WHEN BRITISH JUSTICE DIED

By Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274221/when-british-justice-died-bruce-bawer

July 8, 2019

Tommy Robinson arriving at the Old Bailey building on Friday. (Yui Mok/PA)

Trial by trial, imprisonment by imprisonment, dishonest news report by dishonest news report, the miserable bastards who make up the British establishment are steadily transforming Tommy Robinson, a working-class husband and father from Leeds, into an imperishable symbol of the quiet determination, indomitable courage, and love of liberty for which Britain used to be known but which that selfsame establishment has labored effortfully to stamp out during these opening chapters of the Islamization of that once-great nation.

Even those of us who have been closely following Tommy’s treatment by the British courts during the past couple of years – and who, perusing the charges against him, have recognized just how outrageously he has been treated by a judiciary committed not to justice but to the silencing, and if possible personal destruction, of this latter-day Jeremiah – were stunned by the verdict handed down on Friday after a two-day trial.

This was a rehearing of the same case that last year landed Tommy in prison (more specifically, in what amounted, in violation of the Geneva Convention, to solitary confinement), an ordeal from which he emerged, after two months, looking physically and psychologically all but broken. The charges themselves were absurd to begin with: he was taken into custody near the courthouse in Leeds, where he was doing a live report on Facebook video about an “Asian grooming-gang” (i.e. Muslim child-rape) prosecution that was underway inside. He didn’t do or say anything that any BBC or Guardian journalist in similar circumstances might do; but he was arrested anyway – on the grounds that his reporting from out on the street had somehow threatened to prejudice the trial going on inside the building – and was charged with contempt of court.

The speed with which he was tried, convicted, and incarcerated after his arrest in Leeds – the whole process took just a few hours – shocked observers who still thought of British justice as something serious and worthy of respect. His release from prison two months later came after the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, in an unusually blistering ruling, declared that the court proceedings against him had been illegitimate in a number of ways, and ordered his immediate release.

That solitary glimmer of fairness from the Chief Justice led some of us to hope that Tommy might, in the end, receive something resembling real justice. But no. Contrary to the expectations of many, a retrial on the same feeble charges was scheduled. At the Old Bailey in London on Thursday and Friday, the weakness of the case against him was painfully obvious. Reporting from a street near the courthouse during a lunch break on Friday, Ezra Levant of Canada’s Rebel Media, who attended the trial (and who himself happens to be a lawyer), pronounced on a YouTube video that “this is as close as it comes to a sham trial as I’ve ever seen in a Western democracy.”

He added – and I’ve made the same point previously in articles about this seemingly endless process of judicial harassment – that if this were happening in someplace like Russia, international human-rights organizations would be shouting about it from the rooftops and calling it out for exactly what it is: namely, the kind of nakedly political prosecution that we like to think happens only in totalitarian countries. But even Levant, at midday on Friday, confessed to feeling positive: the first day and a half of the trial had laid so totally bare the weakness of the prosecution’s case that a conviction seemed inconceivable.

But by the end of the day Levant had been proven wrong. The judges, Dame Victoria Sharp and Sir Mark Warby (whom we are supposed to refer to as The Hon. Mr. Justice Warby, but the hell with that), pronounced Tommy guilty. He may get up to two years behind bars: we don’t know yet. In reporting on the verdict, British court reporters – who every day do exactly what Tommy had been convicted for – could barely constrain their glee at what they saw as his comeuppance. He had taken them on, all of them – the judges and MPs, the reporters and professors, the police chiefs and high-ranking civil servants who run that blighted island (and in doing so are running it into the ground) – and, although he had justice on his side and a large and ever-growing segment of the British populace at his back, he had lost.

But those judges, and their entire network of cronies and confederates in the British political, cultural, academic, and media establishment, are fools indeed if they think this means they have won. Thanks to their fatuousness, knavery, and cowardice, Tommy is – step by step, injustice by injustice – growing into nothing less than a world-historical figure, a living symbol of the determination of the Western multitudes to preserve their free civilization in the face of an elite, at once arrogant and craven, that has plainly decided to stand by and manage its gradual subjugation to an alien tyranny.

Tommy is, if you will, our Nelson Mandela or John Brown, only without blood on his hands; he is our Churchill in the 1930s wilderness, sounding the alarm about a looming menace – except that Winston had a bully pulpit in Westminster, while Tommy appears, once again, to be headed back to jail. Rosa Parks became immortal for refusing to sit in the back of one bus on a single day; Tommy faces worse things than a Montgomery, Alabama, bus driver every day of his life, and doesn’t have an organization with the power and resources of the NAACP behind him. Also, Rosa Parks was the face of a cause of which the mass media of the time fully approved; today’s legacy media view Tommy as an existential threat to the power structures of which they are a part, and treat him, accordingly, with consistent dishonesty and disdain.

On Friday evening, after Tommy’s verdict came down, my friend Valerie Price, who runs Act for Canada and who attended the trial, wrote a posting about it on her Facebook page that concluded as follows: “I fear that if the Crown sends him back to prison, this will be the spark that ignites a class war.” The next morning, in a private missive, she expanded on this thought: after Tommy was pronounced guilty and they all filed out of the Old Bailey, the crowd outside, she told me, was “in a rage and ready to ‘storm the Bastille.’” Well, I’m not entirely sure whether it’s wise or not on my part, but I find myself hoping that if Tommy is sent to prison, his supporters do drop their British restraint down the loo and, just this once, act like an eighteen-century French mob. That may be the only thing that will make the torpid, turpitudinous rogues in Westminster sit up and take notice, and perhaps even cause Her Majesty to look up from her tea.

