RUTHFULLY YOURS

India’s Supreme Court is considering petitions that challenge Muslim laws governing marriage on the grounds that they discriminate against women, a charged issue that risks angering the country’s orthodox Muslims.

A panel headed by the chief justice that is hearing the petitions directed the government this week to release an official 2015 report that looks at the impact of some of India’s religion-specific laws on women’s rights and recommends legal reform.

Among the petitioners calling for change is Shayara Bano, a Muslim woman whose husband, after 13 years of marriage, divorced her by triple talaq, a practice that allows Muslim men in India to leave their wives unilaterally and often instantaneously by saying “talaq,” meaning divorce, three times. Other similar petitions were put together by the court and are being heard at the same time.The next hearing in the case is expected in May.

The Indian constitution protects gender equality, but on issues of marriage, divorce and inheritance, different religious communities are governed by their own so-called personal laws. Whether a person is subject to those laws is usually determined by their religion at birth.
Muslim clerics and scholars have rebuffed demands for unifying personal laws into a common civil code for all Indian citizens—advocated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party—rejecting what they call attempts to interfere with their religious practices in Hindu-majority India. There are more than 170 million Muslims in the country out of a 1.2 billion population.

Muslim women’s rights groups argue that the practice of triple talaq misinterprets the Quran and is protected by orthodox Muslim men to perpetuate patriarchy. In her petition, Ms. Bano asks the court to declare it illegal as it “practically treats women like chattel,” infringes their “basic right to live with dignity” and violates their fundamental rights to equality and life guaranteed under the constitution.

“Muslim women have their hands tied while the guillotine of divorce dangles, perpetually ready to drop at the whims of their husbands who enjoy undisputed power,” the petition reads, alleging that women have been divorced over Skype, Facebook and through text messages.

“There is no protection against such arbitrary divorce,” it adds. CONTINUE AT SITE

“Given the risks to the outlook, I consider it appropriate for the [Federal Open Market] Committee to proceed cautiously in adjusting policy,” Fed Chair Janet Yellen told the Economic Club of New York Tuesday, citing slower growth in the US and China and weak commodity prices. Her opposite number at the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, knows better: on March 10 he announced that the ECB would buy corporate bonds to continue quantitative easing, the first time a major central bank has put large amounts credit risk on its balance sheet in living memory.

Draghi feared a collapse of confidence in Italian banks, who in turn own 405 billion euros of Italian government debt, or more than a fifth of the total. The trouble is that the Italian banks probably are insolvent by a wide margin. Non-performing loans stood at about 18% of Italian banks’ total loans at the end of 2014 and the total probably has increased since then.

The Fed’s threat to raise US interest rates sent world stock markets into a tailspin during the first six weeks of the year. Markets snapped back after the US, European and Japanese central banks responded with monetary ease and the promise of more. The central banks are right to worry. The European banking crisis of 2012 was never resolved, just swept under the carpet. It threatened to erupt again in February.

Nonperforming assets are larger than shareholders’ equity in all the top four Italian banks. The basket case is Monte dei Paschi, the third-largest private commercial bank, with non-performing assets at more than 500% of equity. Depending on recovery value, Unicredito and Intesa San Paolo, the two largest banks, might be solvent, presuming that they aren’t lying about their non-performing assets. By contrast, Bank of America and Citigroup have non-performing assets valued at 3% to 4% of their equity.

Chinese banks–the subject of endless scrutiny by foreign analysts–reported nonperforming loans of just 1.6%, and the Hong Kong brokerage house Reorient Group estimated NPL’s at 4.2% of bank assetsin a recent report.

To be updated post verdict….rsk

“Presumed innocent until proven Serb”
–Balkans forum commenter

“The falseness of the entire situation here defies description.”
– Radovan Karadzic, Opening Defense Statement

Well, at least this Hague-held Serb didn’t turn up dead like six or so others.

Very little in or about the Balkans happens by accident. In 2008 Radovan Karadzic was arrested at a time that the U.S. and EU were desperately ramming through statehood for a criminal enclave named Kosovo. Conveniently, the arrest of Karadzic reinforced the image of Serb as war criminal just as they were looking to have fewer questions about officialdom’s obsession with this tiny place.

