RUTHFULLY YOURS

Terry Scambray’s review of Raymond Ibrahim’s “Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians” (Regnery. 247 pages.) first appeared in New Oxford Review. Terry Scambray lives and writes in Fresno, California
The former period of tolerance toward Christians in Muslim lands is an exception, and the present attacks on Christians are the norm. Christians are being slaughtered and the West is making matters worse

Throughout the Muslim world, from Morocco to Nigeria to Indonesia — and even occasionally in Western Europe and North America — Christians are being harassed, tortured, and murdered. Reuters reported in January 2012 that a hundred million Christians were being persecuted, while a few years earlier Britain’s Secret Service, MI6, put the number closer to two hundred million.

In November 2012, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called Christianity, “the most persecuted religion worldwide,” a statement that elicited condemnation from many world leaders. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe estimates that a Christian is killed for his faith every five minutes.

What is the reason for such atrocity? By any measure, the persecution of Christians is one of the dramatic stories of our time. So why is it ignored? Raymond Ibrahim, a fluent speaker of Arabic and a fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, answers these questions and explains both the sources of Islamic violence and the infirmities that cripple the West in his new book Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians.

History provides a large part of the answer. Islam, from its beginnings, in contrast to Christianity, promised its followers worldly success and prosperity. From Mohammed’s first raids, down through the centuries of conquests that followed, Islam has been a religion of victors vanquishing victims.

Contemporary Muslim lands in the Middle East and Africa include what were once great centers of Christendom, such as Jerusalem, Alexandria, Damascus, Antioch, and Constantinople. Lest anyone forget, imperialism is not a Western invention.

Having conquered vast territory, Muslims then went on to dominate it by imposing the cruelties of Sharia law and dhimmitude, both of which reduce “infidels,” non-Muslims, to servile positions. Ibrahim provides examples of brutal conditions under Muslim rule during these early conquests when, “according to one medieval Muslim historian, over the two year course of a particularly ruthless Christian persecution campaign, some 30,000 churches were burned or pillaged in Egypt and Syria alone.”

Little Eli Waller will never grow up to be president. The four-year-old New Jersey boy will never grow up to be anything, because enterovirus D68 took his life – quite possibly because a boy who did grow up to be president, but not really a man, invited the virus into our country.

How many American children have to die in deference to the Democrats’ voter-importation demographic-warfare effort? We often hear that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, but how much Ebola, enterovirus D68 (EV-D68), Chagas disease, malaria, and tuberculosis is an acceptable price to pay to maintain Barack Obama’s open-borders-über-alles policy? These are relevant questions now, especially with a recent report confirming what was always just common sense:

The deadly EV-D68 epidemic in America was likely the result of Obama’s insistence on flooding our country with tens of thousands of illegal-alien minors.

Reports Neil Munro at The Daily Caller, “The evidence includes admissions from top health officials that the epidemic included multiple strains of the virus, and that it appeared simultaneously in multiple independent locations.”

This isn’t something hard to prove or disprove. All you need do is ascertain if the strain prevalent in the U.S. is the same as one found south of the border. This is simple epidemiology, and there’s only one reason we don’t know:

The powers that be don’t want us to know.

Can you imagine the revolutionary uproar that would have ensued if, just when EV-D68 was big in the news, it had been revealed that Obama’s lawless abdication of his responsibility had led to American deaths?

Can you imagine what would be said if it were proven that Obama has blood on his hands?

Below is Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, delivering a kickass speech a few days ago before the UN Security Council Emergency Session on Jerusalem:
“It says a great deal that the international community is outraged when Jews build homes in Jerusalem, but doesn’t say a word when Jews are murdered for living in Jerusalem. Throughout history, Jerusalem has been the capital for one people and only one people – the Jewish people.
Following are excerpts on from remarks by Ambassador Ron Prosor, Permanent Representative of Israel to the UN, to the Security Council during the Emergency Session on Jerusalem:

• I am here to convey one simple truth. The people of Israel are not occupiers and we are not settlers. Israel is our home and Jerusalem is the eternal capital of our sovereign state.