But of course not even a heaping dose of Gallic-style canaillerie on the part of the Eastenders set will do the job that needs to be done: if there’s any possibility of saving Britain from the fate about which Tommy Robinson has been warning all these years, the first real step has to be a general election that sweeps both major parties out of power and into the dustbin and installs in their place a new government that actually represents, and is willing to act boldly on, the will of the British people – and that, moreover, treats Tommy not with condescension but with the respect he deserves. Which is all by way of saying that I’ll know the UK is headed in the right direction when it has a prime minister who recommends Tommy Robinson for a knighthood.

Bruce Bawer is the author of “While Europe Slept,” “Surrender,” "The Victims' Revolution," and "The Alhambra." "Islam," a collection of his essays on Islam, has just been published.

GERMANY VS. THE 'POPULIST WAVE'

Reflections in Munich.

Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273979/germany-vs-populist-wave-bruce-bawer

June 13, 2019

Commitment to Europe: a demonstration in Munich in 2018.(DPA)

When I was walking around Munich this weekend, it occurred to me that one reason why Germans have such a long-lasting international reputation for being brainy and scholarly and stuff is that all those hours they spend standing at street corners waiting for lights to change give them plenty of time to think. Ever since the first time I set foot in this country, several decades ago now, I’ve been stunned by the willingness of these people – in every city, and of whatever age or social station – to crowd together on curbs, with no moving vehicle in sight for half a mile in either direction, unwilling to hurry across even the narrowest of thoroughfares until a green signal gives them permission to move. My first encounter with this cultural practice was especially striking because I was from America, where individual freedom is taken seriously and where it is hard to quash the impulse to violate trivial regulations if they seem to impinge unnecessarily on one’s freedom of movement and are contrary to one’s personal judgment and/or to simple common sense.

Consider, moreover, that I come from New York, where, as they say, traffic lights are only suggestions. 

This whole German standing-at-lights business is, of course, all about obedience – about a fondness, in fact a deep-seated, inborn, and well-nigh ineradicable need, for exceedingly strict order, even in the most meaningless matters, enforced by very strong authority. That, plus an unshakable readiness to obey that authority beyond the point of rationality, in defiance of one’s own reasoning powers, and without ever giving an instant’s thought to the possible illegitimacy, imprudence, or immorality of that authority. It’s this rage for order that explains the insane level of overregulation practiced by the EU – which is, when you come right down to it, a German operation. The other day somebody said that one of the regulations the EU is currently working on is a rule setting the proper lengths for candle wicks. Only a bureaucracy run by Germans could come up with such things. 

Americans love freedom. But to Germans – at least Germans with a traditional German temperament –freedom looks terrifyingly like chaos.

That’s what I was reflecting on as I waited at one Munich street light after another on this first weekend after the seventy-fifth anniversary of D-Day – and the first weekend, too, after the announcement of the winners of the latest European Parliament elections. If not for the German fetish for authority, Americans of my parents’ generation wouldn’t have been put through so many (shall we say) inconveniences during the first half of the 1940s, and D-Day would never have had to happen, and those Normandy beaches would still have French names.

Yes, Germans today like to tell themselves, and us, that they’ve totally changed as a people, but don’t be too quick to believe it: for only Germans – after the tsunami of fake refugees and other Muslim immigrants that has dramatically transfigured their country in recent decades, leading to such atrocities as the wave of mass rapes on New Year’s Eve three years ago in Cologne and elsewhere – could have gone to the polls week before last and put Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic coalition on top yet again, with 28.9% of the vote. That’s Angela Merkel, the chief architect – the veritable Albert Speer – of her country’s current disaster; Angela Merkel, who, in a commencement address last month, utterly ignoring the reality of what open borders have done to her own country and the fact that America’s insufficiently guarded southern border has played into the schemes of drug cartels and child smugglers, told Harvard graduates that they should “tear down walls of ignorance,” a manifest dig at President Trump, Brexit, and anyone who dares to resist EU hegemony; Angela Merkel, the woman under whom Germany, as James Kirchick wrote in April in the Washington Post, is “NATO’s biggest freeloader.”

To be sure, the relatively new Alternative for Germany Party, which opposes mass Muslim immigration, scored 11% of the vote, or fourth place, in Germany’s elections for MEP, which isn’t bad at all (the Social Democrats came in third); but given what the country is going through, it’s hard not to be struck by the German electorate’s readiness to give the Merkel gang yet another shot – all the while also buying, in huge numbers, the establishment’s assertion that the biggest threat to the German way of life is climate change. For, yes, the party that came in second in Germany was the Greens, who picked up more than one out of every five votes, even as so-called “populist” (i.e. anti-EU, pro-freedom) parties were scoring huge victories elsewhere in Europe. Now, let’s be clear here: Germany has been utterly transformed since I first visited it when Jimmy Carter was the U.S. president and Helmut Schmidt was the German chancellor, but the culprit isn’t greenhouse gases.  

