RUTHFULLY YOURS

While the medieval Saudi system of justice was flogging the gentle blogger Raif Badawi 50 out of the stipulated 1000 lashes, a delegation of UN bureaucrats landed in Jeddah to promote an international conference on religious freedom.

The Saudis use these international seats to advance their oppressive agenda, and to press the Western democracies to punish criticism of Islam.

Through the shameful trial of Geert Wilders, Dutch authorities sent a message of surrender to the Saudis and other rogue Islamic regimes that punish dissent.

Did the Dutch prosecute Wilders on behalf of the Saudis, who threatened to impose sanctions on the Netherlands?

The UN and the Western democracies are putting the defense of human rights and freedom in the hands of one the world’s worst violators of religious and intellectual freedom.

Sharia courts are already fully operating in the Netherlands. They know something about “human rights”: stoning, flogging and chopping off heads.

Who will rescue our right to speak?

“My husband has been languishing in a Saudi prison since June 17th, 2012. Our children live with me in the city of Sherbrooke, Québec in Canada. They have not seen their father for five years now… On January 9, 2015, Raif received the first 50 lashes… Will members of the United Nations Human Rights Council join the European Parliament and ask for Raif’s release?”

Unfortunately, the UN members did not respond to this appeal by Ensaf Haidar, the fearless wife of the most famous blogger of the Arab world, the gentle Raif Badawi, imprisoned and flogged by the Saudis for his secular ideas. A few days after Ensaf’s appeal, the United Nations welcomed Badawi’s executioners, the Saudis, at the UN Human Rights Council. The Saudi representative, Abdulaziz Alwasil, will be decisive on three major issues at the UN Palace of Nations in Geneva: women, religious freedom and the system of justice.

What a great achievement for Saudi Arabia: The country flogs poets and bloggers, and its sheikhs have no other concern than filling their sumptuous palaces with wives and concubines, and then stoning them to death if they become “adulterous”. Saudi Arabia is where a Shiite cleric was publicly beheaded and where a Christian cannot wear a tunic or a cross.

The British government supported the Saudi bid to be re-elected at the Human Rights Council (British Prime Minister Theresa May was urged in vain to oppose the Saudi election to the Geneva body). The Obama Administration did the same: Samantha Powers, the U.S. ambassador at the UN, called the Saudi bid at the UN a “procedural position”.

Many of what pass these days for mature adults believe the views of sixteen-year-olds are worth taking into account, and why wouldn’t they? Their own views are baseless invocations of ideas blowing in the wind, therefore no more valid than those of callow youths.
Ever have annoying experiences? Well, of course we all do. I have more these days because I get annoyed by MSM commentators, even by the dwindling number of conservatives. No-one can tell me that the quality of commentary has improved in the past thirty to forty years. I don’t know why precisely. Perhaps it is the fault of post-modern education which, so I understand, encourages barely-formed minds to have views instead of concentrating on absorbing building blocks for rational thinking.

I am glad to say that when I was sixteen I had no views at all. My recollection is that having views was not encouraged. Every mature adult knew that the views of a sixteen-year-old were worthless. Now views have supplanted building blocks. They are, if you like, anchorless views. Accordingly, the new breed of mature adults thinks that the views of sixteen-year-olds are worth taking into account. Why wouldn’t they? Their own views are baseless invocations of ideas blowing in the wind and therefore no more valid than those of callow youths.

The manifestation of this trend towards generalised imbecility is what I call foggy thinking. I was in quite a few ‘pea-soupers’ when growing up in England. You simply couldn’t see a metre in front or behind you. I can only assume that pea soup has crept into commentators’ cranial cavities.

The number of deaths from guns dwarfs deaths from terrorist attacks in the US we are regularly told by left-wing commentators. Juan Williams on Fox News is the latest I have heard spouting this guff during a discussion of the Islamic massacre in Berlin. Quite honestly, what are we supposed to take from this kind of comment?

Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple) spoofed it brilliantly in Quadrant a little time ago. I recall he suggested that Britain in WWII might have been better served concentrating on reducing heart attacks than on countering the blitz, which took far fewer lives.

A related topic that generally has me weeping in frustration is the thought, often propagated by conservative commentators, that it is extremely difficult to identify the few among Muslim migrants who might do us physical harm. The implication is that if ‘extreme vetting’ worked it would be fine to allow Western societies to be inundated by ‘peace-loving’ Muslims. No, it wouldn’t, dummies!

