RUTHFULLY YOURS

How can a religion seize so much power in a country? Before Islamists come to power, they make sham promises to every faith and political party. Using charm, manipulation, and community infiltration, they give the impression that they will be defenders of minorities, the poor, and local politics. Once they are in power, when it is too late to stop them, anyone who does not comply with their narrow view of religion and politics will be eliminated under the name of God and Islam.

The authorities engaged in hate speech and allowed hate crimes to be committed with impunity against Baha’is, and imprisoned scores of Baha’is on trumped-up national security charges, imposed for peacefully practicing their religious beliefs. Allegations of torture of 24 Baha’is in Golestan Province were not investigated. The authorities forcibly closed down dozens of Baha’i-owned businesses and detained Baha’i students.

It is not an “Iran problem”, it is an epidemic of hatred and violence that will continue to spread if something is not done to stop it.

They were quiet family, not politically minded, and they did not get involved in community unrest or gossip. Fear of people knocking on the door, or of a stranger showing up in the neighborhood with unknown intentions, drove them to withdraw from society. They were careful, so careful, that they barely mingled with anyone. They were our neighbors in Iran and trusted us enough to visit with us, until one day, they no longer did.

We checked on them out of concern. Their house was empty. There was no note, no goodbyes to anyone; they were just gone. Despite being our friends, they had never mentioned their last name. We had no way to track them down, to make sure they were safe and unharmed.

Then someone mentioned that they were from the Baha’i religious minority. He explained that the government had finally come for them. All of their fear and seclusion now had a reason. You could see how protective and careful the father was, how fearful and silent the mother was, and how their daughter would never venture far from home. I had thought their problem was just paranoia. In that moment, you see that you, too, have reason to be afraid.

May 14 is the ninth anniversary of the arrest of Bahai’s leadership which included the arrest of seven Baha’i leaders known as “Yaran” or “Friends in Iran”.

The Baha’i faith is monotheistic, but a religious minority in Iran. The Baha’i community has been peaceful and apolitical for a long time.

On June 8, British voters will head to the polls, three years early. When Prime Minister Theresa May called last month for a snap election, the assumption was that she would win easily and increase her parliamentary majority. Recent numbers, however, show the gap closing between May and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn – who was given 200:1 odds of when he ran for the party leadership in 2015 – is doing surprisingly well again. This is despite the fact that Labour has been under fire for anti-Semitism in its ranks, and Corbyn himself has been accused of anti-Jewish bigotry. Corbyn denies having a problem with Jews, claiming that he is merely anti-Israel. Even if it were possible to hate Israel without being anti-Semitic – and I am not sure that it is – Corbyn’s words and deeds demonstrate that he often uses virulent anti-Zionism as a cover for his soft anti-Semitism.

For example, in a speech last year, he said that Jews are “no more responsible” for the actions of Israel than Muslims are for those of ISIS. In 2009, he announced: “It will be my pleasure and my honour to host an event in Parliament where our friends from Hezbollah will be speaking. I also invited friends from Hamas to come and speak as well.”

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. When British voters go to the polls on June 8, will they opt to keep Prime Minister Theresa May in power, or reject rationality in favor of intolerance? (Image source: Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The company that Corbyn keeps, too, suggests that at best he gives a free pass to bigotry, racism and anti-Semitism within the ranks of his own party, and at worst, he espouses them. He has shared speaking platforms and led rallies with some of the most infamous Jew-haters. He has attended meetings hosted by 9/11 conspiracy theorist Paul Eisen, author of a blog titled: “My Life as a Holocaust Denier.” He has been associated with Sheikh Raed Salah – leader of the outlawed northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, a blood libel perpetuator convicted for incitement to violence and racism – whom he referred to as a “very honoured citizen” whose “voice must be heard.” Corbyn was also a paid contributor for Press TV, Iran’s tightly controlled media apparatus, whose production is directly overseen by anti-Semitic Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

One of the biggest criticisms of the “Corbynization” of British politics has been the mainstreaming of traditional anti-Semitism. The country’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, has called the problem within the Labour party “severe.”

