RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Be careful, be very careful. What has happened here will come to you.” — An elderly priest in Iraq, to Father Benedict Kiely.

Last year, more than 90,000 people chose to drop out of the Church of Sweden — almost twice as many as the year before. Meanwhile, in one year, 163,000 migrants, most of them Muslim, entered the country.

“Shouldn’t the issue of Middle Eastern Christians wake up European civilization to its core identity? Shouldn’t we in Europe and the West be telling ourselves that these attacks are also aimed at us?” — Mathieu Bock-Côté, in Le Figaro.

“I fear we are approaching a situation resembling the tragic fate of Christianity in Northern Africa in Islam’s early days”, a Lutheran bishop, Jobst Schoene, warned a few years ago.

In ancient times, Algeria and Tunisia, entirely Christian, gave us great thinkers such as Tertullian and Augustine. Two centuries later, Christianity has disappeared, replaced by Arab-Islamic civilization.

Is Europe now meeting the same fate?

In the Middle East, “Christianity is over in Iraq” due to Islamic extremism; in Europe, Christianity is committing suicide.

Within 20 years, more babies will be born to Muslim women than to Christian women world-wide; it is just the latest sign of the rapid growth that seems to be making Islam the world’s largest religion by the end of the century, according to a new study released by the Pew Research Center.

“Christianity is literally dying in Europe,” said Conrad Hackett, the head of the researchers who worked on the Pew report.

According to it, between 2010 and 2015, the Muslim population increased by more than 150 million people to 1.8 billion.

In Europe, how many Christians have been “lost”? Between 2010 and 2015, “deaths outnumbered births by nearly 6 million during this brief period”.

At this pace, Christianity will vanish in Europe.

In the same time frame, in most European countries — including Britain, Germany, Italy and Russia — Christian deaths outnumbered Christian births. “In Germany alone, for example, there were an estimated 1.4 million more Christian deaths than births between 2010 and 2015, a pattern that is expected to continue across much of Europe in the decades ahead”, Pew discovered. There are clear patterns of demographic trends, church attendance, closures of parishes and the declining number of priests.

These patterns are why Islamic leaders, such as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have been waging a demographic war against Europe. “Have not just three but five children”, Erdogan said to Muslims in the old continent. “You are the future of Europe”. This plan is called, in Islam, hijrah: expanding Islam by migration, based on Mohammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina in 622.

Christianity in Northern Europe has already been weakened by atheism, a trend possibly accelerated by modern gains in science and medicine. The American sociologist Phil Zuckerman, after spending more than a year in Scandinavia, published a book, Society Without God. Recently, after a nationwide advertising campaign by the Atheist Society thousands of people left the Church of Denmark. Norway’s state church lost more than 25,000 members in a month. Last year, more than 90,000 people chose to drop out of the Church of Sweden — almost twice as many as the year before. Meanwhile, in one year, 163,000 migrants, most of them Muslim, entered the country.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Venezuela was going to be a workers’ paradise. President Hugo Chávez said so and declared early into his first term, in 1999, that Venezuela and Cuba would sail toward the same “sea of happiness.” Not surprisingly, Venezuela is now a workers’ hell. Authoritarian and dysfunctional, the oil-rich yet impoverished South American nation of 31 million people suffers dire food shortages; soaring levels of violent crime (28,479 deaths reported last year); and epic levels of corruption and drug trafficking. Unemployment is soaring – not surprising given that large swaths of the economy have been nationalized. Venezuela’s court-ordered seizure of a General Motors plant is the latest such calamity.

Now Venezuelans are venting their anger like never before, and this includes protesters who were once the bedrock of Chávez’s political base – the poor. In recent weeks, tens of thousands of Venezuelans have staged massive anti-government protests that turned streets and highways into seas of humanity. Security forces and armed pro-government militias – Chavista enforcers riding motorcycles — have met the protesters with force: rubber bullets, tear gas, and deadly gunfire. More than 30 people have died and hundreds injured and arrested. Protesters are demanding fresh elections and the restoration of an independent parliament. Human rights watchdogs and neighboring countries are voicing concern over the unfolding crisis.

