RUTHFULLY YOURS

Islamist attacks are becoming routine on the Continent.

Islamist violence visited Denmark twice on the weekend, underscoring Europe’s new terrorist normal. Homegrown or immigrant Muslim terrorists targeting innocents and the Western way of life are becoming a feature of Continental life.

The alleged assailant didn’t choose his victims at random. First he fired dozens of rounds at a cafe in Copenhagen during a debate on free speech, killing one and wounding three. Police believe the same man attacked a synagogue hours later, killing a Jewish civilian guard and maiming two officers. Early Sunday police killed the man they believe committed both attacks. Witnesses heard him cry “Allahu Akbar” during the cafe assault.

Among those attending the debate at the Krudttoenden cafe was Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who has received death threats and an al Qaeda bounty since the 2007 publication of a cartoon he drew that mocked Muhammad. A failed suicide bomber attacking downtown Stockholm in 2010 mentioned Mr. Vilks’s name in an email explaining his motives, and later that year the cartoonist’s home was the target of arson. He lives under police protection.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/02/14/cia-headquarters-in-langley-reportedly-on-lockdown/

According to accounts from a McLean, Virginia resident, the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia are on lockdown for an unknown reason.

Photos provided to Breitbart News show the entrance from the road barred and police tape around the perimeter. Patrol cars were reportedly on hand as well. The local resident also stated that the rear entrance to the facility was also blocked.

This is a developing story.

Yesterday evening’s Copenhagen synagogue shooting is yet another attack on Jews as Jews — just as we have witnessed such attacks at the Toulouse Jewish primary school, the Brussels Jewish museum, the Paris kosher supermarket, the firebombing of the synagogue in the German city of Wuppertal, and at many other places in recent years, from the Jewish communal centers in Mumbai and Casablanca, to the ancient synagogues in Istanbul and Jerba.

Yet only last week, President Obama and his spokespeople were suggesting that it was just some kind of “random” accident that Jews were being killed.

The Obama team has consistently demonstrated a willful lack of understanding about the nature of Islamism, about anti-Semitism, and about the intentions of the Islamic revolutionary government in Iran. They seem more interested in disparaging the prime minister of America’s ally Israel, than in preventing the regime in Tehran going nuclear – a regime which has already de facto taken control of large swathes of Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon. Its terrorist actions outside the Middle East spread to, among other places, Thailand, Bulgaria (where Jewish tourists were blown up in 2012) and Argentina, where 85 people were murdered at the AMIA Jewish centre in Buenos Aires. Only last month an Iranian diplomat in Montevideo was expelled from Uruguay for planting a bomb designed to kill Jews. (This foiled attack was barely reported on outside the Uruguayan and Israeli media.)

When a large number of foreign-policy experts—both Republicans and Democrats—falsely attribute many of the world’s ills to the Jewish state, they are channeling an ancient hatred. The time has come to say so.

Schizophrenia is a much-abused metaphor. Those of us who have ever cared about someone who suffers from the illness have a hard time with all those pundits who get it wrong, confusing it with split-personality disorder, and then applying it metaphorically to anybody who carries two contradictory thoughts.
But knowing about the disease can still be helpful in talking about politics—giving us a much better metaphor to describe the conversation about Israel taking place in Washington today.
Schizophrenics suffer not from multiple personalities, but from an inability to tell the difference between things they encounter or imagine on the one hand and reality on the other. It’s been described as a kind of filtering problem: If they overhear someone on television saying, “the court awarded me $5 million,” a schizophrenic may easily believe she is owed that money and say so repeatedly for years. Schizophrenics also suffer from all manner of delusions, believing things happened that never did. And if they are also paranoid, they will try to convince you that secretive people and forces are conspiring to hurt them.
I can’t tell you how often I have been made to feel like many of Israel’s critics suffer from this disease—or at least are eager to imitate it with shocking fidelity. The use of words like “apartheid,” “genocide,” or “ethnic cleansing” to describe a country that I and millions of other educated, sensitive human beings have visited and lived in without noticing anything resembling South Africa, Rwanda, or Kosovo—a regular Western democratic country I have traveled through, including in the very territories and checkpoints and settlements some are insisting I am in denial about—is on the face of it silly, and remains so no matter how many people repeat it.

“Wherever it goes now, in many respects PEGIDA has already served part of its purpose, in starting a debate on immigration, citizenship, and integration that has been silent for decades…. Perhaps it could even kick-start a new era of openness and discussion in Britain too.” — Oliver Lane, British commentator.

The future of the German grassroots anti-Islamization movement known as PEGIDA has been thrown into doubt after a leadership split resulted in key members leaving the group.

Only 2,000 people attended a weekly rally held in the eastern German city of Dresden on February 9, a sharp decrease from the 17,000 who assembled at the previous rally held on January 25.

PEGIDA — named after the German abbreviation for “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West” — has been organizing “evening strolls” (Abendspaziergang) through downtown Dresden on Monday evenings since October to protest against runaway immigration and the Islamization of Germany.

