RUTHFULLY YOURS

Dr Brendan Nelson, a former medical practitioner and former federal politician (from 2007-8 he was leader of the Liberal Party in opposition, succeeded by Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s current prime minister) is presently director of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

At the opening of the War Memorial’s exhibition “The Holocaust: Witnesses and Survivors” on 29 November Dr Nelson delivered an interesting speech. Inter alia:

‘Six million people. Almost a quarter of the population of Australia, almost the entire population of Sydney. That is how many were exterminated in the worst genocide of the twentieth century. Jews, Roma, gypsies, the disabled and political prisoners. But almost all were Jews.

Jewish identity has been shaped by three things: Antisemitism, still a virulent and repugnant force in many parts of the world; The Holocaust or “Shoah”; The embattled nature of the state of Israel for whom existence is a daily struggle.

Adolf Hitler was able to undertake this mass extermination for two principal reasons. The first was that the majority were indifferent to the plight of the minority. The second was that in Germany – as in other parts of Europe, antisemitism was deeply rooted – religious, secular and racial.

One observation through my own life not having ever faced nor endured even a fraction of the adversities suffered by many of you here, is that almost all of life’s suffering and pain stems from people making themselves the centre of their own lives. So too, nations making their own narrow self-interest the centre of all else….

The Australian War Memorial is many things. But above all else is the repository of our nation’s soul. This place and the stories of two million men and women told here, reminds us that we are Australians and that there are in the end some truths by which we live. And they are worth fighting to defend – politically, diplomatically and at times, militarily.

Not everyone agrees with this exhibition. One regular visitor to the Memorial told me emphatically that she was opposed to this exhibition. “This has nothing to do with Australia and the Australian War Memorial”, she said. She told me that she would never walk through it. It has everything to do with us, for we are a part of humankind.

In a world grappling with the mass movement of people; the persecution of political, religious and ethnic minorities; euthanasia and a generational struggle against resurgent totalitarianism in the form of those who have hijacked the good name [sic] of Islam to build a violent political utopia, we must remind ourselves of that of which humankind is capable.

Our responsibility is to stimulate and challenge visitors, Australian and international, to see the world through the eyes of others….

After the Ohio State attack in which several staff and students were stabbed by a fellow student but no one suffered life-threatening wounds, the Islamic State has gone back to the drawing board in their instructions for lone jihadists on how to go on stabbing sprees — with a picture tutorial this time.

ISIS claimed the Ohio State attack through its news agency, Amaq, about a day after Abdul Razak Ali Artan rammed his car into a group of people who had left a building because of a fire alarm on Nov. 28. Eleven were wounded in the car attack or were stabbed by Artan after he got out of the car. An officer who was near the scene because of the fire alarm short Artan dead.

ISIS wrote about Artan, a Somali refugee who had graduated from a local community college and was in his first year at Ohio State, days later in their weekly newspaper, al-Naba, but notably betrayed some disappointment as within the article they emphasized Orlando shooter Omar Mateen was a good example for lone jihadists in terms of body count.

In today’s new issue of Rumiyah magazine — which was published in English in addition to Russian, German, Croatian, Pashto, Urdu and Indonesian — ISIS again refers to Artan as “our brother” and includes his attack in their roundup of global terror operations over the past month.

“The attack was carried out in response to the Islamic State’s call to target the citizens of the nations involved in the Crusader coalition,” the article states, before printing Artan’s full Facebook message.

“My brothers and sisters, I am sick and tired of seeing my fellow Muslim brothers and sisters being killed and tortured everywhere. Seeing my fellow Muslims being tortured, raped, and killed in Burma led to a boiling point. I can’t take it anymore,” the message said. “America, stop interfering with the Muslim Ummah. We are not weak. We are not weak, remember that. If you want us Muslims to stop carrying out ‘lone wolf’ attacks, then make peace with the Islamic State. Make a pact or a treaty with them where you promise to leave them alone, you and your fellow apostate allies.”

“By Allah, we will not let you sleep unless you give peace to the Muslims. I am warning you, O America!” he added, encouraging fellow Muslims to ignore “celebrity scholars” and “listen instead to our hero Imam Anwar al-‘Awlaki,” the New Mexico-born al-Qaeda recruiter killed five year ago in a U.S. drone strike. “Let me ask you this question: If Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, and his Sahabah were here today, wouldn’t the western media call them ‘terrorists’?”

“To conclude: By Allah, I am willing to kill a billion infidels in retribution for a single Muslim or Muslimah.”

The Ohio State student waged his attack after the October issue of ISIS’ Rumiyah instructed to lone jihadists to launch random knife attacks, with a warning to pick a suitable blade for the job. The article included graphic detail, but no how-to images.

