RUTHFULLY YOURS

First he exposed the History Channel’s miniseries “Roots” as root-and-brunch fiction. Now, the courageous epistolary warrior Kunta (Jack) Kerwick has turned his attention to correcting lies about slavery, promulgated in media and scholarly circles.

A point forcefully made by Kerwick is that although a vibrant, indigenous slave trade was conducted well into the nineteenth century in the interior of West Africa, slavery has become the White Man’s cross to bear.

Also omitted, in the course of the “honest” conversation about race directed by our political masters, is that credit for the demise of the slave trade in Africa belongs to Europeans. In his compact study, The Slave Trade, British historian Jeremy Black (London, 2006), highlights the “leading role Britain played in the abolition of slavery [as]… an example of an ethical foreign policy.” Britain agonized over this repugnant institution, failed to reconcile it with the Christian faith, and consequently abolished it.

Professor Black condemns the exclusive focus on the Atlantic—or transatlantic—slave trade to the exclusion of the robust slave trade conducted by Arabs across the Sahara Desert. Or, across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea to markets in the Middle East. This exclusive focus on westerners as slave owners and traders, notes Black, “fits with the [political] narrative of Western exploitation” of underdeveloped countries and their people.

The greatest development economist to live was Lord P.T. Bauer. As The Economist quipped, Bauer was to foreign aid what Friedrich Hayek was to socialism: a slayer. In his Dissent on Development (London, 1971), Bauer bolstered Black’s point well before the latter made it: “The slave trade between Africa and the Middle East antedated the Atlantic slave trade by centuries, and far outlasted it. Tens of millions of Africans were carried away—north through the Sahara, and from East Africa, by Arab and Muslim slave traders, well before Europeans took up the trade from West Africa.”

Recall when Donald Trump cast doubt on the intentions of many of the Syrian refugees by claiming a disproportionate number were “young, strong men”? Most media quickly attempted to debunk his claim.

Well, Trump’s claim now seems borne out by data from the Pew Research Center.

A shocking report released yesterday on European asylum applications in 2015 shows that, indeed, the refugees are disproportionately represented by “military-age” adult males — to an alarming degree.

A majority of the applicants came from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq in what has become the biggest demographic shift in Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union.

From the Pew report:

As a result, about four-in-ten asylum seekers in Europe in 2015 (42%) were young men ages 18 to 34. This was also true for most leading origin countries: 39% of those from Syria were young men, as were 38% of those from Afghanistan and 47% of those from Iraq. Young adult males made up a larger share of asylum seekers from some origin countries. For example, roughly three-fourths of asylum seekers from Gambia (80%), Pakistan (76%) and Bangladesh (76%) were young adult men in 2015.

The demographic profile of asylum seekers in destination countries varies considerably. About four-in-ten asylum seekers applying in Germany (39%) in 2015 were young adult males, about the same level as asylum seekers to Europe (42%) as a whole. In Hungary, about half (51%) of asylum seekers were more young adult men. In Sweden, just 28% of asylum seekers were young men in 2015. Meanwhile, young adult men made up 74% of asylum seekers in Italy, the highest share of any country in 2015.

Europe has also seen a spike in the number of unaccompanied minors (children under 18 who arrived in Europe without adult guardians) applying for asylum in recent years. Between 2008 and 2015, 198,500 unaccompanied minors applied for asylum in the European Union, Norway and Switzerland, of which nearly half (48% or about 96,000) arrived in 2015. Among all first-time asylum applications in 2015, nearly 7% were from unaccompanied minors, the highest share since data on unaccompanied minors became available in 2008.

For purposes of comparison, of the 4.8 million Syrian refugees the UN has registered, the population split is nearly even: 50.3 percent were men, 49.7 percent were women. And yet, the Syrian refugees who applied for asylum in Europe last year were 71 percent male to 29 percent female.

https://pjmedia.com/video/paris-bus-attacked-with-molotov-cocktails-men-shout-allahu-akbar/

The mainstream media haven’t been reporting this: men, who were shouting “Allahu Akbar,” destroyed a passenger bus in Paris this past week, using molotov cocktails and explosives. See video at site.

