RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Unfortunately, the West has rejected the idea of solidarity with the Christians of the Middle East, prioritizing diplomacy based on oil interests and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Thus, the United States, Britain, and France have largely ignored the persecutions of the Christians of Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, and Sudan, while rushing to save the oil-rich Muslim states of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait…” — Hannibal Travis, Professor of Law, 2006.

Indigenous Christians in Iraq and Syria have not only been exposed to genocide at the hands of the Islamic State and other Islamist groups, but also their applications for immigration to Western countries have been put on the back-burner by, shamefully but not surprisingly, the UN.

When one brings up the issue of Western states taking in Muslim migrants from Syria and Iraq without vetting them for jihadist ties, while leaving behind the Christian and Yazidi victims of jihadists, one is accused of being “bigoted” or “racist”. But the real bigotry is abandoning the persecuted and benign Middle Eastern Christians and Yazidis, the main victims of the ongoing genocides in Syria and Iraq.

The German government is also rejecting applications for asylum of Christian refugees and deporting them unfairly, according to a German pastor.

Nearly a third of the respondents said that most of the discrimination and violence came mostly from refugee camp guards of Muslim descent.

It is high time that not only the U.S. but all other Western governments finally saw that the Christians in the Middle East are them.

Finally, after years of apathy and inaction, Washington is extending a much-needed helping hand to Middle Eastern Christians. U.S. President Donald Trump recently announced that persecuted Christians will be given priority when it comes to applying for refugee status in the United States.

Christians and Yazidis are being exposed to genocide at the hands of ISIS and other Islamist groups, who have engaged in a massive campaign to enslave the remnant non-Muslim minorities and to destroy their cultural heritage.

The scholar Hannibal Travis wrote in 2006:

On the competing strains of populist politics.

The West is abuzz with reports of a populist wave: rolling through Europe, sweeping across the Atlantic, and crashing into Gomorrah-by-the-Potomac. Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States—a watershed event as unthinkable as it was improbable to many across the ideological spectrum of American punditry—followed hard on the British people’s vote to exit the European Union, a cognate popular rejection of bipartisan elite opinion.

In short order, Matteo Renzi was the next shoe to drop. Italy’s now-former prime minister, a young, attractive, politically “progressive” technocrat, darling of the European cognoscenti, had been hailed—it seemed like only yesterday—as Rome’s (or is it Brussels’s?) answer to Barack Obama. He resigned in November, though, after the Italian people resoundingly defeated his proposed constitutional “reform.” The scare-quotes are offered advisedly: Italy having been virtually ungovernable since Garibaldi forced what passes for its unification, Sig. Renzi’s reform was a scheme to end the paralysis by accreting power to himself at the expense of the legislature. Think of it as a gambit to codify U.S. President Barack Obama’s “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone” style of centralized rule.

The victorious Trump had the populist wind at his back. Thus, efforts to caricature the real-estate mogul and reality-television star as a budding Hitler fell flat. Renzi, by contrast, ran into the teeth of that wind. The hyperbole casting him as a would-be Mussolini took its toll.

Renzi’s fall is the continental aftershock of the Brexit earthquake. The “Remain” camp’s failure ushered out David Cameron of the Europhile center-right. He is succeeded by Theresa May, who has promised to carry out the public will despite her (understated) support for “Remain.”

But that’s not all, not by a long shot.

In France, the socialist President François Hollande’s favorability rating is so infinitesimal—well under 10 percent in some polls—that a reelection bid was inconceivable. The two viable candidates to succeed him are both riding the populist wave: the virulently anti-Islamist Marine Le Pen of the Nationalist Front, and the intriguing François Fillon, the former prime minister. As Fred Siegel incisively details in City Journal, Fillon is a social conservative whose economic program is Thatcherite (sacré bleu!) and has its sights trained on Paris’s bloated public sector. One way or another, dramatic change is coming.
Is “populism” the right diagnosis for the upheavals in the West?

While most politicians across Europe – Nigel Farage excepted – responded to Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy with sneers of condescension and greeted his victory with either grudging congratulations or cries of apocalyptic alarm, Geert Wilders was an outspoken Trump cheerleader all along. The day after the American election, the crusading Dutch politician characterized America’s verdict as “a political revolution” and a “stunning and historic achievement” that “sent a powerful message to the world.” He added: “I never doubted Mr. Trump would win. We are witnessing the same uprising on both sides of the Atlantic. The Patriotic Spring is sweeping the Western world.”

