RUTHFULLY YOURS

Trudging around the ruined Church of St. Addai, in the empty Christian town of Karemlash, I saw clearly where radical Islamic extremism leads. This was only days before the attack on Westminster in London on March 22. With broken glass underfoot and the walls of the Church blackened after ISIS firebombed it, perhaps the most powerful symbol I came across in Karemlash was the defaced Cross. Everywhere, in all the churches and monasteries I visited, the Cross was defaced, scratched out, broken, or pierced with bullet holes.

ISIS had spray-painted the message “the Cross will be broken” on the walls of the rectory, and the pastor’s office door was booby-trapped, to kill him when he returned. As I walked around the Christian cemetery, it was clear to me that the followers of the Prophet had dug up the Christian graves. In one instance, I was told, they had beheaded one of the corpses. In the sacristy of the church, they had dug up the grave of one of the priests and thrown his body away. Even in death, the persecuted Christians of Iraq were not safe.

Surveying the horror and the eerily silent town, punctuated only by the distant thump of explosions in Mosul, nine miles away, I asked Father Thabet, the Chaldean Catholic priest who serves as pastor of St. Addai, whether all this destruction represented real Islam. “Yes,” he answered strongly, without a moment’s hesitation. “You wouldn’t be allowed to say that it the West,” I said smiling. He didn’t smile back.

Karemlash, a town of nearly 10,000 people, had been almost 100 percent Christian for centuries. The Iraqi Christian Church, both Catholic and Orthodox, traces its roots back to disciples of Jesus, sent out under the direction of the Apostles. For ill-educated Westerners, who imagine missionaries brought the Christian faith to the Middle East sometime last century, it can come as a bit of a shock to discover that the very opposite is the case. During the awful days of August 2014, as the Islamic State surged across the Nineveh Plain, the ancient Christian heartland of Iraq, the citizens of Karemlash fled, with only the clothes they were wearing.

Now, nearly three years later, the towns are “liberated,” but the houses that were not blown up are burned out and filled with booby traps. A few citizens have been returning, briefly, to check the condition of their houses — very few at the moment, as it is necessary to negotiate multiple checkpoints manned by local militias as well as by the Iraqi army and Kurdish peshmerga. Unfortunately, some of these people are likely to be killed or maimed, because so far no one has removed the multiple booby traps. ISIS has been wickedly ingenious, putting devices even in television remote controls and vacuum cleaners.

Dramatic video shows child aged about seven with ‘explosives’ strapped to waist

This is the dramatic moment Iraqi soldiers disarm a young child in a Chelsea kit who was found with what appears to be a suicide bomb strapped around his waist.

The boy, thought to be about seven, was seized outside the war-torn Iraqi city of Mosul after hiding among families fleeing ISIS.

A soldier can be seen gently lifting up the child’s blue shirt, bearing the name of Chelsea star Eden Hazard, to reveal what looks like an explosive belt fastened to his midriff.

In a tense two-minute clip, he then slowly snips wires and cuts away the device while telling the youngster: ‘Don’t be afraid’.

Video captures the dramatic moment Iraqi soldiers disarm a young child in a Chelsea kit who was found with what appears to be a suicide bomb strapped around his waist

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Video captures the dramatic moment Iraqi soldiers disarm a young child in a Chelsea kit who was found with what appears to be a suicide bomb strapped around his waist

Video of the encounter was captured outside Mosul. A caption with the footage, released on LiveLeak, claims that the boy is the youngest ever child suicide bomber – however this has not been verified.

In the clip a soldier can be seen crouching down next to the youngster and speaking to the camera.

He says the video is being filmed on March 18 and then explains that the child, who he says is about seven, was sent by ISIS.

The child, thought to be called Uday, says he was sent by ‘Amo’, which means uncle, with instructions to target ‘the army’.

The soldier then asks him to raise his arms. In the next few moments, the soldier slowly snips off bandages holding up the device, which appears to include a mobile phone and batteries.

When the child flinches, the soldier says: ‘Don’t be afraid’.

