RUTHFULLY YOURS

Facebook is now removing speech that presumably almost everybody might decide is racist — along with speech that only someone at Facebook decides is “racist.”

The sinister reality of a society in which the expression of majority opinion is being turned into a crime has already been seen across Europe. Just last week came reports of Dutch citizens being visited by the police and warned about posting anti-mass-immigration sentiments on social media.

In lieu of violence, speech is one of the best ways for people to vent their feelings and frustrations. Remove the right to speak about your frustrations and only violence is left.

The lid is being put on the pressure cooker at precisely the moment that the heat is being turned up. A true “initiative for civil courage” would explain to both Merkel and Zuckerberg that their policy can have only one possible result.

It was only a few weeks ago that Facebook was forced to back down when caught permitting anti-Israel postings, but censoring equivalent anti-Palestinian postings.

Now one of the most sinister stories of the past year was hardly even reported. In September, German Chancellor Angela Merkel met Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook at a UN development summit in New York. As they sat down, Chancellor Merkel’s microphone, still on, recorded Merkel asking Zuckerberg what could be done to stop anti-immigration postings being written on Facebook. She asked if it was something he was working on, and he assured her it was.

” To begin with, it is highly unlikely that feminists, gays, etc., are going to flock to the Liberals, Turnbull or not. Even more obviously, it is absurd to claim that there is a powerful global trend against traditional conservative values when the most powerful form of militant political activism on the planet is Islamism, an arch-reactionary creed being systematically imposed on 1.5 billion Muslims (and the rest of the world where possible!). Similarly, both China and India, accounting for nearly 3 billion people, are drawing upon traditional belief systems to sustain their national identities as they undergo accelerated modernization. In Europe, there is an increasing move to the right and far-right as the technocratic progressivism of the central EU powers, such as Germany, France, Italy and the Scandinavian countries, proves to be utterly impotent in the face of the mass Muslim insurgency presently overwhelming their meagre border defences. In America conservatism continues to be an extremely powerful force, as the present presidential campaign is demonstrating. Of the other continents, Africa and Latin America are home to innumerable dictatorships, kleptocracies, and failed or semi-failed states where jihadists and crime syndicates run amok and talk of a conflict between progressivism and conservatism would be not only beside the point but bizarre.”

Philosophically, historically, and economically, progressivism is bankrupt, sustained only by the very capitalist system and productive middle-class it reviles. As the gargantuan costs become utterly unsustainable, it is this chimera in which Turnbull and his supporters invest their hope and rhetoric.

With Islamic State gaining ground in Libya, another Western intervention there looks increasingly likely. The key question is whether it will happen at the request of a Libyan unity government, once rival factions endorse it, or if the West will be compelled to go to war first.

The U.S. and other Western countries helped topple Moammar Gadhafi in 2011 but then turned their attention elsewhere.

By 2014, the country fell into a civil war between an Islamist-led administration in Tripoli and an internationally recognized government based in the eastern city of Tobruk.

Local affiliates of Islamic State took advantage of that division to grab the coastal city of Sirte, Gadhafi’s hometown, last year. They later seized some other areas and inched closer to critical oil fields, damaging vital infrastructure.

With lawless Libya also serving as a springboard for migrants to Europe, European nations—particularly Italy and France, but also the U.K.—have long pushed for a stronger effort to stabilize the country. The U.S., too, has come to view continuing mayhem in Libya as a threat.

PARIS—The presumed leader of the Islamic State operatives who attacked Paris in November boasted that he slipped into Europe among refugees from Syria as part of a team of dozens of militants, according to a key witness.

If true, the testimony adds urgency to a continentwide effort by security services to track down people with links to the extremist group. Authorities fear that Islamic State smuggled many of its fighters into Europe among the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have fled Syria and Iraq in recent years, officials say.

The investigation into the Paris attacks has raised questions about Europe’s ability to screen those refugees for potential threats. At least two people involved in the Paris attacks had registered as refugees on a Greek island in the months before they surfaced in Paris.

The latest testimony, which was reported by French media Thursday, came from a woman who provided information that led French police to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian who is believed to have orchestrated the Nov. 13 killing spree in Paris that left 130 dead and hundreds injured.

Nearly seven years after Warren Bird visited the biggest Protestant church in China, he’s still deeply moved as he recalls its pastor, “Joseph” Gu Yuese, preaching that morning from Psalms.

“His sermon was on how God understands our cares,” says Mr. Bird, an American researcher and expert on global megachurches. “He got very emotional—not in the sense of high emotion carried by his voice tone, but emotional in the sense of affirming, from the Psalms, that God cares about our hearts, and God feels our pain, and God relates to us. It was like, wow.”

Mr. Gu’s sermon in Chongyi Church on that Sunday morning in August 2009 now feels eerie—and prescient. Psalms is a book about finding comfort from God amid hardship and persecution, and this week Mr. Gu disappeared into the hands of the Chinese government. He is reportedly imprisoned in a secretive “black jail,” notorious for deplorable conditions and even torture. Not since the Cultural Revolution has the Chinese government gone after such a high-ranking church leader.

Mr. Gu comes from Zhejiang Province, a region known for both its flourishing Christianity and entrepreneurial spirit. Believers there have long enjoyed relatively good relations with the authorities.

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced last August that her government would allow unregistered refugees to come to Germany, she set off the biggest migrant wave since the Second World War.

Despite the negative effects this huge influx of people has had on the German economy and society, such as the mass sexual molestation and rape of hundreds of women last New Year’s Eve in Cologne, increased crime and concerns for personal safety among native Germans, supporters of Merkel’s action believe it was nevertheless justified by the humanitarian emergency and the need to save lives.