Well, let’s hope so. So far the only other evidence of any such Patriotic Spring has been Brexit (and even that’s starting to look shaky, thanks to the court ruling that the British Parliament has to ratify the referendum vote). The next major test of the “Patriotic Spring” will come on March 15, when Wilders’s own Freedom Party (PVV) will compete in the elections for the Tweede Kamer, the more powerful lower house of the Dutch Parliament. Things have changed a lot since the last election, in 2012, when the two big vote-getters were the left-wing Labor Party (PvdA) and the conservative People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). Wilders’s PVV came in far behind, more or less tied with three other parties, each of which took about a dozen seats out of 150, the rest being distributed among five even smaller parties. In the wake of the 2012 election, the VVD and PvdA formed a coalition government, with VVD head Mark Rutte staying on as Prime Minister.

The new government wasn’t in office for long, however, before Wilders’s PVV skyrocketed in the polls, becoming the nation’s largest party. Next thing you knew – surprise! – the demonization of Wilders kicked into high gear. The pretext: in a speech to supporters, he asked if they wanted more or less of the EU, more or less of the Labor Party, and more or fewer Moroccans. Wilders’s suggestion that the Netherlands might not want to take in limitless numbers of Moroccans outraged pretty much the entire Dutch establishment: the political and media elite savaged him; schoolteachers denounced him in classrooms; clergy decried him from pulpits. Wilders responded by pointing out that three in five Dutch-Moroccan men under age 23 had rap sheets and that Moroccans were 22 times more likely than ethnic Dutchmen to commit violent crimes. But it didn’t help. The slime campaign worked. The PVV’s numbers dropped, and it became the nation’s #3 party.

But not for long. The PVV soon rebounded, and since summer before last, it’s been the Netherlands’s top-polling party, leading the VVD by a comfortable margin and leaving the fast-disappearing PvdA entirely in the dust. After living through their country’s distinctively dramatic post-9/11 history – the assassinations of Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and Theo van Gogh in 2004, the Ayaan Hirsi Ali debacle that ended with her emigration to the U.S. in 2006, and the rise (and international vilification) of Wilders – Dutch voters seem finally to be on the verge of making the PVV the largest party in the Tweede Kamer.

Geert Wilders:
President Donald Trump, what a relief! What a relief in comparison with the leftist dictatorship of the fearful cowardly and willfully blind leaders that we have in the rest of Europe and also here in this Chamber. It makes one cry. I tell you, finally America has a President, finally a Western country has a President who not only fulfills his promises, but also states that the security of his own citizens is his primary concern.

I tell you, Foreign Minister, that, in two weeks’ time, President Trump has passed an immigration policy that is more effective than that of your entire cabinet as long as it has existed. As long as it has existed. They did it. And I tell you something else. If we in the Netherlands, in Europe, had done what Mr Trump does – namely close the borders to people from places such as Syria – then these people, including terrorists, would not have come our way and then a lot of innocent people, innocent victims of terrorism in Europe, would still be alive today.

Speaker of the House:
And your question is?

Wilders:
So stop shedding crocodile tears. My question is: Learn from Trump and stop chickening out like cowards.

Foreign Minister Bert Koenders:
I would like to say to Mr Wilders that what he proposes is exactly what is ineffective in the fight against terrorism, namely the famous divide and rule. Ensure that the people in your own society no longer have any rights. Ensure that you look away when it comes to human rights. Ensure that the Iraqis, with whom our soldiers at the moment are fighting against ISIS, have no rights anymore and that the countries, from which terrorists obviously do not come, are the ones on this list.

The chaos we now see in the international world when it comes to air travel, does nothing to do increase the security of our people. On the contrary, it tears people apart. I will tell you one thing from my experience as foreign minister who frequently visits the Middle East: If you want to fight terrorism the worst thing you can do is to trample human rights, conduct a divide-and-rule policy and so-called screen people, whether they be Christians, Jews or Muslims, and not look at what can really protect us. I address you, because we are at the moment at a central point in the Netherlands and the world. We need to fight against terrorism together. If we fail to do it together, but exclude, then I guarantee you that the fight against terrorism will not be effective and that your position is one of insecurity.

Wilders:
A lot of words, but absolutely no content. What this minister, Mrs Merkel and Prime Minister Rutte have done – what is written large on their foreheads – is open borders. Come on in everyone, do come in. Even when you have a fake passport or no identity card, come on in everyone. And we’ve seen what happens then. We have seen that with the asylum influx, the tsunami of asylum seekers, which was already disruptive in itself, terrorists have come along from countries such as Syria – because you agreed with it, because you refused to check them – who, all over Europe, from Paris to Berlin, have murdered innocent people. You’d better stop talking about security! Just stop it. Because of the open borders and bringing people from Islamic countries here, attacks were committed in Europe. Stop the lies!

