RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Justice is in short supply in northern Nigeria.

In 2013, there were over 200 Christian churches in the thriving Gwoza area. By the middle of 2014, there were almost none left.

The orphans have nothing, but surrounded by the warm and disciplined Christian love of the Kwashis, they have everything.

In Jos, in the middle-belt of Nigeria. despite the proliferating Christmas decorations in homes and churches, peace on earth and goodwill between communities continues to be in short supply. Across northern Nigeria, the church is facing an existential threat from the violence and intimidation of Islam in its various forms.

In the school of Gloria Kwashi, wife of the Anglican Archbishop, Ben Kwashi, which serves 400 orphans, the lunchtime bowl of mixed rice and beans with added nutrients is, for many of these children, the only meal of the day. The education of these orphans is taken seriously by Gloria Kwashi and her dedicated staff of seven, not only as a Christian imperative but also as a vital route out of poverty.

“Often in these cases the police take no action or, worse, side with the rapists. Christian families or witnesses are pressured to withdraw complaints.” — Sardar Mushtaq Gill, Pakistani lawyer and human rights activist.

Asia Bibi, a Christian mother of five, has been on death row since 2010 because a Muslim woman, apparently with a personal vendetta against Bibi, accused her of speaking blasphemy against the prophet of Islam, Muhammad. “She could be killed by any inmate or even a prison guard,” said an official. “She was vomiting blood last month and was having difficulty walking.”

Saddique Azam, a Catholic teacher and headmaster at a primary school in a small village, was beaten and tortured by a group of Muslim teachers who resented being under the authority of an “infidel.”

Nabila Bibi, a Christian woman who was engaged to a Christian man, was abducted, forcibly converted to Islam, and forcibly married to a Muslim man.

The U.S. State Department lists only nine nations as “Countries of Particular Concern” (CPC) — a designation for those nations considered to be the worst violators of religious freedom. These include governments that “engage in or tolerate” systematic, ongoing, and unspeakable violations of religious freedom.

BRUSSELS—Belgian authorities have charged a ninth person in connection with last month’s terrorist attacks in Paris, as they continue to hunt for a key suspect in the atrocity, the federal prosecutor’s office said Thursday.

Abdoullah C., a Belgian national, was arrested in Brussels on Tuesday and charged by an investigating judge with terrorist murders and participation in the activities of a terrorist organization, the prosecutor said.

The man, born in 1985, is suspected of having had “several contacts” with Hasna Ait Boulahcen, niece of the ringleader of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud. Those contacts allegedly took place between the attacks and a subsequent police shootout in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, in which both Mr. Abaaoud and his niece died, the prosecutor’s office said.

Belgian authorities will decide later today whether to extend Abdoullah C.’s detention.

The latest arrest was the result of a house raid close to the Brussels district of Molenbeek, where at least three of the alleged Paris attackers lived, said Eric Van der Sypt, a spokesman for the federal prosecutor.

The process of selecting the successor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei already seems underway.

President Rouhani, government cabinet officers, and deputies of the Majles (consultative assembly/parliament) usually have little to no influence in the vetting process of candidates.

The Revolutionary Guards, ranking intelligence officers, and the regime’s plutocrats do not want to elevate anyone with an independent power base or a charismatic personality.

Whoever is ultimately selected, regime stability at least for the next few years seems assured: anti-regime networks remain shredded after the 2009 nationwide protests were violently suppressed.

While U.S. policymakers, media talking-heads and many think tank pundits are fixated on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and Tehran’s nuclear weapons projects, the focus of Iran’s power-brokers is on regime continuity and leadership succession. Iran’s next parliamentary elections are scheduled for February 26, 2016.

The process of selecting the successor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei already seems underway. Former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989-1997) hinted as much, according to a Reuters report. The aging first generation of the 1979 Islamic Revolution’s leadership are determined to maintain regime stability during the transition to a new rahbar (leader) upon the retirement or death of Khamenei.

Erdogan repeated on Dec. 11 that Turkey would not pull out its troops out of Iraq. In response, Iraq appealed to the UN Security Council to demand an immediate withdrawal of all Turkish troops from Iraq, calling Turkey’s incursion a “flagrant violation” of international law.

“For centuries, and even since the Mongols, sensible Islam has asked: ‘What went wrong? Why has God forsaken us, and allowed others to reach the moon?'” — Professor Norman Stone, prominent expert on Turkish politics.

With the inferiority complex and megalomania still gripping the country’s Islamist polity, Erdogan’s Islam is not sensible; it is perilous.

It is the same old Middle East story: The Shiite accuse Sunnis of passionately following sectarian policies; Sunnis accuse the Shiite of passionately following sectarian polices; and they are both right. Except that Turkey’s pro-Sunni sectarian policies are taking an increasingly perilous turn as they push Turkey into new confrontations, adding newcomers to an already big list of hostile countries.

Take President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s recent remarks on the centuries-old Shiite-Sunni conflict: they amusingly looked more like a confession than an accusation: “Today we are faced with an absolute sectarianism. Who is doing it? Who are they? Iran and Iraq,” Erdogan said.

Daniel Johnson: Our subject is the Left and the Jews. A famous phrase from the 19th century—I think it came from the German social democrat August Bebel—was that “anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools”. If that was true then, there are still plenty of these fools around today. Just as in the 19th century, when leading figures of the Left such as Karl Marx set a bad example in their writings about the Jewish people, so today we have a problem on the Left. Where does this come from? Why does it exist? For so many years, the Left, if we define it as beginning with the French Revolution, was seen as the friend of the Jewish people, of emancipation, toleration and equality. But the problem, I think, stems from something which Isaac Deutscher, a great icon of the Left, called the “non-Jewish Jew”. The price to be exacted in return for emancipation and full equality was that Jews should give up everything that was distinctive and specifically Jewish. For years, most on the Left did not believe this, but some did. Karl Marx, above all, began the trend towards anti-Semitism on the Left. These leftist thinkers saw thousands of years of Jewish tradition, religion and ritual as in some sense a burden to be sloughed off.

In today’s world that attitude still exists, but it has been hugely exacerbated by the unholy alliance that we have found among elements of the Left-not, by any means, among everyone-and the forces of Islamism. A whole new dimension has been created. We began to see this most visibly in the 1960s after the Six-Day War, when anti-Zionism morphed into the “new anti-Semitism”, as it has often been called. In this country today, and indeed across the West, anti-Semitism is no longer the preserve of the extreme Right. It has become embedded even in the respectable salons and newspaper offices of the Left.

Nick Cohen: This discussion is like wading into a minefield. Because what do you mean by Left? As Daniel suggested, there are all kinds of shades of opinions on the Left, on this as any other issue. It is like saying, “The Right and the Jews”. You can’t debate without generalisations—you can’t write without generalisations—so it is certainly true that there are anti-Semites on the Left. But it is equally true that left-wing thought can lead to conspiracy theorising. The late 20th century saw the collapse of socialism. From the 1880s through to the 1980s, you would have none of my problems of definition about talking to the Left. If you were left-wing, you were a socialist of some sort. Socialism died before the Berlin Wall came down. All over the world, people were giving up on socialism, not least Communists, especially in China and Russia.