If we think our interests may only come first and we don’t care for others, it is a treason of our values, a betrayal of all moral values.”

So said Emmanuel Macron, who is (curiously) the president of France (at a gathering in Paris of heads of state to commemorate the centennial of Armistice Day).

The idea is confused. “Only” come first? How many can come first? And to put one’s own interests first does not exclude “caring for others”.

Macron was defending globalism – though he hesitated to call it that because, he admitted, globalism made many French citizens “nervous”.

He prefers to call it “internationalism”, and in defense of it he condemns nationalism. (Donald Trump – sitting near him at the time – proudly  calls himself a nationalist, and insists on putting  his own country’s interests first as his job absolutely requires him to do, so Macron’s speech was generally taken to be an attack on the US president.)

Because internationalism is in itself a good thing to Macron, he praised the League of Nations (!), the UN (!), and the EU(!). (But not empires.)

And he is passionately keen on every country in the world signing on to the Paris Agreement which would commit them all to saving the planet from burning up in, say, a hundred years’ time. For this they must  give up burning fossil fuels to provide their energy for light and heat, industry, business, transport and communication, and let the wind blow it to them instead. To maintain this utopian ideal over the entire globe, UN sponsors of the Agreement frankly admit that world government will be necessary.

The biggest of all possible international organizations that would be, and so the most desirable to internationalists like President Macron. (It’s too soon to aspire to a Federation of Galaxies. That will come when someone finds how to use wind or solar power for intergalactic travel.)

As well as the global warming alarmists, there’s another group aspiring to world government, not as a federation of nations or creeds, but under its own absolute power – Islam.

Islam does not put its own interests first, allowing others to pursue theirs with equal concentration; it wants to rule humankind all by itself.

To attain its end, it will use force whenever it can. For Islam, force is not a last but a first resort. It will use other, non-violent means, such as infiltration and indoctrination of infidel societies, only when force – outright hot war – is not likely to succeed. But force is never to be abandoned. Intermittently, small acts of violence to terrify enemy societies can, must, and do accompany the non-violent efforts.

The cry is often raised that it is because Christian values have been abandoned in the West that Islam has been able to spread in it, filling as it were a religious vacuum.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

While it is certainly true that Christianity as such has lost its hold over most people in the West – which is to say Western Europe and the countries of the New World, with the exception of a large group of Americans – Christian values are dominating the actions of Western leaders as strongly as ever they did.

Indeed, it is those very Christian values that are betraying the West to Islam.

President Macron speaks for all the globalist Western leaders when he says that to put one’s own country’s interests first is “a treason of our values, a betrayal of all moral values”.

The moral values that he means – that they all mean, including the self-confessed Communists in the EU government – are Christian values: self-denial, self-abasement, serving others before, or rather than, oneself.

Whether or not those are good values for individuals to live by is a matter of opinion. (We say they are not. We say that every one of us is his own, not other people’s, responsibility. Our “own” including our natural dependents.)

But the question here is whether those values ought to be the principles of a state.

It cannot be good for a state to be unselfish; it will fall to the enemy that covets it. It cannot be good for a state to be generous with money; the state has no funds of its own, it holds the money taken in taxes from its citizens in trust, and the obligation of a trustee is to be frugal.

Yet the aspirants to world government, the secular Leftist globalist rulers, are yielding their countries to Islam – in  the name of Christian values.

And the actual Christian leaders, both Catholic and Protestant, in the spirit of Christian selflessness, universal love, forgiveness of enemies, and willing martyrdom, are urging them to do so, bowing to a creed that preaches supremacy and vengefulness –  and the duty to despise Christians.

Christianity bowing to Islam? Yes, all the way down to the execution block. We are witnessing a willing martyrdom of an entire “faith”. Of what used to be called Christendom. (Though many individual Christians, particularly in America, will not comply.)

Andrew Jones writes at Jihad Watch, in the first article of “a series examining ‘Islamist’ influence and infiltration into the various branches of the UK establishment: Church, Monarchy, Military, Security Services, Police, Prison Service, Judiciary, Legislature, Civil Service, state media and banking/corporate interests”. (Read the whole of this article here.)

