RUTHFULLY YOURS

I have lived for years in these places in the Middle East and seen with my own eyes the cruelty and abuse that takes place under extremist Islamic law. I have heard the screams of families as their loved ones were tortured and slaughtered for the simplest acts — singing, dancing, voicing an opinion, or simply being a non-Muslim — all of which are crimes.

If we play the game of misinforming and misleading people about Islamism, by making irrelevant analogies to whitewash the violence and terrorism which are generated by Islamic fundamentalism, we are indoctrinating the literally millions of innocent children who will be either the perpetrators or victims of the next radical Islamic terror attacks — including Muslims.

Meanwhile the real scholars of Islam, such as Robert Spencer, who are trying to warn the public about these apologists, are called “Islamophobes,” poisoned, often fired from work, censored on social media and barred from entering democratic countries such as Britain.

When I was new to the United States, a so-called “moderate” Muslim scholar pulled me aside and gave me some “friendly” words of advice:

“In the West, there is a trend unfolding. If you follow it, you will find great success, more than you can imagine. It is very easy, all you have to do is stick to a few simple rules. No matter what your personal views are, you must be a Muslim apologist — an apologist for radical Islam — and present yourself as a ‘moderate’ Muslim scholar. If you can accomplish this, they will lap it up. You will never want for anything again. You will easily gain wealth and become the most in-demand ‘moderate’ Muslim scholar in the West!”

It sounded reasonable enough. “As you have the advantage of being from the region,” he continued, “you will come across as authentic.”

Angela Merkel’s Germany has a new coalition government and a new Social Democrat Party (SPD) Foreign Minister, 51-year old Heiko Maas, who replaced his controversial predecessor, Ingmar Gabriel. Last week was Maas’ first official trip to Israel, which began at Yad V’shem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. In the visitors book Maas wrote “Germany bears the responsibility for the most barbarous crime in the history of humanity.” He also vowed that Germany would continue to fight against anti-Semitism and racism “everywhere and every day.” On this, his preliminary foreign trip, Maas arrived in Jerusalem following visits to Paris, Warsaw, and Rome. On his two day trip he was visiting Ramallah for talks with Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority (PA), and he met with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin.

In recent months, the relationship between Germany and Israel has been pretty frosty, and the new foreign minister seeks to change that. In his inaugural speech in Berlin, Maas announced that he would travel to Israel to mark Israel’s 70th anniversary of independence, and pointed out that, “Personally, the German-Israeli history is not just one of historical responsibility, but it also represents a deep motivation in my political decision-making.” He added, “I didn’t go into politics out of respect for Willy Brandt or the peace movement, I went into politics because of Auschwitz.”

Maas’ statement about his motivation to enter politics is certainly commendable, considering that 42-years ago (1976), an Air France airplane from Israel bound for Paris was diverted it to Entebbe by German hijackers. Once there, the Germans initiated a Nazi-like selection, which separated Jews and Israelis from the rest of the passengers. German soil saw the murder of 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics. Earlier in the 1960’s, German scientists helped Egypt’s Dictator Abdul Nasser develop missiles aimed to destroy the Jewish state. Given (Nazi) Germany’s murder of Six-Million European Jews, Germany’s moral responsibility to the Holocaust survivors in the Jewish state was not upheld. Blood money was indeed paid by the West German government, but at the same time, its scientists sought to finish Hitler’s work against the Jewish state.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hungary-and-the-strongman-1522795619

A mayoral loss for Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party in an urban stronghold in February was a warning that voters are growing disenchanted with his rule. Mr. Orban’s rhetoric about a George Soros -led conspiracy to inundate Hungary with migrants seems to be turning off many undecided voters. Corruption allegations against Fidesz politicians and supporters, which they deny, also weigh on support.

