RUTHFULLY YOURS

Intelligence officers are taught to avoid “mirror imaging.” That is, assuming your adversary shares your analytic reference points and thinks the way you do. Americans tend to ascribe to other countries the best of our own values: tolerance, equal opportunity, rule of law, freedoms of speech and religion, and separation of church and state. But many countries do not share these values. Two of them are among our most problematic foreign relationships: Saudi Arabia and Iran.

These states, one friend and the other foe, promote ideologies that compete with America’s vision of liberal institutions, secular democracy and world order. Yet instead of confronting their illiberal, repressive, and often reprehensible narratives, we attempt to reconcile their views with our own, giving them a free pass based on our own tolerance of religious differences. The problem is that in these states religion does not exist in a vacuum. On the contrary, their religion is their political ideology—and a critical element of their foreign policy.

Despite its status as an important ally, Saudi Arabia poses a major challenge to the U.S. The ruling Saudi royal family depends upon support from the Wahhabi clergy, who represent an ultraconservative doctrine that is the cornerstone of the country’s identity and the source of the monarchy’s legitimacy. The kingdom has long exported the Wahhabi ideology with billions in funding for religious schools, or madrassas, world-wide. While Saudi rulers proscribe religious leaders from actively supporting violent revolution, terrorist groups like al Qaeda and Islamic State frequently cite or distort Wahhabi principles to justify the repression of women, autocratic rule and violence against non-Muslims.

Moreover, as Princeton scholar Cole Bunzel recently detailed in a report published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Saudi religious establishment has been practically mute as ISIS has laid claim to Wahhabi principles. This irresponsible silence, a tacit endorsement of political violence, especially against Shia Muslims, allows terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS to use the Wahhabi faith as a steppingstone to their violent, apocalyptic political ideology.

Although Saudi Arabia, sometimes with U.S. support, has launched effective counterterrorism operations against al Qaeda and ISIS, these efforts are shortchanged if the Saudi kingdom does not also address the underlying ideology that inspires ISIS attacks around the globe. And Riyadh, as custodian of Islam’s holiest sites, is uniquely positioned to act. Americans’ natural aversion to government involvement in religious matters should not become an excuse for U.S. failure to tackle this ideological challenge. CONTINUE AT SITE

SHANGHAI— Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine, was raised in China as the son of a Presbyterian missionary.

He and his family were among a population of foreigners that swelled to as many as half a million before 1949. Some were teachers, doctors and journalists. Others were merchants, engineers, architects and bankers. Within a few years of the Communist takeover almost all had fled or been kicked out. Mao harbored such loathing for Shanghai, China’s most cosmopolitan city, that he considered emptying it out completely after the revolution.

Deng Xiaoping’s “open door” economic reform policies in 1978 brought many of these groups flocking back. Many thought the openness would only grow.

It may be time to review that judgment: These days, foreigners are starting to feel less welcome. The Chinese legislature passed a law last week that puts all foreign NGOs under police administration with onerous registration and reporting requirements, essentially treating them as a security risk. Many will be forced to leave.

In line with this new mood of suspicion, a public poster campaign is warning young female government workers about “dangerous love” with foreign spies, a label frequently attached to the few foreigners who stayed on after 1949, particularly Americans.

State media regularly inveigh against “hostile foreign forces” trying to topple China’s socialist system.

Restrictions on foreign publications are tightening. Time, with a storied past in China, has joined a growing list of foreign news websites blocked by the Great Firewall. It includes the Economist, Bloomberg, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times —in addition to search engines and social-network sites like Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Christianity is in the firing line again: Authorities in eastern China, where missionaries labored before the revolution, are tearing down crosses atop churches. CONTINUE AT SITE

“There are today, we know, a hundred neighborhoods in France that present potential similarities with what’s happened in Molenbeek.” — Patrick Kanner, Minister for Urban Areas.

The Salafists, in fact, do not want to “take the power in these neighborhoods.” In many, they already have it.

“The farther I walked between the buildings, the more I was stunned. A courtyard of Islamist miracles; an enclave that wants to live like during the times of Muhammad. Bakery, hairdresser… It’s a mini Islamic Republic. During the sermons, they denounce, they criminalize. A woman who smokes? A degenerate. A woman who does not veil herself? A tease. A man that does not eat halal? He has an express ticket to hell.” — Paris Match.

