RUTHFULLY YOURS

According to the media machine and pundits on both sides of the Atlantic, President Trump’s recent attendance at two summits—in Brussels (NATO) and Sicily (G7)—went very badly. He went through many tense encounters, made a number of statements his interlocutors did not like, notably on the uneven burden of defense costs, on his dislike of the Paris climate change accords, and on German trade sufficits. Significantly, he sounded lukewarm on NATO’s Article 5 (“all for one, one for all”). Some Europeans tried to score a few domestic points by exploiting latent anti-Americanism in their encounters with Trump, notably the newly elected French president Emmanuel Macron with that now famous gladiatorial handshake.

According to The Guardian, Trump’s visist has left the continent’s leaders aghast, but at the same time it has had one unexpected positive consequence. Just like the Soviet threat forced Europeans to focus on what they had in common and how to protect it, this theory goes, Trump’s attitudes may help improve Europe’s ability to integrate: “The continent’s interests lie in making sure the toxicity of Trump is somehow curtailed. That can only happen if it sets new ambitions for itself. Just weeks after Emmanuel Macron’s electoral victory in France brought a major moment of solace, Trump’s tour will have starkly reminded Europeans of the new world of uncertainties, and the need to pull together.”

According to another commentator writing in the same organ of Britain’s leftist bein pensants, “In truth, Trump’s mixture of vulgarity, arrogance, ignorance and rudeness makes Europeans secretly feel extremely good about their own sophistication and civilised manners. Contrasts can be soothing. Just as Europeans decided Brexit needed to be dealt with in unity . . . Trump is fast turning into a binding factor.” In brief, the postnational elite loathes Trump and wants a new global strategy “for a world where, every so often, the US electoral cycle produces a corrupt, deluded isolationist who can think only in monosyllables.”

This sentiment was reflected in German chancellor Angela Merkel’s unusually blunt statement at an election rally in Munich last weekend: “We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands,” she said, “naturally in friendship with the United States of America, in friendship with Great Britain, as good neighbors with whoever, also with Russia and other countries. But we have to know that we Europeans must fight for our own future and destiny. The times in which we could rely fully on others, they are to some extent over. This is what I experienced in the last few days.”

In Europe Merkel’s statement caused an instant sensation. In America the globalist establishment predictably chastised Trump for undermining our partnerships and alliances of long standing. Richard Haass, president of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, called Merkel’s comments a “watershed,” and warned that the resulting scenario is “what U.S. has sought to avoid” since World War II. On the whole it would be very welcome news if the German Chancellor really meant what she said, but there is less than meets the eye.

If Merkel was serious, over 50,000 American soldiers can finally be withdrawn from Germany, where their stay has not had any military-strategic justification for the past twenty-six years. She is loath to do so, because their upkeep at the U.S. taxpayers’ expense is a boon to the German economy. If she seeks military self-reliance, then Germany—with the GDP of $3.4 trillion—will have to spend considerably more on defense in the future than the miserly 1.2 percent she is spending at the moment. It seems, however, that Merkel still wants to have it both ways: the days of full reliance on the United States are over, she says, but only “to some extent.”

The real meaning of Merkel’s words is clear if we replace “we Europeans” with “I” or “we Germans.” In addition to “the Russian threat,” Trump’s “unpredictability” is a perfect excuse for Euro-federalists to push for a massive restructuring of Europe’s political, economic, military, and trade strategies in order to turn the EU into a superstate, a German-led geopolitical player in its own right. The oligarchs in Brussels can hardly wait: after an icy meeting with Trump, the European Council president Donald Tusk declared that “the greatest task today is the consolidation of the free world around values, not just interests.” Merkel’s and the superstaters’ long-term hope is that Trump will be a single-term president, but that the consequences of their “taking fate into their own hands” and imposing an ever-tighter union will be permanent.

The saddest part about the recent terrorist attacks in the U.K. — aside from the actual horror for the victims and their families, of course — was that there was so little new to say about it.

But that didn’t stop anyone. Everyone backed into their usual rhetorical corners, filling in the blanks on the familiar post-terror conversation like it was a game of Mad Libs, only none of the answers were particularly funny.

I, for one, could easily recycle one of umpteen columns on how the Left’s response is wrong and why we have to shed our dysfunctional aversion to speaking plainly about the nature of the threat and what is required to fight it. Or I could note that President’s Trump’s response to the attack was less than helpful. But to what end? Who hasn’t heard the arguments a thousand times already?

Watching cable news and surveying the algae blooms of “hot takes” on Twitter, it’s hard to imagine anything will dramatically change. We are growing numb to the problem as it becomes part of the background noise of daily life. One of the attackers in London was even featured in a 2016 TV documentary titled The Jihadi Next Door.

