remain stable or decline about 20%.

In my view, the best comparison is between the UK medium fertility scenario and the German low fertility scenario, because German fertility has consistently undershot the “Low” scenario in the United Nations forecasts.

The UK, in short, can cherry-pick immigrants by whatever criteria it adopts (education, professional qualifications, wealth), the way Australia’s point system does. It has time and leisure to decide what sort of immigration population it needs. Germany needs 5 to 10 million females of childbearing age, which implies an overall immigration of 10 to 20 million individuals. Where will they come from? Most of the immigrants to Germany during the past fifty years have come from Southern and Eastern Europe and Turkey. But those sources are drying up, for southern Europe suffers from fertility rates about the same as Germany’s, and Eastern European fertility is even lower.

A widely-publicised Iftar dinner, intended to show that Malcolm Turnbull gets what it means to be inclusive, ended badly after he was advised that one of his guests, Sheikh Shady Alsuleiman, had taught that Islam prescribes death for adulterers, and homosexuals spread diseases. No rogue maverick, Australian-born Alsuleiman is the elected national president of the Australian National Imams Council.

Although insisting that ‘mutual respect is absolutely critical’, Turnbull subjected this prominent Muslim leader to public humiliation. He regretted inviting him to dinner and counselled the sheikh ‘to reflect on what he has said and recant’. In the middle of an election, wanting to limit fallout from the dinner-gone-wrong, held only days after the Orlando massacre, Turnbull stated that his no-longer-welcome guest’s views are ‘wrong, unacceptable and I condemn them’.

Well may Mr Turnbull deplore Alsuleiman’s teachings, but the real challenge is that these were not merely his personal views. The sheikh’s teachings on homosexuality and adultery reflect the mainstream position of Islam, preached by many a Muslim scholar around the world today, and telling a sheikh to reject the sharia is like telling a pope to get over the virgin birth.

Many Australian Muslims will be disappointed at the treatment meted out to Sheikh Alsuleiman. An event designed to honour the Muslim community ended up providing a platform to denigrate one of their most respected leaders for promoting Islamic doctrines. Several Australian Muslim leaders have since dug in their heels to affirm support for the sharia position on homosexuals. So much for recanting.

While Turnbull refused to pass judgement on Islam itself, saying ‘there are different views of different issues, as there are in all religions’, he also sent a message that he is prepared to disparage Australian Muslims’ religious beliefs. It was a bitter pill for Muslims to swallow that this came in the form of a humiliating invite-to-disavow game of bait-and-switch, conducted during a pre-election media storm.

The cognitive dissonance is startling.

The Berlin-based expert on Turkey, Ralph Ghadban, warns that the Islam being preached in Turkish-controlled mosques in Europe is a “Sharia Islam with strong Turkish-nationalist overtones” that calls for a “strict separation from Western individualistic values.”

In February 2016, the University of Vienna published study which found that Islamic kindergartens in the capital are dominated by “intellectual Salafists and political Islamists” who are contributing to the “theologically-motivated isolation” of Muslim pupils. The report calls into question claims by the IGGiÖ that anti-Western textbooks have been removed from Austrian schools.

Muslim students now outnumber Roman Catholic students at middle and secondary schools in Vienna, according to official statistics, which show that Muslim students are also on the verge of overtaking Catholics in Viennese elementary schools. The data confirms a massive demographic and religious shift in Austria, traditionally a Roman Catholic country.

The selection of an ethnic Turk to lead the Islamic Religious Community in Austria (Islamischen Glaubensgemeinschaft in Österreich, IGGiÖ), the primary representative of Muslims in the country, is being challenged by Muslim groups opposed to Turkey’s growing influence over the practice of Islam in Austria.

Ibrahim Olgun, a 28-year-old Austrian-born Islamic theologian with ties to the Turkish state, was quietly named on June 19 to replace 62-yer-old Fuat Sanac, who stepped down after serving as IGGiÖ president for five years.