Swiss authorities are currently investigating 480 suspected jihadists in the country.

“Radical imams always preached in the An-Nur Mosque… Those responsible are fanatics. It is no coincidence that so many young people from Winterthur wanted to do jihad”. — Saïda Keller-Messahli, president of Forum for a Progressive Islam.

Switzerland is the answer to those who claim that Islamic terrorism is reserved for those countries that have participated in operations against ISIS or other Muslim terror organizations. Switzerland has done neither, yet its flag figured among sixty other enemy flags shown in an ISIS propaganda video.

“Huge sums of money from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Turkey are flowing to Switzerland… There is a whole network of radically-oriented mosques in Switzerland. The Muslim World League is behind it…. The network is a hub for Salafists. The Swiss authorities make a big mistake of not looking into the mosques.” — Saïda Keller-Messahli.

There are around 70 Turkish mosques financed directly from Turkey through the Diyanet Foundation in Switzerland.

The Swiss government appears to give Qatar, one of the primary propagators of Wahhabi Salafism in the world today, extremely special treatment.

In November 2016, Swiss police arrested the imam of the An’Nour mosque in Winterthur, in the canton of Zürich, for calling for the murder of Muslims who refuse to participate in communal prayer. The young imam, who had come from Ethiopia, had been in Switzerland for only a short time. The Zurich Federation of Islamic Organizations (Vioz) declared it was “shocked”, and suspended the An’Nour mosque from the federation until further notice: “We are shocked that an imam in one of our houses of prayer called for violence.”

There is little cause for “shock”. Already in 2015, Winterthur made headlines in Switzerland as an emerging center for young Muslims with jihadi ambitions. Four people from Winterthur managed to travel to Syria to join ISIS and a fifth was stopped at the airport in Zürich.

In November 2015, Swiss journalist and Syria expert, Kurt Pelda said, “The IS has a cell in Winterthur in the vicinity of the An’Nur Mosque in Hegi, there is no longer any doubt.” He also said that in addition to the five known cases, another man from Winterthur had travelled to Syria as well.

The former president of the Islamic Cultural Association of An’Nur, Atef Sahoun, denied all claims at the time:

“If we discover radical tendencies in one member, then the appropriate person will be immediately excluded. We send them away, no matter who it is”.

Atef Sahoun was arrested for incitement in November 2016, along with the Ethiopian imam, but later released.

Saïda Keller-Messahli, Islam expert and president of Forum for a Progressive Islam, says that the arrested imam from the An’Nour mosque is only “the tip of the iceberg”:

“Radical imams always preached in the An-Nur Mosque… Those responsible are fanatics. It is no coincidence that so many young people from Winterthur wanted to do jihad”.

After five days of MSM hysteria, President Trump remains justifiably unruffled by the establishment organs’ opprobrium. His January 27 executive order on immigration and refugees is reasonable and legal, and it enjoys strong popular support.

In the medium-to-long term Trump has much bigger fish to fry than a temporary ban on citizens from seven failed, war-torn, or dysfunctional majority-Muslim states, which were singled out by the Obama Administration under the 2015 Terrorist Travel Prevention Act. Prima facie this was no “Muslim ban”; the most populous majority-Muslim countries (Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Turkey) were unaffected. The really important part of Trump’s executive order is contained in its Section 1. Purpose:

In order to protect Americans, the United States must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles. The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law. In addition, the United States should not admit those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred (including “honor” killings, other forms of violence against women, or the persecution of those who practice religions different from their own) or those who would oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Demanding an aspiring newcomer’s commitment to this country’s core values comes as a breath of fresh air. Without naming it, Section 1 implicitly treats orthodox Islam as a violent ideology inimical to America’s “founding principles.” It can and probably will be used to severely restrict immigration of devout, practicing Muslims to the United States. Its drafters displayed awareness that a person’s Islamic faith and outlook is incompatible with the requirements of personal commitment and loyalty to a pluralistic and democratic society.

The Executive Order was carefully crafted: for a Muslim to declare that he accepts the Constitution of the United States as the source of his highest loyalty is an act of apostasy par excellence; and apostasy is punishable by death under the Islamic law. The Sharia, to a Muslim, is not an addition to the Constitution and laws of the United States, with which it coexists; it is the only true code, the only basis of obligation. To be legitimate, all political power must rest exclusively with those who enjoy Allah’s authority on the basis of his revealed will, and America is therefore illegitimate ab initio.

