RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14563/denmark-immigration-integration

How does a society deal with religious institutions that profess values which are the very opposite of the value system of the Western society in which they live?

“When I was in high school, there were around 50,000 people with a non-Western background in Denmark. Today, there are almost half a million. In one generation, our country has changed”. — Lars Løkke Rasmussen, then prime minister of Denmark, January 1, 2019.

The Integration Barometer — which measures the degree of assimilation in the municipality among young people with a non-Western background — showed that almost one third of 18-29 year-olds (31%) believe that “religious and cultural laws must be adhered to, even though they may be contrary to [Danish] law”. The issue, then, is whether these young people believe that Islamic sharia law should take precedence over Danish law…. In addition, the number of youths who view democracy in a positive light has fallen from 86% in 2016 to 79% in 2018.

It recently came to light… that a committee under the government’s Ministry of Church Affairs, which is responsible for formally approving mosques in Denmark, has been handing out approvals for them without knowing “whether they [the mosques] were ruled from abroad, whether women’s rights were suppressed, or there were other problematic conditions”. Formal approval of a mosque means that the mosque becomes eligible for tax benefits and is permitted to bring foreign preachers to Denmark on a special visa.

When the association behind the mosque [asked]… to be approved as a religious community, it had in its statutes a provision saying it operated under the supervision of Iran’s ‘Supreme Leader’, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. At first, this news was a matter of concern for the Ministry of Church Affairs, but then Ahlul Bait simply rewrote its statutes and the ministry gave its approval.

Earlier this year, in his New Year’s speech, Denmark’s prime minister at the time, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, mentioned that religious parallel societies constitute a problem and that immigrants need to learn to “put secular laws over religious ones”.

What, however, if, in the community involved, there seems no desire to do that?

“When I was in high school”, Rasmussen continued “there were around 50,000 people with a non-Western background in Denmark. Today, there are almost half a million. In one generation, our country has changed”.

Just how great are the problems was revealed in a recent survey, Integrations Barometer 2018, published by the municipality of Copenhagen. The Integration Barometer — which measures the degree of integration in the municipality among young people with a non-Western background — showed that almost one third of 18-29 year-olds (31%) believe that “religious and cultural laws must be adhered to, even though they may be contrary to [Danish] law”.[1] The issue, then, is whether these young people believe that Islamic sharia law should take precedence over Danish law. The statistic represents an increase from 2016, when a similar survey showed that 24% wanted sharia law. In addition, the number of youths who view democracy in a positive light has fallen from 86% in 2016 to 79% in 2018[2].

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gulf-states-shrug-as-india-seizes-kashmir-11566255385

The Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir enjoyed a unique status in predominantly Hindu India for more than 70 years. No more. Both houses of the Indian Parliament have approved legislation to divide Kashmir into two “union territories” and allow non-Kashmiri Indians to move freely into the region, open businesses and buy land. Many Kashmiris fear the result will be a wave of migration that ends any hope of Kashmiri independence or autonomy.

Pakistan, which has fought three wars with India over Kashmir, reacted with rage, but it isn’t getting much support from its purported Muslim allies in the Persian Gulf region. As hundreds of Kashmiri intellectuals, journalists and activists were arrested, and as telephone and internet service to much of the state was cut, Saudi Aramco announced a $15 billion investment in an Indian oil company. On Sunday evening, after stone-throwing crowds confronted security forces in Srinagar, Kashmir’s capital, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs announced that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will travel to the United Arab Emirates next week to receive the country’s highest civilian honor. From the U.A.E., he will travel to Bahrain on the first-ever visit to that country by a sitting Indian prime minister.

Civil libertarians and human-rights activists in India and around the world have condemned the crackdown in Kashmir, but a recent opinion poll found 57% of Indians wanted Kashmir to lose its special status. Sixty-five percent said they thought Mr. Modi could solve the Kashmir problem in five years.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/britain-pays-the-price-for-corbyn-11566248428

Blame for most political failures surrounding Brexit rests with Britain’s ruling Conservative Party, but the past week has cast a new light on the ways the Labour opposition also is guilty of dereliction of duty. With the country in the grip of a once-in-a-generation governance crisis, Labour has opted out of serious participation.

