nationalreview--2019-09-11--The Need for a Revival of Lockean Liberalism

A revival of Lockean liberalism would do much to tame the hatreds now afflicting the soul of the West.  In the summer of 1704, English philosopher John Locke began writing a response to a critic of his controversial treatise on religious freedom, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). It was, in fact, the third letter from Locke addressed to Jonas Proast, a chaplain at Oxford University, who insisted that government coercion in religious matters was necessary to preserve social order. Locke fired back: “Men in all religions have equally strong persuasion, and every one must judge for himself,” he wrote. “Nor can any one judge for another, and you last of all for the magistrate.”  Locke died before finishing the letter, but his revolutionary voice is being heard once again. A manuscript titled “Reasons for Tolerating Papists Equally with Others,” written in Locke’s hand in 1667 or 1668, has just been published for the first time, in The Historical Journal of Cambridge University Press. The document challenges the conventional view that Locke shared the anti-Catholicism of his fellow Protestants. Instead, it offers a glimpse into the radical quality of his political liberalism, which so influenced the First Amendment and the American Founding. “If all subjects should be equally countenanced, & imployed by the Prince,” he wrote, “the Papist[s] have an equall title.”  Here was a visionary conception of equal justice for all members of the commonwealth, regardless of religious belief — a principle rejected by every political regime in the world, until 1787 at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. “Locke was willing to contemplate the toleration of Catholics in a fashion which others would never countenance, and he did so with startling impartiality,” write independent scholar J. C. Walmsley and Cambridge University fellow Felix Waldman, who discovered the manuscript. “The tone is emollient, and nowhere replicated in Locke’s works.”  They have it half right. The attitude of English Protestants toward Catholicism in Locke’s day was shaped by over a century of religious conflict. To the Protestant mind, the advance of “Popery” and “priestcraft” represented a temporal and spiritual threat: ranks of religious believers loyal to a foreign potentate, blinded by superstition, hungry for arbitrary power, and latent with schemes of papal domination. Protestant sermons routinely identified the pope with the Antichrist. Locke’s career coincided with the Restoration (1660–88), when Catholics were excluded from public office and their rights of religious worship were severely restricted. By the 1660s, the rise of Catholic France under an absolute monarch, Louis XIV, instigated a fresh round of anti-Catholic fervor. In this acrimonious climate, Locke’s plea for political equality for Catholics was remarkably egalitarian.  Yet — contrary to Locke’s modern interpreters — it was consistent with his views about Catholics and other religious minorities throughout most of his political career. As an assistant to Sir Walter Vane, for example, Locke’s first diplomatic mission in 1665 took him to the Duchy of Cleves, in modern-day Germany. In one of his reports, Locke admits that  Locke also records his surprise at the social harmony between Calvinists, Lutherans, and Catholics, who each practiced their faith in relative freedom: “The distance in their churches gets not into their houses. . . . I cannot observe any quarrels or animosities amongst them upon the account of religion.” It was his first encounter with religious pluralism, and it left a deep and lasting impression.  In his first major treatise supporting religious liberty, An Essay Concerning Toleration (1667), Locke constructs an argument, a defense of the rights of conscience, that he will build upon for the rest of his life. He argues that magistrates have no right interfering in religious beliefs that pose no obvious threat to the social order: “In speculations & religious worship every man hath a perfect uncontrolled liberty, which he may freely use without or contrary to the magistrate’s command.” The challenge of accommodating different religious traditions, including Roman Catholicism, is front and center. “If I observe the Friday with the Mahumetan, or the Saturday with the Jew, or the Sunday with the Christian, . . . whether I worship God in the various & pompous ceremonies of the papists, or in the plainer way of the Calvinists,” he wrote, “I see no thing in any of these, if they be done sincerely & out of conscience, that can of itself make me, either the worse subject to my prince, or worse neighbor to my fellow subject.”  It was an extraordinary claim for an Englishman of his era: that Catholics, Calvinists, Jews, and Muslims alike could all be good citizens and good neighbors. Twenty years later, in the throes of another season of anti-Catholic anxiety, Locke delivers the same argument, yet even more forcefully.  In A Letter Concerning Toleration — now considered foundational to the Western canon — Locke insists that the equal protection of civil rights for all religious groups is “agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the genuine reason of mankind.” He uses Catholicism as a test case for explaining why religious doctrines should be of no concern to the magistrate: “If a Roman Catholic believe that to be really the body of Christ, which another man calls bread, he does no injury thereby to his neighbor.” Locke applies his argument not only to Catholics but to the most despised religious minorities of 17th-century Europe. The best way to safeguard the rights of conscience, he concludes, is “to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion.” The American Founders took note.  Nevertheless, Locke has his critics. Political progressives find his religious outlook — he considered the pursuit of God’s gift of salvation the “highest obligation” facing every human being — outdated and offensive. Many conservatives are also ambivalent or even hostile. Catholic thinkers such as R. R. Reno, editor of First Things, not only take Locke’s anti-Catholicism for granted, they view it as evidence of animus toward biblical religion, underwritten by a contempt for the sources of “traditional authority.” In Why Liberalism Failed, Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen faults Lockean liberalism for “the destruction of social norms” and the “untrammeled expansion of private identity.” Others, such as Yoram Hazony, in The Virtue of Nationalism, denounce Locke’s entire approach to politics as “a far-reaching depreciation of the most basic bonds that hold society together.”  We are entitled to wonder whether these critics have the slightest idea of the actual political and cultural catastrophe that had engulfed Western society when Locke made his most famous arguments for human liberty. The sources of “traditional authority” wistfully recalled by these writers — the state churches and social hierarchies of European society — had transformed much of Europe into a violent, sectarian battlefield. Under the banner of the cross of Christ, the “basic bonds that hold society together” — such as compassion, forgiveness, and mutual respect — were being shredded without a twinge of conscience.  It was Locke’s moral outrage over the widespread abuse of power, reaching another crescendo in the 1680s, that drove him to compose his Two Treatises of Government (1689) and A Letter Concerning Toleration.  English society was in crisis: riven by a brutal crackdown on religious dissent, by the return of political absolutism, and by the growing threat of militant Catholicism. “The idea of a Counter-Reformation design against English Protestantism was far from absurd,” writes historian John Coffey, “and we should resist the temptation to treat Protestant fear as irrational paranoia.” The Dutch Republic, where Locke was living in political exile, was absorbing thousands of religious refugees fleeing Catholic France. The reason: On Oct. 22, 1685 — a few weeks before Locke began composing his Letter — Louis XIV invalidated the Edict of Nantes. France’s brief experiment in religious toleration of its Protestant (Huguenot) population had come to an end.  And a bloody end at that. At least 200,000 Protestants fled in the first wave of persecution. Locke met and befriended many of them. It would have been impossible to ignore the reports of Protestant children taken from their parents, of churches demolished, of ministers beaten, imprisoned, or executed because of their faith. Princeton historian Jonathan Israel describes the mounting Catholic–Protestant tensions thus: “The resurgence of anti-Catholic sentiment, in reaction to the persecution of the Huguenots in France, pervaded the entire religious and intellectual climate of the Republic.”  Despite all of this, Locke defends the civil and religious rights of Catholics in his Letter, as part of a broader argument for freedom of conscience. “I will not undertake to represent how happy and how great would be the fruit, both in church and state, if the pulpits everywhere sounded with this doctrine of peace and toleration.” It is a curious doctrine coming from a man supposedly hobbled by anti-Catholic bigotry.  Why, then, do Locke’s critics conclude that he opposed equal protections for Catholics in the commonwealth? Because in his Letter and other writings, Locke objects to tolerating those who teach that “faith is not to be kept with heretics” or that “kings excommunicated forfeit their crowns and kingdoms.” Such views were a matter of Catholic policy, and it seems clear that Catholic leaders were the chief subjects in Locke’s mind.  Yet Locke makes a crucial distinction between Catholics who pledged loyalty to the political regime under which they lived and those who sought its overthrow — a fifth column “ready upon any occasion to seize the government.” Locke’s detractors fail to acknowledge the machinations of the Catholic Church, in England and elsewhere, in which the Holy See acted to destabilize political authorities or condemn them as heretics and see them toppled. What Locke found intolerable was not Catholic theology per se but rather the agents of political subversion operating under the guise of religious obedience. As he put it in the newly discovered manuscript: “It is not the difference of their opinion in religion, or of their ceremonys in worship; but their dangerous & factious tenets in reference to the state . . . that exclude them from the benefit of toleration.” On this point, Locke could be as tough on Protestants as he was on Catholics.  Today we take political stability and civil order for granted; we do not exist in fear of sectarian forces sweeping away our liberties. But no one living in Locke’s tumultuous times enjoyed this luxury. Some ideas threatened the moral taproot of civil society; they could not be tolerated. In Locke’s world — as in ours — the constitution must not become a suicide pact. Political philosopher Greg Forster insightfully observes that Locke “towers over the history of liberalism precisely because virtually everything he wrote was directed at coping with the problem that gave birth to liberalism — religious violence and moral discord.”  Such is the world as we find it. If prejudice taints Locke’s political legacy, perhaps it is the prejudice of those who prefer false and comforting narratives to difficult moral and historical realities. Locke’s critics have blinded themselves to the bracing nature of his democratic vision: “But those whose doctrine is peaceable, and whose manners are pure and blameless, ought to be upon equal terms with their fellow-subjects.” Here is the only tenable solution to the challenge of religious diversity: equal justice under the law for people of all faith traditions.  No political doctrine has been more integral to the success of the United States, for no nation has been so determined to regard religious pluralism as a source of cultural strength. America’s experiment in human liberty and equality is profoundly Lockean. It is also, in some important respects, deeply Christian. Locke believed that the gospel message of divine mercy — intended for all — implied political liberalism. The founder of Christianity, he wrote, “opened the kingdom of heaven to all equally, who believed in him, without any the least distinction of nation, blood, profession, or religion.”  It would be hard to conceive of a better doctrine on which to build a more just and humane society. A revival of Lockean liberalism would do much to tame the hatreds now afflicting the soul of the West.


