RUTHFULLY YOURS

’Twas two months before Christmas, October 25, 1965. Astronauts Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford sat in Gemini 6, their chic new two-man space capsule, which sat atop a Titan rocket, which sat atop a launch pad at Cape Canaveral.

One launch pad over, an Atlas rocket blasted off carrying an Agena “target vehicle.” If men were going to land on the moon and come home safely, they would have to rendezvous their lunar lander with an orbiting command module that would fly them home. Proving that a space rendezvous was possible was one of the principal objectives of the Gemini program. And a successful rendezvous would be no mean feat. Getting two spaceships together in orbit would be like hitting one bullet with another — except that your average bullet travels one-tenth the speed of an orbiting Gemini.

Gemini 6 would attempt the first-ever space rendezvous with the Agena, which was an unmanned spaceship. As Schirra and Stafford waited, the Agena was launched — and promptly exploded. Gemini 6 was canceled. The exploded Agena was the only one NASA had.

As 1965 drew to a close, there were just four years left till JFK’s end-of-the-decade moon-landing deadline. NASA knew it was falling behind schedule. Without a successful rendezvous under its belt by the end of the year, meeting JFK’s deadline would be impossible. And without an Agena, it looked as if that might be that — till one Agena engineer was struck by inspiration: What if, instead of rendezvousing with an unmanned target, Gemini 6 were to rendezvous with Gemini 7?

NICE, France—Valérie Aubry-Dumont got the news in a WhatsApp message from deep inside Islamic State territory. “Mom, you’re going to be a grandmother,” wrote her teenage daughter, Cléa.

When Ms. Aubry-Dumont last saw her daughter, Cléa was a 16-year-old girl attending Catholic school in a Paris suburb. After a breakup, Cléa met a young man online and within months the couple fled France to live in a stretch of northern Syria ruled by Islamic State.

“I wish Cléa never had children,” Ms. Aubry-Dumont, a child-care worker, says now that her grandson has been born. Her daughter talks some days of returning to France, Ms. Aubry-Dumont said, but is afraid of losing her baby if she tries to leave. “She is trapped.”

In France, the West’s biggest supplier of foreign fighters in Syria, the loss of sons, daughters and grandchildren to Islamic State has been a slow-motion tragedy. For some French families, the Paris attacks, while deepening the wedge between militants and the West, were a painful reminder of their ties to the enemy.

The French wife of Foued Mohamed-Aggad—who along with two others killed 90 people in Paris’s Bataclan concert hall on Nov. 13—is living in Islamic State territory and ready to give birth “any day now,” said Françoise Cotta, a lawyer Mr. Mohamed-Aggad’s mother approached in an attempt to bring the child back to France.

Jews, Christians and Muslims marked Christmas in the Holy Land with a happy-clappy service promoted by, of all people, Mahmoud Abbas — yes, the same Fatah chief who praises terrorists and insists Christians must surrender their holiest sites to Islamic control
We might be close to the end times; the end times of common sense, of common decency, of self-respect and of self-esteem. I have been pondering on the Christmas Eve editorial in The Australian – you know the right-wing rag. God knows what’s in the SMH or The Age or the Guardian, let alone in the Green Left Weekly.

Under the heading of “The Christmas message of hope in challenging times,” the editor reports on a Mass held in St Catherine’s church in Bethlehem for victims of terrorist attacks. It was presided over by the Catholic auxiliary bishop of Jerusalem and attended by Jews, Christians and Muslims. “The event was permeated with peace and goodwill,” apparently. But wait on; no other than Mahmoud Abbas reportedly instigated this kumbaya event.

Pardon me for being discordant at Christmas time, but isn’t this the same Abbas who in September announced that Jews had no right to defile Al Asqua mosque with their “filthy feet” and who claimed Muslim ownership of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre? Will some Catholics and Jews invite anyone home to share supper these days?

Here is a man who celebrates the lives of terrorists who randomly kill Israeli citizens, yet he is feted by his putative victims. And, the only mainstream Australian newspaper of any worth can’t spot the bitter irony. Incredibly, The Australian contrasts the faux bonhomie in Bethlehem with the crass words of Islamic activist Zaky Mallah of Q&A infamy. It got me thinking the way The Australian evidently thinks. If only Zaky were more like Mahmoud what a wonderful world this would be. Whoever wrote this editorial evidently comes straight from la-la land.

As long as we in the West are not prepared to take Muslims at their word when they claim to be waging bloody jihad because it is their religious obligation, we have no chance of repelling the current onslaught on the West.

First to go will be the welfare states. Shrinking native populations cannot generate enough taxes to accommodate masses of immigrants with so few skills as to be effectively unemployable, or who do not want to contribute to “infidel” societies. Well before mid-century, the number of Muslims in Denmark will be large enough irreversibly to have changed the composition and character of the country.

In the United States, a House of Representatives bill, H. Res. 569, has been sponsored that would censor one of the few countries left with freedom of speech. The bill, in accordance with the 10-year plan of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), would criminalize all criticism of Islam, worldwide.

Will Muslim non-integration spell the end of the secular state as we have known it? Probably. Religion – or more accurately, Islamic ideology, which knows no distinction between religion and politics – is on the ascendant.