RUTHFULLY YOURS

The French see René Descartes, a 17th century philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, as the truest expression of their national mind. I am afraid they are right.

Descartes rejected authority in intellectual life and insisted on reconstructing knowledge on plain sense and strict reasoning, hence his famous motto, cogito ergo sum (“I think and therefore I am”). However, he also disdained experience as long as it could not be boiled down into logical and mathematical terms. This approach, so much at odds with the empirical and pragmatic approach favored in the Anglo-Saxon world, is indeed a hallmark of French culture — including politics.

The French elites relish in abstract, “élégant,” symmetrically organized concepts; they have problems with hard, rough, irregular facts. And should it come to pass that facts do not fit with concepts, they would rather ignore the former than question the latter. Even if major aspects of reality are being denied in the process, and the concepts themselves turned into inert dogmas or voided of any meaning.

Such a tendency was worrisome enough in the past, as some of the greatest French authors or thinkers realized, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Hippolyte Taine to Marc Bloch. It grew into an intractable problem after 1945, when France was reorganized as a statist nation, and a new administrative elite, engineered and trained by meritocratic academic institutions like Sciences Po (Political Science Schools), Ecole Normale Superieure (the Higher School for Education), and above all, Ecole nationale d’Administration (National School of Administration) engulfed the political class. Admission to ENA — through competitive examination — and graduation from ENA depend largely on mastering the required conceptual framework and never departing from it.

When Turkey’s Constitutional Court ruled that the detention for 92 days of two journalists, Can Dundar and Erdem Gul, constituted a breach of their basic rights, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did not hide his anger, and said he would not obey the supreme court’s ruling.

Turkish courts, controlled by Erdogan’s government, put the newspaper Zaman, one of the last remaining media critics of Erdogan, under state control. A court actually appointed administrators to run the newspaper. Editor-in-chief Sevgi Akarcesme said that this was effectively the end of media freedom in Turkey.

Turkey ranks 149th amongst the 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index 2015.

Quite realistically, Nigel Farage, a British opposition figure, accused Turkey of “blackmailing” the EU over the Syrian refugee crisis and its proposed EU membership.

Turkey has been sliding into an ugly Islamist despotism. Yet its relations with the European Union (EU) which it aspires to join has rarely been better. Some call it a mutually “transactional” improvement: “pragmatism.” Others, in less diplomatic language, call it Turkish blackmailing on the back of the refugee crisis. Even Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutogu admitted that his latest round of negotiations with Europe’s leaders was a fine bargaining “a la Kayseri,” a Turkish city famous for its tough-bargaining merchants.

In reality, modern Turkey has never been this galactically distant from the core values enshrined by the European civilization and its institutions, including even the EU.

When Turkey’s Constitutional Court ruled that the detention for 92 days of two journalists, Can Dundar and Erdem Gul, constituted a breach of their basic rights, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did not hide his anger. He said he would not respect or obey the Supreme Court’s ruling.

The journalists had been charged with espionage and terrorism after their secular newspaper, Cumhuriyet, ran photos and a story about Turkish intelligence sending trucks full of arms to jihadists fighting in Syria. Prosecutors demand life sentences for the prominent journalists.

In 35 nations Islamic extremism “has risen to a level akin to ethnic cleansing” of Christians.

Something else stands behind this rise of genocidal “Islamic extremism”: U.S. foreign policy. In every Muslim nation where the U.S. has intervened in the name of “freedom and democracy,” Christian life has exponentially worsened.

For years the Obama administration has refused to list Boko Haram as a terrorist organization, and has argued that its violence had nothing to do with Islam and was a result of poverty and grievances. Instead, the U.S. pressured the Nigerian government to make concessions, including by building more mosques—the very structures, as the Nigerian lawyer Emmanuel Ogebe said, where Muslims are radicalized and recruited for the jihad.

Globally empowering forces hostile to Christians is synonymous with globally empowering forces hostile to America.

The primary achievement of U.S. foreign policies, apart from wasted American blood and treasure—

is the unprecedented rise in Muslim nations of Islamic forces outspokenly bent on destroying America.

2015 was the “worst year in modern history for Christian persecution,” according to Open Doors, a human rights organization that has been documenting the persecution of Christians since 1955.

Feminism and multiculturalism held the victim down while Islam wielded the knife.
In Sweden, the headline goes, in the small town of Oestersund, “Women are warned not to go out at night to avoid multiple sex attacks by “foreigners.”

