RUTHFULLY YOURS

Muslim pupils outnumber Christian children in more than 30 church schools, including one Church of England primary school that has a “100% Muslim population.” — Sunday Times.

Six Muslim men shouted “Allahu Akbar” as they were sentenced at Sheffield Crown Court for a total of 81 years for sexually abusing two girls — including one who became pregnant at age 12 — in Rotherham.

“By 2030, one in three people will be a Muslim in the world — that is a huge population.” — Romanna Bint-Abubaker, founder of modest fashion website Haute Elan.

A Chatham House survey of more than 10,000 people from ten European countries found that an average of 55% agreed that all further migration from mainly Muslim countries should be stopped.

February 1. Jim Walker, a 71-year-old volunteer at Carnforth Station, was banned from the premises after someone complained about an alleged racist comment. Walker, who, for more than a decade, has been winding a famous clock at the station, was overheard discussing a newspaper article about young migrants entering Britain from the French port of Calais. Walker said:

“Carnforth Station Trust received a complaint from a visitor who was not happy about me speaking to somebody about the issue…. What they are doing is outrageous. It is absolutely unbelievable, it is a violation of free speech….

“I must be the only man in Carnforth who has a document saying where he can and can’t walk and all for expressing a point of view and quoting an editorial from a newspaper. Now [winding the clock] is no longer possible.”

February 1. Prime Minister Theresa May told the House of Commons that women should feel free to wear the hijab, a traditional Islamic headscarf. Several European countries have imposed bans on parts of Muslim religious dress. “What a woman wears is a woman’s choice,” May said after she was asked — on world hijab day — if she supported the right of women to wear the garment.

“Nothing has been done by Pope Francis or the Bishop of Abu Dhabi to get me released, in spite of contact being made by my captors.” — Rev. Tom Uzhunnalil, a Catholic priest who was kidnapped on March 4, 2016 in Yemen, when Islamic terrorists raided a nursing home and killed 16 people, including several nuns and aid workers.

“Christians continue to be the most persecuted believers in the world with over 90,000 followers of Christ being killed in the last year.” — Massimo Introvigne, prominent statistician and researcher, interviewed on Vatican Radio.

As in previous years, the month of Christmas saw an uptick in Islamic attacks on Christians — much of it in the context of targeting Christmas festivities and worship.

The one that claimed the most lives took place in Egypt. On Sunday, December 11, 2016, an Islamic suicide bomber entered the St. Peter Cathedral in Cairo during mass, detonated himself, killed at least 27 worshippers, mostly women and children, and wounded nearly 70. A witness said:

“I found bodies, many of them women, lying on the pews. It was a horrible scene. I saw a headless woman being carried away. Everyone was in a state of shock. We were scooping up people’s flesh off the floor. There were children. What have they done to deserve this? I wish I had died with them instead of seeing these scenes.”

The death toll and severity of the attack (pictures and videos of the aftermath here) surpassed even the New Year’s Day bombing of an Alexandrian church in which 23 people were killed in 2011. A few weeks before the St. Peter’s bombing, a man hurled an improvised bomb at St. George Church, packed with thousands of worshippers, in Samalout. Had the bomb detonated, casualties would likely have been higher. In a separate December incident, Islamic slogans and messages of hate — including “you will die Christians” — were painted on the floor of the Virgin Mary church in Damietta.

In Germany, Anis Amri, a Muslim asylum seeker from Tunisia, seized a large truck, murdered its driver, and pushed him onto the passenger seat, then drove the truck into a Christmas market in Berlin. Twelve shoppers were killed and 65 were injured, some severely. Four days later, Amri was killed in a shootout with police near Milan. ISIS claimed responsibility despite original reports claiming the man had no ties to Islamic terror groups.

The rule strikes at the very center of free speech, namely that of elected politicians, which the European Court of Human Rights has deemed in its practice to be specially protected. Members of the European Parliament are people who have been elected to make the voices of their constituents heard inside the institutions of the European Union.

The rule can only have a chilling effect on free speech in the European Parliament, and will likely prove a convenient tool in trying to shut up those parliamentarians who do not follow the politically correct narrative of the EU.

By lifting Le Pen’s immunity while she is running for president of France, the European Parliament is sending the clear signal that publicizing the graphic and horrifying truth of the crimes of ISIS, rather than being received as a warning about what might soon be coming to Europe, instead ought to be punished.

Where does this clearly totalitarian impulse stop and who will stop it?