One year into the nuclear deal, two credible and timely intelligence reports reveal that Iran has no intention of honoring the terms of the deal, which, anyway, it never signed.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency revealed that the Iranian government has pursued a “clandestine” path to obtain illicit nuclear technology and equipment from German companies “at what is, even by international standards, a quantitatively high level.”

A secret agreement, obtained by the Associated Press, discloses that Iran’s nuclear deal would not only lift constraints on Iran’s nuclear program after the nuclear deal, but it will also do so long before the deal expires — including the installation of thousands of centrifuges, five times more than what it currently possesses, as well enriching uranium at a much higher pace.

The more the White House ignores Iran’s violations of the nuclear accord, the more Iran will be emboldened to violate international laws and the terms of the nuclear agreement.

On July 14, 2015, Iran and the six world powers known as the P5+1 (China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) reached an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. The deal was intended to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions and put a hold on Tehran’s nuclear development.

President Obama promised that the deal is not based on trust rather anchored in verification. Nevertheless, the following revelations of confidential documents as well as the following breaches of the nuclear agreement by Iran, reveal otherwise.

On paper, the nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), stipulates a series of regulations, monitoring mechanisms, and restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities. But how can the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) maintain these transparency standards and follow through on the proposed regulations? How can the IAEA be sure to detect all illicit nuclear activities in the 18th largest country in the world?

Iran has a history of deceiving the IAEA by conducting clandestine nuclear activities, as it did in Arak, Natanz, and Ferdow.

It is clear based on this stage of political evolution in the West that democracy – to the extent it has meaning – is a form of inclusiveness, expanding the horizons of political participation. On one level it makes sense — why should anyone be denied participation when interests in the aggregate are why we employ the term “representative government”?

The issue as it has now developed is that extensive political involvement results in economic hazards. A government accountable to the electorate regulates to satisfy one constituency or another, borrows money for real and perceived needs, and debases the soundness of the currency for its own political advantage.

Extension of political involvement also means that a “servile” class of those who do not work, but must be supported, are part of the democratic mosaic. Recognizing the imperfections in a free market, compassion has become a moral anodyne. The moral life, in which virtue is a constraint on certain behavior, retreats before a relativism that abjures judgment. So far in the direction of relativism have we gone that it is freedom that must be defined, not slavery. Freedom once meant the capacity to choose along with facing the consequences of that choice. There are burdens attached to freedom. Now freedom is being able to do what one wants assuming the state accepts you as a member of the servile class.

There is a price to be paid for the condition. Every Western nation is in debt. The U.S. level is about to reach $20 trillion, with liabilities at least three times that sum. Deficits in fiscal budgets are the pattern, with the only question being the level of the deficit. The conditions are dicey but political inclusiveness militates against change. The politics of the era makes change a rhetorical claim, not a realistic policy option. Imagine the consequence of trying to reduce entitlement spending?

Senator Bernie Sanders campaigns on free tuition. The British take great pride in a single-payer health care system that has put great strain on national finances. Greece is effectively bankrupt because the state has assumed the role of parent and insurer. Even the once affluent Germany is facing financial hardship in its attempt to incorporate a million migrants into its governmental system.

LONDON—A woman was killed and as many as five others were wounded in a knife attack in central London late Wednesday, hours after more armed police officers were deployed on the city’s streets under measures to prepare the country for the types of attacks by Islamic extremists seen elsewhere in Europe.

London’s Metropolitan Police, known as Scotland Yard, said they arrested a suspect in connection with the attack in Russell Square.

The police didn’t rule out terrorism as a motive, according to a police statement early Thursday. No further information was immediately available.

Earlier on Wednesday, Scotland Yard said the deployment of the previously announced extra armed officers would include ensuring a visible presence in the city, including at well-known landmarks. In the U.K., more than 90% of police officers are unarmed, with only specialist firearms teams permitted to carry submachine guns and pistols capable of killing a hostile suspect.

