RUTHFULLY YOURS

UNESCO has joined forces with Islamic State. The fundamentalists now have a new weapon: resolutions passed by servile international bodies.

An earlier delay and the opposition of UNESCO’s chief, Irina Bokova, had raised hopes that this act of jihadist, barbaric, unjust, and, frankly, arrogant supremacism might be voted down. It was not. Now a new lie was given the sanction of the world’s largest and most unaccountable body whose reason for being is to preserve significant sites, not to bowdlerize them.

Lies by UNESCO to rewrite history, erasing all traces of Judaism and Christianity to favour a jihadist Islamic fancy, were already under way in 2015. UNESCO fraudulently renamed two ancient Biblical Jewish sites, Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs, as Islamic sites. Historically, Islam did not even exist until the seventh century.

This is the history of Islam, how it takes over — with both hard jihad (violence) and soft jihad (usurping history, migration [hijrah], political and cultural infiltration), and intimidation (soft jihad with the threat of hard jihad underneath it). What is even more saddening is that often, as with this vote, it is done with the West’s cooperation and voluntary submission.

Before the United Nations, with its authoritarian, anti-democratic voting blocs, finishes eradicating Western, Judeo-Christian civilization, as it is clearly trying to do, it is high time for Western democracies to run, not walk, away, before further harm comes to them too, as it surely promises to do.

UNESCO last August planned to vote on the historical status of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and its associated Western Wall. Back then, this author stated that UNESCO’s plan was to deny any Jewish link to this most central of all Jewish holy sites, to trash a history going back thousands of years, and to claim the Mount and the Wall as Islamic sites.

Islam believes that it is eternal and had therefore preceded the other two great monotheisms, Judaism and Christianity, even though it was only to become visible to the world through Mohammad in the seventh century AD, but entitled to elbow out the two older religions.

WASHINGTON—A Russian jet fighter flew within a half-mile of an American military aircraft over Syria earlier this month, prompting U.S. officials to register pointed concerns to Moscow, U.S. military officials said.

The encounter was sufficiently close that the “jet wash,” or turbulence from the passing Russian fighter, was felt by the crew of the American aircraft, according to Col. John Dorrian, the spokesman for the American-led coalition against Islamic State in Baghdad.

“That’s closer than we’d like,” he said of the Oct. 17 incident.

Col. Dorrian said U.S. officials have determined thus far that the Russian jet fighter’s near miss to the U.S. aircraft wasn’t done for any “nefarious” purpose, but was an accident. The jet fighter apparently was escorting a Russian spy plane. U.S. officials declined to identify the American plane involved, citing the sensitivity of its mission.

U.S. military personnel aboard the American craft immediately contacted the Russian aircraft crew. The following day, U.S. officials followed up on the incident more formally through an official channel with the Russian military, first established in October 2015.

The memorandum of understanding establishing the channel provides for routine military-to-military exchanges in an effort to “de-conflict” the airspace over Syria. The more formal and higher-level exchange between senior level military and civilian officials on both sides may also take place as needed.

Today, the United Nations General Assembly will elect 14 of the 47 members of the Human Rights Council (UNHRC), the organization’s main body tasked with protecting and promoting human rights globally. Appallingly, six notorious dictatorships — China, Cuba, Egypt, Russia, Rwanda, and Saudi Arabia — are running for reelection for a new three-year term. By gaining these highly coveted seats, which they consistently use to exercise a heckler’s veto, authoritarian regimes seek to prevent any significant exposure of their horrendous human-rights records.

The UNHRC was established in 2006 with the authority to appoint U.N. special procedures (working groups, independent experts, special rapporteurs, etc.), assess the human-rights situation among the 193 member states of the U.N. through its Universal Periodic Review, and receive individual complaints. In practice, around 22 authoritarian regimes — roughly 47 percent of its members — control the council’s agenda, using their seats to block resolutions against friendly dictatorships, disproportionately criticize Israel, paint a rosy picture of their own dictatorial records, and shut down victims of human-rights abuses.

Authoritarian regimes with a leading voice in the council include Ethiopia, Venezuela, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Burundi. Their hijacking of the council is not a recent trend. The UNHRC was created to replace the Human Rights Commission, a body established in 1946, which was disbanded after it infamously elected Muammar Qaddafi as president in 2003.