The protests are aimed at President Nicolás Maduro, the bus driver-turned politician who succeeded the late Hugo Chávez. Maduro has double downed on Chávez’s policies. Now he embodies all the traits of a dictator in an oil-producing country whose coffers hit rock bottom as oil prices tanked. Venezuela produces little for itself. It is dependent on oil. Petrodollars, however, can no longer pay for Venezuela’s traditional style of governance: statism and bread-and-circuses populism. Maduro, for his part, blames the chaos on an “economic war” being waged against him by Washington and Venezuelan elites.

Besides massive protests, a humanitarian crisis is unfolding as thousands of refugees from Venezuela flood into neighboring Brazil on a quest for food and medical care now unavailable to ordinary Venezuelans thanks to shortages created by Venezuela-style socialism. Yet amid the chaos, well-connected Venezuelans and officials are getting rich thanks to epic levels of corruption and drug trafficking. Tareck El Aissami, Venezuela’s vice president, is accused by U.S. authorities of being a drug “kingpin.”

Portents of the coming chaos were obvious (or should have been) months into Chávez’s first term 18 years ago, even if Washington turned a blind eye to it. First came Chávez’s words, his anti-Americanism and leftist rhetoric – words that some in the Clinton administration naively believed were mere bluster. They wanted to believe Chávez was a democratic reformer who would take on Venezuela’s endemic statism and corruption. But then came Chávez’s actions.

Prior to Saudi Arabia’s attempts to spread Salafism across the Muslim world, Indonesia did not have terrorist organizations such as Hamas Indonesia, Laskar Jihad, Hizbut Tahrir, Islamic Defenders Front and Jemmah Islamiyah, to name just a few. Today, it is rife with these groups.

A mere three weeks after the Saudi king wrapped up his trip, at least 15,000 hard-line Islamist protesters took to the streets of Jakarta after Friday prayers, calling for the imprisonment of the capital city’s Christian governor, who is on trial for “blaspheming the Quran.”

In a separate crisis, crowds were demanding that Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (known familiarly as Ashok) be jailed for telling a group of fishermen that, as they are fed lies about how the Quran forbids Muslims from being governed by a kafir (infidel), he could understand why some of them might not have voted for him. If convicted, Ashok stands to serve up to five years in prison.

Accompanied by a 1,500-strong entourage, Saudi King Salman bin Abdul Aziz arrived in Indonesia on March 1 for a nine-day gala tour. He was welcomed warmly not only as the monarch of one of the world’s richest countries, but as the custodian of Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina.

While appearing to be taking a holiday rather than embarking on an official state visit — the 81-year-old sovereign spent six days at a resort in Bali — the king had some serious business to attend to. In what was advertised as an effort to promote “social interaction” between Saudi Arabia and Indonesia — with His Majesty announcing a billion-dollar aid package, unlimited flights between the two countries and the allotment of 50,000 extra spots per year for Indonesian pilgrims to make the hajj to Mecca and Medina – it seems as if the real purpose of the trip was to promote and enhance Salafism, an extremist Sunni strain, in the world’s largest Muslim country, frequently hailed in the West as an example of a moderate Islamic society.

Qadri’s admirable take on terrorism conceals another large elephant in the room. Islam has for centuries used violence against non-Muslims in what is considered a legitimate manner: through jihad. It is not simply that Muslim armies have fought their enemies much as Christian armies have engaged in war. Jihad is commanded in the later verses of the Qur’an, is endorsed in the Traditions and the biography of Muhammad, and codified in the manuals of shari’a law. Qadri knows this perfectly well, and at times inadvertently reveals as much in several ways.

Qadri does not just insist that Islam is a religion of peace and security. By tucking all references to jihad in footnotes in transliterated Arabic, he never has to explain what it is about and how it relates to his rulings on what is and what is not permissible.