The UK’s state religion is the Church of England and as such is a centuries-old branch of the political establishment. Now largely bereft of political power, it nonetheless still exerts some soft-power in terms of moral influence in British public life. Headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, the Church of England has a track record of interfaith dialogue with extremist Muslims.

A former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, advocated the absorption of aspects of Sharia law into UK legislation. Some Muslim groups supported Williams in this, for instance, the Rochdale-based Ramadhan Foundation, an educational and welfare body. They said Williams’ advocacy was “testament to his attempts to understand Islam and promote tolerance and respect between our great faiths”. The same foundation has a history of making outlandish and delusional comments, including referring to Israel as “the new Hitler”. Williams also made the claim at a 2014 conference organized by the supposedly integrationist and progressive Islamic Society of Britain (ISB), that Islam is rejuvenating British values. …

As well-meaning liberals, Williams and Welby engage in interfaith dialogue aiming for a “draw” — they aim for the common ground of understanding among equals. However, Islamic supremacists enter such dialogue with the aim of “winning” — as religious exclusivists, it could not be otherwise, whether they are honest about it or not. Moreover, as Samuel Westrop has noted, “honorable activities do not only attract those with honorable intentions”, and the involvement of extremists poisons the entire interfaith exercise — extremists such as Inter Faith Network members, Jamiat Ulama e Britain (JUB), who are “directly affiliated” with Pakistani seminaries that have close ties to the Taliban. The error of the interfaith template is therefore similar to the equally misguided attempt to engage “Islamists” in the democratic process.  Islam, in the purist 7th century form, advocated by the Muslim Brotherhood and others, is a totalitarian theocratic system and therefore sees democracy as haram. For “Islamists”, engaging with the democratic process is only a means to the end of destroying it from within.

Welby has, in recent years, made numerous pointless attempts at dialogue with those for whom dialogue has a foregone, supremacist conclusion. In 2016, he welcomed Muhammad Naqib ur Rehman to Lambeth Palace to counter “the narrative of extremism and terrorism”, despite Rehman having openly praised acts of terror in Pakistan. In July 2018, Welby hosted the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Shaykh Dr. Ahmad al-Tayyeb, for the “Emerging Peacemakers Conference”. Given the conference title, it is grimly ironic that this is the same al-Tayyeb who in 2015 refused to condemn Islamic State [ISIS] as un-Islamic. Welby, in his capacity as an amateur scholar of Islam compared to al-Tayyeb, contradicted this a year later with his claim that ISIS had “nothing to do with Islam”. Al-Tayyeb also considers apostasy punishable by death and, as head of Al-Azhar, the world’s foremost Sunni university, is party to both incitement against Egypt’s much-persecuted Coptic Christian minority and the promulgation of Sunni jihadism’s ideological underpinning. …

Welby has done much work in the interfaith field with his “friend”, MCB Assistant Secretary General, Ibrahim Mogra. Although moderate in his public pronouncements, Mogra regularly re-tweets posts from the “extremist” advocacy group, Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), and, as a senior MCB member, is formally linked to many who have openly supported the likes of Bin Laden and Hamas. Furthermore, Mogra has promoted “Islamist” narratives within the British education system by writing a Teacher Handbook on Islam. The handbook includes justifications for amputation punishments, violent jihad, polygamy, slavery and — casting doubt on Mogra’s interfaith work — Islamic supremacist thinking.

It is therefore reasonable to conclude that Archbishop Welby is willingly blind to Islamic extremism and is actively covering for it, for instance, with the false-equivalency that “many faiths, not just Islam” have a problem with radicalisation. Moreover, Welby asserts that it is an irrational “fear of Muslims” among the public which is tearing British society apart, rather than Islamic extremism, which he downplays by warning against “hysteria”. Furthermore, he claimed the number of young Muslims travelling to Syria to fight for Islamic State and other jihadist groups was “extraordinarily small” — it was approximately 800 (including family members).

The UK now faces an ongoing severe terror threat from around 400 fighters who have returned, adding a combat-hardened core to the pool of up to 35,000 potential jihadists already in the country. For Welby, the public is not to believe its lying eyes that it is his interfaith partners who sow the ideological seeds which sprout into sectarian apartheid and acts of terror.

So the leaders of one of the largest Protestant denominations, Anglicanism, “cover” for Islam. In other words, they capitulate to it.

