RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/latest-brexit-episode-disappoints-remainers/

It didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to.

In the latest thrilling parliamentary episode of Brexit, the hopes and expectations of, among other Remainers, House of Commons speaker John Bercow were largely disappointed, and the hopes of Brexiteers began to rise again. That was not supposed to happen.

Before the actual votes on seven amendments to a government motion supporting Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement with the European Union, it was generally expected that some would pass and either delay the date of Brexit, or transfer control of parliamentary business from cabinet ministers to a coalition of Remainers, or allow MPs to choose among several alternative versions of Brexit. All of these were departures from usual parliamentary conventions — which Bercow had approved, contrary to both precedent and his duty of impartiality — and almost all represented a reversal of what a vast majority of MPs had voted for a year ago. Most significantly, however, they would all have had the intended effect of delaying Brexit indefinitely and likely canceling it altogether.

That was expected because it has become conventional wisdom that a House of Commons with a Remainer majority would inevitably vote only for a Brexit tolerable to the Remainers and thus disappointing to Leavers. It very much didn’t turn out that way. Of the seven amendments, the five most hostile ones were defeated, all by healthy majorities. The two amendments that did pass were (1) the Brady amendment, which the government had accepted as a way of keeping May’s plan alive, and (2) a non-binding amendment calling for the government not to pursue a No Deal Brexit but not providing any means to prevent it.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13650/finland-grooming-gangs

Much of the coverage of the same problem in Great Britain said that Jay had accused the Rotherham council and police of failing to tackle sexual exploitation because of misplaced “political correctness.” Yet Jay says those are not the words she would use: “I have an aversion to phrases like that,” she said. Instead, she believes the Labour-dominated council turned a blind eye to the problem because of “their desire to accommodate a community that would be expected to vote Labour, to not rock the boat, to keep a lid on it, to hope it would go away.”

What hits hardest in the little town of Oulu in Finland is a disturbing sense that history is repeating itself here and nothing has been learned from the well-documented lessons of the past. Instead there seems to be a hope that with a few overdue statements this problem will go back underground and the noise will go away.

Despite bold assertions that action would be taken and the laws regarding asylum seekers would be tightened, in recent conversations regarding the numbers of migrants to be accepted from the EU quota system, politicians such as the interior minister were still campaigning to increase the refugee quota tenfold.

In January, the Andalus Islamic Center of Kastelholm in Helsinki’s Puolinharju area, published a message to its followers on Facebook. It featured a picture of two lollipops. One was unwrapped, dirty and covered with insects; the other was not. “This is why the Hijab plays an important role in Islam,” it said.

Finland is a curious place. Tucked up under the arm of its celebrity sister Sweden and with Russia as a neighbour, it is one of the world’s most northern and geographically remote countries. It takes a hardy kind of European to withstand the severe climate. The Finns in Oulu, the most populous city in northern Finland, go about their lives as normal in -25 degrees Fahrenheit.

With a national population of just over 5.5 million, trees easily outnumber people; two-thirds of this country is blanketed in thick woodland, making it the most densely forested country in Europe.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13533/european-court-human-rights

It is a shame that voices such as Bahiri’s are being drowned out in the West, not only by fundamentalist Islamists but by liberal apologists — and courts. Evidently they are more fearful of being called “Islamophobic” than they are of protecting the victims of radical Islamism.

The recent ECHR ruling against Sabaditsch-Wolff for speaking her mind about Mohammed’s marriage to a little girl is not merely a slap in the face to freedom of expression in an academic sense. It also serves to keep silent all those Muslims who are physically and mentally victimized by the practices sanctified in the Quran and by those adopting the strictest interpretation of Quranic texts.

In so doing, the court is giving its stamp of approval for criminal practices, such as paedophilia. Crimes that victimize children must not be tolerated. The European Court of Human Rights does not deserve its name.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) recently ruled that referring to the Islamic Prophet Mohammed’s marriage to a 9-year-old as paedophilia is “beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate.”

