RUTHFULLY YOURS

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/fjordman/inside-the-brussels-conference-on-free-speech-and-human-rights/

Editor’s note: Below is a report of the July 9th International Conference for Free Speech and Human Rights, held in Brussels, Belgium. A video compilation of event highlights follows the report.

I had the great pleasure of taking part in the International Conference for Free Speech and Human Rights on July 9, 2012 at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium, sponsored by the International Civil Liberties Alliance. Representatives of 18 countries, the majority being from Europe but with the participation of Coptic Christians from Egypt as well as former Muslims, met to discuss the ongoing Islamization of Europe and the Western world and how to preserve our basic civil liberties.

Sabatina James, a young woman who left Islam for Christianity, told the audience her story, about how her family threatened to kill her. She now lives under witness protection. The punishment for leaving Islam is death, according to sharia law.

MEP Magdi Allam, an Egyptian apostate who now lives in Italy, converted to Christianity and was baptized during the 2008 Easter Vigil service in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. He, too, spoke at the conference.

Author Alexandre del Valle (photo ©Snaphanen).

We heard Gavin Boby from the Law and Freedom Foundation in Britain, plus such interesting people as Alain Wagner and Alexandre del Valle from France, Conny Axel Meier and Christian Jung from Germany and the Syrian Catholic bishop Father Samuel.

Pére Samuel Bishop in the Syrian-Catholic Church (photo ©Snaphanen).

The courageous Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff from Austria has been prosecuted as a criminal for “hate speech” for pointing out that Islam’s founder Muhammad, according to Islamic texts, had sex with a 9-year-old child, Aisha. She talked about how free speech is currently under pressure in many European countries.

Ned May and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff read the Brussels Declaration (photo ©Snaphanen).

Among the highlights of the conference were the presentation and signing of the 2012 Brussels Declaration, a foundational document to defend freedom of speech and civil liberties, and the presentation of the Defender of Freedom Award by Canadian-born author and political humorist Mark Steyn to Lars Hedegaard, founder of the Danish Free Press Society and the International Free Press Society. Together with Ingrid Carlqvist, President of the newly formed (and desperately needed) Swedish Free Press Society, there was further talk of launching a new newspaper in multiple languages as an alternative to our deeply flawed mainstream media.

Lars Hedegaard and Alain Wagner (photo ©Snaphanen).

I was happy to meet Mark Steyn in person for the first time. He is just as funny in real life as he is in writing. Steyn has a special talent for talking about serious subjects with a humorous twist, which has earned him a large audience in a number of countries.

One of the first things he asked me about was whether I had any socks today. This was obviously a reference to the fact that Norwegian police confiscated some of my socks in August 2011 when they ransacked my flat in response to the Breivik case. I don’t know why they needed my terrorist socks, but it’s always a pleasure to help out the police. They were kind enough to give them back to me after 100 days in police custody. I then posted a photo of some of them at the Gates of Vienna website under the heading “Sock and Awe.”

It was a positive surprise to see how many people showed up. The last time I was in Brussels was for the Counterjihad conference in October 2007, also held at the European Parliament. It took us a few minutes to locate it again, but you know it’s an EU building because it’s big, expensive, ugly and useless. If I had my way, the entire European Parliament would be dismantled and replaced by Gisèle Littman Square, supplemented by the Eurabia Museum for the victims of 1400 years of Islamic Jihad.

A few blocks away, the Berlaymont building houses the headquarters of the European Commission, the unelected government for half a billion people that is systematically dismantling political liberty and democratic accountability from the Black Sea to the North Sea. It, too, deserves to be dismantled.

Some of the same individuals were present at this conference as well, with others missing, and plenty of new faces added since 2007. Among the familiar faces was Nidra Poller, an American author and journalist who has lived in Paris for forty years, writing for major publications such as The Wall Street Journal or The Jerusalem Post.

One of the voices we missed was David Littman, the husband of Gisèle Littman, or Bat Ye’or. One minute of silence was held to honor the memory of David Littman, who died in May 2012 after a protracted illness.

Prof. Hans Jansen (photo ©Snaphanen).

