RUTHFULLY YOURS

WHILE a growing number of fashion brands are creating fashion collections aimed at Muslim women, Pierre Bergé has taken issue with designers creating Islamic clothing.

“I am scandalised. Creators should have nothing to do with Islamic fashion,” the 85-year-old told French radio station Europe 1 yesterday, reports The Guardian. “Designers are there to make women more beautiful, to give them their freedom, not to collaborate with this dictatorship which imposes this abominable thing by which we hide women and make them live a hidden life. These creators who are taking part in the enslavement of women should ask themselves some questions.”

Bergé went on to say that the only reason that labels – which include Marks & Spencer, Uniqlo and Dolce & Gabbana – create such collections is “to make dough and nothing else”, and he would tell them to: “Give up the dough. Have convictions. Defend your convictions.” The French businessman – who founded Yves Saint Laurent alongside the eponymous designer, who was also his life partner – stressed that his comments are not Islamaphobic. “I live in Morocco most of the time, I am really not Islamophobic,” he said.

His comments come as Laurence Rossignol, France’s women’s rights minister, criticised Marks & Spencer’s full-body swimsuit, suggesting that the British retailer is “bowing to religious conservatives,” according to The Daily Telegraph.

“What’s at stake is social control over women’s bodies,” she told RMC radio. “When brands invest in this Islamic garment market, they are shirking their responsibilities and are promoting women’s bodies being locked up. It is irresponsible on the part of these brands. All those who participate in how society is represented have a responsibility.”

Marks & Spencer responded to the comments, saying that it “provides a wide range of quality swimwear”, and that it has sold the full-body swimsuit “for a number of years and it is popular with our customers internationally”.

The European Union has been increasingly expressing its growing antagonism towards Israel by

1. imposing specific labelling laws for goods produced by Jews emanating from Judea and Samaria (the West Bank)

2. building structures in Area C of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) without consent or authorisation by Israel – which exercises full administrative and security control over this area under the Oslo Accords to which the European Union is a signatory.

Positions such as these taken by the European Union – coupled with a growing tide of Jew-hatred in Europe during the past decade – create an atmosphere of hostility towards the Jewish State and can legitimise public expressions of opinion in Europe that would otherwise have been deemed politically incorrect and subjected to widespread criticism.

A case in point seems most likely to have occurred following the tragic events in Brussels on March 22 when 32 people were killed and 340 wounded in two terrorist attacks at Brussels Zaventem airport terminal and the city’s underground metro system.

Belgium’s federal hotline – set up by the Belgian Interior Ministry to take calls after these attacks – has fired an operator who told a caller that Israel does not exist and should be called Palestine instead.

The caller told the operator that he was a volunteer for the city of Antwerp’s Jewish Coordination Committee. Their message was recorded and the full English translated transcript follows:

XXX: Good afternoon, my name is XXX. I am a volunteer in the Jewish Coordination Committee of Antwerp. We are contacted by persons… we have two persons of the Jewish community that were hurt in the attacks in the airport.

Crisis Centre: Yes sir.

XXX: They are prepared to be transported back to Israel. Our volunteers are busy with it and take care of everything but we received information from the hospital that we need special papers from the police that they can be released. Is this correct and to who should we ask that? Can you tell me more about that?

People who reflexively blame the wrong party for criminal acts are either misinformed or disingenuous.

The sad truth is that in the Palestinian territories, Christians are forced to live like dhimmis — second-class citizens who survive largely by the protection-money they are required to pay to buy their daily safety. These barely-tolerated citizens exist only at the whim and pleasure of the ruling Muslim majority. Muslim Arab discrimination against non-Muslims includes economic and socially prejudicial behavior that makes it difficult or impossible for Christian Arabs to run a profitable business or for their families to be fully integrated into society.

It is also appropriate for Catholics to raise with Vatican authorities the issue of Father Twal’s continued representation of the Faith in the Holy Land: Who is he serving first, God or man?

No one of good will, especially Catholics, wants to accuse a prominent member of his faith of being knowingly untruthful. The truth rarely is found in the Palestinian public narrative. But in case of the latest repetition of Father Fouad Twal, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, falsely blaming Israel for the ongoing spate of Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians, it appears certain from his consistent record of non-nuanced criticism of Israel, that he is motivated by a political bias.