If Hungarian voters deal Mr. Orban a blow, they’ll have to do it without much help from the country’s opposition parties. The electoral system makes Fidesz beatable if voters choose the single most viable alternative candidate in each district. But many parties are reluctant to stand down their candidates for fear that they may win too few seats to make it back into parliament. The two most prominent opposition parties are also at opposite ends of the political spectrum—the Greens, and Jobbik, a formerly far-right party that claims to have remade itself as a center-right group. That leaves voters to figure out how to vote tactically in each district.

The stakes are high for Hungarians and their European and NATO partners. Mr. Orban has eroded freedom of the press by withholding government advertising from unfriendly media and encouraging his friends to buy newspapers and TV stations, and new laws target funding for civil-society groups that challenge his actions. Mr. Orban is a close friend of Vladimir Putin within the EU and NATO, where Hungary enjoys the same veto as other members. A supermajority would allow him to further entrench his power.

An embarrassment is that the EU hasn’t been more effective at blocking Mr. Orban’s authoritarian moves. Mr. Orban has been shrewd in befriending political groups in Brussels, and the EU doesn’t have much authority to punish countries determined to stray from democracy. That leaves Hungarian voters to defend their democracy as best they can, while they can.

It is a fairly open secret that the immigrant refugees whom Sweden has admitted in large numbers in recent years have unleashed a crime wave, particularly violent rape. Some Swedish media have been willing to broach the topic quite recently.

Via Breitbart:

Researchers at Swedish tabloid Expressen found that 32 of the 43 men sentenced for gang rape are immigrants, with eight born in Sweden to parents who were both born abroad.

A further two of the offenders were born in Sweden to one immigrant and one Sweden-born parent with just one born in Sweden to parents who were both born in Sweden.

Finding that perpetrators were on average 21 years old when they committed the gang rape, with 13 of the offenders aged under 18, the investigation also revealed that 14 of the 43 men – or roughly a third – had been convicted of previous crimes in Sweden.

But the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, known as Brå, is refusing to collect information on the origins of criminals.

The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå) has said that it will not gather ethnic or migrant background data on criminal suspects, claiming the data would not help its mission.

The statement came after an inquiry from Moderate Party politician Tomas Tobé who, like many others, has argued that the statistics agency should gather as much data as possible in order to paint a clearer picture of crime in the country, Helsingborgs Dagblad reports.

“It a betrayal to the victims to actively rule out also looking at the foreign background of the perpetrators. It is obvious that Brå does not dare to do this because they lack government support,” Tobé said.

Like all zealots, those who peddle the notion of group identity as the paramount measure of the individual’s worth are determined to make everyone else talk and think as they do. As with communism, for which it is a posthumous surrogate, identity politics is underscored by the authoritarian urge.

They tramp in mateship side by side—
The Protestant and “Roman”—
They call no biped lord or “sir”
And touch their hats to no man!
—Henry Lawson, “The Shearers”, 1906

Almost from its beginnings in 1788, Australian society was marked by an absence of deference. This was long recognised as something that distinguished the Australian colonies from their parent culture in England, where deference from the lower classes to those above them was deeply rooted. In contrast, nineteenth-century Australia quickly became an egalitarian society. This did not mean that it dispensed with ranks and titles or that the pursuit of wealth was any less important. Rather, Australian egalitarianism originated in the many opportunities the country provided for those on the lowest rungs of society to rise in the world. At the same time, most colonials, whether they advanced their status or not, had a low opinion of those who inherited wealth rather than made it through their own efforts.

As a result, the first attempt to establish a closed system of privilege in our political system found popular opinion its most formidable opponent. In 1853, when William Charles Wentworth tried to emulate the British House of Lords by inserting clauses in the New South Wales constitution that would effectively create a hereditary political class, he was laughed out of the debate by Daniel Deniehy, who derided his proposal as an attempt to give Australia a “bunyip aristocracy”.

In the 1880s and 1890s, Henry Lawson and other bush poets helped create a popular form of Australian nationalism based on a romantic view of the common people, especially those who worked in the pastoral industry. Historian John Hirst has written that in this time, when employers and employees from the top to the bottom of the status hierarchy toiled in the same enterprise, English and Continental habits of status were quickly abandoned. In the pastoral industry:

Gentlemen worked with their hands; they worked alongside their men; and in pioneering days at least wore the same clothes as their men. An age-old inequality disappeared as employees took to horses and met their masters eye to eye.

