RUTHFULLY YOURS

Unidentified gunmen stormed a Catholic-run retirement home in southern Yemen last Friday, killing 16 people, including four Catholic nuns. A priest was taken captive and is still missing. The retirement home, run by the Missionaries of Charity — an organization established by Mother Teresa of Calcutta — houses 80 elderly people in the jihadist-infested port city of Aden. The four gunmen reportedly entered the the home on the pretext that they wanted to visit their mothers at the facility.

Via the Guardian:

The gunmen moved from room to room, handcuffing the victims before shooting them in the head. A nun who survived and was rescued by local residents said she hid inside a fridge in a storeroom after hearing a Yemeni guard shouting “run, run”.

Khaled Haidar said that he counted 16 bodies, including that of his brother, Radwan. All had been shot in the head and were handcuffed. He said one Yemeni cook and Yemeni guards were among those killed.

Chikombedzi, Zimbabwe

My country’s government would rather see people starve than let them eat genetically modified food.

That’s the only conclusion to draw from the announcement in February that Zimbabwe will reject any food aid that includes a genetically-modified-organism ingredient—such as grains, corn and other crops made more vigorous or fruitful through GMO breeding. The ban comes just as Zimbabweans are suffering from our worst drought in two decades and up to three million people need emergency relief.

“The position of the government is very clear,” said Joseph Made, the minister of agriculture. “We do not accept GMO as we are protecting the environment from the grain point of view.”

In other words, my country—which can’t feed itself—will refuse what millions around the world eat safely every day in their breakfasts, lunches and dinners as a conventional source of calories. It doesn’t matter whether the aid arrives as food for people or feed for animals. Our customs inspectors will make sure that no food with GMOs reaches a single hungry mouth.The drought has devastated my family’s farm, which will produce almost no sorghum or corn this year. We’re short on money and the drought has caused prices to soar, even for the simplest goods. In the markets, cabbages the size of tennis balls sell for $1.

People are desperate for work. Last week I watched a man the age of my grandfather carry a hoe from house to house, trying to trade whatever labor he could offer for a meal. He wound up performing backyard chores for a cup of tea. The rejection of GMO food aid is a humanitarian outrage—a man-made disaster built on top of a natural disaster. Yet something even worse lies behind it: a denial of science. GMOs pose no threat to human health, as virtually every scientific and regulatory agency that has studied them knows.

They are also positively good for the environment, allowing farmers to fight soil erosion by planting high-yield crops that need less water, reduce greenhouse gases—and, most important, grow more food on less land. CONTINUE AT SITE

BERLIN—Germany’s federal police agency said that it had obtained files from Islamic State containing names and personal data of members of the extremist group that officials believe could help prosecute suspected militants.

The Federal Criminal Police, or BKA, believes the documents are authentic and would serve in prosecutions and in evaluating security measures, an agency spokeswoman said Thursday. She declined to say how the agency obtained the files or to disclose any details of the information in them.

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière stressed the significance of the documents, saying they offered an opportunity to prove the participation of Germans in the terror activities of Islamic State. The records could help lead to speedier investigations and stricter prison sentences for any Germans who have participated in the Sunni Muslim extremist group’s activities, he said.
Confirmation that German authorities had a trove of Islamic State documents came after Sky News reported late Wednesday that it had obtained tens of thousands of similar documents containing 22,000 names, addresses, telephone numbers and family contacts of Islamic State members. It wasn’t clear whether the documents acquired by the German authorities were identical to those obtained by Sky News. CONTINUE AT SITE

I intend to put Kirralie Smith, representing the Australian Liberty Alliance (ALA), first on the Senate ballot paper for NSW at the next election. I am doing that for four reasons.

First, I believe that Islam represents a dire threat to civilised values. Second, Mrs Smith seems to me, having read about her and heard her speak, an excellent candidate. Third, the ALA is a party of traditional values and small government. Fourth, the ALA supports increasing defence expenditure.

Bear in mind that I will vote for the ALA despite one of the Party’s policy apparatchiks, ex-National Ron Pike, explaining his grand scheme to take the dividends from the Snowy Mountain Scheme, which presently go to the NSW, Victorian and the federal Governments, and use them to pay interest on new borrowings to fund a massive program of hydro-electric dam building. I won’t go into more detail. Rex Connor came to mind.

I have nothing against dams. I like them. But it is self-evidently Mr Pike’s pet scheme and the ALA would have been wise to leave it alone. It has nothing to do with the price of fish – no pun intended. Mr Pike should set up his own party, perhaps.