npr--2019-01-21--Analysis How The Rise Of The Far Right Threatens Democracy Worldwide

Analysis: How The Rise Of The Far Right Threatens Democracy Worldwide  A new president is elected. Within days of being sworn in, he pulls his country out of a U.N. migration pact. His path to power has been pockmarked by disparaging comments about women, including a congresswoman. His preferred choice for top posts are members of the armed forces. When he appoints a fifth military official to his cabinet, he makes the announcement via Twitter, his favored means of communications.  These are the tactics of Brazil's new president, Jair Bolsonaro, who was sworn in to office on Jan. 1, 2019.  On Tuesday, Bolsonaro will headline the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, an annual gathering that attracts heads of state — 65 of them this year — corporate CEOs and billionaire investors. Bolsonaro's nationalistic rhetoric is in sharp contrast to a gathering that has long stood for globalization and has pushed to strengthen international ties.  His tactics may remind many of the American president's. But it is actually symptomatic of a global wave that started almost a decade ago and has only strengthened in recent years. From Turkey and Hungary, to India and the Philippines, the voices of nationalism and the far right have become dominant forces that begin with the election of a charismatic, influential and powerful man.  Hungary, for instance, was once a leader in the drive for democracy in East Europe. But after strongman Viktor Orban rose to power as prime minister in 2010, Hungary's democratic institutions have been dramatically weakened.  In his first year in office, Orban's party amended the constitution 10 times. A wholly new constitution was put in place. It whittled down the power of courts, changed how elections are supervised and dramatically curbed media. New positions were created and filled with Orban allies. The moves have been broadly condemned, including by the European Parliament and the United States.  Orban is one of the strongest symbols of this shift. He was one of the first Western leaders to endorse Donald Trump and pursue friendly relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Last year, Orban won a third term in a landslide victory after pledging to create a "Christian homeland."  Similarly, in the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte swept to power in 2016, promising to be tough on drug criminals. As he carried out that promise, it resulted in the deaths of thousands of alleged drug dealers across the country. Human rights groups say the innocent poor have borne the brunt of these killings. Duterte uses profanities with abandon, he has compared himself to Hitler and has insulted world leaders. He too wants to change the constitution in Philippines.  And Turkey, once a bastion of secularism, today is rife with religious conflict. Its leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president since 2014, has crushed dissent and jailed journalists. Last year, the government's Directorate of Religious Affairs ordered all of Turkey's nearly 90,000 mosques to broadcast a verse from the Koran through loudspeakers on their minarets. The move led Soner Cagaptay, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, to declare that Sharia is gradually taking over long-secular Turkey.  And then there's India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, leader of the world's largest democracy. Under his Hindu nationalist party, the country has pursued laws that hurt the minority Muslim population. For instance, his party declared that eating beef is "against the idea of India." This led to a ban in the sale of cows for slaughter. While beef is taboo for Hindus, it isn't so for Muslims and the decree led to the closing of many slaughterhouses and meat shops, traditionally owned by Muslims in India.  The nationalist zeal has also led to curbing of charities operating in India. Tens of thousands of foreign-funded non-government organizations, like Greenpeace India, Ford Foundation and Amnesty International, were either put on notice or had their licenses revoked. Amnesty, which often accuses the Indian government of human rights violations, said a raid of its offices was aimed at silencing critics.  In Brazil, President Bolsonaro pushed forth an almost identical move after taking office earlier this month. He used an executive order that gave his government far-reaching and restrictive powers over non-governmental organizations working in Brazil.  Ultimately, it is moves like these that have global hackles rising for proponents of democratic values.  In almost each of these instances, the leaders have swept into power on a promise to accelerate economic growth and create new opportunities for those left behind by globalization. But the promises are often laced with undercurrents of nationalism that harp on race or religion and closing borders.  These leaders often have a strong base of support. And often they have a pro-business agenda, which stock markets cheer. The American stock market has been on a roller coaster — calmer now after a rough ride at the end of the year. But for many months after Trump's election, investors gave the U.S. president a clear thumbs up. Brazil's investors are doing the same, and Bolsonaro has tweeted about it.  Last year, Trump told the crowd at Davos: "I'm here to deliver a simple message: There has never been a better time to hire, to build, to invest and to grow in the United States. America is open for business." Bolsonaro will likely echo the same sentiments.  Trump also said: "America First does not mean America alone." Undoubtedly, Bolsonaro believes in Brazil First. And Orban in Hungary First. Likewise, Erdogan for Turkey and Modi for India. But if it is everyone for himself, and keep the others out, who really wins?