It is hard to be a reasonably knowledgeable Muslim and not know that calls for violence pervade the Qur’an and sacred traditions, or that Islamic armies have been fighting European Christians, Indian Hindus, and others since the 7thcentury.

Islam, after all, conquered Persia, Turkey, North Africa and the Middle East, Greece, Spain and most of Eastern Europe — until its armies were stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1683.

Following the terrorist attack outside Britain’s Houses of Parliament on March 22, 2017, it was not surprising or wrong that many Muslims denounced the attack and declared it to be un-Islamic. Two days afterwards, Dr. Mohammed Qureshi, chairman of the Board of Trustees for the Shropshire Islamic Foundation, said:

We need to be united in this situation.

We should not give any religion a bad name and these people need to be dealt with in full force and there should be zero tolerance when it comes to dealing with them.

My heart goes out to these victims. And my heart goes out to the people’s families and those who are injured. I pray they all have peace in their minds.

He added:

There is no place for these acts in the religion of Islam.

The people are being radicalised and the young and vulnerable people need to be protected.

We need to disassociate this with Islam, as Islam is a religion of peace.

This view was echoed in a press release by the Foundation, in which sympathy for the dead and their families was followed by a commitment to non-violence: “as a community, we need to come together to condemn violence and hatred and work towards cohesion and tolerance”.

More recently, a document about Islamophobia published by the Green Party of the United States affirmed the purportedly peaceful character of Islam:

The highest goal of the Islamic faith is Peace. Peace is pursued over all and for Muslims the world over, ‘holy war’ has nothing to do with the concept of jihad. The Arabic word translates as ‘struggle,’ and is used a handful of times in the Quran to speak of the struggle to stay on the righteous path, to fulfill obligations to family, community and Creator, what the Islamic scholars call a higher jihad.

These claims, however, seem innocent of the verses that say:

So when you meet those who disbelieve [in battle], strike [their] necks until, when you have inflicted slaughter upon them, then secure their bonds…. And those who are killed in the cause of Allah — never will He waste their deeds. Surah Muhammad [47:4]

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The appalling terrorist assaults perpetrated by ISIS in Europe have led to significant changes in the European state of mind. By exposing the vulnerability of EU state borders, they have prompted rudimentary initiatives to secure those borders and increase counter-terror cooperation among EU member states, while also boosting the popularity of far-right parties. The attacks have given rise to a discreet cooperation between EU member states and Israel in dealing with the terrorist threat, but have not prompted the EU to change its critical position regarding Israel’s defensive measures against Palestinian terror. The moral double standard of the EU on this issue might undermine its own fight against Islamist terrorism.https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/isis-terror-europe/

The terrorist assaults perpetrated by ISIS in France, Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, and Sweden did not surprise the EU security authorities. They have often noted the threat that at least some of the thousands of Muslim youngsters who left Europe to fight for ISIS might perform acts of terror upon their return. They are also well aware that military intervention against ISIS increases the risk of terror attacks on European soil. The torrent of uncontrolled numbers of refugees from the Middle East has sharpened the warnings issued by the security authorities as well as by the media. The terror attacks have had significant repercussions, and have had an impact on EU-Israel relations.

The wave of terror has produced changes in the state of mind of many Europeans. In the past, though there were occasional terror attacks (such as in London in July 2005), Europeans felt relatively safe – so much so that they did not introduce basic security measures, such as checking bags and suitcases at train stations. The recent wave of attacks, however, has produced feelings of insecurity. Citizens of EU member states are now less hostile to security measures that had been perceived in the past as breaching their civil liberties.

The attacks exposed the vulnerability of EU state borders resulting from the Schengen Agreement, which opened borders among member states. In Brussels and Paris, the perpetrators of the November 2015 attacks crossed borders with impunity.
The EU did, in fact, take a major decision in November 2015 to strengthen control over its external borders in order to protect them from smugglers of firearms and illegal immigrants. It increased cooperation and coordination among EU member states, taking measures such as a Passengers Name Record (PNR) – not only for air travel, but for sea and train travel as well as hotel room and car rentals.