The Devil is a novice. His biggest trick is to convince us that he doesn’t exist. In the face of survey after survey showing religious and social intolerance among Muslim communities most everywhere and in the face of supposedly democratic Muslim countries like Indonesia and Pakistan wanting to punish and execute their citizens for insulting Islam, apparently the vast majority of Muslims are fine and dandy. And this narrative gains strength after each horrific Islamic terrorist massacre. What a trick!

Here we have subscribers to a supremacist, intolerant and violent creed being given a pass because only a relative few (tens of thousands, or is it more?) of their number out of 1.6 billion are monstrous literalists. Well, these monsters could not and do not emerge from a vacuum. They are a product of their creed; a vile excretion from the mass of subscribers.

CANBERRA, Australia—Authorities said they disrupted a terrorist plot inspired by Islamic State to explode improvised bombs in central Melbourne on or around Christmas Day, with a railway station and a cathedral among the suspected targets.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said seven people were arrested, of whom five were expected to be charged over the plot. The plan allegedly involved the use of several improvised explosive devices, and a senior police chief said the accused plotters may have planned to use other weapons as well, including knives and a firearm.

Authorities alleged the suspects had scouted popular sites in Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city and home to some 4 million people, as possible targets. The locations included the centrally located Flinders Street train station, St. Paul’s Cathedral and Federation Square, a popular riverside gathering place.

Mr. Turnbull called it “one of the most substantial terrorist plots” of recent years.

After a truck earlier this week plowed into a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12 people and injuring about 50 others, the Australian government ordered intensified security arrangements ahead of the Christmas and New Year celebrations, with state and national police on guard against a similar attack. Sydney holds large New Year fireworks celebrations each year, usually attracting more than a million people.

In the predawn hours of Friday, counterterrorism police raided several Melbourne buildings and arrested six men and one woman. Five of the men, all in their 20s, were expected to face charges including “acts in preparation of a terrorist event.”

Three appeared in a Melbourne court Friday, aged between 21 and 26, while two others were expected to face a judge on Saturday.

Australia’s five-tier terrorism threat alert system has been set at “probable,” the third-highest level, since September 2014. In December of that year, a lone gunman, later identified as Iranian immigrant Man Haron Monis, took over a central Sydney cafe and held numerous people hostage for 16 hours before police killed the gunman to end the siege. Two hostages—the cafe’s manager and a female customer—also died.

Since then there have been four attacks and 12 others disrupted. In September this year, police charged a 22-year-old man with committing a terrorist act and attempted murder after he allegedly stabbed another man multiple times in Sydney. In total, 57 people have been charged with terrorism-related offenses, Mr. Turnbull said. CONTINUE AT SITE

PARIS—The prime suspect in the Berlin truck attack arrived in Europe five years ago, at the leading edge of a wave of nearly uncontrolled immigration. That influx, culminating in the 2015 mass arrival of refugees, has exposed the region to security threats that will linger far into the future.

The path of the suspect—a 24-year-old Tunisian named Anis Amri who served jail time in Italy, then was detained briefly and released in Germany—has laid bare multiple failings in Europe’s security apparatus, including poor cooperation between national governments, porous borders and lack of biometric data to identify people who use false identities.

Compounding those problems, the rise of Islamic State and Germany’s decision to throw open the door to refugees last year has left security services overwhelmed as they try to track jihadist The attacks in Paris in 2015 and Brussels in March confirmed fears that Islamist groups had exploited refugee flows to smuggle operatives into the heart of Europe. Investigators have determined most of the assailants in those cases traveled from Syria through the Balkans and then Central Europe along with a river of refugees in the summer and fall of 2015.

Around the same time, Mr. Amri was released after four years in an Italian prison for starting a fire at a refugee shelter. The authorities ordered him to return to Tunisia. Instead, he headed to Germany, where he roamed freely using a series of false identities and sought asylum.

His path to Berlin is prompting calls for Europe to fix the longstanding security flaws of the Schengen Zone, which allows border-free travel throughout much of the region.

“We are very late, and we’re in the process of catching up,” said Georges Fenech, chairman of the French parliamentary committee that investigated the Paris attacks. “Because today, these terrorists move freely in the Schengen area. From the moment they enter with the migrants, they pass borders without much difficulty.”

Overtaxed security agencies dropped 24-hour surveillance of Mr. Amri this year when they failed to find enough evidence to make him a high-priority target. Mr. Amri had been under scrutiny after authorities discovered links between him and a radical cleric.

Police detained him in July when they discovered his request for asylum was denied and he was to be deported. But they released him a day later, because of Germany’s strict legal limits on the detention of migrants and Tunisia’s unwillingness at the time to take him back. CONTINUE AT SITE