So do other Protestant churches, but they don’t all influence government policy as the Anglican leaders do in Britain.

The leader of the world’s Catholics, Pope Francis, courts Islam in the person of prominent Imams. (See here and here.)

Broadly, the Christian response to militant, advancing, conquering Islam is to yield to it, and to support governments that yield to it.

And almost all the secular rulers of the West (the most important exception being President Trump), are yielding to it. Because Christian values have soaked the spirit of the West for two thousand years, and every secular ideology the West has embraced, even and especially Communism, claim those values as their own: Put others – the group – before yourself. Put the foreigner before your own people. Give your countries to those who want them. Give them to Islam.

Blame yourselves when they slaughter and terrorize your citizens. Do not blame them.

But those who rule would rather you did not call this Christianity.

Call it anti-racism. Or globalism. Or internationalism.

Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, declares himself to be a patriot.

But not a nationalist.

“Patriotism,” he says, “is the opposite of nationalism.”

To his mind, patriotism is good, nationalism is bad.

He emphatically expresses his own patriotism, saying at various times:

Long live the Republic, long live France.

France is back.

France is a strong, wealthy country.

Our language, history, and civilization shine out across every continent.

I bring the spirit of French conquest.

He believes that France has reason to be proud – but not the French.

Not those who incarnate “the spirit of French conquest”.

For the French to be proud of being French would be nationalism. And nationalism is bad for two reasons:

First, because not just the indigenous French live in France.

Second, because France is only one of the 28 countries in the European Union.

If you are a citizen of one of those countries, you can like the country you live in, you can be proud of it. That makes you a patriot. Good. But you may not like it better than the other 27 countries. If you do, you are a nationalist. Bad.

Macron declares:

We are a continent of refugees, and if you say we can’t integrate refugees, that’s not consistent with our values, even if borders cannot be wide open. 

I want to be the president of all the people of France, for the patriots facing the threat of nationalism.

My responsibility will be to unite all the women and men ready to take on the tremendous challenges which are waiting for us, and to act.

He wants to unite them because very many of them – indigenous French citizens of France – still want France to be their country, not a country of refugees. They do not want the millions of (mainly Muslim) immigrants from the weak, poor Third World coming to live among them not to become French, but to benefit from the freedom and wealth  – which the French have attained through long centuries with their blood, sweat and tears – while keeping their own languages and customs, and even their own law. 

Those whose patriotism nationalism is expressed like that – the conservatives, the political Right – are Macron’s bad people.

The Left calls them “bigots”, “xenophobes”, “Islamophobes”, “Nazis”.

Macron calls himself a man of the Left, though not a socialist:

I am not a socialist.

I am from the Left, but I am happy to work with people from the Right.

Provided that the Right will accept the sharing of their country with multitudes of foreigners.

Macron saw his task as getting the nationalists to accept those multitudes. He called it “reforming” France.

We have no choice but to reform this country. I am not just a liberal movement. I come from the progressive Left. I am trying to refresh and counter the system.

To “refresh and counter”. A contradiction, yes.  Macron’s politics are bundles of contradictions.

On further thought, he was not sure that “reform” is the right word for what he believes he has to do. To “reform” France would be too local a project. Too … nationalistic. The French, all of them, have not only to accept that they must share their country with hostile foreigners – and be generous to them, and adapt their own ways to the foreigners’ because the foreigners are not interested in adapting to the ways of the French – they must fundamentally change from being French to being Europeans.

But wait! Even that is too self-serving, too vain and arrogant – still tainted with the stain of a kind of nationalism. As France is not better than the other 27 countries of the European Union, so Europe is not better than the rest of the world. (With one exception, which we’ll come to.)

It would not be enough merely to reform France into a different kind of country, changed from a nation-state into a constituent state of a United Europe. Not enough because France  needs to be much more changed, to have its Frenchness so eradicated that it will be transformed into just one geographical area named “France” among hundreds of other geographical areas in a United World.  

Macron announced:

I am for a progressive world. I do not propose to reform France; I propose to transform it at its deepest level.

That is “globalism”. It is the goal of the “progressives” – the Left – everywhere.

The Left has always understood that for their dream of a communist utopia to work, human nature must be fundamentally changed. Changed “at its deepest level”.