In addition, EU member state authorities took measures like decreeing a state of emergency (in France) and increasing security forces.

Another significant step was the launch in January 2016 of a new European counter-terrorism center, the ECTC, following the November 2015 decision of the Justice and Home Affairs ministers. The ECTC was designated as an enhanced central information hub through which member states can increase information sharing, bolster operational coordination, track terror financing, and detect online radicalization.

“Some will say I am the anti-Merkel. It is an honor for me.

I don’t agree with the entirety of Marine Le Pen’s party platform but I really do get a kick out of her oratorial bombast and watching her kick Angela Merkel’s butt – and those of the unelected EU technocrats who are on the US State Department’s “unofficial payroll”.

Here, she blasts how the EU maintains itself “With blackmail, threats and intimidation…Your model is to become a servant of the USA, austerity, disloyal competition, mass spying on citizens, ‘social dumping’, migratory submersion.

“I represent another model that unites Europe’s people. One of independence, of a Europe of nations in a multipolar world, of intelligent protectionism, of individual liberties…some will call me the ‘Anti-Merkel’. I accept that label with honor. I don’t acknowledge you, Madam Merkel!

“The ‘right of self-determination’, is a ridiculous attempt at the German domination of Europe. The defense of German interests does not justify the vassalization of the other peoples of Europe. I am the voice of sovereign Europeans. They thirst for the freedom of their nations. I represent the French people, who have turned their backs on you, Mr. Hollande, the same way they turned their backs on Sarkozy – because they thirst for a France that’s free!”

Daniel McCarthy is editor at large of The American Conservative. This article first appeared in The National Interest and has been republished with permission.

The populist Right that seems to be rising throughout the advanced world has two goals. One, obviously, is to win office. But the second, which can be achieved short of actually taking power, is simply to replace the center-right. Marine Le Pen will almost certainly lose to Emmanuel Macron in a few weeks’ time. She and her supporters can count it as a victory, however, that there will be no center-right candidate in the second round of France’s presidential election for the first time since Charles de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic.

The Left has been undergoing a shakeup of its own. Macron represents a tendency toward the pro-market center that bears some comparison with the direction in which Bill Clinton and Tony Blair took the Democrats and Labour in the 1990s. But unlike Clinton and Blair, Macron does not lead an established party. He was formerly a finance minister in the Socialist Party government of Prime Minister Manuel Valls. In picking a nominee earlier this year to succeed the disastrous incumbent Socialist president, François Hollande, the party ultimately faced a choice between the center-left Valls and a left-wing candidate, Benoît Hamon. Hamon won, but so deep is the disaffection with the Socialists that another, independent leftist, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, outperformed him in Sunday’s first-round general election.

The hard Left can take comfort in the thought that the votes for Mélenchon and Hamon together exceeded those for Macron. But this only means that the French Left’s civil war—like the backbiting between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters in the Democratic Party, or between Jeremy Corbyn and his Blairite critics in the Labour Party—will continue.

As different as France, Britain and the United States may be, the similarity of ideological struggles within—as well as between—the Left and Right in all three countries suggests a profound realignment in the politics of the West. Yet where the Right is concerned, the nature of that realignment is all too often misunderstood. There is more than one kind of right-wing populism, and the kind associated with France’s National Front has so far been the least successful. The country’s traditional center-right might even chalk up its failure to get a candidate into the second-round election as a mere fluke—though this would be dangerously overconfident.

