RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.crowdrise.com/help-vladimir-bukovsky-brave-putin-critic1

There are crimes that are unspeakable and accusations that endure time’s long howl because they are so profoundly disturbing. To be accused of the unspeakable is to be marked with a sign that can wipe out a person’s entire life’s work and reduce their voice to ash. When a man is so brave that his courage and fortitude have forced a totalitarian empire to flinch and to begin dissolution—invoking the unspeakable is often the only way to silence that voice and to rewrite history. You can help us keep this from happening to a great truth teller and dissident hero with your support today.

Who: Vladimir Bukovsky, whom The New York Times called “the most widely known prisoner of conscience in the Soviet Union,”and “a hero of almost legendary proportion among the Soviet dissident movement,” is fighting to preserve his legacy.

Bukovsky earned this legacy as a writer and political dissident whom Soviet leaders repeatedly sent to prisons, labor camps and sanitariums — a total of 12 years in captivity — to stop him from spreading the truth about the totalitarian system in the Soviet Union. As a young man, arrested for the “crime” of organizing a poetry reading in Mayakovsky Square in Moscow, he was sent to a psikhushka, a fraudulent psychiatric hospital where troublemakers were often locked up without trial, their writings and political activism dismissed by doctors as the fevered product of schizophrenia.

Instead of folding, Bukovsky found a way to smuggle official documents detailing the medical deception of the psikhushka to the West. The revelation that the USSR was putting political dissidents into mental institutions caused such a widespread uproar in the United States that Yuri Andropov—head of the KGB and future head of the USSR—hastened to chastise Americans, claiming they didn’t understand that the real source of terror was not the government of the USSR but Bukovsky.

However, his acts of “terror” are carried out with only words. Words of integrity and enormous courage, as Bukovsky has been an active and diligent witness to the repression of authoritarian governments and strongmen since he was in his late teens. He revealed the mechanisms of a society in thrall to surveillance and propaganda, kept in poverty and enslaved by the state—with words. Whether in his book, To Build A Castle, about his long periods of imprisonment under the USSR, or his essay in The Washington Post which warned Americans that torture at Abu Ghraib risked making official cruelty as acceptable to them as it had become to many weary Russians —Bukovsky has never shirked the imperative to write truth.

Israeli policy (assisted by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden) produced perhaps the best possible outcome.

The UN Secretary General’s Report on the Gaza Flotilla concluded that Israel was within its rights to use force, and found the blockade of Gaza to be legal.

Turkey agreed to Israel’s original condition to the flotilla ships — aid bound for Gaza will offload in Ashdod.

Israel had also wanted to oust Hamas from Turkey — something that may not have been accomplished. But Turkey, by agreeing to a number of humanitarian projects in Gaza, will increase its leverage over Hamas in ways that might benefit Israel.

The announcement of Turkish-Israeli rapprochement was touted first as an economic achievement for Israel. It should be noted, however, that Turkey-Israel civilian trade, as distinct from military trade, was already robust, rising from $1.5 billion in the first half of 2010 to $5.6 billion in 2015. Israel has an interest in Turkey as a customer for Israeli natural gas fields, but a number of countries — including Russia — also seek partnerships in natural gas.

The deal has also been linked to the resolution of three Turkish conditions arising from the “Gaza Flotilla” of 2010. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (who was prime minister at the time of the Gaza flotilla) had demanded an Israeli apology for the deaths of Turkish citizens on one of the flotilla ships, financial compensation, and the lifting of the Israel’s naval blockade on Gaza. The first two were agreed to by Israel years ago. The resolution — or non-resolution — of the third is a window into what is really going on, which is both more, and less, than the news reports.

Critics of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu naturally blame Israel for delaying the restoration of political and presumably military ties, but, in fact, Israeli policy (assisted by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden) produced perhaps the best possible outcome.

Israel has had some success working with Sunni governments in the region — including Saudi Arabia — on the basis of shared opposition to ISIS and to Iranian plans for regional hegemony. Both are better done with Turkey than without. And Israel’s political and military interlocutors, Russia and Egypt, needed some assurance that would ameliorate their displeasure with Turkish-Israeli reconciliation.

Ironically, the futile Turkish effort to end the naval blockade of Gaza is ending in quite a different direction: Now that Turkey has agreed to send humanitarian aid through the Ashdod port, it accepts the legitimacy of the blockade.

Ostensibly, almost everyone is happy. After six years and countless rounds of secret and public negotiations Turkey and Israel have finally reached a landmark deal to normalize their downgraded diplomatic relations and ended their cold war. The détente is a regional necessity based on convergent interests: Divergent interests can wait until the next crisis.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon welcomed the deal, calling it a “hopeful signal for the stability of the region.”

Secretary of State John Kerry, too, welcomed the agreement. “We are obviously pleased in the administration. This is a step we wanted to see happen,” he said.

And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thinks that the agreement to normalize relations will have a positive impact on Israel’s economy. “It has also immense implications for the Israeli economy, and I use that word advisedly,” Netanyahu said, in likely reference to potential deals with Turkey for the exploration and transportation of natural gas off the Israeli coast.

