RUTHFULLY YOURS

A court in The Hague recently ruled that Geert Wilders can be tried on charges of “inciting racial hatred.” In response to this attack on free speech and truth-telling about Islam, the Glazov Gang is running its interview with Mr. Wilders, which became one of the program’s most popular episodes.

Mr. Wilders came on the program to crystallize the only way the West will be able to preserve itself.http://jamieglazov.com/2016/10/23/video-geert-wilders-on-the-wests-battle-for-freedom-on-the-glazov-gang/

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch Jamie Glazov introduce Geert Wilders at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend:

If an imam violently protests something, the liberal elite always supports the false charge of “Islamophobia.” If a peaceful protest is led by a Catholic bishop, the same elite always rejects it under the name of “freedom of expression.”

The “Caliph” of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ridiculed by Charlie Hebdo, triggered self-censorship because of “hate speech,” while the work of Chris Ofili “The Holy Virgin Mary,” in which the mother of Jesus is covered with feces and images of genitalia, was defended by the New York Times as “free speech.” Does this now mean that some religions are more equal than others?

On Halloween night, only the “Sexy Nun” is available, while “Caliph” Baghdadi can rape his Yazidi and Christian sex slaves with impunity.

The world’s biggest shopping portal, Amazon, sells many Halloween costumes. One of the novelties in 2016 has been the “Sexy Burka”, the typical obscurantist cloak that the Taliban and the Islamic State impose on women. But the sexy burqa, which on Amazon UK was priced at £18.99, did not last long.

The commercial colossus of Jeff Bezos removed the item from the website, after Amazon had been swamped with accusations of “racism”, “Islamophobia,” of marketing an Islamic garment with the white face of a model and using “a religious garment for commercial purposes”. “You are disgusting, my culture is not your costume”, wrote many users of the Islamic faith. Others used a less adorable tone: “Whoever you are, you should fear Allah. This is not a joke.”

A spokesman for Amazon promptly responded: “All Marketplace sellers must follow our selling guidelines and those who don’t will be subject to action including potential removal of their account. The product in question is no longer available”.

So that Halloween parody of the global symbol of female oppression has been censored. It is because Islamic veils contradict Western values of freedom, equality and human dignity so totally that this relativistic progressive mentality defends these Islamic veils, as it does the burkini, with loyalty.

But here also lies a double standard. What about the “Sexy Nun” Halloween costume that mocks the Catholic Church? Despite the protests of many Catholics customers, the “Sexy Nun” is still on sale at Amazon. Is it not a form of “Christianophobia”? Also, a nun is a religious figure, while a burqa is mere cloth.

In the last four years, more than 100 Christian pastors and other religious officials have been deported from Turkey, and banned from reentering.

“When Jesus reached 30 years of age, Allah gave him the duty of being a prophet. He then began inviting people to believe in Allah.” — Turkish textbook on Christianity.

“[R]eligious minority students are faced with the option of taking the class or sitting alone somewhere else on the school premises during the classes, thus separating them from their peers and singling out their religious differences.” — U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, Turkey Textbook Report.

It is high time that the activists of the global “human rights community” condemned or at least publicly discussed this “culture of hate” in the Muslim communities — and particularly the Christianophobia.

American pastors in Turkey are being arrested hand over fist.

American Pastor Andrew Brunson, of the Resurrection Protestant Church, was arrested in Izmir (Smyrna)on October 7 alongside his wife, Norine Lyn Brunson, for “threatening the national security of Turkey.” Brunson is expected to be deported in 15 days. The couple is still being held in detention.

Turkish authorities also seized the residence permit of Ryan D. Keating, an American student pursuing a PhD in the philosophy of religion at Ankara University. Keating is a Christian who heads the Ankara Refugee Ministry for the Kurtulus Church. While he was leaving Turkey for work purposes, he was told at the airport that his residence permit in Turkey had been cancelled in September for “national security”, meaning that he will not be able to reenter the country. His wife and children are still in Ankara.

Yet another American Protestant pastor, Patrick Jansen, was not allowed to reenter Gaziantep, where he served. And still another American Protestant was ordered to leave Turkey upon landing at the airport.

They are not the first. In the last four years, more than 100 Christian pastors and other religious officials have been deported from Turkey — the visas of some of them were not renewed or were completely cancelled. They have been banned from reentering.

Pastor Brunson had also been exposed to an armed attack in front of the church in 2011, by a Turkish Muslim from the city of Manisa who shouted: “Al-Qaeda will bring you to account”, called members of the congregation “traitors” and threatened them with “bombing the church in Manisa.”

In the meantime, the Protestant Life Bridge Church, in the southern city of Antakya (Antioch), has been closed and sealed upon a complaint of the National Education Directorate and the order of the governor’s office for “giving education illegally.” The church, officials of which are also American citizens, was giving Bible lessons to its members.

The congregation has started looking for a new place to hold their Sunday services, the Turkish Christian news channel SAT-7 TURK reported on October 8.

The Protestant community in Turkey has been exposed to discrimination and persecution for a long time.

According to a global report by the organization Open Doors,

BEIJING—Ahead of a top-level Communist Party conclave, Chinese President Xi Jinping is sending an unmistakable signal about what he expects from the tens of millions in the party’s ranks: total loyalty.

Culminating a weekslong state-media blitz hailing the sacrifice of Communist forces that trekked thousands of miles in the mid-1930s to find a haven to continue their revolution, Mr. Xi on Friday called for an equal display of commitment. “In our Long March of today, we must strengthen the party’s leadership, persist with strict party discipline,” he said in a speech carried on national television and emblazoned across the web.

His rallying cry was also a warning. As China’s ruling party braces for a year of intense political jostling ahead of a major leadership shuffle, its leader will brook no dissent within party ranks.