The November issue moved on to a different type of lone attack tutorial — or “just terror” attacks, as ISIS calls them — encouraging that jihadists use a heavy vehicle such as a U-Haul to plow into a crowd.

Shari’a councils should not have the right effectively to deny women rights they hold as British citizens under British law.

In the end, the biggest problem is that there is no system of external regulation for the councils. There is no legal requirement for them to keep full records of the cases they adjudicate on, no requirement to report to a civil authority with the right to prevent abuses, and not even a requirement for any council to register with a government agency.

The Muslim Brotherhood in the US itself listed the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) as one of several organizations who shared their goals, including the destruction of Western civilization and the conversion of the US into a Muslim nation.

The “minorities” jurisprudents generally favour a non-violent approach to the encounter of Islam and the West, while retaining a critical stance towards the latter and a conviction that Islam must, in the end, replace it. But on occasion, as in the Middle East, violence is sanctioned.

The UK has for several years faced problems with its growing number of shari’a councils (often misleadingly called courts). These councils operate outside British law, yet frequently give rulings on matters such as divorce, child custody, inheritance and more, which are based on Islamic law and in contradiction of the rights of individuals (usually women) under UK legislation. Many Muslim communities in cities such as Bradford, Birmingham, Luton, or boroughs such as Tower Hamlets in London are both sizeable and close-knit; individuals in them are made to live lives in accordance with Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Islamic traditional norms. This means that contact with British life at large is often restricted, with a lack of assimilation that traps many women and girls into lives very close to the lives of their sisters in Muslim countries.

Much of the concern about the “courts” has been expressed by Baroness Caroline Cox, whose bill to limit their impact on Muslim women has passed more than once through the House of Lords and, recently, into the House of Commons. Her personal determination and clear-sightedness have meant that the matter has remained for several years a focus for debate in politics and the media. Her arguments have received widespread support from women’s rights organizations, especially several concerned with the rights of Muslim women.

The dragon’s first major tongue-dart at the West was the death threat — a fatwa with a bounty issued in 1989 by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini — on Salman Rushdie, a British citizen, for his novel, The Satanic Verses.

What the dragon learned with that initial thrust! The West was so genteel. The United Nations issued condemnations on — paper! Diplomats wrote scare-letters. Politicians said harrumph.

How different if politicians and diplomats in the West had delivered the simple and forceful message back to the Ayatollah: Unless you remove this threat, we will cancel all diplomatic visas.

“The worst part of the dragon is in the tail.” You do not have to know what it means; it gives off a spooky authority. This thought was written by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the great Cuban writer who knew something about dragons’ tails: he had confronted Fidel Castro and lived to tell about it. While on a diplomatic mission to Brussels in 1965, he denounced Castro, abandoned his post and lived out a life of exile in London until his death in 2005. He never went back.

For a minute, let us call the dragon Islamic Terror (we shall get back later to the tail). There is much about the dragon we do not know: where he lives exactly, his vulnerabilities, his comings and goings, his next attacks, his feeding schedule. We do know that he foments terror and inspires fear. From the front part of the dragon, his snout, emerges a tongue flick — tasting the air, sensing out fresh victims. His first major tongue-dart at the West was the death threat — a fatwa with a bounty issued in 1989 by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini — on Salman Rushdie, a citizen of Britain citizen, for his novel, The Satanic Verses.

Many conservatives are in mourning over Donald Trump’s electoral success. We’re not. Whatever one may think of Trump, and of the dramatic British vote for independence from Europe a few months ago, these events have opened the door to a rebirth of conservatism – and to a conservative movement that is both more authentic to its intellectual traditions and more politically relevant.

The chief conservative complaint about both Trump and Brexit is that they elevate nationalism, a focus on your own nation and people, at the expense of a more global agenda. They see this new nationalism as a betrayal of conservative ideology. We see it as a return.

Conservatives have been nationalists since the days Disraeli wrote novels in London. For Irving Kristol, for example, nationalism was at the center of conservatism. As he saw it, “the three pillars of modern conservatism are religion, nationalism, and economic growth.”

This is another way of saying that Kristol did not confuse conservatism with liberalism. He was firmly committed to entrepreneurship and free markets as the only road to economic prosperity. But he was also relentless in warning that, if left unchecked, liberal individualism and the profit motive would destroy the bonds of national unity, the family, and civility in public life.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Kristol renewed these concerns about the dangers of an unrestrained liberalism, proposing that religious revival and a renascent nationalism had to be “the very core of an emerging American conservatism.” Along these lines, he argued against the continuation of “liberal internationalism” (or “humanitarian imperialism”) in foreign affairs. He insisted that American energies instead had to be turned to meet the challenge of a fraying polity and of a society of isolated individuals set adrift by “secular, nonjudgmental education, bereft of moral guidance.”