Twal proclaimed that Israel’s alleged “occupation” of “Arab Palestine” is the cause of the murderous violence visited on Israeli civilians by Arab attackers — apparently “forgetting” that the Jews have lived in the region for nearly 4000 years. He was also apparently forgetting that the leaders of the Palestinian Authority (PA) have been glorifying such “acts of resistance” since the autumn of 2014. How can Twal ignore the reality that Palestinian media has been glorifying these knife attacks as “glorious feats.” In Palestinian schools, in fact, the attackers are hailed as heroes.

Professional criminals convince the children’s parents that their daughters are going to a better life in Turkey. The parents are given between two and five thousand Turkish liras ($700-$1700) as “bride price” – an enormous sum for a poor Syrian family.

“Girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen are referred to as pistachios, those between seventeen and twenty are called cherries, twenty to twenty-two are apples, and anyone older is a watermelon.” — End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT)

“The most important question is why the refugee camps are not open to civil monitoring. Entry to refugee camps is not allowed. The camps are not transparent. There are many allegations as to what is happening in them. We are therefore worried about what they are hiding from us.” — Cansu Turan, a social worker with the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (TIHV).

Many Muslims have difficulty with, or even an aversion to, assimilating into the Western culture. Many seem to have the aim of importing to Europe the culture of intimidation, rape and abuse from which they fled.

Although the desperate victims are their Muslim sisters and brothers, Arab states do not take in refugees. We have not seen any demonstrations with signs that read “Refugees Welcome!” The people in this area know too well that asylum seekers would bring with them problems, both social and economic. The only way they can think of helping women is to “marry” them.

On International Women’s Day, March 8, Turkish news outlets covered the tragic life and early death of a Syrian child bride. (source: )

Last August in Aleppo, Mafe Zafur, 15, married her cousin, Ibrahim Zafur, in an Islamic marriage. The couple moved to Turkey, but the marriage ended after six months, when her husband abruptly threw her into the street. With nowhere to sleep, Mafe found shelter with her brother, 19, and another cousin, 14, in an abandoned truck.

On 8 March, Mafe killed herself, reportedly with a shotgun. Her only possession, found in her pocket, was her handwritten marriage certificate.

Mafe Zafur is only one of many young Syrians who have been victims of child marriage. Human rights groups report even greater abuse which gangs are perpetrating against the approximately three million Syrians who have fled to Turkey.

The British still don’t understand that the UK and Europe have long funded and connived at not just Palestinian terrorism, but the incitement that causes it.What is that unfamiliar rustling in the British cultural undergrowth? It’s the sound of people suddenly acknowledging a problem with anti-Semitism.

For years, anti-Semitism in Britain was the prejudice that dared not speak its name. The hostility toward Israel endemic in educated circles was emphatically declared to have nothing whatever to do with hatred of Jews. Anyone who claimed a connection was denounced as “waving the shroud of the Holocaust” to silence legitimate “criticism” of Israel.

Jewish students have long run the gauntlet of vicious Israel- and Jew-hatred. “Israel apartheid” weeks, BDS motions and campus conferences declaring Israel is a “settler-colonial state” have morphed into intimidation, stigmatization and discrimination against Jews at university.

VIRTUALLY NO ONE outside the Jewish community has paid this any attention.

Now, though, unease has begun to seep into British national consciousness.

The reason is a shift in perspective. Israel is no longer seen as the world’s major flashpoint. The TV news is instead pumping images of Syrian atrocities and floods of displaced migrants into the living rooms of the nation.

Security officials repeatedly warn of the likelihood of coordinated Islamist attacks in Britain. The terrorist atrocities last year in Paris and most recently in Brussels have ratcheted up anxiety levels.

NOTES FROM TOM GROSShttp://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/02/charity-backing-anti-israel-rallies-has-state-cash-pulled/

The (London) Sunday Telegraph reports today:

The [British] government has ceased funding a British charity which sponsored events accused of promoting hatred and violence against Jews.

The Department for International Development said that it no longer supported War on Want, which helped pay for “Israeli Apartheid Week” in February this year.

The statement comes as the Telegraph obtained undercover recordings of events where anti-Semitism, demands for the destruction of Israel or naked support for terror were expressed by academics and others at meetings in some of Britain’s most prestigious universities.

One speaker, Max Blumenthal, the son of a close adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, praised a massacre by Hamas as sending an “incredible message” and said that taking up arms should be “normal” for Palestinians. He compared Israel to the terrorist group Isil, describing it as “the Jewish State of Israel and the Levant, Jsil”.