Too much policy detail leaves a new party hostage to pet schemes of those who have had no success in pushing them within the established parties. It is best, in my view, simply to establish philosophical positions which will guide policy choices, rather than get among the weeds. The exception in this case is the ALA’s position on Islam, which is its raison d’être and the basis of its appeal for electoral support. Those who do vote for it won’t have dams on their minds.

Although the “Iraqi money affair” is regarded as a post-Dismissal sideshow it may well be part of a much larger endeavour: the flow of Middle Eastern money to unions and pro-Arab, anti-Israel activists in Australia. The cast of shady characters makes such speculation impossible to avoid.
Seven days before Gough Whitlam’s dismissal, the US Ambassador in Canberra told Whitlam that neither the CIA nor any other American government agencies secretly funded any political group or candidate in Australia, and the assurance was put into writing for the Department of Foreign Affairs. In Washington, the Assistant Secretary of State called on the Australian Deputy Head of Mission and repeated the claim.[1] Five days after the dismissal, Whitlam authorised an attempt to obtain and launder secret election funding from Iraq’s ruling Ba’ath Party for the ALP.

Recent evidence in declassified ASIO and Commonwealth Police files, and other accounts which have emerged since 1975, offer fresh perspectives on the excuses, cover-ups and agreed-upon fictions of the “Iraqi money affair”. Accounts of Whitlam’s breakfast meeting with the head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service and his companion, a relation of Saddam Hussein representing the Ba’ath Party, generally run on conventional lines with Whitlam being criticised for his behaviour then generously excused, as the event is made to appear a rather unimportant sideshow. At the same time, Rupert Murdoch, writing the biggest story in Australia’s political history, is pilloried for having unfairly used the event to attack Whitlam. This modern fairy tale has two parts—the lead-up to Whitlam’s encounter with the Iraqi thugs, and the events around the scandal becoming public knowledge.

Once upon a time, the Sunday after the dismissal, an ALP executive meeting was held in Sydney to discuss the unplanned-for election. Pro-Arab left-winger and Victorian Senate candidate Bill Hartley suggested to ALP National Secretary David Combe that campaign funds could be raised in the Middle East. Combe carried the proposal to Whitlam, who in the stress of the political disaster, approved the idea and suggested that well-known menswear retailer Reuben Scarf, the director of the non-profit Scarf Foundation, had proven Middle East contacts and would be a suitable go-between to act for the ALP.[2] Late that afternoon, before returning to Melbourne, Hartley contacted Henry Fischer, a co-director of the Foundation, and discussed the scheme with him. Fischer was interested and Hartley phoned the news to Combe. That night Whitlam and Combe visited Fischer at home. There were nuts and a bottle of German wine. Whitlam had a glass, Combe and Fischer finished the bottle—never mind that Fischer was a teetotaller.[3] No money was talked about, yet several days later Fischer flew to Baghdad to arrange the generous gift for the ALP. Two good-fairy Iraqi emissaries, secret police chief and torturer Farouk Abdulla Yehya and Saddam’s relative Ghafil Jassim Al-Tikriti, arrived and met Whitlam for breakfast and half a million dollars US was (Fischer in 1976)[4] or was not (Jenny Hocking in 2012)[5] handed over, and anyway Fischer stole the money (Fairfax Media in 2015).[6]

“Just using that expression ‘illegal immigrants’ is a form of oppressing the stranger,” a “very painful…inappropriate language biblically,” stated Rabbi Gerald Serotta at a Fairfax, Virginia, February 25 panel before about 50 listeners. Like him, “Welcoming the Stranger: Refugees and Immigrants in Our Midst,” a presentation of the controversial Islamic Gülen movement’s Rumi Forum, was uniformly uncritical towards current Middle Eastern refugee issues.

Serotta, an advisory board member of the leftwing rabbinical organization Truah, began the panel’s presentation of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theological perspectives on immigrants and refugees. Love for the stranger “suffuses the Hebrew Bible” with 36 corresponding scriptural passages, he stated while repeating the talking point that “people are not illegal, they may be undocumented.” He noted Judaism’s forefathers like Abraham migrating in the Old Testament and concluded that the “reason why we are commanded to love the immigrant is because the immigrant is us. We have moved in history.”

Patricia S. Maloof, former United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Director of Refugee Programs, reinforced Serotta’s Old Testament teachings with references to the New Testament. Hebrews 13:2 admonition to welcome strangers recalled Abraham’smeeting with angels in Genesis while the Holy Family itself fled to Egypt when King Herod’s Slaughter of the Innocents threatened infant Jesus. His discussion of any charity shown to the “least of these” being like loving Himself taught that “by helping the stranger we are seeing Christ in the stranger,” she said.