Contrast the reactions to the London attacks and to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord. A writer for The Nation spoke for many when he assured readers that “this is murder” and a “crime against humanity.” No sane liberal condoned the terrorist attacks, but the condemnations seemed rote, while passion was reserved for admonishing those who made too big a deal of them or flirted with “Islamophobia.”

In 2014, Jeremy Corbyn, who has a remote but possible chance of being the next British prime minister, argued that supporting the Islamic State is just another “political point of view” and that the government shouldn’t put up “legal obstacles” to Islamic State fighters trying to return to England. This perspective hasn’t cost him much with his admirers on the left, but I have to wonder what the reaction would be if he described climate-change “denial” as just another political point of view.

But there I go, falling into the familiar trap of scoring ideological points rather than dealing with the larger truth. And what truth is that? Simply that we are in a rut when it comes to terrorism.

The Ariana Grande concert attack in Manchester did generate more than the usual passion because lots of pundits and policymakers, never mind television viewers, have teenage daughters they could imagine attending an event like that.

But did you hear about the bombing of a popular ice-cream parlor in Baghdad last week? Families taking their kids there for a post-fast treat were blown to bits by the Islamic State.

In the four European countries most targeted by terror attacks — Britain, France, Belgium and Germany — the number of official extremists has reached 66,000. That sounds like a real army — on active duty.

The terrorists’ ransom is already visible: they have destabilized the democratic process in many European countries and are drafting the terms of freedom of expression. A jihadist takeover of Europe is no longer unthinkable. Islamic extremists are already reaping what they sowed: they successfully defeated Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, the only two European candidates who really wanted to fight radical Islam.

Europe could be taken over the same way Islamic State took over much of Iraq: with just one-third of Iraqi territory.

“Germany is quietly building a European army under its command,” according to some in the media. Apparently German Chancellor Angela Merkel, after her clash with U.S. President Donald Trump, would like to invest, along with France, in a European army.

At present, however, there is just one real army in Europe — the Jihadist Army, as in the terrorists who struck London on June 3 and murdered seven people, just two weeks after carnage in Manchester.

In the four European countries most targeted by terror attacks — Britain, France, Belgium and Germany — the number of official extremists has reached 66,000. That sounds like a real army, on active duty.

Intelligence officers have identified 23,000 Islamic extremists living in Britain as potential terrorists. The number reveals the real extent of the jihadist threat in the UK. The scale of the Islamist challenge facing the security services was disclosed after intense criticism that many opportunities to stop the Manchester suicide bomber had been overlooked.

French authorities are monitoring 15,000 Islamists, according a database created in March 2015 and managed by France’s Counter-Terrorism Coordination Unit. Different surveys estimate up to 20,000 French radical Islamists.

The number on Belgium’s anti-terror watch-list surged from 1,875 in 2010 to 18,884 in 2017. In Molenbeek, the well-known jihadist nest in the EU capital, Brussels, intelligence services are monitoring 6,168 Islamists. Think about that: 18,884 Belgian jihadists compared to 30,174 Belgian soldiers on active duty.

The number of potential jihadists in Germany has exploded from 3,800 in 2011 to 10,000, according to Hans-Georg Maassen, head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Germany’s domestic intelligence service).

These Islamists have built a powerful infrastructure of terror inside Europe’s cities. These terror bases are self-segregated, multicultural enclaves in which extremist Muslims promote Islamic fundamentalism and implement Islamic law, Sharia — with the Tower Hamlets Taliban of East London; in the French banlieues [suburbs], and in The Hague’s “sharia triangle”, known as “the mini-caliphate,” in the Netherlands. These extremist Muslims can comfortably get their weapons from the Balkans, where, thanks to Europe’s open borders, they can travel with ease. They can also get their money from abroad, thanks to countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia. These Islamists can self-finance through the mosques they run, as well as get “human resources,” donated by unvetted mass migration coming through the Mediterranean.

23,000 potential jihadists in the UK, 18,000 in Belgium, 10,000 in Germany, 15,000 in France. What do these numbers tell us? There might be a war in Europe “within a few years”, as the chief of the Swedish army, General Anders Brännström, told the men under his command that they must expect.

Take what happened in Europe with the terror attacks from 1970 to 2015:

“4,724 people died from bombings. 2,588 from assassinations. 2,365 from assaults. 548 from hostage situations. 159 from hijackings. 114 from building attacks. Thousands were wounded or missing”.