russiainsider--2019-10-13--The Necessity of Anti-Semitism

The Necessity of Anti-Semitism

In 1989, the Jewish screenwriter and journalist Frederic Raphael was invited to deliver the 25th Anniversary Lecture at the University of Southampton’s Parkes Institute for the study of Jewish/non-Jewish relations. Founded by Rev Dr James Parkes(1896–1981), a neurotic Church of England minister who made a career out of the promotion of philo-Semitism in Christianity and the promotion of guilt narratives among Christians (in 1935 he was both celebrated by Jews and targeted for assassination by National Socialists), the Institute quickly became a hub for the production of scholarly-appearing pro-Jewish propaganda.  Rather than offering objective analyses of Jewish/non-Jewish relations, the Institute furthered the familiar narrative that Jews were the blameless and catastrophic victims of an entirely irrational European hatred. Raphael, given the honor of addressing the 25th anniversary of this project, opted on the appointed evening to be a witty gadfly, choosing “The Necessity of Anti-Semitism” as the title of his address. It could be the title of a book, said Raphael, one that could sit in the Parkes Institute library but for the fact it had never been written, and did not exist.  In the meandering speech that followed, Raphael explored the putative contents of this imaginary book, suggesting its potential arguments, and what they might say about the author and about European culture. Confirming the opinions of everyone present, Raphael offered the assurance that although this ghostly and ghastly book did not exist, such a haunting product would not be out of place on a continent where anti-Semitism is “a constant and essential working part of Europe’s somber and unreformed logic.”[1] For Raphael and his smug audience, “The Necessity of Anti-Semitism” lay only in its utility in salving the pathological European mind. Anti-Semitism was in fact extremely illogical and, in a moral sense, completely unnecessary.  Since reading Raphael’s speech several years ago, The Necessity of Anti-Semitism has, in a sense, haunted me too. As a single book, of course, it does not exist. But it perhaps has existed, after a fashion, in the thousands of tracts, pamphlets and books on the Jewish Question that have been written by Europeans over many centuries. In this collected body of anti-Semitic apologetics, one finds The Necessity of Anti-Semitisminflected in varying religious, political, and social hues. But what would the book look like if it was in fact written today? How could any author distill the various aspects of the Jewish Question into a single volume? In the essay that follows, part literary experiment, part historiography, I want us to join Raphael in imagining that this spectral book exists, even if our approach is rather different.  I imagine our author to introduce his volume with the broad case for The Necessity of Anti-Semitism, namely the presence of Jews and their influence in the four primary cultures of White decline: the Culture of Critique, the Culture of Tolerance, the Culture of Sterility, and the Culture of Usury.  The section titled ‘Culture of Critique’ is a both a nod to the work of Kevin MacDonald, and an expansion upon the same. Setting out this section, our author might recall the notorious remark of the Jewish historian Louis Namier (1888–1960) when asked why he did not deal with Jewish history: “The Jews do not have a history, they have a martyrology.” It is this martyrology that lies at the heart of the Culture of Critique. Whereas almost every nation possesses a history that is in most respects objective, the Jews alone possess a mere quasi-history, riddled with mythic and esoteric self-deceptions that give psychological permission for the most clannish and subversive of social behaviors and the most hostile of attitudes towards other peoples. The Culture of Critique, a kind of cultural revenge inspired by the Jewish martyrology, is the clearest expression of the corrosive nature of the disastrous Jewish/non-Jewish relations so mourned by the woefully misguided Rev James Parkes.  In the Jewish mind, the corrosive nature of their interactions with European peoples has always taken on a heroic aspect. The ruse is played out, for themselves and us, that in these interactions we see a unique and virtuous questioning by ‘insiders/outsiders’ uniquely and helpfully placed to show Western culture its own flaws. Jews believe themselves to possess special talents in this respect, and maybe in a perverse sense they do, but in any case, in their great charade they break us down to “benefit” us. David Dresser and Lester Friedman, Jewish scholars of the media, maintain the position that Jewish filmmakers have a unique, untainted objectivity because of their Jewishness. They write that “Jewish artists’ marginality allows them a vantage point denied other, more culturally absorbed, creative thinkers.”[2]  This compares remarkably well with a writer in the Times of Israel who, commenting on the activities of the Jewish politician Alan Shatter in destroying the legal supports of the family in Ireland, has argued that Shatter’s Jewishness “appeared to put him at an advantage, freeing him from the baggage that weighed on his Catholic counterparts.” Just like the Frankfurt School, these cultural heroes know us better than we know ourselves, which allows them to help us see that we are irrational and evil, bigoted and in need of Jewish redemption. We are constantly and warmly assured by our Jewish helpers that this process is undertaken for the West’s own good. They free us from our “baggage.”  In truth, this process is undertaken for our destruction. The Critique, having no coherent objectives beyond the will to decay, never ends. It never ceases the search for novel and unsullied corners of Western culture to drag through the mud. The ‘Rabbi’s Speech’ from Hermann Goedsche’s Biarritz (1868) is a work of fiction, but it drew on a multitude of facts and instincts. In the Jewish cemetery of Prague, Goedsche’s Rabbi addresses a secret nocturnal meeting of thirteen Jewish elders, promising they shall “extirpate all belief and faith in everything that our enemies the Christians have venerated up to the present and, using the allurements of the passions as our weapon, we shall declare open war on everything that people respect and venerate.”  The direction here is accurate, but Goedsche didn’t get everything right. There are no clandestine midnight meetings, no gatherings of Elders of Zion, but instead a shared instinct defending shared interests in a spirit of bitterness and, in reality, the Culture of Critique is not a declaration of open war, but the pursuance of war disguised as friendship, as medicine, as liberation. Boas tore down Western cultural confidence while claiming to set Westerners free from the errors and burdens of chauvinism. Freud perverted everything that was sacred about sex and marriage, and called it a cure. Marx called on the workers of the world to unite, and unite them he did — in the lines for food, in the gulags, and in the mass graves of a starved Ukraine. War has been noisily and bloodily waged, but it has been only silently and subversively declared.  And still they wage it, even if they’ve already toppled “everything that people respect and venerate.” The churches are infiltrated, vanquished, mocked and disdained. The history of Christianity has been put through the Jewish intellectual meat grinder, and emerges today only as a tale of persecutions and slavery. It is a shell, co-opted for endless tolerance. Even discounting religion, no notable Western historical figure has survived the Culture of Critique. And when our uniquely insightful Jewish helpers tired of toppling reputations, they used their ethnic proxies to start toppling statues, removing names, and burning portraits. No aspect of Western culture was to be left standing. Its science, philosophy and moral systems were mocked, derided, and savaged, with every sonnet, concerto, and technological innovation leading obscurely but somehow definitely to a World War II camp in Poland where to this day, we are earnestly told, no birds sing.  Except that I’ve visited what remains of this camp, and the birds do sing. There is no magic there. Time does not stand still. The children, forced to be there by their schools, laugh and scrawl graffiti on old bunks and doors, while adults, clearly worried that someone is watching them, do their best to appear solemn and moved rather than cold and bored.  Our author might concur, pointing out in The Necessity of Anti-Semitism that this particular camp is the jewel in the crown of the Jewish martyrology, and perhaps even the engine of the most advanced form of the Culture of Critique. Almost 55 years after it was written, Jerzy Kosiński’s The Painted Bird is now back in the news. It’s a memoir about his experiences around this same notorious wartime Polish camp, and it is replete with child-rape, bestiality, and pornographic depictions of violence including the feeding of a man’s eyes to pet cats. It’s also a long-exposed fraud, a fanciful pastiche of Kosiński’s own psychosexual fantasies.  This hasn’t stopped it recently being made into a film that is being roundly applauded by critics, nor has the fact it has induced viewers to vomit, faint, and remove themselves from movie theaters. Perhaps, in the age of the Culture of Critique, many Whites have learned to love being told how evil they are towards Jews, taking each condemnation like a dose of welcome medicine. Joanna Siedlecka, a journalist and author of writers’ biographies, studied the life of Kosiński and concluded “[The Painted Bird] has nothing to do with Kosiński’s real childhood; he invented those horrors, while he himself experienced only good, while the villagers took the risk to hide his whole family. (…) Kosiński is still treated as a victim, even though we now know a lot more about his biography. We know Poles didn’t torment him.”  Our author might point out in The Necessity of Anti-Semitism that the example of Kosiński and the Poles is wholly commensurate to the historical relationship between Jews and Europeans. A biographer of these two peoples can attempt to show the reality of the situation, but the Jew “is still treated as a victim.” And this “victim” elevates himself to the position of moral arbiter and arch critic. Armed with their very own sadomasochistic historical pastiche, Jewish activists direct the Critique into action for what one assumes to be a Racial Endgame.  They deny this, of course, and call it a wicked conspiracy theory. But in reality, they are like the proverbial Irishman who denies he stole the bucket, adding the indignant criticism that it had a hole in it anyway. The Jews vigorously deny any role in the decline of Western culture, adding indignantly that Western culture is rotten, sick, racist, bigoted, and irrational anyway. Their denial is a form of admission. This is the essence of the Culture of Critique.  This section might open with the remark that the Culture of Tolerance is itself a child of the Culture of Critique. When did Jews first start calling for Whites to abolish themselves in their own lands? Our author might argue that they began right at the first Jewish entry into European culture — not European lands, but European culture. Isn’t it Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) who is often held up as the first “assimilated” Jew, the first real Jewish intellectual who wanted to be ‘part of German culture’ and who advocated for “tolerance”? Well, what did Mendelssohn, the first “German of the Jewish faith,” actually ask Europeans to do? That much is clear, and a matter of historical record. He impudently and impatiently asked, “For how long, for how many millennia, must this distinction between the owners of the land and the stranger continue? Would it not be better for mankind and culture to obliterate this distinction?”[3] [emphasis added].  And there we have it — the very first Jewish intrusion into Western culture was accompanied by a call for the obliteration of borders and the migration and settlement rights of “the stranger.”  From the very beginning of Jewish activism in Western culture, it was in the interest of Jews to undermine the position of the owners of the land and to promote “tolerance.” It was Mendelssohn’s 1781 work, On the Civil Amelioration of the Condition of the Jews, that is said to have played a significant part in the rise of “tolerance” in Western culture.  But tolerance, despite all the glowing propaganda, is a curious word. Place it in a medical context, and tolerance means “the immunological state marked by unresponsiveness to a specific toxin or other foreign substance which induces an immune response in the body, especially the production of antibodies.”  And isn’t this exactly what Mendelssohn prescribed almost two and half centuries ago— that the owners of the land should be “unresponsive,” suppressing all natural “immune responses” even in the face of intruding toxins? We have to ask ourselves how tolerance ever became regarded as a virtue. The answer is that it became a virtue in the context of the Jewish intrusion into Western culture.  The Culture of Tolerance is now more than two centuries old. It matured slowly, but there can be little doubt that it has now come of age. Kevin MacDonald’s work has conclusively demonstrated that Jewish groups organized, funded and performed most of the work aimed at combating America’s 1924 immigration law, toppling it finally in 1965. Brenton Sanderson has shown that Jewish intellectual movements and ethno-political activism were pivotal in ending the White Australia policy — a policy change opposed by the vast majority of the Australian population.  I have written on how Jews were conspicuous in the dramatic changes in Britain’s citizenship, race, and speech laws from the 1950s to the 1980s. A Jewish Minister for Justice transformedIreland’s citizenship process, opening the country up to Africans and Pakistanis. Today, Jews dominate the mass migration NGO scene, demonstrably holding executive roles at the International Rescue Committee, International Refugee Assistance Project, the Immigrant’s Rights division of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), National Immigration Justice Center, Equal Justice Works, The Immigrant Defense Project, National Immigration Law Center, Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, Northwest Immigrants Rights Project, the Asylum Advocacy Project, Refugee Council USA, the New York Civil Liberties Union, American Immigration Council, The Immigrant Learning Center, the Open Avenues Foundation, the Political Asylum/Immigration Representation (PAIR) Project, Central American Legal Assistance, Halifax Refugee Clinic, and the UK Refugee Law Initiative. The migration policy advisor for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is not a Catholic, but a Jewish woman.  Third World mass migration into Europe and the West is a Jewish project. It has been curated by Jews, promoted by Jews, explained and excused by Jews. It is driven by a Jewish need, as old as Mendelssohn’s tract and perhaps older, to dispossess the owners of the land and open up that land to the stranger in the name of tolerance.  Much like the Culture of Critique, Jews offer us the Culture of Tolerance in the guise of friendship. With broad grins and mellifluous tones, they assure us that we are doomed if we don’t obliterate “the distinction between owners of the land and the stranger.” After all, haven’t we been helpfully informed that our own culture is worthless, bigoted, illusory, tainted, and morally bankrupt? Why not import an array of new, vibrant cultures? That way we can experience a more exciting life and, what’s more, it would go some way to proving ourselves morally acceptable to our Jewish friends, the innocent martyrs of humanity.  And we should listen to them primarily because their advice makes perfect sense. After all, we need unemployable Africans to fund our pensions, Islamic terrorists to care for our ageing populations, and millions more people in our countries in order to solve our housing crises. We need floods of cheap labor to increase our wages. We need poorly trained foreign sex criminals to staff our hospitals, perform our surgeries, and nurse us back to health. We need to tolerate the burqa to demonstrate how profoundly feminist we’ve become as a society. We need to express our patriotism by denying we exist as a people. We need more speech-gagging laws to ensure freedom. And, most importantly of all, we need to become a less racist society by eliminating Whites everywhere.  Our helpful friends deliver these messages to us in a number of ways. When they are feeling generous, they simply bombard us with screen garbage, portraying multiculturalism on film in a manner entirely divergent from the way it plays out in reality. Jewish cinematic magic is a form of cultural alchemy. Take Black crime and low academic achievement, dip it in Hollywood, and muggers and rapists are transformed into educated Black “love interests” fawned over by nubile blondes. Or, take the stability and tranquility of the White middle-class family, dip it in Hollywood, and what now emerges is a claustrophobic den of neuroticism, control and bigotry.  When our Jewish friends are feeling less generous, they force their way into your child’s school curriculum, and when they are angered they remove your right to free speech and imprison you. On the other hand, if you try to impede Jewish particularism by, for example, banning one of their tribal rites such as circumcision, the lesson of the ADL’s threats to the sovereign nation of Iceland shows that blackmail, slander, and unrelenting economic warfare are equally deployable tools in their armory. In this example, of course, we’re back to the Irishman and the bucket. The Jews deny they have outsized influence, adding that if you make that accusation again, their little club in New York will bring your entire country to its knees.  While the Culture of Tolerance is in full swing, one lingering problem is that White babies, for now, keep coming. Here our author might begin the third section of his book.  Jews are everywhere in the Culture of Sterility, an appropriate term for what the world’s leading scholars have described as the “rapid increase” in “levels of childlessness in most European countries.”[4] Our author could start with the fact the oral contraceptive was invented by the Jew Gregory Goodwin Pincus, but really Jews have everywhere in the West been, to use the Jewish historian Howard Sachar’s own words, “pioneers in the underground contraceptives industry.”[5] By plan, co-ordination, or raw instinct, Jews have accumulated in those areas toxic to the White birth rate — contraception, abortion, divorce laws, and the promotion of pornography, homosexuality, gender confusion, and promiscuity.  The pioneers of abortion clinics, birth control literature for couples, and birth control policy measures in America were, according to one scholar, “Anna Samuelson in the Bronx; Olga Ginzburg and Rachelle Yarros in Chicago; Sarah Marcus in Cleveland; Nadine Kavinoky and Rochelle Seletz in Los Angeles; Esther Cohen and Golda Nobel in Philadelphia; Hannah Stone, Marie Warner, Cheri Appel, Anna Spielgeman, Naomi Yarmolinsky, Bessie Moses in Baltimore, Elizabeth Kleinman in Boston, and Lena Levine in New York, Hannah Seitzwick-Robbins in Trenton, and Lucile Lord-Heinstein in Massachusetts.”