RUTHFULLY YOURS

BERLIN—A teenage girl who pledged allegiance to Islamic State was sentenced to six years in juvenile detention for stabbing and severely wounding a German police officer last February, ending the country’s first trial of an attacker accused of drawing inspiration from the militant group.

The 16-year-old girl, identified as Safia S., was found guilty of attempted murder, aggravated assault and supporting a foreign terrorist organization, the regional court in Celle that heard the case said.

Thursday’s sentence is substantially tougher than those handed down in recent terror-related trials, which have targeted unsuccessful plotters, members of designated terrorist organizations or people who had fought alongside such groups in Syria or Iraq before returning to Germany.

The trial of Safia S., who was 15 when she stabbed a federal policeman in the neck, was seen as a test of Germany’s ability to address the growing number of radicalized children and youth in its large Muslim community.

Juvenile law in Germany emphasizes the reintegration of youth offenders back into society and gives judges wide leeway in sentencing. While the sentence handed down to Safia S. was lengthy, it fell within the judge’s discretion, said Nikolaos Gazeas, a Cologne-based lawyer and expert on counterterrorism law.

Germany is still reeling from an attack in December by a Tunisian asylum seeker who rammed a stolen truck into a Berlin Christmas market, leaving 12 dead and scores wounded. Authorities have been under fire since it was disclosed that the perpetrator was a known extremist who had been on a security services’ watch list for months.

The court said chat logs found on the girl’s cellphone indicated that she carried out the stabbing in support of Islamic State, making it an act of terrorism. The trial, including the announcement of the guilty verdict and the sentence, took place behind closed doors because of the defendant’s young age.

Safia S.’s lawyer, Mutlu Günal, said he would appeal the verdict. He had argued in the girl’s defense that she had no intention of killing the policeman, didn’t have a terrorist motive and wasn’t in a position to measure the gravity of her act at the time she carried it out.

Safia S. was born and raised in Germany to a Moroccan mother and German father and has nationality in both countries.

Prosecutors argued during her trial that she had embraced the jihadist ideology of Islamic State by November 2015. But several security officials said the girl’s strict Muslim upbringing had certainly contributed to her radicalization. Videos disseminated on the internet, confirmed by authorities as authentic, show Safia S. at the age of 7, her head covered in a scarf, reciting the Quran with a well-known fundamentalist German preacher. CONTINUE AT SITE

They’re back.

One of the pleasant things about the very best Dutch cafés is that most of them subscribe to a dozen or more newspapers from all over western Europe. It was thanks to this amenity that I became aware, soon after moving to Amsterdam from New York in the late 1990s, of the European media’s poisonous hatred for the United States. In the eyes of almost all European journalists, I discovered, America was a land of illiterates, cretins, racists, xenophobes, warmongers.

And that was under Bill Clinton. It got even worse under George W. Bush. To be sure, on the day after 9/11 a few editorialists took the “We Are All Americans” line, but others enjoyed the opportunity to spit at the victims of Ground Zero, declaring that America had asked for it. Swedish author Jan Guillou cheered the strike on “U.S. imperialism.” Norwegian author Gert Nygårdshaug sneered at somebody’s concern that the next target might be in Europe: Muslims, he explained, hate Americans, and with good reason; for Europeans, however, they had nothing but goodwill.

The Afghanistan war further intensified the European media’s anti-Americanism; and the Iraq war took it up yet another notch. Newspapers all over the continent accused Bush of terrorism, equated him with Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein (or said he was worse than either of them), derided him as a puppet of Israel, depicted Guantánamo as the ninth circle of hell, and called for an end to the Atlantic alliance. “It is not easy to know whom one should believe in this world of Bushmen and Saddamists,” wrote an editor at Norway’s Dagsavisen, “where the truth is for sale and friends can hardly be distinguished from enemies.”

Then, one day, the anti-Americanism almost completely vanished from the European media. The date: November 4, 2008. Americans elected Barack Obama president, and suddenly America wasn’t so terrible after all.

Part of the reason for the shift was, quite simply, shock. For a long time, a core belief of the European media had been that the overwhelming majority of white Americans were racist cavemen. How to make sense of the fact that millions of them had voted to put a black man in the White House? European journalists couldn’t make sense of it.

But they knew one thing: they loved Obama. They had to love Obama. And they had to love him even more than Americans did – even more, indeed, than American journalists did. Because if they didn’t, they’d be the racists. (Of course, the fact that they thought this way made one thing crystal clear: they were racists, the whole lot of them.)