Remadna received a death threat over the phone: “We know where your kids go to school,” and “your daughter is very pretty.” The next day, a delegation of completely veiled Salafist “true Muslim mothers” came and told her, “We want mosques, not schools.”

Patrick Kanner, France’s Minister for Urban Areas, was undoubtedly not planning to tell the truth on March 27.

He was on the set of Europe 1 TV to emphasize the left’s credo: Islamist terrorism is rooted in poverty and unemployment. But they asked one question again and again: “How many Molenbeeks are in France?” Finally, he said: “There are today, we know, a hundred neighborhoods in France that present potential similarities with what has happened in Molenbeek.”

Molenbeek, as the entire world knows today, is the neighborhood of Brussels that has become the epicenter of jihad in Europe. It is a neighborhood under Salafist control that sent three of its residents to assassinate hundreds of people in Paris on November 13, 2015. These are the residents of the same neighborhood that bombed the Brussels airport and the Maalbeek Metro station.

As someone whose autobiography was called I Knew I Was Right, I’ve never been backward in coming forward when it comes to world-class gloating.

But never on any subject have I wanted so much to be proved wrong as on the obscene level of anti-Semitism – or Jew-hatred, to give it an uglier, more accurate name – infecting the left-wing in this country.

A whopping 13 years ago, I wrote a farewell piece in the Guardian explaining that I was leaving my job on the newspaper – the established voice of the British Left – due to what I saw as its ugly, anti-Jew rhetoric and accompanying Islamophilia (the final straw was when they ran an opinion piece by Osama bin Laden).

In that year, 2003, attacks on Jews had risen by 75% and since 2000 there had been a 400% increase in attacks on synagogues.
And the EU’s racism watchdog had recently suppressed a report on the rise of anti-Semitism because it concluded that Muslims were behind many incidents.

“What sort of world do we live in, when racism is ‘allowed’ to be reported only if it comes from the white and the right?” I wondered at the time. And the statistics are far worse now.

The strange fruit which was allowed to blossom by a Labour Party, smug in its anti-racist credentials, has turned the party into a rotting edifice fatally riddled with the ancient disease of anti-Semitism.

The long, lonely road here started with the perfectly ­reasonable desire to be anti-racist and ended up poisoned by what I call Paint-Chart Politics.

I’ve been reading that a considerable part of today’s young American Jews are alienated from Israel. That the impact of its creation in 1948 has faded, along with the impact of the Holocaust that ended three years earlier. That young American Jews no longer perceive Israel as something miraculous or even special, but rather as some country out there that’s embarrassingly violent and nationalistic, doing bad things to Palestinians.

If that is now the picture of Israel for some young American Jews, it’s indeed different from the mystique Israel had while I was growing up in the U.S. in the 1960s and—though by then it started to dissipate—the 1970s. Not knowing too much about the subject, I thought of Israel as an ideal phenomenon, a land of farmers and warriors who were outnumbered and gritty, yet enlightened and humane. My heart sang with pride and admiration.

That idealized vision had something to do with my growing interest in making aliyah, which I fulfilled in 1984. By that time I’d read a lot more about Israel, and had a more nuanced grasp of it as a complex society displaying the normal human shortcomings. Still, I harbored a hope that the Israel I encountered would somehow live up to those earlier impressions.

So began the dialectic of my first, maybe, half-decade in the country. On the one hand, there were cold bureaucrats; Israelis who said, “You came here from America?”; tensions between Ashkenazim and Sephardim that could get quite nasty. On the other hand, I somehow kept feeling that Israel was the most wonderful place on earth, and that becoming part of it was the most wonderful thing I could experience.

Each of these politicians accused of anti-Semitism was voted into power by an electorate who knew exactly what their views were. Had they not held these views, they would not have been elected.

“Anti-Semitism isn’t just tolerated in some sections of the British Muslim community; it’s routine and commonplace.” — Mehdi Hasan, British Muslim political journalist.

The consequences of Western politicians’ continued weakness and appeasement are far greater than encouraging anti-Semitism and undermining the State of Israel. It is the fatal and irreversible descent of their own countries.

