RUTHFULLY YOURS

As the multiyear talks between Iran and the P5+1 nations carried on toward an interim agreement, and eventually the unsigned final deal that one side (ours) hailed, the Iranians played a card that they continue to play today. That card was the bluff that they would walk away if unsatisfied with the concessions offered by the U.S., other permanent U.N. Security Council members and Germany. The Iranians caught on that President Barack Obama was legacy-obsessed and would always concede rather than risk them walking away.

In his first two years in office, blessed with a huge majority in the House of Representatives and a filibuster-proof 60 Senate seats, Obama’s Democratic Party was able to push through health care reform (the Affordable Care Act), financial reform (the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act) and a near trillion dollar stimulus package to tackle the economic downturn caused by the real estate and related Wall Street collapse. Then in the 2010 midterm elections, the evil empire struck back (if one was to believe America’s mainstream media). Tea party Republicans provided the energy for an enormous political shift that gave the House of Representatives back to the Republicans and greatly reduced the Democrats’ Senate advantage. The nation was in for four years of political gridlock.

After Republicans had another successful midterm elections triumph in 2014, capturing control of the Senate following Obama’s re-election in 2012, Obama’s strategy shifted. To become a significant president, he needed to accomplish things that the Republican-controlled Congress could not thwart in his final two years in office. This led to executive orders on immigration (effectively not to enforce the nation’s immigration laws) and continued lawmaking by executive branch agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Democratic-controlled National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Communications Commission. Most significantly, it led in foreign affairs to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the Iran nuclear deal) and the initiative to restore relations with Cuba.

Decades of efforts to avoid stigmatizing Muslims and to understand and address ‘root causes’ of Islamist terrorism have yielded horrific dividends in Europe. Belgium’s 2003 Terrorist Offenses Act criminalizes terrorism and participation in terrorist groups, but gets out its way to exclude Muslim “organization whose real purpose is solely of a political, trade union or philanthropic, philosophical or religious nature, or which solely pursues any other legitimate aim, cannot, as such, be considered a terrorist group.”

Belgium, France, and other European nations are blamed for failing to integrate their Muslim population. While this may be true, it is important to note that Muslim immigrants, increasingly radicalized, refuse to integrate. Instead, the larger the Muslim population got, it demanded, often violently, that their adoptive countries adhere to Islamic law. Imams everywhere preached that Muslim women set themselves apart from non-Muslim and advocate Islamic values of modesty by wearing hijab (head scarfs), although “there is no provision in the Quran that requires Muslim women to wear a headscarf when they are outside of their homes.”

The growing Muslim communities’ efforts to enforce sharia in Europe and elsewhere have been accompanied by Saudi and Gulf funding and very large donations to academic and cultural institutions. Money talks. And when receiving billions of dollars is conditioned on covering cultural monuments symbols of Western civilization, or giving up wine for just a dinner or two as the Italians have last January to please the Iranian president, gets Europeans to toss hastily aside their national identity, independence, and pride.

Some weeks after the attacks of 9/11, a Dutch journalist spoke at a panel discussion in Amsterdam, describing his experience of the events. Faced with the task of writing up what had occurred in New York that day – the devastation, the terror, the unanswered questions that remained – he said he found himself completely overwhelmed. And then at a certain point, he recalled, clarity came. “I realized it was just about America,” he said. “It had nothing to do with me.”

I’ve told this story before, and likely will many times again, but it came to me as I read an op-ed by Daniel Benjamin in response to Tuesday’s terrorist attacks in Brussels. Benjamin served as the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator from 2009-12. What happened in Brussels, he essentially declares, is really just about Europe. It has nothing to do with us. And it can’t happen here.

I respectfully, but emphatically, disagree.

To be sure, Benjamin makes some important points. The background and immigration history of most European Muslims is not the same as that of Americans. Europe’s Muslims largely arrived as guest workers in the 1960s and 70s from rural areas of the Middle East and North Africa (mostly Turkey, Algeria and Morocco). They were not educated; many were even illiterate. Because they were not expected to stay, their host countries did little to help them integrate, including teaching them the language.

But they did stay, and they brought family members from back home to live with them. They had children – many of them. And their children often suffered in school, where they were confronted with different values than their parents had, and with homework with which their parents could not help them. Many failed. Some had trouble getting jobs, and still do; Muslim unemployment all across Europe is significantly higher than the rate for non-Muslims.

