RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12548/turkey-murder-martyrdom

The celebrations are not just about the glorification of guns and killing for national or religious purposes. The events are also marked by historic revisionism in which the genocide victims are blamed for their own extermination.

There are many factors that drive the hysteria in Turkey extolling deaths, killings and attempts to brainwash children and turn them into “voluntary martyrs”: Systematic racism, ultra-nationalism, Islamic jihad and belief in martyrdom as well as the denial of the Christian genocide combined with pride in having waged it.

The 2015 “Islam Law” of Austria, which Erdogan was protesting, states that “The freedom of religion is secured in the Austrian Constitution – individually, collectively and cooperatively” — and that this freedom should not be allowed to be exploited by those who incite hate or violence for any group.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz recently announced that the government was shutting down a Turkish nationalist mosque in Vienna and dissolving a group called the Arab Religious Community that runs six mosques, according to the Associated Press. “Parallel societies, political Islam and tendencies toward radicalization have no place in our country,” Kurz told reporters.

“The move comes after images appeared on Twitter in April of children in a Turkish-backed mosque playing dead and reenacting the World War I battle of Gallipoli (in which an allied invasion of Ottoman Turkey was defeated). Their “corpses” were then covered in Turkish flags. The mosques association called the event ‘highly regrettable,'” according to the CBN News.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12540/reflections-muslim-world

Muslims, in effect, are trapped in a state of bewilderment over how to repair their broken cultures, or how to build them anew — when they are full of doubts about what is new, what is modern and what has been built by others belonging to a different faith and culture.

Muslims in general are a “third world” people whose understanding and practice of Islam remain fixed in their pre-modern cultures. To many Muslims, due to their pre-modern worldview, this paradox is mostly incomprehensible. It is also hugely obstructive in easing their transition to modernity.

The fury of the internal upheaval inside the Muslim world will eventually exhaust itself when a sufficiently large segment of the Muslim population reconciles reason and revelation to discover that God never meant any religion, including Islam, to be a burden preventing man from threading a relationship with Him in harmony with human nature. Embracing modernity does not mean abandoning God.

As Ramadan drew to a close this year, the spectacle of a contrived Muslim rage on the last Friday of Islam’s sacred month — branded “Al- Qud’s [Jerusalem] Day” by Iran’s late leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – was on display across the Muslim world and in the West.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/18/the-trans-atlantic-class-

At the recent G7 summit, President Trump differed with the leaders of Britain, Germany, France and Canada on a host of issues. But the real reason why he and the leaders of longtime allied countries treated one another as enemies is that they belong to socio-political classes engaged in a cold war.

Since World War II, a remarkably uniform ruling class has grown throughout Western Europe as well as in the United States and Canada. It now occupies government bureaucracies, the media, education, big business, and international institutions as well as traditional political parties. Rebellious voters are besieging that class on both sides of the Atlantic. Prime Ministers Theresa May, Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, and Justin Trudeau represent that class. Their political forces have experienced narrow electoral escapes.

President Donald Trump and Italy’s newly installed PM Giuseppe Conte represent rebellious voters who have brought wholesale rejection of that class to their countries’ top office. Within these countries, the old ruling class refuses to accept electoral defeat. In waging this resistance, they find solidarity with their homologues from the Bering Straits to the Oder. What happened at the G7 was one instance of that struggle.

Herewith, an explanation of this dynamic.

As the size of the Western world’s economy has grown nearly nine-fold, the size of government more than doubled. By the hiring, regulations, contracts, and contacts through which they have steered trillions of dollars—even more successfully than they might have done through laws—the people in charge of Western governments have shaped their societies according to their preferences, foremost of which has been to accommodate and advance people like themselves.

In Europe and in America, as more and more activities, educational, commercial, etc. have come under government’s aegis, the boundary between public and private has faded. Already in his 1960 farewell, President Dwight Eisenhower thought it necessary to warn that connection to government was superseding even criteria of scientific truth.