Battle-hardened British soldiers were moved to tears by the horrors they witnessed at the Nazi charnel house of Bergen-Belsen when they liberated the concentration camp in April 1945. Yet seventy years after thousands of troops fought and died to destroy the regime that murdered six million Jews, the scourge of anti-Semitism is again on the march across Europe.

In just one week, a British student leader, a Labour Party constituency MP, a London council leader, a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee and even Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn have all been accused of being mired in Jew-hatred.

It is the tip of the iceberg. Each of these people was voted into power by an electorate that knew exactly what their views were. Had they not held these views they would not have been elected.

All are on the political left, but the problem does not stop there. The cancer of Jew-hatred today spreads from right to left throughout European nations and in all supranational bodies including the European Union and the United Nations. It is led by politicians, human rights groups and the media, whose contorted worldview has contaminated ordinary people on a scale unimaginable possibly even to the arch-propagandist Dr. Josef Goebbels himself.

Haaretz: The British Left can’t tackle anti-Semitism if it doesn’t want to understand it

* Tom Gross: There has been a great amount of coverage in the British media in recent days concerning the furious row that is engulfing Britain’s main opposition Labour party about anti-Semitism within its ranks. The vast majority of readers of this list live outside the UK, so for those interested, I attach seven articles below. (By coincidence, the authors of these articles are all subscribers to this list: four are left-wingers; three are on the right.)

* Niall Ferguson (London Sunday Times): Former London mayor Ken Livingstone’s claim that “when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel” is nonsense and based on the claim of the [self-hating Jewish] American Trotskyist Lenni Brenner, who at an anti-Israel meeting in Connecticut, said that Jews were as “crooked as a dog’s hind leg”. As early as April 1920 Hitler called for Jews “to be exterminated”. In Mein Kampf he wrote: “If at the beginning of the [First World] war and during the war 12 or 15,000 of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas . . . the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.” Germans who voted National Socialist in 1932 and 1933 were therefore not voting for a Zionist resettlement programme. At a torchlit parade on February 6, 1933, in Hamburg 20,000 brownshirts chanted: “Death to the Jews,” and – according to one eyewitness – “sang of the blood of the Jews which would squirt from their knives”.

* Leading British historian Andrew Roberts: The sole reason Ken Livingstone brought up the Fuhrer in his interview was to be as vicious and loathsome as he possibly could to any Jews listening.

* Leading British World War Two historian Antony Beevor: For Livingstone to describe Hitler as a Zionist is “grotesque”. * Liam Hoare (Haaretz) : Anti-Semitism is indeed anti-Jewish racism – but it is also a unique form of prejudice, at once a virus and pathology. Anti-Semitism is a condition where Jews are the eternal antithesis. The hatred against them survives by constantly mutating. Christian anti-Judaism flowed into race-and-blood anti-Semitism. The accusation that Israelis murder Palestinian children and harvest their organs is the freshest incarnation of the old blood libel. Jews have been held responsible for both capitalism and communism, modernity and backwardness, powerfulness and powerlessness, sexual prowess and sexual inadequacy, extreme wealth and extreme poverty.

* Charles Moore (Daily Telegraph) : Jeremy Corbyn has refused to share a platform with David Cameron over the EU referendum, although they both advocate a Remain vote. [But Corbyn happily] shared a platform with Sheikh Raed Saleh, who (elsewhere) called Jews “bacteria”; with representatives of the British Muslim Initiative, which plays the anti-Semitic card of comparing Jews with Nazis with its “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza” placards; with what he calls his “friends” from Hamas, whose charter calls upon Moslems to kill Jews. And Corbyn has shared platforms with others who claim that “the Jews” that carried out the 9/11 attacks.

* Jonathan Freedland (The Guardian): “So this is my plea to the left. Treat us the same way you’d treat any other minority. No better and no worse. If opposition to racism means anything, it surely means that.” * Jonathan Freedland: Israel was deemed a “disease” by a caller to a 2010 show on Press TV, the Iranian state broadcaster, without objection from the host, Jeremy Corbyn.

* Tom Gross: The Guardian itself (though not Jonathan Freedland), along with the BBC, has been contributing to British anti-Semitism for decades now, as I have documented on countless occasions, for example here in my time showing the Guardian editor parts of Israel and the West Bank and here. I have also many times in the past, documented the anti-Semitism of Mayor Livingstone on this list, for example, here.

