RUTHFULLY YOURS

The story of Mehmed Emin Pasha, born a Jew as Isaak Eduard Schnitzer and baptized as Eduard Carl Oscar Theodor Schnitzer, is a multiculturalist’s delight. This Jewish doctor who turned Christian, then Muslim, could be the cosmopolitan poster child, proof that we are all one and that distinctions don’t matter. But universalists beware; this pasha was no Zelig, fitting in chameleon-like at colorful historical moments. This shapeshifter adapted smoothly but stood out boldly, proving that the best way to contribute to the world is to root identities in particular cultures and act on core ideals.

Schnitzer was born in Oppeln, Silesia on March 28, 1840, into a German Jewish family that had already broken from the ghetto’s provinciality. Schnitzer’s father was a merchant, a proper German burgher wannabe. He embodied the Enlightenment delusion that we could, as John Lennon would sing, “all live together as one.” But Schnitzer’s father had made the classic Enlightenment deal with the devil. To become emancipated, to prosper, most Jews felt compelled to abandon much of Judaism—even though they would only be accepted marginally as Europeans.

When Isaak was 5, his father died and his mother ditched her people and purchased acceptance by marrying a Christian. Now baptized as a Lutheran, Eduard Carl Oscar Theodor Schnitzer grew up championing German nationalism as embodying Western humanism at its best. After studying at the universities of Breslau, Konigsberg, and Berlin, he became a physician, to use modern science to save lives.

Schnitzer was derailed temporarily when he failed to file his licensing paperwork on time and could not practice medicine. Ever-resilient, he left for Istanbul.

Arriving in Antivari in Montenegro along the way, he resumed his medical practice far away from German supervision. One of those annoying Europeans with a genius for language, he mastered Turkish, Albanian, and Greek, along with many of the standard Romance languages. This poly-lingual environment so suited him, he became the port’s quarantine officer, processing immigrants.
Always climbing, Schnitzer charmed his way into working for northern Albania’s governor, Ismail Hakki Pasha. In perhaps his creepiest move, Schnitzer returned to Germany in 1873, after his boss died, claiming the widow and children as his wife and kids. That arrangement ended abruptly, mysteriously, in 1875, leading to Schnitzer’s plunge into the Muslim world.

Merkel’s migration policy is causing security mayhem in Germany, where mostly Muslim migrants are raping and assaulting women and children with virtual impunity.

The AfD was founded as a Eurosceptic party in 2013 by German economists advocating the abolition of the European single currency, the euro, and opposing financial bailouts of profligate eurozone countries such as Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Since then, the leader of the AfD, Frauke Petry, has broadened the party’s initial focus on economics to immigration.

Other political and media elites are ramping up a months-long campaign to delegitimize AfD voters as: agitators, arsonists, far-right extremists, fascists, Nazis, populists and xenophobes.

Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel has called on German intelligence to begin monitoring the AfD, presumably in an effort to silence critics of the government’s migration policy. Gabriel has called for Germany to take in even more migrants by airlifting them into the country directly from the Middle East.

“It cannot be that after such an election result, the answer to the electorate is: everything will go on as before.” – Horst Seehofer, the head of the Christian Socialist Union (CSU), the CDU’s sister party in Bavaria.

“I expect the chancellor clearly to admit: ‘Yes, we have understood. We are going to return to the voters. Politics must move toward the voter, not the other way around. This is called democracy.'” – CSU politician Hans-Peter Uhl

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has vowed to continue her open-door migration policy — despite heavy losses in regional elections that were widely regarded as a referendum on that very policy.

Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was defeated in two out of the three federal states voting on March 13. By contrast, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) — an upstart anti-establishment party campaigning against Merkel’s liberal migration policy — surged to double-digit results in all three states: Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt.

Last Monday, a man walked into a Canadian Armed Forces recruiting office in Toronto and began to attack the military personnel working there. After first assaulting the soldier stationed at the reception desk, he pulled out a knife and, while yelling “Allah told me to do this,” slashed two military workers who had come to their comrade’s assistance. Other center personnel then joined in the melee and subdued the attacker, Ayanle Hassan Ali, 27, a Montreal-born man of Somali descent, holding him for police.

The surprising thing about this attack is not that it took place. Islamic terrorist attacks are now so common worldwide that they are almost routine. And this one also did not garner much media attention internationally, probably because no one was killed.

But what was noteworthy about Monday’s attack is the growing, and annoying, tendency to downplay such crimes, omit the word terror in describing them as well as any connection the attacks may have to Islam.

The most conspicuous example of this was provided by Toronto’s police chief, Mark Saunders. At a news conference on the day of the attack, he refused to say what Ali was yelling while trying to murder Canadian military personnel.

The Left made the argument that if international sanctions were lifted against the Islamic Republic of Iran, the country would open up politically and respect fundamental rights, international law and standards.

Nevertheless, the reality indicates that the ruling clerics are heading toward more radicalism, extremism, fundamentalism, and forceful implementation of Sharia and Shiite laws. The ruling mullahs seem to be proud that their country has hit the highest rate of execution since 1989. The official number shows that Iran perforned nearly two times more executions in 2015 in comparison to 2010 when the hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in office, as well as roughly 10 times more than the number of executions in 2005.

Approximately 1000 people were executed in 2015, according to the latest report from the United Nations investigator, Ahmed Shaheed, the special rapporteur for human rights in Iran. The unofficial number is definitely much higher.

The peak of the executions in 2015 was between April and June in which nearly 4 people were executed every day on average. Most of the executions were carried out in prisons located in urban areas, such as Ghezel Hesar and Rajai Shahr in Karaj, and Adel Abad in Shiraz, through various traditional methods.

Iran has surpassed China in the number of executions being carried out per capita. Most of the executions in Iran are being done by hanging. In addition to the alarming increase in executions, fundamental rights, including those for ethnic and religious minorities, appear to have regressed in 2015 as well.