Certainly what happened this year to France’s major center-right party, the Republicans, was unusual. The leading contenders for its nomination were two former prime ministers—Alain Juppé, who had served in that role from 1995 to 1997, and François Fillon, who held the office from 2007 to 2012. Fillon prevailed and briefly became a sensation in French politics, before a financial scandal suddenly made him seem virtually unelectable. He stayed in the race and still finished less than 2 points behind Le Pen. Were it not for the scandal, he would now be headed to a runoff with Macron, and the National Front would once more have failed to repeat its performance in 2002, the only other time it advanced to the second round. Even Juppé would have had a solid chance of getting beyond round one. Only the combination of Fillon’s initial appeal and unexpected detonation doomed the Republicans—or so they might tell themselves.

This would, however, overlook the inroads that the National Front has made under Marine Le Pen. She has already improved upon her party’s previous best showing (when she ran in 2012 and received 17.9 percent of the vote) and her father’s high-water mark in the 2002 election, where he received 16.86 percent in the first-round election; this year, she won over 21 percent. Her father won less than 18 percent of the vote in the second round against Jacques Chirac, who swept to re-election by a 64-point margin. Marine Le Pen is certain to improve upon those numbers in her showdown with Macron, though he can still be expected to win easily. (Fillon and Hamon have already endorsed Macron for the second round, and while Mélenchon has not, his left-wing voters can be counted on to prefer Macron to Le Pen. Macron goes into the second round with the center-left and most of the Left and center-right behind him.)

During a meeting between the former Papal Nuncio to Cairo, Archbishop Jean-Paul Gobel, and Grand Imam Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, the Grand Imam warned Gobel that “speaking about Islam in a negative manner was a ‘red line’ that must not be crossed.” If there are any condemnations of violence against the Coptic Christians, they are likely to be articulated only by the Grand Imam and the Egyptian President.

If the Pope’s humble bearing is excessive, however, it might be interpreted even by peaceable Muslims as a submission. If Francis is asked by the Grand Imam to pray at al-Azhar’s mosque, that is a piety that el-Tayeb would not likely reciprocate in a Coptic Church in Egypt.

Facilitating the establishment of an Islamic-Christian relationship that excludes Judaism can only serve the Islamist goal of isolating Jews and Israel. Although relations between the Vatican and al-Azhar will improve in the near future, the honeymoon will not. The Grand Imam will doubtless protect his own theological power base and keep his distance from both the Vatican and the Egyptian regime.

The twin Palm Sunday bombings at Coptic Christian Churches by Islamic terrorists in Egypt, which killed 44 worshipers, draws attention to what is probably the principal reason for the upcoming visit of Pope Francis to Cairo on April 28-29. The Pontiff will likely seek the assistance of Egypt’s Muslim hierarchy to help protect Egypt’s Coptic Christians, the indigenous inhabitants of the country who now number about 9 million and constitute at least 10% of the population.

During his stay, Francis will meet with the Grand Imam of Cairo’s al-Azhar Mosque, Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb. Al-Azhar’s theological complex, which houses Islam’s oldest university, is considered the most influential center of Sunni Islam.

The Pope possibly hopes that the meeting with el-Tayeb will fully repair relations between the Vatican and al-Azhar. These were restored as a result of a letter sent by Pope Francis to the Grand Imam last year. The Papal letter was followed up by a visit to the Holy See by el-Tayeb in May 2016. Relations between the Holy See and al-Azhar had been severed in 2011 by el-Tayeb after he took offense at comments made by the previous Pope, Benedict XVI, on the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries.

Grand Imam el-Tayeb now appears more disposed towards normalizing relations with the Vatican, especially since his amicable visit to the Holy See in May 2016. Al-Azhar’s Grand Imam is likely to be more agreeable toward Francis than he was toward Benedict. This show of flexibility might possibly also be an effort by el-Tayeb to get in line with President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi’s own call for reform within Islam. However, Al-Azhar, determined to maintain its authority over theological matters, has initiated no substantive, doctrinal reforms in response to President Sisi’s declaration. In fact, Al-Azhar has pushed back against attempts by some Muslim reformists who have suggested a more liberal policy concerning women’s rights, including the ability to divorce.