Sanac, also a Turk, was reviled by Turkish authorities for helping the Austrian government draft a new Islam Law (Islamgesetz) that aims to promote an “Islam with an Austrian character.” The law, which was promulgated in February 2015, seeks to reduce outside meddling by prohibiting foreign funding for mosques, imams and Muslim organizations in Austria. It also stresses that Austrian law must take precedence over Islamic Sharia law for Muslims living in the country.

Observers worry that Olgun — a member of the Turkey-financed Turkish-Islamic Union for Cultural and Social Cooperation in Austria (ATIB), an influential group that has vowed to challenge the Islam Law at Austria’s Constitutional Court — will use his new position both to undermine the Islam Law and to increase further Turkey’s influence over Muslims in Austria.

At least eight Austrian Muslim groups (representing Albanian, Arab, Bosnian and Sufi Muslims) are challenging Olgun, who was selected by the IGGiÖ’s Shura Council (Schurarat), a rules committee (Shura is an Arabic word for consultation) whose five members all happen to be ethnic Turks.

IGGiÖ statutes require a person to be at least 35 years old to head the group, but the Shura Council secretly annulled that stipulation last December, according to Hassan Mousa, head of the Arab Religious Community in Austria (Arabischen Kultusgemeinde in Österreich). He said that Olgun’s selection was “undemocratic” and “illegal” and added that his ties to ATIB would shift IGGiÖ’s balance of power further in Turkey’s direction.

ATIB, an umbrella group that operates more than 60 mosques in Austria, is directly managed by the religious affairs attaché at the Turkish embassy in Vienna, and the imams of these mosques are Turkish civil servants. ATIB and its German counterpart, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), are financed by the Turkish government’s Directorate for Religious Affairs, known in Turkish as Diyanet.

If Britain can forgive America the slights of the Obama era, and if Australia can forgive Britain hers, now is our chance to get the whole family back together. Europe loved Britain when she was submissive. We who share a common heritage can love her once again, very nearly unconditionally
Many of Australians no doubt still cringe at the humiliation of flying into the United Kingdom and having to file into the ‘non-EU’ queue for immigration and customs. Talk about ingratitude. Almost 100,000 Aussies were killed defending Britain from the Second and Third Reichs. Now the Germans get to sail through Heathrow while the grandsons of Gallipoli endure the distinct possibility of a complimentary cavity search. In 2015 the Tory MP Andrew Rosendell called for the creation of a line exclusively for ‘subjects of Her Majesty the Queen’, which, of course, failed. That was at the height of Europhilia among Britain’s elites.

Blood, history, culture: all these hallmarks of a nation’s conservatism were sacrificed at the altar of David Cameron’s One Europe liberalism. Now Britain is bidding goodbye, adieu, auf wiedersehen, and vaarwel to the European Union and David Cameron.

Europe, for that matter, is bidding goodbye adieu, etc. to Britain. At the beginning of the Brexit campaign, EU President Jean-Claude Juncker told British ‘deserters’ that they would have to ‘face the consequences’ of striking out alone. Now he’s making good, insisting the they vacate the premises ‘as soon as possible, however painful that process may be’, and that there will be ‘no renegotiation’. The Leave campaign spent months reaffirming their love for Europe and promising to remain engaged with the EU. Juncker makes it abundantly clear that Europe’s love was altogether more conditional.

All Britain had to do was clear her throat and Junker began throwing her clothes out the window and changing the locks. Which, if anything, confirmed all of the Leavers’ suspicions: that Europe was only interested in them as a dumping-ground for migrant workers and a reserve bank for failed and failing states.

One can’t help but suspect that Australia played no small part in the Brits’ decision to dump Juncker and his cronies. The EU is an unhealthy relationship for all parties involved, but only the UK has any experience with healthy relationships. Of the European states, only the UK developed fruitful bonds with their former colonial possessions in Asia and the Americas – which is to say, only the UK belongs to a real international family rooted in a common history, common values, and, yes, sometimes, common blood. There was no one to be outraged at Germany when she gave special privileges to the British at her airports. No one ever loved Germany the way Australians – and Canadians, Americans, New Zealanders et al – love the United Kingdom, which is enough to feel slighted. Or, at least, no one loved them enough to tell them so.