A few years ago, according to the official Turkish narrative, “Israel is a terrorist state and its acts are terrorist acts.” Today, in the words of Turkey’s Minister of the Economy, Nihat Zeybekci, “For us Israel is an important ally.”

Turkey has long claimed that it would not reconcile with Israel unless its three demands have been firmly met by the Jewish state: An official apology for the killings of nine Islamists aboard the Turkish flotilla led by the Mavi Marmara which in 2010 tried to break the naval blockade of Gaza; compensation for the victims’ families; and a complete removal of the blockade. In 2013, Netanyahu, under pressure from President Barack Obama, apologized for the operational mistakes during the raid on the Mavi Marmara. The two sides have also agreed on compensation worth $20 million. With the deal reached now and awaiting Israeli governmental and Turkish parliamentary approvals, the narrative on the third Turkish condition looks tricky.

Britain’s vote last week to leave the European Union — the Brexit — was a vote for freedom, a revolt against an unaccountable bureaucracy in Brussels. Amid the excitement, Fox News briefly reported the story as even bigger than it was, with a TV screen banner proclaiming not that the UK was leaving the EU, but “UK VOTES TO LEAVE UN.”

Yes, some things are too good to be true, and this was one.

As parody, it would have been genius. As a piece of news reporting, the Fox mixup of the EU and UN inspired plenty of derision — a bit of comic relief, gleefully seized upon by the stricken members of a pro-EU global elite and commentariat. They cannot fathom why a majority of British voters would choose to reclaim from the commissars of the EU the full freedom to control Britain’s own borders, bananas and vacuum cleaners. In that context, Fox’s botching of a news banner helps feed the narrative that the Brexit vote was some boorish mistake cooked up by a know-nothing mob.

Except that’s false, in ways far more profound than the mistake in the Fox chyron. For an eloquent defense of Brexit, see Roger Kimball’s “Focused on Disaster Narrative, Media Ignores Obvious Benefits of Brexit.” To this I’d add that even in Fox’s erroneous UN-exit caption there was, along with the comedy, some grist for serious thought.

I’m not defending Fox’s proofreaders. Accuracy matters, even on TV. But it’s not completely daft that a copywriter in a hurry would read “EU” and write “UN.” There are some pernicious similarities between the two. Both belong to the clan of multilateral institutions set up with the mission of promoting peace and prosperity, post-World War II. Both have proved better at promoting themselves and their own backroom deals. They are clubs of governments, breeding big, intrusive and unelected bureaucracies; largely self-serving, unaccountable and in various ways damaging to and divorced from the real interests of the populations they claim to serve. As Ambassador John Bolton writes in a piece on “How America Should Answer the Brexit Vote,” peace in Europe since 1945 is a product not of the EU, but of the U.S.-led military alliance of NATO.

Both the EU and the UN have a distinct tilt toward central planning, with all the warped incentives, waste and disregard for free choice that this entails. In the EU, this takes the form of regulation. At the UN, it is packaged as an endless array of UN-orchestrated development goals, capacity-building programs and bureaucratically directed spending of other people’s money, much of it funneled through despotic governments whose oppressive misrule is the main reason for the poverty and perils the UN proposes to alleviate.

We’ve all read plenty in recent times about the troubles within the EU. Let’s take a moment to reprise just a few of the problems with the UN. A good place to start would be a June 17th article by a former Swedish diplomat and UN whistleblower, Anders Kompass, who recently resigned from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. In this article, headlined “The ethical failure — Why I resigned from the UN,” Kompass writes:

Cholera in Haiti, corruption in Kosovo, murder in Rwanda, cover-up of war crimes in Darfur: on too many occasions the UN is failing to uphold the principles set out in its Charter, rules and regulations. Sadly, we seem to be witnessing more and more UN staff less concerned with abiding by ethical standards of the international civil service than with doing whatever is most convenient — or least likely to cause problems — for themselves or for member states.

Kompass ran afoul of his UN bosses in 2014, when he reported to French authorities that French UN peacekeepers were sexually abusing children in the Central African Republic. The UN accused Kompass of sharing confidential information, suspended him from his job and asked him to resign. Many months later, he was exonerated, but he writes that the UN has done nothing to address the “systemic issues of internal accountability” raised by his case. CONTINUE AT SITE

ISTANBUL—Suicide bombers struck Turkey’s busiest airport Tuesday, killing at least 36 people and injuring scores more on the eve of a major holiday, the deadliest in a string of attacks in Istanbul this year.
Three bomb blasts shook the arrivals area of the international terminal at Istanbul Atatürk Airport around 9:22 p.m., Istanbul Governor Vasip Sahin said. At least 147 people were wounded.

One assailant set off a bomb after being shot by police near a checkpoint just inside the terminal, a Turkish official said. Two other attackers blew themselves up outside—one near the entrance and one in a parking lot across the street, the official said.

No group had claimed responsibility hours after the attack. However, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said initial findings of an investigation suggested Islamic State carried out the assault. U.S. and other Western officials said the attack bore the hallmarks of the extremist organization, but added it was too early to assign blame.

Since last summer, Turkey has faced threats from Islamic State and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, an outlawed militia that has attacked Turkish security forces and civilian targets, including Istanbul’s second busiest airport, Sabiha Gokcen.