Terrorism across Europe has killed 10,537 people in 18,803 reported attacks. And it is getting worse:

“Attacks in 2014 and 2015 have seen the highest number of fatalities, which includes terrorists targeting civilians, government officials, businesses and the media, across Europe since 2004”.

Facebook has been aiding abusers of human-rights — such as China, Turkey, Russia and Pakistan — to curb the freedom of expression of their people.

“On the same day that we filed the report, the ‘Stop Palestinians’ page that incited against Palestinians was removed by Facebook… for ‘containing credible threat of violence’ which ‘violated our community standards.’ On the other hand, the ‘Stop Israelis’ page that incited against Israelis, was not removed. We received a response from Facebook stating that the page was ‘not in violation of Facebook’s rules.'” — Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, head of The Israel Law Center.

According to Darshan-Leitner, Facebook’s insistence that it cannot control all the content on its pages is disingenuous, if not an outright lie. After all, its algorithms are perfectly accurate when it comes to detecting users’ shopping habits.

There is a problem at Facebook. On May 8, the social media platform blocked and then shut down the pages of two popular moderate Muslim groups — on the grounds that their content was “in violation of community standards” — without explanation.

Had these pages belonged to the radicals who incite followers to violence, however, the move would have been welcome, and would have corresponded to Facebook’s Online Civil Courage Initiative, founded in Berlin in January 2016, to “challeng[e] hate speech and extremism online,” in the effort to prevent the use of social media as a platform for recruiting terrorists.

The pages that Facebook shut down, however — Ex-Muslims of North America, which has 24,000 followers; and Atheist Republic, with 1.6 million — do nothing of the sort. In fact, they are managed and followed by Arabs across the world who reject not only violence and terrorism, but Islam as a religion.

This, it turns out, is precisely the problem.

Angry Islamists, bent on silencing such “blasphemers” and “apostates,” troll social media and abuse Facebook’s complaint system. It’s a tactic that works like a charm every time, as conservative and pro-Israel individuals and groups — whose posts are disproportionately targeted by political opponents and removed by Facebook for “violating community standards” — can attest. As in most of those cases, the pages of the former Muslims were reinstated the next day, after their administrators demonstrated that the charges against them were false.

The president of Ex-Muslims of North America, Muhammad Syed, who is originally from Pakistan, complained about the practice in an open letter to Facebook, and demanded that the company do more to protect former Muslims from online harassment by Islamists:

“Ironically, the same social media which empowers religious minorities is susceptible to abuse by religious fundamentalists to enforce what are essentially the equivalent of online blasphemy laws. A simple English-language search reveals hundreds of public groups and pages on Facebook explicitly dedicated to this purpose [enforcing blasphemy laws online] — giving their members easy-to-follow instructions on how to report public groups and infiltrate private ones.”

Syed also started a Change.org petition, calling on Facebook to “prevent religious extremists from censoring atheists and secularists.” According to the website Heat Street, which broke the story, there are many other secular Arab groups that have been similarly flagged by religious Muslims on social media.

Swedish politicians keep trying to portray Sweden as a liberal and tolerant paradise. Experience from the suburbs, however, where most of the migrants are, shows that a large part of Sweden’s population is not part of Sweden’s liberals and feminists. They, in fact get harassed by Islamists every day. In those communities, there is a lack of tolerance.

These women are not some right-wing pundits who criticize Islam. Instead, they are simply Muslim women who are denied fundamental rights in Sweden because they are women and happen to live in communities where parallel Islamic social structures have been created.

The problem is that those who govern Sweden do not originate from, or have any deeper knowledge about, the immigrant suburbs, where people cannot live as free citizens, and clearly have no interest in these suburbs. The LGBT movement and the feminist movement prefer to silence those who protest Islamic oppression in Sweden’s immigrant suburbs.

In Sweden, as in many other suburbs throughout Europe, the repression from which many refugees are fleeing, instead seems to be following them there. Nalin Pekgul, who defines herself as a practicing Muslim and has served as a politician in the Social Democrat Party, stated that in immigrant-settled areas, such as Stockholm’s Tensta suburb, where she lives, the self-appointed “morality police” gather outside assembly rooms to prevent young people from entering if they try to organize parties with music. Islamist organizations in Sweden, Pekgul says, have strengthened their position through support from Saudi Arabia and Sweden’s government agencies, media, political parties and so on.According to Pekgul, there are many Muslims in in Sweden who have become fundamentalists. For calling public attention to these changes, Pekgul has been called an “Islamophobe”. When, in protest against the extremist Muslims, she began wearing short skirts in Tensta, she was harassed.

