The radicalization of Muslims in Belgium provides ominous lessons for the rest of Europe
At the turn of the 21st century, a parade of books and articles declared that the American century had ended, and that the new century would be a European century. Matthew Kaminski of Politico wrote recently that in 2000, many believed that a continent free, whole, prosperous looked within reach and that the new century promised pooled sovereignty, peaceful cooperation, soft power, and social justice. As Kaminski notes, futurologist Jeremy Rifkin wrote that Europes vision of the future is quietly eclipsing the American dream and that Europe will run the 21st century. Washington Post correspondent T.R. Reid predicted that the Euro would replace the dollar as the worlds reserve currency. The Euro, he wrote, is more than money. It is also a political statementa daily message in every pocket that cooperation has replaced conflict across the continent.
Brussels represented the kind of post-national, multicultural city that European bureaucrats hoped the continent would become. In a 2001 report entitled Brussels: The Capital of Europe, Italian philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco wrote, In the presence of a multi-lingual, multi-religious, multi-ethnic Europe, Brussels [is] the center where diversities are not eliminated, but rather exalted and harmonized. In May 2001, British historian Timothy Garton Ash described Brussels as a place where highly sophisticated, multilingual men and women from the most diverse backgrounds . . . reconcile national interests and national ways of thinking with the pursuit of larger, common interests.
This tenth anniversary of the Mohammed cartoons is a glum day for free speech. But that’s no reason for some “social media” billionaire not to make it worse. During her visit to New York for the grand UN dictators’ ball, Angela Merkel was overheard rebuking Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for permitting people to post “anti-immigrant” sentiments on social media:
On the sidelines of a United Nations luncheon on Saturday, Merkel was caught on a hot mic pressing Zuckerberg about social media posts about the wave of Syrian refugees entering Germany, the publication reported.
The Facebook CEO was overheard responding that “we need to do some work” on curtailing anti-immigrant posts about the refugee crisis. “Are you working on this?” Merkel asked in English, to which Zuckerberg replied in the affirmative before the transmission was disrupted.
The very small cartel that run “social media” worldwide are increasingly hostile to free speech outside of a limited and largely trivial number of subjects. Ours will be the first civilization to slide off the cliff while watching cat videos.
~I wonder if, by the time Zuckerberg’s “done some work” on this, we’ll still be able to quote Henryk Broder on Facebook. The author of The Last Days of Europe, Broder was one of the speakers in Copenhagen joining me to mark the tenth anniversary of the Motoons. (You can hear my remarks here, and Douglas Murray’s here.) As befits his book title, he was something of a pessimist, especially when it came to Chancellor Merkel and her perplexing enthusiasm for unassimilable “refugees”:
So — who had the Russians bombing Syria and the Palestinians voiding all deals with Israel in the pool on Tuesday night before going to bed?
“News,” a coinage of the late Middle Ages, is a shortened version of the phrase “new things.” And these two pieces of news genuinely define the word. They’re events that hadn’t happened before and immediately changed what will happen going forward.
What’s amazing is that they came as a surprise, since both have been foreshadowed for weeks in the case of Russia and a couple of years in the case of the Palestinian Authority. And yet they did.
Presidential candidate Marco Rubio literally predicted the former during the Sept. 16 GOP debate.
This week, the hero of the Democratic Party’s liberal activists — Elizabeth Warren — forced the resignation of Robert Litan, a distinguished scholar from the center-left Brookings Institution. Her actions deserve attention because they suggest the tactics she might employ if she were to become the Democratic presidential nominee — or the president. Her hardball moves also underline just how intolerant of opposing views many liberals now are. Litan, who had been affiliated with Brookings for more than 40 years, is no conservative, but his failure to sign on to the Warren crusade against financial institutions turned him into a casualty. Previously, Warren had blocked investment banker Antonio Weiss from becoming a top Treasury official and Larry Summers from becoming Federal Reserve chairman. She has real power. But is she misusing it?
In the Litan case, Warren and her allies are angry about the growing opposition to a proposed Obama Labor Department rule that would increase disclosure requirements for financial advisers. In fact, that opposition now includes half of all House Democrats and virtually all Republicans in Congress. Ninety-six House Democrats signed a letter this month calling on President Obama to make major changes in the rule. “We continue to hear from constituents, academics, providers, and investors that there are specific provisions of the Rule that may cause market disruptions and limit the ability of segments of the market to reasonably access advice,” the lawmakers’ letter said.
It’s a moment Republican onlookers always knew would come, though they did not know precisely when: The long-simmering tension between former Florida governor Jeb Bush and his one-time protégé, Florida senator Marco Rubio, has become a public spat. It was Bush who made it one.
Until this week, the two presidential rivals had exchanged veiled barbs. Bush had claimed, without naming Rubio, that he is the only candidate in the race with enough experience to clean up the mess in Washington. Rubio had said, without naming Bush, that the time is ripe for a new generation of leadership.
But on Wednesday, Bush began naming names, comparing Rubio, a man he once urged Mitt Romney to select as his running mate, to Barack Obama — not the inspirational leader who has helped to remake the Democratic coalition, but the neophyte executive who has left many conservatives angry and dispirited.
