RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the grand scheme of things, it was a small event: 40 Muslim primary schoolers declined to sing the National Anthem because it violates the tenets of their creed. As one more assault on what Australian should stand for, it confirms the assault on our society is ongoing and implacable
Nation states like Australia are built around a national identity and nothing symbolizes that identity more than the national anthem. Inevitably, that makes it a primary target for those radical leftists, progressivists, and special interest groups intent on undermining our national identity and systematically deconstructing our society.

In contrast, Islam is built upon a transnational identity, symbolized by the adulation the Koran and the Prophet Mohammed. Nowhere in Islam is there an imperative to place allegiance to a national identity over one’s faith; quite the contrary in fact, one’s Muslim allegiance is regarded as having absolute primacy. Inevitably, that makes it a primary vehicle to be exploited by radicals and Islamists alike.

It is therefore no surprise that the latest attack in the culture wars over Australia’s national identity should be mounted at a Victorian primary school, where around 40 Muslim students were recently allowed to walk out of the singing of the national anthem for allegedly religious reasons. Let there be no mistake, this attack was mounted deliberately to set a precedent that can now be followed by other Muslim students in other schools, in both Victoria and interstate.

Of the 100-200 million Christians at risk, the majority are in Muslim-dominated countries. Of the world’s three largest religions Christians are the most persecuted with 80 percent of all acts of religious discrimination being directed at them. So why the inaction from the Church?

My text for the day is, ‘By their fruits shall ye know them’, inspired by the 84 bishops who have called upon the Prime Minister to admit not 20,000 refugees over the next five years but 50,000, with 20,000 over the next 2 years.

Here is what they wrote:

“We believe such is this country’s great tradition of sanctuary and generosity of spirit that we could feasibly resettle at least 10,000 people a year for the next two years, rising to a minimum of 50,000 in total over the five year period you foresaw in your announcement. Such a number would bring us into line with comparable commitments made by other countries. It would be a meaningful and substantial response to the scale of human suffering we see daily.”

Not that long ago, Austria’s Nazi collaborationist party was accusing Hungary of being Nazis for the whole border security thing. Now Austria appears to have had enough and has caught fence fever.

Austria on Wednesday said it plans to build a fence at its main crossing with Slovenia, the first such barrier between two members of Europe’s document-free travel area, in one of the clearest signs to date of how Europe’s migrant crisis is undermining Europe’s institutions and sowing discord across the bloc.

News of the plan, aimed to slow the stream of migrants headed toward Germany via Austria, drew sharp criticism from Berlin. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has sought to preserve freedom of travel across the continent, even as she struggles to maintain her own open-door refugee policy in the face of mounting opposition at home and growing impatience in other European countries on the migrants’ route.

“The federal government and the chancellor repeatedly have stressed that we believe that the refugee crisis can’t be solved with the building of fences,” Ms. Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said Wednesday.

Re the accelerating Islamization of Europe, Bob Belvedere over at the Camp of the Saints has an interesting aside:

People like the Koch Brothers should really be forming paramilitary units for the purposes of rescuing what European Treasures they can, such as the aforementioned Throne [of Charlemagne], the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s David and Pieta, Magna Carta, etc.

Put Magna Carta to one side for the moment, since the document is a mere souvenir of the idea, and it’s the idea that matters, which is why some of us are still writing books on the subject (personally autographed copies exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore).

But the notion of commando teams rescuing what’s left of western art from the Eurabian night struck me a year or so back as I was watching a rather undernourished George Clooney flick, The Monuments Men, about art experts rescuing great paintings marooned behind enemy lines during World War Two. In the first chapter of his very prescient book The West’s Last Chance, written before the Mohammed cartoon eruptions, the late Tony Blankley contemplates a European future in which firebreathing imams incite art wars on whatever’s to hand – Michelangelo’s “Little David” gets blown up in Florence, Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve are attacked with acid, a car bomb explodes outside the Rodin museum… More and more of the surviving works are carted off to “secure” storage facilities, never to be seen in public again.

Do students in any British or American university have to be held responsible for the actions of the British or American armed forces in Northern Ireland or Iraq? Would we not think it the grossest ignorance, not to mention bad manners, to think they should be?

It is that time of year again. News arrives of 343 “university teachers” who signed a letter pledging that henceforth they will not cooperate with Israeli academic institutions. Their joint letter took up a full page today in Britain’s left-wing Guardian newspaper (where else?) and has caused almost no stir in Britain. It comes days after a letter signed by 150 leading British writers, musicians and others — including JK Rowling, Simon Schama and Hilary Mantel — opposed any and all such boycotts against Israel, and pointed out that in the eyes of most people, intellectual and cultural exchange is a good thing.

The anti-boycott letter was signed by some of Britain’s leading intellectuals. The main response to the pro-boycott letter, however, may well be, “Who?” Who knew, for instance, that Israel — or any state — would be diminished if it could not gain from the wisdom of Professor Alex Callinicos, one of Britain’s most obscure Marxist academics? He is the author of numerous interminable tracts; his efforts to bring his thoughts into mainstream politics reached their summit during his involvement with the Socialist Worker’s Party, an entity too extreme even for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party. As almost nobody in Britain wants Prof. Callinicos’s thoughts, why would anybody in Israel be begging for them?