Wherever Islam goes, so goes its ethos. The barbarity and variety of actions of Islamic extremists are seen daily around the globe, committed under the banner of Islam, and have become so commonplace that the world has come to view them as part and parcel of a troubled humanity. And from time to time, the world is shocked into a passing and momentary realization of the evil deeds these Islamist robots commit…and quickly gets over it and does nothing to seriously address this affliction of humanity.

Humankind is confronting a deeply troubling quandary. On the one hand is the aspiration of tolerant people whose objective is to forge a world of diverse people into one human society ruled by peace and respect for the inherent dignity and well-being of each member of that family. On the other, Islamic extremists are hell-bent on imposing their stone-age dogma on everyone else.

Savagery and viciousness carried out by the devotees of Muhammad in Belgium’s capital city of Brussels was another reminder that every now and then (and much more often these days), the adherents of the “Religion of Peace” are willing to massacre innocent people in cold blood in a most dastardly act of cowardice. Returning Islam to its pure and glorious roots is precisely what the “jihadists” are fighting for.

Atrocities of this magnitude not only break our hearts, but make us wonder. What compels a seemingly ordinary person to even contemplate, much less carry out, such a slaughter? How did these creatures end up carrying out all these heart-wrenching murders?

An easy answer is Islam. The life manual of Islam, the Quran, is a document of exclusion, hatred, and violence that shapes Muslims’ thinking and behavior. Sadly, Muslims themselves are the ones who are most victimized by Islamic doctrine. They have inherited this viral psychological disease of hate and violence; they live by it, and they transmit it to their children as well as to receptive others.

Qur’an 9:5 “Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war.”
Islamic doctrine, like a mental retrovirus, has mutated into numerous varieties and degrees of severity over the past 1,400 years. Everyone born in a Muslim family, as well as those who convert to Islam, contract a particular mutation of the Islamic virus. As is the case with all retroviruses, the Islamic virus burrows deeply into the person and erupts from time to time, with potentially devastating consequences.

A puzzle to non-Muslims: why would any intelligent and reasonably sane person live his life by the dogma of Islam? It is particularly disconcerting when this Muslim lives in a secular non-Islamic society. The befuddlement becomes mind-boggling when seemingly educated women in free societies voluntarily submit to the yoke of Islamic misogyny.

“When we inflict such radical changes on our society, we should ask ourselves whether we are being faithful stewards of the prosperous, free societies for which our ancestors struggled, fought and sometimes died. Perhaps instead we are squandering our inheritance, for the sake of that happy frisson we experience when we do or say something supporting “openness”, “tolerance”, and “social justice”. We are purchasing approval from our fellow upper-middle-class citizens, with social capital stolen from our children and grandchildren. We are feathering our own cosy nests, while making life even more wretched for our own nations’ native poor—whose ancestors did fight and die, alongside ours, for their descendants’ stakes in the nation. We are stealing the precious gifts of freedom and order from our least-advantaged fellow citizens—the blue-collar workers, the unemployed, the troubled war veterans—in order to salve our confused consciences, and feed our self-esteem.”

Inflict mass migration’s radical changes on a society and we are no longer faithful stewards of the prosperous, free societies for which our ancestors struggled — a legacy betrayed for the pottage of self-satisfaction in deeming ourselves caring, compassion and tolerant to a fault.
As people who are blessed to be citizens of highly developed countries—such as Australia or the United States, my own homeland—we have a long list of privileges we did little or nothing to earn. Some of them, such as natural resources, are the gifts only of God. But most of the others came from our fellow man. They are less like a landscape than a legacy, a trust passed down from father to son, mother to daughter, across the centuries. These gifts came from our ancestors, either personal or political, who painstakingly built up the peaceful and orderly, free and dynamic countries in which we live.

We are moved by a sense of compassion, and even of justice, to wish that we could share these blessings with people in other countries—if only by letting them come and live in ours. That’s a laudable sentiment, but it must be counter-balanced by a realistic understanding of where these privileges come from, how they are maintained from one generation to the next, and how fragile they really are. In fact we can overstrain our societies and destroy the very institutions that we so treasure, if we are reckless and overconfident in our acceptance of large numbers of new citizens from societies with hostile or alien values and incompatible civic habits. We can choke the goose that lays all these golden eggs.

