RUTHFULLY YOURS

Those who argue loudest for open borders seldom resist the temptation to verbal Jesus, preaching that He would want us to take in all who show up. When Tony Abbott can be painted as a hypocrite in the same breath, so much the better.
I’m not going to get into the habit of defending Tony Abbott, but why are his critics so damn trivial? You could blame him for allowing Peta Credlin to terrorize the ministry – or, alternatively, you could blame thirty grown men and women for allowing themselves to be terrorized by Peta Credlin. You could say, as his detractors do, that resurrecting knighthoods was the waste of a day, but there’s no need to waste the next three months saying it. And if God didn’t want us to eat an onion, he wouldn’t have put it there.

Now we have The Guardian dragging out an infamous Abbott quote from Q&A a few years back, which goes: ‘Jesus knew that there was a place for everything and it is not necessarily everyone’s place to come to Australia.’ In response, Josh Bornstein writes, ‘If Christianity helps us understand the federal government, then it is a particularly aggressive and intolerant strain.’ While we’re rightly loathe to dignify Mr. Bornstein’s flogging of a dead monk by acknowledging his doing so, this habit of some to justify open borders with half-baked theology is really quite dangerous.

Mr. Abbott’s wording was, admittedly, clumsy. But you’d have to go rather out of your way to believe he meant that Jesus doesn’t want boat people to land on the shores of the Northern Territory. He meant that Christ was comfortable with the idea that there are nations, and that those nations have an integrity beyond a mere reference to a location. That is to say, ‘Australia’ must mean more than ‘at the end of the street’ or ‘the third parking spot from the left’.

In the last two decades, Belgium has become the hub of jihad in Europe. The district of Molenbeek in Brussels is now a foreign Islamist territory in the heart of Belgium. It is not, however, a lawless zone: sharia law has effectively replaced Belgian law.

One of the organizers of the Paris bombings, Salah Abdeslam, was able to live peacefully in Molenbeek for four months until police decided to arrest him. Belgian police knew exactly where he was, but did nothing until French authorities asked them to. After his arrest, he was treated as a petty criminal. Police did not ask him anything about the jihadist networks with which he worked. Officers who interrogated him were ordered to be gentle. The people who hid him were not indicted.

Europe’s leaders disseminated the idea that the West was guilty of oppressing Muslims. They therefore sowed the seeds of anti-Western resentment among Muslims in Europe.

Hoping to please followers of radical Islam and show them Europe could understand their “grievances,” they placed pressure on Israel. When Europeans were attacked, they did not understand why. They had done their best to please the Muslims. They had not even harassed the jihadists.

The March 22 jihadist attacks in Brussels were predictable. What is surprising is that they did not take place sooner. What is also surprising is that more people were not killed. It seems that the authors of the attacks had larger projects in mind; they wanted to attack a nuclear power plant. Others may succeed in doing just that.

In the last two decades, Belgium has become the hub of jihad in Europe. The district of Molenbeek in Brussels is now a foreign Islamist territory in the heart of Belgium. It is not, however, a lawless zone: sharia law has effectively replaced Belgian law. Almost all the women wear veils or burqas; those who do not take risks. Drug trafficking and radical mosques are everyplace. The police stay outside and intervene only in cases of extreme emergency, using military-like commando operations. Other areas of Belgium, such as Shaerbeek and Anderlecht have the same status as Molenbeek.

A surge in migrants arriving in Italy via Libya, just weeks after the European Union sealed a deal with Turkey aimed at halting the influx landing in Greece, is raising concerns that a previous front in Europe’s migration crisis is reopening.

Austria is already preparing to close its border with Italy, a move that raises the prospect of tens of thousands of migrants being stuck in Italy, mirroring the situation that has developed in Greece.

According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 6,000 migrants have arrived in Italy in the past five days, compared with fewer than 200 arriving in Greece.

So far this year, 24,000 migrants have arrived in Italy. Arrivals in the first three months surged by 85% compared with last year, with the biggest jump in March.

The recent drop in Greek arrivals followed a deal last month between the EU and Ankara under which all migrants crossing the sea to Greek islands are to be returned to Turkey.

The Italian government now is preparing to ask its EU partners for further support in coping with the new arrivals, who risk languishing in Italy because of the hardening of migration policy among its neighbors.

“We won’t look away if someone is breaking the rules, said Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on Friday. “We are confident they won’t.”

