RUTHFULLY YOURS

“In Berlin or in the north of Duisburg there are neighborhoods where colleagues hardly dare to stop a car — because they know that they’ll be surrounded by 40 or 50 men.” These attacks amount to a “deliberate challenge to the authority of the state — attacks in which the perpetrators are expressing their contempt for our society.” — Rainer Wendt, President of the German Police Union.

“Once Duisburg-Marxloh was a popular shopping and residential area. Now clans claim the streets for themselves. The police are powerless. The descent of the district is nightmarish.” — N24 Television.

Police say they are alarmed by the brutality and aggression of the clans, who are said to view crime as leisure activity. If police dare to intervene, hundreds of clan members are mobilized to confront the police.

A 17-page report prepared for the NRW State Parliament revealed how Lebanese clans in Duisburg divide up certain neighborhoods in order to pursue their criminal activities, such as robbery, drug dealing and extortion.

“Further data collection is not legally permissible. Both internally and externally, any classification that could be used to depreciate human beings must be avoided. In this respect, the use of the term ‘family clan’ is forbidden from the police point of view.” — Ralf Jäger, Interior Minister, North Rhine-Westphalia.

Two police officers stopped a driver who ran a red light. The driver got out of the car and ran away. When police caught up with him, they were confronted by more than 50 migrants. A 15-year-old attacked a policeman from behind and began strangling him, rendering him unconscious.

The international media was shaken by the October 31 police raids in Turkey, on both the Cumhuriyet daily newspaper and on the homes of its editors and writers.

“The law on abandoned properties was an excuse to seize other people’s property, and Armenian assets in particular became the main basis of the republican regime. The property of the murdered Armenians was Turkified, along with Greek and Jewish properties.” — Alin Ozinian, journalist.

It seems that throughout Turkish history, the Turks have not been able to take a single step without committing crimes against the non-Muslim citizens of their country.

The international media was shaken by the October 31 police raids in Turkey, on both the Cumhuriyet daily newspaper and on the homes of its editors and writers.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) declared that it is “appalled by the accelerating extinction of media pluralism in Turkey,” and referred to Cumhuriyet (“The Republic”) as “the latest victim of ‘never-ending purge’ of Turkish media.”

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) now faces congressional inquiries, legal challenges, and harsh criticism from the scientific community that are shredding the agency’s credibility and threatening its future. The Lyon, France–based group is an arm of the World Health Organization and has received millions in U.S. tax dollars, funding that is now being questioned by top lawmakers on Capitol Hill including House Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz. Congress is also investigating whether IARC is colluding with officials at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to advance a political agenda rather than sound science.

IARC’s central role is to evaluate certain risk factors and whether they can cause cancer. Each year, an IARC working group produces a report — called a monograph — classifying the level of risk for each agent. Out of the nearly 1,000 factors IARC has evaluated, only one (caprolactam) was deemed non-carcinogenic.

But one particular finding — that the agricultural chemical glyphosate is carcinogenic — led to serious questions about IARCs scientific integrity and exposed conflicts of interest among IARC participants who are trying to influence public policy here and abroad. In March 2015, IARC released its monograph on glyphosate, classifying the chemical as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” It is the only international agency to issue such a classification.

That report raised immediate suspicions for being politically motivated; glyphosate is a widely used weedkiller now targeted by environmental and anti-GMO groups around the world because it is used on several genetically engineered crops. The chemical was created by Monsanto, which also sells genetically engineered seeds, and sold under the brand name Roundup. Nearly every other scientific and governmental agency has determined that glyphosate is safe. (After the IARC report in March 2015, a separate WHO agency found that glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer.) But armed with the imprimatur of a global health agency, anti-GMO activists brandish the report as proof that glyphosate is unsafe and unhealthy.

No intelligent government should impair the right of free speech to placate people who falsely claim they are victims when often they are, in fact, aggressors.

To the 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, however, all human rights must first be based on Islamic religious law, Sharia: whatever is inside Sharia is a human right, whatever is outside Sharia is not a human right.

Therefore, slavery or having sex with children or beating one’s wife, or calling rapes that do not have four witnesses adultery the punishment for which is death, or a woman officially having half the worth of a man, are all “human rights.”

Soft jihad includes rewriting history as with the UNESCO vote claiming that ancient Biblical monuments such as Rachel’s Tomb or the Cave of the Patriarchs are Islamic, when historically Islam did not even exist until the seventh century; migration to widen Islam (hijrah), as we are seeing now in Europe and Turkish threats to flood Germany with migrants; cultural penetration such as promoting Islam in school textbooks or tailoring curricula for “political correctness”; political and educational infiltration, as well as intimidation (soft jihad with the threat of hard jihad just underneath it).

More regrettable is that these are so often done, as at UNESCO, with the help and complicity of the West.

Both hard and soft jihad are how Islam historically has been able to overrun Persia, Turkey, Greece, Southern Spain, Portugal, all of North Africa, and all of Eastern Europe. It is up to us not to let this be done to us again.

Archaeology has long been used by the state of Israel as a means of demonstrating modern Jewish rights to an old land. Palestinians, for their part, have often resisted these findings, either rejecting them outright or pointing to other ancient artifacts to support their own national claims. In the Holy Land, historical heritage is one of the few truly abundant resources, and it stands at the center of the latest battle in the decades-old conflict.

Last week, the U.N.’s culture and heritage body, Unesco, passed a resolution referring to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount exclusively by its Arabic name—the Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary—and only mentioning its significance to Islam. For Muslims, Jerusalem is the third holiest city, behind Mecca and Medina. For Jews, it is the most sacred: Two Jewish temples stood there in antiquity.