It’s Bush’s latest attack against an adversary he clearly considers a threat, and it comes as the governor is feeling pressure from skittish donors to break out in debates and in the polls. First, in what appeared an attempt to make the GOP contest a two-way race, came sallies in early September against the businessman Donald Trump, who had assailed Bush as a “low energy” candidate. The polls didn’t budge, and Trump’s charge stuck. Now, with his super PAC beginning a $24-million ad buy, Bush is turning his sights to Rubio, who has risen in the polls and who many say is threatening to steal his former mentor’s position as the party’s establishment favorite. Whether the ads persuade and the attacks land will do much to determine Bush’s fortunes.
President Obama’s attitude and policies of appeasing the Islamic Republic have reached an unprecedented level. After the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, lashed out at the United States and Israel at the United Nations General assembly, President Obama’s response was intriguing: He continued to apply additional appeasement policies. He pointed out to the world leaders gathered at the U.N. General Assembly that the “United States is prepared to work with any nation, including Russia and Iran, to resolve the conflict.”
Basically, President Obama’s words granted critical global legitimacy to Iran, projecting Iran as a powerful state in fighting terrorism and resolving conflicts, projecting the United States as desperate, weak on the global stage, and in need of Iran. More fundamentally, Obama’s statement placed Iran on the right side of the equation: Iranian leaders are the “good folks” battling terrorism.
How can the US work with Iran while the Islamic Republic is the major sponsor of terrorism in the region? The Quds force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps is militarily operating more freely than before in several countries in the region including Yemen, Syria, Iraq, etc. Iranian leaders are boasting about occupying four Arab capitals: Sanaa, Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad.
Mere hours after a young, mixed-race religion-hater fatally shot at least nine apparently Christian victims at an Oregon college, President Obama tried to harangue Americans into supporting fresh restrictions on guns, the most severely regulated consumer goods in America.
The shooter has been identified as 20-year-old Chris Harper-Mercer. Police say in mid-morning they received reports of a gunman walking around Umpqua Community College (UCC) near Roseburg, Ore. As is the case in all or perhaps nearly all mass shootings at schools, UCC was a gun-free zone.
Wearing body armor, the man reportedly entered a classroom where an English and writing class was being conducted and demanded that those present state their religion.
Those who indicated they were Christian were fatally shot. Those who refused to answer were reportedly shot in the legs. Harper-Mercer apparently died during a shootout with responding police but at time of writing it was unclear if he killed himself or was shot by the officers.
http://jamieglazov.com/2015/10/01/the-unknown-understanding-the-islamic-republic-through-the-quran/
In this new episode of The Unknown, Anni Cyrus helps us in Understanding the Islamic Republic Through the Qur’an.
Why is the Islamic Republic so viciously oppressive of women? Anni connects the dots:
And make sure to watch below the BLOCKBUSTER first episode, The Day I Was Called a Woman by Islam, that launched this series.
(The second edition, My Nightmare as an 11-Year-Old Girl in an Iranian Prison, can be seen HERE; the third edition, My Islamic Court Date and No Way Out, can be seen HERE.
“May they rest in peace, and let Netanyahu prepare for war.”
On Thursday night, Eitam and Naama Henkin were killed in cold blood by Palestinian terrorists who drove by their car and riddled them with bullets. The incident would have caught the attention of the Israeli public in any case. But the fact that the couple was gunned down in front of their four children — aged 9 and under, with the youngest being a 6-month-old baby — made the attack that much more heart-wrenching.
Even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s voice cracked slightly while issuing an official statement on the tragedy, in which he expressed deep sorrow for the orphans. This was mere hours after he addressed the U.N. General Assembly in New York and said he was “prepared to immediately, immediately, resume direct peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority without any preconditions whatsoever.”
Turning to the Palestinian Authority leader, whose own speech, delivered the day before, was a tirade of threats to renege on all agreements signed with Israel, Netanyahu said, “President [Mahmoud] Abbas, I know it’s not easy. I know it’s hard. But we owe it to our peoples to try, to continue to try, because together, if we actually negotiate and stop negotiating about the negotiation, if we actually sit down and try to resolve this conflict between us, recognize each other, not use a Palestinian state as a stepping stone for another Islamist dictatorship in the Middle East, but something that will live at peace next to the Jewish state, if we actually do that, we can do remarkable things for our peoples.”
Jesus was quite specific: Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s. A political entity as much as a religion, Islam makes no such distinction. That is why, while the Prophet’s nominal followers might be trusted with high office, devout believers never should
Contender for the US Republican presidential nomination Ben Carson made the politically incorrect statement some days’ ago that Islam was inconsistent with the American Constitution and, ‘controversially’, that he wouldn’t support a Muslim becoming president. Oh, verily, did the progressives bring down their scorn upon him. If they were not such a bunch of atheists they would have willed God to strike him down. But the operative word Dr Carson used was ‘Muslim’. I will explain.
Take so-called ‘Christians’ who don’t believe that Christ was divine, was crucified and physically rose from the dead on the third day. There are, in fact, such ‘Christians’. John Shelby Spong, the retired American Episcopal bishop, is a prime and prominent example. He’s an outlier, but others head in his direction.
John Shepherd, the then-Dean of St George’s Anglican Cathedral in Perth, made the physical Resurrection an optional extra in his Easter message in 2008:
Well, what I do believe is that, to be a Christian, to be a member of the Christian Church, it is not necessary to believe that the Resurrection of Jesus was an extraordinary physical event which restored to life Jesus’ original, earthly body. The resurrection of Jesus need not be understood as a restored physical reality, but as a new spiritual reality.
