RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2019/04/22/denmarks-blaspheming-mother/

“This is a nightmare. We’re in shock,” Jaleh Tavakoli says. Last month, the 36-year-old Iranian-Danish critic of Islam received notification from Danish social services that she is no longer fit to care for the 8-year-old child she’s fostered since birth. Why? Tavakoli, a columnist and author, says it is because of her politically incorrect views on Islam. Social services maintains it is looking out for the best interest of a potentially vulnerable child. Tavakoli lives under security precautions, has been threatened on the streets of Copenhagen, and even survived a jihadist attack in 2015. As she prepares for the most difficult challenge of her life, Danish society must contend with the unprecedented challenge of where to draw the line when radical Islam intersects with free speech and children’s rights.

Denmark, a kingdom of just 5.7 million people, consistently ranks among the top countries in the world in quality-of-life indexes. The small Nordic state is envied for its strong universal healthcare system, high levels of trust and extremely generous welfare benefits. In 2018, it ranked third in the world for having the happiest citizens according to the UN World Happiness Report (it has topped the list three times since the report began in 2012).

Denmark has also settled hundreds of thousands of immigrants, primarily from the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Today, around 10 percent of its population are immigrants—a rapid demographic change that only started in the last decades. And yet, beneath the façade of happiness surveys and the welfare state, Denmark has been unable to escape the social and political tensions now afflicting the body politic of nearly every country on the continent. Immigration, Islamism and integration are salient issues even in the happiest place on earth.

https://quadrant.org.au/

For want, as yet, of Waleed Aly laying out with his customary attention to nuance how Australians, at least those of the ABC-watching and Age-reading demographic, must regard the recent “irritations” in Sri Lanka, readers might care to consult the writings of another and somewhat less prominent Muslim thinker, young Jake Bilardi.

The Melbourne teenager, as some might recall, departed from Iraq for an imagined Paradise after failing to take any enemies of Allah with him when he detonated himself and an explosive-laden truck. That was in 2015 and, as is Facebook’s custom, his posts were taken down straight away.

Quadrant Online managed to grab and copy those disturbing screeds before they vanished forever,all of them preserved here. To read them again today, with 300-plus funerals underway in Colombo and other of the island’s Christian parishes, is to gain an insight into why, whenever and whatever Waleed Aly might eventually have to contribute, the problem is and always will be Islam, most particularly its salafist stream.

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/440348-china-russia-iran-rise-in-latin-america-as-us-retreats

In Latin America, a U.S. retreat that began under President Barack Obama has accelerated under President Donald Trump, creating a vacuum that China, Russia, and Iran are moving to fill.

The most fruitful opportunity for those U.S. adversaries lies in the socialism-ravaged state of Venezuela, where each of them is jockeying for position, but opportunities abound elsewhere as well.

It’s just one more example – though a particularly noteworthy one, coming in America’s own backyard – of how the U.S. withdrawal from its post-war global leadership is creating opportunities for authoritarian powers with anti-American designs to expand their influence far and wide.

“The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over,” Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, declared in late 2013, renouncing a doctrine of 190 years through which the United States made clear that it would not tolerate interference by outside powers in the Western Hemisphere.

Kerry’s words reflected Obama’s refusal to address outside inference in Latin America, by (1) Iran, as it nourished economic and military ties to the anti-American “Bolivarian alliance” of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua and (2) Hezbollah, Iran’s key terrorist client, as it conducted activities from its regional headquarters at the crossroads of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil.

It was a far cry from the spirit of President Kennedy’s inaugural address in which, after promoting his Alliance for Progress for the region, he renewed the Monroe Doctrine with this clarion call: “[L]et every other power know that this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.”