In fact, of course, Europe is not “a continent of refugees”. At least not until very recently. Now Macron and his fellow European Union leaders are trying to make it so by importing multitudes from Asia and Africa. Until that began to happen, the countries of Europe were largely homogeneous.

The country whose population is a mixture, is the United States of America. The American nation is the one that does not define itself in terms of origin and descent, or by subjection to king or chieftain, or by adherence to a particular religion. It is a nation of many peoples bound into one by a Constitution. It’s existence is the greatest political achievement of humankind. Those Americans who are aware of this have great cause to be proud of their country. Cause to be patriots. To be nationalists. Their nationalism is not a narrow arrogance. It is an achievement. And its present leader, President Donald Trump, is a proud patriot, a self-declared nationalist who puts the interests of his own country first, who wants it to be a great force and example for promoting freedom in the world. A country tolerant of all religions. With all its citizens equal before the law.

And it is this country, this leader, this patriotism, this nationalism that Emmanuel Macron and his fellow European globalists despise!

Within America, the Left, the “progressives” do not like their country the way it is. They are  trying, furiously and violently, to change it. Insurrectionist organizations, many of them financed by the multibillionaire George Soros, are fighting by all means, including treasonous conspiracy inside the agencies of the state, to unseat the president, align the country with globalist Europe. Also to abolish borders and admit as many immigrants from the poor, weak Third World as desire to come and benefit from the freedom and wealth of the US, while keeping their own languages and customs, and even their own law. 

George Soros collaborated with the Nazis in his youth, when his native Hungary was under occupation by the German Third Reich. He is a Jew who helped the Nazis kill Hungarian Jews. He calls one or a group of his organizations the Open Society Foundations. His “open society” ideal is a socialist – which is to say a closed – society. When Karl Popper praised the “open society” he meant a conservative, capitalist, free enterprise society within the nation-state. So George Soros, whether ingenuously out of misunderstanding, or disingenuously and ironically, is misusing the label by sticking it on the collectivist system he works treacherously in many countries to instate.

Opposition to this Nazi-assisting, communist sympathizing, promoter of civil chaos is deplored by President Macron. He has not only embraced the Soros idea of an open society (“I am for an open society,” he states plainly), he also accuses those who denounce Soros of “anti-Semitism”. (Which recalls the classic example of “chutzpah”: the murderer of father and mother pleading for mercy at his trial on the grounds that he’s an orphan.)

When Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, Emmanuel Macron courted him. The first state banquet given by the Trump administration was in his honor. On television news one could watch the slight figure of Macron scampering about to claim a place beside the dominating figure of Trump when photographs of NATO or European or world leaders were being taken.

But he reformed his fascination. As President Trump is a self-declared nationalist who likes the nation-state and insists on firm borders, Macron came to perceive him as the enemy. The enemy of globalism.

Breitbart reports:

French President Emmanuel Macron denounced nationalism during an Armistice Day centennial observance in Paris on Sunday.

“Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism: Nationalism is treason,” Macron said …

Macron spoke in front of world leaders including President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

“If we think our interests may only come first and we don’t care for others, it is a treason of our values, a betrayal of all moral values,” he said. “We must remember this.”

Macron said that the moral values of France helped them fight for the future of their country.

He praised the world leaders that formed the first League of Nations, after World War I.

“They imagined the first international corporation, the dismantling of empires, and redefined borders, and dreamed at the time of a union, a political union of Europe,” Macron said.

The League of Nations! A horrible organization, brainchild of President Woodrow Wilson although his own country, the United States, never joined it. It was the precursor to the even more horrible United Nations. But Macron likes international bodies. He believes they keep peace between nations. The League, for all its imagining, did not keep peace between nations. World War Two broke out despite its being there. And the United Nations has not succeeded in keeping peace anywhere. It is a hopelessly corrupt organization. As is also the European Union. 

Oh, but for all his fondness for internationl bodies, for a United States of Europe, for open borders, Macron does not wish to be called a globalist.    

In an interview with CNN, Macron continued his condemnation of nationalism but was hesitant to claim the “globalist” label.

He doesn’t find it easy to say why. Perhaps because a lot of untransformed French voters understand that the Great Political Argument is now between Globalists and Nationalists and are on the side of the Nationalists.