If we follow the carefully documented arguments of Daniel Hannan in Inventing Freedom (2014), we will see that some of the greatest blessings which we residents of the “Anglosphere” (from Canada to India, from Australia to the Falkland Islands) enjoy are the fruit of the political principles, personal sacrifices and prudent decisions of particular people—the rebels and preachers, barons and burghers, who resisted the arbitrary power of kings, and fought for religious, political and economic freedom. These distinct people, at distinct times and places, undertook political actions with enormous moral consequences, which generations of schoolchildren used to be dutifully drilled to remember: Runnymede, the Glorious Revolution, the abolition of the slave trade. All these political events were the fruit of certain stubborn beliefs, which we can boil down to one: that the dignity of each human being affirmed by Christian theology has political implications, which philosophers such as John Locke presented in secular form as “life, liberty and property”.

As we study less history with each generation, it is all too easy for us to take these privileges for granted, to assume that because (as our theology teaches us) every person deserves them, that it is only natural that they enjoy them. But in fact, as we read the chronicles of the centuries, and survey not just non-Western civilisations, but most Western nations for most of their history, we will learn something quite different: that it is highly unusual for human life to be treated with unconditional respect; for citizens to be protected from arbitrary arrest and to be free to speak their minds; for the work of our hands and our brains to belong to us and our families, exempt from unfair confiscation. If life, liberty and property rights are what God intends for us—as we Westerners grow up believing—in cold fact, murder, bullying and theft are too frequently the norm.

The Palestinian Authority has no intention of recognizing Israel’s right to exist. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the Methodists are laboring under the false hope that “peace and justice” is possible if only Israel would be more accommodating.

The United Methodist Kairos Response Committee has adopted “apartheid” and boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) strategies, without considering how this may instead actually increase friction, strife and division.

The Methodists and other Christian groups with “peace and justice” interests such as the Presbyterian Church USA, United Church of Christ, Scottish Presbyterian Church and the members of the World Council of Churches need to accept some responsibility for aggravating the anti-Semitism energizing the popular imagination today.

The Methodist Church could instead consider actions of a kind designed to help rather than undermine peace — projects envisioned by a variety of goodhearted and resourceful people, who see opportunities where others clearly appear to be more interested in hurting Israel and the Jews than in actually helping the Palestinians.

Roughly 850 delegates from every corner of the world are currently preparing for the upcoming United Methodist General Conference (May 10-20, 2016). The quadrennial policy conference brings together representatives of 12.5 million members worldwide, including 7 million in the USA. During this ten-day event, delegates will consider a variety of church governance issues and a broad spectrum of social action proposals presented by member committees.

The United Methodist Kairos Response (UMKR) is one such committee. This group’s alleged mission, to promote “peace and justice” in Israel and Palestine, is sadly based on promoting the Palestinian cause — at Israel’s expense. Israel, according to the UMKR, appears to be the sole cause of Palestinian suffering.

Although the group accuses Israel of expanding “illegal settlements” in Arab territory, according to Elliott Abrams and Uri Sadot, writing in Foreign Policy, the accusation is totally untrue:

“To the question, ‘Is Israel vastly increasing the pace of settlement activity, making the establishment of a future Palestinian state less and less likely?’ the short answer, and the right answer, is no.

“Just as Israel was denounced far and wide for ‘settlement expansion,’ regular reports released by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics on settlement activity reveals is that Israel’s actual settlement construction pace has reached a historical low. Only 507 housing units were approved for construction by Netanyahu’s government in the first six months of 2014, a 71.9% decrease from the same period in 2013. About one-third of those is being built inside the major blocks it is understood Israel will keep in any final status agreement.

“For a population of more than 300,000 Israelis living in the West Bank, that pace of construction does not even allow for natural population growth, much less rapid expansion.

“It’s a lose-lose situation for Bibi, as nasty attacks from settler leaders coincide with those from prime ministers, foreign ministers, and presidents across the globe. The Israeli prime minister deserves credit, under these circumstances, for sticking to what he has said and appears to believe: Israel must build where it will stay, in Jerusalem and the major blocks, and it is foolish to waste resources in West Bank areas it will someday leave.

Freedom of speech is the ultimate liberal value — and it is the first value that people who wish to control us would take away.

If a court in a Western society decides to censor or punish Geert Wilders or others for non-violent speech, the court not only attacks the very humanistic values and liberal society we claim to hold dear; it brings us a step closer to totalitarianism. Even the idea of having an “acceptable” range of views is inherently totalitarian.