As in most of Europe and a good chunk of America — like the White House — the honest word for Muslim sex attackers cannot be said.

It is taboo.

Jihadist attackers constantly look for signs of weakness, and nothing shows weakness more than failing to protect your women and children. Protecting the in-group may be the most basic role for human families, clans, tribes, and entire civilizations. But after decades of multicult self-indoctrination, Europe has managed to emasculate itself.

This is not just a metaphor. It is real, as you can see if you take a trip over there.

The Oestersund police chief is quoted in the news as saying that the local police simply did not have the resources to cope with roving gangs of Muslim teenagers looking for girls to rape.

But historically there were no police in places where people lived. (“Police” means “man of the city”). There were very few cities, and many villages and lonely farms. You couldn’t call 911, and in any case, organized help had to come from miles away. There was the militia — the one the Founders referred to in the U.S. Constitution. But for everyday purposes there were just male volunteers, the neighbors, who would respond to local dangers by defending the village. They were usually fathers or grown males, but everybody recognized a common duty to fight danger. Farm women were often very strong, and they would join in.

“The police” as an official force did not exist until a few centuries ago. Instead, every citizen, especially strong men and boys, would rush to defend a woman or child in danger. In every civilization before Multicultified Europe, it was the men who defended the women.

Apparently Sweden has totally lost one of the most important roles of men, seduced by PC propaganda.

Male gang attacks are the rule in Jihad warfare, just like the ancient warrior tribes of Mohammed’s Arabia. The Vikings and the Mongols and Cossacks were the same. Go back in history, and that kind of piratical rapine is the norm, as we can see in Homer’s Iliad, which glorifies the war of revenge conducted by the Greeks after the beautiful Helen was raped and kidnapped by the Trojans.

For 12 years, al Qaeda’s franchise in the Sahara has focused its attacks on the continent’s weakest and poorest states. Now it has turned its violence on a new kind of target: an African success story.

For nearly an hour on Sunday, gunmen in bulletproof vests stalked vacationers on a beach in Ivory Coast, Africa’s largest cocoa producer and its fourth-fastest-growing economy.

By the time security forces arrived and killed the three attackers, at least 15 civilians—most of them locals who had been drinking beer and enjoying the surf on a sunny afternoon—and three soldiers were dead.

Among the dead were four French nationals, French President François Hollande said on Monday, along with a German national identified as Henrike Grohs, who had been the director of the Goethe Institute in Ivory Coast since 2013. Ivory Coast Interior Minister Hamed Bakayoko added that other victims came from Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Mali.

The commando-style raid confirmed growing fears across West Africa that al Qaeda fighters are turning their attention to the region’s most flourishing states with the aim of exacting the highest possible toll of civilian lives.

With grenades strapped to their waists, the three fighters crept through a parking lot, shooting people standing next to BMW and Peugeot sedans. On the beach, they killed sunbathers reclining next to coolers and beach balls, and fired at swimmers. The nationalities of the attackers remained unclear on Monday.

“They were shooting in the direction of everybody eating along the beach,” said Yves Losseau, a Belgian lawyer who spends several weeks each year in the area.

On Monday, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the Saharan affiliate of al Qaeda that claimed responsibility for Sunday’s attack, said it was a warning to other African countries that cooperate with France in its counterterrorism efforts. Some 18,000 French citizens live in the former French colony.

The attack appears to mark a turning point for Islamist militancy in Africa. Since 2003, AQIM has taken root in Mali, Mauritania, Niger and other desperately poor landlocked countries that have territory forming part of the Sahara. CONTINUE AT SITE

It may seem hard to believe that the United Nations can hold any new surprises when it comes to unprincipled attacks on Israel, but never despair: There is always farther to fall.

For more than 20 years, the U.N. Human Rights Council has had a dedicated “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.” (Needless to say, there’s no U.N. Special Rapporteur for the condition of Tibetans or Cubans; only Palestinians.) Now, the incumbent Israel-Hater-in-Chief is leaving and his replacement must be chosen.

This being the U.N., what kind of candidate will they choose? Be careful, now: The position’s entire purpose is to condemn Israel, so it’s important to disqualify anyone who might examine the evidence in an unbiased search for truth. Heaven forfend. Much better to choose someone whose anti-Israel bias is absolute.

And this being the U.N., that’s what they’re doing.