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/the-revolt-comes-to-germany/

It has been said a nation can have either welfare or open borders — but not both — in the same way one can have a cool air-conditioned room in a blazing desert or an open door — but not both. It is the inequality between the outside and inside temperatures that the door is intended to preserve.

The problem of keeping the room cool while leaving the door open is now consuming Angela Merekel’s European Union as the refugee problem grows in political size. Can the EU have no internal borders if it lacks an external one? If there’s no way of keeping benefits in, what is the meaning of out?

That in a nutshell is the problem posed by the 21st century European migrant crisis where millions, mostly “from Muslim-majority countries of regions south and east of Europe, including Western Asia, South Asia and Africa,” have streamed into the continent. They predominantly enter through nations bordering on the Mediterranean and Turkey yet disproportionately settle in the Northern European high-wage areas of the continent. The resulting disruptions have fueled a succession of local rebellions from countries disproportionately affected by the inrushing tide. Each straining member country is demanding at least a partial return of control over their internal border in order to cope.

That revolt has finally reached Germany. The New York Times writes that “the populist surge that has left Hungary, Austria and Italy threatening to close their borders to migrants has now spread to Germany, where it could even bring down Chancellor Angela Merkel and further unhinge Europe Union’s cohesion and stability.”

The mutiny is led by her own interior minister, Horst Seehofer, a former Bavarian premier with a towering stature and plenty of beer-tent charisma, who sounds more in line with the nativist forces shaping politics in neighboring countries than with his own boss.

His region found itself on the front line of the refugee crisis in 2015, when Ms. Merkel opened the borders to hundreds of thousands of migrants who poured into Bavaria.

A similar story line was playing out in southern Europe, where Italy demanded an apology from French president Emmanuel Macron “for critical comments he made about Italian immigration policy”.

Macron said Rome had acted with “cynicism and irresponsibility” by closing its ports to a migrant ship earlier this week, setting off a bitter diplomatic spat between the two countries, with Italy’s new Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte considering putting off a meeting with Macron due on Friday.

“We’re waiting for an apology. If we get one, we can start down a new path,” Di Maio said in a radio interview. “There’s still time to take a step back, apologize, and then start over.” CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-force-behind-europes-populist-tide-frustrated-young-adults-1529250781?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=0&cx_tag=pop&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

A youth revolt is upending Italian politics, and it could be a harbinger of things to come.

Western Europe’s largest anti establishment government came to power earlier this month, driven largely by young Italian voters. Struggling with a persistent lack of job prospects over the past decade, they voted in droves for two parties in the country’s March 4 elections, the 5 Star Movement and the League, an anti-immigration party.

The result laid bare a stark generation gap, with older Italians, who often have to support their grown children, continuing to vote for mainstream parties.

The same pattern appears across southern Europe, and the forces behind the divide show few signs of slowing. Almost 30% of Italians age 20 to 34 aren’t working, studying or in a training program, according to Eurostat, more than in any other European Union country. Greece is second at 29%, while Spain’s rate is 21%.

“Italy is collapsing and yet nothing has changed in this country for at least 30 years,” said Carlo Gaetani, a self-employed engineer in Puglia. Ten years ago, when he was in his early 20s, he voted for a center-left party that he hoped would push for economic development in southern Italy. When Italy descended into a crippling recession, he felt betrayed by the traditional Italian left-wing parties. He has seen friends struggle to find jobs, and said his own business opportunities are limited to the stagnant private sector, because commissions for the public sector are usually awarded to people with connections he doesn’t have.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12519/ramadan-europe

In France, the government, which previously vowed to reduce foreign influences on the practice of Islam in the country, approved visas for 300 imams from Algeria and Morocco to lead Ramadan services in French mosques.

