RUTHFULLY YOURS

When it comes to choosing sides, the hard left’s anti-Western mindset inevitably trumps respect for the values it otherwise professes to endorse: gender equality, gay rights and opposition to theocratic absolutism, to name but a few. Shame, however, remains an alien concept
Judged even by its own inane standards, Guardian Australia has published a splendidly stupid essay by Irfan Yusuf, in which he likens radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir to Andrew Bolt and modern conservatism. This comparison is apt, apparently, because of a common sense of yearning: Hizb ut-Tahrir longs for the return of the Caliphate, and Bolt for the return of Abbott.

No doubt Yusuf and the Guardian heartily congratulated themselves for their daring, but I think the essay is interesting for reasons that Yusuf certainly didn’t intend. He writes

Perhaps another reason groups like HT have some traction is because, for all their silly rhetoric, they are actually doing something.

Doing what, exactly? He has warm words for the group’s efforts to educate everybody on counterterrorism, surveillance and radicalisation. He admonishes what he evidently regards as lazy Muslim moderates and concludes

You don’t have to believe in Hizb ut-Tahrir’s caliphate to appreciate their effort.

There you have it. The intellectual clumsiness is staggering. You watch transfixed as some mild criticism of Hizb ut-Tahrir wobbles into an endorsement. I mention, only in passing, that Hizb ut-Tahrir has also made an effort to justify the actions of jihadists going to fight in Syria, as well as the murder of Australian troops and the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. None of this invalidates Hizb ut-Tahrir’s credibility. For all his loose talk about the group’s undeserved media attention, the worst Yusuf can offer is modest applause.

In the history of political clichés, has there ever been one quite so misjudged as the line—some version of which is attributed either to Israel’s martyred Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin or fabled Defense Minister Moshe Dayan—that “you make peace with your enemies, not with your friends”?

OK, “give peace a chance” and “nation building at home” are worse. But the Rabin-Dayan line is an expression of the higher mindlessness that passes for wisdom among people who think they are smart. After Monday’s make-nice session between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it’s time for a reconsideration.

To wit: You do not make peace with enemies. You make peace with former enemies—either because you have defeated them, as we defeated the Axis Powers in World War II; or because they collapse, as the Soviet Union did after the fall of the Berlin Wall; or because they have defeated you and you’re able to come to terms with the outcome from a safe distance. Witness Vietnam.

The Rouhani-Zarif façade of civility toward the West was enough to persuade the vain, delusional and acquisitive in Western leadership circles that change had finally come again to Iran. However, no amount of Persian tea or Iranian rosewater-drenched ice cream shared between Kerry and Zarif can drown out the deceptive hoax of the JCPOA. Before the ink was dry, Khamenei and the security services announced that the agreement has no standing in Iran.

To punctuate the point, Tehran arrested a prominent Iranian-American businessman, Siamak Namazi, and a Lebanese-American, Nazar Zaka, to add to its collection of fraudulently-charged hostages: Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian; former marine Amir Hekmati; Pastor Saeed Abedini, and retired FBI agent Robert Levinson.

Just in case the U.S. needed one more symbolic kick, the regime closed down the first KFC fast food restaurant in Tehran on Monday, just one day after it opened.

In the end, it matters little what the government, people, or even the theocratic institutions think is in Iran’s best long-term interests.

“She writes something but means something else.” — Tehran Islamic Prosecutor.

The irony in all this is that Ekhtesari is not a political poet. In fact, she has written that those who try to use poetry for politics betray both.

The sentencing was made easier thanks to a recent lecture by “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, laying down the rules of what he believes “good Islamic poets” should observe when writing poetry.

The poet Sa’id Sultanpour was abducted on the day of his wedding and shot dead in a Tehran prison. Rahman Hatefi-Monfared had his veins cut and was left to bleed to death in the notorious Evin Prison.

“I hope to see the day when no one is sent to jail in this land for writing poems.” — Mehdi Mussavi, convicted poet.

Does a seminar on reforming the meter and rhyme schemes of Persian poetry violate “Islamic values” and threaten the foundations of the Islamic Republic of Iran?

Monday, Nov. 9, marks the anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1938, when Nazi hordes ran wild throughout Berlin, as well as in other German cities. Jewish houses of worship were desecrated and then set afire. Thousands of Jews were rounded up, some beaten to death, others sent to concentration camps. Jewish-owned businesses and homes were looted.

I will never forget seeing the unimaginable horror of the night and the following day 77 years ago. By luck, my parents were not in Berlin. I was at my grandmother’s. Through the window I could see my beautiful synagogue engulfed in flames as desperate screams rose from the street below. Each knock on our apartment door brought terror, followed by incredible relief. By some miracle, two of my uncles made it to my grandmother’s seeking safety from the savagery of this night.