Apropos of that transformation: when I checked into my hotel on Friday, the desk clerk used a minor error in my reservation as an excuse to explode in aggressive anger at me, growling and barking accusations and making ridiculous threats. He was not a native German; my guess, based on his accent and appearance (in particular his scraggly gray beard), is that he was a Turk. Although, in decades of extensive travel, I had never experienced such a greeting at a hostelry, I have had my share of unpleasant encounters in Europe with unnecessarily belligerent Muslims; and as the number of Muslims on this continent has risen steadily, and their tendency to feel empowered has grown, these encounters have increased in frequency and degree of vitriol. I share this trifling anecdote only because, over the years, I have come to view such episodes, however trivial they may appear to be in the scheme of things, as providing a foretaste of what life will be like under the caliphate.

For while individual Muslims can be extremely friendly and hospitable, Islam, as such, when you get right down to it, is an ideology of contempt, contumely, and conquest. From birth, its adherents are taught that it is inappropriate for them to live for very long as passive subjects in infidel lands, and that it is only natural for them to do everything they can – exert pressure, claim victimhood, demand censorship, blow things up – to wrest power, over time, from the infidel. Owing to this imperative, there is a bullying quality that is intrinsic to Islam, an attribute that, when experienced in Germany, of all places, cannot but bring to mind the fierce, brutal truculence at heart of Nazism itself – the very attribute, of course, that drove a certain ambitious Austrian, in this selfsame city, on the night of November 8, 1923, to try to initiate the overthrow the Weimar Republic at a beer hall called Bürgerbräuenkeller; the very attribute, too, that led more and more Germans, over the course of the 1920s and early 30s, to find Herr Hitler (whom most foreigners at the time regarded as comical and cartoonish) nothing less than mesmerizing.

Anyway, strolling around Munich and espying some of the burg’s newest denizens, I’ve been reminded that while the Führer was famously consistent in his passionate Jew-hatred, he actually found Islam appealing – and many Muslims felt the same way about Nazism, which is why hundreds of thousands of them traveled long distances to serve in the Wehrmacht and SS. Part of the mutual attraction between Nazis and Muslims, naturally, had to do with their shared loathing for Jews; but another part was that each side appreciated the bellicose qualities of the other. While Hitler considered Christianity “effeminate,” he glorified Islam “as a strong and aggressive warrior religion.” Both Nazism and Islam, moreover, revere order. Both cherish discipline. Both see individual liberty as anarchy. This is why so many Westerners convert to Islam: freedom, as the planners of the Iraq War never understood, isn’t for everybody. Some people prefer being part of a pack. They enjoy following orders. Marching in lockstep gives them a feeling of security, of belonging, of collective identity and meaning. This is also why the EU has so many fans.

For the past half century or so, Germans have acted as if the lesson of the Holocaust is to pay endless penance to each and every minority group – and the worse those groups are, the more virtuous you prove yourself to be for bowing down to them. No, the real lesson – which, judging by Merkel’s calamitous immigration and integration policies and the overwhelmingly docile public reaction thereto, they have entirely failed to recognize – is to keep your eyes open for totalitarian impulses and to refuse to let them take root in your soil. Unfortunately, the Germans’ own native affection for power, the reflexive enthusiasm with which they respond to tyrants, has blinded them to the fact that Islam is not remotely akin to the Judaism that their not-so-distant forebears tried to extinguish (and toward which they now feel a rather abstract guilt that, curiously, translates into concern not for present-day Jews but for the Muslims who harass those Jews with impunity) but is, rather, in all too many ways, akin to the ideology preached by the author of the Final Solution.   

Bruce Bawer is the author of “While Europe Slept,” “Surrender,” "The Victims' Revolution," and "The Alhambra." "Islam," a collection of his essays on Islam, has just been published.

We must have the right to blaspheme against Islam

The Saatchi Gallery's covering up of two "Islamophobic" paintings is an outrage.


By Brendan O'Neill
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/05/06/we-must-have-the-right-to-blaspheme-against-islam/
6 May 2019

Saatchi Gallery (Getty Images)

Thou shalt not insult Islam. Bizarrely, terrifyingly, this has become the creed of 21st-century Britain. Consider the Saatchi Gallery’s decision to cover up two paintings after Muslim visitors complained they were offensive. In a blow to the ideal of artistic freedom, the supposedly edgy gallery in west London draped grey sheets over two new paintings that infuse verses from the shahada, one of the five pillars of Islam, with images of naked women and the US flag. The Saatchi is behaving like Saudi Arabia, hiding from public view artworks that blaspheme against Islam. Perhaps the artist responsible will now get 50 lashes for effrontery to the religion of peace.

The works are by the pseudonymous artist SKU. The aim of the paintings was to explore how individuals become subjected to ‘wider cultural, economic, moral and political forces’. But visitors were denied the ability to judge how successfully the paintings did this because they were covered up by Islam-respecting modesty sheets in response to complaints that they were ‘blasphemous’. The Saatchi Gallery said it respected ‘the sincerity of the complaints made against these works’. SKU proposed a ‘compromise’, in the words of the Guardian, with the visitors who called for the paintings to be taken down – SKU said they shouldn’t be taken down but they should be covered with sheets. Way to defend artistic freedom! This is the ‘respectful solution’, said SKU.

This wasn’t a compromise. It was a capitulation. It was a caving-in to the censorious cries of people who clearly think that public space, even artistic spaces, should be cleansed of any images that offend their religious convictions. There is no significant difference between the intolerant desire of certain visitors to have the paintings taken off the walls and the spineless decision of the artist and the gallery to cover them up instead: in both cases, actual artworks would be hidden from public view, defaced with censorious cloth, on the basis that they offend religious sensibilities. It is positively pre-modern.