That’s the meaning of a remarkable series of events in recent days in which even the politicians most staunchly opposed to Brexit have concluded that Brexit would be better than letting Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn become Prime Minister. Mr. Corbyn last week urged pro-Remain members of other parties to oust Boris Johnson ’s Tory government, which has a single-seat majority. The parliamentary putsch would install Mr. Corbyn as caretaker Prime Minister for long enough to delay Brexit and organize a general election. Yet no one took Mr. Corbyn up on his offer.

It’s hard to blame them. Mr. Corbyn can’t lead a “national unity government” when his economic platform is the most radical Britons have seen in two generations and his tolerance for anti-Semitism within Labour continues to shock voters. His personal views on Brexit, and Labour’s Brexit platform under him, are so confused that Remainers distrust him to lead. It’s not even clear that Mr. Corbyn, steeped as he is in the tactics and ethos of the radical left, could be trusted to relinquish power quickly under an anti-Brexit parliamentary maneuver if he became Prime Minister.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/tiananmen-then-hong-kong-now/

Orville Schell, who covered the Tiananmen Square protests for the New York Review of Books 30 years ago, has an essay in Foreign Affairs that is worth your time. Schell compares what happened in Beijing then with what is going on in Hong Kong now. The similarities are not reassuring.

“The Tiananmen Square demonstrations taught that powerful movements of dissent against the Chinese Communist Party are almost always destined to end in confrontation,” Schell writes. “Why? Because such challenges are intolerable to a Leninist one-party system that allows no notion of dissent and whose leaders are perennially worried about displaying weakness.”

A generation ago, Deng Xiaoping waited until the conclusion of a high-profile summit with Mikhail Gorbachev before acting against the democracy activists in Tiananmen. Gorbachev departed on May 18. Within a few weeks, the government massacred the protestors.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/advocates-internationalize-the-fight-to-free-raif-badawi-from-saudi-prison

MONTREAL — More than seven years after Raif Badawi was thrown in prison, lawyers and allies of the Saudi blogger are increasingly lobbying foreign governments in an effort to secure his release as Saudi Arabia prepares to host next year’s G-20 meeting.

Irwin Cotler, a human rights lawyer and former federal justice minister who represents the family internationally, says advocates for Badawi have recently been meeting with foreign governments, UN representatives and others to encourage them to call for the release of Badawi, his sister Samar, their former lawyer Waleed Abulkhair and other imprisoned human rights defenders.

People hold pictures of Samar Badawi (C) and her brother jailed Saudi blogger Raif Badawi (R) as they demonstrate in support of Raif Badawi, who was sentenced to 1,000 lashes for “insulting Islam, on May 7, 2015 in Paris. Stephane de Sakutin / AFP/Getty Images

Cotler sat down with The Canadian Press to discuss the intensifying effort to free the 35-year-old Badawi, who was arrested on June 17, 2012, and was later sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in jail for his online criticism of Saudi clerics.

Cotler said it is urgent “to both internationalize and intensify our advocacy” as Saudi Arabia chairs the G-20 ahead of the meeting in Riyadh in November 2020.

Jack Letts, dubbed ‘Jihadi Jack’ by British media, has been detained for about two years after a 2014 trip to Syria where he helped the Islamic State

OTTAWA — The United Kingdom is shirking its share of the international community’s duty to help keep the world safe from terrorism, the federal government suggested Sunday after the British Home Office revoked the citizenship of a dual citizen imprisoned in Syria.

Jack Letts, a British-Canadian man who has been behind bars in a Kurdish prison since 2017, has been stripped of his British citizenship, the office of Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale confirmed in a sternly worded statement.