[6] All of these women were Jews. Stone was particularly influential, working closely with Sanger and producing key birth control texts like Contraceptive Methods of Choice (1926), Therapeutic Contraception (1928), Contraception and Mental Hygiene (1933), and Birth Control: A Practical Survey (1937).  In the 1920s and 1930s, the primary lawyer for Margaret Sanger, the non-Jewish public face of the pro-abortion and birth-control movement in New York, was the Jew Morris Ernst. And when Sanger decided to move for Federal birth control legislation, she wrote to Rabbi Stephen Wise in 1931 asking him to use Jewish political influence and his own extensive list of political contacts to help make it happen, a request he happily obliged.[7]   Of course, Sanger had married a Jew, and according to one biographer “surrounded herself with Jewish colleagues and friends.”[8]  In fact, Jewish influence is so tightly bound up with the origins of abortion in America that historian Daniel K. Williams has characterized the abortion debate of the 1930s as a “religious conflict because nearly all the doctors speaking out against abortion were Catholic while the most vocal proponents of abortion legalization were Jewish.”[9]Williams adds the fact “Reform Jewish rabbis also became early leaders in the abortion law liberalisation movement.”[10]   The link between Jewish organizations and the more sordid (and often Jewish-dominated) corners of the medical profession came into stark relief during investigations into illegal abortions in the 1940s and 1950s, when the crossover was such that, according to historian Leslie J. Reagan, local authorities in New York, found “pro-birth control and Jewish organisations of particular interest.”[11] By the time Pincus developed the Pill, he was sufficiently aware of the potential for birth control and Jewish activism to be linked in the popular mind that he deliberately selected John Rock, a Catholic, rather than Abraham Stone and Alan Guttmacher, long-term colleagues and leaders of the birth control movement, to develop a contraceptive regimen in women, in order to avoid “anti-Semitic stigma.”[12]  The same pattern has been repeated in every other Western nation. Alan Shatter may have acted as chief propagandist for birth control legislation in Ireland in the 1970s, but even a century before Shatter’s actions a member of the Irish clergy reported:  In New York, Jews like Moses Jacobi and Morris Glattstine were particularly influential and conspicuous in the sale of illicit contraceptives and in the underground abortion scene as early as the 1870s.[14] Similarly, during the late nineteenth century, “Jews were among the leaders of the revolution in birth control in southern Germany.”[15] In interwar Germany, according to scholar Harriet Freidenreich, “Jewish women physicians played a very prominent role in the campaign to legalise abortion. … Jewish women physicians were disproportionately involved in the sex reform movement that promoted more widespread availability of birth control. They were very visible in the dissemination of contraceptive devices.”[16]  In the Polish Second Republic, the central pioneer of sexual education, contraception, the promotion of homosexuality, and abortion was Irena Krzywicka (née Goldberg). As well as founding Liga Reformy Obyczajów (The League to Reform Mores), Krzywicka wrote for the influential journal Wiadomosci literackie (Literary News) where she argued the case for civil unions, easy divorce, easily accessible contraception, female “sexual liberation,” and abortion.[17] In his Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland, historian Robert Blobaum points out that the “anti-Semitic press” in Poland made the link between Jews and “the spread of birth control literature” as well as pornography, but is notably shy of discussing Krzywicka’s career or that of her many Jewish colleagues.[18] Ronald Modras notes that even the Polish birth control movement’s non-Jewish leaders stood out for their “philosemitism.”[19]  In France, the main body behind the legalization of contraception and abortion was Choisir (To Choose), founded by the Jewish lawyer Gisèle Halimi, and the relevant legislation was finally passed by the Jewish Minister of Health Simone Veil (born Simone Jacob).[20] In the United States, of course, Roe v. Wade was effectively the product of activism by the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, founded by the Jew Bernard Nathanson. Nathanson worked closely on abortion legislation activism with Jewish feminist Betty Friedan, until he experienced an apparently legitimate crisis of conscience in the late 1970s and subsequently converted to Catholicism. By that date, he had personally performed more than 60,000 abortions, later explaining in an interview: “We fed a line of deceit, of dishonesty, of fabrication of statistics and figures; we coddled, caressed, and stroked the press. … We were calling ourselves pro-abortionists and pro-choice. In fact we were abortifiers: those who like abortion.” And Jews certainly like abortion. According to Pew data, Jews have a higher rate of support for abortion than any other religious group in America. In fact, Jews enjoy limiting the fertility of other populations so much that in 2013 Israel admitted giving birth control to incoming Ethiopian migrants without their consent.  Our author might linger on the subject of birth control and abortion only because the prevalence of Jews in other areas of the Culture of Sterility is now so well-documented. Jewish involvement in early sexology, through influential figures like Albert Moll, Iwan Bloch, Magnus Hirschfeld, Albert Eulenberg, Hermann Joseph Lowenstein, Julius Wolf, Max Marcuse, and Eduard Bernstein, was universally concerned with the need for “tolerance” and social pluralism. What they in fact promoted were pathological sexual aberrations, distant from reproduction and toxic to social cohesion. Hirschfeld, probably the originator of “Love is Love” propaganda, had “subverted the notion that romantic love should be orientated toward reproduction,” arguing instead for the acceptance of homosexual lifestyles and hedonistic, non-reproductive, sexual relations in general.[21]  Here it is worth stressing that Jews have not accumulated in the promotion of “tolerance” for homosexuals, gender-benders, abortion-seekers, and transvestites because they genuinely believe in the “rights” or “worth” of these people. Rather, Jews see in these people traits that it wishes to promote in the population at large and recruit them to the Culture of Tolerance. Society never really accepted homosexuality and transgenderism, but rather society itself first became ‘homosexual’ in its traits before it could tolerate actual homosexuals and transgenders. As the West became progressively more childless, promiscuous, hedonistic, and brimming with delusional self-confidence, the differences between the normal and the abnormal narrowed, and there appeared fewer reasons to continue to deny ‘equality.’ Societies with demographic concerns will have harsh penalties for both homosexuality and abortion/infanticide. The West, celebrating both, is in demographic free fall but, ignorant of the profound implications of this racial death, its people are actually in the process of indulging a culture cultivated for their demographic assassination. Homosexuality has never been more tolerated. Abortion has never been easier and less stigmatized. And Whites have never been closer to leaving the stage of history.  Promiscuity has replaced the pushchair. A glance at the modern generation of Whites of child-bearing age is sobering. Rates of sexually transmitted disease in America have never been higher. According to senior physicians, the U.K. is heading for a “sexual health crisis.” The same phenomenon has been reported in Australia, Canada, Ireland, France, and Germany. Meanwhile, the Gatestone Institute reports that: “Abortion has recently assumed epic proportions in countries such as Sweden or France. In France, there are 200,000 abortions a year. To put things in perspective, there are in France around 750,000 births a year. France, therefore, is aborting 20% of its babies/fetuses/embryos/cell clusters — choose according to your personal convictions — each year.” You can be sure it isn’t French Muslims who are aborting their babies by the hundred thousand, and this perhaps explains why they’ve been telling the Archbishop of Strasbourg that “France will be theirs one day.”  In The Population Bomb (1968), the Jewish biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote that the best method to reduce population is the legalization of abortion. That was without considering the effect of birth control or the broader Culture of Sterility that glorifies perverted, empty, childless visions of “love.” When Europeans began to legalize both birth control and abortion 40 years ago, a few years after Roe vs. Wade (1973), the Catholic Church warned of the risk of Europe entering into a “morbid civilization.” This is what we now inhabit.  In a West gone wildly materialistic, it can be difficult to see the extent of Jewish usury. When you mention Jewish moneylenders to most people, the response normally relates to the Middle Ages. But Jewish usury is alive and well in modernity, and entire countries are in debt to Jewish financiers, who then pass on some of their wealth to Jewish organizations dedicated to the promotion of the three other cultures of White decline (Critique, Tolerance, Sterility). Paul Singer, of the Jewish “investment fund” has been described by Bloomberg as “The World’s Most Feared Investor,” but really he’s the world’s most feared exploiter of debt. The Democratic Republic of Congo owes Singer and his Jewish colleagues $90 million, Panama owes him $57 million, Peru owes him $58 million, and Argentina owes him $1.5 billion. When payments have been late, Singer seized and detained the flagship of the Argentinian Navy, and when South Korea put up a fight to prevent him getting control of Samsung, he drove the nation’s President to impeachment and imprisonment.  While these activities may appear very high-level, and distant from the reality of day-to-day life (unless you are a citizen of the Congo and Singer is blackmailing you for payment by withholding essential work on your water supply), Singer and his Jewish financial clique have a hand in almost every purchase you make, and every war your country wages. Singer, his son Gordin, and their colleagues Zion Shohet, Jesse Cohn, Stephen Taub, Elliot Greenberg and Richard Zabel, have a foothold in almost every country, and have a stake in every company you’re likely to be familiar with, from book stores to dollar stores. With the profits of exploitation, they fund the Culture of Sterility, boost Zionist politics, invest millions in security for Jews, and promote wars for Israel. Singer is a Republican, and is on the Board of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He is a former board member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, has funded neoconservative research groups like the Middle East Media Research Institute and the Center for Security Policy, and is among the largest funders of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was also connected to the pro-Iraq War advocacy group Freedom’s Watch. Another key Singer project was the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group that was founded in 2009 by several high-profile Jewish neoconservative figures to promote militaristic U.S. policies in the Middle East on behalf of Israel and which received its seed money from Singer.  Although Singer was initially anti-Trump, and although Trump once attacked Singerfor his pro-immigration politics (“Paul Singer represents amnesty and he represents illegal immigration pouring into the country”), Trump is now essentially funded by three Jews—Singer, Bernard Marcus, and Sheldon Adelson, together accounting for over $250 million in pro-Trump political money. In return, they want war with Iran. Employees of Singer’s firm, Elliott Management, were one of the main sources of funding for the 2014 candidacy of the Senate’s most outspoken Iran hawk, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who urged Trump to conduct a “retaliatory strike” against Iran for purportedly attacking two commercial tankers. These exploitative Jewish financiers have been clear that they expect a war with Iran, and they are lobbying hard and preparing to call in their pound of flesh. As one political commentator put it, “These donors have made their policy preferences on Iran plainly known. They surely expect a return on their investment in Trump’s GOP.” When Adelson and Singer first made overtures to Marco Rubio, Trump tweeted that Rubio would be their “puppet.” Trump has now taken money from the same puppetmasters, but has thus far refused to go “all the way” with their demands, even firing John Bolton, a favorite of the Jewish triad. How the latter will proceed in the face of Trump’s defiance on the matter remains to be seen.  The Intersection of the Culture of Usury and the Culture of Zio-Wars: Paul Singer, Bernard Marcus, and Sheldon Adelson  The Jewish triad behind Trump is a perfect example of the role of Jewish finance and the Culture of Usury in sustaining and advancing Jewish power and influence in contemporary society. Singer embodies usury and vulture capitalism, while Bernard “Home Depot” Marcus is symptomatic of bloated consumerism, and Adelson represents the sordid commercial exploitation of vice (gambling). There is nothing productive in the economic activity of any of these figures, their vast accumulations arising from sociopathic parasitism, ethnic nepotism, and the will to cultural decay.  We feel this decay lower down the scale, since we live in a society of conspicuous consumption, funded by ever-escalating household debt. Everywhere, people buy things they don’t need with money they don’t have. Household debt is rising yet again in the United States. According to the New York Federal Reserve, Americans owe $13.86 trillion in household debt, slightly higher than the total amount right before the 2008 financial crisis. In Australia, the household debt to income ratio is above 190%, among the highest in the developed world. The same situation is seen in the U.K. Jews, of course, were involved disproportionately in the development of department stores, the fashion industry, retailing business, and other aspects of the consumer society.[22] Jews in late nineteenth-century Germany, as they did in several other Western countries, initiated the “consumer revolution,” and “held, or at least started, the overwhelming majority of department stores and clothing and fashion houses throughout the country.”[23] Werner Sombart remarked at the time that department stores were the herald of a new, degenerative economic culture, typified by “the anonymous, objectifying forces of capitalism and marketing.” Contemporary anti-Semites saw these centers of the economic culture as “a consuming temple in two senses, as both a temple of consumption and a temple that consumes — that is, a place of destruction, a Moloch even, that greedily devours vulnerable customers and neighbouring businesses.”[24]  Today, largely worthless “branded” consumer products are overwhelmingly Jewish, are promoted via Jewish dominance of the advertising industry, and their purchase by consumers is funded by Jewish financiers. Calvin Klein, Levi Strauss, Ralph Lauren, Michael Kors, Kenneth Cole, Max Factor, Estée Lauder, and Marc Jacobs are just some of the Jews whose very names have become synonymous with debt-fueled consumer culture and the subscribing to carefully cultivated fashion fads, while Jewish-owned companies like Starbucks, Macy’s, the Gap, American Apparel, Costco, Staples, Home Depot, Ben & Jerry’s, Timberland, Snapple, Häagen-Dazs, Dunkin’ Donuts, Monster Beverages, Mattel, and Toys “R” Us have come to epitomize the endless and superfluous production of garbage for mass consumption on credit.  The consuming temple of debt-fueled consumerism is also linked to the cultures of Critique, Tolerance, and Sterility. So-called anti-racism, support for gender confusion, and the celebration of mass migration and multiculturalism have become mainstays of modern advertising as the Racial Endgame nears its conclusion and the West commences its death rattle.  You might ask what tortilla chips have to do with sodomy, but that’s only because you’re suffering from a tolerance deficiency, and the best way to correct that is to admit White privilege, buy a Starbucks, and go try on a new pair of $200 jeans at Macy’s.  Critique, Tolerance, Sterility and Usury have converged. This is the necessity of anti-Semitism. As much as The Necessity of Anti-Semitism has haunted me, so too has the image of Goedsche’s Rabbi addressing the graveyard meeting of thirteen elders. It haunts me because it appears so antiquated and naive, as if the situation could ever have been so simple. The reality has always been much more profound, and infinitely more dangerous. The Jewish Question, such as it might exist for Jews, has always amounted to “Is it good for the Jews?” For Whites, it should always have been “Are the Jews good for us?” An answer might be found in their accumulation in their four aspects of White decline. Our opposition to this accumulation and its associated activities is perfectly logical, and morally necessary.  [4] M. Kreyenfeld Childlessness in Europe: Contexts, Causes, and Consequences(Cham: SpringerOpen, 2017), v.  [5] Cited in T. Russell, A Renegade History of the United States (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).  [6] M. R. Klapper Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890-1940 (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 151.  [8] E. Chesler Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 51.  [9] D. K. Williams Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v Wade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 27.  [11] L. J. Reagan When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 173.  [13] M. P. Leone Atlantic Crossings in the Wake of Frederick Douglass (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 111.  [15] A. C. Crombie (ed) History of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 371.  [16] H. P. Freidenreich Female, Jewish, and Educated: The Lives of Central European University Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 154.  [17] Y. Hashamova (ed) Transgressive Women in Modern Russian and East European Cultures: From the Bad to the Blasphemous (New York: Routledge, 2017), 16.  [18] R. Blobaum, Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 87.  [19] R. Modras The Catholic Church and Antisemitism: Poland, 1933-39 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 62.  [22] G. Reuveni, Consumer Culture and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), xiii.  [23] P. Lerner, The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880-1940 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 5.