As Judith Bergman explained in the wake of the October 25, 2018 judgement, which was handed down seven years after “free speech and anti-jihad activist, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, was convicted by an Austrian court of ‘denigrating religious symbols of a recognized religious group'”:

“Sabaditsch-Wolff was ordered to pay a fine of 480 euros and the costs of the proceedings. The Vienna Court of Appeal upheld the decision… Sabaditsch-Wolff then appealed… to the European Court of Human Rights. She stated that her right to freedom of expression, safeguarded in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, had been violated.”

According to the recent ECHR ruling, Article 10 had not been violated. Furthermore, it stated that the Austrian court that convicted Sabaditsch-Wolff had “served the legitimate aim of preserving religious peace in Austria.”

Even more shocking than ignoring the whole point of freedom of expression by talking about “preserving religious peace” was the ECHR’s defense of the Austrian court for stating that that “child marriages were not the same as pedophilia, and were not only a phenomenon of Islam, but also used to be widespread among the European ruling dynasties.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/01/29/county-lines-gangs-make-500m-profit-exploit-10000-children-sell/

Criminal gangs are making £500m profit a year from “county lines” networks with 10,000 children as young as 11 being exploited to sell drugs, police have revealed.

There are now 2,000 county lines through which gangs run their drug dealing networks, almost treble the 720 of just a year ago, according to analysis by the National Crime Agency (NCA) and National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC).

Each line generates more than £800,000 profit and turns over some £5,000 a day, equivalent to £3.6bn a year if scaled up.

The gangs exploit children whom they recruit to sell heroin, cocaine and crack in areas outside their normal territories, directing them via mobile phone “lines.”

Duncan Ball, NPCC lead on county lines, said 10,000 was a “reasonable” estimate of the number of children now being used, with most being boys aged 15 to 17.

He said the youngest gang member police had safeguarded was just 11 but there was evidence gangs were grooming younger children so they could join their operations when they reached 11.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/29/laura-plummer/

A British woman has told of her “15 month trip to hell” after her holiday turned into a nightmare when she was jailed over painkillers.

Laura Plummer, 34, landed at Heathrow Airport on Tuesday afternoon and said she thought her “nightmare would never end” when she was held in al-Qanater women’s prison, south of Cairo in Egypt.

The shopworker from Hull was sentenced to three years in prison on Boxing Day 2017 for taking 290 Tramadol tablets into the country.

Breaking down in tears as she arrived back in the UK, Ms Plummer said: “Words cannot express how delighted I am to be home.

“At times I thought this nightmare would never end. What should have been a two-week holiday in the sun turned into a 15-month trip to Hell.

“I would like to thank everybody for supporting me throughout this, especially my family.”

Ms Plummer was arrested at Hurghada Airport on October 9 2017 when she flew into the Red Sea resort.

She claimed she was taking the tablets – which are legal in the UK but banned in Egypt – for her Egyptian partner Omar Caboo, who suffers severe back pain.

http://jcpa.org/holocaust-denial-

Memory loss can be a terrible disease. In the best case, it affects our recall of the minor details of an event, but in the worst case, such as with Alzheimer’s, it can lead to complete distortion of the past.

Holocaust denial is a kind of amoral cultural Alzheimer’s, and what makes it worse is that, unlike dementia, it is an intentional disease. Holocaust deniers often consciously lie, but they do so in the name of deep-seated hostility toward Jews. Their attitude is based on typical anti-Semitic bias – the idea that the Jews are taking advantage of the memory of what happened. This is a particularly ridiculous thought, given the colossal, overwhelming nature of the experience the Jewish people went through. It is impossible to imagine that some advantage could be gained from an absolute evil that pervades recent knowledge and the facts of Jewish history and life. Yet, the desire to deny the Holocaust propels these individuals to repudiate historical evidence and even eyewitness accounts.