Priests are afraid to talk about Jesus during mass. — Eva Hamberg, priest and professor, who in protest resigned from the priesthood and left the Church.

The Church of Sweden may be headed towards “Chrislam” — a merging of Christianity and Islam. Swedish priests, noting the religious fervor among the Muslims now living in Sweden, enthusiastically take part in various interfaith projects.

“There are reliable sources from Egypt, showing that the Saudi royal family is really a Jewish family that came from Iraq to the Arabian Peninsula sometime in the 1700s. They built an army with the aid of British officers fighting the Ottoman sultanate.” — Imam Awad Olwan, with whom a priest, Henrik Larsson, is cooperating in an interfaith project.

“The involvement that the Church of Sweden has shown for the vulnerability of Christian Palestinians, has been replaced with indifference to the ethnic cleansing of Christians in Syria and Iraq. In these countries, it is mostly Muslims who commit the atrocities, which is evidently enough to make the Church of Sweden concentrate on climate change and environmental issues instead.” — Eli Göndör, scholar of religion.

The Church of Sweden has departed from being a strong and stern state church. In the past, Swedes were born into it and, until 1951, no one was allowed to leave the church. These days, however, it is an institution that has very little to do with Christianity or Jesus. Sweden now, according to the World Values Survey, is one of the world’s most secular countries; every year a large number of Swedes leave the church.

It used to be that only atheists left the church; now it is the devout Christians that leave — in protest against the church’s increasingly questionable relationship to the Christian faith.

When, for example, the current Archbishop, Antje Jackelén, just before being appointed, participated in a question-and-answer session in the fall of 2013, and one of the questions was: “Does Jesus convey a more truthful image of God than Muhammad does?” surprisingly, the would-be archbishop did not immediately say yes, but instead involved herself in a long monologue about there being many ways to God. Evidently, this upset a lot of parishioners. A high-profile priest and professor, Eva Hamberg, resigned from the priesthood in protest and left the Church of Sweden.

“This made me leave faster,” she told the Christian newspaper, Dagen. “If the future Archbishop cannot stand by the Apostles’ Creed, but rather, rationalizes it, then secularization has gone too far.”

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8351/video-geert-wilders-freedom

Dutch opposition leader Geert Wilders discusses the dangers of the Islamization of the West and the growing influence of Sharia law. He outlines his plans to defend the identity and civilization of the West from indoctrination.

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Turkey suffered its 10th terrorist attack in less than a year on Tuesday when a coordinated suicide assault on Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport killed 41 people and injured more than 200. The choice of target is noteworthy. Ataturk airport is one of the world’s busiest, processing some 42 million passengers and 314,000 commercial flights last year. Among the dead were citizens of China, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan, in addition to Turkish nationals. As terrorist atrocities go, it’s hard to get more global than that.

All of this suggests the attack was the work of Islamic State, though the group hasn’t taken credit at this writing. It fits a template of recent Islamic State attacks on the Brussels airport in March, on tourists near Istanbul’s Blue Mosque in January, the downing of the Russian airliner over the Sinai peninsula in October, and the Bardo National Museum in Tunis in March 2015.

These terrorist spectaculars achieve multiple aims at once: They inflict casualties on multiple nationalities, shake confidence in government security forces, harm local economies and demonstrate the reach of Islamic State.

That should temper hopes that Islamic State’s recent military setbacks in Iraq will offer relief from these sorts of attacks. The opposite might be true. Islamic State has now been territorially entrenched for years in Iraq and Syria, during which it has been able to radicalize and train thousands of recruits, including many with foreign passports. These jihadists will be paying lethal calls on crowded civilian targets for many more years, a deadly price for the Obama Administration’s gradualist policy against Islamic State and its willingness to allow Syria to descend into chaos.

The Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan also bears responsibility for allowing Islamic State to gain strength. Much like Pakistani strongman Zia ul-Haq, who made a bargain with jihadists in the 1980s so long as they attacked his enemies in Afghanistan and India, the Turkish government largely looked the other way as Syria-bound jihadists used Turkey as a staging ground and entry point for waging war against the Assad regime. Turkey has also been friendly with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, in the fatal conceit that terrorism is legitimate so long as it is targeting someone other than you.