I’ve heard Hans Jansen, retired Professor of Modern Islamic Thought at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, speak several times in the past. He always impresses his audience with his immense knowledge. In his new speech he reminded us that “Sharia includes a large number of provisions about people who are not Muslims. These rules are usually prohibitions that carry severe penalties if violated. These provisions of the Sharia make life unsafe and uncertain for someone who lives under Sharia law and who is not a Muslim. Under Sharia law, someone who is not a Muslim possesses no inalienable rights. If I am wrong here, I will be relieved, and happy to stand corrected and receive your e-mails pointing out why I am wrong. But if I am right, a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay possesses more rights than a Jew or a Christian who lives under Sharia law. Unlike the legal systems of most modern nation states, Sharia law is not subject to democratic supervision. Like international law and rabbinic law, Sharia law is an academic affair: experts discuss and debate the rules until they reach an agreement.”

Professor Jansen emphasized that Islamic sharia law does not emerge from a parliament that acts as legislator, but its rules come into being by being agreed upon by legal experts. Sharia law is in this way somewhat similar to international law as embodied in institutions such as the EU. As international law demonstrates, communities of academic specialists, in their isolation, have a tendency to develop a degree of pedantry that an elected lawgiver could never afford. Up to a point, this is what has happened to sharia.

Allowing sharia, or a part of it, to be the law of the land in a Western nation will diminish the democratic character of that nation. It means giving away legislative power to unelected self-appointed men, who are unknown and anonymous and operate from far-away mosques in Pakistan or Egyp

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/davidhornik/romney-takes-tough-stance-in-israel/ On Sunday Mitt Romney took the fight for the American Jewish (and Evangelical) vote to Israel, a country most American Jews have never visited. His target—a large and convenient one—was Barack Obama’s record of behavior toward the Jewish state. Even so, there’s no possibility that Romney will get most of the Jewish vote in […]

Gingrich: Political ‘elites’ avoiding Islamist issue
Politico
Sunday, July 29, 2012
News
Gingrich: Political ‘elites’ avoiding Islamist issue
The underlying driving force behind this desperate desire to stop unpleasant questions is the elite’s fear that an honest discussion of radical Islamism will spin out of control. They fear if Americans fully understood how serious radical Islamists are, they would demand a more confrontational strategy. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz226MJoni2
Iran seethes as ‘Ramadan of discontent’ unfolds
Los Angeles Times
Monday, July 30, 2012
News
Amid soaring prices, sweltering temperatures and escalating international tensions, a Ramadan of discontent is unfolding in the Islamic Republic. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz226MWVcrS
Mali leader calls for peace talks with Islamists
BBC
Monday, July 30, 2012
News
A
Mali’s interim President Dioncounda Traore has called for talks with militant Islamists who have captured the north. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz226Mj8qET

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/312576

National Review already has endorsed Ted Cruz in the Texas Republican primary contest to run for the Senate seat currently held by Kay Bailey Hutchison. That we now feel it urgently necessary to reiterate that endorsement on the eve of the runoff between Mr. Cruz and his Republican-establishment rival, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, is an indication of The Editors’ belief that this race is a critical opportunity for principled conservatism and that its import reaches well beyond the borders of the Lone Star State.

Mr. Dewhurst is an undistinguished, go-along/get-along creature of the GOP leadership’s seniority-oriented model of politics. He is a student of the school of thought that rallied party operatives behind Indiana’s too-long-lived Richard Lugar when a credible conservative alternative was available in the person of Richard Mourdock. His views — though perhaps not his temperament — would make him an ideal candidate to represent a state such as Maine, where the only other option would be a Democrat to his left. But a strong conservative can win in Texas, and we have one in Ted Cruz.

Given the intensity with which conservatives prefer Mr. Cruz to Texas’s popular lieutenant governor, some Republicans have asked, not unfairly, “What’s so bad about David Dewhurst?” Six months ago, our answer might have been: “Nothing, really, if there weren’t a much better choice available. Ted Cruz is far and away a preferable candidate for conservatives seeking an effective and articulate champion of their ideals.” But much has happened since the early days of this race, and Mr. Dewhurst’s vulgar and dishonest campaign of scorched-earth ad hominem against Mr. Cruz raises serious questions about his judgment and his commitment to conservative values.

He has transformed himself from second-best to flailing embarrassment. He has run campaign ads that are clearly predicated on the notion that Texas conservatives are rubes — ads that treat national conservative groups such as the Club for Growth as out-of-state interlopers, and that attack Cruz for taking on unpopular clients as an attorney.

