RUTHFULLY YOURS

When the same Home Office that forbade Sister Ban even to enter the country discovered that the young male Iraqi was in Britain, he explained clearly that he had been trained by ISIS. He told the Home Office officials that the group had trained him to kill. The Home Office promptly found him a place to live and study, and treated him as the minor he said he was but most likely was not. He subsequently told a teacher that he had “a duty to hate Britain”.

Last year the Institute of St Anselm (a Catholic training institute for priests and nuns, based in Kent) closed its doors because of problems it had getting the Home Office to grant visa applications for foreign students. One nun last year was apparently denied entry to the UK because she did not have a personal bank account.

So, those who flee ISIS are turned away, while those who are trained by ISIS are welcome.

The behaviour of government departments in charge of immigration and asylum across Europe repeatedly demonstrate the truth of the late Robert Conquest’s maxim — his “third law of politics” — that the simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation “is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies”.

Last week it was reported in the Catholic Herald that a nun who was driven out of the town of Qaraqosh, on the Nineveh plains in Iraq, has been forbidden to visit her ill sister in the United Kingdom. Sister Ban Madleen was among those Christians who were forced to flee the largest Christian town in the area when ISIS entered it in 2014. She was among the thousands of Christians who fled the approaching jihadists and found refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan. There, she set up kindergartens to look after the children of other refugees who had also sought sanctuary in the Kurdish areas. A letter, seen by the Catholic Herald, from the UK Visa and Immigration division at the UK Home Office, stated that Sister Ban had not given evidence of her earnings as a kindergarten principal or shown enough evidence that her order of nuns would fund her visit.

The UK Home Office noted that Sister Ban had previously travelled to the UK and had on those occasions always complied with the terms of her visa. However, the Home Office pointed out that her visa was issued seven years ago, in 2011, and noted her lack of recent travel to the UK. It shows no understanding of why her recent travel might have been limited. Such as the possibility that events such as the rise of ISIS, the attempted annihilation of Iraq’s Christian community and that community’s quasi-Biblical flight to safety in the Kurdish regions might explain the nun’s otherwise inexplicable absence from the UK?

The international reaction to Hamas’ provocative “March of Return” had its predictable voices mired in typical hypocrisy. The European Union (EU), and the Human Rights Watch (HRW) called for “an independent and transparent investigation” into Israel’s use of live ammunition to quell the rioting. The United Nations (UN), that “paragon of virtue,” called for an emergency Security Council meeting with the aim of condemning Israel. France called on Israel to “show restraint.” The most blatant attack on Israel came from Turkey’s dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He called Israel’s Prime Minister “a terrorist.”

The EU seems to be interested in investigations only when Israel is involved and when the victims are Palestinians. That is not the case when Israelis are murdered by Palestinian terrorists. The UN, beholden to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which is its most powerful component in the General Assembly and other UN institutions, is clearly a biased party. The UN has habitually devoted the lion’s share of its proceedings to condemn Israel. Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the UN observed (12/10/2017): “The UN has outrageously been of the world’s foremost centers of hostility towards Israel.”

Turkey’s President Erdogan exceeded all others in his hypocritical righteous indignation. At a Saturday speech (April 1, 2018) in Istanbul, Erdogan declared: “I strongly condemn the Israeli government over its inhumane attack.” He was referring to the Hamas organized riot called the “March of Return,” in which 15 Palestinians died in clashes with Israeli soldiers. Erdogan added on his social media page, “Israel will get trapped under the oppression it inflicts in Palestine. We will continue to support our Palestinian sisters and brothers in their rightful cause until the very end.”

The following day, Erdogan continued his attack, this time on Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally, calling him “a terrorist.” In a televised speech in Adana, Southern Turkey, he shouted “Hey Netanyahu! You are an occupier. And it is as an occupier that you are on those lands. At the same time you are a terrorist.” Reuters quoted Erdogan the same day as saying (referring to Israel)

“You are a terrorist state. It is known what you have done in Gaza and what you have done in Jerusalem. You have no one that likes you in the world.” This last remark revealed Erdogan’s anti-Semitic disposition.

“Wow! Are you ever nice and tight!”

It sounded like dialogue from some porn video, but the speaker was Dr. Bassam El-Tatari, a physician in Windsor, Ontario. The doctor was addressing one of his Canadian patients during a vaginal exam.

“I was shocked,” the woman told reporters. “I immediately started looking for another doctor.” So did six other patients, who say that the doctor, whose full name is Bassam Mohamed Khalil Darwish El-Tatari, kissed female patients on the lips, squeezed their breasts, played with nipples, and showed excessive interest in women’s vaginal areas.

This activity recalls Dr. Syed K. Zaidi, 41, of Granite Bay, California, a wealthy community near Sacramento. As several of his patients noted, the eager Dr. Zaidi liked to cup their naked buttocks, squeeze their breasts, and show a surge of attention during vaginal examinations. Even so, the California Medical Board did not lift Zaidi’s license and settled instead for five years probation. So far, Canadian authorities are taking sterner measures with Dr. Bassam El-Tatari.

Allegations dating back to 2009 have landed him in court on charges of sexual assault. One woman told the court “I never let him do another female exam again,” and three other victims have testified. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario has allowed El-Tatari to retain his medical license but barred him from being alone with patients. The doctor, who trained in the Czech Republic, will face disciplinary hearings that could result in the loss of his license to practice medicine. As this plays out, a much more serious case has yet to reach the courtroom.

In October of 2017, Habibullah Ahmad, 21, attacked Anne Widholm as she strolled on the Ganatchio trail in Windsor, Ontario. The 75-year-old grandmother suffered “the worst skull fractures I’ve seen in my 12 years here in Windsor,” as neurosurgeon Dr. Balraj Jhawar told reporters. The victim’s lacerated scalp, bruised face and fractured neck vertebrae were “among the most brutal things I’ve seen in my career.” The attack, Dr. Jr. Jhawar said, “is not just another assault,” but represents “a new, dark side of Windsor that we can’t let propagate.”

On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, the New Israel Fund announced it signed a partnership agreement with Anne Frank Fonds, the foundation Anne Frank’s father, Otto Frank, established in 1963 to administer the profits from the sales of her diary.

Frank’s diary has sold more than 30 million copies in 60 languages since it was first published in 1947. Its sales and global reach make it the most famous book authored by a Jew aside from the Bible.

The New Israel Fund’s deal with the Anne Frank Foundation is a symbolic expression of the existential struggle being waged in the Jewish world today. That struggle pits the government of Israel against much of the American Jewish leadership. It pits Israel’s public against the justices of the Supreme Court. It pits IDF line soldiers and commanders against the General Staff.

The effective merger of the New Israel Fund with the Anne Frank Foundation is the latest chapter in the theft of Anne Frank’s legacy, which began in the 1950s.

In 1952, a Jewish-American journalist named Meir Levin discovered The Diary of Anne Frank in French translation. Levin recognized that her diary was the ideal vehicle for telling the story of the genocide of European Jewry to the American public.

Frank was a Westernized Jew. Her family wasn’t religious. They were cosmopolitan German Jews who decamped to Amsterdam in 1933 when the Nazis rose to power, and immediately fit right in.

But for the Nazi occupation of Holland in 1940, Anne would likely never have received any Jewish education. But when the Dutch collaborationist government implemented the Nazi race laws, and expelled all Jewish children from public schools, in 1941 her parents were compelled to enroll her in a Jewish school.