RUTHFULLY YOURS

Western Europe is now being hit by a wave of terror. Israel has expressed sympathy to the governments and peoples, and is helping or has offered to help the hardest-hit countries—France, Germany, and Belgium—fight the terror.

It has been different when terror has pounded Israel. Even during the five-year onslaught known as the Second Intifada (2000-2005), Europe was sharply critical of Israel and denounced all its terror-fighting methods as immoral.

The contrast is particularly striking in light of some disparities. From the Charlie Hebdo attack on January 7, 2015 to Tuesday’s attack in a church, 239 have been killed in France (pop. 67 million). In the Brussels bombings on March 22 this year, 32 were killed in Belgium (pop. 11 million). Since September 15, 2015, terror attacks (counting the Munich shooting late last week) have killed 15 in Germany (pop. 82 million).

During the five years of the Second Intifada, however, 1000 were killed in Israel (current pop. 8.5 million; even smaller then)—a much higher rate even than France has endured since the start of 2015.

Yet, in the course of those intifada years—and since then as well, including, of course, the Gaza wars—Europe’s criticism of Israel’s fight against terror has been unremitting.

The irony is deepened by the fact that some of the Israeli measures that Europe has most fiercely condemned are now used routinely by European countries themselves—without, of course, having to put up with criticism from Israel or anyone else.

For instance, there was once a time when targeted killings—if practiced by Israel—stirred world outrage. On April 17, 2004, with the Second Intifada still seething, an Israeli airstrike killed Hamas terror master Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi in Gaza.

Condemnations followed like clockwork. From the European direction, they were voiced, among others, by then-EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, then-Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini, and then-British foreign minister Jack Straw, who said: “The British government has made it repeatedly clear that so-called targeted assassinations of this kind are unlawful, unjustified and counterproductive.” Only a U.S. veto saved Israel from UN Security Council censure for the killing.

Today, of course, drone strikes on terrorists by the U.S. and European countries are so routine that they can hardly compete for attention with weather forecasts. On November 26, 2015, the Daily Mail reported that “British drone strikes have killed 305 ISIS targets in the last year….”

European Union High Representative/Vice-President Federica Mogherini has publicly rejected PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s call for Arab nations to lobby the UN Security Council to not endorse a Quartet Report that Abbas considers biased in favour of Israel.

Addressing the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on 22 July, Mogherini declared:

“John Kerry and I sit together in quite an impressive number of different formats. Together we decided to revitalize the Middle East Quartet. The report we have come up with just a few weeks ago cannot be underestimated. For the first time ever, the US, the EU, Russia and the United Nations have agreed on a clear analysis of the situation on the ground, and also more importantly on recommendations on the way forward to turn the two states solution into reality. Together we have also agreed to engage more regularly with the key Arab states such as Saudi Arabia – the initiator of the Arab Peace Initiative – Egypt – for obvious reasons – and Jordan – for its role in the Holy places.”

The Report certainly cannot be underestimated – condemning and identifying the PLO and Hamas as fostering and condoning terrorism, including:

* “recent acts of terrorism” against Israelis, and incitement to violence including over 250 attacks and attempted attacks by Palestinians against Israelis since October 2015 – resulting in at least 30 Israelis having been killed in stabbings, shootings, vehicular attacks, and a bombing.

* Palestinians committing “terrorist attacks” being often glorified publicly as “heroic martyrs”

* Some members of Fatah – which Abbas heads – publicly supporting attacks and their perpetrators, as well as encouraging violent confrontation – including a senior Fatah official referring to perpetrators as “heroes and a crown on the head of every Palestinian”.

* Palestinian leaders having not consistently and clearly condemned specific “terrorist attacks”. And streets, squares and schools having been named after Palestinians who have committed “acts of terrorism”.

I live in Ma’ale Adumim, Israel. Some call it a West Bank Settlement but actually it’s a beautiful municipality of about 40,000 Jews. It has a mall with typical women’s shoe stores, places to eat, jeans stores, ACE hardware and more. It’s about 30 minutes east of Jerusalem by bus.

Ma’ale Adumim was almost given away to the PA by either PM Barak or PM Ohlmert in one of the land-for-peace deals that were turned down by the Arabs because 95% of what they asked for wasn’t enough. They can get way more dollars and euros complaining about an imaginary plight than by having their own state.

