A New Law To Contain Islamic Radicalism Threatens French Protestants

https://markdurie.com/a-new-law-to-contain-islamic-radicalism-threatens-french-protestants/

Six years ago, when I was serving as the pastor of an Anglican church, the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission wrote to the parish requesting that it implement measures to stop our church from funding terrorists.

Warning a quiet suburban Anglican parish against funding terrorism seems more than faintly ridiculous, but for some types of charities it could be entirely reasonable. For example, during the 1990’s the Islamic Council of Victoria was administering a “mujihadeen” account, to raise funds for jihad in Afghanistan, although representatives of the Council later stated that the ICV never funded any jihadis who were ‘extremist’.

The ICV’s mujahideen campaign had a religious basis in Islam. One of the obligatory five pillars of the faith is to make financial contributions, known as zakat. According to the Qur’an, these ‘alms’ can be used for various purposes, not all of which would meet the conventional Christian understanding of ‘charity’. One of the permitted uses is to fund jihadis. The Qur’an calls this ‘alms … in the path of Allah’. This phrase was explained by the renowned Muslim commentator Ibn Kathir as “‘in the path of Allah’ is exclusive for the benefit of fighters in jihad.”

The Islamic sharia presents many unique and specific regulative challenges for secular governments. In addressing these challenges the authorities are understandably loath to discriminate between religions, so when they set out to impose legislative boundaries around Islamic radicalism, there is a risk that the freedoms of other religions will be damaged.  Freedoms and privileges currently enjoyed by Christian charities could be wound back, as collateral damage of a scattergun response to Islamic radicalism.

Arming Taiwan Against China Is A Smarter Strategy Than Sending U.S. Troops By Sumantra Maitra

https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/02/arming-taiwan-against-china-is-a-smarter-strategy-than-sending-u-s-troops/

President Biden shouldn’t make empty promises. The strategy should be about bleeding China if they overstretch, rather than committing American lives to a potentially attritional war.

Largely unreported in corporate media, last week Chinese fighters apparently simulated sinking a U.S. carrier in an attack. On Jan. 23, according to intel sources, cockpit chatter highlighted a command to simulate targeting the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier group.

China has been in news over sporadic border clashes with India and a flyby of Taiwan on the day of President Biden’s inauguration. But a direct simulation of a strike on a U.S. carrier group signifies that Beijing now considers even a limited military clash with America over Taiwan within the realm of possibility.

That brings us to the biggest foreign policy question, which the Biden administration is likely not yet ready to face. What happens the day after China launches an invasion of Taiwan?

So far, the Biden administration’s reaction has signaled rhetorical continuity with the Trump era. American foreign policy wonks, despite all divisions, are bipartisan about the China threat. One might not hear it much in public, but despite being divided between realists who prefer a narrower national interest-based approach, and liberals and neoconservatives who prefer interventions and democracy promotion, foreign policy circles so far are united in their threat appraisal of the rise of China as the largest threat facing the United States.

Kamala Harris already becoming a problem for Biden White House By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/kamala_harris_already_becoming_a_problem_for_biden_white_house.html

I suspect that regret already is setting in among his handlers over their pick of Kamala Harris for Joe Biden’s running mate. The first of what will be many clean-up efforts began yesterday for her bungling an incident 8 days in office.  CNN reports:

The White House called Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin after Vice President Kamala Harris conducted interviews with West Virginia media, according to a person with knowledge of the conversation.

The outreach comes after Harris’ apparent move to apply pressure on Manchin frustrated the conservative Democrat, something that he made clear over the weekend.

The pressure VP Harris attempted to apply came in the form of an exclusive interview she granted to WSAZ TV in Huntington, WV. Curiously, I have been unable to locate a video clip on Rumble or YouTube or Twitter. Even WSAZ’s own website is not making available what has to be one of the most newsworthy broadcast moments in the station’s history.