It is also ironic. And riddled with double standards too. For the Saatchi art crowd has long presented itself as dangerous and sensational and willing to offend against orthodoxies. Charles Saatchi himself – the wealthy co-founder of the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi who set up the Saatchi Gallery to display his immense art collection – has made a name for himself as a shower of supposedly offensive art. He famously sponsored the Young British Artists of the 1990s, who were rarely out of the headlines for their shocking works. At Sensation, the 1997 exhibition of his collection at the Royal Academy of Art in London, a painting of Myra Hindley by Marcus Harvey caused a huge storm. Some members of the Royal Academy resigned in protest at its inclusion and the painting was vandalised by visitors twice. Yet the Saatchi crew didn’t cover it up.

Even more strikingly, the Saatchi collection then included ‘The Holy Virgin Mary’ by Chris Ofili, which is an Africanised painting of the mother of Christ that rests on two big slabs of elephant dung. It caused a storm in London in 1997 and even more so when it was displayed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999. Rudy Giuliani, then New York mayor, threatened to shut down the museum over the ‘offensive’ Ofili work. Christian organisations said the painting should be removed because it is ‘offensive to religious viewers’. The museum refused to remove it. Saatchi’s people didn’t suggest covering it up. Nor did they talk up ‘the sincerity of the complaints’. Which raises a big and awkward question: why is it okay for the edgy art world to ‘insult’ a Christian icon but not to ‘blaspheme’ against Islam?

(The Times/Becky Barrow)

This is where we get to the heart of the problem: Islam, uniquely among religions, is being forcefieled from criticism, ridicule and even artistic depiction in 21st-century Britain. The Saudi-style covering-up of SKU’s two paintings follows the shushing or shelving of other works of art or entertainment deemed to be offensive to Islam. Various theatres, including the Barbican and the Royal Court Theatre, have rewritten or cancelled works that might offend Muslims. Or witness the fire-and-brimstone condemnation that rains down on anyone who criticises or jokes about certain Islamic practices, whether it’s the wearing of the niqab (Boris Johnson) or the 72 virgins thing (Louis Smith).

Student unions agitate for the banning of speakers who criticise Islam too harshly (whom they of course brand ‘Islamophobic’). Charlie Hebdo continues to be shamed by British leftists as a publication that ‘punches down’ because it dares to publish cartoons that mock Muhammad or take the piss out of Islamic beliefs. Even the Metropolitan Police recently decreed that it is ‘Islamophobic’ to describe Islam in any of the following ways: as a ‘static’ belief system, as ‘other’, as ‘irrational’, ‘sexist’ or ‘aggressive’, or as a ‘political ideology’. Apparently anyone who holds these entirely legitimate views of Islam is guilty of an act of ‘phobia’ – which in essence means blasphemy.

Everyone from the police to the commentariat to the political class now treats criticism of Islam as tantamount to a speechcrime. Consider the All Party Parliamentary Group’s recent embrace of adefinition of Islamophobia as any prejudice against ‘expressions of Muslimness’, which could include dislike of basically any Islamic practice. It is little wonder people feel they have the right to walk into a gallery and say ‘Take down this blasphemous work’. After all, they live in a country in which the powers-that-be have reintroduced blasphemy laws by the backdoor in order to protect one religion in particular – Islam – from harsh criticism.

This is really worrying stuff. It is bad for artistic freedom, bad for public discussion, and bad for freedom of thought. The right to blaspheme is a hard-won liberty. We should have the freedom to mock all gods, prophets, beliefs and ideas. The right of the individual to blaspheme against religion should always override religious people’s sensitivities. The worst thing is this: censorship inflames intolerance. When we say Islam must never be insulted, we play directly into the hands of Islamists who believe that anybody who does insult their religion deserves to be punished. We license their bigotry. We strengthen their belief that criticism of Islam is immoral and thus deserving of some kind of blowback. Hiding those two paintings behind sheets was an incredibly bad, illiberal and destructive thing to do.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked and host of the spiked podcast,The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy

The Burning of Notre Dame and the Destruction of Christian Europe

by Guy Millière
April 22, 2019 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14107/notre-dame-destruction-christian-europe

(Benoit Tessier/Reuters)

The fire that destroyed much of the Notre Dame Cathedral in the heart of Paris is a tragedy that is irreparable. Even if the cathedral is rebuilt, it will never be what it was before. Stained glass windows and major architectural elements have been severely damaged and the oak frame totally destroyed. The spire that rose from the cathedral was a unique piece of art. It was drawn by the architect who restored the edifice in the nineteenth century, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who had based his work on 12^th century documents.

In addition to the fire, the water needed to extinguish the flames penetrated the limestone of the walls and façade, and weakened them, making them brittle. The roof is non-existent: the nave, the transept and the choir now lie in open air, vulnerable to bad weather. They cannot even be protected until the structure has been examined thoroughly, a task that will take weeks. Three major elements of the structure (the north transept pinion, the pinion located between the two towers and the vault) are also on the verge of collapse.

Notre Dame is more than 800 years old. It survived the turbulence of the Middle Ages, the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, two World Wars and the Nazi occupation of Paris. It did not survive what France is becoming in the 21^stcentury.

The cause of the fire has so far been attributed to "an accident," "a short circuit," and most recently "a computer glitch."

If the fire really was an accident, it is almost impossible to explain how it started. Benjamin Mouton, Notre Dame's former chief architect, explained that the rules were exceptionally strict and that no electric cable or appliance, and no source of heat, could be placed in the attic. He added that an extremely sophisticated alarm system was in place. 