The European Parliament has introduced a new procedural rule, which allows for the chair of a debate to interrupt the live broadcasting of a speaking MEP “in the case of defamatory, racist or xenophobic language or behavior by a Member”. Furthermore, the President of the European Parliament may even “decide to delete from the audiovisual record of the proceedings those parts of a speech by a Member that contain defamatory, racist or xenophobic language”.

No one, however, has bothered to define what constitutes “defamatory, racist or xenophobic language or behavior”. This omission means that the chair of any debate in the European Parliament is free to decide, without any guidelines or objective criteria, whether the statements of MEPs are “defamatory, racist or xenophobic”. The penalty for offenders can apparently reach up to around 9,000 euros.

“There have been a growing number of cases of politicians saying things that are beyond the pale of normal parliamentary discussion and debate,” said British EU parliamentarian Richard Corbett, who has defended the new rule. Mr. Corbett, however, does not specify what he considers “beyond the pale”.

In June 2016, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, addressed the European Parliament in a speech, which drew on old anti-Semitic blood libels, such as falsely accusing Israeli rabbis of calling on the Israeli government to poison the water used by Palestinian Arabs. Such a clearly incendiary and anti-Semitic speech was not only allowed in parliament by the sensitive and “anti-racist” parliamentarians; it received a standing ovation. Evidently, wild anti-Semitic blood libels pronounced by Arabs do not constitute “things that are beyond the pale of normal parliamentary discussion and debate”.

https://www.wsj.com/graphics/polling-for-elections-in-europe-2017/
Netherlands

The March 15 general election is in 4 days.

Mark Rutte
16%
People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy
Center-right
Geert Wilders
15%
Party for Freedom
Far-right
Lodewijk Asscher
8%
Labor Party
Center-left
Indicates current prime minister
France

The April 23 first-round vote in the presidential election is in a month.
Marine Le Pen
26%
National Front
Far-right
Emmanuel Macron
26%
En Marche
Centrist
François Fillon
20%
Les Républicains
Center-right
Germany

The Sept. 24 general election is in 6 months.

Angela Merkel
32%
Christian Democratic Union
Center-right
Martin Schulz
31%
Social Democrats
Center-left
Frauke Petry*
11%
Alternative for Germany
Far-right
*Ms. Petry is her party’s most prominent politician, but the party hasn’t agreed a candidate for the election.
Indicates current chancellor

South Korea’s Constitutional Court unanimously decided Friday to remove President Park Geun-hye from office. Her successor, who must be elected in the next 60 days, will likely come from the left-of-center Democratic Party. That raises important policy questions for Seoul, both domestic and international, but it is also an important reminder of the strength of the South’s democratic institutions.

Ms. Park’s dramatic downfall began last October, following allegations of influence-peddling and corruption by her confidante Choi Soon-sil. By December Ms. Park had been impeached by the National Assembly, a decision the court’s ruling confirmed while Acting President Hwang Kyo-ahn governs in her place. Gerald Ford took over from Richard Nixon in 1974 by declaring “our Constitution works,” and South Koreans can now make the same boast.

The challenges for Ms. Park’s successor will be heavy. Pyongyang’s belligerent young dictator has accelerated his nuclear and ballistic missile programs even as he murders his political rivals overseas. One consolation is that the two leading Democrat candidates, Moon Jae-in and Ahn Hee-jung, have moderated their opposition to this week’s deployment of the U.S. Thaad missile defense system in recent months. This reflects the reality that South Korea can’t afford to alienate the Trump Administration when the U.S. remains the guarantor of its security.

The next South Korean administration will also have to act when it comes to its economic system. The scandal that brought down Ms. Park involved the country’s largest conglomerates, known as chaebol. On Monday prosecutors released a report that described how Samsung executives allegedly asked Ms. Park for government favors, and she asked officials to support a Samsung merger.

That merger of two subsidiaries in 2015 epitomizes the corruption at the heart of Korea Inc. Minority shareholders lost an estimated $7 billion in a deal that allowed Chairman Lee Kun-hee to pass control of the chaebol to his son Lee Jae-yong. Government regulators failed to protect shareholder rights, and the Park administration used the National Pension Service to help Samsung win a proxy vote.

The younger Mr. Lee is now on trial for bribery and embezzlement. Samsung will likely have to adopt a more transparent ownership structure, which will benefit shareholders.

That’s a promising outcome, but new laws are needed to extend shareholder capitalism across the economy. The scandal might never have come fully to light had it not been for the muscular shareholder activism of New York-based hedge fund Elliott Associates in opposing the Samsung merger—another example of how the forces of “globalism” can help make national politics more democratic and accountable, not less.