“Every message, no matter how poisonous the message is, should have the right to be expressed.” — Ahmed Aboutaleb, Mayor of Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

“The Turkish minister of foreign affairs tried to teach me a lesson about my Islamic identity. It is going too far if a foreign state, which is far away, tries to teach the mayor of Rotterdam about Dutch law and how I should apply it.” — Ahmed Aboutaleb, Mayor of Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Muslims across Europe are marking the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month, which in 2018 was observed between May 17 and June 15, in accordance with the Islamic lunar calendar.

Ramadan, a major topic for public discussion in Europe this year, received considerable media coverage, a reflection of Islam’s rising influence.

Muslim leaders sought to leverage the media attention to showcase Ramadan — a time when Muslims abstain from eating and drinking between sunrise and sunset, to commemorate, according to Islamic tradition, the revelation of the Quran to Mohammed — as the peaceful nature of Islam in Europe.

European multiculturalists, normally strict enforcers of secularism when it comes to Christianity, made great efforts to draw up guidelines, issue instructions and carve out special privileges to ensure that Muslims were not offended by non-Muslims during the festival.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/death_of_susanna_antisemitism_never_goes_away.html

Having recently visited the Jewish Museum in New York City, I learned of a series of paper engravings titled “In the Eruv of Theresienstadt.”

In their diabolical way, the Nazis fooled the world concerning the ghastly concentration and extermination camps. During World War II, “small bits of information about the extreme and horrific episodes perpetrated under the Third Reich reached an unbelieving world. The Nazis needed to answer the world’s growing concern, yet they wanted to continue implementing their final solution” of exterminating the Jewish people. So the “Nazis decided to use Theresienstadt to solve the growing outside pressure. Through deceit and subterfuge, the Nazis transformed Theresienstadt into a model ghetto.”

Those who survived the horrors of the Holocaust remembered. Fritz Lederer (1878-1949), who was trained at the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts, “designed sets for theater productions in Theresienstadt” – yet another incongruity. After the war, though, he created “oppressive scenes of the camp, including the ‘The Eastern Fortress,’ ‘The Only Exit from Eruv,’ and the ‘Little Fortress’ depicting the prison where many inmates were tortured and murdered.”

The term eruv refers to the symbolic boundary established in some Jewish communities, demarcating a space considered the shared private property of all members, within which certain practices normally forbidden on the Sabbath may be performed. Lederer’s use of the term eruv in the context of Theresienstadt is laced with irony. The only way out of this eruv was by death or deportation to an extermination camp.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12515/diplomatic-big-bang

Diplomacy is changing before our eyes.

“The unspoken objective is to constrain the U.S., and to transfer authority from national governments to international bodies. The specifics of each case differ, but the common theme is diminished American sovereignty, submitting the United States to authorities that ignore, outvote or frustrate its priorities…. By reasserting their sovereignty, the British are in the process of escaping, among other things, the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights.” — Ambassador John R. Bolton, Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2017.

The Singapore summit is indeed historic. First, it is so because just a few weeks ago we were closer to a nuclear war than to even the semblance of a peace process. The way we got here is surprising, because it did not obey the usual rules.

A few days ago, during the G7 summit held in Canada, US President Donald Trump upheld his decisions on tariffs and his positions on the trade deficit. These stances followed his decision to pull out of the Paris climate change agreement and the Iranian “nuclear deal”. It is clear that the new US administration challenged the alliances inherited from the Cold War. President Trump, a businessman, not a politician — one of the reasons he was elected — is asking America’s trading partners just to have “free, fair and reciprocal” agreements. It is probably not all that unusual to feel affronted when asked for money or to regard the person asking for it as mercenary or adversarial. It does not always mean that this feeling is justified.

In short, President Trump’s arguments, which sound like a leitmotif, go back to the economic aspect of things. NATO? Why should it be normal that, in order to defend Europe, the American taxpayer pays the heaviest part. Free trade? Why should America suffer a trade deficit with so many countries? Climate change? The results of the Paris Climate Change conference, COP 21, were apparently not only costly but questionable, and to critics, looked like a list of unenforceable promises that would not have come due until 2030 — if ever.