The company that installed the scaffolding did not use any welding and specialized in this type of work. The fire broke out more than an hour after the workers' departure and none of them was present. It spread so quickly that the firefighters who rushed to the spot as soon as they could get there were shocked. Remi Fromont, the chief architect of the French Historical Monuments said: "The fire could not start from any element present where it started. A real calorific load is necessary to launch such a disaster".

A long, difficult and complex investigation will be conducted.

The possibility that the fire was the result of arson cannot be dismissed. Barely an hour after the flames began to rise above Notre Dame -- at a time when no explanation could be provided by anyone -- the French authorities rushed to say that the fire was an "accident" and that "arson has been ruled out." The remarks sounded like all the official statements made by the French government after attacks in France during the last decade.

In November 2015, on the night of the massacre at the Bataclan Theater in Paris, in which jihadists murdered 90 people, the French Department of the Interior said that the government did not know anything, except that a gunfight had occurred. The truth came out only after ISIS claimed responsibility for the slaughter.

In Nice, after the truck-attack in July 2016, the French government insisted for several days that the terrorist who crushed 86 people to death was a "man with a nervous breakdown".

In 2018, Sarah Halimi's murderer, who recited verses from the Quran while torturing his victim, was declared "mentally disturbed" and held in a psychiatric institution immediately after his arrest. He will most likely never face a court. On April 8, Alain Finkielkraut and 38 other intellectuals published a text saying that her murderer must not escape justice. The text had no effect.

The fire at Notre Dame took place less than three years after a "commando unit" of jihadi women, later arrested, tried to destroy the cathedral by detonating cylinders of natural gas. Three days before last week's fire, on April 12, the leader of the jihadis, Ines Madani, a young French convert to Islam, was sentenced to eight years in prison for creating a terrorist group affiliated with the Islamic State.

Saint Sulpice (Reuters)

The Notre Dame fire also occurred at a time when attacks against churches in France and Europe have been multiplying. More than 800 churches were attacked in France during the year 2018 alone. Many suffered serious damage: broken, beheaded statues, smashed tabernacles, feces thrown on the walls. In several churches, fires were lit. On March 5, the Basilica of St. Denis, where all but three of the Kings of France are buried, was vandalized by a Pakistani refugee. Several stained-glass windows were broken, and the basilica's organ, a national treasure built between 1834 and 1841, was nearly wrecked. Twelve days later, on March 17, a fire broke out at Saint Sulpice, the largest church in Paris, causing serious damage. After days of silence, the police finally admitted that the cause had been arson.

For months, jihadist organizations have been issuing statements calling for the destruction of churches and Christian monuments in Europe. Notre Dame was repeatedly named as a primary target. Despite all that, the Cathedral was not adequately protected. A couple of young men, who entered the Cathedral at night, climbed on the roof last November and shot a video that they then put on YouTube.

Many messages were posted by people with Muslim names on social media -- Twitter, Facebook, the website of Al Jazeera -- expressing a joy to see an important Christian symbol destroyed. Hafsa Askar, a migrant from Morocco and the vice president of the National Union of Students of France (UNEF), the main student organization in France, published a tweet saying, "People are crying on little pieces of wood... it's a delusion of white trash".

French President Emmanuel Macron, who had never even mentioned the attacks on Saint Denis or Saint Sulpice, quickly went to Notre Dame and declared, "Notre Dame is our history, our literature, our imagination". He totally left out cathedral's religious dimension.

The next evening, he said that Notre Dame would be rebuilt in five years: it was a bold statement. Many commentators interpreted his words as dictated by his will desperately to try to regain the confidence of the French people after five months of demonstrations, riots and destruction stemming from his ineffective handling of the "Yellow Vests" uprising. (On March 16, much of the Champs-Élysées was damaged by rioters; repairs have barely begun.) All experts agree that it will almost certainly take far longer than five years to rebuild Notre Dame.

Macron strangely added that the cathedral would be "more beautiful" than before -- as if a badly damaged monument could be more beautiful after restoration. Macron went on to say that the reconstruction would be a "contemporary architectural gesture". The remark raised concern, if not panic, among defenders of historic monuments, who now fear that he may want to ​​add modern architectural elements to a jewel of Gothic architecture. Again, he totally left out the cathedral's religious dimension.

Macron's attitude is not surprising. From the moment he became president, he has kept himself away from any Christian ceremony. Most of the presidents who preceded him did the same. France is a country where a dogmatic secularism reigns supreme. A political leader who dares to call himself a Christian is immediately criticized in the media and can only harm a budding political career. Nathalie Loiseau -- the former director of France's National School of Administration and the leading candidate on the electoral list of Macron's party, "Republic on the Move," for the May 2019 European Parliament elections -- was recently photographed exiting a church after mass, which led to a media debate on whether her church attendance is a "problem."

The results of French secularism are visible. Christianity has been almost completely wiped out from public life. Churches are empty. The number of priests is decreasing and the priests that are active in France are either very old or come from Africa or Latin America. The dominant religion in France is now Islam. Every year, churches are demolished to make way for parking lots or shopping centers. Mosques are being built all over, and they are full. Radical imams proselytize. The murder, three years ago, of Jacques Hamel, an 85-year-old priest who was slaughtered by two Islamists while he was saying mass in a church where only five people (three of them old nuns) were present, is telling.