In the interview, Harris tried to pressure the popular former governor by speaking directly to his own constituents:

On Thursday, Harris promoted the $1.9 trillion Covid relief plan in interviews with television stations in West Virginia and Arizona — states that are home to Democrats whose votes could be critical to passing Covid relief, including Manchin in West Virginia and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, along with Sen. Mark Kelly, who will face re-election in the state in 2022, in Arizona.

Andy Ngo Unmasks Antifa in New Book and Warns: ‘Antifa Lives and Thrives Only if America Dies.’ By Victoria Taft

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/02/02/andy-ngo-unmasks-antifa-in-new-book-and-warns-antifa-lives-and-thrives-only-if-america-dies-n1422325

Antifa is the muscle, the Southern Poverty Law Center and other non-profits help pick the targets, and anyone who points out their totalitarian intolerance is called a fascist, promptly canceled, or burned in effigy. That’s the crazy Leftist triangulation playing out these days on the streets of Portland and in many other riot-prone American cities. Journalist Andy Ngo knows this all too well.

The angry red communist comrades of antifa and BLM have tried to cancel the Portland-based journalist but Ngo told PJ Media that it obviously hasn’t worked out too well for them. Antifa “protesters” beat him senseless and sent him to the hospital with brain damage in 2019, engaged in a sustained smear campaign against him due to his coverage of the group, and basically put out a hit on him, but Andy Ngo’s still standing. And thriving.

Instead of being canceled, Ngo wrote a book about antifa and BLM. Unmasked: Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy has just hit bookstores.

Though I’ve watched the Portland protest scene go from the chill Friday-at-4 drum circles to shrieking animal rights protesters, Occupy encampments, May Day melees, and antifa trying to burn down my hometown, Ngo’s book is a valuable resource and well told.

Trump Eviscerates Democrats’ Impeachment Charges By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/02/02/trump-lawyers-claim-impeachment-is-a-legal-nullity-n1422577

On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump’s lawyers Bruce L. Castor, Jr., and David Schoen released Trump’s answer to the Democrats’ article of impeachment accusing him of “incitement of insurrection.” Trump’s response breaks the Democrats’ impeachment article into eight separate allegations and responds to each claim. In a nutshell, the former president argues that it is unconstitutional for the Senate to remove a president when he has already left office and that he is innocent of the Democrats’ charges.

Trump asks the Senate to “dismiss Article I: Incitement of Insurrection against him as moot, and thus in violation of the Constitution, because the Senate lacks jurisdiction to remove from office a man who does not hold office. In the alternative, the 45th President respectfully requests the Senate acquit him on the merits of the allegations raised in the article of impeachment.”

The Senate already voted to take up the impeachment, with five Republican senators joining 50 Democratic senators in holding the matter constitutional. However, 45 Republican senators voted not to hold the trial, given constitutional concerns. This vote signified that the Senate is not likely to convict Trump.

The former president makes a few extremely salient arguments against the Democrats’ impeachment article. In addition to the claim that the Senate cannot convict a former president on impeachment, Trump argues that the Democrats violated his free speech and due process rights in rushing to impeach him and that the article of impeachment is deceptively drafted in an unfair manner. Trump also claims that disqualifying him from office would constitute a “bill of attainder,” which has been broadly interpreted to mean a legislative act against a class of people that inflcits punishment on them without a judicial trial.

YouTube Cancels the U.S. Senate It censors testimony from physicians on early treatments for Covid-19 patients. By Senator Ron Johnson (R-WIS.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-cancels-the-u-s-senate-11612288061?mod=opinion_lead_pos5 Google’s YouTube has ratcheted up censorship to a new level by removing two videos from a U.S. Senate committee. They were from a Dec. 8 Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing on early treatment of Covid-19. One was a 30-minute summary; the other was the opening statement of critical-care specialist Pierre Kory. […]

The Lincoln Project Lowlifes and Their Enablers No one at the Lincoln Project offers anything of value; they’re cruel and stupid, ugly on the inside and out. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/01/the-lincoln-project-lowlifes-and-their-enablers/

The Trump era has spawned an abundance of show clowns clowning either for or against the president. One can’t help but wonder what the country did to deserve the likes of Anthony Scaramucci, Michael Avenatti, and Ana Navarro all foisted upon us at the same time.

