RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20171/jihad-on-churches-in-france

A map, published by Christianophobie.fr, which marks with a red pin every spot where a church in France was attacked between just 2017-2018, looks like a war zone. Virtually the entire map of France is covered in red. Even Snopes, which presents itself as the final arbiter on what is real or fake news, admitted the accuracy of the map, while trying to minimize its findings…

One wonders if [Snopes] would be so casual if a Christian vandalized a mosque, or broke into a mosque while screaming Christian slogans?

Christian churches are under attack throughout Western Europe, with very recent examples from Austria, Germany, Italy and Sweden.

No Western nation, however, seems to experience as many attacks on its churches as France, once known as the “Eldest Daughter of the Church.”

Investigative journalist Amy Mek tweeted on July 1, 2023:

“Attacks on Churches are the norm in France; two Churches a day are vandalized — they are being burned, demolished, and abandoned, and their adherents are being sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. Priests are under constant threat. At what point will France’s open border politicians be held responsible?”

That last question inadvertently identifies the culprits — namely, migrants from the Muslim world, where attacks on churches are not abnormal.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/macrons-flip-flop-on-israel-the-result-of-domestic-politics/

On October 7, French President Emmanuel Macron was among the first to declare his solidarity with, and support for, Israel as it began its war to root out Hamas from Gaza. Three weeks later, his tone had changed, and he has now been lecturing Israel on the need to “stop bombing,” which, if Israel were to agree to do so, would constitute a victory for Hamas and a defeat for Israel.

An Israeli official, who does not want to be identified, has said that Macron’s change in attitude toward Israel’s campaign in Gaza was the result of “domestic politics.” By that he meant the pressure on Macron from the five million Muslims in France to end his support for Israel in Gaza, and to start getting tough with the Jewish state. More on this can be found here: “French Jews worry Muslim unrest could see Macron flip on Israel, putting them at risk,” by Canaan Lidor, Times of Israel, November 14, 2023:

Philippe Karsenty, a French-Jewish media analyst and former deputy mayor of the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, was more specific. “Macron is seeking to avoid a civil insurrection by Muslims. He doesn’t want another French intifada, so he’s betraying Israel,” said Karsenty.

Karsenty is exactly right. There are only 500.000 Jews in France, but nearly five million Muslims, or ten times as many. When the Jews march, as they do so very seldom, they do so, in quiet and dignified fashion, only to express their alarm over antisemitism, and their solidarity with the embattled Jewish state. There is no yelling, no violence, no setting fire to cars, no attacks on police stations and mayoral offices.

But when the Muslim mobs form, they yell their hatred of Jews and of the French, smash shop windows, set thousands of cars on fire, ignore police orders to stop their vandalism and disperse, and even fight with the police — an entirely different affair from the Jewish marches. And if a Muslim is injured or killed by the police when fleeing, all hell breaks loose throughout the Hexagon.

https://www.jns.org/argentinas-first-jewish-president-milei-wins-decisive-victory/

Argentina’s newly elected president, Javier Milei, won a resounding victory on Sunday on promises to save the country’s crumbling economy. But Jewish issues, too, are close to his heart.

“I am thinking about converting to Judaism and I aspire to become the first Jewish president in Argentine history,” Milei has said, according to Argentina’s Radio Perfil.

He promises to move the Argentinian embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and to make the Jewish state his first international stop as president.

Milei, an iconoclastic outsider who entered politics in 2020 vowing to “blow up” the system, won by 56% to 44% against his rival, Peronist Economy Minister Sergio Massa.

Milei makes no secret of his philo-semitism, which appears to have made little difference with the Argentinian electorate, despite its being 92% Catholic. (Jews make up less than 1% of the population, though at 200,000 it is the largest Jewish population in Latin America.)

He told La Nacion, “I don’t go to church. I go to synagogue. I don’t follow a priest. I follow my rabbi. I learn Torah. I’m known internationally as a friend of Israel. And as someone who learns Torah, I’m almost Jewish. I’m just missing the ‘blood covenant.’”

He took the stage at his rock concert-like election rallies—as a teenager, Milei was the vocalist for a Rolling Stones cover band—to the sound of a shofar. At one rally in August, an image of a Jew dressed in a tallit, or prayer shawl, was projected onto a giant screen as the shofar sounded.

http://www.settimananews.it/informazione-internazionale/us-and-china-difficult-coups-and-institutions/

American newspapers are voicing growing concern that Donald Trump, who is running for president, is sounding more like Mussolini and Hitler.[1] Also, following the 2020 January 6 attack on Capitol Hill, something like a preview of an attempted coup, some fear Trump may be tempted to repeat the game, only this time better organized.

