RUTHFULLY YOURS

A woman falsely accused of burning a Koran was ripped to pieces by a mob in Afghanistan. The woman, Farkhunda Malikzada, was falsely accused by a merchant who was selling Viagra and magical pregnancy amulets.

The tormented final hours of Farkhunda Malikzada, a 27-year-old aspiring student of Islam who was [falsely] accused of burning a Quran in a Muslim shrine, shocked Afghans across the country. That is because many of her killers filmed one another beating her and posted clips of her broken body on social media. Hundreds of other men watched, holding their phones aloft to try to get a glimpse of the violence, but never making a move to intervene. Those standing by included several police officers.

At first, the trial and convictions that followed seemed a victory in the long struggle to give Afghan women their due in a court of law. But a deeper look suggests otherwise. The fortuneteller who several investigators believe set the events in motion was found not guilty on appeal. The shrine’s custodian, who concocted the false charge of Quran burning and incited the mob, had his death sentence commuted. Police officers who failed to send help and others who stood by received slaps on the wrist, at most. Some attackers identifiable in the videos avoided capture altogether.

Farkhunda’s death and the legal system’s response call into question more than a decade of Western efforts in Afghanistan to instill a rule of law and improve the status of women. The United States alone has spent more than $1 billion to train lawyers and judges and to improve legal protections for women; European countries have provided tens of millions more.

SEE THIS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZtc2ma2GEQ

Pat Condell is the most outspoken and eloquent commentator in the English-speaking world. (Hello, Dr. Krauthammer: maybe it’s time to take a vacation from the Beltway and realize what’s really going on and why the elites of the world in their bubble are so out of touch.) Perhaps he is too outspoken for Fox News Channel, but that is their loss. The rest of us can watch him on our computers and handheld devices and avoid those endlessly rising costs of cable TV subscriptions.

I must confess: my heart breaks for Sweden. Like anyone born and raised in Minnesota, I feel a certain closeness to that country and feel a familiarity that transcends my visit to it long ago. Despite their embrace of political correctness, the Swedes are at heart very decent, humane people, their main faults being a desire to please others in their community (which leads to silencing dissent and conformity) and self-righteous hypocrisy. But these are minor blemishes considering the personal decency most people center their lives on.

Taking advantage of Sweden’s generosity, Muslim immigrants have been arriving in large numbers and, in recent months, catastrophically overwhelming the country’s budget and facilities to house and feed them.

The few minutes you spend watching Condell’s commentary will reward you:

So far everything the Bush and Obama administrations have done has made it worse for the West. The US has not figured out who the enemy is nor how to deal with the threats
In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration struggled to define the enemy and to decide how to defeat it. Even though 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis and the Saudis were involved in the planning and financing of the attack, President Bush allowed the Saudis to fly out of the country in the next 24 hours when all other air traffic had been shut down.

No doubt that Bush had decided to maintain good relations with the Arabs, and Saudi Arabia particularly, just as the US had done for half a century. This policy led Bush to say on Sept 17, 2011 to the Islamic world, “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war,” in a speech as sycophantic as any President Obama has ever delivered.

On a different policy tack, Bush said on the evening of 9/11, “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”

On Sept 20/11 Bush spoke to the Joint Houses Congress emphasizing both tacks:

The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends. It is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them.

…any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.

And so began the bifurcation of Islam into the peaceful Muslims on the one hand and the radicals who hijacked the religion on the other.

Gareth Porter, national security policy analyst, wrote in 2008:

Three weeks after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively in then-under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith’s recently published account of the Iraq war decisions.

Mark Durie is a theologian, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and author of The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom.

President Obama was mistaken in his Christmas message: it is not true that church bells have been ringing in the Middle East for centuries.

Dear President Obama,

In your recent statement on persecuted Christians at Christmas you stated: In some areas of the Middle East where church bells have rung for centuries on Christmas Day, this year they will be silent; this silence bears tragic witness to the brutal atrocities committed against these communities by ISIL. When you say that ‘church bells have rung for centuries’ you are not speaking the truth. Bells have rung in Syria and Iraq for not much more than a hundred years, at most.

As determined by Islamic law, church bells did not sound throughout the Middle East for more than a thousand years from the 7th century conquests until modern times (except under the Crusaders). This was due to the conditions set by the Pact of the Caliph Umar, by which Christians of Syria surrendered to Islamic conquest in the 7th century AD. In this pact the Christians agreed that “We will not sound the bells in our churches.” Churches in regions controlled by Muslims used semantrons (also calls nakos) instead of the forbidden church bells. Examples of these are still visible in Jerusalem to this day, e.g. see here.

King Edward VIII was forced to abdicate in 1936, and soon took the title of the Duke of Windsor. He has always been known for his pro-Nazi sympathies. However, the extent of his betrayal could never be fully verified due to the secrecy of the Royal Archives.

The Royal Archives have always ensured that letters from German relatives of the royal family in the run up to World War II remain closed. Naturally, such censorship has led to endless conspiracy theories.

But over the past eight years I have accumulated damning evidence by sifting through 30 archives all over the world that are open. Intelligence reports and German, Spanish and Russian documents show members of the British royal family were indeed far closer to Nazi Germany than has previously been recognised. I present this in full in my new book Go-Betweens for HitlerExternal link .

One key to this Anglo-German network is Charles Edward Duke of Coburg (1884-1954). In a Channel 4 programmeExternal link on him in 2007, I called Coburg “a Nazi who got away with it”, but I had no idea about the magnitude of his crimes at the time.