In any event, for eight years, the presence of a black man in the Oval Office not only made it impossible for the European media to criticize him; it made them hesitate to go after America itself, at least in the take-no-prisoners way they’d been accustomed to. Guantánamo remained open, and Obama’s policies helped make the Middle East even more destabilized and dangerous and led to the creation of ISIS. But you’d hardly have known it if you read the European press.

It must have hurt, having their hands tied like that for so long.

While it is not surprising to find Muslims offended by certain words or images, it is distressing to find Western courts and other bodies only too willing to turn “Islamophobia” into a criminal offence in countries that otherwise value free speech and open expression.

When the Dutch politician Geert Wilders was brought to court on a hate speech charge, all he had done in fact was to ask a simple question about Moroccan immigrants — should the Netherlands take in more or fewer? That is a question with many potential answers based on political, social, or demographic grounds. It is a rational question that is, almost by definition, one that could be asked in the Home Office of any state that receives immigrants.

“Forty percent of Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands between the ages of 12 and 24 have been arrested, fined, charged or otherwise accused of committing a crime during the past five years, according to a new report commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Interior.” – Dutch-Moroccan Monitor 2011.

We, and not our opponents, must place ourselves in a position to define what is and what is not real “Islamophobia.” If we cannot do that, others will conflate criticism and hatred, and clamp down on both at once.

If we had to choose one thing that has obstructed many Westerners from understanding modern Islam and undermined our ability to handle its excesses, it would be our perception of Islamophobia. How many times have fair and honest criticisms of one aspect or another of Islam, rebukes of behaviour, or literary and artistic expressions of Muhammad or other figures been loudly shouted down or banned on the grounds that such criticism was “Islamophobic”? In Europe, individuals have been arrested, tried and sentenced for “Islamophobic” utterances. As Judith Bergman recently commented, in Europe it is becoming a criminal offence to criticize Islam.

In 2011, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, for example, a former Austrian diplomat and teacher, was put on trial for “denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion [Islam],” found guilty twice, and ordered to pay a fine or face 60 days in jail. Some of her comments may have seemed extreme, but the court’s failure to engage with her historically accurate charge that Muhammad had sex with a nine-year-old girl and continued to have sex with her until she turned eighteen — its regarding the historical record as somehow defamatory — and the judge’s decision to punish her for saying something that can be found in Islamic sources, illustrates the betrayal of Western values of free speech. A charge of “Islamophobia” was enough to confine the freedoms that most Westerners take for granted.

The heroes of our nationhood were not resistance leaders or freedom fighters, but politicians and statesmen, most now forgotten or only half-remembered. Their creation is an achievement worth celebrating.
An amazing, but little remarked, fact in the current concern about securing Australia’s borders – cue ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ – is that they are entirely maritime. We have no land borders, and Australia is the largest country in the world not to have any any. According to Geoscience Australia, we have a coastline of almost sixty thousand kilometres (mainland plus islands). The perimeter of our territorial waters is probably longer, and the outer edge of our exclusive economic zone (EEZ) longer again. Back on shore we have, of course, state borders, and we once built a rabbit-proof fence over thousands of kilometres of outback, but only at sea do we share international borders with other countries (PNG Indonesia and East Timor).

Australia is the only inhabited continent that is not criss-crossed with international boundaries and a patchwork of nation states. Not for us razor-wire fences, concrete barriers, guard-posts, check-points, manned border-crossings, heavily armed border patrols, disputed terrain. We are one country, one nation, spanning an entire continent and its offshore islands. The shape is so iconic, so much the image of our country, that we take it for granted.

It is pertinent to ask how this happy situation came about. It was not, it must be said, anything to do with the first inhabitants, the Aborigines and Torres Strait islanders. Whilst they had spread across the entire continent and adjacent islands, and shared a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence, they were divided into around 250 separate tribal groups, each with its own traditions, customs, language and territory, with which it had a strong and deep affinity. Whilst there was, of course, contact between adjacent groups, it is doubtful whether there was any knowledge of, or affinity with, groups beyond this range of contacts, with those living on the other side of the continent. Nor is it likely that the first inhabitants had any concept of the country, of the continent, of Australia, in its entirety. This awareness could only come in the modern era.

It was the British, at the end of the eighteenth century, who changed all that. It was an Englishman, Arthur Phillip, who with a small ceremony on the shore of Botany Bay on 26 January, 1788, began the annexation of the continent for the British Crown. It was another Englishman, Matthew Flinders, who first circumnavigated the continent and revealed in detail its size and shape, and it was he who bestowed upon it the name Australia. In just a mere 113 years after Arthur Phillip established the first British settlement at Sydney Cove, Australia became a united sovereign nation, taking its own place in the world. This it achieved freely, and with the encouragement and consent of Britain. There was no ‘throwing off of the British yolk’, no need for an independence struggle. The heroes of Australia’s nationhood were not resistance leaders or freedom fighters, but politicians and statesmen, most now forgotten or only half-remembered.