Between us and Jerusalem are Palestinian villages. Actually they’re townships with 8 to 12 story residential apartment buildings. There are large signs at the entrances to these townships warning Jews not to make a wrong turn and accidentally enter them. The signs say it’s dangerous to your life.

Israel is different than most countries; its immigrants are Jewish. First they sell their houses in America, France, South Africa, the former Soviet Union and other countries. Then many arrive with good amounts of cash. Not all have money, but enough to drive up the prices of apartments. The prices are alright for some but difficult for many children of those who’ve immigrated in the past decades and marry in their 20s.

In the Jerusalem area land is expensive and rents are high. New construction advertises luxury apartments and old buildings are constantly being renovated. But there’s lots of land around Ma’ale Adumim. It’s desolate. It’s desert. It’s comprised of rolling hills barren of vegetation.

Our mayor has been asking for permission to build on outlying land for years but the Israeli government had not given permission because of international pressure.

It’s been called Palestinian land but a Palestinian people never existed. The land was Jordanian or it was part of the Ottoman Empire. The desolate land around us never had a recognizable population. Most of today’s so-called Palestinians originally came from Jordan and Egypt for jobs. Yasser Arafat was Egyptian.

Palestine never existed beyond a map at British headquarters.

If the Obama administration needs any more clarity on what radical Islamic terrorism is all about, it was provided by Islamic State butchers in a Catholic Church in Normandy, France when they beheaded 86-year-old French priest Jacques Hamel as they chanted – wait for it “Allahu Akbhar” (God is great) As the Daily Mail reports:

Two ISIS knifemen who stormed a church in Normandy forced an elderly priest to kneel before filming themselves butchering him and performing a ‘sermon in Arabic’ at the altar, a terrified witness has revealed.

The attackers, claimed as ‘soldiers’ by ISIS, were both known to French police before they cut the throat of 84-year-old priest Jacques Hamel at the church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray near Rouen.

Both were shot dead by police marksmen as they emerged from the building shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ following the attack that also left a nun critically injured.

French President Francois Hollande, who visited the scene today, said the country is now ‘at war’ with ISIS after the terror group claimed responsibility for the attack.

It is a war between civilizations and cultures. It is also a war between religions, although we like to tip-toe around the politically correct “religion of peace” argument. As Christians, even those President Obama called “less than loving”, are being slaughtered around the world, and a French priest is beheaded, it might be time to ponder that Christian tenet, by their fruits ye shall know them.

The war on Christians by Islamist fanatics worldwide by ISIS and its associated groups has been documented by Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch:

We have seen this before on several occasions in Kenya. In September 2013 at Nairobi’s Westgate Mall, Muslims murdered people who couldn’t answer questions about Islam. In June 2014, Muslims murdered people who could not pass an Islam quiz. In November 2014, Muslims murdered 28 non-Muslims who couldn’t recite Qur’an verses. In April 2015, Muslims screaming “Allahu akbar” stormed Garissa University College, and only shot those who couldn’t recite Qur’an.Now we see it in Mali.

And this is coming to the U.S.

What “provocation” had the murdered priest, Father Jacques Hamel, provided?

An enemy willing to slaughter the most rollicking secularists and the most devout priest, both in their places of work, is an enemy with the entirety of French civilisation and culture in its sights. It is an enemy — extremist Islam — clearly intent not on some kind of tributary offering or suit for peace, but rather an enemy which seeks its opponent’s total and utter destruction.

Should this not be the moment for the entirety of one of the greatest cultures on earth to unite as one, turn on this common enemy and destroy it first, in the name of civilisation?

It is now 18 months since two gunmen forced their way into the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris and set about murdering the staff of that magazine. The gunmen from al-Qaeda in Yemen called for the editor — “Charb” — by name before murdering him and most of his colleagues. In an interview shortly before his death, taking into account the threat to his life which entailed constant security protection, Stéphane Charbonnier had said, “I prefer to die standing than live on my knees.” Charb did die standing, in the office of the magazine he edited.