However, there are substantial differences between Trump and Hitler, Mussolini, or Lenin, the master of it all. In all these cases, the tricks worked because they had the backing of the army and the national police, who thought they had been wronged; one way or another, they had no voice, and they were ready to support whoever gave them that representation.

With Lenin, the army was tired of fighting a war they deemed unwinnable against Germany, and the German command, who aided his return to Russia, saw clearly that he was the man to deliver on it.

With Mussolini, the army and many veterans felt deprived of better results from the victory in World War I. They wanted to topple a political system they thought was giving in to dangerous communist revolutionaries. With Hitler, the army felt stabbed in the back because the terms of surrender were too harsh and chafed under a civilian government ready to give in, again, to socialists and communists.

To stage a coup

Presently, the situation in the US, like in Israel at the time of the protests against the constitutional reforms, looks pretty different. The army and the security apparently do not side with Trump; they are neutral, if not hostile to him.

In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to implement reforms that would remove some powers from the judiciary and concentrate them on the executive. The reform was bitterly opposed by large parts of the population and most of the army and the security bodies.

The long Israeli struggle between the government and part of the military — and the ensuing mutual distrust — was certainly the breeding ground for the intelligence failure leading to the October 7 Hamas attack.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/11/19/the-sinister-rise-of-the-islamo-left/

Is Hamas a terrorist group? This was the question posed to former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn by Piers Morgan on his Monday evening TalkTV show. It wasn’t a difficult question. Corbyn was being invited to condemn a group that had raped, tortured and slaughtered hundreds upon hundreds of Israelis just over a month ago, on 7 October.

Yet Corbyn couldn’t do it. Morgan asked the same question no fewer than 15 times. Each time, Corbyn, growing ever more irascible, avoided answering. He preferred instead to witter on about needing to ‘start a process that leads to a ceasefire’. His programming just wouldn’t allow him to respond. He was in the grip of the political equivalent of ‘computer says no’. (To be fair, Corbyn has now referred to Hamas as a ‘terrorist group’ in an article for Tribune, a full four days after refusing to do so on TalkTV, and a full seven years after referring to the group as ‘friends‘ at a public meeting.)

Corbyn’s shocking reluctance, when challenged by Morgan, to call out Hamas for what it is – a violently repressive Islamist group committed to the annihilation of Israel and Jews – is not just a personal failing. It is also the failing of much of what passes for the left in general today, from Labour’s Corbynista fringe to bourgeois academic ‘theorists’ to the hard-left activists organising those interminable ‘pro-Palestine’ demos. They all labour under the same delusion as Corbyn – namely, that Islamist groups like Hamas are at the vanguard of the global resistance to the West. And that Israel and its Western allies are inherently evil.

This is what needs to be interrogated here. Not Corbyn’s absurdist performance on Piers Morgan Uncensored. But the broader leftist milieu that enabled Corbyn’s performance. A milieu that now cleaves so closely to Islamism that it actually sees its regressive, violent antipathy to modernity as progressive. Indeed, a milieu among which there have even been some willing to hail Hamas’s pogrom and declare 7 October a ‘day of celebration’.

The roots of this moral and political degeneration run deep. Most of the blame lies with the left’s abandonment of class politics in favour of identity politics. This wasn’t deliberate exactly. It was primarily a response to the political defeats endured by the British working class in the 1980s, followed by the collapse of Communism abroad. By the 1990s, some on the left, disoriented and disillusioned, were turning away from – and increasingly turning against – the working class. In its place, they were starting to champion particular identity groups and to campaign around identitarian issues.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20153/france-two-demos

Sunday’s march… attracted over 100,000 people, five times larger than the pro-Palestine demo.

There were also many Muslim figures [Sunday] including imams of mosques who ignored the “advice” of the Grand Mosque of Paris not to attend.

Anti-Semitism isn’t a byproduct of the Israel-Palestine conflict; it is an evil in its own right and a threat to what even the politically correct Macron says he upholds as “values of our civilization.”

Anti-Semitism challenges the fundamentals of what one may call modern civilization. It denies the existence of human beings as individuals with inalienable rights beyond religious, ethnic, racial and other backgrounds. It dissolves the concept of citizenship as the basis of the relationship between the individual and the state.

Anti-Semitism also violates the principle under which guilt by association and collective punishment could not be accepted. Worse still, it rejects the principle of innocence until proven guilty by a court of one’s peers, thus sapping the roots of civilized legal systems.