* David Hirsh: Last month Livingstone said that in his 45 years in the Labour Party he had never once seen any anti-Semitism. On that occasion he was jumping to the defence of Gerry Downing, a Labour Party member who wanted to “re-open the Jewish Question” and Vicki Kirby, a Labour member who tweeted that the Brits “invented Israel when saving them [the Jews] from Hitler, who now seems to be their teacher”. He was also trying to douse the scandal in Oxford University Labour Club after its Chair resigned, saying that members seemed to have “some kind of a problem with Jews”. These were the students who taunted Jewish members calling them “Zios” and singing “Bombs over Tel Aviv”. – See more at: http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001608.html#sthash.JkHXvBzB.dpuf

OXFORD–As it has for over 500 years, the Magdalene College Choir sang the Hymnus Eucharisticus from a tower high above this university town on the first day of May, followed incongruously by a dirty Elizabethan ditty about nymphs in Spring. An Anglican vicar blessed the bedraggled revellers crowding the surrounding streets. Most of them had tippled through the night.

Undergraduates for centuries celebrated May Morning by jumping off Magdalene Bridge into the shallow and frigid River Cherwell, but this year police barriers made the stream inacessible. Risk aversion has trumped tradition even in Oxford, once the last redoubt of British bloodymindedness. Whether one thinks the British Empire organized rapacity (mostly) or a civilizing influence (occasionally) or both (mainly), the men who made it evinced a madcap daring. The once-adventurous British no longer wish to leap into the unknown, except perhaps in the fantasy world of Harry Potter. For the same reason, Britain will vote to remain in the European Union on June 23. The annoyance of remaining in Europe is not too onerous to bear, and the risk of something going pear-shaped during a British exit (“Brexit”) is incalculable. Besides, Europe is gradually falling apart on its own, which means that the British have no urgent need to exit at the moment.

Stick around long enough, alas, and you turn into a theme park: the Oxford faculty recalls the last Spartan hoplites oiling their hair, playing their flutes and drilling in phalanx for Roman tourists at the end of the first century. Oxford is the world’s prettiest university town and a tourist destination par excellence, with dons and students substituting for the cartoon characters who greet the guests at Disney World.

Oxford today is all overpaying foreign students and bewildered Britons with middle-class accents. The accents are the giveaway: absorbing the clipped consonants and plummy vowels of the academic dialect was half the reason to go down to Oxford, the hallmark of acculturation into the British elite. Oxford itself is divided quaintly into thirty colleges, which range in order of poshness from Balliol to Ruskin and in braininess from Merton to Pembroke. Students meet weekly with a tutor and otherwise are left to their own devices. That is the mode of learning most easily replaced by Internet communication and the digitization of libraries, but such is Oxford’s residual cachet that inertia will carry it forward for another century.

The barbarians have not conquered it so much as infiltrated, as in the late Roman Empire. Oxford’s faculty still speak the King’s English and strike grand poses, but their grandeur is redolent of caricature. The end of empire spelled the end of the British elite, that is, the Mandarin caste of civil servants and military men who played Great Games and fought Britain’s wars. Almost nothing is left of the British merchant banks who once dominated world finance. As the victors in two World Wars, Britons are the only Western Europeans still ready to fight, as they did effectively in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Britain’s military and political role is too withered to support an elite caste.

Islamic scholarship divides the world in two: the House of Islam (dar al-Islam, nations ruled by Sharia law) and the House of War (dar al-harb, nations in rebellion against Allah). It is incumbent on dar al-Islam to make war upon dar al-harb until all nations submit to the will of Allah and accept Sharia law. “He it is who has sent His Messenger (Mohammed) with guidance and the religion of truth (Islam) to make it victorious over all religions even though the infidels may resist.” — Koran 61:9. Jihad is the force that gives Islam meaning.

In his book, Lights Out: Free Speech, Islam and the Twilight of the West, Mark Steyn wrote: “These are the books we will never read, the plays we will never see, the movies that will never be made… The lamps are going out all over the world – one distributor, one publisher, one silenced novelist, one cartoonist in hiding, one sued radio host, one murdered film director at a time.” This may be called World Jihad. Preventing free speech is Jihad, with the Jewish people as Islam’s perpetual target.