The European Commission, the EU’s executive, has sent a letter to Vienna demanding an explanation for the construction this week of a 250-meter (820-foot) long checkpoint at the Brenner Pass, which connects Italy and Austria. The move could contravene the Schengen accord, which governs passport-free travel between member states. CONTINUE AT SITE

In Terry Gilliam’s dystopian film-classic Brazil, London is under assault from a 13-year-long terrorist campaign that Londoners won’t stop and so just live with. A bomb goes off in a restaurant, and the waiters scurry to screen off the mangled and dying so survivors can continue eating. When reminded by a journalist that “The bombing campaign is now in it 13th year,” the Deputy Minister laughs, “Beginner’s luck!” The West today is rapidly approaching the surreal insouciance of Gilliam’s fantasy.

Think about Obama, hanging out with head of terror-state Raul Castro at a baseball game during the Brussels attacks that killed 34, including four Americans. Obama told Chris Wallace that the terrorists “win” if we don’t go about our daily business, like the diners in Brazil ordering dessert among the screams and moans of the dying and wounded. After all, ISIS is not an “existential threat,” as the president keeps saying, and more of us die in bathtub falls than are killed by terrorists. Obama apparently thinks he has achieved John Kerry’s goal during the 2004 presidential campaign to reduce terrorism to a “nuisance” like prostitution.

I suppose the absurd security measures we endure every time we board a plane is the sort of “nuisance” Kerry and Obama are talking about. I guess we “win” when we dutifully take off our shoes and coats, put our computers and three ounces of liquids in a tray, and submit to aggressive wanding by surly TSA functionaries. Are such silly measures now part of the daily life we should just get on with? Of course Obama’s attitude is preposterous, and he should know that it is the terrorists who “win” every time an 80-year-old has to endure being felt up by a federal worker. Meanwhile, in breach tests of TSA inspectors in 2015, 95% of fake explosives and contraband sailed through the screening process.

These inefficient and intrusive procedures have been put in place mainly to avoid stigmatizing Muslims. Such obeisance to politically correct proscriptions against “profiling” is just one of the myriad ways in which we tell the jihadist enemy we really aren’t serious about the latest battle in the 14-century-long war of Islam against the infidel West.

Take Obama’s Executive Order 1341, which banned waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” of captured jihadists. Now only those practices in the Army Field Manual can be used to question detainees, despite the fact that the document is public and so jihadists can use it to train terrorists how to resist. Forget that one technique, waterboarding, is legal under U.S. law, and generated actionable intelligence––according to former CIA chief George Tenet, waterboarding a few high-value suspects helped foil over 20 al Qaida plots against the U.S. Those facts cannot outweigh Obama’s need to preen morally and gratify international anti-Americanism.

Just after the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, I warned that radical Islam would horrify the West into submission. In Europe, it has taken a giant step towards success. Europe’s horror at the prospect of human suffering has made it supine. Sadly, the more the Europeans indulge in their humanitarian impulses, the more Muslims will suffer. To be kind is to be cruel.

The Daily Mail recently described an incident off the coast of Italy:

The 240ft Monica had been spotted in international waters during the night.

When Italian coastguard boats drew alongside, the crews were shocked to see men and women on board begin dangling the infants over the side.

The refugees – mostly Kurds and many said to be heading for Britain – calmed down only when they were assured they would not be turned away from Italy.

What kind of people threaten to murder their own babies? The normal response would be to arrest them and put them in prison for endangering children. Instead, the British newspaper reported, “The Archbishop of Catania, Luigi Bommarito, was at the dockside to greet the Monica in what he called ‘a gesture of solidarity’. He said: ‘I’m here to appeal to people not to close their hearts and doors to people trying to survive. We mustn’t forget that in the last century many immigrants also left Italy.’”

The Monica incident is multiplied ten thousand-fold at the diplomatic level. Turkey’s President and de facto dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan last October threatened European officials with 10,000 to 15,000 drowned migrants, according to minutes leaked to a Greek news site and widely reported by European mainstream media–with no official denial. Erdogan demanded 6 billion Euros up front and 3 billion Euros a year to stop the refugee flow, telling European officials, “We can open the doors to Greece and Bulgaria anytime and we can put the refugees on buses, What will you do with the refugees if you don’t get a deal? Kill the refugees? the EU will be confronted with more than a dead boy on the shores of Turkey. There will be 10,000 or 15,000. How will you deal with that?”