The cases against Ms. Park and Samsung are a reminder of the danger of economic nationalism and industrial policy giving officials discretionary power over business. The next President has an opportunity to create a more entrepreneurial and competitive economy, even while staring down the North Korean threat. In both cases, closer strategic and economic ties to the U.S. strengthen will help.

Bruce Bawer is the author of “While Europe Slept,” “Surrender” and, most recently, “The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind.”

From the moment it became clear that the ongoing Islamization of the Western world was a potential disaster of historic proportions, the mainstream media – in their perverse effort to defend the indefensible and keep the cart careening downhill – have been making use of shameless sentiment to overcome the plain facts. One of the first examples of this practice that I can recall was way back in 2003, when the big, bad Norwegian government put resident terrorist Mullah Krekar through the first of what would turn out to be many deportation scares. Since Krekar, back in his homeland of Iraq, had been responsible for the violent deaths of innumerable innocents – children included – it wasn’t an easy proposition to try to whip up sympathy for him (although, heaven knows, some media tried).

Instead, many reporters chose the family angle: Krekar might be a bad guy, but what about his poor wife and kids? Repeatedly, the papers ran tearful close-ups of Krekar’s wife and pictures of her and Krekar embracing. VG ran a whole story about the intelligence services’ confiscation of her beloved cookbook, which had been in the family for generations and which contained the recipes of all of Krekar’s favorite foods. Dagbladet, for its part, ran a report whose headline told us that when Krekar’s kids heard on TV that Daddy had been released from custody and was headed home, they kissed the TV screen. It was Dagbladet, too, that published one of the great sob stories of all time. The headline: “My children are waiting every single day to hear from Papa.” The first sentences: “Mullah Krekar’s wife (39) is scared. For her four children, and for the future.”

And so on. You get the idea. If you’re trying to obscure the truth, defend the indefensible, and smear the good guys, go for sheer, unadulterated bathos. So it is that as the clock ticks down to the March 15 parliamentary elections in the Netherlands (which, as it happens, I write about in this week’s National Review), Anna Holligan of the BBC – in an effort to paint Geert Wilders, head of the Freedom Party (PVV), as a racist hatemonger – kicked off a March 7 article from The Hague by focusing on one of the Dutch Moroccans whom Wilders, as she put it, had “accused…of making the streets unsafe.” Needless to say, Holligan didn’t talk to one of the majority of Dutch Moroccan males who have dropped out of school and are living on social welfare benefits; nor did she buttonhole one of the nearly 50% of young Dutch Moroccan males who have rap sheets.

Really? Did he visit the jails where dissidents are “housed” under appalling conditions? Raul Castro has a “soft spot” for Jews? He and his bro were great pals with Arafat also. Did Dersh, smart litigator that he is, not realize he was being propagandized? Yes another group of the Buena Vista Suckers Club. rsk

I finally made it to Cuba — nearly 60 years after first trying. It was Christmas Vacation during my senior year at Brooklyn College. Five members of Knight House – the poor folks version of a live at home fraternity at my commuter college –decided to visit Havana. Our motives were not entirely pure. Yes, we wanted to see the old City of Havana and its cultural gems. But we had also wanted to participate in its notorious nightlife. We were 20 years old and seeking post-adolescent adventures of the sort we couldn’t experience back in Brooklyn.

We never made it. When we got to the Miami airport for the half-hour, $50 flight, we were greeted by a State Department Travel advisory. It seems like another young man – just a dozen years older than we were – was also trying to get to Havana. He had been trying for several years and finally – on the very day we were departing Miami for Havana — Fidel Castro and his revolutionary army were at the outskirts of the city

Disappointed, we returned to Miami Beach where we had to be satisfied with Jai Alai and crowded beaches. Years later I learned that members of a rival house plan, undeterred by a mere “advisory,” had taken the flight to Havana and partaken of its vices – vices which were soon to end, or be driven underground by Castro’s revolution.

The disappointed young man who didn’t make it to Cuba in 1958 is now an old man, with different tastes and tamer vices, such as an occasional cigar and a Cuba Libra drink. Among my passions now are art and music, and Cuba excels at both. So my wife and I, with three other couples, set out on an age-appropriate adventure as part of a “people-to-people” cultural group. Travelers still need an acceptable “justification” to visit the long-boycotted destination. Mere tourism or the love of beaches won’t do. It has to be cultural, religious, educational or some other broad category of virtuous pursuit. You still can’t go there for the reasons we had in mind back when Castro had kept us involuntarily virtuous.