The section of the Quran that a Muslim student recited at the church service points out the Islamic belief that Jesus was not the Son of God. Even in today’s Britain, this does not seem quite the view that leaders of the national church are supposed to propagate.

“The justification offered that it engages some kind of reciprocity founders on the understandable refusal of Islamic communities to read passages from the Gospel in Muslim prayers announcing the Lordship of Christ. It never happens…. apologies may be due to the Christians suffering dreadful persecution at the hands of Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere. To have the core of a faith for which they have suffered deeply treated so casually by senior western clergy such as the Provost of Glasgow is unlikely to have a positive outcome.” — Reverend Gavin Ashenden, The Times.

“I resigned in order to be able to speak more freely about the struggle that Christianity is facing in our culture. I had no idea that there were plans afoot by a Scottish Cathedral to ‘reach out to Muslims’ by scrapping a Bible reading from their worship on the Feast of the Epiphany (when Christ’s Lordship is celebrated as the Light of the World) and replacing it with a part of the Koran that denied Jesus was the Son of God…. it represented one more step along a road, which if the Church continues to follow, will speed up the destruction of Christianity in our country.” — Reverend Gavin Ashenden, The Times.

In a nation much in need of heroes, an Anglican Reverend has stepped forward, putting his sincere and serious beliefs ahead of the unserious and insincere pieties of our time. Everybody — secular or religious — has cause to feel enormous gratitude.

Very occasionally — even in contemporary Britain — some good news arrives. No single piece of news has been more invigorating than the discovery that a member of the clergy of the Church of England has found a vertebra.

In recent years, the British public have become used to a steady succession of bad-news stories from the purveyors of the Good News. This has taken every imaginable form, from the former Bishop of Oxford suggesting in the House of Lords that the Quran could be recited at the next coronation service, to the former Archbishop of Canterbury — Rowan Williams — notoriously suggesting that a place should be found for Islamic sharia in the law of the land.

So the place in the British national comedy reserved for the type of vicar unwilling to take the side of his own faith in any argument has darkly morphed. The failure of the Church of England to defend its own beliefs or its own followers when they are facing persecution around the world, has become an unamusing stain on the reputation of the church. Its representatives increasingly look as though they are willing to defend anything — including the most intolerant expressions of the world’s most intolerant religions — rather than argue for their own faith or the faith of their own congregants.

One example that emerged earlier this month appeared to epitomise the trend. At a service in the Cathedral of St Mary in Glasgow to mark the Feast of the Epiphany, the Cathedral thought it wise to invite a Muslim student to read from the Quran. The aim — according to the leader of the Scottish Anglican church, Bishop David Chillingworth — was to try to improve relations between Muslims and Christians in the city. If that were indeed the intention, it was singularly ill-advised. And as though the decision were not already poorly enough thought through, the section of the Quran the Muslim student recited at the service was the section of the Quran about Jesus. The section in question points out the Islamic belief that Jesus was not the Son of God. Even in today’s Britain, this does not seem quite the view that leaders of the national church are supposed to propagate.

There was a small rumpus when this story broke. During it, the ray of hope came in the form of a letter in The Times of London. Written by the Reverend Gavin Ashenden, it pointed out that:

“Sanctioning a key passage from the Koran which denies the divinity of Jesus to be read in Christian worship has been widely criticised as a rather serious failure. The justification offered that it engages some kind of reciprocity founders on the understandable refusal of Islamic communities to read passages from the Gospel in Muslim prayers announcing the Lordship of Christ. It never happens.

“Quite apart from the wide distress (some would say blasphemy) caused by denigrating Jesus in Christian worship, apologies may be due to the Christians suffering dreadful persecution at the hands of Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere. To have the core of a faith for which they have suffered deeply treated so casually by senior western clergy such as the Provost of Glasgow is unlikely to have a positive outcome. There are other and considerably better ways to build “bridges of understanding”.

It is not a lie to say that on reading this letter the heart sang. And not just for the contents and for the fact that the signatory was a Reverend but for what was listed beneath as his title: “Chaplain to Her Majesty the Queen.” It may be pointed out that there are several dozen people who hold this title, and so the Revd Ashenden is not the sole spiritual adviser to Her Majesty. But nevertheless, this made the letter a statement of considerably more significance. The Queen is the Head of the Church of England who swore at her coronation that she would be the “Defender of the Faith.” Here was one of her Chaplains standing against the prevailing trends of the age and actually defending the faith which his employer swore to uphold. In a struggle this complex, such stands — even, or especially when they should be statements of the obvious — stand for a great deal.