RUTHFULLY YOURS

To read Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch website regularly is to get an unsettling daily dose of real-life Islam-related horrors. But on April 4, Robert posted a half-hour audio that was even more disturbing than the bulk of his usual offerings. The audio records the visit by a couple of British police officers to the home of a British subject who had apparently been reported to the authorities for posting anti-Islam comments on social media. The householder in question greeted the cops with surprising – perhaps nervous? – cheeriness, and for a half hour he earnestly, willingly, and good-humoredly answered their indefensibly intrusive and insulting questions about his opinions. Among them: What were his political beliefs? What did he think of Islam? Did he hate Muslims? Was he a racist? Was he a Nazi?

It quickly became clear that this man – whose name we never learn, unless I missed something – is anything but a racist or Nazi or hater of any kind. On the contrary, he is a thoughtful citizen who, after considerable study, has come to some sensible conclusions about Islam. He made it clear that, unlike his visitors, he had read the Koran, had acquainted himself with the major specifics of the life of Muhammed, and knew the basics of Islamic theology. He was, it emerged, a strong opponent of Islam for precisely the right reasons, including (as he mentioned) the fact that it commands believers to do harm to infidels, Jews, and gays.

Yet even as he spelled out these indisputable truths about Islam, the police officers responded as if he was imagining it all. They suggested that he might want to sit down for a conversation with an Islamic scholar, who could clear up what they seemed determined to view as his misunderstandings. They insisted, moreover, that they were not the Thought Police – even though there is no other word for police officers who show up at the home of an innocent citizen to interrogate him about his personal opinions.

A couple of reader comments on the Jihad Watch audio suggested it was fake, on the grounds that police officers in a free country would surely never do such a thing. Wrong. For me, the audio brought back vivid memories – for I’ve had my own very similar encounter with European policemen. My experience was slightly different in that instead of being visited at home, I was summoned to a local police station in Norway, where I live. But the encounter itself, which took place in January 2014, was strikingly similar to the one recorded on the Jihad Watch audio. My interrogators even assured me, as their British colleagues assured the fellow in the audio, that they were not the Thought Police. When I heard that statement on the audio, I couldn’t help wondering: are cops around Europe, even in different countries, working off of the same script?

Immediately after returning home from my visit to the police station back in January 2014, I sat down and typed up everything I could remember about the exchange I’d had with my new uniformed friends. The conversation had been in Norwegian, and I wrote it out in Norwegian. I sent copies to a few friends of mine, including Hans Rustad, editor of the vitally important Norwegian website document.no, who, in response, told me that he had heard similar, and equally disturbing, accounts from other people living in Norway. He actually took a copy of my testimony with him to a meeting at the Norwegian Ministry of Justice, where he confronted officials with this example of thoroughly inappropriate police conduct.

My bet: Orban and his party will not manage a landslide but will hang on.

Today, Sunday, April 8, sees Viktor Orban’s attempt to win a third successive term for his party, Fidesz, and for himself as prime minister, put to the test by the country’s eighth election since the end of Communism. Hungarians have become used to elections since 1989 and to power changing hands as a result. Governing parties lost elections in 1994, 1998, 2002, and 2010.

Usually an election in a small Central European country with this democratic record would struggle to get into the news at all, let alone into the headlines. Yet the restless caravan of the world’s media has for the last week been bidding up the prices of Budapest’s best restaurants and hotels (which, incidentally, are very good indeed — as a glimpse at the travel pages of the same media would disclose) to cover the result.

And this level of interest is itself a story — and a changing one.

Until a month ago, the international media consensus was that the election was a formality, or at best a foregone conclusion, because Orban was the authoritarian strongman of a nation that had ceased to be a real democracy. Fidesz had ensured its victory by gerrymandering the election system, suppressing opposition media, buying votes with EU money, and swamping the country with posters appealing to the nationalist and ethnic prejudices of the electorate. The conditions for genuine democratic elections were therefore no longer in place, and Orban’s victory would confirm the fact. To be sure, the media would still turn up in large contingents for the burial, but the story they wrote would be the end of democracy.

And then in Hodmezovasarehely, a town in the southeast of Hungary (pop., 47,019, local attractions: thermal bathing), there was a small political earthquake. An independent candidate for the local mayoralty, but one supported by all the opposition parties, easily defeated the front-runner Fidesz candidate by a healthy margin of 16 points.

That was genuinely a big surprise since the town had been a Fidesz stronghold. At once there was an outburst of optimism among the opposition parties along the lines of . . . a Fidesz election triumph wasn’t a foregone conclusion . . . if only the opposition parties united as they had done in Hodmezovasarehely . . . the mathematics for an opposition victory were there in the result . . . And so on and so forth. That response may have overinterpreted one small-town election result — we’ll know later tonight — but it made the result look less certain and gave the opposition a real fillip.

“Erdoğan has cynically referred to these students as ‘terrorists,’ vowed to expel them from Boğaziçi University, and to deny them the right to study at any other university. We have heard this kind of verbal attack from Erdoğan before and it was followed by the detention of thousands of academics, journalists, artists, and human rights advocates.” — Open Letter signed by over 1,800 renowned academics from around the world, including Nobel and Pulitzer Prize laureates.

Ankara does nothing to prevent ISIS from selling Yazidi women and children in Turkey; allows unspecified numbers of people to use Turkish territory as a point of entrance into Syria and Iraq to join ISIS or other jihadist groups; hosts and aids Hamas, a terrorist organization that proudly targets civilians and vows to obliterate Israel; and enables jihadi terrorism through the oil trade.

Turkey, a NATO ally that considers itself a worthy candidate for EU membership, warmly welcomes and assists terrorists who commit genocidal crimes against humanity, yet persecutes non-violent academics and journalists whose opinions differ from those propagated by the regime.

On March 19, a group of students at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University, Turkey’s leading institute of higher education, demonstrated against an event on campus. The event against which they were demonstrating, organized by the Society for Islamic Research, was to champion the Turkish soldiers who had participated in the Afrin invasion. While the pro-government students distributed Turkish delight sweets, the counter-demonstrators unfolded a banner reading: “Invasions and massacres are not [to be celebrated] with delights.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan responded by having the anti-war students arrested for spreading “terrorist” propaganda. On April 3, a Turkish court jailed nine of them and freed the other six, pending their trial.

(CNN)Here is some background information on terror attacks involving vehicles used as deadly weapons by radicalized individuals or terror groups.
Facts:
Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch encouraged its Western recruits to use trucks as weapons. A 2010 webzine article, “The Ultimate Mowing Machine,” called for deploying a pickup truck as a “mowing machine, not to mow grass but mow down the enemies of Allah.”
In September 2014, ISIS spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani called for lone wolf attacks using improvised weaponry, “If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock or slaughter him with a knife or run him over with your car or throw him down from a high place or choke him or poison him.”
Timeline:
March 3, 2006 – Mohammed Taheri-azar, an Iranian-American, drives an SUV into an area crowded with students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Nine people sustain minor injuries during the attack, which Teheri-azar later says is retribution for the killing of Muslims overseas. He is convicted of attempted murder in 2008 and is sentenced to 33 years in prison.

October 22, 2014 – A three-month old girl and an Ecuadorian tourist are killed when a driver swerves into a crowd at a light rail station in Jerusalem. The driver, Abdel Rahman al-Shaludi is shot and killed by police. Israeli media reported he published militant writing on Facebook and supported Hamas, a fundamentalist Islamic group that has conducted attacks in Gaza and the West Bank, but his family denied he supported Hamas or any terror organization.
July 14, 2016 – After a Bastille Day fireworks display in Nice, France, a man drives a 20-ton rental truck into the crowd, striking and killing 86 people. The attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, a Tunisian national, drives nearly a mile on the beachfront promenade before he is shot and killed by authorities. French officials say Bouhlel seemed to become radicalized “very quickly” by ISIS propaganda before the attack. He also suffered from mental illness, according to his father.
November 28, 2016 – At Ohio State University, 11 people are injured when a student, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, 18, carries out a car and knife attack. A campus police officer shoots and kills Artan, whom police believe was inspired by ISIS and the radical cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki.

BERLIN — Authorities say a van crashed into a crowd Saturday outside a popular bar in the German city of Muenster, killing two people and injuring 20 others. The driver of the vehicle shot and killed himself after the crash, local police said. Six of the injured are listed in critical condition.

It’s not yet clear who the suspect is or what the motive is. Police said they are examining reports that other suspects may have fled the crash scene.

The incident is being treated as terrorism, but the suspect’s identification has not yet been transferred to the U.S., a U.S. intelligence source told CBS News.

Herbert Reul, the interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia state, said the driver was a German citizen. Reul stressed the investigation is at an early stage but said “at the moment, nothing speaks for there being any Islamist background.”

“We are investigating in all directions,” he explained, according to the Associated Press. Reul said two people were killed in the crash, lowering the previous figure provided by police.

Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reports that the suspect’s apartment was being searched for possible explosives.

On Twitter, local police warned residents to “avoid the area near the Kiepenkerl pub” in the city’s historic downtown area where a large-scale police operation was underway.

Police said a suspicious object was found in the van and they’re still examining it to see if it is dangerous. They told German news agency dpa that the object was the reason why a large area around the scene was sealed off after the crash.

Residents said they were enjoying the first warm afternoon in the area that features many shops and cafés, CBS News correspondent Roxana Saberi said on CBSN. People were outside enjoying themselves, many of them college students, enjoying the weather.

Today, France is the only country in the Western world where Jews are murdered simply for being Jews.

Jews may be the main victims, but they are not the only ones. In just five years, 250 people in France have been murdered by Islamic terrorists.

The main problem is the spread of hatred against Jews, France and the Western world. Many Muslim extremists incite murder; and more and more often, murders occur.

A year ago, in Paris, on April 4, 2017, Sarah Halimi, an elderly Jew, was horribly tortured and murdered in her home in Paris, then thrown from her window by a man shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the greatest”) . She had reported to the police several times that she was the victim of anti-Semitic threats — in vain.

Less than a year later in Paris, another elderly — and disabled — Jew, Mireille Knoll, was raped, tortured and murdered in her apartment by another Muslim extremist. Mrs. Knoll, a Holocaust survivor, had also contacted the police to say that she had been threatened. Again, the police did nothing.

For months, the French justice system tried to cover-up the anti-Semitic nature of Sarah Halimi’s murder; the judge in charge of Mireille Knoll’s case at least recognized the anti-Semitic nature of her murder at once.

Both women were victims of an anti-Semitic hatred that is rising quickly in France.

French Jews live in constant insecurity. The men who murder them evidently do not hesitate to break into homes and attack elderly women; they seem to know they can threaten their future victims without fear of arrest. More often than not, the police do not even record the complaints of Jews who go to the police station, but simply note in the daybook that a Jew claiming threats came and went.

The cultural-Marxist Left’s war on Western civilization and American society is conducted on many fronts, including the courts and the streets, but also on a daily basis in the arena of public opinion, via the language. One prominent example has been their transformation of the two human sexes, male and female, first into “genders” (a term drawn from English grammar, and of which there are three, including neuter) and then into multiple genders. This of course demands a new set of pronouns which promptly are given “identity” characteristics, the better to tribalize and thus weaponize these hitherto unknown species of human beings.

Another example is the transformation of the words “immigrants” and “asylum,” which in the space of a decade or so have now acquired a host of subtextual signifiers of race and class in order to change their meaning. To those of us who are the descendants of the last great wave of genuine immigration, which ended around 1920, the words have a sentimental patina about them, recalling the great-grandparents from the old countries of Europe still glimpsed in sepia-toned photographs—the folks who arrived with nothing, worked hard, married either within or without their ethnic group, built houses, started families, moved up and moved out into the mainstream of American society and disappeared into history.

They are our familial heroes who arrived with no entitlement chips on their shoulders, and asked for nothing but an opportunity to work hard and do well. And in exchange, they promised allegiance to their new land, swore to put aside, insofar as possible, the old ways, customs, and conflicts, endure nativist tribulations, and subsume themselves into something larger called the United States of America. None of them arrived with a “right” to enter the country, none expected either a handout or the immediate right to vote, and all understood they were here at the sufferance of the American people.

THESE ARE EXCERPTS FROM JOSH FRYDENBERG’S IMPRESSIVE FIRST SPEECH AS AN ELECTED OFFICIAL IN 2010

Standing before the parliament of our great country, I see my journey to this place in the continuum of my family’s story.

My grandparents on both sides were migrants from Europe. In the late 1930s Morrie and Leah Frydenberg came from Poland to Australia to seek a better life. They arrived while Europe was plunging into darkness.

The experience was different for my maternal grandparents, Sam and Ethel Strauss, and their young daughters, including my mother, who were interned in the Budapest ghetto by the Hungarian fascists. They survived and eventually made their way through displaced persons camps to Australia.

My great‐grandparents, and many relatives on both sides, perished in the Holocaust, but one who survived is with us today.

My great‐aunt Mary Frydenberg spent two years at Auschwitz. She was transferred back to Germany by the Nazis and then sent on a death march, but she escaped with the assistance of a humane German guard. In her run for freedom, she was given shelter by a Catholic priest—at great risk to him—before making her way to Australia.

Mary’s story serves us all as a constant reminder of hope, even in the presence of tragedy.

What drives us as Liberals are notions of individual liberty, individual responsibility and a fairness borne out of a particular kind of equality.

The equality which Liberals seek in a society is the equality of opportunity, not the other kind of equality—the equality of outcomes.

By mandating outcomes, the state removes responsibility from individuals and denies the worker, the student and the patient the opportunity to be the best that they can be. It seems to me that these two notions of equality reflect the fundamental fault lines between us and the members opposite. It is not a thin divide.

“How can we all be better off when the government targets independent and Catholic schools merely because parents are exercising choice?”

“The opportunity to prosper is given its best chance through competitive markets—the insight reached by Adam Smith more than two centuries ago.”

“It may appear a paradox but the first of my large thoughts is that we need to limit the government. Our government is too big.”

“We must always remember that whenever we create a new arm of bureaucracy or expand a field of activity, we are not spending our own money; we are spending the money of our citizens who look to us as the guardians of their wealth.”

“The reduction of our per capita consumption of energy and non‐renewable resources is necessary … but part of being responsible is knowing what it will cost, who it will impact and how communities and businesses will need to react.”

“There has never been a better time for innovative technologies, practices and solutions.It seems inexplicable that in Australia we have yet to have a constructive and thorough debate about nuclear power, the only baseload, carbon neutral energy source.”

“How can we all be better off when the government discourages private health insurance at a time when the public system is overburdened?

“Our alliance with the United States is the cornerstone of our national security strategy. It must be protected and defended by both sides of the House.Our friendship and common purpose rests upon more than Realpolitik; it reflects our values, traditions and commitment to the democratic ideal.”

My vision is to achieve what Menzies termed ‘civilised capitalism’, unleashing the power of the individual and his enterprise while always providing a safety net for those who despite their best efforts are unable to cope.

These are my motivations, my cause and my way, and they not negotiable.

In its effort to gather evidence against the Burmese government for its ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims, the international community must not let the dire circumstances of the Hindu Rohingyas go unnoticed.

On March 11, 2018, the UN Special Advisor on Genocide Prevention told the chairman of the National Human Rights Commission of Bangladesh that the United Nations is planning to amass evidence of genocide against the Rohingyas in Myanmar (formerly Burma) through a judicial investigation.

The persecution of Muslims in Myanmar has been condemned by Western policymakers, international human rights organizations and the United Nations for the past year. Since August alone, more than 600,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh to escape atrocities committed against them by the Burmese army.

During the same period, however, more than 100,000 Hindu Rohingyas have also sought refuge in Bangladesh, but for a different reason: to escape the brutality of the members of Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a Muslim terrorist outfit fighting against the Myanmar government.

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria—Boko Haram insurgents launched coordinated assaults on a Nigerian military base and villages close to this regional capital on Monday, a brazen operation that left at least 20 people dead just weeks after the government confirmed it was in talks with a breakaway faction of the extremist group.

The dawn raids—which saw insurgents deploy suicide bombers, mortars and truck-mounted machine guns—sparked a protracted battle with Nigerian soldiers at a military base on the edge of Maiduguri, an army spokesman said. Local officials, still tallying the dead and injured Monday afternoon, said the jihadists were attempting to infiltrate the city.

The attack left at least 20 people dead and 63 injured, according to Kashim Shettima, the governor of surrounding Borno State. “We will continue to intensify our efforts to safeguard lives and properties,” Mr. Shettima said. “Terrorists bask in the oxygen of publicity, they are aiming at soft targets and senselessly opening fire on innocent citizens, but we will stop them.”

The brazen operation came after Nigeria’s government revealed it was in peace talks with a Boko Haram breakaway faction allied with the Islamic State terror group and led by a mysterious young commander called Abu Musab al-Barnawi. CONTINUE AT SITE