After Copenhagen, we are tragically reminded that our leaders are sending mixed messages about terrorism both in their dithering about Islamist terror against Israel, and their absurd statements that Islam is an irrelevant factor

Following Saturday’s deadly attacks in Copenhagen, on a meeting on free speech at a cafe and then outside a synagogue, the condemnations have, of course, been rolling in fast. They are not insincere. Who, after all, outside terrorist circles, actually welcomes murder?

But that has never been the problem. The problem is that our leaders, from the White House, through Westminster and across Europe continue to lack clarity about what this is all about.

Here is what this is all about. For decades now, the Islamic world has been producing ideas and groups who believe there is a world-historic zero sum game at play between Islam and Western-style liberal-democracy, with the Jewish people in general and the State of Israel in particular right in the front-line of the war.

Augusto Zimmermann is Senior Lecturer in Law at Murdoch University, a Fellow of the International Academy for the Study of the Jurisprudence of the Family, and a Commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia. This article is an extract from a paper he presented at the 7th Symposium of the International Academy for the Study of the Jurisprudence of the Family, University of La Coruña (Spain), in June.

The high-sounding “right to choose”, derived from feminist ideology, hides the elementary fact that not all choices are reasonable, legitimate or morally valid. As we are seeing, the disregard for human life in the womb is the devaluation of human life outside it.

Laws reflect a nation’s priorities, agenda, and values. The moral landscape of a country is strongly influenced by its laws. When we think of Nazi Germany, for example, we often think of the Holocaust and the brutal mass murder of millions of Jews and other “undesirables”.[1] Because Hitler believed that the Jews were sub-human, in the same category as animals, the Nazis changed the law to ensure that Jews could be legally exterminated. To extinguish this “race” would no longer constitute a crime.[2] With the declaration that some people were beneath animals, there would be no trials for killing Jews and other “undesirable” individuals.[3]

In the same way, courts and parliaments in today’s Western societies have decided to arbitrarily exclude an entire class of individuals from legal protection, namely the unborn child. Parents who now opt to abo

The Ukraine crisis has dramatically worsened relations between NATO and Russia. With cooperation on nuclear security now suspended and the lack of a “red telephone,” experts at the Munich Security Conference warn any escalation in tensions could grow deadly.

The scientists had no idea that their experiment could spell the end of civilization. On Jan. 25, 1995, Norwegian and American researchers fired a rocket into the skies of northwestern Norway to study the Northern Lights. But the four-stage rocket flew directly through the same corridor that American Minuteman III missiles, equipped with nuclear warheads, would use to travel from the United States to Moscow.

The rocket’s speed and flight pattern very closely matched what the Russians expected from a Trident missile that would be fired from a US submarine and detonated at high altitude, with the aim of blinding the Russian early-warning system to prepare for a large-scale nuclear attack by the United States. The Russian military was placed on high alert, and then President Boris Yeltsin activated the keys to launch nuclear weapons. He had less than 10 minutes to decide whether to issue the order to fire.

Our fair-minded media have decided to make Darwin’s theory of evolution a test of presidential qualifications. Governor Scott Walker refused to answer on the basis that he wasn’t a biologist. Nobody knows if Obama knows anything about science — like climate prediction, solar energy, shale, or Iran’s nuclear bomb program. Or, say, economics.

Media heads are basically filled with straw when it comes to science. Just ask them the pros and cons of solar energy. They can’t tell you. It’s just another superstition they heard from somebody.

So here is a little quiz for your favorite news guy or gal about Darwinian evolution. Any biology student should ace it.

What is a biological species? How does it differ from a variety? Give examples.
How has Darwinian theory changed since Darwin? (Be specific.)
Define the two criteria for “Darwinian fitness.”
What are “Darwin finches?” Where are they found?
What is the function of HOX genes?
What is meant by “ultra-conservation” in evolution? Give two examples.
Give an example of a recent evolutionary change in humans, within the last 10,000 years.
What is parallel evolution? Give an example.
What is meant by “genetic drift”?
Why are there two sexes in most species?

Please ask your favorite journalist or talking head to return their answers (without cheating) to you, and grade according to the answers in Wikipedia. Then send us your journalist’s score to be published to the world.

Next: A quiz about the U.S. Constitution. If your journo flunks it, s/he gets fired.

If this is Tuesday, it must be… Belgium… oops, Denmark. Sorry, Belgium was last week. It was Copenhagen [1] this time under jihadist attack… scratch that again… I meant “random violence.” Is that correct, Mr. President? A few weeks ago, it was some “folks at a deli” in Paris, now it’s some “folks standing in front of a synagogue” in Cope. Koinky-dinky, as the kids say. What next?

Oh, no.. Don’t tell me ISIS has got us surrounded in Anbar [2]? Sorry, I meant ISIL. I thought they were the jayvee team. Oh, right, they’re “on the defensive” [3] and Congress has an ““extraordinary opportunity.” [4]

That’s fine then. Don’t be upset, you “progressives” at the Huffington Post [5] and Vox [6]. This is just a police matter — like parking tickets or, at worst, running a red light. All this 1938 talk is a bunch of nonsense from wingnuts. History never repeats itself except, as Marx told us, as farce [7]. Chairman Barack’s got it all handled. He’s holding a conference on “extremism.” And he has a new pen pal [8]. No, it’s not Netanyahu.