sottnet--2019-01-30--Grenade attack on mosque in southern Philippines kills 2 comes on heels of cathedral bombing

Grenade attack on mosque in southern Philippines kills 2, comes on heels of cathedral bombing

Two people were killed and at least four wounded in a grenade attack on a mosque early on Wednesday (Jan 30) morning in Zamboanga city, a key gateway in the Philippines' restive south.This occurred just three days after twin blasts rocked a Roman Catholic cathedral on Jolo island, southwest of Zamboanga, and left at least 21 dead and more than 100 injured.Chief Inspector Shellamae Chang, Zamboanga police spokesman, identified those killed as Mr Habil Rex, 46, and Mr Haj Sattal Bato, 47. Both were said to be Muslim missionaries, known as "tablighs".An unidentified assailant reportedly turned off a nearby streetlight and lobbed a grenade at the Kamahaldikaan mosque, in Talon district, where about 10 people on a Muslim retreat were sleeping, just past midnight on Wednesday.One investigator told online news site Rappler that a safety lever of a Belgian-made grenade was recovered at the scene.In a statement, the Ulama Council of Zamboanga Peninsula called the attack "devilish, irrational and inhumane".President Rodrigo Duterte's spokesman Salvador Panelo said in a text message: "Terrorism has once again reared its barbaric and ugly head.""The successive attacks on two different places of worship depict the ruthlessness and the godlessness of these mass murderers," he said.Defence Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said in a news conference on Wednesday that it was possible the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terror group could also be behind the attack on the mosque."ISIS may want to bring it to a higher level of religious war. But Catholics, Christians and even mainstream Muslims are not biting into that," he said.For now, he said, "there doesn't seem to be any connection".Security forces are currently chasing after militants from the Ajang-ajang faction of the Abu Sayyaf, a small but brutal gang of self-styled Islamic militants founded in the 1990s with seed money from Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network.Initial investigations showed the two blasts that tore through the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel were set off remotely using a cellphone, and were not a suicide attack.Wading into the issue, Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin said in a tweet: "Now the mayhem is interfaith.""That means the secession is over, and plain vanilla mass murder has taken over," he said.Security officials, though, advised against painting the Jolo and Zamboanga attacks as a religious conflict."It is not a retaliatory act," Colonel Leonel Nicolas, commander of Joint Task Force Zamboanga, said of the attack on the mosqueLieutenant-General Arnel de la Vega, chief of the Western Mindanao Command, called suggestions of a religion-defined war "fake news".A local militant, meanwhile, was killed in a raid on Tuesday on a home where one of the suspects in the Jolo attack was hiding.Colonel Gerry Besana, spokesman of the Western Mindanao Command, said Ommal Usop, 64, was killed when he drew a firearm as security forces were swooping down his home.Usop is said to be a kin of a certain "alias Kamah", who was suspected to be one of the key planners of the bombing. Kamah and one other unidentified man managed to flee.Only Kamah was seen in CCTV footage running away seconds after the first bomb exploded inside the Jolo cathedral. Usop, however, is a known Abu Sayyaf militant.President Duterte said on Tuesday the twin blasts that rocked the Jolo cathedral may have been a suicide attack, carried out by the Abu Sayyaf, citing a briefing given to him by military commanders."It exploded. That is terrorism and suicide," he said when asked by reporters to clarify an earlier remark.He said a woman wearing a crucifix detonated a bomb inside the cathedral, and that a male companion had blown himself up outside minutes later.Military investigators, however, have said that bystanders saw a woman, presumably the female bomber, put a bag onto a wooden pew and leave the cathedral shortly before the blasts.They also believe the second bomb was rigged onto a motorcycle parked just outside the church's compound.Mr Lorenzana told reporters on Wednesday "the suicide bombing theory is hanging in the air"."It appears to be suicide bombing... but we're still waiting for confirmation," he said.He said one unvetted report where Mr Duterte could have drawn conclusion from was a text message from Mr Rohan Gunaratna, a terrorism expert with Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, claiming a Yemeni couple were behind the Jolo attack."These are all things that we have to validate," he said.