• There are many threats in the Middle East, but the presence of Jewish homes in the Jewish homeland has never been one of them.

• It says a great deal that the international community is outraged when Jews build homes in Jerusalem, but doesn’t say a word when Jews are murdered for living in Jerusalem. The hypocrisy is appalling.

• Throughout history, Jerusalem has been the capital for one people and only one people – the Jewish people.

• Jerusalem is central to our identity and our tradition. The holy city is named more than 900 times in the Bible. On holidays we sing לשנה הבאה בירושלים – “Next year in Jerusalem.”

For thousands of years, through persecution and massacres, expulsions and crusades, blood libels and pogroms, Jews turned their hearts in prayer towards Jerusalem. The connection between the Jewish people and our capital cannot be denied.

• The Palestinians and others have had the audacity to accuse us of trying to alter the historic Jewish character of our ancient city. Really? The truth of the matter is that Jerusalem had a Jewish character long before most cities in the world had any character. It was the capital of the Jewish people long before Homer composed the Iliad, before Romulus and Remus founded Rome, and before the armies of Alexander the Great swept across the Middle East. Jerusalem is steeped in Jewish history.

After a survey which suggests that most London Muslims support ISIS, it should surprise no one that they’re showing their support.

An Army Cadet was blasted in the face with a makeshift blowtorch in an unprovoked attack after selling poppies for Remembrance Sunday.

The 15-year-old boy was waiting at a bus stop at 6pm on Saturday evening in Manchester city centre when a man approached him with an aerosol can and lighter and sprayed him with lit fumes.

The cadet, who was wearing his camouflaged uniform, suffered minor burns to his face and singed hairs in his face and right forearm, Greater Manchester Police said. He and his family are in “total shock”.

He had spent the day selling poppies in the city centre to commemorate Armistice Day.

The offender, described as black or Asian, 5ft 8in tall and wearing a dark hooded top, walked off from the bus stop by the Manchester Gallery opposite George Street without saying a word.

Asian in these cases is usually a euphemism for Pakistani, Bangaldeshi, etc.

Detectives are ‘keeping an open mind’ about the motive of the attack, which happened yesterday at 6pm.

Ah yes. Let’s not jump to any conclusions. Can’t have a thing to do with the Jihad against Civilization.

A recent legal victory by Freedom X upheld the right of private citizens to discuss openly sharia law at a Knoxville, Tennessee, high school. “This is a victory for free speech,” Freedom X’s President William J. Becker rightly explained, in yet another instructive example of Islamists seeking to subvert the United States Constitution’s First Amendment.

A local Knoxville chapter of ACT! for America began the case by arranging an April 24 evening town hall at Farragut High School (FHS). The event featured Dr. Bill French, Center for the Study of Political Islam founder under the pen name Warner, and Matt Bonner, regional director of the Crescent Project, a Christian evangelization ministry for Muslims. They intended to address the encroachment in America of sharia, vaguely described in one online report as “Islamic laws governing worship and lifestyle.” Becker correctly clarifies that “Sharia is incompatible with our constitutional and legal protections” in numerous ways.

Both local and national Muslims groups, however, greeted the event with harsh opposition. Abdel Rahman Murphy, a Muslim chaplain at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, emailed then FHS principal Mike F. Reynolds on April 8 requesting the event’s cancellation. The town hall flyer had “kind of an aggressive tone,” Murphy argued to reporters. “Feel free hosting” the event “anywhere else by renting out a banquet hall,” Murphy added, “but to host it at a public place…is not comfortable for the rest of us.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a radical faux civil rights group and an unindicted terrorism financing coconspirator, also objected. An April 11 CAIR news release publicized a letter by CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper to FHS the previous day that “vilifies…French, Bonner and ACT! for America” with a “false attribution” of “anti-Muslim hate” refuted by Becker’s complaint. “We support the First Amendment right to free speech—even…hate speech used by these speakers,” Hooper argued. The “need for a safe and inclusive learning environment,” though, makes a “school…not the proper setting.”