A week after Paris witnessed a march in support of the “Palestinian cause” it hosted another march on November 12, this time against anti-Semitism.

Ostensibly provoked by the ongoing war in Gaza the two marches may persuade the French to take a closer look at the messages they convey and their impact on French politics.

Despite denials by its organizers, the leftist and extreme left parties, the first march, which took part on the right bank of the River Seine, was clearly anti-Israel, at times with anti-Semitic undertones.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20148/bangladesh-secularism-islamism

Bangladesh’s first constitution, adopted in 1972, the year after the war for independence, created the legal foundation for secular governance. Secularism was declared one of the fundamental principles of the state, and the use of religion for political ends was prohibited.

“The rise of violent extremism and militancy not only in Bangladesh, but also in the South Asia region and the worldwide phenomenon of religious extremism is one of the greatest contemporary threats to global security that can lead to violence and terrorism, and which can permeate all sovereign borders.” — European Bangladesh Forum, Voice of European Bangladeshis.

It is thus critical to neutralize such radical Islamist forces, as Israel is now doing to Hamas, for both ideological and security-related reasons.

The 1971 Bengali genocide is an urgent reminder of the depths to which political ideologies can lead, and why, if one wants to preserve freedom in the West, it is essential to confront them.

As Bangladesh, a nation that is majority Muslim, prepares for January elections, its secular government has come under increasing pressure from Islamists.

The opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI), and their allies are holding rallies regarding a single demand: the resignation of the secular government. They insist that the prime minister step aside for an “impartial caretaker administration” to oversee January’s polls.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20018/erdogan-muslims-un-seat

Editor’s note: The following is the last article written for Gatestone by Burak Bekdil, a few days before he tragically passed away last month. Burak was an extraordinary person, and a brave and brilliant journalist. May he rest in peace.

In [Erdoğan’s] speech [at the UN General Assembly], greeted as a brave international challenge by the Turkish media (90% of which he controls), he called on the international community to collectively fight what he thinks is the greatest malady of mankind: Islamophobia. He wants, he said, to revolutionize the post-World War II international political order by giving Muslim nations a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

That is not all. Erdoğan wants the world to recognize the breakaway Turkish statelet of Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, recognized only by Turkey. That statelet emerged after Turkey’s illegal invasion of Cyprus in 1974.

Still not all. Erdoğan admitted he was holding NATO hostage. On September 26, he said that the Turkish parliament would abide by his pledge to ratify Sweden’s accession to NATO if the US sticks to its commitments to deliver F-16 fighter jets to Ankara.

Meanwhile, at home, a brave Turkish journalist broadcast a video showing Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists being detained in Turkey, then released and sent to government-run camps for military training.

In Erdoğan’s worldview, Islamophobia is the greatest threat to humanity. Radical Islamist suicide bombers and torturers are not.

The world’s “strategic eyes” should have looked closer at Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s speech in September at the UN General Assembly. It was another warning to the West about his intended Islamist design for the entire world — not that he can accomplish this ambition, but what he aims for comes in with several red flags with it.

In his speech, greeted as a brave international challenge by the Turkish media (90% of which he controls), he called on the international community to collectively fight what he thinks is the greatest malady of mankind: Islamophobia. He wants, he said, to revolutionize the post-World War II international political order by giving Muslim nations a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. “The world is bigger than five” has been his dictum over the past several years. He wants Muslim nations, preferably Turkey, to have a veto power, via the UN, over a new world order.

https://hotair.com/david-strom/2023/11/13/london-has-fallen-n591974

I have been following London’s decline for a while now, and have written a fair amount about the societal decline in Britain.

I often speak of Western culture, and the Anglosphere as a subset of it. Generally speaking, the Anglosphere comprises Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA–the countries that not only predominately speak English, but whose traditions and legal practices derive from English Common Law and the Scottish Enlightenment.

Obviously, these countries differ in important respects. Still, aside from knowing what side of the road to drive, citizens from one country would feel pretty comfortable navigating the streets of any of the others.

I happen to be a fan of the English Common Law and the Scottish Enlightenment and believe that the modern concept of human rights derives from the traditions embodied within them. It’s not that I believe that the ideals embodied in these traditions have been universally upheld by the societies built upon them–that is hardly the case. Rather, we judge the failures to do so based on these very ideals.

When people acknowledge that America’s record of slavery is shameful, we don’t do so based on superior non-Western values, but rather in reference to our own belief in the equality of all men.

This is why I am so saddened to see the obvious decline of London as a home for the values of the Anglosphere. While Washington D.C. may be the informal political capital of these nations, London has been its spiritual hometown.

And London has fallen to the barbarians.