RUTHFULLY YOURS

On a crisp, sunlit morning in March, I ceased to feel at home in London. It dawned on me that the city where I had been born 58 years ago was no longer safe. I was walking past two men at a stall outside my local Underground station. Their beards and dress revealed them as Salafists; they were proselytising for their fundamentalist form of Islam. My face must have betrayed my anxiety, because they started pointing and talking while I entered the station. As I looked round, both men were grinning at me.

Why did I find their presence disquieting? A couple of hours earlier in Brussels, three suicide bombers had detonated nail bombs in the airport and on the Metro, killing 32 passengers outright and inflicting horrific wounds on another 312 people, of whom 62 were critically injured — all in the name of the Islamic State. It was hard to believe that the two jovial gentlemen outside the station could have been unaware of what had just taken place less than 200 miles away. That was presumably why they were there.

As I descended into the Tube, my thoughts went back to a similar morning, July 7, 2005, when four suicide bombers struck the London transport system. I was going to work on one of the Tube lines that was attacked, having just delivered my two youngest children to their school. Like thousands of others, I was lucky to be on a different train and to have escaped injury, but 52 died and 700 were maimed in the name of al-Qaeda. At the time, Londoners assumed that this terrorist threat would eventually pass, just as the IRA threat with which we had grown up had passed. Though Madrid had already been attacked, killing 192 and injuring more than 2,000, nothing on the scale of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington had then seemed likely. But over the past decade the threat has grown steadily worse. Above all, last year there had been the attacks on Paris, since which the French capital had yet to return to normality. After Paris and Brussels, I looked back on the horror of London 11 years ago with a sickening feeling of dread. Was there any reason to suppose that such attacks would not be repeated, now that jihadis loyal to IS had multiplied across Europe and notably in London? We now know that Mohamed Abrini, the “man in the hat” bomber who survived the Brussels airport attacks, was not only also involved in the Paris massacre, but visited Britain last July and allegedly met more than a dozen Islamists here. At the time of writing, five Britons have been arrested.

“Meanwhile, on Sunday morning TV, the most hate-filled studio “discussion” took place between Israel bashers and defenders, hand-picked, it would seem, by Katie Hopkins. Lunatic, petrifying, anti-Semites — the worst being self-hating Jews who prefaced each remark with “I’m Jewish myself, but . . .”. Shame on the researchers. It made me feel sick all day.
The Palestinian cause is as important a cause as the occupation of Tibet, Chechnya, Crimea, Kurdistan, Northern Cyprus. I won’t go on because they will accuse me, as they always do, of “what-about-ism” and never, never give me an answer as to why they don’t give a flying fart about the “right to return” of any of these other oppressed peoples. So, as I said, I did not respond. I am too tired. I am 4,000 years too tired.”

“So what do you think?” people keep asking me. Would I come on the Today programme, Newsnight, breakfast television for heaven’s sake, and talk about it. “It” was not the opening of a new play, the surprisingly good reviews, or the fact that one of the four actresses had to leave the show permanently after the first night due to family illness. Nor the broken limbs of two audience members who tumbled down the theatre steps, on two different nights (making the term “break a leg” a no-go area for ever more), stopping the show while paramedics were called.

Nor was it for my thoughts on Barack Obama’s gig as a stand-up comedian — good — or his lecturing us on the consequences of a Brexit — bad — or even the terrible shock of losing the bright and beautiful Victoria Wood, whom I had not even known was ill.

What they sought was my response to Ken Livingstone’s response to Naz Shah’s delicate 2014 tweet on the Jewish question. I turned them all down. I was — am — too tired.

I read and listened and watched, though, and came to a cynical conclusion. For the Jews in the diaspora, as for the state of Israel, one thing is for sure: we’re damned if we respond and damned if we don’t.

Out of the blue, the papers and the airways are filled with the word “anti-Semitism”. It is all about us. Again. Why? Have I missed something? Did Israel attack a neighbour in response to rocket fire? No. Have Jews attacked, surrounded, blown up, beheaded, caged, destroyed, proselytised, rounded up, raped or hijacked anybody? No. Have any recent terrorist attacks been perpetrated by Jewish groups? No. Have we vowed in our constitutions, on our websites and on social media to destroy any one of the Muslim states or Catholic or Christian countries of the world, or urged young Jews to stab members of other faiths? Have we flown planes into tower blocks or trained suicide bombers to blow themselves up in marketplaces, on buses, and in hospitals? No.

For 17 days this month, Dutch columnist Ebru Umar was held against her will in Turkey, legallybarred from leavingthe country. Her alleged crime: insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But after extended negotiations between the two governments, the controversial, outspoken Umar finally returned home to Amsterdam on May 11.