And it is again no accident that the date of the Karadzic verdict eight years later was “set for March 24th,” the infamous date in 1999 of America’s greatest international crime and shame, when a purportedly anti-war president took us to war against a Christian, European population that had been America’s historical ally. All for doing battle against domestic terror and the ambitions of Greater Islam which, having little experience with it at the time, Washington dubbed “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.” As did Berlin, Paris and Brussels.

Payback is a bitch. Particularly when it’s self-orchestrated, as Europe and America are today reaping the karma and consequence of what they’ve sown, making Serbs of us all. As publisher Milo Yelesiyevich, who has translated Karadzic’s Opening Defense Statement, put it in a letter to me:

I hope the Europeans give Dr. K a second look, because they’re in for it now. In a few short decades, they’ve been cast in the role of “Serbs” in their own countries, yet they still refuse to acknowledge their complicity in their own downfall, which stems from having attacked Serbs and Serbia throughout the 1990s [on behalf of what would become the next nexus of jihad — Bosnia and Kosovo].

From the back cover of the hard-copy version of the opening statement, by Kirkus Reviews:

Karadžić’s defense itself is remarkable, by turns eloquent, historically provocative…. Karadžić claimed Serbs had long been champions of peace and compromise, but they met an intransigent Muslim faction that all but insisted on either war or submission. Moreover, he contended that the “forcible removal of Bosnian Muslims and Croats was never our plan.” In many ways, the full account of Karadžić’s defense does add valuable perspective, especially in pointing out that Muslim insurgents were themselves guilty of extraordinary war crimes and that they were often stubbornly unreasonable partners in political dialogue…. This translation remains an important contribution to the understanding of a historically significant war.

No doubt one U.S. presidential candidate in particular will seek to capitalize on the carefully timed verdict to burnish her credentials, for having urged her husband to wage that “successful” 1999 war and for the overall ’90s Balkans legacy that today culminates in this “important” conviction of yet another Serbian official.

A salient point from the book’s web page:

The U.S. and NATO used the Bosnian War as a laboratory to test weapons as well as new methods of perception management, which they deployed in a long series of wars. Americans who no longer believe the U.S. government’s selective presentation of its foreign policy will find much to consider in Dr. Karadžić’s Opening Defense Statement.

With that, a few relevant snippets. First, an October 2013 email from the American who first coined the term “ethnic cleansing” in the context of Bosnia while serving as a foreign service officer, George Kenney. (Kenney subsequently subscribed to a more balanced version of the war than the cartoon that Americans were fed.):

I am still mystified as to why, but last Friday I was invited to a lunch at a fancy restaurant on K Street for Zeljka Cvijanovic, the Bosnian Serb Prime Minister. She was in town for a couple days, opening an office here. About a dozen people attended, including several former government types. After the meal, over coffee, about half a dozen of us lingered, swapping stories

While England Slept is the title of Winston Churchill’s 1938 book documenting the failure of England to counter Germany’s rearmament. Despite the gruesome price paid for ignoring Churchill’s warnings, postwar Europe has slumbered for decades while its cultural dysfunctions have nurtured the jihadist violence erupting across Europe. Last week’s attacks in Brussels, coming four months after the Paris attacks that killed 130, suggests there are more attacks to come. According to AP, 400-600 ISIS-trained terrorists are making their way to Europe.

Europe can’t say it wasn’t warned. In 2002 Oriana Fallaci published The Rage and the Pride, a passionate defense of Western civilization and an indictment of those who appease Islamic illiberalism. Ten years ago Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept gave first-hand reports of Europe’s feckless immigration policies that fostered and appeased Muslim radicalism and violence. A year later Claire Berlinski’s Menace in Europe and Melanie Phillips’ Londonistan sounded the same alarms. And there are the dystopian novels of Michel Houellebecq like Platform and last year’s Submission, which link Europe’s cultural and spiritual exhaustion to the rise of homegrown jihadism and Islamization.

