RUTHFULLY YOURS

Muslims can, but Islam cannot be saved. Its scripture is innately flawed at source. If a god isn’t about universal love there is no point or product in trying to build society around him or even having him in the mix.
I wrote a piece in April on Hirsi Ali’s book latest book Heretic (“Hirsi Ali’s Quixotic Tilt at Fixing Islam“). Daryl McCann reviewed the book for the June issue of Quadrant and Paul Monk wrote an erudite piece, inspired by Hirsi Ali’s book, for the July/August issue (editor’s note: Paul’s essay is still behind the paywall. Why not subscribe?). So it’s all been done to death, so to speak. Why then bring it up again?

Because, I don’t think that many in the West – aside from people like Robert Spencer (The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam) — quite get it. McCann and Monk realise, as do I, that Hirsi Ali’s reference to the need for a ‘reformation’ in Islam, to parallel the Christian one, is hopelessly wide of the mark. However, they still appear to entertain a flimsy hope that Islam can be saved. This is utterly forlorn.

On the Reformation, Martin Luther was primarily interested in ridding the Catholic Church of indulgences as payment for sins. He had no objective of rewriting scripture. His objective was for the Church to act more in keeping with scripture and with Saint Paul’s direction that we could not gain redemption through our own works but through the grace of God alone. This didn’t mean we should not do good works, of course. And, in fact, such works in Luther’s sensible estimation were worth something, as distinct from the purchase of indulgences.

In response to the recent ratification of a U.S. trade law, the State Department expressed reservations about provisions of the law intended to discourage economic warfare against Israel. These reservations include concern over the law’s alleged “conflation” of the West Bank with the remainder of Israel. Eugene Kontorovich points out that not only does the law make no such conflation, but the State Department’s reservations bespeak a poor understanding of U.S. policy:

The State Department has recently tried to minimize the significance and effect of provisions in the newly enacted trade promotion laws that seek to discourage boycotts and other economic sanctions against Israel. Some have suggested that the State Department’s spin on these laws effectively negates them. But while the administration’s backtracking on a law it just signed proceeds from inaccurate facts and bad policy, it does not — and cannot — annul the legislation.

Both houses of Congress unanimously introduced the provision as an amendment to the Trade Promotion Authority that instructs that the United States to adopt as part of its trade negotiation policy the goal of “discourag[ing] politically motivated actions to boycott, divest from, or sanction Israel” by foreign countries.

The day after President Obama signed the law, a State Department spokesman expressed disapproval of the provisions that make it clear that the law applies in full to “business in Israel or in Israeli-controlled territories.”

How do charges of Israeli crimes in the Six-Day War match up with similar charges against American forces in other wars?

Martin Kramer has performed a valuable public service by investigating the origins of the film Censored Voices and its claims of Israeli soldiers committing war crimes during the Six-Day War. Beyond the specifics of this particular documentary and that particular conflict, his article, “Who Censored the Six-Day War?,” raises larger issues relating to actual or imaginary war crimes committed by the armed forces of liberal democracies, whether Israeli or American, British or French.

Generally, such accusations are publicly aired—often in exaggerated form—during controversial or unpopular conflicts and ignored during more popular ones. There is a particular tendency for allegations of misconduct to seize the spotlight in guerrilla wars where troops have trouble distinguishing combatants from civilians. The circumstances under which troops fight, rather than what they actually do, thus prove more important in determining whether or not “war crimes” become a subject of public controversy.

This isn’t the first time this has happened.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. The BBC did it before. I’ve seen ABC do it here in the US. The goal is to churn out hit pieces against Israel while covering up the racism of the Muslim settlers.

It’s also important to remember that “Yahud”, like a lot of terms for a minority group that the majority doesn’t like, is effectively a slur. In the Arab world, “Yahud” has the sound that “Jude” did under the Nazis. More than a name for a people, it carries a heavy weight of hatred and contempt.

In the Islamic tradition, Jews are one of the more contemptible groups around. While apologists for Islamic terrorism like to distinguish between Islamic anti-Semitism rooted in the Koran and Muslim violence against Jews today as a response to Israel, there is no distinction. They are all tied together by animus toward the “Yahud”. The Jews of the 18th century were still viewed as enemies of Islam who plotted to dominate Muslims… just as they are today.

Wall Street Journal columnist offers solutions for an increasingly disordered and violent world at the Freedom Center’s Texas Weekend.Editor’s note: Below are the video and transcript to Bret Stephens’ speech at the Freedom Center’s Texas Weekend, held June 17 – 18, 2015 at the Ritz-Carlton in Dallas, Texas.
Bret Stephens: You know, I think when I wake up every day to the daily terror of finding out just what went wrong in the preceding six to eight hours that I’ve been sleeping, the thought that comes to my mind again and again, thinking about the world, is — what happened? What happened in our world in just the past two or three years?

And if you cast your mind back to, let’s say, the summer of 2012, when the ideas for this book began to percolate, Mitt Romney was running for the presidency. And the Obama Administration was touting its smart diplomacy. It was touting its record of achievement, success, reset throughout the world.

