RUTHFULLY YOURS

Africa’s Muslim belt is getting bloodier.

Boko Haram—the regional affiliate of Islamic State and one of the world’s deadliest terrorist groups—has accelerated its campaign of almost daily suicide bombings. Just last month, the group massacred 86 people, many of them children, in the Nigerian village of Dalori and 32 others in the Cameroonian village of Bodo.

To the west, al Qaeda’s regional franchise has been waging war on the government of Mali and expanded its reach last month to the previously peaceful country of Burkina Faso, slaying at least 30 people—many of them Westerners—in an assault on a luxury hotel. In the east, another al Qaeda affiliate, Somalia’s al-Shabaab, overran an African Union military base three weeks ago and slaughtered more than 100 Kenyan troops.

In 2009, the American journalist Christopher Caldwell famously characterized the changes that a massive non-European, non-Judeo-Christian, immigration was forcing over Europe as a “revolution.” We may now be on the brink of a counter-revolution, and that can be as violent and far-reaching as revolution itself.

Last year’s massacres in Paris (the attacks on satirical cartoonists and a kosher supermarket’s customers in January 2015, then the November 13 killing spree) were a tipping point : the French – and by extension, most Europeans — realized that unchecked immigration could lead to civil war.

Then there was the Christmas crisis in Corsica, a French island in the Mediterranean. On December 24, a fire was activated at an immigrant-populated neighborhood in Ajaccio, the capital of Southern Corsica. As soon as the firemen arrived, they were attacked by local youths, Muslims of North African descent. Such ambushes have been part of French life for years. This time, however, the ethnic Corsicans retaliated; for four days, they rampaged through the Muslim neighborhoods, shouting Arabi Fora! (Get the Arabs out, in Corsican). One of Ajaccio’s five mosques was vandalized.

Then, there was the New Year’s crisis in Germany and other Northern European countries. On December 31, one to two thousand male Muslim immigrants and refugees swarmed the Banhofvorplatz in Cologne, a piazza located between the railway Central Station and the city’s iconic medieval cathedral. As it turned out during later in the evening and the night, they intended to “have fun”: to hunt, harass, or molest the “immodest” and presumably “easy” German women and girls who celebrated New Year’s Eve at the restaurants and bars nearby, or to steal their money. 766 complaints were lodged. Similar incidents took place in other German cities, like Hamburg, Frankfurt and Stuttgart, as well as in Stockholm and Kalmar in Sweden, and Helsinki in Finland.

While the UN devotes its human rights operations to the demonization of the democratic state of Israel above all others and condemns the United States more often than the vast majority of non-democracies around the world, the voices of real victims around the world must be heard.

At least 10,000 refugee children have vanished after arriving in Europe with many being forced into sex work and slavery, officials believe.

Thousands of young migrants have been targeted by criminals and are now missing, according to the European Union’s law enforcement agency Europol.

The news emerged as charity Save the Children estimated that around 26,000 children were forced to travel into Europe alone last year.

Brain Donald, Europol’s chief of staff, told Mark Townsend at the Observer: ‘It is not unreasonable to say that we are looking at 10,000-plus children.

‘We just don’t know where they are, what they are doing and whom they are with.’

Facebook has been slow to take down pages inciting violence against Israelis and Jews.

Although Facebook’s ground rules officially prohibit bullying, harassment, and threatening language, last year it received numerous complaints about online incitement. On January 18, Facebook launched an initiative to prevent anti-Muslim hate speech on its German platform. But, according to a lawsuit filed in New York state court and a highly-publicized “experiment,” Facebook has no problem with anti-Jewish incitement.

Last October 20, the German daily Bild printed a double-page newspaper spread documenting racist vitriol posted on Facebook against migrants. On November 10 – days before the Paris attacks – Hamburg prosecutors launched an investigation into Facebook for allegedly failing to remove racist postings. The investigation was reportedly motivated by concern over “how the country’s long-dormant far-right was using Facebook to mobilize” against the influx of refugees. In other words, it was motivated by concern over anti-Muslim and anti-Arab posts.

Perhaps stung by that criticism, mere days after two Muslims murdered fourteen people in San Bernardino, California, CEO Mark Zuckerberg vowed that Facebook would “create a peaceful and safe environment” for Muslim users.

Facebook is now removing speech that presumably almost everybody might decide is racist — along with speech that only someone at Facebook decides is “racist.”

The sinister reality of a society in which the expression of majority opinion is being turned into a crime has already been seen across Europe. Just last week came reports of Dutch citizens being visited by the police and warned about posting anti-mass-immigration sentiments on social media.

In lieu of violence, speech is one of the best ways for people to vent their feelings and frustrations. Remove the right to speak about your frustrations and only violence is left.

The lid is being put on the pressure cooker at precisely the moment that the heat is being turned up. A true “initiative for civil courage” would explain to both Merkel and Zuckerberg that their policy can have only one possible result.

It was only a few weeks ago that Facebook was forced to back down when caught permitting anti-Israel postings, but censoring equivalent anti-Palestinian postings.

Now one of the most sinister stories of the past year was hardly even reported. In September, German Chancellor Angela Merkel met Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook at a UN development summit in New York. As they sat down, Chancellor Merkel’s microphone, still on, recorded Merkel asking Zuckerberg what could be done to stop anti-immigration postings being written on Facebook. She asked if it was something he was working on, and he assured her it was.