In the 18 months since the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the massive demonstrations in solidarity on the streets of Paris, France has suffered a terrible set of further terrorist assaults The ISIS attack (which killed 130 people) last November on the Bataclan Theatre and other sites around Paris and the attack (which killed 84 people) in Nice on July 14 are the deadliest and most prominent. But other acts of terror — including the murder last month in their home of two members of the police, carried out by a man pledging allegiance to ISIS –have gone on and almost become normal.

Yesterday’s murder of an 84-year old priest, Father Jacques Hamel, while he was saying mass is shocking even by the standards of France during this period. Two men claiming allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS) entered the church and ritually murdered the priest by slitting his throat. A second victim is currently struggling to stay alive. It is hard to see any end in this sight of this horror, but these two atrocities across an 18-month gap are worth considering alongside each other — not least because the reaction to them in France and outside may contain the tiniest glimmer of hope in a very dark time.

One of the striking things about the outrage after the murders at Charlie Hebdo was that it very nearly united France. There were those, including people who had been the victims of Charlie Hebdo’s satire in the past, who were not able to lionise them. But across mainstream society in France, there was near unanimity around the idea that the magazine and its rude, irreverent and specifically anti-clerical style of satire was uniquely French. No one seemed surprised that so many people around the world had missed the point of the magazine — people across the Muslim world in particular. The publication was recognised as a particularly French publication which as such stood for more than itself. In the days and weeks after January 7, 2015. the sense of the Republic itself having been attacked was especially strong.

Jesus warned his Apostles that men of faith would kill them, thinking they had done God a favor.

Pope Francis, in the Vatican, referred to this killing as “an absurd murder.” He could not be more wrong. This was a purposeful act of war against Judeo-Christian civilization. The murder of Father Jacques has great meaning. Our would-be replacements are telling us, “it is time for you to leave the stage of history.”

This most recent murder is additional evidence that the old France is dying.

Yesterday at a Catholic church in France, there were two quite different types of martyrdoms.

Two young male Muslims, bent on waging personal jihad and thereby securing salvation through martyrdom, burst into the old church of St. Étienne-du-Rouvray in Rouen, Normandy during the morning Mass. There they martyred the 85-year old priest, Father Jacques Hamel. They slit his throat as if he were an animal killed for the recent Eid-al-Adha (“The Feast of Sacrifice”), celebrated by Muslims all over the world on the last day of Ramadan.

The Catholic Mass is re-enactment of the voluntary sacrifice of Christ crucified to redeem us before God.

The murder committed by the two terrorists was in obedience to the Koran-directed will of Allah, to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them” (Quran 9:5).

We Christians believe that Father Hamel’s martyrdom ushers his soul before the presence of God.

As the two murders stepped outside the church, they too were martyred, dying just after shouting “Allahu Akbar!” (“Allah is Greatest!”).

The head of a department of the Supreme Court of Appeals has revealed that nearly 3,000 marriages were registered between the victims of sexual abuse, including rape, and their assailants. The judge mentioned a particular case in which three men kidnapped and raped a girl, then one of them married her and the sentences for all three were lifted.

Instead of passing legislation to amend grotesque articles in the penal code, Erdogan keeps doing “family engineering” in line with his Islamist thinking. Most recently Erdogan told a women’s association that “family planning and contraception were not for Muslim families.”

Turkey’s First Lady, Emine Erdogan, shocked many people when she said that the Ottoman-era harems were “educational centers that prepared women for life.”

There have been several dramatic aspects of Turkey’s creeping Islamization over the past 15 years. Anti-Semitism, xenophobia, an eroding secular social life and majoritarianism (that the majority in a society is entitled to primacy) are not all. The Islamization of Turkish society has also made life more difficult for women.

In 2015, Turkey ranked 130th in gender equality among a group of 145 countries. But that was hardly surprising. Only a year earlier, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had objected to equality between men and women. “Women’s equality with men is against nature,” he said.

All this is in contrast to the secular principles Erdogan has long fought to undo. Turkish women won suffrage as early as 1934, 25 years before Swiss women won the same right. Now, 82 years after winning the right to vote, Turkish women had to hear their president, Erdogan, offering them “Turkish-style” women’s rights. “We don’t necessarily have to express, defend and implement women’s rights in the format and style that exists in the West,” Erdogan commented.

