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Remembering Islam’s July 4th Victory By Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/remembering_islams_july_4th_victory.html

Soon after liberating the ancient Christian city of Antioch from Muslim oppression, the First Crusaders managed in 1099 to realize their primary goal: take Jerusalem from Islam.

Despite all the propaganda that surrounds the conquest of Jerusalem, there were very few Muslim calls to jihad (only one is known, and it quickly fell on deaf ears).  After all, in the preceding decades, and thanks to Sunni and Shia infighting, local Muslim populations were hardly unused to such invasions and bloodbaths.

In Muslim historian Ibn al-Athir’s words, “[w]hile the Franks — Allah damn them! — were conquering and settling in a part of the territories of Islam, the rulers and armies of Islam were fighting among themselves, causing discord and disunity among their people and weakening their power to combat the enemy.”

In this context, the pure doctrine of jihad — warfare against infidels — was lost to the average Muslim, who watched and suffered as Muslim empires and sects collided.

It was only during the reign of Imad al-Din Zengi (d. 1146) — a particularly ruthless Turkish warlord and atabeg of Mosul and Aleppo — and even more so under his son and successor, Nur al-Din (r. 1146-1174), that the old duty of jihad was resuscitated.  They founded numerous madrasas, mosques, and Sufi orders all devoted to propagandizing the virtues of jihad and martyrdom.  Contemporary literature makes clear that Islamic zeal (or, in modern parlance, “radicalization”) reached a fever pitch during their reigns.

‘I’m going to chop your head off’: Orthodox Jew chased down London street

“A man started running behind him saying ‘I’m going to kill you, I’m going to chop your head off,’” said Nizza Fluss, a councilor in the London Borough of Barnet.

By World Israel News Staff 

In east London, a knife-wielding man threatened to behead an Orthodox Jew as he walked down a street on Monday, says the Evening Standard, a London newspaper.

Police arrested a man on suspicion of “a racially aggravated public order offense after the incident” in Whitechapel, the newspaper reported.

“A man started running behind him saying, ‘I’m going to kill you, I’m going to chop your head off,’” said Nizza Fluss, a councilor in the London Borough of Barnet, the paper added.

The victim, in his 40s, reportedly was said to have been threatened and called a “f****** Jew” by a man while he made his way to work.

The man allegedly then pulled a knife and chased him down the street while shouting additional “anti-Semitic abuse,” according to the Evening Standard. 

Police said that a knife was recovered from the scene, the newspaper reports.

While rising anti-Semitism has been recorded in many countries, the conversation in the U.K. also involves the leading opposition party, Labour, and accusations of anti-Semitism on the part of party head Jeremy Corbyn.

Labour MP Catherine West has said it is a matter of “deep shame” that Jews can no longer support the party because of its anti-Semitism crisis, The Jewish Chronicle reported on Tuesday.

“It is very clear that Labour has to do more and it has to do it quickly,” said West, a Corbyn supporter, to the British Jewish news outlet.

Constantinople’s new mayor Imamoglu: What does he think of Cyprus? Uzay Bulut

https://greekcitytimes.com/2019/07/02/istanbuls-mayor-imamoglu-cyprus/

Turkey’s main opposition, the Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) mayoral candidate Ekrem Imamoglu won the do-over election in Constantinople, now known as Istanbul, on June 23, which will be his second mayoral position in the city.

The “Cyprus monument” he erected in Istanbul in 2017 represents his nationalistic stance on Cyprus, which takes pride in Turkish occupation of the island and disregards its Greek history and identity.

Imamoglu’s interest in Cyprus has a lot of history behind it. He moved to Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus at the age 18 in the late 1980s. He studied at university there for two years and played football for the team “Turkish Hearths Limassol” (Türk Ocağı Limassol – TOL). During his mayoral election campaign in May, Imamoglu went back to the occupied territories in Cyprus or the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” (TRNC) and was also welcomed by its ‘President,’ Mustafa Akinci.