An even more important prophet is Bat Ye’or, whose Eurabia (2005) documented “Europe’s evolution from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment secular elements, into a post-Judeo-Christian civilization that is subservient to the ideology of jihad and the Islamic powers that propagate it.” The result is the dhimmi mentality of Europe’s elites, which manifests in word and deed Western inferiority to Islam, and guilt over alleged crimes against the Muslim world.

But a secularized Europe committed to multicultural fantasies and la dolce vita as the highest goods has dismissed these prophets as bigots and “Islamophobes” who distort the “religion of peace.” Yet after the collapse of the Ottoman caliphate in 1923––the “catastrophe” Osama bin Laden mentioned after 9/11–– the theorists of modern jihadism were forthright and plain in expressing the intolerant and triumphalist Islamic beliefs and jihadist imperative consistent with Ye’or’s analysis. Islam’s nature, Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna wrote, is “to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its laws on all nations, and extend its power to the entire planet.” Fellow Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb concurred: “Islam has a right to remove all those obstacles which are in its path.” The Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian Revolution, agreed: “The great prophet of Islam carried in one hand the Koran and in the other a sword; the sword is for crushing the traitor and the Koran for guidance . . . Islam is a religion of blood for infidels but a religion of guidance for other people.”

The facts show is that all these “excuses” for terrorism are incorrect. Israel is not, for instance, carrying out the “war crimes,” “apartheid” or “genocide,” which propagandists have persuaded Europeans that Israel is engaged in. Israel is, quite the contrary, fighting an enemy that breaks every rule of armed conflict, and responds in a manner so precise and so moral that allied nations are concerned that they will not be able to live up to the Israeli military’s moral standards the next time they go to war.

Well, what a shock the rest of the world will one day have to undergo. Because if you allow an “excuse” for one false narrative of Islamic extremists, you will then have to allow it for the others. You will, for example, have to accept the word of ISIS that Belgium is a “crusader” nation, deserving to be attacked because it is involved in a “crusade.”

The question is not why it took over 24 hours for the UK to find Belgian-colored lights to project in solidarity, but why after 67 years of terror, it still has not found the simple blue and white lights to project the flag of Israel onto any public place.

The day after the Brussels terror attack, landmarks in the UK were lit up in the colors of the Belgian flag. Portions of the press in Britain excoriated the country on this. Why, they asked, had the now-traditional, mawkish ceremony occurred the day after the attacks rather than on the evening of the attacks themselves? Why were we a day late with our lights when other cities had managed to do their “solidarity” gesture straightaway? Such are our times. And such are our questions.

As the multiyear talks between Iran and the P5+1 nations carried on toward an interim agreement, and eventually the unsigned final deal that one side (ours) hailed, the Iranians played a card that they continue to play today. That card was the bluff that they would walk away if unsatisfied with the concessions offered by the U.S., other permanent U.N. Security Council members and Germany. The Iranians caught on that President Barack Obama was legacy-obsessed and would always concede rather than risk them walking away.

In his first two years in office, blessed with a huge majority in the House of Representatives and a filibuster-proof 60 Senate seats, Obama’s Democratic Party was able to push through health care reform (the Affordable Care Act), financial reform (the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act) and a near trillion dollar stimulus package to tackle the economic downturn caused by the real estate and related Wall Street collapse. Then in the 2010 midterm elections, the evil empire struck back (if one was to believe America’s mainstream media). Tea party Republicans provided the energy for an enormous political shift that gave the House of Representatives back to the Republicans and greatly reduced the Democrats’ Senate advantage. The nation was in for four years of political gridlock.

After Republicans had another successful midterm elections triumph in 2014, capturing control of the Senate following Obama’s re-election in 2012, Obama’s strategy shifted. To become a significant president, he needed to accomplish things that the Republican-controlled Congress could not thwart in his final two years in office. This led to executive orders on immigration (effectively not to enforce the nation’s immigration laws) and continued lawmaking by executive branch agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Democratic-controlled National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Communications Commission. Most significantly, it led in foreign affairs to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the Iran nuclear deal) and the initiative to restore relations with Cuba.

Decades of efforts to avoid stigmatizing Muslims and to understand and address ‘root causes’ of Islamist terrorism have yielded horrific dividends in Europe. Belgium’s 2003 Terrorist Offenses Act criminalizes terrorism and participation in terrorist groups, but gets out its way to exclude Muslim “organization whose real purpose is solely of a political, trade union or philanthropic, philosophical or religious nature, or which solely pursues any other legitimate aim, cannot, as such, be considered a terrorist group.”