Another Muslim, Zeliha Dagli, who came to Sweden from Turkey in 1985 and was an elected representative of the Left Party in Sweden, has fought for women’s rights in Stockholm’s immigrant suburbs for 25 years. In 2015, she wrote:

“Once upon a time I ran away, terrified of my childhood imams in our former homeland. Some of them controlled the girls in the village. Older girls were not allowed to pass through the square in the village, but had to sneak and take detours and make themselves ‘invisible’.

The teenage daughter of the University of Surrey’s Jewish chaplain was allegedly beaten by an antisemitic gang and left bleeding in a park for two hours late last month after police failed to respond to an emergency call.

Hannah Goldberg — whose father is prominent community member Alexander Goldberg — was reportedly sitting in a public park with two friends on the Shabbat of May 27, when a group of five men approached them with comments like, “Hitler should have killed all you Jews when he had the chance” and “You should have all been gassed.” The men were also said to have used terms like “c*nt.”

According to Alexander Goldberg, the girls, who were identifiably Jewish in their modest skirts, had started to leave the area when one of the boys threw a basketball at Hannah’s face and kicked her in the chest, while another boy punched her in the face repeatedly.

Hannah’s friends approached a nearby postal worker for help, who in turn called the Metropolitan Police Service.

Officers never arrived and the girls eventually made it home.

The attack was detailed in a Facebook post this week by Alexander Goldberg, in which he wrote, “Proud of my daughter…for standing up to sexism, racism and religious abuse…for continuing to fight for the rights of others despite a viscous assault of her.”

He added that, “Both my daughter and I…shall be jointly writing to the Met Commissioner in light of the lack of police response,” and that he had published the story, with his daughter’s permission, “in the hope that the Met Police sort themselves out here.”

Goldberg, a lawyer, has served as chief executive of the London Jewish Forum and chair of the Faith Forum for London, as well as serving as Jewish chaplain to the 2012 London Olympic Games. He has also reportedly worked closely with police to develop standards in response to discriminatory acts.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) wrote in a statement that it was “appalled by the lack of a police response to a violent antisemitic assault on Jewish children.”

“This incident should have resulted in police officers attending within no more than eight minutes, and the failure of the Metropolitan Police Service to deploy must be investigated thoroughly and transparently,” wrote the CAA. Like the Goldbergs, the CAA said it will be writing to the police commissioner.

Although there has been hard-right anti-Semitism for decades, the bigotry of the hard-left is far more prevalent and influential on many university campuses. Those on the left, who support left-wing anti-Semites try to downplay, ignore or deny that those they support are really anti-Semites. “They are anti-Zionist” is the excuse du jour. Those on the right do essentially the same: “they are nationalists.” Neither side would accept such transparent and hollow justifications if the shoe were on the other foot.

Linda Sarsour supports Islamic religious law, Sharia. If taken literally, this would presumably mean that she also supports punishing homosexuality by death; amputation for theft; death by stoning for “adultery” (which can include being raped); women being valued at half the worth of a man, being flogged for drinking alcohol, and above all, slavery.

The growing tolerance for anti-Semitism by both the extreme left and right is quickly becoming mainstream. That is why it is so dangerous and must be exposed for what it is: complicity in, and encouragement of, the oldest form of bigotry. People on both sides of the aisle must have the same zero tolerance for anti-Semitism as they do for sexism, racism and homophobia.

All over the world anti-Semites are becoming mainstreamed. It is no longer disqualifying to be outed as a Jew hater. This is especially so if the anti-Semite uses the cover of rabid hatred for the nation-state of the Jewish people. These bigots succeed in becoming accepted — even praised — not because of their anti-Semitism, but despite it. Increasingly, they are given a pass on their Jew-hatred because those who support them admire or share other aspects of what they represent. This implicit tolerance of anti-Semitism — as long as it comes from someone whose other views are acceptable — represents a dangerous new trend from both the right and left.

In the United States, although there has been hard-right anti-Semitism for decades, the bigotry of the hard-left is far more prevalent and influential on many university campuses. Those on the left who support left-wing anti-Semites try to downplay, ignore or deny that those they support are really anti-Semites. “They are anti-Zionist” is the excuse du jour. Those on the right do essentially the same: “they are nationalists.” Neither side would accept such transparent and hollow justifications if the shoe were on the other foot. I believe that when analyzing and exposing these dangerous trends, a single standard of criticism must be directed at each.

Generally speaking, extreme right-wing anti-Semitism continues to be a problem in many parts of Europe and among a relatively small group of “alt-right” Americans. But it also exists among those who self-identify as run-of-the-mill conservatives. Consider, for example, former presidential candidate and Reagan staffer, Pat Buchanan.