He also visited the memorial tomb of Rauf Denktas, the once head of the “Turkish Resistance Organization” (TMT) that is known to have committed many crimes in Cyprus and paved the way for Turkey’s invasion of the island in 1974. Denktas became the “founding president” of the “TRNC” that is recognized only by Turkey.

During his speech at Denktas’s memorial tomb, Imamoglu said he is honored to have personally known Denktas. He continued:

“When you get elected to any government office, you should make your first state visit the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. That is why I am here.

France: The Real Emmanuel Macron by Guy Millière

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14477/real-emmanuel-macron

Charles de Gaulle refused to speak of the many French who had collaborated with the authorities of the German occupation. He refused to commemorate D-Day. He even went on to claim that the Normandy landings had “not been the beginning of the liberation of France,” but “the starting point of an American attempt to colonize France”.

President Emmanuel Macron went one step further, saying that France and Germany should create a European army to “protect themselves against Russia, China, and even the United States”.

France also supported the PLO at a time when it was openly a terrorist movement, unreservedly dedicated to destroying Israel and murdering Jews….. Macron continues the same policy as his predecessors. He never misses an opportunity to invite the current Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to the Elysée Palace and he never forgets to kiss him.

President Donald Trump now knows Macron. Trump probably remembers that during Macron’s visit to Washington 14 months ago, Macron seemed friendly toward him; then, when he went to the Congress, spent his whole speech running down the essential decisions of the Trump administration.

June 6, 2019. Normandy, France. The remains of 9,387 American military dead are buried at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial; 9238 Latin crosses for Christians and 149 Stars of David for Jews are aligned on the bluff overlooking Omaha Beach, one of five sectors on the Normandy coast where 132,000 soldiers of the Western allies landed on June 6, 1944. US President Donald J. Trump delivers a speech praising heroism, duty, honor and freedom, and pays tribute to the young Americans who gave their lives; he also speaks of the other soldiers who fought in the Normandy landings: Canadians, British, French. He behaves as a great statesman.

Just before he spoke, French President Emmanuel Macron also paid tribute to those brave soldiers. He added some remarks — that immediately were seen as a way to lecture the American President:

“America is never as great as when it fights for the freedom of others. It is never as great as when it is faithful to the universal values defended by its founding fathers when two and a half centuries ago, France came to support its independence”.

EU picks first woman to rule Brussels – German minister who called Brexit ‘a burst bubble of hollow promises’ by James Crisp

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/07/02/eu-leaders-pick-women-rule-brussels-first-time/

EU leaders have nominated two women to Brussels’ most important jobs for the first time, picking Ursula von der Leyen, a German defence minister who supports a United States of Europe and an EU army, to be the next president of the European Commission and Christine Lagarde to lead the European Central Bank. 

Mrs von der Leyen’s selection as replacement for the outgoing Jean-Claude Juncker is a victory for Angela Merkel, who will have succeeded in placing a German member of her centre-Right European People’s Party (EPP) at the top of the EU’s executive for the next five years from Nov 1. But Germany abstained from the decision because Mrs Merkel’s socialist coalition partners did not support the choice for commission president.

Emmanuel Macron was persuaded to swing behind Mrs von der Leyen in return for Mrs Lagarde, the French head of the International Monetary Fund, taking the presidency of the European Central Bank. 

Donald Tusk, the outgoing president of the European Council had said the allocation of the EU top jobs had to reflect gender diversity.  “After all, Europe is a woman,” said Mr Tusk in reference to Europa, who in Greek Mythology was abducted by Zeus in the shape of a bull.

VICTOR SHARPE: THE MOSQUES OF WAR

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe

“Islamic hatred for Jews and Christians alike dates from Mohammed, is expressed in many passages of the Koran and repeated daily in mosques in every corner of the world.”

Of the three monotheistic religions, Judaism may be considered the mother faith and the other two, Christianity and Islam, her daughters.

