RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/12/19/did-stupid-man-say-stupid-woman-least-break-brexit/
Did a stupid man say ‘stupid woman’? Well, at least it’s a break from Brexit

Michael Deacon

Please, in your prayers tonight, spare a thought for the disciples of Jeremy Corbyn. They’ve been having the most miserable time, frantically trying to agree on the most plausible excuse.

“No, of course he didn’t call Theresa May a ‘stupid woman’!”

“All right, he did say it – but it’s not sexist, because it’s true!”

“Anyway Tories can’t complain about sexism, because Tories are sexist!”

“And what about austerity! And arms sales! And Israel! And BBC bias! And—”

The funny thing is, I’m not sure anyone actually saw it at the time – in the Commons, at any rate. There was no immediate outcry from MPs. Instead, they saw it minutes later, while idly browsing their phones. There it was, all over Twitter: a video clip of Jeremy Corbyn appearing to mouth “Stupid woman” at the Prime Minister.

Yes, really: Jeremy Corbyn, that paragon of progressive virtue, captured on camera spitting a sexist insult. From up in the gallery, you could see it spread across the chamber: MPs on both sides goggling at their screens, and then showing their neighbours. On the Labour side, little huddles formed and swapped anxious whispers. Perhaps they were brainstorming an explanation for their leader to use. “Actually Mr Speaker, what I said was ‘Stupendous woman.’ Despite our differences politically, I can’t help but admire the Prime Minister for the way that, in deeply trying circumstances, she always—”

The first MP to mention it out loud was Paul Scully (Con, Sutton & Cheam). Did Mrs May, he asked, think it was acceptable for an MP to use the phrase “stupid woman”?

Mrs May had been busy answering questions, so she couldn’t have seen the video, but a colleague must have passed her a note about it, because she seemed to know what Mr Scully was alluding to. All MPs, she said darkly, with just the briefest glance in the direction of Mr Corbyn, “should use appropriate language when referring to female members”.

To which Mr Corbyn, believe it or not, nodded earnestly, and mouthed: “Quite right.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/12/19/islamist-terrorists-suspected-murder-scandinavian-tourists-morocco/

Two Scandinavian tourists killed in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains were the victims of a terrorist attack, prosecutors believe.

One man has been arrested following the discovery on Monday of the bodies of 24-year-old Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, from Denmark, and Maren Ueland, 28, from Norway.

One of the women had been beheaded, a source told AFP.

A suspect in the murder was arrested in Marrakech on Tuesday, and was known to have ties to radical Islamist terror networks.

Police are hunting for three other suspects.
Louisa Vesterager Jespersen
Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, who was found dead on Monday in Morocco

Boubker Sabik, a police spokesman, said terrorism was suspected and that the three suspects on the run had been “identified and a search for them is under way by all the security services”.

One of the three had “a court record linked to terrorist acts”, he said, while the prosecutor general’s office said the man in custody also belonged to an extremist group.

“Radical Islam is not ruled out, due to the profile of the suspect arrested and of the three men wanted,” a source close to the investigation told AFP.

The women’s bodies were found in an isolated area near Imlil, on the way to Toubkal, North Africa’s highest peak and a popular hiking destination.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/wheres-tutu/

Once upon a time, a large framed photograph of Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu hung on the wall of my living room in Manhattan. I wasn’t the one who put it there, but I never felt a moment’s inclination to take it down, either. As it happens, the person with whom I lived at the time worked for the Episcopal Church (ECUSA), which is a part of the Anglican Communion, and which is headquartered in New York City. At the time — and I assume this is still going on today — the ECUSA was pouring plenty of cash into the Anglican churches in Africa, and Tutu, who back then was a frequent visitor to New York and very chummy with the ECUSA honchos and with Episcopal clergy in the city, was an especially favored object of the ECUSA’s largesse.

In any event, my cohabitant idolized Tutu as a champion of peace, reconciliation, brotherhood, and human rights in the aftermath of apartheid. He even met Tutu once or twice, and after those encounters he was walking on air. He quite simply adored the man.

Of course, Tutu wasn’t the only big name associated with the end of apartheid. There was Nelson Mandela, who headed up the African National Congress, spent years in prison, and ended up President of South Africa. And there was Mandela’s predecessor as president, F.W. DeKlerk, who worked with Mandela to dismantle apartheid and eventually shared the Nobel Peace Prize with him in 1993. But before they won their Nobels, Tutu won his, in 1984, with the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee hailing his leading role in “the non-violent struggle for liberation” in his country, “a struggle in which black and white South Africans unite to bring their country out of conflict and crisis.” Tutu deserved the honor: this was a man who, respected by both black and white, was able to persuade South Africans of both races, through sheer nobility of spirit, to resist uncivilized impulses and take the high road.

In his Nobel Prize lecture, Tutu sounded a noble note:

Unless we work assiduously so that all of God’s children, our brothers and sisters, members of our one human family, all will enjoy basic human rights, the right to a fulfilled life, the right of movement, of work, the freedom to be fully human, with a humanity measured by nothing less than the humanity of Jesus Christ Himself, then we are on the road inexorably to self-destruction, we are not far from global suicide; and yet it could be so different.

When will we learn that human beings are of infinite value because they have been created in the image of God, and that it is a blasphemy to treat them as if they were less than this and to do so ultimately recoils on those who do this? In dehumanizing others, they are themselves dehumanized. Perhaps oppression dehumanizes the oppressor as much as, if not more than, the oppressed. They need each other to become truly free, to become human. We can be human only in fellowship, in community, in koinonia, in peace.

I hadn’t thought about Tutu for a long time, but he’s been on my mind lately because of the horrors that are currently underway in the Republic of South Africa. In March, that nation’s parliament voted overwhelmingly to confiscate farmland from whites without compensation. Mass appropriation of white-owned land by black marauders is already taking place on a wide scale. Families that helped build South Africa and that have tilled their acres for generations have now either had their property stolen already or are huddling in their boarded-up, fenced-in homes waiting for an armed mob to come take it from them. And the assailants aren’t stopping at mere thievery. They have committed acts of physical cruelty motivated purely by greed and race hatred.