Principal Reynolds’ April 10 letter to Knox County Schools Superintendent James P. McIntyre, Jr. shared Hooper’s sentiments. “Groups promoting hate rather than tolerance” would have the event “serve as a public forum for harassment and bullying practices that contradict the open-minded, academic discussion we seek to…foster at” FHS, Murphy wrote. The event would generate “little positive press or educational benefit,” yet “polarize our community” when “deemed ours by association.” Concerns of “potential backlash” and “future security threats” from “retaliation of opposing groups” existed. These “expressed concerns…about…disruption” from an event unsuitable for “a safe, healthy and comfortable learning environment” caused McIntyre to rescind ACT!’s invitation in an April 11 letter to its Knoxville chapter leaders.

A week before the anniversary of September 11, John Kerry announced that he had been given a divine mission to protect Muslim countries from Global Warming.

The Secretary of State had spent September arguing that the Islamic State was Un-Islamic. He told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs that it was a war against the “enemy of Islam.” Kerry was so eager to go native that he even switched from calling the Islamic State by the acronym of ISIL and instead joined Muslim governments in calling it by the more insulting Daesh.

The distinction made by Daesh is only intelligible to Arab Muslims, but our foreign policy has gone native by increasingly becoming obsessed with what they think, rather than what we think and what we need.

Some members of the Obama team had been accused of secretly converting to Islam, but only Kerry, whom no one had ever accused of believing in anything, seems eager to play a poor man’s Sheikh.

Kerry’s freelance Islamic lectures are as offensive as they are clueless.

When it came to the Mohammedan practice of enslaving non-Muslim women as sex slaves, Kerry insisted that the Islamic State’s claim that its actions were sanctioned by Islamic law was just as bad as the actual rapes. No doubt the Yazidi and Christian women who were being raped by Muslims would have agreed with the Secretary of State that their plight was just as terrible as the defamation of Islam.

After meeting with Muslim leaders, Kerry insisted that we had to delegitimize ISIS as Un-Islamic and “begin to put real Islam out there.”

It’s not the job of the Secretary of State to “put real Islam out there” and in deciding which Islam was the real Islam, Ayatollah John was functioning as an unlicensed Muslim leader.

Reports the past two days indicate that two “vetted moderate” Syrian rebel groups, Harakat Hazm and the Syrian Revolutionaries Front (SRF), have surrendered, with some even defecting, to Jabhat al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria.

Ruth Sherlock reports today at The Telegraph:

Two of the main rebel groups receiving weapons from the United States to fight both the regime and jihadist groups in Syria have surrendered to al-Qaeda.

The US and its allies were relying on Harakat Hazm and the Syrian Revolutionary Front to become part of a ground force that would attack the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

For the last six months the Hazm movement, and the SRF through them, had been receiving heavy weapons from the US-led coalition, including GRAD rockets and TOW anti-tank missiles.

But on Saturday night Harakat Hazm surrendered military bases and weapons supplies to Jabhat al-Nusra, when the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria stormed villages they controlled in northern Idlib province.

The development came a day after Jabhat al-Nusra dealt a final blow to the SRF, storming and capturing Deir Sinbal, home town of the group’s leader Jamal Marouf.

The attack caused the group, which had already lost its territory in Hama to al-Qaeda, to surrender.

A couple important points to note based on other reporting.

First is that al-Nusra was reportedly aided in the attack on the SRF by ISIS. According to a McClatchy report:

Here is the problem with the old-style Obama strategy of slicing and dicing the electorate into aggrieved minorities and then gluing them back together to achieve a 51% majority. On almost every issue in this election that they should be running on, they simply cannot. And on those that they are running on, they probably should not be.

Let me explain.

We Didn’t Do What We Did

Foreign policy?

Consider the failed Russia “reset,” the bugout from Iraq, the “leading from behind” in Libya, the Benghazi scandal, the Iranian soon-to-be bomb, the smearing of Israel, the special relationship with a thuggish Erdogan, the dissolving Middle East, the eroding NATO, and an ever more bullying China. No Democrat will run on something like, “I fully support the Obama foreign policy initiatives and the brilliant work of Secretaries Clinton and Kerry.” Foreign policy, then, cannot be a campaign issue, in the positive sense of defending the status quo. No Democrat even made the attempt.