In 1905, the French parliament passed a law decreeing that all the properties of the Catholic Church in France were confiscated. Churches and cathedrals became property of the State. Since then, successive governments have spent little money to maintain them. Those churches that have not been vandalized are in poor condition, and most cathedrals are in poor condition, too. Even before the devastating fire, the Archdiocese of Paris stated that "it can't afford all the repairs" that Notre Dame needed, "estimated at $185 million." According to CBS News, in a March 20, 2018 report:

"The French government, which owns the cathedral, has pledged around $50 million over the next decade, leaving a bill of $135 million. To raise the rest, Picaud helped launch the Friends of Notre-Dame of Paris Foundation. It works to find private donors both in France and across the Atlantic. 

"'We know Americans are wealthy, so we go where we think we can find money to help restore the cathedral,' Picaud said."

On the evening of the fire at Notre Dame, hundreds of French people gathered in front of the burning cathedral to sing Psalms and pray. They seemed suddenly to understand that they were losing something immensely precious.

Following the fire, the French government decided to start collecting donations from private individuals, businesses and organizations for reconstruction; more than one billion euros have poured in. French billionaires promised to pay large sums: the Pinault family (the main owners of the retail conglomerate Kering) promised 100 million euros, the Arnault family (owners of LVMH, the world's largest luxury-goods company), 200 million euros, the Bettencourt family (owners of L'Oréal), also 200 million. Many on the French "left" immediately said that wealthy families had too much money, and that these millions would be better used helping the poor than taking care of old stones.

For the foreseeable future, the heart of Paris will bear the terrible scars of a fire that devastated far more than a cathedral. The fire destroyed an essential part of what is left of the almost-lost soul of France and what France could accomplish when the French believed in something higher than their own day-to-day existence.

Some hope that the sight of the destroyed cathedral will inspire many French people to follow the example of those who prayed on the night of the disaster. Michel Aupetit, Archbishop of Paris, said on April 17, two days after the fire, that he was sure France would know a "spiritual awakening".

Others, not as optimistic, see in the ashes of the cathedral a symbol of the destruction of Christianity in France. The art historian Jean Clair said that he sees in the destruction of Notre Dame an additional sign of an "irreversible decadence" of France, and of the final collapse of the Judeo-Christian roots of Europe.

An American columnist, Dennis Prager, wrote:

"The symbolism of the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral, the most renowned building in Western civilization, the iconic symbol of Western Christendom, is hard to miss. 

"It is as if God Himself wanted to warn us in the most unmistakable way that Western Christianity is burning -- and with it, Western civilization."

Another American author, Rod Dreher, noted:

"This catastrophe in Paris today is a sign to all of us Christians, and a sign to all people in the West, especially those who despise the civilization that built this great temple to its God on an island in the Seine where religious rites have been celebrated since the days of pagan Rome. It is a sign of what we are losing, and what we will not recover, if we don't change course now."

For the moment, nothing indicates that France and Western Europe will change course.

Dr. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, is the author of 27 books on France and Europe.

Jihad Against Churches

Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273515/jihad-against-churches-joseph-klein

April 18, 2019

Catholic churches in Nimes, Houilles and Lavaur were among those targeted by vandals (Image: N/C)

The cause of the tragic Notre Dame Cathedral fire remains under investigation. Although authorities so far are treating the fire as an accident, rather than as an act of terror, Islamists have wasted no time celebrating what happened as a major defeat for the “Crusaders.”

A jihadist media group linked to ISIS carried an image of the iconic 850 year-old cathedral on fire next to their warning, “Wait for the next.” In truth, we do not have to “wait for the next.” During the last three years, as the migrant population coming to Europe from the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa rose dramatically, so has the number of attacks on Christian churches and religious symbols.  “Countless churches throughout Western Europe are being vandalized, defecated on, and torched,” Raymond Ibrahim has reported in an article published by Gatestone Institute. He noted that “in European regions with large Muslim populations, there seems to be a concomitant rise in attacks on churches and Christian symbols.” And we must not forget the July 2016 attack against Fr. Jacques Hamel, who was killed by two young Islamists in the middle of mass at Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray church. They slit the priest’s throat while screaming "Allahu Akbar." ISIS claimed responsibility.  

The vicinity of Notre Dame itself has been the scene of prior Islamist crimes. On June 6, 2017, an Algerian-born journalist named Farid Ikken, who had moved to France on a student visa, attacked a police officer with a hammer outside the Notre Dame Cathedral. He reportedly shouted "c'est pour la Syrie" ("this is for Syria") during the attack and then claimed he was a soldier of the caliphate.

On September 4, 2016, a car containing seven canisters of gas and pages with Arabic writing was found parked near Notre Dame. Three female jihadists were reportedly planning to blow up the car outside the cathedral, but the plot was foiled in time.

More than 1000 attacks on Christian churches, crucifixes, icons, and statues were registered in France alone in 2018, according to a German news site referenced by Mr. Ibrahim. In February of this year, nine churches were desecrated in France during an 11-day period. Mr. Ibrahim described some truly disgusting examples of desecration that occurred this past February and March. In one example he described, “Vandals plundered Notre-Dame des Enfants Church in Nîmes and used human excrement to draw a cross there; consecrated bread was found thrown outside among garbage.” In another example, “Vandals desecrated and smashed crosses and statues at Saint-Alain Cathedral in Lavaur, and mangled the arms of a statue of a crucified Christ in a mocking manner.”