In the 7th century, the prophet Mohammad struck the infamous ten-year hudna, with the Quraysh tribe of Mecca, who rejected his claim of prophethood. He broke the agreement over a minor infraction, conquered Mecca, and extirpated the last remaining major tribe of Jews in Medina, the Qurayza, because they rebuffed his faith. Preferring bloodshed to mercy, Mohammad’s 3,000 Muslims set the paradigm of merciless inhumanity for future generations. The brutal annihilation of entire communities is Jihad, and modern-day Israel remains in the spotlight of Islam and her many accomplices.

Allah endorses Islam in battle, celebrates slaughter and enslavement (Sura 33:25-27), and sanctions the capture and beheading of Jews and plundering their property. Jewish experience has shown that Land for Peace has brought nothing but violence and bloodshed from their Muslim neighbors. The concept cannot succeed because land is not returned when the peace agreement fails and becomes a base of operations against Israel. Truces and treaties with Islamic regimes is another opportunity for Jihad.

A similar spirit now infects the nations. The Jews have been a presence in the Golan Heights since Biblical times. After many attacks by Syria, Israel won and, in 1979, Syria signed a disengagement agreement; Israel then democratized the Golan Heights. Although Syria continues supporting terrorism, the Golan is flourishing under Israeli civilian law – with infrastructure, electrical and water services, agricultural improvements and job training, and health clinics for 46,000 Jewish and Druze residents. Israel’s protection has brought welfare and social security programs, schools, freedom of worship, industry and tourism. Yet now, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Syria and the UN are calling for the return of the Golan to Syria. While thousands of people are being massacred in Syria, the UN Security Council together with Israel’s enemies are focused on Israel. Intimidation and coercion for land is Jihad.

According to France’s Defense Minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, 800,000 migrants are currently in Libyan territory waiting to cross the Mediterranean.

The multitude of very costly social problems that Muslim migration into Europe has caused thus far, do not exist in this whitewashed European Union report, where the “research” indicates that migrants are always a boon. Similarly, any mention of the very real security costs necessitated by the Islamization occurring in Europe, and the need for monitoring of potential jihadists, simply goes unmentioned.

Several European states have a less optimistic picture of the prospect of another three million migrants arriving on Europe’s borders than either the Pope or the European Commission do.

Pope Francis, on his recent visit to the Greek island of Lesbos, said that Europe must respond to the migrant crisis with solutions that are “worthy of humanity.” He also decried “that dense pall of indifference that clouds hearts and minds.” The Pope then proceeded to demonstrate what he believes is a response “worthy of humanity” by bringing 12 Syrian Muslims with him on his plane to Italy. “It’s a drop of water in the sea. But after this drop, the sea will never be the same,” the Pope mused.

The Pope’s speech did not contain a single reference to the harsh consequences of Muslim migration into the European continent for Europeans. Instead, the speech was laced with reflections such as “…barriers create divisions instead of promoting the true progress of peoples, and divisions sooner or later lead to confrontations” and “…our willingness to continue to cooperate so that the challenges we face today will not lead to conflict, but rather to the growth of the civilization of love.”

The Pope went back to his practically migrant-free Vatican City — those 12 Syrian Muslims will be hosted by Italy, not the Vatican, although the Holy See will be supporting them — leaving it to ordinary Europeans to cope with the consequences of “the growth of the civilization of love.”

There is nothing quite as free in this world as not practicing what you preach, and what the Pope is preaching is the acceptance of more migration into Europe, and more migration — much more — is indeed what is in the cards for Europe.

At the UN’s Geneva conference on Syrian refugees on March 30, Italy’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Paolo Gentiloni, put the total number of asylum seekers into Italy in the first three months of 2016 at 18,234. This is already 80% higher than in the same period in 2015.

According to Paolo Serra, military adviser to Martin Kobler, the UN’s Libya envoy, migrants currently in Libya will head for Italy in large numbers if the country is not stabilized. “If we do not intervene, there could be 250,000 arrivals [in Italy] by the end of 2016,” he said. According to France’s Defense Minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, the number is much higher: 800,000 migrants are currently in Libyan territory waiting to cross the Mediterranean.