You remember that pungent line during the 2012 campaign, where various noteworthies like Madeline Albright and other all-stars of American foreign policy would joke that the 1980s had called and it wanted its foreign policy back. Actually, I’d like to call the 1980s and borrow its foreign policy, if you want the short version of my speech.

Islamist newspapers claim that the real victims are not those who were burned alive at the Hotel Madimak in Sivas, but those who murdered them and have since remained in prison.

An army of lawyers rushed to offer their services to the Sivas massacre defendants, most probably on a pro bono basis. They probably felt this was part of the jihad — this time taking place at courtrooms with jihadists in lawyers’ robes.

Those lawyers’ career moves in later years are telling. One Sivas massacre defense attorney became the justice minister. One became an AKP state minister. Two became Erdogan’s personal lawyers.

More than 715,000 people have applied for asylum in the EU during the past twelve months.

In 2014, Hungary received more refugees per capita than any other EU country apart from Sweden. Asylum requests for Austria rose nearly 180% in the first five months of 2015, to 20,620, and were on track to reach 70,000 by the end of the year. It recently emerged that three out of four refugees who came to Denmark in the early 2000s are jobless ten years later.

“The face of European civilization… will never again be what it is now. There is no way back from a multicultural Europe. Neither to a Christian Europe, nor to the world of national cultures.” — Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary.

The European Commission announced a controversial “relocation plan” that would require EU member states to accept 40,000 over the next two years. This is in addition to a separate “resettlement plan” to distribute 20,000 refugees currently living in camps in the Middle East.

Politics and money go together, as the old song says, like “love and marriage.” “You can’t have one without the other.” Cronyism, corruption and extravagance are consequences.

The cost of a Presidential campaign has risen ten fold over the past sixteen years. In 2000, George Bush spent about $180 million. It has been estimated by CNN that Hillary Clinton will spend $1.7 billion on her 2016 campaign. That suggests the cost of running a Presidential campaign has compounded annually at 15%, while the annual inflation rate has risen by 2.1 percent. Another way of looking at the same picture is that the Bush campaign spent roughly $3.50 for every vote received in 2000; Mr. Obama spent about $20.00 for every vote he received in 2012; and Mrs. Clinton, should she win in 2016, will have spent $30.00 for every vote. The value received (unless one is in the media business) does not warrant the moneys expended.

The indelibly tainted battle flag came down in South Carolina, but in context, other Confederate monuments can help teach history for all Americans

In June of 1865, Confederate Gen. Joseph Shelby and about a thousand of his cavalrymen rode into Mexico and exile rather than remain in a conquered South. As they forded the Rio Grande, they stopped and sank their faded banners midstream in an act of symbolic defiance.

Decades later, in the era of Jim Crow and racist attempts to deny black citizens their civil rights, that emblem rose anew, and it has refused to be submerged—until now. Today, the Confederate battle flag may be going down again, perhaps for good, but it is worth considering what we allow to sink with it.

On Friday morning at 10 a.m., a vestige of a sad epoch faded when that flag was finally taken down from a flagpole in front of the South Carolina State House. The banner was not destroyed but taken to a museum, to rest alongside other vestiges of the state’s dramatic past. Meanwhile, some country-music stars are backing away from the flag, and House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, said Thursday that he personally didn’t believe Confederate flags should be on display in federal cemeteries and parks. The debate continues in Mississippi, the only remaining Southern state whose flag incorporates the design of this Confederate banner. It too may be destined for a museum.

This is an old debate electrified by the June 17 massacre of nine people at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., a mass shooting that authorities call a racially motivated hate crime. In fact, what is popularly known as “the Confederate flag” never flew over Confederate capitols or public buildings, where different banners reigned. Rather, this emblem brought down on Friday was the Confederate “battle flag,” designed to be carried at the head of a regiment and used as its rallying point in battle, where the flag’s blue St. Andrew’s cross on a field of brilliant red might stand out through the smoke of battle. As such, it primarily stood for a unit’s pride in its valor in action, though all of the Confederacy’s symbols naturally carried an intrinsic affirmation of its foundational tenets, including the perpetuation of slavery. After the Union victory in 1865, those battle flags not surrendered, buried, thrown into rivers or cut up as souvenirs went home to quiet repose in closets, attics and, later, museums.

There they remained for decades, undisturbed and in the main undisturbing despite the unhappy meaning still attached to them, their image even protected by veterans’ groups from inappropriate political or commercial use. But that all ended in the 1940s, when opponents of the emerging civil-rights movement raised the old banner for a new battle.

“Ghost Fleet” is a fictional warning that real-life technologies could expose the U.S. to a devastating attack.

Arthur Conan Doyle ventured beyond his Sherlock Holmes novels in 1914 to write a short story called “Danger!” about risks in future wars from new technologies such as submarines. Even the hardheaded Winston Churchill, then running the Royal Navy, dismissed Mr. Doyle’s predictions as pure fantasy—until German submarines in World War I started torpedoing civilian ships.

A new novel, “Ghost Fleet,” warns Americans about advances in cyberwarfare that could leave the U.S. as unprepared as Britain was against the U-boats. The title refers to mothballed warships and planes the U.S. recommissions because their pre-Internet technologies haven’t been hacked. (Disclosure: The publisher is Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, on whose board I serve.)