But she is hardly free, and certainly not home safe: threats against her life mean she cannot return to her apartment. She stays in safe-houses in “undisclosed” locations. She must notify police of her whereabouts at all times. Officials have offered bodyguards, though she refuses.

Yet while she still faces prosecution – and a potential four-year jail sentence – in Turkey, it is neither Erdogan nor his government that poses the real danger. It’s the Dutch.

Or rather, it is Dutch-born men and women of Turkish ancestry, who continue to issue threats against her life.

In fact, it was Dutch Twitter users who reported Umar, herself of Turkish heritage, to the Turkish police for her obscenity-laced, anti-Erdogan postings on her Twitter feed, sent out from her vacation home in Kusadasi. And it is Dutch youth, mostly appearing to be in their 20s, who have since posted things like, “The Mosque has collected funding to rent a crane to hang you when you arrive at Schiphol.” Another stopped her in the street in Turkey and snarled, “I know where to find you in Holland. You know what happens after death?”

In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI said what no Pope had ever dared to say — that there is a link between violence and Islam. Ten years later, Pope Francis never calls those responsible for anti-Christian violence by name and never mentions the word “Islam.”

Pope Francis does not even try to re-evangelize or reconquer Europe. He seems deeply to believe that the future of Christianity is in the Philippines, in Brazil and in Africa. Probably for the same reason, the Pope is spending less time and effort in denouncing the terrible fate of Christians in the Middle East.

“Multiculturalism” in Europe is the mosque standing on the ruins of the church. It is not the synthesis requested by Pope Francis. It is the road to becoming extinct.

Asking Europe to be “multicultural” while it experiences a dramatic de-Christianization is extremely risky. In Germany, a new report found that “Germany has become demographically a multi-religious country.” In the UK, a major inquiry recently declared that “Britain is no longer a Christian country.” In France, Islam is also overtaking Christianity as the dominant religion.

To scroll the list of Pope Francis’s apostolic trips — Brazil, South Korea, Albania, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, Cuba, United States, Mexico, Kenya, Uganda, Philippines — one could say that Europe is not exactly at the top of his agenda.

The two previous pontiffs both fought for the cradle of Christendom. Pope John Paul II took on Communism by toppling the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. Benedict XVI took on “the dictatorship of relativism” (the belief that truth is in the eye of the beholder) and bet everything on re-evangelizing the continent by traveling through it (he visited Spain three times) and in speeches such as the magnificent ones at Regensburg, where he spoke bluntly about the threat of Islam, and the German Bundestag, where he warned the gathered politicians against declining religiosity and “sacrificing their own ideals for the sake of power.”

In January, I attended the Cybertech conference in Tel Aviv, on a trip sponsored by the America–Israel Friendship League and the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Also on the trip was Richard Stiennon who wrote about it here. In his illuminating article, he calculated the number of information security vendors per country.

Predictably the United States came out on top with 827 firms. Surprisingly, Israel was second with 228. What’s astonishing from Stiennon’s research is that Israel has more security companies than the next 5 countries combined. How is it that Israel has more security firms than the UK, Canada, India, Germany and France combined? The question is even more compelling given that Israel has a population of roughly 8 million; while those five countries have roughly 1.5 billion inhabitants.

An excellent resource with detailed listings of Israeli technology startups is the IVC Research Center High-tech Yearbook. It has trend analysis and YOY investor activity, along with detailed profiles of investors, including venture capital funds, private equity funds, incubators, angels and corporate investors investing in Israel.

For a visual listing of firms, the Israel CyberScape map from Bessemer Venture provides a listing across 14 information security domains.

So just how did Israel become a global information security superpower? Here’s a few of reasons.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set the goal of making Israel one of the world’s five leading global cyber powers. When a government makes something a priority, and backs it up with financials incentives including research and development grants, which Israel has done; that’s a compelling initiative to generate interest.

Both around the world and here at home, free speech is under assault. From the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris to the “unexplained” deaths of critics of Russian president Vladimir Putin, people who express unpopular opinions or report the truth are in danger. Worldwide, more than 110 journalists were killed in 2015, bringing the total to 787 since 2005, according to Reporters without Borders.

The threats to free speech in this country don’t rise to that level, of course. But Hillary Clinton wants to change the First Amendment to limit political speech, and Donald Trump wants to rewrite libel laws so that he can sue media critics. Meanwhile, colleges routinely punish those who take unpopular stands and reject speakers who might challenge student orthodoxy.

That’s one reason why it is significant that the Cato Institute will award the eighth biennial Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty to a true champion of free speech, the Danish journalist and author Flemming Rose.

Rose came to the world’s attention in 2005, when, as an editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, he published a series of twelve cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Rose did so, not because he sought to be offensive, he said, but to challenge the growing wave of “self-censorship in Europe caused by widening fears and feelings of intimidation in dealing with issues related to Islam.”