Also, last month, a Pakistani immigrant, who had arrived in France quite recently, allegedly tried to burn down the organ of the Saint-Denis basilica and destroyed some stain glass. The year before, pro-migrant activists alongside illegal migrants had stormed this same basilica to protest changes in France’s asylum law.

Germany has experienced a similar pattern of attacks on churches and holy objects, with four separate churches vandalized and/or torched in March alone. “Before Christmas 2016, in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany, where more than a million Muslims reside, some 50 public Christian statues (including those of Jesus) were beheaded and crucifixes broken,” Mr. Ibrahim reported.

Some of the perpetrators are not shy about their motivation. A German report quoted by Mr. Ibrahim stated:  "Crosses are broken, altars smashed, Bibles set on fire, baptismal fonts overturned, and the church doors smeared with Islamic expressions like 'Allahu Akbar.'"

European government leaders and the mainstream media have been in denial about the Islamist source of many of the attacks. Instead, they try to kill the messenger. They brand as racists and Islamophobes those who point out that the rising number of Islamist attacks on Christian churches and religious symbols in Europe tracks the dramatic increase of migrants from Muslim-majority terrorist-prone countries.

Some French authorities are blaming what they call “militant secularism” for the church attacks in their country. That is patently absurd. Militant Islam, which teaches hatred of Christians and Jews, is the driving ideology behind many of the attacks. And the attacks are not just occurring in “secular” Europe or in Muslim countries in the Middle East where Christians are becoming a dwindling, persecuted minority. Last January, for example, there was a double bomb attack on a Catholic church in the Philippines, which killed at least 18 people. ISIS claimed that “two martyrs of the Islamic state carried out a double suicide attack.”  Approximately 80 percent of the Philippine population is Roman Catholic. The Catholic Church still plays an important role in Philippine life. "Militant secularism" is not being used as a convenient excuse for the church attack by Philippine government authorities.

In 2017, a propaganda video was released by ISIS militants in the Philippines threatening the life of Pope Francis, and showing a church set on fire as well as the destruction of statues of Jesus, Mary and St. Joseph. “After all their efforts, it would be the religion of the cross that would be broken,” the narrator said as a church in flames was displayed.

In Nigeria, which is split between a majority-Christian south and a majority-Muslim north, the ISIS-linked Boko Haram terrorist group and other Muslim terrorists have slaughtered Christians and burned churches. More than 6,000 Christians were killed or maimed by Islamist terrorists during 2018 alone. “We are deeply concerned by religious violence in Nigeria, including the burning of churches and the killing and persecution of Christians,” President Trump said during a joint press conference at the White House in April 2018 with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, who is himself a Muslim and has condemned the attacks but done little to stop them. “It’s a horrible story,” President Trump added. The horrible story is continuing in 2019.

Islamists justify their murder of Christians and desecration of churches, as well as their murder of Jews and desecration of synagogues, by pointing to verses in the Koran. One example is found in Koran (9:29): "Fight against Christians and Jews until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low."

We may not know what really caused the Notre Dame fire for quite some time. Terrorism cannot be entirely ruled out just yet, although investigators presently believe the fire started accidentally. We do know, however, that Islamists have targeted Notre Dame, the Vatican, and churches all over the world repeatedly in the past. Their jubilation at what happened this week to an enduring symbol of the Christian faith reveals the depth of their hatred for anything symbolic of Judeo-Christian values and of Western civilization. They will kill and destroy anything they consider infidel whenever they are given the chance. That is who they are. Our answer must be to value life, protect freedom, stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before us, and rebuild.

The West's Crimes against Persecuted Minorities in the Middle East

by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13969/crimes-minorities-middle-east

March 29, 2019 

Nobel Peace Prize 2018 laureate Nadia Murad delivers her speech during the Nobel Peace Prize 2018 Ceremony in Oslo Town Hall, Oslo, on Dec 10, 2018.PHOTO: EPA-EFE

The debate in Western Europe about the rights of returning Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists reflects a disturbing sentiment: There appears to be tremendous concern for the well-being of people who decided to leave their native or adopted countries to pledge allegiance to ISIS, the followers of which perpetrated some of the most gruesome crimes committed in this or any century.

Now that the US-supported forces in Syria have taken the last ISIS stronghold in Syria, Baghouz, and ISIS in Iraq and Syria has been defeated, its terrorists and their brides apparently long for the West again.

Few people in the West seem concerned that the reason for this longing might not be Western comforts alone, but also an ISIS command. One ISIS spokesmen, Abu al-Hassan al-Muhajer, recently "issued a recording calling on organization operatives in all ISIS's provinces to continue the path of jihad and expand their activities against the 'infidel nations,' particularly the United States..."

Swedish officials issued concern about returning ISIS perpetrators in curiousstatements. One, for instance, by Klas Friberg, the head of the Swedish Security Service (Säpo), in January, described returning ISIS fighters as "broken people who have been traumatized by their experiences" and said that Swedish society has to "play a big role in re-integrating them".[1]

There were also questionable statements about an ISIS bride, Shamima Begum, attempting to return to Britain. In a recent interview from Syria, Begum readily admitted that she had no problem with beheadings and other atrocities committed by ISIS, because, "Islamically that is all allowed." Despite this, Richard Barret, a former director of global counter-terrorism at the UK's MI6 intelligence agency, said Begum should be "given a chance" and allowed to come home, despite her lack of remorse. He then lamented that the British government, at the initiative of Home Secretary Sajid Javid, in stripping Begum of her citizenship and not allowing her to come back to the UK, had shown "a complete lack of concern for her plight". British MP Diane Abbott said that making Begum "stateless" was "callous and inhumane".