Consider the late Gerald Kaufman, a Labour veteran and close political associate of Corbyn’s who touted conspiracy theories about Jews throughout his political career. When speaking at a pro-Palestinian event, Kaufman said: “Jewish money, Jewish donations to the Conservative Party – as in the general election in May – support from the Jewish Chronicle, all of those things, bias the Conservatives.” While Corbyn condemned this remark, he refused to yield to widespread demands for disciplinary action against Kaufman. This is in keeping with what a key former adviser to Corbyn, Harry Fletcher, wrote: “I’d suggest to him [Jeremy] about how he might build bridges with the Jewish community and none of it ever happened.”

The Dutch have officially been enjoying the feast of Pentecost since 1815, but the church wants it replaced by an official holiday on Eid-al-Fitr, the day marking the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

We are too tolerant to intolerance. We think that by allowing freedom to the enemies of freedom we prove to the world that we stand for freedom. But in reality, by refusing to draw boundaries to our tolerance, we are handing away our freedom.

If we want to remain the free and tolerant society which we used to be, we must realize that the West has a concrete identity. Our identity is not Islamic, but based on Judaism, Christianity and humanism. Our freedoms result from this identity.

Next Sunday, Christians are celebrating the feast of Pentecost. A Protestant church in the Netherlands is using the occasion to propose the abolishment of the public holiday for the second day of Pentecost. The Dutch have officially been enjoying this holiday since 1815, but the church wants it replaced by an official holiday on Eid-al-Fitr, the day marking the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

With its proposal, the Christian group says, it wants “to do justice to diversity in religion.” That is politically-correct claptrap. Browsing through today’s papers, I can, however, understand why many Dutch are in a festive mood once Ramadan is over! These days, the headlines are full of incidents, which De Telegraaf, the leading newspaper in the Netherlands, describes as Ramadan rellen (Ramadan riots).

Suppose Christians would, on an annual basis, start to riot after leaving church on Pentecost and demolish property, arson cars, attack police, throw stones through the neighbor’s windows. Suppose the police would feel obliged to mark the Christian Lent in the calendar as days of heightened tensions. Would we not begin to wonder whether there was something wrong with Christianity?

Or suppose Jewish gangs would terrorize entire town districts on Yom Kippur day. Would we not beginning to wonder what they were being taught in their synagogues? Or would we just accept it, celebrate it even, as indications of the cultural “diversity” of our society?

I am writing these lines in my office in the Dutch Parliament in The Hague, barely a few minutes away from the house where the great 17th century Dutch and Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza lived and died. Spinoza gave the world a philosophy of tolerance and freedom.

However, what we must never do is be tolerant to intolerance. Because if tolerance becomes a snake devouring its own tail, soon there will be no freedom left and the intolerant will rule the world. Indeed, we are almost there. Three and a half centuries after Spinoza, in the city where he lived, I am writing these lines in a heavily protected sector of the parliament building. The windows are blinded, the doors are armored, and police officers are standing watch outside. They are there to protect me against the intolerance which has in recent decades entered our country – an intolerance that is neither Christian nor Jewish or secular, but Islamic. I am not an extremist if I say that. I am telling the truth. And that is my duty.

For here is the crux of the matter: If we want to remain the free and tolerant society which we used to be, we must realize that the West has a concrete identity. Our identity is not Islamic, but based on Judaism, Christianity and humanism. Our freedoms result from this identity. By depriving Islam of the means to destroy our identity, we are not violating freedom; we are preserving our identity and guaranteeing freedom.

Red nappies, green nappies — that’s how the progressive Left grooms its social justice warrior babies, a process that begins, as one kiddie-book author asserts, ‘fresh out of the womb’. Join us now at storytime and learn that ‘A’ is for ‘Activist’, ‘L’ for LGBTQ and ‘T’ stands for for ‘Trans’.

Progressives are concerned about the “indoctrination gap” which leaves many kids untouched by Green Left ideology. This gap involves the important demographic from birth through to three- and four-year-olds.

From four onwards, the kids are safely captured by state interventions, such as the Victorian Labor government’s political and gender-bending education down to pre-school and kindergarten level. For example, Premier Dan Andrews is now rolling out a $3.4 million program for 4000 educators to eliminate four-year-old boys’ “hegemonic masculinities”.

