RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/qed/where-we-are-in-the-west/

On July 9, 2024, Axel Rudakubana stabbed to death three young girls, ages 6, 7 and 9, at a dance class in Southport in the northwest of England . I know the town well. I stayed there only a few years ago when visiting my sister and niece in Liverpool. My dad often took us there for an outing. It is a very pleasant seaside town less than 20 miles from Liverpool, where I was born and grew up.

This is a description of the crime from the Doughty Street Chambers in the UK:

On 13 July 2024, aged 17 years old, he [Rudakubana] purchased a large knife. On 29 July, he travelled to the Hart Space on Hart Street, Southport. He targeted a dance workshop for young girls, mostly aged 6 to 11 years old. There were 26 children at the workshop. Within 15 minutes, he killed three of those girls, and attempted to kill eight more. He attempted to kill two adults who tried to stop him.

The girls who were killed were aged 6, 7, and 9. Elise, who was 7 years old, suffered 85 sharp force injuries to her body. Bebe, who was 6 years old, suffered at least 122 sharp force injuries to her body. The children who survived suffered between one or two to 32 stab wounds. 

Rudakubana was sentenced to a minimum of 52 years in prison in January this year. This sentencing note from the Liverpool Crown Court gives a more comprehensive account of the horrific events, if you can handle reading it. Because he was seventeen and not eighteen at the time he avoided a whole-of-life sentence. Where is capital punishment when nothing else remotely fits the bill? ‘Executed and in everlasting Hell’ would seem a fitting epitaph.

If you look up the killer you will find that he was born in Cardiff in 2006 to Rwandan parents who had been admitted to the UK in 2002. You will also find a good deal of emphasis given to them being evangelical Christians. At the same time, one of the charges against Rudakubana was possession of an Al-Qaeda training manual. Put that together with killing girls dancing and it has the fetid smell of Islamic terrorism, though the authorities found nothing corroborating that connection — apparently. How can that be trusted these days is a separate question. What is clear is that Rudakubana is no evangelical Christian.

The police, in their monumental incompetence and loyalty to the compromised political class, gave out no information on the killer. Thus rumours spread. A popular variant of which was that the killer was a Muslim asylum seeker. A Muslim? I wonder why? Just a thought. Could it be anything to do with teen girls’ legs being blown off at an Ariana Grande concert on May 22, 2017, in Manchester? Or the killing and attempted beheading of British Army soldier Lee Rigby in 2013? Or the London bombings of 2005? Or any of the 48,000+ deadly Islamic terrorist attacks worldwide since 9/11? (See religionofpeace.com)

Riots followed the rumours about Rudakubana which followed the killings. Starmer came down hard on the rioters. What else would you expect from Western politicians these days who represent no-one but themselves or perhaps, which comes to the same thing, some evil force or other. Over emotional? Maybe. But how else to explain them flooding their respective countries with culturally discordant refugees and asylum seekers, and then persecuting those among their own citizens who are driven to object.

Lucy Connolly, intelligent, personable, a mum and child-minder, wife of an engineer and Conservative councillor, objected. She had an immediate and impassioned reaction to the depraved murder of three young girls and the cruel wounding of others. Who wouldn’t? She posted this message on X:

 “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the bastards for all I care… if that makes me racist so be it.”

Thinking better of it, she deleted the post 3½ hours later. Though to me it is nothing more than a common or garden emotional reaction that you could have heard in any pub. She plead guilty to inciting racial hatred. She did not obtain legal advice and lacked an understanding of what it might mean to plead guilty, as she explains here. Obviously she did not expect to be sent to prison. She was sentenced to 31 months imprisonment. Jailed in October last year, she was freed in late August this year, having served the required minimum ten months.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21829/the-woman-behind-the-veil

When I ask my mother why she decided to wear the niqab, she looks at me, puzzled. “Decide?” she repeats, as if I’d asked why she “decided” to speak Arabic.

She manages her own stock portfolio entirely in Arabic… she notes that “wars slow things down, yet when there are wars, gold goes up.”

When asked what she thinks of interest, she explains that interest has multiple meanings. When someone is desperate or helpless and needs a loan with interest, that is unacceptable — it exploits the needy. But interest on her own deposits? That is her money “working” to bring more money.

She does not trust foreign stocks. Even locally, she is selective about private ventures, such as new hotels. “It’s never clear what they’re doing exactly,” she says. “They could be financing prostitution.”

Watching so many politicians talk about my mother’s niqab, I do not see bad intentions. I see concern. People want to protect their culture. They worry that foreign customs might slowly replace their own. It is true of people in the West, as well, who might worry that people could be in their midst who wish to replace miniskirts with burqas.

This response is not prejudice. What people are picking up on — sometimes without knowing how to name it — is that people wish to protect what matters to them…. Like church bells in Salzburg or kimonos in Kyoto, they belong to a place, and they deserve to be protected.

In the end, my mother’s story is not really about the niqab. It is about how to stay rooted in a world that keeps shifting.

This means being yourself within the world as you find it, not demanding the world to change for you. That is the kind of wisdom we do not talk about enough.

When most of the world sees a woman in a niqab, a face veil that covers everything except the eyes, the assumptions are predictable — and harsh.

Recently, in Dubai, a tourist filmed a woman in a niqab eating at a restaurant. The tourist and her friend were treating the woman as if she were entertainment for them, rather than as a person trying to enjoy her dinner. Eventually, when the video clip went viral on social media, the Dubai Police issued a statement that they were investigating the matter.

