RUTHFULLY YOURS

Until the West’s leaders are prepared to call a spade an invasion, all this brave talk of fighting militant Islam will result in nothing more than a few more air strikes, more summits and, just maybe, additional special forces advisers on the ground. That is not enough. We will lose.
Last Wednesday, former Army officer and now poster girl for the LGBTI community, Catherine McGregor, had a piece in the Daily Telegraph. Here is the opening sentence:

Australia is engaged in a war, though you would never grasp that from listening to our political leaders or the political class.

Well, that’s refreshing, I thought. I had previously written McGregor off as, primarily, a self-promoting activist. Maybe there’s more to her than I thought, I thought. Let mes see what she has to say. The piece started promisingly with McGregor explaining that our present troubles had their genesis a long time ago.

I do not subscribe to the populist view that this began on September 11, 2001. There have been perennial frontier clashes between Islam and the West going back to The Crusades. Muslim invasions of Europe were defeated as recently as the lifting of the siege of Vienna in 1683.

She rightly criticizes the progressives’ position: that Islam was not the Orlando killer’s motivation. Unfortunately her piece goes rapidly downhill from there, degenerating into a lament at the way that conservatives have allegedly mistreated her LGBTI cohort:

Conservatives have been just as guilty of sophistry. The worst have instinctively blamed the victims for flaunting their “perversion” and ­ piously observed that Islam and homosexuality are each derived from Satan. I could not make this garbage up.

“I could not make this garbage up”? I rather think she did. Perhaps she should have named and shamed any conservative who spouted this ‘garbage’ – a conservative of standing, that is, not some lunatic on Twitter or the utter crazies who fill the pews at the infamous Westboro Baptist Church. Perhaps she didn’t think to cite them when writing her article, but the ABC certainly did. On Thursday’s Lateline, compere Tony Jones did a satellite interview with Louis Theroux that began by quoting the crackpot congregation’s delight at the Pulse massacre. Remember, it was a Muslim who killed 49 people in an orgy of bloodshed, but Lateline chose instead to place its focus on an entirely unrepresentative group of “Christians”. Why would that be, do you think? No need to answer.

But back to McGregor, who continued in a similar vein. And at the end we are not treated to any suggestions as to how Group Captain McGregor, a senior serving officer, thinks we should prosecute this war she claims we are involved in. On her initial point — Islam’s expansionist enmity for the West — McGregor is right. But like her former boss and mentor, Australian of the Year David Morrison, she seems unable to talk the talk, let alone walk the walk.

Yes, we are at war. Most Quadrant readers have known as much for years. After the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Francois Hollande also said it, but whether the French president or any of the so-called leaders of the West genuinely understand what this means is highly doubtful. That they have the stomach for such a war for is an even more dubious proposition.

Europe is being invaded, an invasion that commenced many years ago and has been facilitated by one of the most self-destructive initiatives that the West could possibly devise: the European Union. That most of the invaders are unarmed is neither here nor there. Thanks to the mindless vacuity of the progressive Left and its infiltration of all our institutions, they haven’t needed to be armed. But the effect is the same. The sheer numbers of those so called ‘refugees’ guarantee that they will fester as sullen, unassimilated and parasitic communities, feeding off their host nations while coming to represent an ever-larger and more powerful demographic within them. Ultimately, as Mark Steyn has warned (see the clip below), they will take over.

On June 23 the British people will be going to the polls to choose whether they want to continue with the present system whereby 60% of British laws are made in Brussels and foreign judges decide whether those laws are legitimate or not, or whether we want to strike out for independence and the right to make all of our own laws and have our own British judges decide upon them.

It’s about whether we can recapture the right to deport foreign Islamist hate preachers and terrorist suspects, or whether under European human-rights legislation they must continue to reside in the U.K., often at taxpayers’ expense. The European Union is currently experiencing migration on a scale not seen since the late 17th century—with hordes of young, mostly male Muslims sweeping from the southeast into the heart of Europe. Angela Merkel invited them in and that might be fine for Germany, but why should they have the right to settle in Britain as soon as they get a European passport?

Surely—surely—this is an issue on which the British people, and they alone, have the right to decide, without the intervention of President Obama, who adopted his haughtiest professorial manner when lecturing us to stay in the EU, before making the naked threat that we would be sent “to the back of the queue” (i.e., the back of the line) in any future trade deals if we had the temerity to vote to leave.
Was my country at the back of the line when Winston Churchill promised in 1941 that in the event of a Japanese attack on the U.S., a British declaration of war on Japan would be made within the hour?