Not since the days of James Carville and Mary Matalin has a power couple like the Conways and, unfortunately at least one of their children, epitomized the political war tearing families, friendships, businesses, and the overall country apart.

So it’s appropriate—and gratifying—to see the Lincoln Project, the poisonous outlet co-founded by George Conway, the corpulent husband of Kellyanne, now drowning in its own droppings amid confirmation of one of Washington’s worst kept secrets; co-founder John Weaver is a closet homosexual who preys on young men, some as young as 14. (Karl Rove admitted in an interview Monday that he’s known about Weaver’s behavior since 1988.)

According to a New York Times exposé published over the weekend, nearly two dozen men said Weaver, who is married with two children, “for years sent unsolicited and sexually provocative messages online to young men, often while suggesting he could help them get work in politics.” Weaver mostly attempted to lure his prospects via direct messaging on Twitter.

The “longtime Republican strategist,” as the Times described Weaver, helped manage the failed presidential campaigns of the late Senator John McCain in both 2000 and 2008 and former Ohio Governor John Kasich in 2016. But Weaver and his fellow Lincoln Project lowlifes weren’t bolstered by the media and funded by rich Democratic donors because of winning campaign records or savvy political skills or telegenic good looks.

No, like other NeverTrump shticks—a “former” Republican or “disgruntled” conservative acts as the anti-Trump foil on CNN or in the Washington Post, as I detail in my bookLincoln Project hoodlums revitalized stalled careers by relentlessly and viciously attacking the former president, his family, his administration, and his supporters in Congress.

This slime machine includes losing campaign advisor Rick Wilson and losing campaign manager Steve Schmidt; they spend most of their time making threats on Twitter and cable news shows. Last month, Schmidt warned he will punish pro-Trump Republicans. “They will not write their history,” Schmidt claimed. “We will write their history. And their shame will last forever. They are carved like etching into granite, granite, onto history’s list of villains in the country.”

Biden is the most radical left-wing president in US history, period Rich Lowry

https://nypost.com/2021/02/01/biden-is-the-most-radical-left-wing-president-in-us-history-period/

Joe Biden is off to the most left-wing start of any Democratic president in recent memory. 

Just two weeks later, the dulcet tones of Biden’s inaugural address already seem an artifact of a bygone era. Republicans will hammer him for the rest of his presidency for failing to deliver on his unifying message, but the fact is that Biden is governing as he promised — further to the left of his own record, further to the left of his ex-boss, former President Barack Obama, and further to the left of any Democrat who made his career prior to the ascendency of the cultural left. 

It isn’t new for Democratic presidents to want to tax, spend and regulate, even if Biden seeks to do more of all three than his immediate predecessors. Biden layers on top of this a cultural agenda that represents a new dimension of radicalism that would be alien and baffling to bygone Democrats, who may have wanted to extend the New Deal but never sought to transcend the gender binary. 

Biden is willing, too, to go it alone via rapid-fire unilateral executive actions. 

If Lyndon Johnson gave us the Great Society, he came to office after the assassination of John F. Kennedy seeking to fulfill the legacy of his martyred predecessor, which included passing a tax bill that reduced income-tax rates across the board and slashed corporate taxes. Once he was elected in his own right in 1964, Johnson embarked on a spate of federal activism that no subsequent Democrat has been able to match, although Johnson largely enacted his priorities the old-fashioned way, by passing bills through Congress. And he operated in a much more culturally conservative country and party. 

Jimmy Carter doesn’t really rate. He ran in 1976 as a genuine Southern moderate, and his early administration was marked by ineffectual overreach. 