Germany’s political stability and economic sway have until recently earned Chancellor Angela Merkel unprecedented global influence and power.

Postwar Germany has become the financial powerhouse of Europe and a model nation. Give credit to German hard work and competency for the country’s continuing economic miracle.

Less appreciated is how Germany also brilliantly exploited the lucrative in-house trade framework of the European Union market — along with nearly seven decades of subsidized defense from an American-led NATO.

The result is that Germany alone now determines the fiscal future of the nearly insolvent southern European Union nations on the Mediterranean.

Germany was also the self-appointed broker between Vladimir Putin and the apprehensive EU. Merkel supposedly has watered down Putin’s military ambitions by seducing Russia with lucrative German trade.

In addition, Germany positioned itself as the moral voice of Europe. In penance for an aggressive past that had nearly wrecked Europe on three occasions, it became the loudest critic of supposed U.S. imperialism.

The results of the Canadian general election are now graven in stone and Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party has been given a decisive majority. Canadians have opted for change without stopping to consider that change is by no means an unalloyed good. The “hope and change” that Obama promised the American people has led the country into an abyss of debt, racial conflict, open-border chaos, destructive initiatives like global warming legislation, alliances with genocidal enemies, alienation of political friends, and a state of international weakness that would be risible were it not so devastating. America allowed itself to be seduced by a charismatic interloper with spotty credentials, a pro-Muslim bias, hard-left sympathies, and no accomplishments worth mentioning.

It appears that Canada has followed suit, electing an aureate nonentity whose CV would in any sane society have generated howls of laughter or stunned disbelief. “Spectacularly unqualified,” as a PJM commenter posted, Trudeau studied environmental geography at McGill University and engineering at the Université de Montréal—but failed to complete degrees in either discipline. Among his other triumphs, which apparently earned the confidence of the electorate, Trudeau was a snow board instructor, a camp counselor, a white water rafting instructor, and a substitute drama teacher. Even a farcical billet like community organizing would have been more impressive.

The pro-government newspaper Sabah claimed that dragging dead bodies in the streets was “routine practice” around the world, a security measure to check if the body was booby-trapped.

“If we wanted to, we could round up all of them, kill them and say they committed suicide.” — Ismet Sezgin, former Minister of the Interior, 1993.

What Turkey is engaging in appears an attempt at historicide, just as al-Qaeda and ISIS have done in Bamiyan and Palmyra and throughout Iraq – and as the Palestinian Authority did last week with the help of a duplicitous UNESCO by labeling the Jewish holy sites of Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs Muslim sites.

How are Kurds supposed to trust such a government and its army when even their dead are exposed to attacks, torture and attempts at obliteration?

In Turkey’s election on June 7, the pro-Kurdish party came in third, evidently thwarting the plans of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to attaining the supermajority of 367 seats to be President-for-Life — or Sultan. In an apparent attempt to rectify this supposed miscarriage of the democratic process, Erdogan called for another, snap election on November 1, seemingly to try once again to get his permanent Sultanate.

A German political expert has warned that a successful Islamic political party is not a far off thought given Germany’s rapidly changing demographics. In an interview with the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung newspaper, Professor Jürgen W. Falter, who specialises in political extremism, noted that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s position on immigration may soon change, claiming “Pandora’s box is opened too far”.

Professor Falter said: “I do not think that the position of Mrs. Merkel, with time, will be held. Her words are rowing forward, but below the surface, back already… certainly this has something to do with the fact she sees that she has to get the genie back in the bottle… a Pandora’s box is opened too far.”

“[Her migration policy] was probably not meant the way it has arrived. But it sounded like an invitation to the entire world, unlimited refugees are welcome.”

His views on the rise of the Alternative fur Deutschland are also worthy of note, claiming that it was destined to become a small, regional party before the migrant crisis, but that now it can flourish without really doing much at all.

The Iranians are also believed to have supplied their new terrorist group in the Gaza Strip with Grad and Fajr missiles that are capable of reaching Tel Aviv.

The leader of Al-Sabireen, Hisham Salem, is a former commander of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip. His activities and rhetoric have worried many in Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who fear that his group is beginning to attract many of their followers.

Salem has been accused by many Palestinians of helping Iran spread Shia Islam inside the Gaza Strip, where all Muslims belong to the rival Sunni denomination.

This, of course, is bad news for [Palestinian President Mahmoud] Abbas, who is now watching as many of his former loyalists have become on Iran’s payroll and are sharing its radical ideology.

Many Palestinians and Arabs in the region are already voicing concern. The last thing Abbas, Egypt’s President Sisi and Jordan’s King Abdullah need is another Iranian terror group such as Hezbollah in the Middle East.

It now remains to be seen whether the Obama Administration and other Western powers will wake up and realize that the Iranians are continuing to fool them, not only regarding Tehran’s nuclear program, but also concerning its territorial ambitions in the Middle East.

Unless the U.S. and Western powers realize that Iran remains a major threat to world peace, Al-Sabireen and other terrorist groups will one day manage to establish a UN-recognized Palestinian state that would pose an existential threat to Israel and destabilize the entire Middle East.