Erdogan is not alone in thinking that a woman’s best role should be as a mother. His wife, Turkey’s First Lady, Emine Erdogan, shocked many people when she said that the Ottoman-era harems were “educational centers that prepared women for life.”

That being the mindset of Turkey’s most powerful man, life for modern Turkish women, especially those who dissent about anything, would become harder.

In May a Turkish court sentenced a journalist, Ms. Arzu Yildiz, to 20 months in jail for showing video footage of arms shipments in trucks apparently operated by Turkish intelligence and carrying a cargo of weapons bound for various Islamist groups in Syria. Erdogan has been particularly sensitive about the film and claimed that searching the trucks and some of the media coverage of it were part of a plot by his political enemies to undermine him and embarrass Turkey.

BEIRUT—The attack on a French church signals the arrival in Europe of a type of intimidation long familiar to Christians in the Middle East, whether from religious extremists, other armed groups or even secular governments.

In areas of Syria and Iraq under its control, Islamic State has seized churches, dismantling crucifixes and vandalizing paintings depicting scenes out of the Bible—considered to be idolatry in their hard-line interpretation of Islam. Many Christians flee when the militants sweep their areas; thousands escaped from northern Iraq when Islamic State took over in summer 2014.

Its branch in Libya killed 21 Egyptian Christians and 31 Ethiopian and Eritrean Christians in two separate massacres last year, slitting their throats and recording their deaths for Islamic State propaganda, which highlighted their religion as justification for the slaughter.

Islamic State’s Egyptian affiliate, Sinai Province, in late June claimed the shooting death of a Christian priest in the north Sinai city Al Arish. The group said the priest was targeted for being a “disbelieving combatant.” It has attacked hundreds of police and military personnel in the area since 2014.

Egypt’s Coptic Christians have long claimed they are treated as second-class citizens by the country’s secular but authoritarian governments, and peaceful protests against discrimination have been met with brutality by security forces, resulting in dozens dead and injured.

There also have been attacks by other extremist groups and unknown actors in Syria and Iraq.

Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, an Italian Jesuit priest who lived in Syria for three decades, went missing in 2013 in the city of Raqqa, shortly after it was captured by Islamic State. His fate remains unclear.

In 2014, 13 Syrian nuns and other women captured by al Qaeda-linked rebels and released three months later in exchange for a hefty ransom. They had been abducted from their monastery in the ancient Christian town of Maaloula, north of the Syrian capital Damascus.

When claiming attacks across Europe in recent months, Islamic State has claimed they targeted “Crusaders”—a reference to Christian armies that battled Muslims in the Middle Ages, used to denote Western intervention in the Mideast—and members of the U.S.-led military coalition striking its positions, rather than citing specific religious motives. CONTINUE AT SITE

ATHENS—Greece took a major step toward approving the construction of the first officially sanctioned mosque in Athens, after decades of objections that were often colored by the country’s fraught relationship with neighboring Turkey.

Greece’s highest administrative court, the Council of State, this month dismissed objections from some local residents to the planning application to build a mosque, clearing the way for the issuance of a building permit.

The development now goes to the environment ministry and interior ministry for procedural approvals, a process that could take weeks or over a year as it winds through Greece’s bureaucracy.

A spike in refugees fleeing the Middle East has swelled the capital’s Muslim population, already on the rise over the past decade from immigration from Pakistan, Afghanistan and other Asian countries.

The political mood has also shifted under the left-wing government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, only a few years after the rise of the anti-immigrant fascist movement Golden Dawn. The government supports the mosque and plans to cover the €1 million ($1.1 million) construction costs.

“The refugee crisis has increased the pressure for the mosque to be built,” said John Dimakis, political analyst at Athens-based communications consultancy STR.

The planned building, on state-owned land in the western Athens neighborhood of Elaionas, is an inconspicuous low-rise complex with no minaret and a prayer hall for up for 350 people.

Athens is one of the few capital cities in the European Union that has no purpose-built mosque, despite being home to an estimated 200,000 Muslims, according to a senior government official.

Until now, Muslims have worshiped in unofficial locations such as private homes, basements, and abandoned warehouses. Greek government officials estimate there are 70 to 80 unauthorized mosques in Athens and the surrounding region. Four such sites have been given a license, but none is a purpose-built mosque. All places of religious worship need a permit in Greece.