The first daughter, Christianity, under the influence of the early church fathers, rejected the mother and distanced herself from Judaism, even to the extent of changing the Sabbath from the seventh day, Saturday, to Sunday and renaming it the Lord’s Day. Seventh-Day Adventists still retain Saturday as the Sabbath.

The youngest daughter, Islam, under Muhammad, turned on both the Jewish and Christian tribes of Arabia, who declined to accept Muhammad claim that he ushered in God’s final revelation.

After Rome embraced Christianity under Constantine, the Church fathers increasingly used temporal powers to discriminate against the Jews and proscribe the practice of their faith. For Jews this tragically led to the horrors of the Crusades, the Catholic inquisition, forced conversions, pogroms, and ultimately, the Holocaust.

Finally The U.S. (aka Trump) Has Caught On To What The G20 Is About Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-7-1-finally-the-us-aka-trump-has-ca

Everybody knows what the G20 is about. Everybody, that is, except high-ranking members of the Democratic Party, the “establishment” branch of the Republican Party, the mainstream press, and the U.S. State Department career bureaucracy. Those people somehow think that what the G20 is about is reasonable people trying to work together in good faith to solve the world’s problems. Really! (Could anybody be that dumb? Yes. In fact, the “smarter” they appear to be from their credentials, the dumber they prove to be when it comes to understanding world affairs.)

And by the way, I don’t mean particularly to single out the G20, other than by the fact that they were just holding their annual meeting last week in Japan. Essentially all major international organizations, from the UN on down, are about the exact same thing.

And here’s the thing that all those organizations are about: They are about trying to disadvantage the United States in international competition, and to hit up the United States for big money to be redistributed by the international bureaucrats. But then, I think you already knew that.

So there was President Trump over at the G20 meeting in Japan last week, and they present him with a draft of a so-called “Joint Statement” that everybody is supposed to sign. A lot of it is the usual anodyne diplomatic bafflegab. But then there is the section headed “Climate Change” (starting at paragraph 35). “Climate” is the issue on which the international bureaucrats have come to believe that self-respecting Americans can be made to feel so guilty that they will give you anything you want, and pay any number you might name. So here are a few of the things that they have thrown in under the heading of “Climate”:

Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld:Sweden Is a Perplexing Location for an Antisemitism Conference

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/sweden-antisemitism-conference/

Sweden’s Social Democrat PM Stefan Löfven has announced that his country will host an international antisemitism conference to commemorate the Holocaust. This gathering of heads of state and governments is planned for October 27-28, 2020, and is to be held in Sweden’s third-largest city, Malmö.

This is a perplexing announcement. One would expect the initiative for such a conference to come from a country that has made serious efforts to fight antisemitism. Sweden has a long history of unanswered antisemitic incidents. The Board of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in Sweden voted in 2016 to accept the definition of antisemitism – yet the country does not accept the definition domestically (while the UK, Germany, Austria, Israel, and a number of other countries do). Extreme manifestations of antisemitism, unequaled elsewhere, have taken place in Sweden. The Jewish community of the Swedish town of Umea had to disband entirely because it was threatened by neo-Nazis and harassed by radical Muslims.

In May of this year, the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (BRA) released a report on antisemitic hate crimes. The report notes that Jew-hatred in Sweden stems from the left wing, the right wing, and the Muslim population. Antisemitism is openly expressed, and “there are few places where people with a Jewish background feel safe.”

Germany: Some Hate Speech ‘More Equal than Others’ by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14484/germany-hate-speech-al-quds

Although the “military arm” of Hezbollah is prohibited in the EU, the “political arm” is not, which means that in Germany, Hezbollah is free to engage in “non-military” activities — such as fundraising.

On the one hand, the federal police conduct countrywide raids on middle-aged Germans who post their thoughts on Facebook, while on the other, members of openly lethal terrorist organizations who espouse nothing but hatred towards a specific ethnic group, the Jews, are not only allowed to march in the heart of the German capital… but are free to organize and fundraise for their purpose.