How about bigger and competent government?

No Democratic congressman would wish to campaign on, “Obama made government work for you — just look at the new and dynamic IRS, VA, ICE, GSA, NSA, and Secret Service.” “Not a smidgen of corruption” is not a viable campaign theme. No candidate even tried that.

Why don’t Sens. Landrieu, Pryor, and Udall play up their support for the Obama economy [1]?

We did not see a candidate commercial like the following: “I was instrumental in keeping interest rates at zero percent for six years. I made sure that we borrowed another $7 trillion and oversaw the $1 trillion stimulus. We kept GDP above 1% and unemployment below 7%.” Apparently avoiding a depression is not felt to be an economic renaissance, and thus not a winning message.

Citing authorities as reliable as Australia’s very Clive Hamilton, a US author bares the depression and shocking psychological impacts afflicting climate activists whose warnings of imminent catastrophe go unheeded. For alarmists, blue is the new green.

This is from the Department of You Just Can’t Make This Stuff Up. Reporter Madeleine Thomas (no relation), writing for Grist, has described how climate scientists are driving themselves into depressed states over their climate forecasts. One solution she suggests is that relieve their incredible stress by shouting out “F—k!” and other dirty words*. Her piece can’t really be satirised so I’ll give it to you straight.

The heading is, “Climate depression is for real. Just ask a scientist“.

The piece instances Professor Camille Parmesan at the University of Texas , who became so “professionally depressed” that she questioned abandoning her research in climate change entirely. But she soothed her anxiety by shifting from the US to the UK, where the grant money was easier to get.

The reporter emphasised Parmesan’s tragedy by noting that the distraught professor “shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore in 2007. Sorry, Madeleine, she didn’t.

In 2009, The Atlantic named Parmesan [note to self: refrain from cheesy puns] one of its “Brave Thinkers” for her work on how climate change is harming species. But despite these accolades “she was fed up” because no-one was paying attention to her catastrophism.

“I was really thinking, ‘Why am I doing this?’” the professor told the Grist reporter. Things are so bad that, whenever she gives a talk, she complains of having to devote the first half to persuading people “that climate change is really happening.” [For the past 18 years, it hasn’t happened]. She decamped from Texas to Plymouth University.

Reporter Ms Thomas moves on to say that climate change, according to the “new field of psychology of global warming”, is causing depression, substance abuse, suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder. She adds that Parmesan certainly isn’t the first to experience some sort of climate-change blues: “For your everyday environmentalist, the emotional stress suffered by a rapidly changing Earth can result in some pretty substantial anxieties.”

But for climate scientists “on the front lines of trying to save the planet, the stakes can be that much higher”:

The fight to win back America will have to come from somebody.

But it will not come by way of Jewish voters. This is so because American Jews have lost the will to fight.

We have become soft.

Nothing stopped an anti-Semitic opera from taking place in New York. A few hundred protesters chanted outside. Whoopee.

BDS and other Palestinian groups are overrunning our campuses. Jewish students and their parents wring their hands, but no heroes arise.

The courage, the brilliance, the can-do spirit that characterizes the Jews of America in every other field absolutely disappears when it comes to politics. My landsmen will play follow the leader even if he drives them over a cliff. My American brothers and sisters have sold their souls to the religion of Liberalism – to the extent that they have forfeited the ability to reason.

They are told what to think. They are told what to say. Listen to Alan Colmes. They are told how to vote – and always they will take orders from headquarters.

They cannot entertain another point of view, nor can they weigh conflicting arguments.

Yet they know the argument.

I spoke with a man who is a leader within his synagogue. He agreed! He agreed that America is declining into the path of ruin. He agreed that the Democrats are hostile to Israel and that they are even hostile to America. He even remembered how Israel was booed at the Democrat National Convention.

All that and STILL he would do it all over again. He is a Democrat. He is a Liberal – despite everything.