RUTHFULLY YOURS

In 2006, the Sunday Times columnist India Knight wrote a piece arguing that Muslims are “the new Jews”, in which she attacked Jack Straw for asking female Muslim constituents consulting him at his Blackburn surgery to consider uncovering their noses and mouths in order to allow better communication. (I use the word “attacked” loosely; if, as Denis Healey said, being dissed by Geoffrey Howe was like “being savaged by a dead sheep” then being attacked by Knight is akin to being traduced by a twice-used tea-bag.)

A decade later, so many sad souls have clambered aboard this ship of fools that it’s a wonder it stays afloat, so extreme is the level of dysentery masquerading as discourse which issues from it. Most recently, Holocaust Memorial Day was used by Islamists and their grisly groupies as the opening steps to a danse macabre of what-aboutery, comparing the Kindertransport to the current influx of refugees from the Muslim world and implying that if we do not welcome them all to our shores with open arms, we are as bad as the Nazis.

But those who make such hysterical comparisons are, in my view, the silly led by the sinister, as the Sainted Hitchens once dismissed the Not In My Name mob.

How are Muslims not the New Jews? Let me count the ways.

For a start, there seems to be no sign of any sort of Kindertransport in action – rather, the modus operandi would appear to be “women and children last” judging by the huge groups of able-bodied young men who have found their way to the West. And this of course leads to the sort of trouble we saw in Cologne. Though no one could accuse Jewish men of not being interested in sex, I don’t recall any accounts of marauding bands of Jewish youths mob-handedly molesting gentile women on the streets of countries which gave them refuge.

Splendidly Chinese girls from poor homes are now the highest achieving group of school children in Britain

Western women are now being told by the governors of some European cities that they should do their best not to inflame men, many of whom are coming from countries where child-marriage is legal, where scholars say it’s fine to sexually assault non-believers and where it is allowable to attack young women out on their own, singly or in groups. The Muslim Brotherhood was behind the gangs of men attacking young women who dared leave their homes unescorted in Egypt from the 1960s onwards.

The deadline for a ceasefire in Syria by 19 February has passed with no indication that it will be achieved at any time in the foreseeable future. Hopes for that ceasefire were high after the UN Security Council had unanimously passed Resolution 2254 on 18 December 2015 requesting:

“the Secretary-General to lead the effort, through the office of his Special Envoy and in consultation with relevant parties, to determine the modalities and requirements of a ceasefire as well as continue planning for the support of ceasefire implementation, and urges Member States, in particular members of the ISSG, to support and accelerate all efforts to achieve a ceasefire, including through pressing all relevant parties to agree and adhere to such a ceasefire”

The ISSG mentioned in the Resolution is the International Syria Support Group – comprising the Arab League, China, Egypt, the EU, France, Germany, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the United Nations, and the United States.

ISSG has proved totally ineffective in ending the five year conflict in Syria that has seen more than 300000 deaths and seven million Syrians internally displaced or fleeing to neighbouring States and swamping Europe to escape the horrific carnage unleashed in Syria during that time.

Islamic State was spawned in Syria and Iraq in July 2014 and now occupies more land than the area of Great Britain. Together with Al Nusra Front – a Syria-based Sunni extremist group that adheres to the global jihadist ideology of al-Qa’ida – both have been declared terrorist organisations by the UN Security Council. Meeting in Munich on 12 and 13 February the ISSG members agreed that:

“The UN shall serve as the secretariat of the ceasefire task force. The cessation of hostilities will commence in one week, after confirmation by the Syrian government and opposition, following appropriate consultations in Syria.”

The West is doomed because, as Europe is demonstrating, there aren’t enough births to sustain culture and traditions under assault by exuberantly fecund new arrivals who simply do not share them. The solution: subsidise larger families rather than immigrant benefits
A French novel has changed my mind on an expensive piece of entitlement largesse championed by Tony Abbott. Mr Abbott was right and I was badly wrong, along with all conservative commentators. I have also been wrong about opposing the increasing amounts of taxpayer money paid and promised for child care. The reason is simple: we pay it, and a lot more of it, or we die. Bear with me.

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” came to mind when reading: “If you control the children, you control the future.” The first is the familiar Party slogan in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The second is a description of the Muslim Brotherhood’s motivation in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission (2015). I was struck by the parallel, and it didn’t end there.

I was not familiar with Houellebecq’s work before reading Submission. For those like me, Douglas Murray provides an excellent review of Submission and some of the author’s earlier works, together with a little about the man, in the November, 2015, edition of Quadrant. Murray recounts that Houellebecq was the target of legal proceedings for having one of his characters in Platform (2001), whose girlfriend had been killed on a tourist beach by jihadists, express hatred for Islam and Muslims. He speculates that this may have been one of the reasons Houellebecq decided to live in Ireland. Whatever the truth of that, it says something sinister about where we are heading when a novelist is held to legal account for the expressed feelings of one of his characters. Perhaps the local Thought Police suspected he was venting his own secret Islamophobic thoughts?

http://www.wsj.com/articles/where-obama-fails-on-iran-sanctions-the-gulf-states-can-step-in-1456096639

Meaningful new U.S. sanctions on Iran will have to wait for the next administration. President Obama continues to oppose congressional efforts to inflict financial pain on Tehran for its malign activities. In January the Treasury Department finally did react to Iran’s unlawful ballistic-missile tests, but those sanctions will cause no economic damage. Instead they targeted individuals and companies—procurement networks that Tehran can easily reconstitute.

The Gulf States might not be so timid: Saudi Arabia and its allies have potent financial weapons they can deploy against Iran. The sectarian war between the Sunni and Shiite states is intensifying militarily, with proxies fighting from Syria to Yemen, and economically. On Jan. 4 Riyadh announced an end to all commercial relations with Iran and said it would cut off travel, with an exception for pilgrims visiting holy sites. In response Tehran banned imports of all Saudi products.

Last week the Saudis teamed up with Russia to propose capping oil production at January levels, putting pressure on Tehran to do the same as it tries to rescue its battered economy. Riyadh has deployed oil as a weapon before. In 2012 and 2013, after sanctions halved Iranian oil exports, Saudi Arabia raised production to prevent global price shocks. As the Iran nuclear deal was being negotiated in 2014-15, the Saudis increased oil production again. That helped to push prices below $35 a barrel. Now as Iran re-enters energy markets, desperate for economic relief, it will get only about half the price for its oil on which it based its budget last year. READ MORE ATE SITE