When more than 300 top party officials gather Monday for a four-day policy meeting themed on discipline, Mr. Xi’s own clout will also come in for a test. The Central Committee’s closed-door plenum comes after an anticorruption drive that has punished more than a million officials over nearly four years, and ahead of a party congress due late 2017 that will be his chance to install his allies in top posts.

The plenum “marks the start of a critical year” for the party, as it grapples with uncertainties in leadership transition and pushback against Mr. Xi’s domineering style, said Matthias Stepan, a specialist in Chinese domestic politics at the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies.

Already, more than a dozen provincial party chiefs have been replaced in the past six months, with some succeeded by up-and-coming officials seen as being close to Mr. Xi. Speculation has also grown within party ranks over whether Mr. Xi may break from existing retirement norms to keep his anticorruption chief, Wang Qishan, in office.

Such a move, analysts say, may destabilize a party already wary of Mr. Xi’s stature as China’s most dominant leader in decades. Discord at the party’s highest levels spilled into the open this summer, when Mr. Xi and China’s No. 2 leader, Premier Li Keqiang, disagreed over economic policies, creating confusion among officials as they grappled with a slowing economy.

Mr. Xi has cashiered generals and is putting the politically powerful military through its most thoroughgoing reorganization in a half-century. Restructuring is also being pushed onto large state-owned industries, some of which have resisted, leading to a reminder from Mr. Xi this month that they must obey the party.

Turkish air and ground forces are attacking northern Syria. The target is not ISIS – the presumed threat to Turkish interests – but rather Kurdish forces that have borne the brunt of anti-ISIS ground fighting and are key to the battle for Mosul in Iraq.

Since the July aborted coup in Ankara, the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been making internal war against what it calls the “Gülenist threat,” followers of Turkish cleric Fetullah Gülen, who Erdoğan believes engineered the coup. Tens of thousands of Turks have been arrested, dismissed from their jobs, and otherwise harassed. Turkey has also been conducting an external war – either overtly or by proxy – to control sensitive areas of Iraq and Syria and short-circuit any possibility of Kurdish independence or large-scale autonomy emerging from the wreckage of wars in both those countries.

After shelling Kurdish positions just north of Aleppo, the Turkish Air Force bombed headquarters, ammunition dumps, and shelters. Turkish sources claimed 200 dead; Kurdish sources said 10 people were killed. They were PKK, said the Turks – members of the Peoples Workers Party, which has carried out operations inside Turkey for decades. The People’s Protection Units (YPG), however, said in a statement that the airstrikes targeted fighters from the YPG-affiliated Jaish al-Thuwar (Revolutionary Front), which was advancing against ISIS in the city of Ifrin.

Turkey makes little distinction among Kurdish groups. The U.S. takes a different tack, agreeing that the PKK is a terrorist organization but arming and training the YPG and finding it the most effective force on the ground fighting ISIS. A U.S. official says the particular Kurds targeted this time were not among those we have trained, so there were no Americans in the area of Turkish fire. This time. But the possibility of direct U.S.-Turkish confrontation is rising daily.

There has been little mention of Turkey’s wars in the American press, aided by the fact that militias, rebel armies, terrorist groups, and sub-state actors sound like alphabet soup: FSA, PKK, PYD, YPG, JAN, ISIS, AQI, and more fight in Syria and Iraq. Even when they have names, Americans are likely to find themselves confused. How does Jaish al-Thuwar relate to the Khalid ibn al-Walid Brigade, or the Free Syrian Army or the Authenticity and Development Group, the Sun Battalion, the Al-Qousi Brigade, or the Truthful Promise Brigade?

Confusion is serving Turkey well.

The much-heralded offensive against ISIS in Mosul by the Iraqi army, Kurdish Peshmerga and Shiite militias may succeed in capturing Iraq’s second largest city. It is unlikely to result in the destruction of the Islamic State’s fighting capacity, however. It is even less likely to lead to the establishment of stable and permanent government control over Iraq’s Sunni Triangle, which has Mosul at its northern tip.

The importance of Mosul is clear. It is a major population center of over two million (before the war) and the pivot that intersects the east-west line of communication from the Syrian border to the north-south axis that leads to Baghdad, 250 miles to the south. The first question, which has not been adequately considered in mainstream media reports, concerns the battle readiness of government forces. In June 2014 the Iraqi army collapsed and fled without a fight when ISIS attacked Mosul, although it was vastly superior to the attackers in numbers and equipment. The high command in Baghdad was unable to maintain any semblance of command and control, even though the U.S. had spent some 20 billion dollars on arming, training and equipping it in preceding years. Its mostly Shiite soldiers were uninterested in fighting for Sunni-majority areas which they did not regard as their own. It was unable to develop any sense of loyalty or common purpose among its non-Shia recruits, who deserted en masse.

It is unclear what if anything has changed over the past two years and four months to shift the balance. The personnel, equipment, training and doctrine are still largely the same. Early signs were not encouraging. On the first day of the current offensive it took the Iraqi army six hours of fierce combat to push back a platoon-sized IS unit from Ibrahim Khalil, a village 20 miles south of Mosul. The jihadists came back and retook the village during the night: “No reinforcements showed up so when they attacked we had to retreat from the five villages we captured on Tuesday. We ended up right back where we started,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Mohammed Hadi. “We took back three today but we can’t advance further towards Mosul until the others arrive.” This episode bodes ill for the future of a complex operation which requires precise planning and coordination. Subsequent army claims of battlefield successes, such as the taking of the city of Bartella on October 21, may reflect the unwillingness of ISIS to give battle in open plains south of the city where its fighters would be at an obvious disadvantage.