Never missing an opportunity to confuse, disappoint, and demoralize the Catholic faithful, Pope Francis, according to the Latin American Herald Tribune, said on Good Friday that “Christians ought to express shame for the actions of those who are leaving future generations a world ‘fractured by divisions and wars.’”

Speaking to Jesus, the Pope said that “our gaze upon you is full of shame, repentance and hope. Before your supreme love, shame pervades us for having left you alone to suffer for our sins … shame for having chosen Barabbas and not you, power and not you, appearance and not you, the god of money and not you, worldliness and not eternity.”

The Pope added that Christians should also feel shame for those who “allowed themselves to be deceived by ambition and vainglory, losing sight of their dignity and first love,” leaving behind a world “fractured by divisions and wars” and “consumed by selfishness.”

In speaking of those who have left the world “fractured by divisions and wars,” Pope Francis doesn’t seem to have said a word about the religion that actually teaches that believers should wage war against and subjugate unbelievers. But of course, about that religion he has said, “Authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”

So it is the Christians who should feel shame for the strife in the world, not anyone else.

This is nothing new. Pope Francis last September met in the Vatican with Dr. Muhammad bin Abdul Karim Al-Issa, the secretary general of the Muslim World League (MWL), a group that has been linked to the financing of jihad terror. During the meeting, al-Issa thanked the Pope for his “fair positions” on what he called the “false claims that link extremism and violence to Islam.”

MARCHING IS STREET THEATER IN FRANCE…AFTER CHARLIE HEBDO AND THE BOMBING OF THE KOSHER DELI….THEY STRUTTED, ARMS CROSSED…POSEURS WHO THEN DO NOTHING …..RSK

PARIS—On April 4 of last year, a 67-year-old Jewish woman in Paris named Sarah Halimi was beaten to death and thrown off the balcony of her third-story apartment in a public housing complex by a neighbor who shouted “Allahu Akbar.” It took 10 months and a public outcry that began with France’s Jewish community, the largest in Europe, before prosecutors officially called the attack an anti-Semitic hate crime. Last Friday, Mireille Knoll, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, was stabbed 11 times and set alight by a neighbor and a homeless man. This time, authorities immediately, perhaps even prematurely, called it an anti-Semitic attack. Gérard Collomb, France’s interior minister, said this week that before killing Knoll, one of the two men arrested for the murder had told the other, “She is a Jew, she must have money.”

A lot took place between the death of Halimi and the death of Knoll. It may seem cynical to point it out, but one of them is an election, whose winners and losers seem freer to call out anti-Semitism when they’re not trying to win the support of Muslim voters in the banlieues, or the working-class suburbs that are home to generations of France’s immigrant underclass. Another is a growing sense, one that has been compounded by every terrorist attack here in recent years, that something has gone wrong in France, and its institutions are struggling to keep pace. While there have been concerns about new strains of anti-Semitism in Sweden and Britain, to say nothing of Poland and Hungary, France’s challenges are unique. It is a nation founded on deeply held universalist republican ideals, on the notion that citizens are citizens, not members of individual ethnic or religious groups—no intersectionality, no American-style identity politics, no interest groups—and it has struggled to develop a vocabulary for religiously motivated violence, let alone a solution. The problem defies Cartesian logic and transcends traditional divisions between left and right.

The murder of a woman who had narrowly escaped deportation as a child in Nazi-occupied France at the hands of a young Muslim neighbor unlocked something here, a sense of public outrage that seemed to transcend even the horrible facts of the case. On Wednesday evening, thousands of people, including French political leaders, held in a march through eastern Paris to Knoll’s public housing complex. I went to see for myself. Some held signs that read, “In France, we kill grandmothers because they’re Jewish.” Others wore buttons with Knoll’s picture. It had been an intense day. That morning, President Emmanuel Macron delivered a eulogy at the state funeral of Colonel Arnaud Beltrame, a gendarme who had served in Iraq and was hailed as a national hero after he took the place of a hostage in a jihadist attack in southwest France last Friday, the same day as Knoll’s death.