Consider Mr. Dewhurst’s attack on Cruz for having endorsed a bid by Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) for a leadership position while declining to do the same for Texas’s Senator John Cornyn. The substance of Mr. Dewhurst’s criticism amounts to the fact that Mr. Cruz is more moved by the prospect of advancing conservatives from all 50 states than by the possibility of helping advance the career of a senator who happens to be from Texas. For many Texans, putting principle over politics must appear to be an excellent thing. Senator Cornyn is not a bad man, but he sometimes allows his party loyalties to trump his conservative beliefs — as shown by his steadfast support for the worst Republican senator, Arlen Specter, which lasted right up until the moment that Specter joined the Democrats to try to salvage his political career. Just as the Senate and the republic are better off with the reliable conservative Pat Toomey in the seat once held by the fickle and opportunistic Arlen Specter, Texas and the nation would be better off with the reliable conservative Ted Cruz in the seat held by Senator Hutchison — who, to be fair, is no Arlen Specter, but is no Ted Cruz, either.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443437504577547313612049308.html?mod=hp_opinion The system to review misconduct is rigged so even abusive teachers can stay on the job. By resisting almost any change aimed at improving our public schools, teachers unions have become a ripe target for reformers across the ideological spectrum. Even Hollywood, famously sympathetic to organized labor, has turned on unions with the documentary […]

A mystery too deep for me (Islamist edition) http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/ The other day, I wrote a brief column in this space called “The State Department Invertebrate Embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Taking off from a column by Andy McCarthy about the case of Huma Abedin. You remember Abedin. She’s a top aide to Secretary of State […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

New York City has been invaded, its buildings blown up and its citizens slaughtered hundreds of times. The invaders come every summer, descending from the sky and under the earth. Sometimes they aliens or gods or monsters. They are, however, never Muslims.
Every summer, for 10 dollars you can see a fantasy version of September 11 reenacted with invading enemies who deserve no mercy and receive none. They come in swarms, buildings fall, people run for cover and then they are beaten back and banished. And then, as summer fades, we pause for that obligatory week in which attention must be paid to commemorating the attacks of September 11 while seeing no connection between the discharges of tension through fictional victories used as an escape mechanism from a war that we dare not fight.

The Dark Knight, the previous Batman film, contained an elaborate analogy to the War on Terror, a shadow version of the real war fought out by men in costumes proving that it was possible to release a big-budget movie supportive of the War on Terror so long as it was dressed up in the right costume.

Since then, and before, New York City has been attacked by meteors, ice ages, mythical skeletons, more costumed criminals, the year 2012, and every possible imaginary scenario that can be dreamed up. It just hasn’t been attacked by Muslims because that’s something that doesn’t happen in movies. Only in real life.

The actual enemy rarely shows up in movies. There have been more movies made attacking the War on Terror than movies showing American soldiers and law enforcement officers fighting terrorists. After ten years of war there have hardly been any movies made about the war in Afghanistan and the most watched movie about the War in Iraq began with an anti-war quote, just so no one made any mistakes about where everyone involved stood. And all of these are a drop in the bucket.

http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2012/07/29/the-book-to-defeat-obama-stanley-kurtzs-spreading-the-wealth/?print=1

[1]What Stanley Kurtz has accomplished in his new book Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities [2], to be published on August 2, is nothing less than the complete exposure of President Barack Obama’s secret plans for his second term in office — plans that in reality amount to an assault on the values, well-being ,and quality of life of the very middle-class voters he claims to represent.

The unfortunate title — not an attention-grabber in bookstores —does not covey the breadth of his research, the scholarly yet readable and comprehensive analysis of where the president is coming from, and the nature of the social policy Obama will put into practice if he wins a second term. They amount to an entire gamut of initiatives, some well underway, to redistribute wealth not from the fabled 1% — who really do not have enough to save us from fiscal Armageddon even if the government took 80% of their profits — but from the average, middle-class, hardworking citizens who sought better lives and realized the American dream by moving to the suburbs, where the air is cleaner, the schools are decent, and life is peaceful and integrated.

These citizens are the very swing voters Obama is now courting; his many TV commercials about helping the middle class target them. What Kurtz reveals in chilling detail is that the group of radicals surrounding the president — names most of us (including me) are not familiar with — are nevertheless as dangerous and extreme in their goals as Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Reverend Jeremiah Wright. While those three are persona non grata in the White House, these unknown radicals are just as important, and they are planning social policy with Obama’s approval.

Here are their names, and when Kurtz’s book is published, they will hopefully become household names and what they advocate will be there for anyone to see. They are: Mike Kruglik, Obama’s boss and his trainer when Obama was a community organizer in the 1980s; Myron Orfield, a University of Minnesota law professor; John Powell, a law professor at Ohio State University who believes America suffers from structural racism; David Rusk, a former mayor of Albuquerque, NM, who favors annexation of the suburbs by the cities; and Linda Darling-Hammond, a proponent of a politicized curriculum for schools, a close associate of Ayers, and a leader in the administration’s effort to create new national standards and tests for our schools.

http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2012/07/29/dershowitz-flacks-for-obama/

“Why is the august law professor suddenly acting like a low-rent Ivy League Deborah Wasserman-Schultz?”