Closing the gap is under way through radicalising picture-books for toddlers. These include those board-books with hefty cardboard pages. Traditionally their content was of the “My First Colours” kind; the new authors fill them with images of their better society.

The gap-closing has gained momentum from the election of President Trump, to American progressives a near-unthinkable disaster. Some authors’ explicit goal is to raise a new generation programmed to avert any Trump lookalike in coming decades. “We’re going to have to start in utero,” one reviewer says.

Feminist Baby is by New Yorker and BuzzFeed worker Loryn Brantz. It’s for babies “fresh out of the womb” up to two-year-olds, as she puts it. Published in April and “the perfect baby-shower gift for today’s new parents”, it’s flying off the shelves at Australian bookstores and libraries.

Brantz told Time magazine, “Why not start kids off right away? Hopefully if we raise a whole generation of kids with Feminist Baby and with older books for kids about feminism and activism, something like this [Trump’s election] will never happen again.” Brantz is marketing the book with comics aimed at adult buyers. In these, “Feminist Baby serves as an under-age heroine bent on smashing the patriarchy and subverting tired traditions like the ‘gender reveal’ [that is, binary male or female].” In one panel, Feminist Baby punches Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who is dressed as a Nazi.

Brantz started to write the book pre-Trump, but obviously, “his administration is complicit in oppressing women of all shapes, sizes and colors”, which is why her book is so very important. Feminist Baby “is decidedly the one we need right now”, says another reviewer. “She’s here smashing your patriarchy, speaking her truths, and not taking anybody’s crap.”

Feminist Baby’s first words (tongue in cheek) are “Gender is a social construct.” In Brantz’s world, the feminised cradle-dweller “lives how she wants and doesn’t let the patriarchy keep her down”:

Feminist Baby chooses what to wear
and if you don’t like it she doesn’t care!

When it’s snowing, let’s hope she doesn’t choose sandals.

And do it tough, Dads. If you coo to Feminist Baby that she’s beautiful, the infant swipes back, “And I’m smart and capable too!”

Another reviewer says presciently that the book should “imbue your tiny tot with all of the important characteristics necessary for her (or him) to become a lifelong, probably insufferable, feminist”.

Brantz sees toddlers’ books opening a cot conversation about “intersectionality and feminism”. (No, I don’t know what intersectionality is either.)

Another such author is Innosanto Nagara, whose book for children up to three years old A is for Activist has sold 50,000-plus copies. He’s “calling children and parents to action” on things like social justice and immigration. His board book is “unapologetic about activism, environmental justice, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, and everything else that activists believe in and fight for”.

Originally written for the InvestigativeProject on Terrorism.

Jordan, a country that has had a formal peace treaty with Israel since 1994, has seen an uptick in anti-Israel hostility.

Last month, Jordan condemned the killing of a Jordanian-Palestinian attacker who was filmed stabbing an Israeli policeman multiple times before he was shot, calling it “a heinous crime.” In September, Israeli police killed a Jordanian tourist who attacked with a knife. Jordan described this act of self-defense as a premeditated and “barbaric act of the army of the Israeli occupation.”

Israeli analysts disagree whether Jordan’s rhetoric is a cause for concern.

Since the second Palestinian Intifada broke out in 2000, Jordan’s public statements often contradict private behavior, said Elad Ben-Dror, a Bar-Ilan University Middle Eastern Studies senior lecturer. Publicly, “the Jordanian parliament and press are fierce in their denunciation of Israel… Beneath the surface, however, there is a strong link and security cooperation between the two countries, especially with regard to the war on terrorism.”

Jordanian demographics drive the public vitriol, said Tel Aviv University Contemporary Middle Eastern History Chair Eyal Zisser. Palestinians comprise half the Jordanian population, “and because the population is conservative and very much Islamic, the regime lets the public…express anti-Israeli sentiments as a way to vent and reduce…pressure on the regime.”

So “cheap shots” like condemning the shooting of a terrorist in the act of trying to kill are “aimed at showing the Palestinians in Jordan [that] the Hashemites have not abandoned them,” said Oded Eran, a senior research fellow at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. “The King expects the Israeli government” to ignore such statements. And for the most part, Jerusalem does.

