RUTHFULLY YOURS

On December 25, millions of Christians in countries whose leaders voted against the United States’ recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, as well as Pope Francis, who joined in the condemnation, will be celebrating the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, in the Holy Land of Israel. We wish them and our readers a Merry Christmas!

Growing numbers of Christian-majority countries seem too willing to rewrite history by adopting the newly invented Palestinian state’s lies, which include the denial of more than two millennia of Jewish presence in the Holy Land, even claiming that Jesus was not a Jew, but a Palestinian, and a Muslim!

The Christian identity of Europe has been eroded not only by growing secularism, but also by the threat of Islamist terrorism. And it all started with the Palestinians who from the beginning were in the business of extorting concessions from the West. They did it again on Thursday. Only this time, they didn’t even have to hijack passenger planes of any of the 128 countries that voted against the U.S. at the General Assembly. By now, most of the 128 countries that endorsed the Palestinians condemnation of President Donald Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem have learned to dread violence committed by the growing numbers of radicalized second-generation Muslims and refugees who often cite Palestinian lies – about Jerusalem, Israel, and the Jews – as a motive for terrorists’ attacks. Besides, their leaders oppose U.S. president Donald Trump and are mostly anti-Israeli. Then there is the financial motive. How can they justify spending billions of dollars on aid to the terrorists in Gaza and the West Bank? Moreover, they are greedy. They would rather do business with the mullahs in Iran, Turkey’s Muslim brother President Erdoğan, Qatar, and other Islamist entities.

The General Assembly’s condemnation of the U.S. for declaring the relocation of its Israel embassy to Jerusalem, the capital, came after several resolutions passed earlier by the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian U.N. purportedly cultural body, UNESCO. Last May, as Israel was celebrating its 69th Independence Day, 22 of the 58 member-countries in UNESCO passed a resolution denying the Jewish State of Israel’s legal and historical rights anywhere in Jerusalem or at any other Jewish holy sites that have repeatedly been documented for more than 2,000 years as belonging to the Israelites. Twenty-three countries that lacked the courage to openly resist the Palestinian-led Arab-Muslim initiative abstained. Most of the ten countries that opposed UNESCO’s deplorable resolution lacked the courage to oppose the General Assembly’s resolution. Why?

Yesterday’s election victory for Catalan separatists, including
humiliating losses for the ruling center-right Partido Popular,
denotes yet another setback for the grand project of European
unification and a challenge for a continent divided between a strong
north and a lagging south. The Catalan separatists won a thin majority
in the regional parliament, leaving them precisely where they were
before the Oct. 1referendum on secession from Spain – with a small
plurality in favor of breaking away and a large minority determined to
stay. The election result, though, has dire implications for Partido
Popular leader Manuel Rajoy’s minority government, and for European
cohesion in general.

Nationalism is a ghost that refuses to be exorcised. As Annette
Prosinger wrote in a front-page commentary in the conservative German
daily Die Welt. “This election was in reality a referendum on the
independence movement. The result will astonish all of those who bet
on the disenchantment of the Separatists. The magic is more tenacious
than people thought: It has overcome everything: The drop in tourism
and economic investment, the flight of enterprise from Catalonia, and
the rejection that the independence movement received from the EC. The
supporters of the independence movement were not unsettled by the fact
that none of the glorious promises of Carlos Puigedemont and his group
came true, and that prospering Catalonia has become a crisis region.”

The term “disenchantment” (in German, Entzauberung) is deeply fraught
in the German language: it was the watchword of the Romantic movement
that incubated European nationalism during the 19thcentury, calling
for the “re-enchantment” of a world left disenchanted by the
Enlightenment.

Exalting Mohammed in churches effectively proclaims that Mohammed is greater than Jesus — The “Archbishop Cranmer” blog.

A school in Lüneburg postponed a Christmas party after a Muslim student complained that the singing of Christmas carols during school was incompatible with Islam. Alexander Gauland, the leader of the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD), said the school’s action was “an unbearable, involuntary submission to Islam” and amounted to a “cowardly injustice” toward non-Muslim children.

“The word ‘Christmas,’ a symbol of our faith and our culture, does not discriminate against anyone. Striking the emblems of Christmas does not guarantee anyone’s respect, does not produce a welcoming and inclusive school and society, but fosters intolerance towards our culture, our customs, our laws and our traditions. We firmly believe that our traditions must be respected.” — Milan politician Samuele Piscina.

This year’s Christmas season has been marked by Islam-related controversies in nearly every European country. Most of the conflicts have been generated by Europe’s multicultural political and religious elites, who are bending over backwards to secularize Christmas, ostensibly to ensure that Muslims will not be offended by the Christian festival.

Many traditional Christmas markets have been renamed — Amsterdam Winter Parade, Brussels Winterpret, Kreuzberger Wintermarkt, London Winterville, Munich Winter Festival — to project a multicultural veneer of secular tolerance.

More troubling are the growing efforts to Islamize Christmas. The re-theologizing of Christmas is based on the false premise that the Jesus of the Bible is the Jesus (Isa) of the Koran. This religious fusion, sometimes referred to as “Chrislam,” is gaining ground in a West that has become biblically illiterate.

In Britain, for instance, the All Saints Church in Kingston upon Thames recently held a joint birthday celebration for Jesus and Mohammed. The “Milad, Advent and Christmas Celebration” on December 3 was aimed at “marking the birthday of Prophet Mohammed and looking forward to the birthday of Jesus.” The hour-long service included time for Islamic prayer and was followed by the cutting of a birthday cake.

Fundamentalist Muslims in Turkey — and elsewhere — do not see jihad, forced conversions or other forms of persecution against non-Muslims as criminal. On the contrary, their religious scriptures openly command them “to chop off heads and fingers, and kill infidels wherever they may be hiding,” among many other openly violent teachings.

Hence, what the rest of the world would describe as “genocide,” “massacre,” “terrorism,” or “ethnic cleansing” is viewed by radical Muslims as a “righteous” way of spreading Islam and of liberating kafir (infidel) lands. Erdogan is clearly such a radical, which is why he takes pride in his country’s criminal history, while chastising and rewriting that of other states, such as Israel.

The West’s misunderstanding of this knows no bounds.

Since the Trump administration’s official recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been ramping up his anti-Israel rhetoric, calling the country “a state of occupation and terrorism.”

This is worse than ironic. The Jews are not “occupiers” in their ancient native homeland, where they have lived for more than 3,000 years. Turks, on the other hand, 3,000 years ago were most likely in Central Asia, nowhere near the area that is now Turkey. To add hypocrisy to injury, Erdogan also said about his own country, “Let it be known that there has never been any holocaust or genocide in this nation’s past. There’s no campaign of ethnic cleansing, massacres, persecution, or torture in this nation’s history.”

Oh really?

The cities in today’s Turkey — most of which are in Anatolia (Asia Minor) and the Armenian highlands — were actually built by Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians; and Jews have lived there since antiquity. Turkic jihadists from Central Asia invaded and conquered the Christian Byzantine Empire in the eleventh century, thereby paving the way for the gradual Turkification and Islamization of Anatolia and Armenia. The Ottoman invasion of Constantinople (Istanbul) in the fifteenth century brought about the complete destruction of the Byzantine Empire.