RUTHFULLY YOURS

If Britain can forgive America the slights of the Obama era, and if Australia can forgive Britain hers, now is our chance to get the whole family back together. Europe loved Britain when she was submissive. We who share a common heritage can love her once again, very nearly unconditionally
Many of Australians no doubt still cringe at the humiliation of flying into the United Kingdom and having to file into the ‘non-EU’ queue for immigration and customs. Talk about ingratitude. Almost 100,000 Aussies were killed defending Britain from the Second and Third Reichs. Now the Germans get to sail through Heathrow while the grandsons of Gallipoli endure the distinct possibility of a complimentary cavity search. In 2015 the Tory MP Andrew Rosendell called for the creation of a line exclusively for ‘subjects of Her Majesty the Queen’, which, of course, failed. That was at the height of Europhilia among Britain’s elites.

Blood, history, culture: all these hallmarks of a nation’s conservatism were sacrificed at the altar of David Cameron’s One Europe liberalism. Now Britain is bidding goodbye, adieu, auf wiedersehen, and vaarwel to the European Union and David Cameron.

Europe, for that matter, is bidding goodbye adieu, etc. to Britain. At the beginning of the Brexit campaign, EU President Jean-Claude Juncker told British ‘deserters’ that they would have to ‘face the consequences’ of striking out alone. Now he’s making good, insisting the they vacate the premises ‘as soon as possible, however painful that process may be’, and that there will be ‘no renegotiation’. The Leave campaign spent months reaffirming their love for Europe and promising to remain engaged with the EU. Juncker makes it abundantly clear that Europe’s love was altogether more conditional.

All Britain had to do was clear her throat and Junker began throwing her clothes out the window and changing the locks. Which, if anything, confirmed all of the Leavers’ suspicions: that Europe was only interested in them as a dumping-ground for migrant workers and a reserve bank for failed and failing states.

One can’t help but suspect that Australia played no small part in the Brits’ decision to dump Juncker and his cronies. The EU is an unhealthy relationship for all parties involved, but only the UK has any experience with healthy relationships. Of the European states, only the UK developed fruitful bonds with their former colonial possessions in Asia and the Americas – which is to say, only the UK belongs to a real international family rooted in a common history, common values, and, yes, sometimes, common blood. There was no one to be outraged at Germany when she gave special privileges to the British at her airports. No one ever loved Germany the way Australians – and Canadians, Americans, New Zealanders et al – love the United Kingdom, which is enough to feel slighted. Or, at least, no one loved them enough to tell them so.

Priests are afraid to talk about Jesus during mass. — Eva Hamberg, priest and professor, who in protest resigned from the priesthood and left the Church.

The Church of Sweden may be headed towards “Chrislam” — a merging of Christianity and Islam. Swedish priests, noting the religious fervor among the Muslims now living in Sweden, enthusiastically take part in various interfaith projects.

“There are reliable sources from Egypt, showing that the Saudi royal family is really a Jewish family that came from Iraq to the Arabian Peninsula sometime in the 1700s. They built an army with the aid of British officers fighting the Ottoman sultanate.” — Imam Awad Olwan, with whom a priest, Henrik Larsson, is cooperating in an interfaith project.

“The involvement that the Church of Sweden has shown for the vulnerability of Christian Palestinians, has been replaced with indifference to the ethnic cleansing of Christians in Syria and Iraq. In these countries, it is mostly Muslims who commit the atrocities, which is evidently enough to make the Church of Sweden concentrate on climate change and environmental issues instead.” — Eli Göndör, scholar of religion.

The Church of Sweden has departed from being a strong and stern state church. In the past, Swedes were born into it and, until 1951, no one was allowed to leave the church. These days, however, it is an institution that has very little to do with Christianity or Jesus. Sweden now, according to the World Values Survey, is one of the world’s most secular countries; every year a large number of Swedes leave the church.

It used to be that only atheists left the church; now it is the devout Christians that leave — in protest against the church’s increasingly questionable relationship to the Christian faith.

When, for example, the current Archbishop, Antje Jackelén, just before being appointed, participated in a question-and-answer session in the fall of 2013, and one of the questions was: “Does Jesus convey a more truthful image of God than Muhammad does?” surprisingly, the would-be archbishop did not immediately say yes, but instead involved herself in a long monologue about there being many ways to God. Evidently, this upset a lot of parishioners. A high-profile priest and professor, Eva Hamberg, resigned from the priesthood in protest and left the Church of Sweden.

“This made me leave faster,” she told the Christian newspaper, Dagen. “If the future Archbishop cannot stand by the Apostles’ Creed, but rather, rationalizes it, then secularization has gone too far.”

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8351/video-geert-wilders-freedom

Dutch opposition leader Geert Wilders discusses the dangers of the Islamization of the West and the growing influence of Sharia law. He outlines his plans to defend the identity and civilization of the West from indoctrination.

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Turkey suffered its 10th terrorist attack in less than a year on Tuesday when a coordinated suicide assault on Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport killed 41 people and injured more than 200. The choice of target is noteworthy. Ataturk airport is one of the world’s busiest, processing some 42 million passengers and 314,000 commercial flights last year. Among the dead were citizens of China, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan, in addition to Turkish nationals. As terrorist atrocities go, it’s hard to get more global than that.