But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently took exception. “It is outrageous to hear the Jordanian government’s speaker support the terror attack which occurred today in Jerusalem’s Old City,” a statement released by Netanyahu’s office said. “It’s time Jordan stopped playing both sides of the game. Just like Israel condemns terror attacks in Jordan, Jordan must condemn terror attacks in Israel. Terror is terror.”

Moreover, some anti-Israel hostility by Jordan goes beyond mere statements.

In March, Jordan released Ahmed Daqamseh, a former soldier who murdered seven Israeli schoolgirls as they visited his country. His tribe gave him a hero’s welcome and he called for Israel’s destruction on Al-Jazeera TV. Many lawmakers and politicians had reportedly lobbied to set him free, and doing so may have been a populist move.

Jordan also hosts “Al-Quds,” the official TV station of Hamas, the Gaza-based terror group committed to Israel’s destruction.

President Donald Trump fulfilled a key campaign promise yesterday when he announced the United States will pull out of the potentially economically disastrous Paris Climate Accord that President Obama imposed on the country in his final months in office.

In so doing, Trump is taking on all of this global warming poppycock that rests on the utterly ridiculous notion that carbon dioxide, the natural gas humans and other earthly life forms constantly produce and expel, the same gas that promotes plant growth, is a pollutant.

It is a truly insane idea that has no support in science but leftists are running with it because they hope to browbeat and intimidate Americans into accepting shrinking the economy by drastically reducing carbon emissions.

Obama signed a legal instrument related to the Paris Climate Accord on Aug. 20, 2016, titled “Acceptance on behalf of the United States of America.” The relevant part of the document provides that Obama does “hereby accept the said Agreement and every article and clause thereof on behalf of the United States of America.”

Some on the Left are now arguing that process somehow prevents Trump from taking the country out of the agreement unilaterally, even though Obama (unconstitutionally) purported to bring the country into the agreement unilaterally.

In the White House’s Rose Garden, Trump called the treaty “the latest example of Washington entering into an agreement that disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries.” The agreement leaves American workers and taxpayers “to absorb the cost in terms of lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories, and vastly diminished economic production.”

He continued:

Thus, as of today, the United States will cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris Accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country. This includes ending the implementation of the nationally determined contribution and, very importantly, the Green Climate Fund which is costing the United States a vast fortune.

Compliance with the PCA could cost the country as many as 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025, he said, citing a study by National Economic Research Associates. By 2040, he added, compliance could cause the country to miss out on $3 trillion in gross domestic product, wipe out 6.5 million industrial jobs, and reduce household incomes by $7,000 or more.

The pact leaves America at a disadvantage by “effectively putting” the country’s vast energy reserves, including coal, “under lock and key,” while allowing other countries to further develop their coal resources.

President Donald Trump has decided to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord. The United States never should have been in it in the first place, and it’s not even entirely clear that it ever was. In choosing American interests over Davos pieties — in the face of resistance from some within his own administration — the president here has made good on his promise to put America first.

The Paris Agreement is a treaty in all but name: The European signatories put it through their usual treaty-ratification protocols, but the United States did not. President Obama went to great lengths to pretend that the treaty was something other than a treaty because he did not wish to submit it for ratification by the Senate, which was almost sure to reject it — as, indeed, the Senate would likely reject it today. In a government of laws, process matters.

Substance matters, too, and here the Paris Agreement is deficient.

Even if one accepts, for the sake of argument, the alarmist interpretation of climate-change data, the Paris Agreement is unlikely to produce the desired result — and may not produce any result at all. Two countries that are responsible for a large share of greenhouse-gas emissions — China and India, the world largest and fourth-largest carbon dioxide emitters, respectively — have made only modest commitments under the agreement, which puts most of the onus on the more developed nations of North America and Western Europe. Both would continue to emit more carbon dioxide through at least 2030, and both have chosen, as their major commitment, not reductions in total emissions but reductions in “carbon intensity” — meaning emissions per unit of GDP. But these improvements are likely to happen anyway, irrespective of treaties or public policy, due to ordinary economic changes, such as the growth of the low-impact services sector relative to heavy industry, the aging-out of high-emissions vehicles, and the replacement of antiquated infrastructure.