This is a broad conservative outlook that both of us strongly identified with at the time. And we know we weren’t the only ones. But over the years, much of this vision was quietly dropped from the conservative agenda, and we found that we were nationalists in a movement that had somehow tilted global. We found ourselves astonished as friends talked of how America and Britain were going to bring democracy to Iraq, Egypt, and Libya. And while we continued to give two cheers for capitalism, we watched in dismay as an awareness that the Bible has to be at the center of any conservative politics was replaced by a cult of liberal individualism that sounded more like Ayn Rand than like William F. Buckley Jr.

What the vote for British independence and Trump’s election have in common is one big idea: the idea that a country isn’t just a heap of isolated atoms. That you can’t just sweep everyone into a borderless international marketplace as the be-all and end-all of their lives.

Another way of saying this is that America and Britain are still nations. Many people in these countries still believe that there’s something unique and important about their history and traditions. Something that binds them to their ancestors and to untold future generations. And it isn’t the disgusting white racism, either, that some in the media want us to believe American and British conservatives are now all about. It’s something fundamentally decent and good that the great majority of Americans and Brits believe these countries stand for and that those who cast a nationalist ballot in 2016 hope to see awakened again.

Seventy-five years ago, on December 7, 1941, the American Navy suffered the worst defeat in its history when a force led by six Japanese fleet carriers launched a surprise attack at the battleships at Pearl Harbor. Two of the eight battleships, Arizona and Oklahoma, were destroyed, and the other six were knocked out of action for many months. The Army Air Corps fields were attacked with great loss, and other smaller naval vessels were attacked as well.

The American carriers were at sea. Had those carriers been at Pearl Harbor, the whole course of the Pacific War would have been very different. During the first year of that conflict, only the carriers were able to slow down the Japanese advance. Battleships proved too vulnerable to air attack to fight major fleet actions alone. American submarines, which eventually would prove an incredibly potent force in the Pacific, were plagued by multiple problems with torpedoes which made them almost useless for many months.

The Japanese still might have inflicted crippling damage even with the carriers gone. The fuel depots for the American Fleet were at Pearl Harbor and so were major repair and maintenance facilities. Without these, the American Fleet could have had to operate out of San Diego, thousands of miles east.

The Japanese could also have utterly destroyed all the battleships, instead of just Arizona and Oklahoma, and these other battleships in two years were refitted and fighting the Japanese Navy. There were a number of other, smaller naval vessels at Pearl Harbor, which would be desperately needed in the first six months of 1942 and which follow-up attacks by the Japanese would have damaged or sunk.

Admiral Nagumo might have also done what Newt Gingrich played out in one of his brilliant counterfactual novels and ordered the two Japanese battleships with their 14-inch guns to pound every target those guns could reach while coyly holding the six Japanese fleet carriers back to pound on returning American carriers.

As America enters an increasingly dangerous world with our European allies threatened from within and our Pacific allies doubting our resolve, our incoming President Trump ought to grasp the dangers we face. (The superb team of capable military commanders he is surrounding himself with will surely help him with this task.)

Four officers were injured (two badly burned) when a group of around 15 Muslim gang-members swarmed their cars and hurled rocks and firebombs at them. Police were aggrieved when the minister of interior called the attackers “little wild ones.” Police and opposition politicians replied that the attackers were not “little wild ones but criminals who attacked police to kill.”

Two students at a vocational training school in Calais attacked a teacher, and one fractured the teacher’s jaw and several teeth — because the teacher had asked one of the students to get back to work.

“This is a warning. These young people did not attack the school by chance; they wanted to attack the institution, to attack the State.” — Yacine, 21, a student at the University of Paris II.

The riot lasted for four nights, after the arrest of a driver who did not stop after being asked to by a policeman.

This revolt of one pillar of French society, the police, was the biggest that ever happened in modern France. Yet, virtually no one in France’s mainstream media covered the event.

“Everything that represents state institutions (…) is now subjected to violence based on essentially sectarian and sometimes ethnic excesses, fueled by an incredible hatred of our country. We must be blind or unconscious not to feel concern for national cohesion”. — Thibaud de Montbrial, lawyer and expert on terrorism.

France will elect a new president in May 2017. Politicians are already campaigning and debating about deficits, welfare recipients, GDP growth, and so on, but they look like puppets disconnected from the real country.

What is reality in France today?

Violence. It is spreading. Not just terrorist attacks; pure gang violence. It instills a growing feeling of insecurity in hospitals, at schools, in the streets — even in the police. The media does not dare to say that this violence is coming mainly from Muslim gangs – the “youths,” as they say in the French media, to avoid naming who they are. A climate of civil war, however, is spreading visibly in the police, schools, hospitals and politics.