sottnet--2019-02-12--Anti-semitism is growing in France weekend vandalism and spike in hate crimes

'Anti-semitism is growing in France, weekend vandalism and spike in hate crimes

after multiple incidents of anti-semitic vandalism, and a spike in anti-Jewish hate crimes last year.Parisians were greeted with crudely daubed anti-Semitic slogans on shop fronts last weekend, including swastikas sprayed over images of late politician and Holocaust survivor Simone Veil, and the German word for Jews ("Juden") sprayed on a bagel shop in the city center.A memorial tree planted in honor of a young Jewish man, tortured to death in a 2006 attack, was also chopped down. Visiting the suburb where the tree once stood,It's rotting minds, it's killing," Castaner continued, before vowing to crack down on anti-Jewish hatred.Castaner did not blame any particular group for the spread of anti-Semitism, butGovernment spokesman Benjamin Griveaux linked the graffiti to an arson attack on the home of Parliamentary Speaker Richard Ferrand one week earlier, believed to be the work of the Yellow Vests. The Union of French Jewish Students also pinned blame for the racist daubings on the Yellow Vests.The number of reported anti-Semitic attacks in France rose 74 percent last year to 541, up from 311 in 2017. The most vicious of these attacks was carried out by Islamic extremists, who have revived an ancient religious conflict on the streets of modern France.After surviving the Vichy government's roundup of Jews in 1942, 85-year-old Mireille Knoll was was stabbed to death and set on fire in her apartment last March by her Muslim neighbor. Prosecutors said the attack was motivated by the neighbor's anti-Semitic beliefs.One year earlier, another elderly Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi, was killed by a Malian man who shouted: "Allahu Akbar," before throwing her out of a window. In 2015, a gunman pledging allegiance to the Islamic State terror group killed four people in a Kosher supermarket in Paris, while 2012 saw three children and a teacher from a Jewish school in Toulouse killed by an Islamist fanatic.Ilan Halimi, whose memorial tree was vandalized over the weekend, was abducted and ransomed by a group of attackers who believed that all Jews were rich, and could afford to pay up. His family could not afford the ransom, and Halimi died after being tortured for three weeks. In court, the ringleader of the attackers appeared unrepentant, declaring and pointing upwards while saying: "Allahu Akbar."After every attack, the French government pledged to do more to combat anti-Semitism. However, some of France's Jewish population - the largest in the world behind the United States and Israel - have had enough. An EU-wide survey last year found thatwhere citizenship is a birthright for Jews worldwide. More than 20,000 of France's roughly half a million Jews made the one-way trip since 2014."In two months we'll be emigrating to Israel because of the anti-Semitism in Europe," one French woman told the survey. "Nothing is being done about it. So we are leaving voluntarily."


sputnik--2019-01-22--Indias Crackdown on Rohingyas Has Prompted A Reverse Exodus Reports

India's Crackdown on Rohingyas Has Prompted A Reverse Exodus – Reports

30 Rohingyas who were roaming inside Indian territory in search of livelihood have been detained by the authorities in the north-eastern state of Assam. The group, comprising 12 children and a few women, were travelling to Guwahati, the capital of Assam, from the neighbouring state Tripura when the police identified and nabbed them, reports newspaper The Assam Tribune.  "During routine interrogation at the check-post, these Rohingyas were found without valid documents. They have violated the Passport Act hence steps would be taken accordingly. Further investigation is in progress", a senior police official, Inom Saikia, told The Assam Tribune on Tuesday.  Another police official told Sputnik on condition of anonymity that during the interrogation, all of the Rohingyas confessed that they came to Tripura from Jammu via Delhi last week. After spending three days in Agartala, the capital of Tripura, they were unable to find work; therefore they decided to travel to Guwahati. They also revealed that a local named Raju had brought them to northeast India from Jammu by promising to assist them in finding jobs.  A similar attempt by 31 Rohingyas, including nine children and six women, were foiled last week by the border forces after they were stranded between the Indian barbed wire border fencing and the border pillars demarcating India and Bangladesh.  In the last few weeks, hundreds of Rohingyas in India have started fleeing to Bangladesh after the Indian government tightened the noose around them in terms of gathering their biometric data and other such details.  "Massive detentions are under way in different Indian states. The level of the crackdown on the Rohingyas in the Muslim-dominated Jammu-Kashmir, Hyderabad and New Delhi is extreme. Fearing deportation to Myanmar, they are crossing the border into Bangladesh", Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner Abul Kalam Azad told a Bangladeshi news portal last week.  In 2018, at least 230 Rohingyas were apprehended by India's Border Security Force guarding the Indo-Bangladesh border.  Rohingya Muslims are originally from Myanmar, which they fled owing to inter-religious conflicts in 2017. Currently, over 1.1 million Rohingya reside in Cox's Bazar refugee camp in Bangladesh. An estimated 40,000 Rohingya have taken refugee in states like Jammu and Kashmir, West Bengal, and Telangana in India. Fewer than 15,000 are registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.


sputnik--2019-02-22--OSCE Following Events Around Ukrainian Orthodox Church Aware of Risks - Chief

OSCE Following Events Around Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Aware of Risks - Chief

"We are very closely following what is happening, so we are also fully aware of potential risks. SMM [Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine] is asked to monitor, if you follow the reports of SMM, you can see there are regular reports about it", Greminger said.  Greminger told Sputnik that the OSCE had responded to a request by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.  WATCH: Orthodox Christmas Midnight Mass at Church of Nativity in Bethlehem Earlier in February, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church addressed the United Nations, the European Union and the OSCE, expressing concerns about the increased risk of escalation of religious conflict in Ukraine. The church subsequently said that it had not received a response from any of organisations.  In the wake of the recent recognition of the independence of the newly established church in Ukraine, the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church has cited various cases of discrimination and aggression against its priests, congregation and properties on the part of the authorities, members of the new church, and nationalist groups.


sputnik--2019-06-24--Jewish Diaspora in Swedens Third Largest City Facing Extinction Amid Growing Anti-Semitism

Jewish Diaspora in Sweden's Third Largest City Facing Extinction Amid Growing Anti-Semitism

Malmö's Jewish community is about to disappear from the city in the very near future if nothing is done about the spread of anti-Semitism in the city, the Jewish community has written to Malmö City Hall.  In recent decades, Malmö has been one of the hardest hit by the rise of anti-Semitism, ranging from hateful messages to attacks on synagogues and even stabbings. This has prompted serious measures such as surveillance cameras and extra policing.  The Jewish congregation itself has called the situation “critical”, because its numbers have more than halved in the past two decades alone. In 1999, there were 842 members. In 2009 it was 610 and this year it is 387 members. In the early 1970s, the congregation still had 2,500 members.  “The Jewish congregation will soon disappear entirely if nothing is done drastically. Malmö is already a no-go zone for Jews around the world. When Malmö is mentioned in the media around the world, far too often it happens in connection with anti-Semitism. A Google search for 'anti-Semitism Malmö' yields 215,000 results. Unfortunately, current initiatives are not enough”, the congregation wrote, as quoted by the news outlet Nyheter Idag.  Svante Lundgren, associate professor of theology at Lund University's Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, has attributed the hatred of Jews in Malmö to a long religious conflict in the Middle East, exacerbated by the fact that Malmö has received a large number of immigrants from the Middle East.  “In many Middle Eastern countries, there is strong anti-Semitism, and hence there are people who grow up with it, not just hate against Israel but against all Jews. There is a lot of research on this and what you see then is that some people from the Middle East bring along strongly anti-Semitic views from their home country”, Lundgren told the Expressen tabloid daily.  In its action plan, the congregation describes a picture of constant threats.  “In recent years, the threats and risks have increased dramatically, and many believe that it is only a matter of time before a more serious incident will occur”, the Jewish congregation said.  Before the Swedish state joined in and took care of the policing costs three years ago, the congregation had to bear the costs itself. Alarm agreements still set the congregation back SEK 100,000 ($106,000) per year. According to the action plan, almost no insurance companies are willing to insure the Malmö synagogue.  “Our insurance has more than doubled compared to what we paid a few years ago. Today, it amounts to almost SEK 400,000 [almost $425,000] per year. There is only one insurance company that today is still willing to insure the Malmö synagogue”, the Jewish congregation stressed.  Malmö, which is often hailed as Sweden's most multicultural city due to the fact that 140 languages are spoken there, is on its way to becoming a “minority majority” area. While official statistics put the share of immigrants at over 45 percent of the population in 2018, individual studies estimated that immigrants already outnumbered Swedes at some point in the 2010s. Many of the newcomers belong to the Muslim community, such as Iraqis, Iranians, Bosnians, Turks, and Kurds.  Sweden's Jewish diaspora currently numbers some 20,000 people and is still one of Europe's largest. Yiddish is listed as one of Sweden's official minority languages.