Extremists have launched attacks recently in France, Belgium and Germany, and their methods have included multiple shooters and lone assailants using weapons including guns and heavy vehicles. That has left authorities across Europe scrambling to adapt.

In January, following the massacre in Paris late last year, U.K. authorities said they would add 600 officers trained to handle weapons to the 2,200 already in London. Those are the officers who are now ready to be deployed. CONTINUE AT SITE

We have heard many disturbing statements in recent years made by Catholic clerics, from bishops and cardinals right up to Pope Francis, who seem to believe that Islam is a religion like any other, that criticism of Islam is unjustified and based on the motiveless malignity of “Islamophobia,” and that the main duty of Catholics with respect to Muslims is not to challenge or confront them both as to their ideology and as to the many acts of Muslim terrorism, but to engage, rather, in endless Catholic-Muslim Dialogue. Ever since the Second Vatican Council, the Church has had an ill-considered mandate to engage in “dialogue” with Muslims, as the Committee for Ecumenical and Religious Affairs of the United States Conference of Bishops has stated:

“The declaration has been consistently upheld by recent popes. Pope John Paul II affirmed the need for dialogue with Muslims on numerous occasions throughout his long pontificate (1978–2005). For example, in Crossing the Threshold of Hope he remarked in the chapter entitled “Muhammad?” that “believers in Allah are particularly close to us” and that “the religiosity of Muslims deserves our respect” ([New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005], 91, 93). The pope also reiterated the central mandate of Nostra Aetate by reminding the faithful that they are called to maintain “a dialogue with followers of the ‘Prophet’” and that “the Church remains always open to dialogue and cooperation” (ibid., 93, 94).

Unfortunately, while American Bishops claim that Muslims have been willing to engage in such dialogue, they report that the Christian side has not been as forthcoming:

“Sadly, in recent years, there has been a deliberate rejection of this call to engage in dialogue with our Muslim brothers and sisters by some in the Catholic Church and in other ecclesial families. We understand the confusion and deep emotions…

Not “confusion” and unspecified “deep emotions,” but rage.

…stirred by real and apparent acts of aggression and discrimination…

Not unspecified “acts of aggression and discrimination,” but mass murder, repeated again and again.

…by certain Muslims against non-Muslims, often against Christians abroad. We, and increasingly our Muslim partners in dialogue, are concerned about these very real phenomena. Along with many of our fellow Catholics and the many Muslims who themselves are targeted by radicals…

Muslims have not been “targeted” in Europe, even if some have unavoidably been among those killed when large groups have been the target. It is only Shia Muslims in the Middle East and Pakistan who have been deliberately targeted, by Sunnis, and solely because they are regarded by those Sunnis as Infidels, even the worst kind of Infidels.

“Last year, Weigel wrote a First Things article emphasizing John Paul II’s refusal to believe that some problems in the world cannot be fixed:

Those frightened by the seeming power of the wicked in the world today can take heart from what John Paul II said to young people in Cracow in June 1979: “Be afraid only of thoughtlessness and pusillanimity.” Be not afraid: his signature phrase, lived to the end, made him John Paul the Great.”

As over 3 million young Catholics gathered in Krakow during a time of escalating violence across the world — and as the Sussers reflected on the horrific violence that affected their family decades ago — the words of the first and only Polish pope remained as timeless and important as ever.

The sun set slowly, shining its last light against the barbed-wire fences of Auschwitz, and casting a shadow on the ground where unspeakable atrocities were committed, three-quarters of a century ago. Ron Susser and his 16-year-old daughter Zoe set foot onto the former concentration camp, crossing beneath a gate that bore the infamous inscription: arbeit macht frei, or “Work sets you free.”

After traveling all day, a group of 220 people from the Arlington diocese in Virginia had arrived at the camp as part of their World Youth Day pilgrimage to Krakow, Poland. The trip to Auschwitz was an emotional one for much of the group. But it held particular significance for Ron and Zoe.