That participants in the anti-Semitic Al Quds march have been allowed to flaunt their hatred for nearly four decades now, while middle-aged Germans are having their apartments searched for anti-Semitic and racist messages on Facebook, exposes a disturbing double standard in the application of the law.

At the very least, it shows that German authorities appear to harbor extremely selective views of what constitutes hate speech, based, it seems, on nothing more than the identity of the group that voices it.

In June, the “Al Quds Day” march took place in Berlin. Al Quds Day, in the words of the late historian Robert S. Wistrich, is “The holiday proclaimed by Khomeini in 1979 to call for Israel’s annihilation” which “has since been celebrated worldwide…”

In Germany, Al Quds Day marches have been taking place in the country’s capital since the 1980s[1], first in Bonn and since 1996 in Berlin. On Al Quds Day in December 2000, more than 2,000 demonstrators in the Kurfürstendamm — a central boulevard in Berlin — called for “the liberation of Palestine and the holy city of Jerusalem”. In November 2002, only one year after 9/11, the march featured slogans such as “Death to Israel” and “Death to the USA”. At the march in 2016, the slogans were, among others, “Death to Israel”, “Zionists kill children”, and so on.

Despite nearly four decades of such rhetoric — the kind that is arguably capable — according to paragraph 130 of Germany’s Criminal Code, which prohibits hate speech — “of disturbing the public peace” by inciting “hatred against a national, racial, religious group or a group defined by their ethnic origins”, German authorities have continually refused to ban the Al Quds Day march. The argument is, reportedly, that the Administrative Court would overrule such a ban. “A constitutional state must act in accordance with the rule of law,” said the spokesperson for the interior administration of the city of Berlin, Martin Pallgen. “Freedom of assembly and expression also applies to those who reject the rule of law”. Instead, German authorities have prohibited marchers from being overtly anti-Semitic and inciting hatred against Jews. The exercise is a bit like telling a neo-Nazi march please to cover up the swastikas to look more presentable.

Dublin’s Anti-Israel Boycott Bill: Bad for Ireland, Worse for the Palestinians, Terrible for Everyone by Lawrence A. Franklin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14483/ireland-israel-boycott-bill

The chief government figure opposing the bill is Foreign Minister Simon Coveney. Coveney argues that Ireland risks its standing in the European Union because the bill is legally unsound. He is correct. A Brussels-based EU trade official warned the Irish government that “the bill would be in contravention of EU competence on trade matters,” as the EU Commercial Treaty demands uniformity in member-state trade policies.

Irish politicians who passed it would likely be regarded as racist, particularly in view of the German Parliament’s recent resolution to designate BDS (the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel) as anti-Semitic.
In addition, there could be “potentially huge losses of US tax benefits for US companies with subsidiaries in Ireland, if the Bill is passed into law. This could potentially lead to major US companies pulling out of Ireland, and for other companies who were considering relocating, to not do so.”

The bill may also may well hurt Ireland’s effort to secure a position on the UN Security Council (UNSC) in the 2020-2021 vote by regional member-states in the General Assembly. Canada and Norway are competing with Ireland for the two seats allotted to the UNSC’s West Europe/North America region.

[The] legislation… will harm the interests of Palestinians — an estimated 30,000 of whom are employed by Israeli businesses in the West Bank… The Ireland Israel Alliance also accuses the bill’s supporters of hypocrisy, and cites their failure to condemn analogous situations in which Irish firms invest in international companies that do business in other occupied territories around the world.

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar and his governing Fine Gael party oppose a bill that would make it a crime for Irish citizens to import or sell anything produced by Israelis in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). Varadkar may wisely be pressuring politicians who voted in favor of the Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill to examine the possible negative consequences for Ireland’s national interest if the bill becomes law.