The Unesco resolution outraged Israel. The head of the Israel Antiquities Authority, the government body in charge of archaeology and artifacts, likened Unesco to Islamic State in its destruction of cultural heritage. The Palestinian Authority praised the move for preserving the city for the three monotheistic faiths and saw it as a political win, with one official accusing Israel of “using archaeological claims and distortion of facts as a way to legitimize the annexation of occupied east Jerusalem.”

In its more than 3,000 years of habitation, Jerusalem has known many masters, including Canaanites, Judeans, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Hasmoneans, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans and Brits. Both Israelis and Palestinians consider Jerusalem the historic center of their national identity and claim it as their capital.

Excavations in Jerusalem, particularly around the Temple Mount, have provoked protests from both sides. Israelis contend that maintenance projects carried out by the Muslim organization that manages the contested site have resulted in the destruction of artifacts and the geological strata critical to modern archaeology. The Palestinians, in turn, claim that Israeli excavations south of the site ignore Muslim history in the pursuit of Jewish artifacts that could be used to lay claim to the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in East Jerusalem.

As it happens, just as Unesco was passing its controversial resolution, the Israel Antiquities Authority was holding its annual conference, which focused on new archaeological discoveries around Jerusalem. The finds announced at the gathering included artifacts from limited excavations on the Temple Mount carried out over the past decade in concert with Islamic authorities and a 2,700-year-old papyrus bearing the oldest known reference to Jerusalem in Hebrew outside the Bible.

Although some scholars have raised questions about the authenticity of the ancient text, Israeli politicians immediately pointed to it as incontrovertible proof of the ancient Jewish link to Jerusalem—Unesco be damned. An Israel Antiquities Authority spokeswoman insisted that the timing of the announcement was coincidental. “There is no connection whatsoever, no relevance,” she said. “The conference was planned months in advance.” CONTINUE AT SITE

“It is absolutely true that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism as we have seen it before. This is a new breed. A mixture. It is dangerous and it is scary because this anti-Zionist movement cannot survive without carrying the antisemitism along with it. So for the Jewish Zionist, the vast majority of Jewish people in the world, we become targets. Until someone in a position of power puts a stop to this, preferably through an accepted definition of antisemitism, the vast majority of Jews remain ‘legitimate’ targets of hate crimes.”

Yesterday there was an event at the House of Lords, put together by the Palestine Return Centre (PRC). The evening was hosted by Jenny Tonge.

There were no tickets remaining, but I had to go. The PRC and I have history. It was at one of their events that Gerald Kaufman told tales of Jewish money and Israeli conspiracies. Jenny Tonge needs little introduction. I wanted in. A little back story, a tale or two spun along the way, and I had successfully gate-crashed a party at the Houses of Parliament. Soon I was sitting in the front row of committee room 2A.

As it turned out Tonge was tame, but there was still much to shake me. I go to so many of these events and I am still trying to formulate a complete picture of what it is I am seeing. For example, there is more antisemitism in the air than there was 18 months ago. Much more. I see it on campus, I saw buckets of it at a recent event at Lichfield. I saw it last night at Westminster. A definite increase. But why?

There is no point being directed by anger, nor to lose yourself in the creation of an irrational inhuman enemy. These methods merely provide a lazy way out, a system of avoiding uncomfortable moments of self-reflection. Theirs is a line that can be drawn. Drawn between the civil war in 1948 and those who sit in the House of Lords today demanding an apology from the British government. We can draw the line further back, even beyond the 1917 letter they created this event to discuss.

I look around and feel sorry for the Arabs in the room. They have tied their flag to yet another pole that will only bring additional wasted years, more bloodshed. I cast my mind back to the Arab families I knew so well. Families, friends, in Ramallah, Nablus, Jericho and Bethlehem. In Qalqilya and Tulkarm. These are the choices of the people representing them? It is 16 years since the outbreak of the second ‘intifada’. Since all those bridges were burnt. Another generation wasted. How can you not have sympathy for a desperate people who depend so totally on this, the hopeless cast of a thousand who lead them?
The PRC event

Almost immediately I realised I was not the only Zionist in the room. Jenny Tonge publicly welcomed someone from ‘Israel radio’. I am not sure why she did this. Tonge used the opportunity to score points, by thanking the reporter for the publicity his articles had brought her in the past. Reveling in her own notoriety. But she had also passed warning to everyone present that Zionist ears were in the room. From that moment I knew Jenny Tonge would be on her best behaviour.

The event was to launch the ‘apology for Balfour’ campaign and the central thrust was to discuss activity over the next twelve months. Within a week we can expect to see the launch of an online petition – target 100,000 signatures by late Spring. There are also plans to have a large public demonstration in Trafalgar Square at the time of the 100th anniversary.

Then came the speakers. One introducing himself as a ‘British Palestinian’. What a ‘British Palestinian’ is I have no idea. They are born here. They are British passport holders, not refugees. This one Karl Sabbagh was born in Worcestershire in the early 1940’s, so whatever his family did, they did out of their own self interest. His mother was British, of American and Irish parentage. Karl is willing the international community to create an alliance of power to remove the ‘invaders’ and replace the Jewish state. A mirror image of the Zionist monster he imagines in his head. Karl Sabbagh is on a strange personal mission.

The first two talks were nothing special. The same fare I have heard 1000 times. Balfour was ‘a mistake’. The telling of a narrative held together by sticky tape with a C.S Lewis or Enid Blyton signature. The third talk was by Betty Hunter, Honorary President of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Enough said. There was also a ‘special guest’ speaker, who had not been on the programme. Yakov M. Rabkin, ‘a professor of history at the Université de Montréal’. A rabid anti-Zionist Jew.

Then the audience gets to speak. We leave the scripted, careful talk behind, and open up the room for comment. There were four incidents that I need to describe, to expand on this issue of growing antisemitism. But first, the groundwork: