RUTHFULLY YOURS

Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, urged the nation’s Jews not to wear the Kippah publicly Tuesday, one week after two individuals wearing the traditional skullcaps were attacked in Berlin by a man spewing anti-Semitic vitriol in Arabic.

“Defiantly showing your colors would in principle be the right way to [tackle anti-Semitism],” Shuster said on Berlin Public Radio. “Nevertheless, I would advise individual people against openly wearing a kippah in big German cities.”

The warning comes ahead of the “Berlin Wears Kippah” solidarity march set to take place in the German capital Wednesday.

Angela Merkel addressed the trend of anti-Semitic attacks perpetrated by Arab refugees over the weekend, announcing that her government had appointed a commissioner to lead its efforts in combating anti-Semitism.

“We have a new phenomenon, as we have many refugees among whom there are, for example, people of Arab origin who bring another form of anti-Semitism into the country,” Merkel told the Channel 10. “The fact that no kindergarten, no school, no synagogue can be left without police protection dismays us.”

The 19-year-old perpetrator of last week’s attack in Berlin is a Syrian refugee living in a shelter for migrants outside the city. He turned himself into police Friday. A video of the incident shows him beating two Jewish men with a belt while yelling “Yahudi,” the Arabic word for “Jew.”

Anti-Semitic attacks have been on the rise in Germany in recent years; the number of individuals affected rose 55 percent in 2017, according to The Department for Research and Information on Anti-Semitism, a Berlin-based NGO.

Merkel’s detractors point to her liberal immigration policies, which led to roughly 1 million asylum seekers crossing the border in 2015, as the primary factor in the nationwide spike in anti-Semitic hate crimes.

A report commissioned by the German government found that newly-arrived asylum seekers were behind more than 90% percent of the increase in violent crimes in the state of Lower Saxony.

As of December 2017, an estimated 600,000 able-bodied asylum seekers in Germany were on the welfare dole, according to Die Welt. “More than half of the able-bodied unemployment benefit receivers at present are of foreign descent,” wrote Der Spiegel on April 10, 2018.

Meanwhile, poverty in Germany, especially among elderly pensioners, has reached a historic high.

While the number of Salafists in Germany reaches a record high and machete-wielding gangs riot on the country’s streets, the establishment media not only covers up the fallout from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open door migration policy, but continues to paint a false picture of the country’s current state.

“Cool Germany,” a cover story on Britain’s magazine, The Economist, claims that, “Germany is becoming more open and diverse” and “[m]any of the country’s defining traits” including “its ethnic and cultural homogeneity, conformist and conservative society” are “suddenly in flux.”

The Economist attributes this change to Chancellor Merkel’s migrant policy. “The biggest change comes from Mrs. Merkel’s “open door” policy towards refugees, which brought in 1.2 million new migrants in 2015-16. The magazine celebrates the sudden outburst of diversity as its transforms “once-homogeneous Germany” into a “melting-pot” and claims that the “patriarchal culture has become more gender-balanced.”

The Economist also advocates the urgent necessity of the open-door policy for refugees, and alleges that the “flow of newcomers to Germany” will “cushion the demographic crunch.”

Since the onset of the migrant crisis, which began in the autumn of 2015, much of the mainstream media has been peddling the idea of an influx of hundreds of thousands of migrants from Arab and Muslim countries as a silver bullet for Europe’s economic woes. Young and sturdy immigrants were going to bolster Europe’s shrinking labor force and usher in the next economic boom, a miracle comparable to Germany’s post-war Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle”).

Since the March 2004 attacks on Madrid’s trains, Spanish authorities have arrested more than 750 jihadis in 243 counter-terrorism operations, according to the Interior Ministry.

Jihadis remain undeterred. A recent Islamic State document included a list of grievances against Spain for wrongs allegedly done to Muslims since the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa on July 16, 1212.

“There is little doubt that the autonomous region of Catalonia has become a prime base of operations for terrorist activity. Spanish authorities tell us they fear the threat from these atomized immigrant communities prone to radicalism, but they have very little intelligence on or ability to penetrate these groups.” — US diplomatic cable, October 2, 2007.

Ten members of an Islamic State jihadi cell have been sentenced to combined prison terms of nearly 100 years for a plot to bomb landmarks and behead infidels in Barcelona.

The cell, composed of five Moroccans, four Spaniards and a Brazilian, was separate to and independent of the jihadi group that killed 16 people in Barcelona and nearby Cambrils in August 2017.

The case shows that Spain continues to be a prime target for jihadis, many of whom are striving to reconquer al-Andalus, the Arabic name given to those parts of Spain, Portugal and France occupied by Muslim conquerors (also known as the Moors) from 711 to 1492. Many jihadis believe that territories Muslims lost during the Christian Reconquest of Spain still belong to the realm of Islam, and that Sharia law requires them to re-establish Muslim rule there.

The president’s potential meeting with Kim Jong Un would come at a time when American foreign policy is rapidly changing.

The world has been stunned by North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s announcement last week that he was suspending his country’s nuclear tests in preparation for the impending meeting with President Trump. Even critics have had to concede that Trump’s bellicose rhetoric since last summer regarding the North Korean threat may have actually paid off — especially when his “speak loudly and wave a big stick” approach to foreign policy is backed by the real use of force, as demonstrated by the recent air strikes in Syria.

How sincere are Kim’s promises? Trump skeptics like to point out that Kim has announced suspensions of his nuclear program before. But Kim made one other concession last week that has gone largely unnoticed but is even more significant for the future: He withdrew his previous demand that U.S. troops leave the Korean peninsula before any discussion of denuclearization. That means any deal struck on shutting down North Korea’s nuclear program may well be separate from the status of U.S. forces in Korea — and America’s strategic role in the region.

Trump’s success points the way to a major realignment of the balance of power in East Asia. For that reason, it’s time to pause to consider how Trump’s approach to foreign-policy issues such as North Korea, and that of national-security adviser John Bolton, differs from the approach of his predecessors — and represents a revolution in America’s relations with the rest of the world.

The contrast with Trump’s two immediate predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, could not be sharper. Both Obama and Bush were animated by grand visions of the U.S. leading the world toward a new era of peace and stability, either (in Bush’s case) through an ever-widening process of coalition-building on the multilateral level and state-building on the bilateral level, or (in Obama’s) via “strategic patience” and “leading from behind,” phrases Obama’s foreign-policy team made famous — or rather notorious.

Forget the beheading videos, the ISIS propaganda on social media, even the terrorist attacks themselves. Europe, says counterterrorism expert Afshin Ellian, is Islamizing itself, and in the process, the Western values on which its democracies are built are increasingly put at risk.

Take, for instance, Belgium’s ISLAM Party, which now hopes to participate in the country’s October local elections in 28 regions. (Its name serves as an acronym for “Integrité, Solidarité, Liberté, Authenticité, Moralité.)

Its ultimate aim: transforming Belgium into an Islamic state. Items high on its agenda include separating men and women on public transportation, and the incorporation of sharia law – as long as this does not conflict with current laws –according to the party’s founder, Redouane Ahrouch. His own behavior, however, suggests that his respect for “current laws” and mores has its bounds: He reportedly refuses to shake hands with women, and in 2003, he received a six-month sentence for beating and threatening his wife. Currently, the Islam Party has two elected representatives in office – one in Anderlecht, the other in Molenbeek – both regions that happen to be known as hotbeds of extremism.

Or consider DENK, Holland’s pro-Islam party founded in 2015 by Turkish-Dutch politicians Selçuk Ozturk and Tunahan Kuzu. The party platform, which supports boycotts and sanctions against Israel, also discourages assimilation, calling instead for “mutual acceptance” of multiple cultures. Non-Muslims, for instance, would apparently be required to “accept” the Muslim extremist father who beats his daughter for refusing an arranged marriage, or for becoming too “Westernized” for his taste. It’s his culture, after all.

DENK also calls for a “racism police force” to monitor allegedly racist comments and actions. Those found guilty would be placed in a government “racism register,” and banned from government jobs and other employment.

So far, such pro-Islamist views have served the party well. In local Dutch elections last month, DENK (which means “think” in Dutch) gained three seats in Rotterdam, totaling four seats among 45 total and edging out Geert Wilders’ far-right Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV), which fell from three seats to one. In Amsterdam, which also has 45 seats, a full 50 percent of Dutch-Moroccans and about two-thirds of Dutch-Turks gave the party a three-seat win in its first election there, as well. Many of these voters, according to post-election analyses, moved to DENK from the center-left Labor Party (PvdA), clearly feeling more at home with a more overtly pro-Muslim politic.

Similarly, France’s Union of Muslim Democrats (UDMF) has taken a number of voters from the Green Party by promising to defend Muslims. UDMF’s online program statement condemns burqa and headscarf bans. What’s more, in its pretense of supporting what it calls the “sweet dream of Democracy, Union and Human Rights,” the party loudly (though rightly) condemns “anti-Muslim speeches” that “lead the most psychologically fragile people to commit acts of unprecedented violence.” Examples of such “unprecedented violence” follow: a German white supremacist, who killed an Egyptian woman wearing a veil in 2009, and the stabbing of a French Muslim in Vaucluse. “Heavy weapons attacks have exploded in Europe since the beginning of the year against Muslim places of worship,” the statement reads.

To survive the fast-spreading cancerous metastases of the Political Islamic movement, liberal democracies must adopt a wide range of immunotherapeutic methods to inoculate their national cultural, political, and economic systems to withstand aggressive assaults on freedom.

Supporters of the Political Islamic movement invade societies, much like cancerous cells invade the human body. Like cancer, they deceive a nation’s ill-informed secular liberal vulnerable democratic system by mimicking a society’s traditional factions. These stealthy strategies allow them to remain hidden for a long time until, as with cancer, they are difficult to eradicate.

Liberal democratic societies, like normal body cells, fail to recognize the distinction between the healthy, politically different factions of society, and the parasitic Political Islamic invaders, who mimic other civil groups, pretending to be equally harmless elements of the national system. Emulating exceptionally parasitic biological cells, Political Islam’s sinister operatives employ a variety of tactics to invade their targets, to undermine social norms, and convert and lure non-Muslims to their cause.

Their disinformation campaigns are often joined by progressive leftist “Human Rights,” “Transparency,” and “Social Justice” organizations enabled by sympathetic media and politicians. These dangerous campaigns typically are carried out by nongovernmental local and international organizations, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); Human Rights Watch; the Muslim Council of Britain, Muslims for Progressive Values; the American Muslim Association; Muslim Advocates; the Islamic Circle of North America; and the Muslim Students Association, to mention but a few. They relentlessly undermine the existing system by decrying and often suing anyone who dares to criticize their activities and expose their agenda to replace tolerant, free societies with Political Islam’s intolerant, repressive sharia.

“If I speak about Islam, they interpret it as hating Muslims. But I do not hate Muslims. I believe that this ideology is dangerous for all mankind. The Muslim community will also suffer under the Sharia.” — Mona Walter, Swedish activist from Mogadishu, Somalia.
“Jesus said we should love our enemies, but not that we should be stupid.” — Mona Walter.
“I always say to my Christian friends, ‘What do you think, what will happen to you if Islam becomes dominant here?'” — Mona Walter.

Mona Walter, age 45, is a Swedish activist from Mogadishu, Somalia. In the early 1990s, she fled as a refugee to Sweden. There, she abandoned Islam and converted to Christianity. The act resulted in criticism and death threats. The mainstream media consider her a person working for religious freedom. Other organizations accuse her of fueling anti-Islamic movements.

Natalia Osten-Sacken: I have heard your statements stigmatizing Islam as an intolerant and hateful culture. If it is so, why did you not notice it in Somalia?

Mona Walter: In my country, we had our own African culture. People did not deal with religion so much. There was no Sharia, we had our own secular law. We came here as young, secular people. It is worth mentioning, that we belonged to the Sufi Sunni faction.

When I came from Somalia to Sweden, I experienced a huge clash of cultures, because Islam here is more extreme and fanatical than in my country. What is very important – we were Islamized after 1991, here in Sweden. In these closed areas, immigrant ghettos are deprived of democracy.

Research conducted in March by 50 teachers from the Imam Hatip schools revealed that students are moving away from Islam.

“[Mosques] no longer serve people, but rather serve as a source of income for certain people.” – Young imam, later fired.

Another cause of upset on the part of many religious Muslims is the content of the Diyanet-prepared Friday sermons, which frequently advocates violent jihad.

What is clearly on the rise, however, is great disappointment in the Erdogan government’s version of Islam, especially when accompanied by corrupt politics and a deteriorating justice system.

For decades, prominent Islamist figures would rarely criticize Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and when they did, it would be directed at his policies, rather than his personality. That trust seems beginning to change.

On March 26, for instance, Temel Karamollaoglu, the head of the tiny but increasingly influential Saadet (Felicity) party, railed against Erdogan and the members of the public “under his spell.” Karamollaoglu’s repeated reference to Erdogan as having performed “magic” on the Turkish people is significant. Accusing the leader of the ruling Islamist party of violating Islam, which bans sorcery and witchcraft, goes against the grain of the prevailing culture of unconditional loyalty and obedience. In fact, the 76-year-old Karamollaoglu has been a devoted follower of the political Islamic ideology of dawa (religious outreach) and a former supporter of both Erdogan and his Justice and Development (AKP) Party. Today, outspoken in his opposition, he says that his movement is the only one “that can stop the polarization in Turkey because we can sit down and speak with everyone, accepting our differences. Ours can be a platform of social democrats, nationalists, Kurdish voters and those who previously supported the AKP but are now disillusioned.”