Belgium, France, and other European nations are blamed for failing to integrate their Muslim population. While this may be true, it is important to note that Muslim immigrants, increasingly radicalized, refuse to integrate. Instead, the larger the Muslim population got, it demanded, often violently, that their adoptive countries adhere to Islamic law. Imams everywhere preached that Muslim women set themselves apart from non-Muslim and advocate Islamic values of modesty by wearing hijab (head scarfs), although “there is no provision in the Quran that requires Muslim women to wear a headscarf when they are outside of their homes.”

The growing Muslim communities’ efforts to enforce sharia in Europe and elsewhere have been accompanied by Saudi and Gulf funding and very large donations to academic and cultural institutions. Money talks. And when receiving billions of dollars is conditioned on covering cultural monuments symbols of Western civilization, or giving up wine for just a dinner or two as the Italians have last January to please the Iranian president, gets Europeans to toss hastily aside their national identity, independence, and pride.

Some weeks after the attacks of 9/11, a Dutch journalist spoke at a panel discussion in Amsterdam, describing his experience of the events. Faced with the task of writing up what had occurred in New York that day – the devastation, the terror, the unanswered questions that remained – he said he found himself completely overwhelmed. And then at a certain point, he recalled, clarity came. “I realized it was just about America,” he said. “It had nothing to do with me.”

I’ve told this story before, and likely will many times again, but it came to me as I read an op-ed by Daniel Benjamin in response to Tuesday’s terrorist attacks in Brussels. Benjamin served as the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator from 2009-12. What happened in Brussels, he essentially declares, is really just about Europe. It has nothing to do with us. And it can’t happen here.

I respectfully, but emphatically, disagree.

To be sure, Benjamin makes some important points. The background and immigration history of most European Muslims is not the same as that of Americans. Europe’s Muslims largely arrived as guest workers in the 1960s and 70s from rural areas of the Middle East and North Africa (mostly Turkey, Algeria and Morocco). They were not educated; many were even illiterate. Because they were not expected to stay, their host countries did little to help them integrate, including teaching them the language.

But they did stay, and they brought family members from back home to live with them. They had children – many of them. And their children often suffered in school, where they were confronted with different values than their parents had, and with homework with which their parents could not help them. Many failed. Some had trouble getting jobs, and still do; Muslim unemployment all across Europe is significantly higher than the rate for non-Muslims.

Wherever Islam goes, so goes its ethos. The barbarity and variety of actions of Islamic extremists are seen daily around the globe, committed under the banner of Islam, and have become so commonplace that the world has come to view them as part and parcel of a troubled humanity. And from time to time, the world is shocked into a passing and momentary realization of the evil deeds these Islamist robots commit…and quickly gets over it and does nothing to seriously address this affliction of humanity.

Humankind is confronting a deeply troubling quandary. On the one hand is the aspiration of tolerant people whose objective is to forge a world of diverse people into one human society ruled by peace and respect for the inherent dignity and well-being of each member of that family. On the other, Islamic extremists are hell-bent on imposing their stone-age dogma on everyone else.

Savagery and viciousness carried out by the devotees of Muhammad in Belgium’s capital city of Brussels was another reminder that every now and then (and much more often these days), the adherents of the “Religion of Peace” are willing to massacre innocent people in cold blood in a most dastardly act of cowardice. Returning Islam to its pure and glorious roots is precisely what the “jihadists” are fighting for.

Atrocities of this magnitude not only break our hearts, but make us wonder. What compels a seemingly ordinary person to even contemplate, much less carry out, such a slaughter? How did these creatures end up carrying out all these heart-wrenching murders?

An easy answer is Islam. The life manual of Islam, the Quran, is a document of exclusion, hatred, and violence that shapes Muslims’ thinking and behavior. Sadly, Muslims themselves are the ones who are most victimized by Islamic doctrine. They have inherited this viral psychological disease of hate and violence; they live by it, and they transmit it to their children as well as to receptive others.