HE HAS HARDLY BEEN A “STAUNCH DEFENDER OF ISRAEL”….SLAMMING THE SETTLEMENTS AT EVERY TURN AND SHILLING FOR THE “TWO STATE SOLUTION”….RSK

Harvard law professor and pundit Alan Dershowitz is, like most of us, a man of parts — good and bad. I witnessed the good personally a few years ago when I saw him go toe-to-toe with supporters of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the UN’s Durban II conference in Geneva. He was magnificent.

Of course, opposing Ahmadinejad isn’t exactly a complicated moral challenge. The execrable Iranian is auditioning for Junior Hitler. Still, Ahmadinejad’s presence as speaker at a “human rights conference” was a disgrace and, as much as anyone else on the scene, Dershowitz led the charge against him.

He has also been a staunch defender of Israel against the likes of Walt and Mearsheimer and he recently had some insightful things to say about the dubious second-degree murder indictment of George Zimmerman. (We’ll excuse as best we can Dershowitz’s cringeworthy participation in OJ’s prevaricating legal Dream Team as an unfortunate exercise in self-promotion.)

But today, for reasons that are unclear at best, at the very moment of Mitt Romney’s arrival in Jerusalem, the law professor has decided to inject himself in the political process by publishing an apologia pro vita Obama [1] regarding the president’s Israel policy. He has no “buyer’s remorse,” Dershowitz tells us, from supporting Obama in 2008 and will do it again this year.

All this although the president has made no secret of his distaste for the prime minister of Israel, both through overheard conversation with Sarkozy and his own ugly snubbing of Netanyahu at the White House. More importantly, in actual political terms, the Obama administration seems to have a policy of putting pressure on the Israelis in the peace process but never on the Palestinians. Besides being grossly unfair, this has also been unworkable and will undoubtedly continue to be so. (It is also arguably racist because it treats the Palestinians as ungovernable children unable to compromise like adults.) Obama’s Middle East policy has achieved the hat trick of being at once cynical, unimaginative, and reactionary.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/praise-the-troops-screw-the-troops?f=puball

It’s a rare politician, left, right or center, who won’t grab a photo opportunity with our troops then plaster the image all over campaign materials. Even the hard left has learned to mouth insincere praise for the men and women in uniform before attacking our national defense. Nonetheless, we’re about to see another shameless and shabby example of Capitol Hill hypocrisy: Those senators and representatives-including yours, my fellow conservatives–are going to put 100,000 veterans out on the street. And that’s just the beginning.

It’s not just the dreaded sequestration issue, which would force across-the-board cuts at the Pentagon. Those who have served our country in our recent wars are going to get served with pink slips over the next few years, no matter what happens before the automatic-cuts deadline on the Hill. Why? Because spending is going to get tighter, and Republicans and Democrats alike are going to slash troop strength to protect lavish spending on our defense-industry cartel. When the political chips are down, ain’t nobody on the Hill loves a Soldier more than he loves Lockheed-Martin.

There really is plenty of fat, even now, in our vast defense budget. But instead of cutting the fat, we’ll cut the muscle.

You’re going to hear the usual rationale: “We won’t need ground troops in tomorrow’s wars.” We’ve been sold that same b.s. time and again. Replay recent history: After World War II, the advocates of airpower swore the age of the infantryman had passed. We demobilized and starved the handful of Army divisions remaining on active duty. And what came next? Korea, an infantryman’s war, and we were embarrassingly unready. Then we were told that the age of the grunt had really, really passed, since atomic weapons would rule the battlefield. And we cut Soldiers again to invest in long-range bombers and missiles. And what came next? Vietnam, another infantryman’s war.

After Vietnam, every “serious” person knew we’d never do anything like that again. So we hollowed out our ground forces. Yet, every significant military action over the following decades required boots on the ground: Grenada, Panama, Desert Storm, Somalia, the Balkans, even Sinai peacekeeping. Then a new Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, assured us that we didn’t need all those ground troops anymore: Better to free up money for the technologies that single-handedly would win the coming wars, and we could start by cutting two Army divisions and paring down the Marine Corps. And what came next? Afghanistan and Iraq, where our too-lean ground forces were stretched to the limit (but did their duty nobly).