The number of children involved in ‘suicide’ attacks in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, and Niger has risen sharply over the past year, from four in 2014 to forty-four in 2015, according to a disturbing United Nations report released on Monday. More than 75 percent of the children involved in the attacks are kidnapped schoolgirls.

“Let us be clear: these children are victims, not perpetrators,” said Manuel Fontaine, UNICEF Regional Director for West and Central Africa. “Deceiving children and forcing them to carry out deadly acts has been one of the most horrific aspects of the violence in Nigeria and in neighboring countries.”

UNICEF says that the report — released two years after the abduction of over 200 schoolgirls in Chibok, Nigeria, who were never found — shows alarming trends in four countries affected by Boko Haram over the past two years. The fact being ignored by many in the Obama administration and the media is that the group’s jihad has spread from Nigeria to its African neighbors such as Niger and Cameroon.

According to the Homeland Security News Wire, UNICEF report reveals that:

Between January 2014 and February 2016, Cameroon recorded the highest number of suicide attacks involving children (21), followed by Nigeria (17), and Chad (2).
Over the past two years, nearly 1 in 5 suicide bombers was a child and three quarters of these children were girls. Last year, children were used in 1 out of 2 attacks in Cameroon, 1 out of 8 in Chad, and 1 out of 7 in Nigeria.
Last year, for the first time, “suicide” bombing attacks in general spread beyond Nigeria’s borders. The frequency of all suicide bombings increased from 32 in 2014 to 151 last year. In 2015, 89 of these attacks were carried out in Nigeria, 39 in Cameroon, 16 in Chad, and 7 in Niger.

Europe’s open door policy to Muslim immigrants has utterly failed. Its tolerance of the intolerant tenets of Islamic law and practices under the banner of multiculturalism has also failed. Great Britain is a case in point. Muslims have created their own segregated communities by choice. Even pro-immigration leaders are admitting they were wrong in their optimism that Muslims would willingly integrate into British society over time.

As the saying goes, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” A former head of Great Britain’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Trevor Phillips, came to that realization after doing a 180 degree turn on the issue of Muslim immigrant integration.

As a member of the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, he endorsed a report in 1997 that helped popularize the term “Islamophobia.” The report blamed widespread “anti-Muslim prejudice” among Great Britain’s majority population for Muslim immigrants’ “exclusion.” It placed the responsibility for resolving issues holding back “social inclusion” of Muslim immigrants on the British government. As the summary of the report states:

“The need for legal changes is clearly identified in the report. This, it is argued, will consolidate the changes in public opinion and popular understanding which are required and which are outlined throughout the pages of this report.”

Nearly two decades later, Mr. Phillips admitted that he “got almost everything wrong” on Muslim immigration.

“Liberal opinion in Britain has, for more than two decades, maintained that most Muslims are just like everyone else, but with more modest dress sense and more luxuriant facial hair; any differences would fade with time and contact,” Trevor Philips, who commissioned the poll for use in a TV documentary, wrote in a column entitled “An Inconvenient Truth.” His revealing column appeared in the Sunday Times on April 10th. “But thanks to the most detailed and comprehensive survey of British Muslim opinion yet conducted, we now know that just isn’t how it is,” he added.

The poll results dramatically evidence that a significant minority of Muslims living in Great Britain have core beliefs that are in direct opposition to the fundamental precepts of Western secular beliefs, including a pluralistic democracy and fundamental human rights such as freedom of expression, freedom of religion and equality of all people.

This is a decent try by an apparently very decent man…..but an Arab Palestinian state of any size or demographic constitution would destroy the future of Jewish Palestine, namely, Israel….rsk

Israel could have played by Arab rules and deported all Arabs in the land it occupied, but it did not. Precisely because Israel respected the human rights of Arabs, and despite its own self-interest, Israel gave the Palestinians a platform from which to seek the destruction of Israel.

One can only hope that the Palestinians, like Egypt and Jordan, will soon decide to live in peace with a neighbor which turned out to be far better in the way it treats Palestinians than the Palestinians’ own “Arab brothers” — not all that bad, after all. One can only hope that Palestinian leaders will start promoting a culture of peace rather than a culture of hate.

From the moment Israel declared its independence, one of the main Arab tactics has been to exploit the Jews’ Achilles heel – their highly developed culture, which respects and values life, and their support for human rights.