Similarly, when UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) denies that Jerusalem has been linked to the Jewish people for centuries and millennia, it also rejects the extensive historic evidence attesting to the ongoing Jewish presence in the city. By so doing, it is also suffering from what could be diagnosed as anti-Semitic Alzheimer’s.

There is nothing improper about this comparison. The connection between relegating the Holocaust to non-existence and doing the same with the relationship between the Land of Israel and its people are two forms of denial intended to obliterate the Jewish people.

It is therefore very important and positive that International Holocaust Remembrance Day is currently observed in Europe with commitment. International Holocaust Remembrance Day takes place on January 27 every year, on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau on this day in 1945. In Italy, the president of the Italian Republic Sergio Mattarella will participate in the commemorations, alongside many schoolchildren. Commemorations also include educational programs, trips to Auschwitz, and public speeches. Most importantly, this day provides a unique opportunity to meet with survivors, who are dwindling in number but can still provide us with their personal testimonies and the strength of their presence.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13648/india-muslims-divorce-law

The All India Muslim Personal Law Board has argued that the bill amounts to interference with religious law, and therefore violates the Constitution of India. This objection might be thought of as disingenuous. According to Article 44 of the Constitution, “The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India.”

By contrast, triple talaq is a unilateral, arbitrary tool in the hands of men against women, a condition what that is simply not acceptable in modern India.

For decades, Indian courts have upheld the precedence of Muslim women’s right to equality over Muslim Personal Law. The court ruled in 1985 that the denial of alimony was a violation of Bano’s fundamental rights, regardless of her religion, and that triple talaq ran contrary to those rights. In other words, Muslim women must enjoy the same rights as other women in India.

India’s Parliament must do the right thing for the country’s Muslim women, as it did nearly 64 years ago for the country’s Hindu women. Until the passage of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, Hindu women in India were not at liberty to divorce their husbands, while Hindu men were free to engage in polygamy. It will be a shattering miscarriage of justice if oppositionist politicians succeed in blocking this much-needed bill.

The Narendra Modi government in New Delhi deserves applause for passing the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, 2018, which criminalizes the practice of “triple talaq” — a medieval, patriarchal divorce procedure still in use in many Muslim communities in India and abroad. All this procedure requires for a man to divorce his wife is to repeat the word “talaq” three times.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13646/palestinians-preparing-for-peace

If, in the eyes of the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership, normalization with Israel is an act of “treason,” a “crime” and a “big political and national sin,” the Trump administration may well be wasting its time and prestige on a peace plan that envisions peace between the Arab countries and Israel, at least at this time.

To achieve peace with Israel, Palestinian leaders need to prepare their people — and all Arabs and Muslims — for peace and compromise with Israel, and not, as they are now doing, the exact opposite. Shaming and denouncing Arabs who visit Israel is hardly a way to prepare anyone for peace, or the possibility of any compromise.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration and the international community would be doing a real service to the Palestinians if they start paying attention to assaults on public freedoms, including freedom of the media, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Holding Palestinian leaders accountable for their systematic abuses of public freedoms, assaults on journalists and incitement is the only way to encourage badly needed moderate and pragmatic Palestinians and Arabs to speak out.

While the Palestinian Authority (PA) continues to arrest and intimidate Palestinian journalists in the West Bank, its loyalists are also waging a campaign against Arab journalists who dare to visit Israel.

This month alone, the PA security forces have arrested nine Palestinian journalists, according to the Palestinian Committee for Supporting Journalists.

One of the journalists, Yousef al-Faqeeh, 33, a reporter for the London-based Quds Press News Agency, was taken into custody on January 16. On January 27, a PA court ordered al-Faqeeh remanded into custody for 14 days. His family said that they still do not know why he was arrested.

Al-Faqeeh’s wife, Suhad, said that PA security officers raided their house; when Yousef asked whether they had a search warrant, they proceeded to arrest him. “They took him to an unknown destination and did not provide a reason for his arrest,” she said. “They also confiscated his computer and mobile phone.”