The next morning as I wandered through my neighborhood, I saw shards of plate glass everywhere, as every Jewish-owned shop had been looted and painted with vile Jew-hating slogans. Uniformed Nazis and their sympathizers were having fun as they surveyed their brutality. One group looked at a large stain on the street that was said to be the blood of a Jew. Even now I can hear their laughter.

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/11/08/sweden-on-the-verge-of-collapse-on-the-glazov-gang/

This new special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Ingrid Carlqvist, a Senior Distinguished Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.

Ingrid came on the show to discuss Sweden: On the Verge of Collapse, unveiling the cliff that Sweden is speeding toward — as the mass wave of Muslim “refugees” overwhelms the country. [See also Ingrid on The Glazov Gang special: Islam’s Rape of Sweden].

Throughout Europe today if you listen carefully you can hear echoes of the sound of shattering glass.

On November 9, 1938, a date that came to be known as Kristallnacht, the full fury of the Nazi campaign against the Jews of Germany reached its climax with attacks on Jewish storefront windows, Jewish houses of worship, and Jewish bodies of men, women, and children.

The nightmare had not come out of the blue. Repressive measures against Jews had been building since Hitler took power in 1933. By stages, Jews had been forbidden the use of public spaces, fired from professions such as teaching, and relieved of their businesses. They were beaten and spat on in public and would soon be subject to the final solution. Those who were lucky enough to get out in time were few. Unwanted almost everywhere, they had no haven and nowhere to go except for the fortunate few who had relatives willing to assume financial responsibility for them and countries willing to grant them visas.

When World War II ended the world seemed to take pity on the surviving remnant of European Jewry but it still required unprecedented effort for Jews to achieve their own state—Israel, a haven, just in case Never Again should become a meaningless slogan.

Some Jews remained in the countries of Europe and chose to rebuild their lives there with varying degrees of success. Antisemitism was not dead—Jew hatred simply evolved into Israel hatred.

And now, seventy years after the end of the Second World War, waves of Muslim migrants are washing ashore in the countries of Europe. How long before their numbers enable them to take over their host countries? How long before Europe hears again the sounds of breaking glass and breaking hearts and bodies?

How long before we know the answers to these questions?

The mass migration from Islamic countries including Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and others, continues apace. Around three-quarters of a million migrants have entered Europe in the current wave. They generally travel through some combination of Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia and Hungary, but very few migrants come to rest in those countries. Almost all head for the richer nations of northern Europe. So far, Germany and Sweden have been the principal destinations of choice.

This has, of course, caused major disruptions in both countries. Germany may have reversed its policy of allowing the families of migrants to join them, while Sweden is now telling migrants they will have to find their own places to stay, or else be deported back to Germany or Denmark.

What makes Germany and Sweden so attractive, at least in part, is their welfare systems, which people in the Middle East correctly believe to be lavish. Norway, so far, has played only a minor role in the current migration, and wants to keep it that way. How to deter more immigrants than the nation can reasonably absorb? By letting them know welfare benefits are being cut: “Norway launches anti-refugee advertising campaign.”

German hospitals are increasing security to protect doctors and nurses from violent attacks by migrants who are unhappy with the medical treatment they are receiving.

Critics are warning that German taxpayers will end up paying billions of euros to provide healthcare for a never-ending wave of asylum seekers. This is in addition to the billions of euros already being spent to provide newcomers with food, clothing and shelter.

In addition to the massive economic and social costs, as well as the burden of increased crime, including a rape epidemic, Germans are now facing the risk of being exposed to exotic diseases — and tuberculosis.

Roughly 5% of asylum seekers are carrying resistant germs. In real numbers, this works out to around 75,000 newcomers with highly infectious diseases. — Dr. Jan-Thorsten Gräsner, director of the Institute for Rescue and Emergency Medicine.

Twenty types of vaccines are now in short supply, and 16 others are no longer available at all. Because of production bottlenecks, some vaccines will not become available until 2017.

Muslim women refuse to be treated by male doctors, and many Muslim men refuse to be treated by females. — Max Kaplan, director of the Bavarian Medical Board.

AKP supporters celebrated their victory on November 1 with chants of “Allahu Akbar” [“Allah is the greatest”], an Islamist slogan, indicating that for them the political race in Turkey is in fact a “religious war.”

The Turkish “Sultan wannabe” runs an empire of fear. The November 1 vote will only help make him even more despotic.

A recent study found that only a quarter of Turks were NOT afraid of Erdogan. According to the research, even some of his own supporters are afraid of him.

“The rapidly diminishing choice of media outlets and restrictions on freedom of expression in general impacted the process and remain serious concerns.” — Ignacio Sanchez Amor, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe

The AKP’s setback in last June’s elections was because some nationalists disapproved of the AKP’s peace process with the Kurdish minority. In July, the government scrapped the peace process and ordered the military relentlessly to bomb the strongholds of militant Kurds in northern Iraq.