” To begin with, it is highly unlikely that feminists, gays, etc., are going to flock to the Liberals, Turnbull or not. Even more obviously, it is absurd to claim that there is a powerful global trend against traditional conservative values when the most powerful form of militant political activism on the planet is Islamism, an arch-reactionary creed being systematically imposed on 1.5 billion Muslims (and the rest of the world where possible!). Similarly, both China and India, accounting for nearly 3 billion people, are drawing upon traditional belief systems to sustain their national identities as they undergo accelerated modernization. In Europe, there is an increasing move to the right and far-right as the technocratic progressivism of the central EU powers, such as Germany, France, Italy and the Scandinavian countries, proves to be utterly impotent in the face of the mass Muslim insurgency presently overwhelming their meagre border defences. In America conservatism continues to be an extremely powerful force, as the present presidential campaign is demonstrating. Of the other continents, Africa and Latin America are home to innumerable dictatorships, kleptocracies, and failed or semi-failed states where jihadists and crime syndicates run amok and talk of a conflict between progressivism and conservatism would be not only beside the point but bizarre.”

Philosophically, historically, and economically, progressivism is bankrupt, sustained only by the very capitalist system and productive middle-class it reviles. As the gargantuan costs become utterly unsustainable, it is this chimera in which Turnbull and his supporters invest their hope and rhetoric.

With Islamic State gaining ground in Libya, another Western intervention there looks increasingly likely. The key question is whether it will happen at the request of a Libyan unity government, once rival factions endorse it, or if the West will be compelled to go to war first.

The U.S. and other Western countries helped topple Moammar Gadhafi in 2011 but then turned their attention elsewhere.

By 2014, the country fell into a civil war between an Islamist-led administration in Tripoli and an internationally recognized government based in the eastern city of Tobruk.

Local affiliates of Islamic State took advantage of that division to grab the coastal city of Sirte, Gadhafi’s hometown, last year. They later seized some other areas and inched closer to critical oil fields, damaging vital infrastructure.

With lawless Libya also serving as a springboard for migrants to Europe, European nations—particularly Italy and France, but also the U.K.—have long pushed for a stronger effort to stabilize the country. The U.S., too, has come to view continuing mayhem in Libya as a threat.

PARIS—The presumed leader of the Islamic State operatives who attacked Paris in November boasted that he slipped into Europe among refugees from Syria as part of a team of dozens of militants, according to a key witness.

If true, the testimony adds urgency to a continentwide effort by security services to track down people with links to the extremist group. Authorities fear that Islamic State smuggled many of its fighters into Europe among the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have fled Syria and Iraq in recent years, officials say.

The investigation into the Paris attacks has raised questions about Europe’s ability to screen those refugees for potential threats. At least two people involved in the Paris attacks had registered as refugees on a Greek island in the months before they surfaced in Paris.

The latest testimony, which was reported by French media Thursday, came from a woman who provided information that led French police to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian who is believed to have orchestrated the Nov. 13 killing spree in Paris that left 130 dead and hundreds injured.

Nearly seven years after Warren Bird visited the biggest Protestant church in China, he’s still deeply moved as he recalls its pastor, “Joseph” Gu Yuese, preaching that morning from Psalms.

“His sermon was on how God understands our cares,” says Mr. Bird, an American researcher and expert on global megachurches. “He got very emotional—not in the sense of high emotion carried by his voice tone, but emotional in the sense of affirming, from the Psalms, that God cares about our hearts, and God feels our pain, and God relates to us. It was like, wow.”

Mr. Gu’s sermon in Chongyi Church on that Sunday morning in August 2009 now feels eerie—and prescient. Psalms is a book about finding comfort from God amid hardship and persecution, and this week Mr. Gu disappeared into the hands of the Chinese government. He is reportedly imprisoned in a secretive “black jail,” notorious for deplorable conditions and even torture. Not since the Cultural Revolution has the Chinese government gone after such a high-ranking church leader.

Mr. Gu comes from Zhejiang Province, a region known for both its flourishing Christianity and entrepreneurial spirit. Believers there have long enjoyed relatively good relations with the authorities.

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced last August that her government would allow unregistered refugees to come to Germany, she set off the biggest migrant wave since the Second World War.

Despite the negative effects this huge influx of people has had on the German economy and society, such as the mass sexual molestation and rape of hundreds of women last New Year’s Eve in Cologne, increased crime and concerns for personal safety among native Germans, supporters of Merkel’s action believe it was nevertheless justified by the humanitarian emergency and the need to save lives.

But in an exclusive and revealing interview with the German newspaper Die Welt, an internationally recognised migration and Third World expert, Paul Collier, author of the book Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World, convincingly debunks this myth. Collier, a former director of the World Bank who currently holds an economics professorship at Oxford University, believes Merkel’s open-doors decision “…did not save a single Syrian from death.”

“Despite best intentions, Germany has, instead, dead people on its conscience,” Collier told Die Welt. “Many people understood Merkel’s words as an invitation and only after that did they actually set out on the dangerous journey, sacrifice their savings and entrust their lives to dubious smugglers.”

Meant as a humanitarian gesture, Collier maintains Merkel’s announcement had the opposite effect in regard to migrants’ safety and well-being. The refugees, he said, were already in safe, third states, such as Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, and did not come to Germany directly from “war and crisis countries.” But it was this “invitation” that caused them to leave these relatively safe havens, where most lived in tolerable conditions, and risk their lives on the arduous trip to Germany.