Of Arab origin, I have long known about the Arab stereotype of the West and Israel — that they are weak because they care about the lives of their own people and they are eager to respect the human rights of their enemies. Golda Meir is reported to have said, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”

Until now, Israel has conformed to that Arab stereotype — such as with “knocks on the roof” in Gaza to warn residents to leave buildings being used for military purposes before they are targeted — but in conversations with Zionists, it seems that this attitude is changing. While Jews will always value life, their determination to minimize enemy casualties and to respect their human rights at almost all costs might be unraveling, and it is the Palestinians who are likely to pay the price.

During the War of Independence, the Arab side ensured that not a single Jew was left on the Arab side of the 1949 armistice lines, but a large number of Arabs were allowed by Jews to remain on the Israeli side. Today those Arabs constitute 20% of the Israeli population.

Israel’s respect for the human rights of Arabs living in Israel has been used by Arabs against Israel. The idea of any Jews on the Arab side is demonized and any “normalization” with Jews is aggressively discouraged

By contrast, Arabs living in Israel have consistently elected Arab parliamentarians, even anti-Zionist ones who openly support Palestinian terrorists. If Israel expels those politicians from the Knesset — as there is a proposed law to do — it is accused by the West of being undemocratic, but if it does not expel them it is seen by Arabs as weak.

In the nearly 30 years since the Fall of the Berlin Wall the fortunes of freedom have experienced a drastic reversal. In the Philippines, where the color revolutions all began in 1986, the son of Ferdinand Marcos is among the leading candidates for the vice-presidency. “The Philippines is steadily giving into ‘strongman syndrome’, the misguided belief that tough-talking and political will alone can address complex 21st-century governance challenges.”

Soon, Philippine (cacique) democracy as we know it may come to an end, as the Filipino people increasingly opt for political outsiders as well as the offspring of a former dictator, who have promised decisive leadership and national discipline. The latest survey suggests that a provincial mayor, Rodrigo Duterte, and Senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr. are cruising towards the top two positions in office.

If “political outsiders” and “strongmen” sound attractive to the voters in the 2016 election cycle, they’re in lots of company. A Bloomberg report notes that voter anger and consequent shift toward political outsiders is world-wide. “From the supporters of Donald Trump to the street protesters of southern Europe, voters around the world are mad as hell. Inequality, immigration, and the establishment’s perceived indifference are firing up electorates in a way that’s rarely been seen before. As these charts show, the forces shaping the disruption of global politics have been building for years and aren’t about to diminish.” Among their findings are:

The share of wealth owned by the middle class declined in every part of the world on a relative basis;
U.S. workers’ share of income has dropped to near the lowest since World War II;
Incomes in Europe’s southern crisis countries have fallen since 2009 relative to the northern Europeans;
The European youth has lost its future. In Spain and Greece, unemployment among those under 25 is close to 40 percent;
U.S. student debt is soaring, while median pay for recent college graduates has barely budged;
Europe’s asylum and border policies have collapsed under the pressure of refugee and immigration flows;
In 2015 only 19% of Americans trusted their government “just about always” or “most of the time” – down from 54% after the 9/11 attacks;
It’s the same picture in Europe as distrust of government has surged, to a high of 84% in Spain

In brief the report suggests that “the future” — that favorite word of the Left — has disappeared. Nearly 90% of French parents, 72% of British, 65% of American and 56% of German are convinced their children will be worse off than they are. Not that the “present” is any better. For one thing the threat of major “war”, that condition the Left promised to save the world from, has grown under the stewardship of their Nobel Peace prize winner.

In the light of these global trends the situation in the Philippines is not unique but typical. The Bloomberg report argues that all over the world insurgent parties, often featuring strongmen who promise the trains will run on time, are on the rise. In place of the Color Revolutions three decades ago there is an enormous nostalgia for the age of diktat. The Wall Street Journal describes an Arab democracy activist who evolved into a suicide bomber. A Japan Times article argues that the Arab Spring has taught Western diplomats that the best way to spread progress is through stable autocracy. If one were to ask leftists what’s the biggest foreign policy mistake of the last 20 years the answer would probably be ‘not leaving Saddam in power’.

Inside the Beltway, the analysts are awakening to the possibility that faith in old-time democracy may be dying in America too. Eli Saslow of the Washington Post begins by way of focusing on a funeral in Oklahoma. “Anna Marrie Jones: Born 1961 — Died 2016.”