Was Great Britain at the back of the line when America was searching for allies in the Korean War in the 1950s?

When America decided to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War in the early 1990s, was Britain at the back of the line when we contributed an armored division that fought on your right flank during Operation Desert Storm?

Were we at the back of the line on 9/11, or did we step forward immediately and instinctively as the very first of your allies to contribute troops to join you in the expulsion of the Taliban, al Qaeda’s hosts, from power in Afghanistan?

Or in Iraq two years later, was it the French or the Germans or the Belgians who stood and fought and bled beside you? Whatever views you might have over the rights or wrongs of that war, no one can deny that Britain was in its accustomed place: at the front of the line, in the firing line. So it is not right for President Obama now to threaten to send us to the back of the line. CONTINUE AT SITE

The 57-member-state Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) have been working hard for years to render Islam the only religion, political system and ideology in the world that may not be questioned with impunity. They have tried — and are in many respects succeeding — to ring-fence Islam as a creed beyond criticism, while reserving for themselves the right to condemn Christians, Jews, Hindus, democrats, liberals, women and gays in often vile, even violent language. Should anyone say anything that seems to them disrespectful of their faith, he or she will at once be declared an “Islamophobe.”

Like almost every world leader, Obama declares, with gross inaccuracy, that “Islam is a religion of peace”. It is politically expedient to deny the very real connection to jihad violence in the Qur’an, the Traditions (ahadith), shari’a law, and the entire course of Islamic history. They do this partly for political reasons, but probably more out of fear of offending Muslims. We know only too well how angry many Muslims can become at even the lightest offence.

“If PEN as a free speech organization can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organization is not worth the name. … I hope nobody ever comes after them.” – Salman Rushdie, on the PEN members who objected to giving its award to Charlie Hebdo, after 12 of its staff were murdered by jihadists.

The OIC succeeded in winning a UN Human Rights Council resolution that makes “defamation of religion” a crime. But the OIC knows full well that only Muslims are likely to use Western laws to deny free speech about their own faith. Last year, the US Congress introduced House Resolution 569, also purportedly intended to combat hate speech. It contains an oddity: it singles out Muslims for protection three times. It does not mention any other faith community.

One of the greatest achievements of the Enlightenment in Europe and the United States is the principle of free speech and reasoned criticism. Democracy is underpinned by it. Our courts and parliaments are built on it. Without it, scholars, journalists, and advocates would be trapped, as their ancestors had been, in a verbal prison. It is enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution, in the words

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman died of a single bullet to the head in January 2015, a day before he was scheduled to testify to Argentina’s Congress about an alleged government coverup of the 1994 Iranian terrorist bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center. There is still no official court ruling on whether he was murdered, but a new investigative report—to be published Tuesday—goes a long way in proving motive.

Joseph Humire, the executive director of the Washington, D.C., based Center for a Secure Free Society, uses thousands of documents and legal wiretaps released to the public to show how the prosecutor’s death eliminated a key stumbling block for Iran and “paved the way for [it] to move into a new phase of its information and intelligence operations in Latin America.” If the theocracy, which is the No. 1 state-sponsor of terrorism in the world, did not murder Nisman, it was the biggest beneficiary of his death.
Nisman was the special prosecutor investigating the terrorist attack on the Jewish community center—known by its Spanish initials as the AMIA. In 2006 he indicted eight former Iranian officials (including former President Ali Rafsanjani) and one Lebanese national. The following year, at Nisman’s behest, Interpol issued “red notices” for the arrest of six of the accused. But Iran took no action.

Using legal wiretaps, Nisman later built a case that President Cristina Kirchner’s government had a covert agreement with Iran to wipe Tehran’s fingerprints off the AMIA attack in exchange for Iranian oil and reopening Iran’s market to Argentine grain and beef.

Nisman had filed a criminal complaint against members of the Kirchner government the week before he died. Killing him did nothing to stop the public from learning of the contents of his report. Yet his death did put the brakes on his plan to bring the Iranian crime into the international arena. It had the potential to undermine the key foreign-policy objectives of Tehran.

Iran’s asymmetric warfare against the West demands commercial engagement because it allows Tehran to deploy political operatives specializing in propaganda, intelligence and terrorism and to finance their activities under the guise of business activity. CONTINUE AT SITE