The harrowing video emerged as Iraqi government forces attempted to evacuate civilians from Mosul’s ISIS-held Old City on Tuesday so that troops could clear the area, but militant snipers hampered the effort, Iraqi officers said.

They said the insurgents were also using civilians as human shields as government units edged towards the al-Nuri Mosque, the focus of recent fighting in the five-month-long campaign to crush Islamic State in the city that was once the de facto capital of their self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate.

As many as 600,000 civilians remain in the western sector of Mosul, complicating a battle being fought with artillery and air strikes as well as ground combat. Thousands have escaped in recent days.

‘Our forces control around 60 percent of the west now,’ Defence Ministry spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Rasool told a news conference in eastern Mosul. ‘It’s the Old City now with small streets and it’s a hard fight with civilians inside. We are trying to evacuate them.

‘We are a few hundred metres from the mosque now, we are advancing on al-Nuri. We know it means a lot to Daesh,’ he said, using an Arab acronym for Islamic State.

The capture of the mosque would be a huge symbolic prize as well as strategic gain for the government as it was there where Islamic State leader Abu Bakr alâBaghdadi declared the caliphate in July 2014 after the militants had captured large areas of Iraq and Syria.

Government forces backed by a U.S.-led international coalition retook several cities last year, liberated eastern Mosul in December, and are now closing in on the west, but the militants are putting up fierce resistance from the close-packed houses and narrow streets.

The Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB) in Germany is the official arm of the Diyanet, the Turkish government’s Presidency of Religious Affairs, which operates 900 mosques and employs 970 imams and religious officials. DITIB represents 70 percent of Germany’s Muslim community and serves the more than three million German nationals of Turkish origin or Turkish citizens who live in Germany.

But investigations into the DITIB in recent months have revealed that the Turkish government-controlled mosques have been used extensively as part of the spy network of the Turkish intelligence agency, the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati (MIT).

Through a network of 6,000 informants in Germany, they have spied on the German-Turkish community and reported back to the MIT on activities seen as contrary to the increasingly dictatorial rule of Turkish President Recep Erdogan.

In response, German authorities have conducted raids on the homes of DITIB imams and suspended any government funding to the organization.

The spying affair has also prompted German media to investigate claims that the DITIB mosques are preaching extremism and openly hindering integration.

These reports have so far culminated today in a report that German authorities are investigating one of the top DITIB authorities who called on Turkish diplomatic missions to increase spying on the followers of U.S.-based Turkish Islamist Fethullah Gulen.

According to Deutsche Welle, this includes two members of the German Parliament:

Erdogan and the Turkish government have accused Gulen and his followers of complicity in the attempted coup in Turkey this past July. More than 40,000 people have been arrested in a purge of accused Gulenists.

Salvatore Babones is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney. He wrote on Alexander Dugin in the October issue. His most recent book is Sixteen for ’16: A Progressive Agenda for a Better America (2015).
More important than the physical geography of trade is the human geography of institutions. The US and UK share a language, a financial infrastructure, a business culture, a legal heritage, and a way of thinking. In quitting Europe, Brexit backers voted to rejoin the larger world.
After the United Kingdom voted on June 23, 2016, to leave the European Union, most people focused on immigration as the root cause. Some said it was xenophobia or even racism. And certainly immigration, xenophobia and racism were major issues in the referendum. But the ultimate cause of the Brexit vote wasn’t immigration. It was economics.

Around 3.2 million non-British EU citizens live in the UK. Two-thirds of them are working there. Only 1.2 million British citizens live in the rest of the EU. Most of them are retired. More British citizens work in the United States than in continental Europe.

Imagine if the Franco-German core of the European economy were like the north-eastern core of the North American economy. In terms of GDP per capita, France and Germany are roughly on the same level as the UK. The north-eastern US is 50 per cent richer. If France and Germany were 50 per cent richer than the UK, instead of 2 million Europeans working in Britain, there might be 2 million Britons working in Europe.

If that were the case, would there have been so many European immigrants in the UK? Would there have been so much anti-immigrant sentiment? Would there have been a vote for Brexit? Britain’s Brexit vote is merely a reflection of larger global economic patterns that create little incentive for Britain to tie itself to the second-rate Western European economy.