Even in a Muslim-majority country, the woman could not simply be out in public without becoming a spectacle.

In 2017, Australian Senator Pauline Hanson wrote about the burqa, which covers the whole body and face:

“I have long believed that full face coverings, such as the burqa, were oppressive, presented barriers to assimilation, disadvantaged women from finding employment, were causing issues inside our justice system, presented a clear security threat and has no place in modern Western society.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUpfwBY5gPI

Is the new Syrian leader, al-Jolani, truly transformed from a terrorist into a pragmatic statesman? Or, is he employing Taqiyya—disguise and deception—to lure Western nations into a trap? Explore the shifting tactics, underlying motives, and what it means for international relations.
US policy should condition the lifting of sanctions and the resumption of diplomatic ties on ending hate education, halting inciting sermons, stopping hateful official media, and publicly disavowing the vision of establishing a global Islamic society governed solely by Islam.

https://www.nysun.com/article/macrons-hidden-game-turn-against-israel-animated-by-rising-political-clout-of-french-muslims

According to the latest Elabe/Les Echos polling, only 21 percent of the French — one citizen out of five — say they trust President Emmanuel Macron, writ large, and 73 percent say they don’t. More remarkably, only 41 percent of the French who voted for him in the 2022 presidential election say they still trust him, and 54 percent say they don’t any longer. 

Likewise, 62 percent of the French — according to an even more recent CSA poll — don’t trust the president either when it comes to stemming a rising tide of antisemitism, despite his protestations to the contrary. 

Monsieur Macron was indignant when both the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the American ambassador to France, Charles Kushner, publicly questioned his stand in this matter a few days ago.

It looks like more than six French citizens out of ten side with Israel’s premier and America’s envoy rather than with their own president on this issue. “Trust” is a key word here. The French are not so absurdly down to earth as to expect their president to succeed in all his endeavors. Yet the record of the present administration — now in its eighth year — keeps getting worse. 

In 2024, France ranks 24th globally in gross domestic product per capita, according to the International Monetary Fund. That is down from 11th place in the 1990s and 19th in 2017, the year Monsieur Macron was first elected. Public debt has soared to around 113 percent of the GDP in 2024, placing France third in the European Union behind Greece and Italy. Insecurity is rampant: Serious assaults rose to 628.3 per 100,000 in 2023 from 396.5 per 100,000 reported in 2017, according to United Nations statistics.

Immigration has slipped out of control, leading 61 percent of the French to believe that a “great replacement” by non-European immigrants is underway. The political scene has been thrown into chaos after the reckless dissolution of 2024 and the election of a new, hung National Assembly. A centrist, François Bayrou, Macron’s fourth prime minister in less than two years, might not survive a vote of no-confidence next week.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21877/france-silent-dictatorship

On March 31, 2025, the Paris Criminal Court sentenced Marine Le Pen to five years of electoral “ineligibility” with immediate effect…. This sentence, described by the defendant as a “witch hunt”, bars the frontrunner in the polls from standing in the 2027 French presidential election.

The aim of this maneuver is clear: to remove the opposition leader from competing for the highest office in the land.

These court rulings form an impenetrable wall: an elected majority can vote, but the “wise” guardians of the left ensure that nothing passes that offends egalitarianism, environmentalism or the dogma of open borders.

In France, sadly, democracy, has become nothing more than an illusion: the people vote, but the bureaucracy blocks the will of the voters.

The new dictatorship appears based on a single ideology and the gradual suppression of freedoms and subverting the constitutional order in favor of a supposedly superior caste, whose contours, methods and appetites are reminiscent of what our American friends call the “deep state” – self-appointed bureaucrats running your life behind the scenes, where there is no transparency, accountability or readily available means to remove them.

In a cruel twist of history, France, the self-proclaimed cradle of the Enlightenment and freedom, has turned into a regime where democracy is nothing more than a mask, concealing a dictatorship that is still in its infancy but nonetheless unflinching. It is not a dictatorship of boots and uniforms; it is a hushed tyranny, judicial and institutional, crushing any hint of real change under the weight of its legal trappings.

I. France, a formal dictatorship: the judicial elimination of opponents

In a democracy, elections are the inviolable sanctuary of the popular will. In the France of 2025, justice, like a partisan guillotine, falls on opposition figures with surgical precision, rendering them supposedly too disqualified to compete. Examples reveal a damning pattern: searches (National Rally party), convictions (François Fillon, Marine Le Pen, Nicolas Sarkozy), smear campaigns (Éric Zemmour).

On March 31, 2025, the Paris Criminal Court sentenced Marine Le Pen to five years of electoral “ineligibility” with immediate effect, in the so-called European parliamentary assistants case. This sentence, described by the defendant as a “witch hunt”, bars the frontrunner in the polls from standing in the 2027 French presidential election.

The aim of this maneuver is clear: to remove the opposition leader from competing for the highest office in the land. The judges justified their decision on the grounds of misappropriation of European funds for the party’s national activities. Money it seems, intended for the party’s operations at European level was instead used by the national party in France. That is the whole story. It is a far cry from a violent crime or personal enrichment. No personal enrichment on the part of Le Pen was ever found. The timing of this ruling and the provisional exorbitant enforcement, betray the manipulation of the justice system by her opponents.

This is not an isolated case. The legal persecution of Le Pen’s National Rally is far from over.