Rose’s decision to publish the cartoons sparked riots in Europe and across the Islamic world. A price was put on Rose’s head, and he has received numerous credible death threats. A plot to assassinate him was disrupted by the FBI in 2009. Still, he firmly rejects the idea, so prevalent these days, that “you have a right not to be insulted or offended.”

While he came to prominence as a result of the Muhammad cartoons, Rose is not a provocateur but a defender of free speech as a matter of principle. In fact, he has recently undertaken a new cause: standing up for Muslims targeted by some of Europe’s new anti-terror laws, and fighting restrictions on religious speech deemed “extreme” by authorities. He has condemned Dutch politician Geert Wilders’s call to ban the Quran.

Forget the Syrian Civil War for a moment. Even without the Sunnis and Shiites competing to give each other machete haircuts every sunny morning, there would still be a permanent Muslim refugee crisis.

The vast majority of civil wars over the last ten years have taken place in Muslim countries. Muslim countries are also some of the poorest in the world. And Muslim countries also have high birth rates.

Combine violence and poverty with a population boom and you get a permanent migration crisis.

No matter what happens in Syria or Libya next year, that permanent migration crisis isn’t going away.

The Muslim world is expanding unsustainably. In the Middle East and Asia, Muslims tend to underperform their non-Muslim neighbors both educationally and economically. Oil is the only asset that gave Muslims any advantage and in the age of fracking, its value is a lot shakier than it used to be.

The Muslim world had lost its old role as the intermediary between Asia and the West. And it has no economic function in the new world except to blackmail it by spreading violence and instability.

Muslim countries with lower literacy rates, especially for women, are never going to be economic winners at any trade that doesn’t come gushing out of the ground. Nor will unstable dictatorships ever be able to provide social mobility or access to the good life. At best they’ll hand out subsidies for bread.

The Muslim world has no prospects for getting any better. The Arab Spring was a Western delusion.

Growing populations divided along tribal and religious lines are competing for a limited amount of land, power and wealth. Countries without a future are set to double in size.

There are only two solutions; war or migration.

Either you fight and take what you want at home. Or you go abroad and take what you want there.

Would you hire a lawyer who couldn’t handle references to violence? If not, then be wary of anyone who graduated from Oxford with a law degree in 2016.

Lecturers at my old university are being told that they should issue ‘trigger warnings’ when discussing ‘potentially distressing’ cases. I suppose it was only a matter of time before this latest madness spread from American to British campuses.

Oxford undergraduates reading English, for example, are now given a “trigger warning” about Robert Lowell’s 1964 poem, “For The Union Dead,” because it contains the following stanza about Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry that he led during the Civil War:

Shaw’s father wanted no monument

Except the ditch,

Where his son’s body was thrown…

Never mind that the poem is about a memorial to the black and white heroes who fought side-by-side against slavery, all in the midst of the civil rights movement of Lowell’s day. Context is never a defense in these cases. A student’s readiness to take offense trumps the literary canon.

In much the same way, an older student and janitor at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis was disciplined in 2008 for racial harassment just because during his break, he had been seen reading a book titled Notre Dame vs. the Klan.

The book is a sympathetic history of Notre Dame students’ opposition to a Ku Klux Klan march in South Bend, Ind., in 1924. But one of his co-workers on the school’s janitorial staff took offense at the image of a Klansman on the cover, and that was all that counted.

British students are having to learn the bizarre newspeak with which Americans are familiar: “micro-aggression,” “safe space,” “cultural appropriation.”

European political and media elites have been quick to hail the election of Van der Bellen, who campaigned on a pro-immigration, pro-EU platform. They seem to believe his razor-thin win validates their uninterrupted pursuit of European multiculturalism.

Meanwhile, European elites have expressed relief at Norbert Hofer’s defeat. Their reactions would indicate that they unaware that they are largely responsible for the rise of anti-establishment parties in Austria and other parts of Europe.

“Europe has been polarized for years by misguided policies pursued by the old major parties, not only in Germany but in many European countries. The fact is that it must be our task to preserve freedom, democracy and the rule of law across the continent. And the policy of open borders does exactly the opposite.” — Frauke Petry, Alternative for Germany party.

Norbert Hofer of the anti-immigration Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) has been narrowly defeated in his bid to become Austria’s next president.

Alexander Van der Bellen, former leader of Austrian Greens party, won 50.3% of the vote, compared to 49.7% for Hofer. The margin of victory was 31,026 out of nearly 4.5 million votes cast.

European political and media elites have been quick to hail the election of Van der Bellen, who campaigned on a pro-immigration, pro-EU platform. They seem to believe his razor-thin win validates their uninterrupted pursuit of European multiculturalism.