But in an exclusive and revealing interview with the German newspaper Die Welt, an internationally recognised migration and Third World expert, Paul Collier, author of the book Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World, convincingly debunks this myth. Collier, a former director of the World Bank who currently holds an economics professorship at Oxford University, believes Merkel’s open-doors decision “…did not save a single Syrian from death.”

“Despite best intentions, Germany has, instead, dead people on its conscience,” Collier told Die Welt. “Many people understood Merkel’s words as an invitation and only after that did they actually set out on the dangerous journey, sacrifice their savings and entrust their lives to dubious smugglers.”

Meant as a humanitarian gesture, Collier maintains Merkel’s announcement had the opposite effect in regard to migrants’ safety and well-being. The refugees, he said, were already in safe, third states, such as Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, and did not come to Germany directly from “war and crisis countries.” But it was this “invitation” that caused them to leave these relatively safe havens, where most lived in tolerable conditions, and risk their lives on the arduous trip to Germany.

A group of Muslim men recently went into a Christian district in Pakistan, abducted a 7-year-old boy, and took turns gang raping him before finally strangling him to death with a rope. Locals found the child’s body dumped in a field the next day:

[T]he body was sent for post-mortem examination which revealed that the 7-year-old was killed after being brutally raped…. Speaking to The Express Tribune, a local said, “The suspects belonged to rich families and were drunk when they kidnapped the child and took him to their dera where they raped him.

Interestingly, while the NY Daily News, the Independent, and other media state that the boy was seized from a “Christian district,” the original report, published by one Kashif Zafar in the International New York Times’ Express Tribune, avoids mentioning the religious identity of either rapists or raped. It even fails to mention that this atrocity took place in Pakistan and merely names the region, Bahawalnagar, in both the title and body of the report, though few have any clue what country Bahawalnagar is located in.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom implored Secretary of State John Kerry late last month to admit to the United States some Bangladeshi bloggers at high risk of assassination by al-Qaeda groups.

That follows a plea just before Christmas from a coalition of human rights groups warning that dozens of Bangladeshi writers — deemed blasphemers by Islamists for their secular works — were in “urgent danger” and in need of protection.

But today at the State Department, the Obama administration wouldn’t confirm if it had any response to the requests in which the urgency of the matter was clearly spelled out.

USCIRF Chairman Robert P. George wrote to Kerry on Jan. 25, asking “that our government provide humanitarian parole for a limited number of Bangladeshi writers at imminent risk of assassination by extremist groups.”

Last year, one American, Avijit Roy of Atlanta, and four Bangladeshis, Washiqur Rahman Babu, Ananta Bijoy Das, Niloy Chatterjee, and Faisal Arefin Dipan, were viciously murdered by assassins aligned with al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent.

George noted that they “were assassinated because of their writings, including expressing their secular beliefs that amounted to blasphemy in the eyes of the religious extremists who killed them.”

“Additionally, numerous other individuals have been placed on ‘hit-lists,’ which are widely available on the Internet. The five murders, along with the hit lists, underscore that several individuals remain in imminent danger,” he wrote.

“USCIRF respectfully urges you to use your good offices to help secure humanitarian parole for a select number of bloggers who remain in imminent danger in Bangladesh.”

The December letter to Kerry from PEN American Center, Freedom House, Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders and others noted that “the government of Bangladesh has not provided adequate protection to those at risk and, in some cases, has promoted the idea that these bloggers should self-censor in order to deter attacks against them—or that they should leave the country.”

“In what appears to be a concession to appease Islamist groups, Bangladeshi officials have also arrested secular bloggers on charges of insulting religious sentiments in the past,” the coalition wrote.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union funded “peace movements” throughout the west – because for the Soviets “peace” meant “the absence of opposition”.

In our time the new peace movement is Islam. And so we are told today, from the podium of a mosque with “extremist” “links”, that the very word Islam means “peace”. Actually, it means “submission” – ie, the absence of opposition.

The only difference between then and now is that instead of being chanted by scrofulous hippies protesting outside a Nato air base the old line’s being peddled to us by the President of the United States. Odd.

~At the end of September, I spoke in the Danish Parliament on the tenth anniversary of the Mohammed cartoons. (See my speech here.) Afterwards I was hustled off-stage and, a little weary and the worse for wear, gave an interview in a rather handsomely appointed ante-room on the subject of Chancellor Merkel and her Million Muslim March. You might be interested in what I had to say – remember this was two months before the Paris attacks and three months before the New Year sexual assaults and the cover-up by German police and media. Click below to watch:

The flag the Turkish prime minister proudly witnessed while being hoisted at the United Nations is an inspiration of the flag used by the Arab Palestinian nationalists in the first half of the 20th century, which was the flag of the 1916 Arab Revolt against Prime Minister Davutoglu’s beloved Ottoman Empire.

In his speech, Abbas did not forget to “convey our best wishes to our beloved Armenian brothers in Palestine, in Armenia and in the entire world,” and invited Armenian President Serzh Sarghsyan “to visit Palestine and we hope he will accept the invitation.”

Although it came as no surprise, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, in his weekly parliamentary group speech last December, spoke like a Palestinian politician, not a Turkish one:

“The most oppressed people of the 20th and 21st centuries is the Palestinian people … Our support will continue until Jerusalem becomes the capital of independent Palestine … No one should doubt our devotion to the Palestinian cause … We won’t forget Palestine, Gaza, Jerusalem, not even in our dreams … We do politics for this holy way.”