RUTHFULLY YOURS

Over the years since President Obama first took office, he has lectured Americans about the receding tide of war, al Qaeda on the run, and, more recently, ISIS (or, as the administration has it, ISIL) being degraded, slated for ultimate destruction, and, even more recently, “contained.” Meanwhile, the world is getting ever more dangerous. Over the past six months alone, the State Department in its efforts to keep up with the turmoil and threats has issued more than three dozen travel warnings for Americans thinking of visiting places from Eritrea to Mali, Lebanon, Colombia, Sudan, El Salvador, Nigeria, Tanzania, Cameroon, Burma, Nepal, Mali, the Philippines, Kenya, Turkey… and of course Syria, Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

Now, in the aftermath of the ISIS terrorist attacks on Paris, with ISIS threatening strikes on America, and Brussels heading into its fourth day on lockdown, the State Department is taking a more wholesale approach. Today, as PJ Media’s Bridget Johnson reports, the State Department issued a “Worldwide Travel Alert,” warning U.S. citizens of “possible risks of travel due to increased terrorist threats.”

Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens remarked that terrorism in Europe
was no longer limited to Jews and law enforcement officials, but now
affects targets of a different profile, including the general public,
The Guardian reported on Sunday.

Geens, the justice minister, said that the Paris attacks had shown
that the profile of potential targets had changed. “It’s no longer
synagogues or the Jewish museums or police stations, it’s mass
gatherings and public places,” he said.

By the calculations of the social scientists at the World Economic Forum, the United States’ gender-equality ranking has slipped from 20th place to 28th since 2014. WEF’s Global Gender Gap Index 2015 found that the U.S. is outranked not only by such leftist Valhallas as Iceland (first) and Sweden (fourth), but also, among others, by Mozambique (27th), Namibia (16th), Rwanda (sixth), and Burundi (23rd).

Yes, according to this report, American women who want to enjoy greater gender equality should move to Burundi — a small East African country whose president held a sham election to garner an unconstitutional third term and who is currently threatening to commit genocide against his own people in order to keep power. Burundi also has a continuing history of widespread rape committed by both private citizens and government officials.

Or there’s Burundi’s neighbor Rwanda, whose government recently recruited Burundian refugees, apparently to wage an armed insurgency within Burundi.

Also outranking the U.S. are the Philippines (seventh), where human-rights abuses such as extrajudicial killing are normal; Bolivia (22nd), where corruption and gender-based violence prevail; and Nicaragua (twelfth), where property rights are tenuous and the press faces judicial and legal harassment from the Ortega administration.

The murder of 27 hotel guests in Mali’s capital city by Boko Haram, now an al Qaeda franchisee, highlights yet again the delusional futility of asserting that, as Hillary Clinton put it in a tweet, “Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” Like Obama, Hillary also vigorously condemns the use of a phrase like “Islamist radicalism.”

These evasions are contrary to the history and doctrines of Islam consistent over 14 centuries, and contradict the professed motives for the continuing violence perpetrated across the globe––27,295 deadly attacks just since 9/11–– by Islamic terrorist groups who emulate the Prophet and take seriously his injunction to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captive and besiege them, and lie in wait for them in every ambush” (9.5), one of 109 verses––the direct commands of Allah–– that order war against infidels.

Moreover, that most Muslims do not engage directly in such violence, or may even condemn it, does not change the fundamental doctrines that justify it, no more than the millions of Catholic women who use birth control invalidate the church’s doctrine against contraception. The doctrine of jihad has been part of Islam from its beginning, enjoined by the Koran and Hadith, and confirmed and celebrated by the most eminent Islamic historians, jurisprudents, and theologians. One of the most famous, the late-14th century writer Ibn Khaldun, wrote in the Muqaddimah, “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” When we see Muslims in the 21st century killing and dying in service to this traditional religious imperative created in the 7th century, it is perverse blindness to claim that there is no connection between Islam and Islamic terrorism.