At another rally – sponsored by War on Want – a speaker said that British government policy was created by “Zionist and neo-con lobbies”.

A second speaker at the same event spoke of a “rumour” that Israelis were harvesting dead Palestinians’ organs.

The meeting was held at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)… War on Want has received £260,000 in funding from the British government over the last two years.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3520852/You-pay-two-Palestinian-terrorists-left-Britain-woman-dead-killed-friend-9-000-year-reward.html
[Note by Tom Gross]http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/

I attach two pieces below from today’s British newspapers, the Sunday Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday. (I helped advise both newspapers with these pieces.)

The Mail on Sunday (the Sunday edition of the Daily Mail, the world’s most read online newspaper) reports:

You, the British taxpayer, pay two Palestinian terrorists who left this British woman for dead and killed her friend £9,000 each every year – as a ‘REWARD’.

Kay Wilson was left for dead in an orgy of violence in Jerusalem in which Kristine Luken, an American, was killed by two Palestinian terrorists.

Reports revealed the assailants were being paid a monthly stipend equivalent to £750 each effectively from the Palestinian Authority (PA).

The Mail on Sunday exposed how ‘reward’ payments are going via the PA – which UK aid gives more than £24million each year – to terrorists

If you want to end the madness, you can sign the petition HERE [at the link below]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIfMAP4Q1yk&feature=em-uploademail

President Obama and his subordinates blatantly lied to Congress in order win approval — or, more accurately, to escape disapproval — of his Iran nuclear deal. At a time when jihadist mass-murder attacks are surging, and when Syrian-regime war crimes are abetted by Iran’s jihadist armed forces (which include Hezbollah and the Quds Force, both formally designated terrorist organizations), Obama’s deal infuses Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and an unapologetic enemy of the United States, with over $100 billion in sanctions relief . . . some slice of which, the Obama administration admits, will be diverted to terrorism.

This is old news, of course. Yet, it is worth repeating, for two reasons.

First, these are impeachable offenses of the first order. As I recounted in Faithless Execution, the Framers of our Constitution counted presidential dishonesty in dealings with Congress and presidential concealment of dealings with foreign powers as among the most egregious high crimes and misdemeanors.

Second, Obama is doing it again.

To persuade the Republican-controlled Congress to refrain from rejecting the Iran deal, even under the shamefully indulgent Corker-Cardin process to which GOP leaders agreed, the Obama administration made two key promises. The first was that, if Congress went along with Obama on dismantling nuclear sanctions (for the purportedly greater good of winning the terror regime’s commitment not to build nuclear weapons), the administration would stand strong on other sanctions — sanctions that punish Iran for its terror promotion, ballistic-missile development, and related aggression. The second promise was that Iran would continue to be banned from the U.S. financial system.

Robert S. Litwak is a vice president of the Wilson Center and the author of “Iran’s Nuclear Chess: After the Deal.” He was director for nonproliferation on the National Security Council staff in the Clinton administration.

North Korea’s missile test Friday highlighted the threat discussed by President Barack Obama, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and others gathered at the Nuclear Security Summit.

Since 2010 these meetings have spearheaded progress in securing some 2,000 tons of weapons-grade nuclear material around the world, with the goal of denying terrorist groups such as Islamic State the essential component to build a weapon. Still, much work remains to secure nuclear material in the former Soviet republics, South Africa, and elsewhere. And theft or purchase of a weapon are the more immediately plausible routes of terrorist acquisition.

Concern about these two routes to nuclearization focuses on Pakistan and North Korea. Pakistan has the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It is developing small, low-yield tactical nuclear weapons potentially for use against India. Their size and portability makes these weapons vulnerable to theft, whether by rogue commanders or other forces. President Obama said in 2009 that the Pakistani nuclear arsenal was secure but administration officials no longer offers such assurances, the New York Times reported this week.

In North Korea, there is more to worry about than the regime’s threats to use weapons. The government in Pyongyang is desperate for funds to maintain the lifestyle of Kim Jong Un and his cronies. The regime needs to raise about $1 billion a year, estimates David Asher of the Center for a New American Security. For the right price, the North Koreans might sell anything to anyone. And Pyongyang’s arsenal of a dozen weapons is poised to surge to as many as 100 weapons by 2020. CONTINUE AT SITE