Britain’s finance industry has long been more closely tied to New York than to Frankfurt or Paris. The rest of the economy may soon follow. Even before Brexit, British investment in continental Europe was declining while British investment in North America has been rising.

With Donald Trump promising to fast-track a trade deal with Britain, the UK will hardly be isolated once it leaves the European Union. But the whole idea that trade deals integrate economies is outdated, if it ever made sense at all. Countries are integrated into international networks by the actions of companies. In the contemporary world, countries don’t trade with countries. Companies transfer goods within value chains, and when these transfers cross national boundaries they are recorded as “trade”.

From an economic standpoint, Brexit boils down to a question about where British companies most want to do business. Is it in Western Europe, or in North America? Despite nearly half a century of strong institutional pressure to integrate with Western Europe, the EU still takes less than half of the UK’s exports. But exports are really beside the point. These days trade deals—like the EU itself—are really about economic governance. The UK could govern itself, as Australia does. Or it could choose closer integration with the world’s leading economic region: North America.

Between 1995 and 2008 global levels of merchandise trade increased from around 20 per cent of global GDP to around 30 per cent. The world globalised as goods (and services) traversed the world as never before in human history. The previous 1913 peak in international trade was dwarfed as new transportation technologies—from leviathan container ships to just-in-time air freight—reshaped global production networks. Now nearly one in three things bought on earth (by value) comes from somewhere else. The era of globalisation has arrived.

And departed? Global trade as a percentage of GDP has been flat since 2008, and an increasing proportion of that trade is in intermediate goods. On average around one-quarter of the value-added embodied in the world’s exports actually consists of intermediate goods that are then incorporated into products for re-export. But intermediate goods tend not to be sourced globally. They are overwhelmingly drawn from countries’ regional neighbours.

British multiculturalists are feeding Islamic fundamentalism. Muslims do not need to become the majority in the UK; they just need gradually to Islamize the most important cities. The change is already taking place.

British personalities keep opening the door to introducing Islamic sharia law. One of the leading British judges, Sir James Munby, said that Christianity no longer influences the courts and these must be multicultural, which means more Islamic. Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and Chief Justice Lord Phillips, also suggested that the English law should “incorporate” elements of sharia law.

British universities are also advancing Islamic law. The academic guidelines, “External speakers in higher education institutions”, provide that “orthodox religious groups” may separate men and women during events. At the Queen Mary University of London, women have had to use a separate entrance and were forced to sit in a room without being able to ask questions or raise their hands, just as in Riyadh or Tehran.

“London is more Islamic than many Muslim countries put together”, according to Maulana Syed Raza Rizvi, one of the Islamic preachers who now lead “Londonistan”, as the journalist Melanie Phillips has called the English capital. No, Rizvi is not a right-wing extremist. Wole Soyinka, a Nobel Laureate for Literature, was less generous; he called the UK “a cesspit for Islamists”.

“Terrorists can not stand London multiculturalism”, London’s mayor Sadiq Khan said after the recent deadly terror attack at Westminster. The opposite is true: British multiculturalists are feeding Islamic fundamentalism. Above all, Londonistan, with its new 423 mosques, is built on the sad ruins of English Christianity.

The Hyatt United Church was bought by the Egyptian community to be converted to a mosque. St Peter’s Church has been converted into the Madina Mosque. The Brick Lane Mosque was built on a former Methodist church. Not only buildings are converted, but also people. The number of converts to Islam has doubled; often they embrace radical Islam, as with Khalid Masood, the terrorist who struck Westminster.

The Daily Mail published photographs of a church and a mosque a few meters from each other in the heart of London. At the Church of San Giorgio, designed to accommodate 1,230 worshipers, only 12 people gathered to celebrate Mass. At the Church of Santa Maria, there were 20.

The nearby Brune Street Estate mosque has a different problem: overcrowding. Its small room and can contain only 100. On Friday, the faithful must pour into the street to pray. Given the current trends, Christianity in England is becoming a relic, while Islam will be the religion of the future.