By Benoit Faucon and Laurence Fletcher in London and Giovanna Legorano in Rome

U.K. and other Western security agencies were seeking to nail down international connections of the attackers in London’s weekend rampage, as it emerged that one of them had tried to go to Syria from Italy.

Authorities had been warned about at least two of the attackers but weren’t actively monitoring them before the attack, exposing the difficulty national security services have keeping tabs on extremists and communicating with their foreign counterparts.

Security agencies are probing possible links to Islamist networks of Moroccan origin, a Western security official said Tuesday, focusing on the movements and connections of two of the attackers: Youssef Zaghba —a 22-year-old dual Italian-Moroccan citizen police identified on Tuesday—and Rachid Redouane, a 30-year-old Libyan-Moroccan with an Irish identity card.
They are also investigating a mostly South Asian group in London that has been a fertile recruiting ground for Islamic State in Syria, the official said. The third attacker, 27-year-old Khuram Butt, was a Pakistan-born British citizen known to U.K. authorities, but police have said no intelligence suggested an attack was being planned.

“People are going to look at our front pages today and they’re going to say, ‘How on earth could we have let this guy or possibly more through the net?’” Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson told Sky News, adding security services would have to answer to how Butt and the others were able to stage the attack.

Another security official said the attack was potentially put together quickly and it was still too early to draw conclusions about which of the three attackers led the operation and how deeply their networks extended in Britain and abroad.

The three men, all residents of east London, mowed down pedestrians in a van on London Bridge and slashed their way through the popular Borough Market pub-and-restaurant area before being shot and killed by police. CONTINUE AT SITE

Well into the second decade of Islamic jihad against the West, we all know the bloody script. In London, “radical jihadists” or “Islamist extremists” for the third time in a year went on a rampage, ramming pedestrians and slashing throats, and leaving seven dead and 48 wounded so far. Police immediately round up suspects they obviously could have snatched before the carnage. Prime Minister Theresa May blusters “enough is enough” and “terrorism breeds terrorism.” Politicians across the world issue rote “condemnations” of terrorism,” then go back to business as usual. Shrines of teddy bears, flowers, candles, and therapeutic bromides are the best the Brits can do in response to yet another act of a war they don’t even know they’re in.

Welcome to the new normal for a Western civilization, content, like H.G. Wells’ Eloi, to party and consume in leisure and affluence until the Morlocks devour them.

Like most acts of appeasement, this refusal to defend our way of life––individual rights and freedom, tolerance, separation of church and state, representative government, popular sovereignty, and political liberty––starts with the denial of reality. PM May’s comments in response to the attack are a textbook example of the received wisdom that cripples our response to Europe’s ancient enemy that it fought for a thousand years to drive from its lands.

The terrorists, May claims, “are bound together by the single evil ideology of Islamist extremism that preaches hatred, sows division and promotes sectarianism. It is an ideology that claims our Western values of freedom, democracy and human rights are incompatible with the religion of Islam. It is an ideology that is a perversion of Islam and a perversion of the truth. Defeating this ideology is one of the great challenges of our time but it cannot be defeated through military intervention alone.” Meaning, as May says, “teaching Western values.”

It’s important to parse this statement, for it reprises every delusion that has marked the West’s response to Islamic jihad since 9/11. Jihad is not “Islamist extremism,” but has been a foundational tenet of traditional Islam since the seventh century. The Koran repeatedly commands Muslims to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them,” “Fight those who do not believe in Allah,” “fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness,” “kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from whence they drove you out,” “I [Allah] will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve . . . Therefore, strike off their heads” ––these are just a few samples of the divine justification for “hatred, division, and sectarianism” found in Islam’s most holy book.

Moreover, the jihad imperative is consistent over 14 centuries. Here is Ibn Taymiyyah, 14th century jurist and theologian:

Since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and sine its aim is that the religion is Allah’s entirely and Allah’s word is uppermost, therefore, according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.

Or Ibn Khaldun, the 15th century historian and jurist:

In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the [Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or force . . . Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations.

Medieval backwardness? Here’s Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna writing in the early 20th century:

It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its laws on all nations, and extend its power to the entire planet.

His disciple Sayyid Qutb explains how this domination will happen:

Islam has the right to remove all those obstacles which are in its path,” not “through sermons or discourse,” for “Those who have usurped the power of Allah on earth and made his worshipers their slaves will not be dispossessed by words alone.”

So too the Ayatollah Khomeini, the most revered modern Shi’a theologian and creator of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism:

Those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world . . . Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! . . . Kill them, put them to the sword and scatter [their armies]! . . . Islam says: Kill in the service of Allah those who want to kill you!