“Canada is disappointed that the United Kingdom has taken this unilateral action to off-load their responsibilities,” the statement said. “Terrorism knows no borders, so countries need to work together to keep each other safe.”

Letts, who was dubbed “Jihadi Jack” by the British media, has been detained for about two years after he travelled to Syria in 2014 to support the Islamic State group.

A statement from the Home Office said revoking British citizenships is one way it counters terrorist threats. It said it does not comment on individual cases.

“Decisions on depriving a dual national of citizenship are based on substantial advice from officials, lawyers and the intelligence agencies and all available information,” the statement said.

Letts’ parents, John Letts and Sally Lane, were found guilty in June for funding terrorism when they tried to send him money. The couple, from Oxford, England, received suspended sentences of 12 months in prison.

John Letts wrote a letter to Canadian MPs last year that said his son is not a terrorist and deserves Canada’s protection. In his letter, Letts wrote that the money was to pay “people smugglers,”which he described as his son’s “only way out” of Syria.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14737/spain-jews-citizenship

The legislation’s main barriers to Spanish citizenship have been obligatory exams on Spanish language and socio-cultural history, the need to travel to Spain and exorbitant fees and costs — all without any guarantee of success.

“We want to express our disappointment because this law, which was supposed to restore justice, has become increasingly complicated. If we observe the procedures, the prerequisites, the number of documents to be submitted, the certified translations, the fees, the language and culture exams and the need to travel to Spain, we cannot but wonder about the reason for all of these hurdles.” — Jon Iñarritu García, a congressman representing the Basque Country.

Although official data on the number of Sephardic Jews who will have obtained Spanish citizenship under the 2015 law will not be available until all applications are processed… initial indications show that the law has failed to “right a wrong.”

A piece of much-heralded legislation to grant Spanish citizenship to up to 3.5 million descendants of Jews expelled from the country in 1492 is about to end in failure: fewer than 10,000 Jews have been awarded Spanish passports ahead of an October 1, 2019 deadline.

Spanish leaders promised that the law — which entered into force on October 1, 2015 for a period of three years and was extended for one additional year — would “right a historic wrong” and demonstrate that more than 500 years after the Inquisition began, Jews are once again welcome in Spain.

The legislation, however, introduced so many cumbersome bureaucratic hurdles to obtain Spanish citizenship that most prospective hopefuls appear to have been deterred from even initiating the application process.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14691/extinction-christians-middle-east

“I don’t believe in these two words [human rights], there are no human rights. But in Western countries, there are animal rights. In Australia they take care of frogs…. Look upon us as frogs, we’ll accept that — just protect us so we can stay in our land.” — Metropolitan Nicodemus, the Syriac Orthodox archbishop of Mosul, National Catholic Register.

“Those people are the same ones who came here many years ago. And we accepted them. We are the original people in this land. We accepted them, we opened the doors for them, and they push us to be minorities in our land, then refugees in our land. And this will be with you if you don’t wake up.” — Metropolitan Nicodemus.

“Threats to pandas cause more emotion” than threats to the extinction of the Christians in the Middle East. — Amin Maalouf, French-Lebanese author, Le Temps.

Convert, pay or die. Five years ago, that was the “choice” the Islamic State (ISIS) gave to Christians in Mosul, then Iraq’s third-largest city: either embrace Islam, submit to a religious tax or face the sword. ISIS then marked Christian houses with the Arabic letter ن (N), the first letter of the Arabic word “Nasrani” (“Nazarene,” or “Christian”) . Christians could often take no more than the clothes on their back and flee a city that had been home to Christians for 1,700 years.

Two years ago, ISIS was defeated in Mosul and its Caliphate crushed. The extremists, however, had succeeded in “cleansing” the Christians. Before the rise of ISIS, there were more than 15,000 Christians there. In July 2019, the Catholic charity, Aid to the Church in Need, disclosed that only about 40 Christians have come back. Not long ago, Mosul had “Christmas celebrations without Christians”.