sputnik--2019-11-15--Ayodhya Verdict Has Shredded Secularism in India, Mosques Under Threat - Pakistan Foreign Ministry

Pakistan on Thursday again voiced its deep concern over the Ayodhya verdict, maintaining that all mosques in neighbouring India are now under threat.  "The decision has failed to uphold the demands of justice. The decision has put the security of all mosques and places of worship in India under threat. It has made clear that minorities in India are no longer safe," Pakistan Foreign Office spokesperson Dr. Mohammad Faisal said during his weekly media briefing.  Last Saturday, the Pakistan Foreign Office had said in a statement that "a process of rewriting history is underway in India in order to recast it in the image of a Hindu Nation” in pursuance of an ideology in favour of the majoritarian Hindu community.  It further warned that "The rising tide of extremist ideology in India, based on the belief of Hindu supremacy and exclusion, is a threat to regional peace and stability."  While calling on the international community to restrain New Delhi from pursuing this Hindu-centric “extremist ideology”, Islamabad said the Indian government should ensure the protection of Muslims at all costs.  The Ayodhya land dispute, a decades-old religious conflict between the Hindu and Muslim communities in India, flared up following the 1992 demolition of a Muslim mosque, Babri Masjid, by Hindus claiming that Mughal Emperor Babar had ordered the demolition of a Hindu temple in Ayodhya, a city in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.  The Supreme Court of India’s decision to hand over the disputed piece of land to the Hindu community came as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who has led a campaign to build the temple for years after the 16th-century Babri mosque was demolished, appealed to the masses to maintain calm, saying the verdict was not anyone’s victory or loss.  The Hindu community has always believed that the Babri mosque had been built over the birthplace of one of their most revered deities, Lord Ram. Muslims, however, have countered that argument by insisting that they had worshipped at the mosque for centuries until an idol of Ram was covertly placed inside the mosque in 1949.  After the demolition of the mosque on 6 December 1992, Hindus constructed a makeshift temple in the name of Lord Ram, a physical incarnation of the god Vishnu, who is believed to have been born at the site.  The destruction of the mosque was followed by Hindu-Muslim violence that left at least 2,000 people dead, most of them Muslims.  Subsequent years have seen groups belonging to both religions bickering in courts over who had control over the historic site.


talkingpointsmemo--2019-03-15--White Supremacist References Plaster NZ Mosque Killers Rifles Online Posts

White Supremacist References Plaster NZ Mosque Killer’s Rifles, Online Posts

The self-proclaimed racist who attacked a New Zealand mosque conducting Friday prayers during an assault that killed 49 people opened fire with rifles covered in white-supremacist graffiti and listened to a song glorifying a Bosnian Serb war criminal.  These details highlight the toxic belief system behind an unprecedented, live-streamed massacre, which Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called “one of New Zealand’s darkest days.”  Much of the material posted by the alleged killer resembles the meme-heavy hate speech prominent in dark corners of the internet. He even seemingly randomly referenced a prominent YouTube user before carrying out the attack.  But amidst those online tropes lies a man who matter-of-factly described himself in writing as preparing to conduct a terrorist attack before opening fire on Muslims who simply had gathered to pray on a Friday.  — The shooter’s soundtrack as he drove to the mosque included an upbeat sounding tune that belies its roots in a destructive European nationalist and religious conflict. The nationalist Serb song from the 1992-95 war that tore apart Yugoslavia glorifies Serbian fighters and Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, who is jailed at the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, for genocide and other war crimes against Bosnian Muslims. A YouTube video for the song shows emaciated Muslim prisoners in Serb-run camps during the war. “Beware Ustashas and Turks,” says the song, using wartime, derogatory terms for Bosnian Croats and Muslims.  — When the gunman was finished in the mosque and returned to his car, the song “Fire” by English rock band “The Crazy World of Arthur Brown” can be heard blasting from the speakers. The singer bellows, “I am the god of hellfire!” as the man, a 28-year-old Australian, drives away.  — At least two rifles used in the shooting mention Ebba Akerlund, an 11-year-old girl killed in an April 2017 truck-ramming attack in Stockholm by Rakhmat Akilov, a 39-year-old Uzbek man. Akerlund’s death is memorialized in the gunman’s apparent manifesto, published online, as an event that led to his decision to wage war against what he perceives as the enemies of Western civilization.  — The number 14 is also seen on the gunman’s rifles. It may refer to “14 Words,” which according to the Southern Poverty Law Center is a white supremacist slogan linked to Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” He also used the symbol of the Schwarze Sonne, or black sun, which “has become synonymous with myriad far-right groups,” according to the center, which monitors hate groups.  — In photographs from a now deleted Twitter account associated with the suspect that match the weaponry seen in his live-streamed video, there is a reference to “Vienna 1683,” the year the Ottoman Empire suffered a defeat in their siege of the city at the Battle of Kahlenberg. “Acre 1189,” a reference to the Crusades, is also on the guns.  — The name Charles Martel, who the Southern Poverty Law Center says white supremacists credit “with saving Europe by defeating an invading Muslim force at the Battle of Tours in 734,” was also on the weapons.


tass--2019-02-28--Number of extremism-related crimes in 2018 went down by 17 says Putin

Number of extremism-related crimes in 2018 went down by 17%, says Putin

MOSCOW, February 28. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin has demanded the Interior Ministry should take a hard line against extremist crimes. Speaking at a board meeting of the Interior Ministry on Thursday Putin said the overall number of such cases was on the decline.  "Resistance to extremism is the most important guideline. True, the overall number of registered extremism-related crimes in 2018 went down by nearly 17%. However, different manifestations of such crimes have been registered practically in all regions of Russia," Putin said.  "The Interior Ministry must take a hard line against the radical groups and pool efforts with the public and other bodies of power locally to prevent ethnic and religious conflicts and take resolute measures to expose and punish those who may try to spread ideologies of aggression, violence and intolerance in different social strata. Possibly, among youth in the first place," he said.  In other media


tass--2019-04-16--Foreign intelligence may plot to destabilize North Caucasus warns security official

Foreign intelligence may plot to destabilize North Caucasus, warns security official

BALASHIKHA, April 16. /TASS/. The North Caucasus may become a target for those who seek to spread instability in the country, Deputy Director of Russia’s National Guard Sergei Melikov told reporters on Tuesday.  According to him, "the Caucasus has been and for now will remain a region that, from our foreign partners’ standpoint, may become a target for intelligence agencies and those who may try to create instability of various sorts there."  The deputy director pointed out that religious conflicts and territorial disputes occasionally break out in the North Caucasus. "The deployment of law enforcement units [the Joint Military Force] cools off hotheads and makes it possible to timely respond to challenges and threats," he said, adding that "law enforcement agencies have complete control of the situation in the Caucasus, there are no deterioration trends but we do remain ready for action."  Melikov went on to say that, the region had gone through crucial changes. "We cannot help but witness the changes that have taken place in the Caucasus. Numerous counterterrorism activities, aimed at eliminating clandestine armed groups, have been conducted in Dagestan, which was viewed as ground zero for terrorist activities over the past years," the National Guard deputy chief noted.  Chechnya and its capital of Grozny have become a tourist destination. "If you come to Mineralnye Vody’s airport, you will meet travel agents who will offer you tours to the Chechen Republic, even to the mountainous areas where it was impossible to travel in the past," he emphasized.  In other media


theamericanconservative--2019-09-25--How Much More Christian Blood Must Our Interventions Spill

How Much More Christian Blood Must Our Interventions Spill?