But what does one do if immigrants prefer not to assimilate? Europeans may be faced with a painful choice: What do they want more, the humanistic values of individual freedom or an Islamized Europe?

Censorship is not a path we should wish to take. While we may rightly fear those on the political right, we would do well to fear even more the autocratic thought police and censorship on the political left.

You are not truly a proponent of free speech unless you defend speech you dislike as fervently as speech you like.

There are many issues concerning the views of the Dutch MP, Geert Wilders, head of rapidly growing political party, the Freedom Party (Partij voor de Vrijheid, or PVV). Dutch prosecutors have charged Wilders with insulting deliberately a group of people because of their race and inciting hatred. Wilders’s trial focuses on a speech he gave, in which he asked a crowd of supports whether they wanted more or fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands. In another instance, Wilders is reported to have stated that The Hague should be “a city with fewer burdens and if possible fewer Moroccans.” Wilders admits to having made the remarks.

Srdja Trifkovic discusses on Radio Sputnik International the sentencing of Dr. Radovan Karadzic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
Trifkovic: The verdict had been written well in advance of Karadzic’s arrest in 2008. All key points in the verdict had been prepared well in advance based on a previous sentence, against General [Radislav] Krstic, when the “Srebrenica genocide” was quasi-legally verified. This is the logical outcome of a politicized tribunal with politicized proceedings…

Sputnik: What are we going to see now, when it comes to the future of the Republika Srpska?

Trifkovic: We are going to see the use of this verdict as another building bloc in the political case for the dismantling of the Dayton Agreement, signed in the fall of 1995, which recognized the Republika Srpska as a semi-autonomous entity within Bosnia-Herzegovina. This will be used, together with some previous verdicts, as justification for a sustained attempt to delegitimize its existence and to claim that—having verified the guilt of Karadzic—it is now time to look for another arrangement for the future of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a more or less unitarized state—in which, by virtue of their members, the Muslims will have predominance.

Sputnik: Many people will probably think “well, this is the end of an era, the end of the story,” but it’s not going to be like that in your opinion?

Trifkovic: Not at all. The whole show at The Hague Tribunal has the task of providing legal justification for the decisions made by the Western powers in the 1990’s. Nobody at The Hague is looking at the circumstances that led to the civil war in Bosnia, the way in which the illegal referendum on February 29-March 1, 1992 resulted in the war; or at the role of the American Ambassador in Belgrade at that time, Warren Zimmermann, who flew to Sarajevo in March 1992 to dissuade Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim leader, from accepting the plan put together by the European Union under Portugals’ presidency, the plan which could have prevented the war even before the first shot was fired. This is selective justice by a tribunal with a clear brief to prove Serbian guilt as retroactive justification for political decisions made at the time.

JAKARTA, Indonesia—Indonesia’s foreign ministry said Tuesday that 10 Indonesian nationals are being held hostage after their ship was hijacked in Philippine waters.

The ministry said in a statement that the owner of the hijacked tug boat and coal barge has received two telephone calls purportedly from militant group Abu Sayyaf, which is demanding a ransom.

It doesn’t know exactly when the incident occurred but said the shipowner was first contacted on Saturday. The ministry’s statement referred to the hostage takers as pirates.

Abu Sayyaf, which is on U.S. and Philippine lists of terrorist organizations, is notorious for bombings, extortions and kidnappings for ransom in the volatile south of the Philippines. It has been weakened by years of U.S.-backed Philippine military offensives but remains a security threat.

Retired leader Fidel Castro accused U.S. President Barack Obama of sweet-talking the Cuban people during his visit to the island last week and ignoring the accomplishments of Communist rule, in an opinion piece carried by all state-run media on Monday.

Obama’s visit was aimed at consolidating a detente between the once intractable Cold War enemies and the U.S. president said in a speech to the Cuban people that it was time for both nations to put the past behind them and face the future “as friends and as neighbors and as family, together.”

“One assumes that every one of us ran the risk of a heart attack listening to these words,” Castro said in his column, dismissing Obama’s comments as “honey-coated” and reminding Cubans of the many U.S. efforts to overthrow and weaken the Communist government.

Castro, 89, laced his opinion piece with nationalist sentiment and, bristling at Obama’s offer to help Cuba, said the country was able to produce the food and material riches it needs with the efforts of its people.