Section 1 effectively demands that a Muslim gives up this key tenet of his faith in order to be eligible for admission. Its drafters knew that a foreigner who becomes naturalized has to declare, on oath, “that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”

According to a recent public statement by the HDP, 1478 Kurdish politicians — including 78 democratically-elected mayors — have been arrested since July 2016.

The co-heads of the HDP party, Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksektas, are also in jail. Prosecutors seek up to 142 years in jail for Demirtas and up to 83 years in jail for Yuksekdag. One of the charges directed to Demirtas is “managing a terrorist organization.”

According to a recent report by Turkey’s Platform for Independent Journalism (P24), 151 individuals are in prison for being journalists or for being employed in the news media. Dozens of TV stations, news agencies, newspapers, magazines, and radio stations have been closed down by the Turkish government.

In Turkey, it seems, ISIS members are freer than journalists and peaceful, democratically-elected Kurdish politicians.

According to the Turkish ministry of justice, only seven members of the Islamic State (ISIS) have been convicted of crimes and jailed in Turkey in the last year and a half.

The data was made public when Bekir Bozdag, the Turkish justice minister, was asked in Turkey’s parliament the number of ISIS convicts in Turkish jails.

One of the many ISIS members in Turkey that has been released by Turkish courts is Abdulsamet C., arrested on September 2 of last year on charges of being a member of a terrorist organization.

Abdulsamet C. confessed that he had travelled to Syria to join ISIS in 2014. He added that an Azeri man with the code-name “Ammar”, who spread ISIS propaganda in an Istanbul mosque, provided him with contact information that enabled him to go to the Turkish city of Gaziantep, through which he entered Syria, where he joined ISIS.

Abdulsamet C. said that he went to the Syrian town of Jarabulus with a group of people, received religious education in the town of Manbij for a month, and then traveled around to Iraq and Syria before returning to Turkey in July 2015.

Seeking to benefit from the “Active Repentance Law,” he was released by a Turkish court on probation. Yet he continued to be in contact with ISIS even after returning to the Umraniye neighborhood in Istanbul, where his family resides.

An indictment drafted for Abdulsamet C. by the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office includes evidence showing his connections with ISIS, such as banners, photographs, videos and songs. During a raid on Abdulsamet C.’s house, police also found a book entitled, “44 Ways of Supporting Jihad,” which is banned in Turkey.

Despite all the evidence at hand, Abdulsamet C. was released by an Istanbul court on probation on the grounds that he has a permanent residence in Istanbul. The newspaper Hurriyet contacted the lawyer of the ISIS member, who said he was surprised at the release of his client.

The 2008 Holy Land Relief terrorism funding criminal trial resulted in multiple convictions and was touted as the one of the largest terrorism financing trials in American history. Expectations were high that the 2008 trial would be followed by further trials involving the listed unindicted co-conspirators such as CAIR USA and the Islamic Society of North America.

However, with the appointment of Eric Holder as the U.S. Attorney General in 2009, all further actions on this file appear to have been frozen. Holder would later speak at a conference supporting one of the unindicted co-conspirators.

It is not clear if the ongoing criminal investigation focuses only on those individuals leading IRFAN at the time of its delisting as a charity and listing as a terrorism entity, or if the investigation also includes those who helped found IRFAN. This may be an important distinction, as the Canada Revenue Agency stated that IRFAN was deliberately created and designed to circumvent Canadian terrorism-funding rules.

It appears possible that the Trump Administration will crack down on Islamist extremist groups in the USA. This would likely have a spill-over effect into Canada and Europe, though greater attention to border security and issues of funding terrorism.

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz last week submitted legislation to designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a Terrorist Organization.

Cruz (R-TX) earlier had a bill in the Senate which would not only ban the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. but also three of its front groups: Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) USA, Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). These American-based front groups have corresponding chapters or organizations in Canada as well.

Muslim Brotherhood front organizations and their members have an ongoing problem with criminal activity, terrorism-funding activities and overall negative relations with legal authorities. These problems range from being listed as terrorist groups, being charged for weapons possession and an even an arrest for alleged sexual charges involving a 12-year-old girl. Several of the charges are consistent with the extremist nature of the Muslim Brotherhood itself, given its commitment to violent political change. Both criminal investigations and terrorism listings in North America, for instance, have been directly related to terrorism funding for Hamas, itself a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.