So we went to visit the studios and houses of Cuban artists — some established, others young and on the way to achieving international recognition. The visits were fascinating, as the artist regaled us with stories of their own experiences with increasing artistic freedom, as Cuban Artists became part of the international art market. This made some of them quite rich, at least as compared with average wages for other occupations including lawyers and doctors.

Al Harith’s story reveals the depth of one of biggest Europe’s scandals: the jihadis’ use of European cradle-to-grave entitlements to fund their “holy war”.

Europe gave them everything: jobs, homes, public assistance, unemployment benefits, relief payments, child benefits, disability payments, cash support. These Muslim extremists, however, do not see this “Dependistan”, as Mark Steyn called the welfare state, as a sign of generosity, but of weakness. They understand that Europe is ready to be destroyed.

Filled with religious certainty and ideological hatred for the West, not required to assimilate to Europe’s values and norms, many of European Muslims seem to feel as if they are destined to devour an exhausted civilization.

Public policy goals instead need to be to move people off welfare — shown to be basically a disincentive to looking for work — and toward personal responsibility. There need to be legal limits on the uses to which welfare funds can be put — for example, welfare funds should not to be used for purchasing illegal drugs, gambling, terrorism or, as there is no free speech in Europe anyway, for promoting terrorism. One could create and fine-tune such a list. Disregarding the limitations could result in losing benefits. This would help fight the ghettoization and Islamization of Europe’s Muslims. The cycle of welfare and jihad needs to be stopped.

Four years ago, the British liberal newspaper, The Guardian, ran a story about the “survivors of Guantanamo”, the “victims of America’s ‘icon of lawlessness'”, “Britain’s survivors of the detention centre that has been called the ‘gulag of our times'”. The article featured a photograph of Jamal al Harith.

Al Harith, born Ronald Fiddler, a Christian convert to Islam, returned to Manchester from detention at Guantanamo Bay thanks to activism of David Blunkett, Home Secretary of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair. Al Harith was immediately welcomed in England as a hero, the innocent victim of the unjust “war on terror” after September 11. The Mirror and ITV gave him £60,000 ($73,000) for an exclusive interview about his experience at Guantanamo. Al Harith was also compensated with one million pounds by the British authorities. The victim of the “gulag of our times” bought a very nice house with the taxpayers’ cash.

A few weeks ago, al Harith made his last “journey”: he was blown up in Mosul, Iraq, on behalf of the Islamic State. Al Harith had also been recruited by the non-governmental organization “CAGE” (formerly known as “Cageprisoners”) as part of its testimony advocating the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

Quite likely you don’t spend a lot of time following the doings of Andrew J. Schofer, a career State Department officer who is currently the Charge d’Affaires at the U.S. Mission to International Organizations in Vienna (UNVIE). Nor was Schofer anywhere high on my radar until this week, when he delivered a statement on North Korea that seemed to me slightly at odds with what Ambassador Nikki Haley was saying at the United Nations in New York. Which sent me to the web site for his legation in Vienna … but before I get ahead of myself on that, here’s a bit more background.

Haley, at a UN press stakeout in New York, following a Security Council meeting this Wednesday on North Korea, said that while the U.S. reevaluates how to handle North Korea, “all options are on the table.” But Haley also went out of her way to imply that the Trump administration is far from eager to accede to pressures, such as those from China, to default to talks or deals with North Korea. Referring to North Korea’s tyrant, Kim Jong Un, Haley told reporters:

I appreciate all of my counterparts wanting to talk about talks and negotiations. We are not dealing with a rational person.

To my mind, Haley may be wrong in her assessment of Kim Jong Un as irrational. We can debate whether Kim is actually a madman incapable of rational calculation, or a wily thug, who in the interest of maintaining his hereditary totalitarian throne has been proving adept, like his forebears, at calibrating what he can get away with in the way of threats, hostage-taking, assassinations, executions, extortion rackets, and nuclear missile projects — all in the interest of consolidating his grip on power and expanding his reach.

But wherever one comes down on the crazy-Kim question, Haley deserves applause for deflecting the pressures to start bargaining with Kim. Deals with North Korea do not work, and will not work while Kim remains in power. The long record of U.S. talks, deals and attempted talks with North Korea is one of humiliation and failure for the U.S., as North Korea’s dynastic Kim regime has repeatedly pocketed any gains, milked every concession, cheated on every agreement, and carried on with its atrocities and its nuclear missile projects.