During the Nazi regime, now-notable figures such as Anne Frank and her father, Viktor Frankl, Primo Levi, Maximilian Kolbe, Edith Stein, and Elie Wiesel were imprisoned in Auschwitz. The concentration camp also detained many of Ron’s ancestors, only three of whom survived: his great aunt and his parents.

“My parents were liberated on May 1, 1945,” Susser said. “My father referred to that day as his second birthday.”

Auschwitz operated for less than five years, and yet the number of people murdered at the camp is estimated to be somewhere around 1.1 million. Only about 200,000 people who passed through the Auschwitz camps survived.

The group from the Arlington diocese arranged to visit Auschwitz on the first day of their trip to Poland for World Youth Day, a global encounter that took place all of last week and gathered 3 million Catholics in Krakow to see Pope Francis.

The Islamic State terror group has come out publicly to reject Pope Francis’ claims that the war being waged by Islamic terrorists is not religious in nature, assuring the pontiff that their sole motivation is religious and sanctioned by Allah in the Qur’an.

The Islamic State terror group has come out publicly to reject Pope Francis’ claims that the war being waged by Islamic terrorists is not religious in nature, assuring the pontiff that their sole motivation is religious and sanctioned by Allah in the Qur’an.

In the most recent issue of Dabiq, the propaganda magazine of the Islamic State, ISIS criticizes Pope Francis for his naïveté in clinging to the conviction that Muslims want peace and that acts of Islamic terror are economically motivated.

“This is a divinely-warranted war between the Muslim nation and the nations of disbelief,” the authors state in an article titled “By the Sword.”

The Islamic State directly attacks Francis for claiming that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Quran are opposed to every form of violence,” saying that by doing this, “Francis continues to hide behind a deceptive veil of ‘good will,’ covering his actual intentions of pacifying the Muslim nation.”

Pope Francis “has struggled against reality” in his efforts to portray Islam as a religion of peace, the article insists, before going on to urge all Muslims to take up the sword of jihad, the “greatest obligation” of a true Muslim.

Despite the obviously religious nature of their attacks, the article states, “many people in Crusader countries express shock and even disgust that Islamic State leadership ‘uses religion to justify violence.’”

“Indeed, waging jihad – spreading the rule of Allah by the sword – is an obligation found in the Quran, the word of our Lord,” it reads.

“The blood of the disbelievers is obligatory to spill by default. The command is clear. Kill the disbelievers, as Allah said, ‘Then kill the polytheists wherever you find them.’”

The Islamic State also reacted to Pope Francis’s description of recent acts of Islamic terror as “senseless violence,” insisting that there is nothing senseless about it.

“The gist of the matter is that there is indeed a rhyme to our terrorism, warfare, ruthlessness, and brutality,” they declare, adding that their hatred for the Christian West is absolute and implacable.

The Ostrich in Rome’s Pope’s denial that Islam is not engaged in a religious war with the West has of course been received with delight by weaklings, quislings, and fellow-ostriches everywhere.

His assertion that

“It’s not right to identify Islam with violence. It’s not right and it’s not true. I believe that in every religion there is always a little fundamentalist group….If I speak of Islamic violence, then I have to speak of Catholic violence”

has, as the BBC reports (the approval of his remarks by the leftist broadcaster being, nonetheless, almost tangible, in its counter-examples), outraged many members of said Ostrich’s Pope’s own flock, with the hashtag #PasMonPape trending in the land where the aged Father Jacques Hamel was mercilessly done to death last week.

Unimpressed by his interpretation of the present conflict, the boys from Isis have issued a blunt message for His Holiness, though given his proclivities, it’s unlikely to stop him turning a blind eye as well as the other cheek.

This foolish, dangerous man seems unwittingly bent on making the requiem for Father Jacques the requiem for us all.

And of course the Pope is not the only opinion leader in the West, clerical or lay, who refuses to see the enemy, much less see the enemy’s designs for what they are.