The dangerous, disappearing Persians A steadily declining population could push Iran toward a regional confrontation David Goldman

https://asiatimes.com/author/david-p-goldman/

Persians have good reason to worry. In the Persian home provinces, total fertility rates last year fell to close to 1 (only one child per female). 

Iran will decide sometime in the next few months whether it will risk war in the hope of becoming the dominant regional power, or whether it will accept national decline in the hope of a modest degree of prosperity.  It is running out of people slowly, but it is running out of Persians at an alarming rate: The fertility rate in ethnically Persian provinces including Tehran is barely above 1 child per female, a formula for demographic implosion within a single generation. I have warned since 2006 in this publication (and in a 2011 book) that Iran’s declinist mood makes it dangerous, but Iran now has to make an existential choice.

Iran will gauge carefully the likely response to its decision from Washington, Jerusalem as well as Beijing, weighing the costs and benefits of a war whose outcome almost certainly would be disastrous for the countries of the Persian Gulf. How damaging such a war would be to Israel depends on a set of unknowns, including the effectiveness of Israel’s three-tier layered missile defense system, the number and accuracy of Iran’s medium-range missiles, and the willingness of Hezbollah to deploy its 130,000 missiles in southern Lebanon under the threat of an annihilating Israeli retaliation.

The Persians are in the kind of panic about their future that impelled France and Germany toward war respectively in 1914 and 1939. I do not agree with much of Harvard Prof. Graham Allison’s “Thucydides Trap” thesis, which views the 5th-century B.C.E. Spartan-Athenian war as a template for the response of a declining established power to a challenger, but there is an unsettling parallel between ancient Sparta and modern Iran. Sparta already had entered irreversible demographic decline when it warred with Athens, and Iran’s leaders are so possessed by fear of population shrinkage that they arrest academic demographers for publishing the wrong data.

A use-it-or-lose-it mood may push Iran towards an early attempted breakout as a nuclear power. On Jan. 2 Iran announced that it would enrich uranium up to 20% at its underground Fordo nuclear plant “as soon as possible.” The Biden Administration’s determination to revive the Iran nuclear deal that Trump eschewed may persuade Tehran that the costs of a nuclear breakout would be manageable. Meanwhile prominent Israeli analysts warn that this would mean war.

Denmark: “Our Goal is Zero Asylum Seekers” by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17025/denmark-asylum-seekers

“Our goal is zero asylum seekers. We cannot promise zero asylum seekers, but we can establish the vision for a new asylum system, and then do what we can to implement it. We must be careful that not too many people come to our country, otherwise our social cohesion cannot exist. It is already being challenged.” — Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen.

“Unfortunately, I believe that the easing will result in an increase in the number of asylum seekers in Denmark once the Covid-19 crisis is over. We can only look at the Canary Islands, which is now being flooded with refugees. The question is whether we will experience a new migration crisis, similar to the one in 2015, when the corona crisis is over.” — Pia Kjærsgaard, MP, Danish People’s Party.

“The fight against Islamism is about the survival of the welfare state. Denmark must not adapt to Islam. Islam must adapt to Denmark.” — Danish Immigration Minister Mattias Tesfaye.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has announced that her government intends to significantly limit the number of people seeking asylum in Denmark. The aim, she said, is to preserve “social cohesion” in the country.

Frederiksen’s comments, which many have welcomed, and others have dismissed as empty promises, are the latest salvo in a long-running debate about multiculturalism and the role of Islam in Danish society.

Denmark, which has a population of 5.8 million, received approximately 40,000 asylum applications during the past five years, according to data compiled by Statista. Most of the applications received by Denmark, a predominately Lutheran country, were from migrants from Muslim countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

In recent years, Denmark has also permitted significant non-asylum immigration, especially from non-Western countries. Denmark is now home to sizeable immigrant communities from Syria (35,536); Turkey (33,111); Iraq (21,840); Iran (17,195); Pakistan (14,471); Afghanistan (13,864); Lebanon (12,990) and Somalia (11,282), according to Statista.