Prior to its disappearance, the commission suffered a barrage of criticism and vilification precisely because many of its members were dictatorial regimes. Kofi Annan, the U.N. secretary general at the time, said in 2005 that “the commission’s capacity to perform its tasks” was “undermined by its declining credibility and professionalism.” In particular, Annan criticized the states that had “sought membership of the commission not to strengthen human rights but to protect themselves against criticism or to criticize others,” resulting in a “credibility deficit” that cast a “shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole.”

To prevent the disaster that was the Human Rights Commission from happening again, the U.N. General Assembly established a set of minimum standards that states should fulfill if they wished to join the newly created council. Its founding resolution mandated that states “take into account the contribution of candidates to the promotion and protection of human rights and their voluntary pledges and commitments made thereto.” The resolution also stated that the candidates “shall uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights.”

So, given the selection criteria developed by the U.N. General Assembly itself, no country that violates human rights systematically and that is likely to use its membership to undermine the protection of human-rights victims should even be allowed to run for election.

She leads a clandestine existence, on the move and under 24-hour guard as France’s most protected woman. Yet Zineb El Rhazoui, the Charlie Hebdo journalist who happened to be in Casablanca on January 7 last year, the day terrorists “avenging the Prophet” massacred nine people at the satirical magazine in Paris, believes she has a duty to defy Islamists desperate to silence her.

Shaken but undeterred by the fatwas and relentless, precise death threats issued via social media to “kill the bitch” since she helped produce the publication’s first survivors’ issue following the attack — and spoke about it in Arabic for the Arab press — the Moroccan-French writer refuses to assume an anonymous identity. Fleeing Paris or abandoning her human rights activism, and her unforgiving critiques of the religion she grew up with, are also out of the question.

“I don’t have the right to renounce my struggle, or to give up my freedom,” says the reporter and sociologist of religion in an interview with Women in the World, during a recent trip to New York, as part of French president Francois Hollande’s delegation when he received the Appeal of Conscience Foundation’s World Statesman Award for 2016. “If the French state protects me it is not little individual me: What is being protected is my freedom to be irreverent, and freedom of expression, so I should exercise this even more because I enjoy this protection.”

“It’s totally crazy. I have done nothing against the law and have nothing to hide, yet I live with security while those who threaten us are free,” El Rhazoui declares with an air of shock and anger that underscores the arbitrariness and brutality visited on a 34-year-old woman condemned to living on the run and mostly in the shadows. “And if you call them by their names you are Islamophobic and racist. I am racist? I can teach them a few things about Arab culture. I can show them how to discover its richness and the diversity of their culture. I believe this culture deserves universality because you can be Arab, Muslim and a free thinker.”

As far as the State is concerned, when it comes to reporting Muslim crimes, “mum’s the word.” The State doesn’t want you to know.

I left this comment on an October 26th Gatestone column by Soren Kern, “Germany’s Migrant Rape Crisis: Where is the Public Outrage?”:

“Where is the public outrage?” The outrage did not exist because the federal government and the local police forces withheld information about the identity of the criminals in an effort to ameliorate public opposition to the invasion of hundreds of thousands of “refugees,” most of whom were fully grown males. But now, as sporadic news stories are reporting, the German public is waking up to the stories that have been suppressed in a futile and dishonest effort to “educate” the public and not “stigmatize” whole races or religions. The government and the local police would rather “stigmatize” groups opposed to “immigration.” That policy is also beginning to fall apart, as well. In its efforts to keep Germans in the dark about the perilous situation Germans are in, it is laying the groundwork for possibly a civil war between the duped Germans, immigrants, and the government itself. What brilliance!

In the meantime, in Britain, Her Majesty’s government has seen fit to “screen” children from the Calais “jungle” – or rather hide behind physical screens their arrival and the fact that most of these “children” are advanced teenagers or full-grown males.

In Sweden, the government and the press mitigate the criminal impact of Muslim migrants on its society.