This week’s agreement between Ankara and Jerusalem to resume normal diplomatic relations after a six-year hiatus is a sign that Mr. Erdogan may have begun to appreciate the consequences of that conceit, as well as the need for capable regional allies. Mr. Erdogan also seems to have understood that Turkey’s most dangerous enemies are Islamic State jihadists, not the Kurdish separatists on whom he has trained most of his fire. One reason to doubt Kurdish responsibility for Tuesday’s attack is that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, generally targets Turkish police and military personnel, not civilians and foreigners.

For the second year in a row, Egyptian television is portraying Jews in a positive light during Ramadan, much to the chagrin of some of the public and members of the country’s media, pro-Israel blogger Elder of Ziyon reported on Tuesday.

According to the report, this year’s series that is relatively sympathetic to the Tribe – through one of its characters — is called “Mammon and Associates.” Egyptian press coverage of the backlash the show has elicited includes a “defense” of the show’s directors, who – Elder of Ziyon paraphrases – “are generally uniformly anti-Zionist and against any sort of ‘normalization’ with Israel,” quick to make a distinction between Jews and the Jewish state.

Last year, as Elder of Ziyon reported at the time, an Egyptian actress portraying the role of a Jewish woman in a series launched on Ramadan, released a statement to assure viewers that the show’s intention was not to “beautify the face of Israel.”

Menna Shalabi, co-star of “Haret al-Yahood” (“Jewish Quarter”) – a historical drama about Egypt’s vanished Jewish community – “pleaded for critics and the public not to rush to judgment on the work before its full release.”

Elder of Ziyon quoted a Times of Israel description of the series, launched on June 18, 2015 for the Ramadan holiday:

The plot … unfolds in Cairo between two landmark events in 20th century Egyptian history: the 1952 Revolution — which replaced the ruling monarchy with the militaristic Free Officers Movement led by Muhammad Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser — and the 1956 Suez Crisis, known in Israel as the Kadesh Operation and in Egypt as the Tripartite Aggression.

It depicts a love story between Ali, an Egyptian army officer played by Iyad Nassar, and Laila, a young Jewish woman, played by Mona Shalabi. As one might expect, the romance is marred by the rising wave of Egyptian nationalism and the social tensions brought about by the creation of Israel.

The story of Orlando shooter Omar Mateen, like those of countless other “homegrown” terrorists, is now familiar to the point of cliché. The parents immigrate to the West filled with hope, but their children fail to thrive. They may be successful in some things and fit in with others of their generation, but only superficially.

Sometimes they are soccer-playing, rap-aspiring, beer-drinking lads from the neighborhood, whose failures often lead first to car theft and drug dealing. Other times they are outwardly successful, but the contradictions between the terms of that success and an inner reality or aspiration become too much to bear.

Within them is a grain of sand that irritates, which forces them to seek out that which they believe is missing in themselves. It is a means of overcoming individualism, the self, and becoming part of something much larger. It is a path to meaning.

Passions begin to burn over causes, indignities, injustices; the world does not work the way is it supposed to. Visions of perfection begin to loom but the means of realization require commitment to secrecy, lies, and double lives, to violence and inflicting pain. A sense of authenticity and being whole grows until, in a flash, rage explodes outward.

The stories of most ‘homegrown’ Muslim terrorists are all too familiar.

The base instincts of their insecurities, misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Semitism are given useful scriptural context and legitimation by local mosque sermons. The videos they view online extol jihad with heroic visions of Muslim warriors past and present.

Sometimes outward behavior changes in ways obvious to co-workers, such as the adoption of Islamic dress, strange statements about Islamic supremacism, and complaints about Western “decadence.” They become indignant when questioned or mocked by friends about their increasing religiosity.

In a search for authenticity, they make all-important visits to Saudi Arabia or the homelands of their parents, places they left as children or knew not at all, in search of answers about themselves, anxious to understand their place. But they find they belong nowhere, except in the world that ISIS claims to be remaking. And they return home with a fire in them, having either enlisted in a larger plot or with their own smoldering inside. Then the countdown begins.