There are two top candidates, both worthy successors to Richard Falk, who served in the post from 2008 to 2014. Falk was the nut-case Princeton professor who wanted U.S. officials prosecuted as war criminals for deposing Saddam Hussein, and once said, “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.” You can see why the U.N. chose him.

Anyway, back to the current candidates. Ranked second for the Special Rapporteur job is a Canadian named Michael Lynk. Who is Lynk? The invaluable U.N. Watch notes: “Lynk . . . promotes an extreme anti-Western political agenda. Three days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Lynk instinctively blamed the West, pointing the finger at ‘global inequalities’ and ‘disregard by Western nations for the international rule of law.’” Needless to say, this political stance means he hates Israel. As UN Watch reports:

Lynk plays a leadership role in numerous Arab lobby groups, including CEPAL, which promotes “Annual Israeli Apartheid Week” events; signs anti-Israel petitions; calls to prosecute Israel for alleged war crimes; addresses “One State” conferences that seek to eliminate Israel; and argues that “the solution” to “the problem” must go back to Israel’s very creation in 1948, which he calls “the start of ethnic cleansing.”

You might think, “Wow, he’s perfect for the U.N.!” But no, he’s only ranked second, under the top candidate, Penny Green. Who is Green? She’s a British criminologist whose hatred of Israel is even more blatant. She has urged that the U.K. de-list Hamas as a terrorist group. U.N. Watch reports that she “advocates the total boycott of Israel, posting statements on Twitter such as: ‘Support BDS against Israel – best way to resist this criminal government’; ‘Academics should now systematically refuse any invitations to visit Israeli universities or attend conferences there’; ‘the West must impose sanctions against, boycott and divest from Israel.’”

As in any comedy, there is a clown, and Biden was played for a fool by a Palestinian Authority leadership that finds that it pays to point its finger at Israel.

Here is a dirty little secret: the Palestinian attackers were not driven to murder Jews because of “settlements” and “checkpoints.”

Check their Facebook accounts: what fueled their hatred were the lies they had been fed for the past few years by President Abbas and other Palestinian leaders. Palestinian media outlets and spokesmen vomit poison against Israel.

And so the curtain rises on another act of the ceremonial, make-believe theater of the Middle East. In Abbas’s sneaky script, it is about settlements. In reality, it is about the refusal of the Americans to read, speak or even translate Arabic.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden visited Ramallah last week, and Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas and his top officials are laughing their heads off.

Why not laugh? Biden arrived in the region hoping to persuade the Palestinian leaders to issue a “condemnation” of the reign of terror, which they continue to describe as a “popular and peaceful uprising.” This in itself reeks of gallows humor.

Donald Trump’s latest politically incorrect comment concerning Islam is much truer than most know.

After being asked last week on CNN if he believed the West was at war with Islam, the Republican presidential candidate simply said:

I think Islam hates us. There’s something there that — there’s a tremendous hatred there. There’s a tremendous hatred. We have to get to the bottom of it. There’s an unbelievable hatred of us.

While millions of Americans undoubtedly agree with Trump’s assertions — at least those who have eyes and ears to see and hear with — few realize that this “tremendous hatred” is not a product of grievances, political factors, or even an “extremist” interpretation of Islam; rather, it is a direct byproduct of mainstream Islamic teaching.

According to the ancient Islamic doctrine of wal’a wa bara’, or “loyalty and enmity” — which is well grounded in Islamic scriptures, well sponsored by Islamic authorities, and well manifested all throughout Islamic history and contemporary affairs — Muslims must hate and oppose everyone who is not Muslim, including family members.

Welcome to what is becoming the new global terrorist normal.

Few days go by now without at least one mass-casualty terrorist attack somewhere in the world. Two such attacks on Sunday, in the Ivory Coast and Turkey, killed 39 people combined.

On Sunday afternoon gunmen raided Grand Bassam, a resort town in the Ivory Coast popular with wealthy locals and Westerners. The assault followed the template of other recent Islamist attacks in the region, with gunmen spraying fire at vacationers on the beach.

At least 12 people were murdered in Grand Bassam, at least one a French citizen, before security forces killed six terrorists and stopped the attack, according to the Ivorian government. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb claimed responsibility for the attack.

Left unchecked in the Middle East, al Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS) have expanded into Africa. An Islamist crescent stretches from the Horn of Africa to West Africa, and to compete for recruits Africa’s al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates are racing to out-do each other in savagery. CONTINUE AT SITE