All of this suggests the attack was the work of Islamic State, though the group hasn’t taken credit at this writing. It fits a template of recent Islamic State attacks on the Brussels airport in March, on tourists near Istanbul’s Blue Mosque in January, the downing of the Russian airliner over the Sinai peninsula in October, and the Bardo National Museum in Tunis in March 2015.

These terrorist spectaculars achieve multiple aims at once: They inflict casualties on multiple nationalities, shake confidence in government security forces, harm local economies and demonstrate the reach of Islamic State.

That should temper hopes that Islamic State’s recent military setbacks in Iraq will offer relief from these sorts of attacks. The opposite might be true. Islamic State has now been territorially entrenched for years in Iraq and Syria, during which it has been able to radicalize and train thousands of recruits, including many with foreign passports. These jihadists will be paying lethal calls on crowded civilian targets for many more years, a deadly price for the Obama Administration’s gradualist policy against Islamic State and its willingness to allow Syria to descend into chaos.

The Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan also bears responsibility for allowing Islamic State to gain strength. Much like Pakistani strongman Zia ul-Haq, who made a bargain with jihadists in the 1980s so long as they attacked his enemies in Afghanistan and India, the Turkish government largely looked the other way as Syria-bound jihadists used Turkey as a staging ground and entry point for waging war against the Assad regime. Turkey has also been friendly with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, in the fatal conceit that terrorism is legitimate so long as it is targeting someone other than you.

This week’s agreement between Ankara and Jerusalem to resume normal diplomatic relations after a six-year hiatus is a sign that Mr. Erdogan may have begun to appreciate the consequences of that conceit, as well as the need for capable regional allies. Mr. Erdogan also seems to have understood that Turkey’s most dangerous enemies are Islamic State jihadists, not the Kurdish separatists on whom he has trained most of his fire. One reason to doubt Kurdish responsibility for Tuesday’s attack is that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, generally targets Turkish police and military personnel, not civilians and foreigners.

For the second year in a row, Egyptian television is portraying Jews in a positive light during Ramadan, much to the chagrin of some of the public and members of the country’s media, pro-Israel blogger Elder of Ziyon reported on Tuesday.

According to the report, this year’s series that is relatively sympathetic to the Tribe – through one of its characters — is called “Mammon and Associates.” Egyptian press coverage of the backlash the show has elicited includes a “defense” of the show’s directors, who – Elder of Ziyon paraphrases – “are generally uniformly anti-Zionist and against any sort of ‘normalization’ with Israel,” quick to make a distinction between Jews and the Jewish state.

Last year, as Elder of Ziyon reported at the time, an Egyptian actress portraying the role of a Jewish woman in a series launched on Ramadan, released a statement to assure viewers that the show’s intention was not to “beautify the face of Israel.”

Menna Shalabi, co-star of “Haret al-Yahood” (“Jewish Quarter”) – a historical drama about Egypt’s vanished Jewish community – “pleaded for critics and the public not to rush to judgment on the work before its full release.”

Elder of Ziyon quoted a Times of Israel description of the series, launched on June 18, 2015 for the Ramadan holiday:

The plot … unfolds in Cairo between two landmark events in 20th century Egyptian history: the 1952 Revolution — which replaced the ruling monarchy with the militaristic Free Officers Movement led by Muhammad Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser — and the 1956 Suez Crisis, known in Israel as the Kadesh Operation and in Egypt as the Tripartite Aggression.

It depicts a love story between Ali, an Egyptian army officer played by Iyad Nassar, and Laila, a young Jewish woman, played by Mona Shalabi. As one might expect, the romance is marred by the rising wave of Egyptian nationalism and the social tensions brought about by the creation of Israel.

The story of Orlando shooter Omar Mateen, like those of countless other “homegrown” terrorists, is now familiar to the point of cliché. The parents immigrate to the West filled with hope, but their children fail to thrive. They may be successful in some things and fit in with others of their generation, but only superficially.

Sometimes they are soccer-playing, rap-aspiring, beer-drinking lads from the neighborhood, whose failures often lead first to car theft and drug dealing. Other times they are outwardly successful, but the contradictions between the terms of that success and an inner reality or aspiration become too much to bear.

Within them is a grain of sand that irritates, which forces them to seek out that which they believe is missing in themselves. It is a means of overcoming individualism, the self, and becoming part of something much larger. It is a path to meaning.

Passions begin to burn over causes, indignities, injustices; the world does not work the way is it supposed to. Visions of perfection begin to loom but the means of realization require commitment to secrecy, lies, and double lives, to violence and inflicting pain. A sense of authenticity and being whole grows until, in a flash, rage explodes outward.

The stories of most ‘homegrown’ Muslim terrorists are all too familiar.

The base instincts of their insecurities, misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Semitism are given useful scriptural context and legitimation by local mosque sermons. The videos they view online extol jihad with heroic visions of Muslim warriors past and present.

Sometimes outward behavior changes in ways obvious to co-workers, such as the adoption of Islamic dress, strange statements about Islamic supremacism, and complaints about Western “decadence.” They become indignant when questioned or mocked by friends about their increasing religiosity.

In a search for authenticity, they make all-important visits to Saudi Arabia or the homelands of their parents, places they left as children or knew not at all, in search of answers about themselves, anxious to understand their place. But they find they belong nowhere, except in the world that ISIS claims to be remaking. And they return home with a fire in them, having either enlisted in a larger plot or with their own smoldering inside. Then the countdown begins.