As people began gathering at the start of the march, I ran into Alain Finkielkraut, one of France’s most prominent public intellectuals, a philosophy professor who had participated in the French student uprisings in 1968 but shifted rightward over the years and whose 2013 book, L’Identité Malheureuse, or The Unhappy Identity, is about immigration and its discontents. “It wasn’t even a question for me to come and express my fear and my anger,” Finkielkraut told me. In 2006, there had been a large demonstration after a Jewish man named Ilan Halimi (no relation to Sarah) was tortured and killed by a violent band in what French authorities were loath to call an anti-Semitic attack. “Only Jews came to the demonstration in memory of Ilan Halimi’s barbarous assassination. They had been abandoned by the international community,” Finkielkraut told me. Today, he said, things were changing. “I think the denial is slowly disappearing, the denial about a new anti-Semitism,” he told me. “For a long time, we didn’t want to stigmatize fragile youth from bad neighborhoods, so we minimized the effect. We looked for excuses—in exclusion, in discrimination, in segregation, in all the ‘-ations’ you can find. I think this narrative is in the process of extinction, and I think, in this sad moment we’re living, that that’s good news.” CONTINUE AT SITE

March came in like a lion and maintained its “Big Cat” status for most of the month – four Nor’ Easters here in Connecticut! Only in its last few days did the month begin to resemble a member of the ovine race, and then more of a ram than a lamb. The month saw persistent, unprecedented attacks on Mr. Trump, like Joe Biden who threatened to beat him up (imagine two septuagenarians going at it!); andJohn Brennan who alluded to Trump’s venality and moral turpitude (talk of the pot calling the kettle black!).And then there were the gale-force winds of a morally deficient porn star “Stormy” Daniels, a temptress, certainly, but more a squall than a tempest, in her claim of being defamed.

It was not only gusty weather and blustery verbiage from Washington that made the month roar like a lion. Wall Street’s bears, who had emerged from hibernation in February, continued their selling in March. Islamic terrorists persisted in the killing and maiming of civilians in Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Pakistan, India, Yemen, Niger, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Egypt and France. Gun violence at home and deadly fires overseas found their way into the month.

Kim Jong-un, President of North Korea announced his desire to meet with President Trump. The President accepted the invitation. An hysterical Left expressed disbelief. How could the loud-mouthed braggart in the White House succeed where pin-striped savants from “Foggy Bottom” had failed? Should the meeting come off, it would be reminiscent of the anti-Communist Richard Nixon going to China in 1972. For Trump is a hard-liner when it comes to North Korea. He believes in negotiating from strength. Keep in mind, the ironic motto of the former Strategic Air Command (SAC): “Peace is Our Profession.” Mr. Kim met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, which was likely a command performance. It is stability in the Korean peninsula that the Chinese want, and the mercurial Mr. Kim’s antics have made them nervous. The mandarins in Beijing do not want a nuclearized Korean Peninsula. Two consequences of Mr. Kim’s parley with Mr. Xi: the announced visit of Kim Jong-un to South Korea and an overture made to Japan.

Elsewhere, in the Syrian city of East Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascus, rebels were forced out after months of combatting Assad’s troops and their Russian allies. Over a thousand civilians have become casualties in fighting that is reminiscent of Aleppo. Nerve gas was responsible for the near-deaths of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the English city of Salisbury. Without doubt, Vladimir Putin was responsible, even though he denied Russian complicity. Great Britain expelled 23 Russian diplomats. President Trump ordered the Russian consulate in Seattle closed and told 60 Russian intelligence officers they had seven days to leave the U.S. By last Monday, more than 25 countries had acted in solidarity with Great Britain, in the largest collective expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history. Russia retaliated, expelling diplomats and shuttering the U.S. consulate in St. Petersburg.