The problem is that these same representatives of the political establishment have not shown remotely similar concern -- if any at all -- for the real victims of the ISIS terrorists; they appear to have been completely forgotten.

The real victims were the many people whom ISIS terrorists had happily volunteered to rape, torture, behead, drown, burn alive, crucify and shoot to death for sport. Yet, the horror of these victims -- Yazidis, Christians, Druze and the "wrong kind" of Muslims -- is barely mentioned in public debates about returning ISIS fighters. It is as if those victims had never existed. The only comment that keeps being repeated is the right of the perpetrators to return because they happen to be in possession of Western citizenship. One wonders, if such compassion would also have been extended today to, say, Nazis, if they had run off to kill victims abroad and then, after being defeated, asked to come back.

The West, by this disregard of ISIS's victims, is committing a double crime against them: First, by failing to speak out for and help rescue the victims at the time they were being devastated; second, by their sentimental concern for these terrorists after their hard-won defeat.

Recently, fifty Yazidi women were found to have been beheaded in the city of Baghouz. That discovery, however, did not seem to propel Western leaders to help find those thousands of Yazidis who are still missing, including many children. According to one report, 3000 women are still being held by ISIS as slaves and their likely fate is to be held in sexual slavery for the rest of their lives, unless someone rescues them. Nadia Murad, the Yazidi human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who was one of thousands of Yazidi women taken prisoner by ISIS and held as a slave until she managed to escape, recently wrote, "My greatest fear is that if the world still fails to act, my community – the Yazidi community – will cease to exist".

Unfortunately, the world has stood by passively for nearly five years, since August 2014, when the Yazidi genocide by ISIS went into in full swing. Some of these terrorists are already back in the West or on their way there. One Yazidi teenage girl, who had been sold into slavery by ISIS, managed to escape to Germany, where she was horrified to discover that her former captor, who had beaten and raped her, was also living in Germany:

"I know you, he said. And where you live and who you live with. He knew everything about my life in Germany... The last thing I expected was to meet my IS captor and that he would know everything about me."

It appears to be dawning on some of the mainstream media outlets, at least in the UK, that Britain's inaction on behalf of the persecuted Middle Eastern minorities makes its government look horrendous. The Sunday Times recently wrote of the UK government:

"The Home Office has repeatedly failed to give sanctuary in Britain to a fair proportion of Christians, Yazidis and Druze, according to figures obtained under freedom of information laws by Barnabas Fund, which helps persecuted Christians overseas. 

"The finding that it appears to discriminate in favour of Muslisms [sic] risks embarrassing the government which has begun a review, ordered by the foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, into the global persecution of Christians.
"When he announced the review on Boxing Day, Hunt cited estimates of about 215m [million] Christians suffering persecution around the world and suggested Britain had not been generous enough."

That is putting it mildly. According to the Sunday Times, of the 4,850 Syrians accepted in 2017 by the Home Office, 4,572 were Sunni Muslims; only 11 were Christians. According to figures for the second quarter of 2018, of the 1,197 Syrians accepted into the UK, 1,047 were Sunnis and 10 were Christians. There was no mention at all of Yazidis, despite the genocide committed against them in 2014, when ISIS terrorists stormed the predominantly Yazidi city of Sinjar in northern Iraq and proceeded to destroy Yezidi shrines and murder, abduct and rape the Yazidis. 200,000 people fled Sinjar and around 50,000 took refuge on Mount Sinjar. To this day, Yazidi refugees are still living there in tents and in unimaginable poverty, waiting for help from a world that has completely forgotten them.

Unfortunately, the rot at the core of Britain's Home Office seems so deep, it is doubtful that it can be shamed into anything. According to The Times, the Home Office recently refused asylum to an Iranian who converted from Islam to Christianity on the grounds that Christianity is supposedly not a peaceful religion:

"Immigration officials wrote to the man citing violent passages from the Bible to prove their point. They said that the Book of Revelation was 'filled with imagery of revenge, destruction, death and violence'. The Church of England condemned the 'lack of religious literacy' shown by the immigration officials, after the man warned he might now face persecution in Iran for his faith".

Across the Western world, the political and media classes put on a daily show of pretending to care about human rights, while letting down persecuted minorities -- including many Muslim women. As Asra Nomani wrote:

"One of our greatest challenges here in America is that progressives don't always stand with the progressive Muslims because in the interest of freedom of religion and civil liberties and political correctness, they don't want to offend cultural choices by Muslims. I know that people have gone to these interfaith sessions at different mosques and they see that the women end up in the basement, but they don't want to challenge anyone because they think, 'Oh, well this is your way.'"

It is long overdue for everyone to start calling out this posturing for the moral narcissism it is and to demand from their politicians and the establishment media, who seemingly never tire of proclaiming their commitment to human rights, to begin providing some to the countless real victims waiting to be helped.

Judith Bergman, a columnist, lawyer and political analyst, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.

[1] Integrating former ISIS fighters in Sweden is not going very well. In a recent study of 29 male returned ISIS fighters, 13 were suspected of or had been convicted of committing crimes in Sweden after their return. The crimes included committing severe physical abuse, money laundering, dealing in stolen goods, extortion, theft and drug offenses.