Qur’an 9:5 “Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war.”
Islamic doctrine, like a mental retrovirus, has mutated into numerous varieties and degrees of severity over the past 1,400 years. Everyone born in a Muslim family, as well as those who convert to Islam, contract a particular mutation of the Islamic virus. As is the case with all retroviruses, the Islamic virus burrows deeply into the person and erupts from time to time, with potentially devastating consequences.

A puzzle to non-Muslims: why would any intelligent and reasonably sane person live his life by the dogma of Islam? It is particularly disconcerting when this Muslim lives in a secular non-Islamic society. The befuddlement becomes mind-boggling when seemingly educated women in free societies voluntarily submit to the yoke of Islamic misogyny.

“When we inflict such radical changes on our society, we should ask ourselves whether we are being faithful stewards of the prosperous, free societies for which our ancestors struggled, fought and sometimes died. Perhaps instead we are squandering our inheritance, for the sake of that happy frisson we experience when we do or say something supporting “openness”, “tolerance”, and “social justice”. We are purchasing approval from our fellow upper-middle-class citizens, with social capital stolen from our children and grandchildren. We are feathering our own cosy nests, while making life even more wretched for our own nations’ native poor—whose ancestors did fight and die, alongside ours, for their descendants’ stakes in the nation. We are stealing the precious gifts of freedom and order from our least-advantaged fellow citizens—the blue-collar workers, the unemployed, the troubled war veterans—in order to salve our confused consciences, and feed our self-esteem.”

Inflict mass migration’s radical changes on a society and we are no longer faithful stewards of the prosperous, free societies for which our ancestors struggled — a legacy betrayed for the pottage of self-satisfaction in deeming ourselves caring, compassion and tolerant to a fault.
As people who are blessed to be citizens of highly developed countries—such as Australia or the United States, my own homeland—we have a long list of privileges we did little or nothing to earn. Some of them, such as natural resources, are the gifts only of God. But most of the others came from our fellow man. They are less like a landscape than a legacy, a trust passed down from father to son, mother to daughter, across the centuries. These gifts came from our ancestors, either personal or political, who painstakingly built up the peaceful and orderly, free and dynamic countries in which we live.

We are moved by a sense of compassion, and even of justice, to wish that we could share these blessings with people in other countries—if only by letting them come and live in ours. That’s a laudable sentiment, but it must be counter-balanced by a realistic understanding of where these privileges come from, how they are maintained from one generation to the next, and how fragile they really are. In fact we can overstrain our societies and destroy the very institutions that we so treasure, if we are reckless and overconfident in our acceptance of large numbers of new citizens from societies with hostile or alien values and incompatible civic habits. We can choke the goose that lays all these golden eggs.

If we follow the carefully documented arguments of Daniel Hannan in Inventing Freedom (2014), we will see that some of the greatest blessings which we residents of the “Anglosphere” (from Canada to India, from Australia to the Falkland Islands) enjoy are the fruit of the political principles, personal sacrifices and prudent decisions of particular people—the rebels and preachers, barons and burghers, who resisted the arbitrary power of kings, and fought for religious, political and economic freedom. These distinct people, at distinct times and places, undertook political actions with enormous moral consequences, which generations of schoolchildren used to be dutifully drilled to remember: Runnymede, the Glorious Revolution, the abolition of the slave trade. All these political events were the fruit of certain stubborn beliefs, which we can boil down to one: that the dignity of each human being affirmed by Christian theology has political implications, which philosophers such as John Locke presented in secular form as “life, liberty and property”.

As we study less history with each generation, it is all too easy for us to take these privileges for granted, to assume that because (as our theology teaches us) every person deserves them, that it is only natural that they enjoy them. But in fact, as we read the chronicles of the centuries, and survey not just non-Western civilisations, but most Western nations for most of their history, we will learn something quite different: that it is highly unusual for human life to be treated with unconditional respect; for citizens to be protected from arbitrary arrest and to be free to speak their minds; for the work of our hands and our brains to belong to us and our families, exempt from unfair confiscation. If life, liberty and property rights are what God intends for us—as we Westerners grow up believing—in cold fact, murder, bullying and theft are too frequently the norm.