There may be a certain humanitarian appeal in asking the richer nations to pay the higher price, but the developed world already is far more efficient in its use of energy. If you measure greenhouse-gas emissions relative to economic output, the United States already is more than twice as green as China, and it is a middling performer on that metric: France is five times as efficient, Norway and Sweden six times. The real cost of marginal emissions reductions is necessarily going to be much higher in Switzerland than it is in Mongolia.

The Paris Agreement fails to take that economic reality into account, and it does so in ways that could end up making emissions worse rather than improving them. For example, limiting the amount of coal consumed by North American power plants would not necessarily reduce the amount of coal consumed on Earth — and climate change is, famously, a planetary issue — but would instead most likely result in shifting coal consumption from relatively clean North American facilities to relatively dirty ones in China — the U.S. already is a net exporter of coal, and China is the world’s largest importer of it. Global energy markets are no great respecters of idealism, and the gentlemen in Beijing and New Delhi (and elsewhere) cannot reasonably be expected to adopt policies that will materially lower the standards of living of their respective peoples in order to satisfy the moral longings of Western elites. We don’t expect the powers that be in Washington to do so, either, and Trump here has chosen the right course.

The total costs of climate change to the United States would run less than 2 percent of GDP a century from now.

If you consider climate change a moral issue — and acting on it a moral imperative — then the Paris Agreement might look attractive: The desire to do something, anything at all, is very strong in environmental circles. But the question is more intelligently viewed as a question of risk assessment and cost–benefit trade-offs, in which case planning for future adaptation programs is the more intelligent course of action. As the Natural Resources Defense Council estimates the costs (and NRDC is not exactly the Heritage Foundation), the total costs of climate change to the United States — expansively defined to include everything from hurricane damage to higher food costs — would run less than 2 percent of GDP a century from now. Other studies have produced similar findings. Taking radical and expensive action in the present to avoid the possibility of a 1.8 percent hit to a GDP that will be much larger in the year 2100 than it is today is a losing proposition — especially given that the Paris Agreement is far from guaranteed to produce any meaningful results.

Climate change presents the world with genuine risks, and there is of course room for international action in addressing them. But the Paris Agreement takes the wrong approach, committing the United States to a high-cost/low-return program that secures neither our national interests nor global environmental interests. It is part of the Obama administration’s legacy of putting sentiment over substance, and the United States is better off without it.

When Canada’s Conservative party picked a new leader on May 27, most political observers believed that the libertarian-leaning Maxime Bernier, a sitting member of parliament and former cabinet minister, would win by a comfortable margin. Instead, the party chose Andrew Scheer, an MP and ex-House speaker whose views more closely align with former prime minister Stephen Harper.

On the surface, this may seem like a puzzling decision. The common perception is that Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau won the 2015 federal election by presenting himself as a left-leaning alternative to Harper. And while Trudeau’s political honeymoon is over, he continues to hold solid personal approval ratings (46 percent, according to an April poll by Nanos Research) and remains a strong bet to win the next election in 2019.

Bernier, therefore, seemed to fit the growing international trend of new, dynamic political leaders with moderate fiscal sensibilities and social values. Scheer, a fiscal and social conservative by comparison, appeared to be a step backward in the eyes of some pundits, commentators, and columnists.

Appearances can be deceiving, however.

Scheer has been an MP since 2004. At 38, he’s seven years younger than Trudeau, and as a husband and father of five he maintains the same youthful outlook on life as the current PM. His time as deputy speaker (2008–11) and then speaker of the House (2011–15) also worked to his political advantage during the leadership campaign. These are nonpartisan positions without voting privileges, meaning that the bulk of his political career has been spent developing relationships with politicians of different stripes. Most have described him as a thoughtful, pleasant, and intelligent individual.

Meanwhile, Scheer’s conservative values are perceived to be the natural continuation of Harper’s political legacy. He’s been called “Stephen Harper with a smile,” and for good reason.

Like his predecessor, he believes in small government, lower taxes, cracking down on crime, and greater individual liberty. He wants to reestablish a more muscular foreign policy, getting Canada back into the important fight against radical Islamic terrorism. He also wants to maintain a big-tent party, and recognizes that the Conservatives must continue to expand and broaden their base to ensure long-term political success.