Back in June, Islamic militants in Burkina Faso entered a village, forced everyone to lie face down on the ground, found four people wearing crucifixes, and summarily executed them. It was the second time in as many months that Islamists had singled out and murdered people wearing Christian imagery. At least 20 Christians in Burkina Faso have been killed in 2019 across five attacks that have targeted Christian communities. “The trouble began three years ago,” reports The Washington Post, when Islamic militants began trickling in from neighboring Mali. Many of them carried weapons stolen after the 2011 collapse of Libya, which, we should remember, was caused by a U.S.-led NATO intervention.  As we never seem to learn, American foreign adventurism has been terrible for the global Christian population.  The president of the Episcopal Conference of Burkina Faso and Niger, Bishop Laurent Dabiré, warned in June that local Christians were in danger of “elimination” because of continued attacks by Islamic militants. “Their main target appears to be the Christians and I believe they are trying to trigger an interreligious conflict,” Dabiré noted. Christians are only 20 percent of Burkina Faso’s population, and the threat to African Christians by Muslim extremists connected to instability farther north is not unique to there. It has been observed in Mali, the Central African Republic, Niger, and Nigeria. It has included kidnappings, rapes, executions, and the beheading of a 77-year-old Spanish nun in CAR. “Africa is a continent where violence against Christians is exploding,” Cardinal Dieudonne Nzapalainga told the German media outlet Deutsche Welle.  So…Libya. Eight years after the NATO intervention, the country is still a chaotic mess of competing violent militias. Millions of Libyan refugees now reside in other countries. Thousands of Libyan civilians, soldiers, and mercenaries from neighboring countries have been killed. Nor can we forget Benghazi, where Islamic militants dragged the body of a U.S. ambassador through the streets. Now we can add to that list the violence and persecution of Christians 1,500 miles away. Imagine the war in Ukraine causing tremors of violence in London.  We remain a nation with one of the most vocal Christian political communities in the West—still one third of America’s citizens deem her a Christian nation. One would think we would steer clear of conflicts that disproportionately harm Christians of other lands, especially where they are already vulnerable minorities. Yet we still invaded Iraq in 2003, and it’s proven disastrous for the ancient, venerable Christian community there. Before the invasion, approximately 1.4 million Christians lived in Iraq. Today, there are fewer than 250,000, an 80 percent drop.  Though the Islamic State, the greatest existential threat to the survival of Iraqi Christianity, has largely been neutralized (for now), new threats from Muslim ethnic militias remain. Power vacuums, it would seem, cause distress for minority groups. The Islamic State—whose creation can be traced back to instability set off by the invasion—have persecuted, abused, and murdered plenty of Christians in neighboring Syria. The Christian population of Syria, similar to that of Iraq, dropped from 1.7 million in 2011 to below 450,000 today. ISIS’s influence is still felt there.  We could also add to the list the state of Israel, to whom the United States gives billions of dollars every year. Estimates made by the British during their colonial rule in 1922 put the Christian population of Palestine near 10 percent, and near 8 percent in 1946. Yet huge numbers of Arab Christians fled or were expelled from Jewish-controlled areas of Mandatory Palestine during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Elias Michael Chacour, a former archbishop of Akko, Haifa, Nazareth, and All Galilee of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, recounts in his book Blood Brothers how Yishuv forces expelled Christians from his village in Palestine. They then executed many of the village’s Christian men.  Also relevant is Vietnam. The United States encouraged hundreds of thousands of Catholic Vietnamese to flee communist North Vietnam in the 1950s for safety in South Vietnam. The South became a haven for religious liberty, and the Catholic population there flourished, until Washington endorsed the execution of Christian South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. After South Vietnam’s 1975 surrender to the communists—precipitated by America’s withdrawal of military and financial support—the persecution of Christians increased multifold. For example, then-archbishop of Saigon Nguyen Van Thuan was arrested and imprisoned—he would spend 13 years in prison, nine of which were in solitary confinement.  Yet while the United States’ record on protecting vulnerable Christian minority communities around the world is a disgrace, we are reticent to learn the relevant lessons. Senior members of the administration have been eager to pursue new military interventions. If it’s not conservative hawks demanding that we crush America’s enemies, it’s self-righteous liberal do-gooders like Samantha Power, who never see an international crisis that doesn’t merit U.S. involvement. Power, we should also remember, supported the Saudi intervention in Yemen—now among the worst humanitarian disasters of this century—during her time in the White House.  Whatever the character, and whatever the political party or ideology, the same thing always happens. Military adventurism inevitably causes instability, which immediately puts vulnerable communities—be they Christian, Yazidi, or Muslim—at greater risk. Thanks to a long, seemingly unlikely series of events, Christians in Burkina Faso now die because eight years ago we decided to bomb Moammar Gaddafi’s totalitarian regime out of existence. In the ensuing chaos, guns and militants flowed out of Libya across the African continent. How many more times must we do this before we learn our lesson?  Casey Chalk is pursuing a graduate degree in theology from Christendom College and is senior writer for Crisis Magazine. He covers religion and other issues for The American Conservative.


thedailyblog--2019-03-07--Insurgents In Jammu And Kashmir Are Not Liberators They Kill Muslim And Hindu Alike

Insurgents In Jammu And Kashmir Are Not Liberators – They Kill Muslim And Hindu Alike

So earlier this evening, a terrorist attack took place in Jammu; hospitalizing at least 28, of which I’m told, some have already died. This attack was carried out in a similar manner to other such outrages over the past ten months – with a hurled grenade.  Yet while other instances have more directly targeted Indian police (one, nominally against a local police station … which nevertheless managed to hit a bus-station in front of it, instead; and another, along the same stretch of road as the current one, which *did* actually succeed in injuring two policemen along with at least one civilian); this one just went straight for the mass-casualty civilian-target option instead.  I say this, because it is important.  Every time I have one of my pieces on the ongoing Kashmir confrontation, or other matters relating to Indian politics published, there are people who turn up in the comments-sections of the articles to angrily decry and vitriolically denounce what they see as Indian outrages, Indian excesses. Indian efforts to kill “innocent Muslims”, “innocent Kashmiris”, etc.  Now, I am not going to dispute that yes, civilian casualties *have* been inflicted by Indian forces. Of course they have.  Yet the explicit metanarrative being pushed by these commenters, and which I rather strongly suspect to have a far broader salience out here in the Anglosphere than many would like to admit, is that the terrorists – the Pakistani-backed, based, and bolstered insurgency in J&K and elsewhere further afield – are somehow “the good guys”.  That what they are doing, in these conflict-zones, is “fighting the good fight”. Working together, with huddled, oppressed masses, to cast off the shackles of some “Evil Empire” that’s occupying the place {never mind that said Evil Empire left just over seventy years ago; tearing out stents in a wedge as it went, almost as a parting “favour” to its local vanquishers).  Funny, come to think of it, that’s pretty much *exactly* the same treatment that was given to *another* set of ISI created and Saudi funded Sunni extremists “fighting an ‘Evil Empire'”, who’ve turned out to be the villains – the Taliban in Afghanistan, throughout the 1980s. “The moral equivalent of America’s Founding Fathers”, said President Reagan (and I do not necessarily disagree – but that is another story, for another time).  But while official figures on this sort of thing have not yet been released, I would be inordinately surprised if the twenty eight casualties of this latest atrocity did *not* contain a rather large number of Muslims. The demography of the area supports it.  So what does this mean?  Well, you put it together with the various other outrages of these ‘insurgency’ groups – the JeM and their ilk – and it quite rapidly becomes abundantly clear that while some organizations (media, certain-governmental, and otherwise) would very much like you to believe that the situation around these incidences is one of “Muslim vs Hindu” …  … that is not, as it happens, at all the case.  Even if we leave aside the manifest series of facts that these ISI-incepted Sunni extremist groups seem to have a rather nasty habit of attacking Pakistani citizens who just so happen to be Shi’ite or Sufi; or, as we saw just a day before the February 14th attack, daring to take on the might of Iran for their Saudi paymasters …  … it has become abundantly clear, time and time again, that the would-be “liberators” of Kashmir, have no compunctions whatsoever about killing their fellow Muslims (*whatever* their sect-ional persuasion) in order to strike at the generalized concept of India. (An India which, it must be remembered, for all its problems, has never been anything like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia in terms of its treatment nor relegation of religious minorities. Why, even the RSS has a Muslim wing) [Gosh, no wonder at least one Pakistani state was not so long ago talking about the possibility of coming back to India]  So what am I saying?  You are being asked to believe, by all sorts of voices around the mediasphere and elsewhere, that this is some sort of conflict – perhaps even an ‘existential’ one – between Hindu and Muslim.  Some Muslim extremists are, themselves, very, *very* keen upon this idea. And for obvious reasons. They want all the tools they can have access to to try and bolster their flagging cause.  But that is not what it is. Not in reality.  On one level, sure, it is Pakistan versus India. I do not seek to deny that. I do not seek to dispute that. In fact, on the contrary – highlighting the *direct* and *deliberate* role which Pakistan and its occasionally ‘possibly’ “rogue” intelligence service have played in these and other similar flame-fanned flashpoints, as active inceptors, is a big part of what I write.  Yet it is not “Hindu versus Muslim”.  As the ongoing callous disregard for their co-religionists’ lives more than amply demonstrates … what it *actually* is, is a conflict of “the abominable” (and their occasionally ignorant, occasionally deliberate prospective supporters), versus pretty much everybody else.  These terrorists hurling grenades at bus-stations or police stations … they do not care how many Muslims they kill in the process.  In fact, according to some approaches of political-warfare, a higher number is probably a *better* number, from their deranged perspective. Much more likely to contribute to general feelings of unease, unrest, and “India can’t protect us.  They only really care that they are killing, wounding, or maiming, some Indians – of whatever religion – in the process.  Because while it is easier for the world at large to turn its eyes away from the facts and realities of the situation, if it is thought that this is just some ‘religious conflict’ [an almost stultifyingly reductionist perspective upon the issues in J&K, and yet an unedifyingly common one outside of the Subcontinent] …  When considered in its true light, it becomes utterly inarguable that the world at large , who profess to abhor atrocity and iniquity, terrorism and torment, *must* stand on India’s side against these ongoing outrages.  And that means *also* lending voice to the clarion calling out of those who facilitate them, issue their perpetrators’ orders, and otherwise work fiendishly overtime to endeavour to bring them about.  You know, without me having to say it, which states , and their ‘softer’ backers and wilful (or, perhaps, at best ‘wilfully blind’) partners, I am indicating here.  It is said, by some, that these insurgents are come across the border from Pakistan as “liberators” of Kashmiris.  And yet, it is a curious thing – the only “liberation” that they ever seem to bring, is Death.  Well, in that case, “charity starts at home”, as the ancient maxim states.  “Full Freedom” to them, then.