Those calling for a Muslim reformation are overlooking the consequences of the revolt that Martin Luther prompted against Rome. Were Islam to replicate that upheaval, as many seem to wish, the world would be convulsed for bloody centuries to come.
Martin Luther unleashed his attack on the monolithic Catholic Church exactly 499 years ago on All Saints Eve Now (now popularly known as Halloween) when he nailed his 95 theological theses on the Church door of Wittenberg. Now, as we approach the quincentenary of that momentous event it is possible to gain some long-term perspective on its essential nature and impact on modern history. In particular, it is an ideal time to explore the grim implications of such a religious upheaval for the crisis of Islam, which is engulfing much of the world in the same type of internecine and sectarian violence that characterized the epochal upheaval that convulsed Christian Europe.

Continually there are demands for Islam to undergo its own ‘reformation’ akin to that endured by the West half a millennium ago. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s polemic, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (2015), exemplifies this campaign, envisaging a reformed Islam akin to liberal Christianity in its capacity to accommodate the modern world. She states the case against the savagery of fundamentalist Islamism in a defiant and optimistic fashion, drawing great encouragement from the various calls for reform that were manifest in the Muslim world during the so-called Arab Spring. Equally optimistic calls come from Muslim intellectuals who imagine that Muslims around the world could band together to overthrow Muslim despots, reject Sharia law, establish new liberal constitutions, and deploy diaspora Muslims living in Western countries like Australia as “ambassadors [to] educate their non-Muslim neighbours about the peaceful, compassionate and sharing nature of Islam in order to bring Muslims and non-Muslims closer together”.

Tragically, much of this is fanciful. In their enthusiasm, these commentators have imposed an idealised vision of the rationalism of the 18th century Enlightenment upon the brutal religious passions of the 16th century Reformation. Moreover, there seems to be little evidence that the contemporary despots, theocrats, and jihadists that dominate the Muslim world will relinquish their wealth and power or give up on their apocalyptic dreams of global conquest. Moreover, these Muslim leaders and their many supporters are heirs to an ancient intellectual counter-revolution that diverted Islam away from the rationalism that facilitated the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment in the West. Instead they embrace a theological obscurantism that Robert R. Reilly has carefully analysed in The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis (2010). As I have observed:

“Reilly details how the emerging religion of Islam initially embraced the rationality and scientific orientation of the Hellenic world to which it was a successor before it abruptly turned its back on this heritage and embraced a quite primitive form of theological irrationalism. The resulting world-view fundamentally undermined Islam’s capacity to embrace science, democracy and economic development down to the present day.”

Nothing has changed: Islam remains constitutionally unable to embrace the open society that the West enjoys. Instead Islamists and other devotees of ultra-reactionary Saudi-backed Salafi fundamentalism are vigorously seeking to reassert this medieval theological irrationalism throughout the Muslim world. They are never going to yield to calls for reform.

Nor is there any likelihood that the backward-looking Muslim diaspora exploiting the welfare states of the West will rise to the challenge, contest this obscurantism, and modernize Islam, perhaps transforming it into something akin to liberal Christianity by capitulating abjectly to secular consumerism, political correctness, Green-Left ideology, and becoming a Uniting Church of Islam. Such suggestions are preposterous, as these diaspora are largely funded and controlled by Salafists, as part of the ‘Arabization of Islam’. Consequently, Western Muslims, protected by their political front men and cultural quislings in the media and academia, are far more likely to develop and entrench their enclaves and no-go areas in the cities of the West where they can enforce the more brutal and benighted aspects of Salafist Islam. This is especially the case with their womenfolk, with radical Muslim intellectuals even prepared to defend honour killings. As their reticence to take a stand against jihadism and their eagerness to claim victimhood reveals, they are more likely to be part of the problem than part of the solution.

In fact, the Reformation that Ali and other commentators want the Islamic world to emulate offers lessons diametrically opposed to their optimism. To begin with, it didn’t establish the separation between church and state: various theocratic Protestant regimes were established in Europe and North America, Henry VIII made the Monarch head of the Church of England, and religious orthodoxy was brutally enforced through capital punishment, including innumerable burnings at the stake. Subsequently, church and state battled for supremacy for centuries after the Reformation.