“I would say I’m a patriot,” he said, but added: “I’m not a believer in a sort of globalism without any differentiation. I think it doesn’t — it’s very inconsistent, and it’s extremely — it makes our people very nervous. But I’m not a nationalist, which is very different for me from being a patriot.”

One of the most important political scholars of our time, David Horowitz, founder of the Freedom Center, wrote a letter to Philip Hanlon, president of Dartmouth College, which encapsulates all that has gone wrong with most American universities.

Horowitz demands an apology for the treatment he received at Hanlon’s academy. It is clear that he deserves it.

We quote from the letter (a must-read-in-full):

On October 23, I spoke at your college. I was invited by members of College Republicans and Students Supporting Israel. They probably wanted to hear what I had to say because I am one of the most prominent conservative intellectuals in America …

Despite my credentials –

Extremely impressive credentials, of which he gives a summary –

– and even though these conservative students pay the same tuition – $75,000 per year – as your leftwing students, I was forced to raise the money to underwrite my visit and lecture. This was particularly galling to the Dartmouth conservatives who invited me, because the previous spring Dartmouth’s “Office of Pluralism and Leadership” sponsored a visit by notorious anti-Semite and terrorist supporter Linda Sarsour – who has no academic credentials to speak of – underwriting her expenses and paying her a reported $10,000 honorarium for her talk.

Linda Sarsour is a genuine, fanatical, total bigot: outspokenly anti-Semitic, an agent and defender of the terrorist organization Hamas, a propagandist for intolerant Islam, she is a prime example of the vicious and immoral type of person idolized by the Left in this era of Western decadence.

My hosts were also probably interested in what I had to say because over the preceding decades, Dartmouth has purged conservative intellectuals from its faculty so effectively that the students could only name two Dartmouth liberal arts professors who were conservative. This reflects a collective faculty attitude that intellectual diversity is dangerous and unwanted. This is a disgraceful fact of academic life, which could easily be remedied, which prevents Dartmouth students from getting a decent liberal arts education, where all issues are controversial and intellectual diversity is the only guarantee that students are being educated rather than indoctrinated, or that there are reasonable checks on unchallenged leftist professors going off the deep end. As it happens my visit elicited a professorial outburst showing just how far leftwing bigotry and anti-academic discourse can go on your campus. …

He describes the outburst in some detail. It was aggressive, arrogant, lying, unjust, savage.  

And it was encouraged to be what it was by faculty staff.

Leading the pack of Dartmouth character assassins who mobilized to combat my presence was Professor Annelise Oreleck, an out-of-control Gender Studies professor who tweeted:

Long-time hater, Islamophobe and anti-intellectual David Horowitz is speaking today in Rocky 3 at 6pm. He is a hater of the first order. If you’re so inclined, support students who are organizing a protest – Bring signs. Turn your back. Stage a walkout.

… There were several Dartmouth administrators overseeing this event, including Keysi Montás, the Director of Safety and Security who was in charge. Unfortunately, they were not there to enforce an educational decorum but to encourage the protesters by tolerating their antics and refusing to eject them. …

You had no personal role in these travesties, but you are president of the institution that made them possible. I’m not going to ask you to have your “Office of Pluralism (how Orwellian is that)” sponsor a return visit from me, since it might well provoke a faculty riot. I just want you to think about these signs of a damaged institution. and the warping of the educational experiences of your students.

And –

I would like an apology from you on behalf of the Dartmouth community. …

Will he get an apology?

If he does, it will mean that there is still a trace of moral responsibility in at least one highly-paid Big Cheese of the educational establishment.

What if anything is the Trump administration’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, doing to stop this rot in the mind-nurseries of the nation?

This is very good news.

A death sentence hung over Aasiya Noreen – called “Asia Bibi”, meaning “Asia Woman”, by Muslims and the international press – for blasphemy against Muhammad. But today (October 31, 2018) an appeal court in Pakistan set her free.

She has not gone unpunished. She has been in solitary confinement in a dark prison cell for eight years.

We posted her story recently here.

And here is our Facebook summary of the Channel NewsAsia report of the court ruling and its immediate consequences:

Pakistan’s Supreme Court today freed a Christian woman from a death sentence for blasphemy against Islam and overturned her conviction, sparking angry protests and death threats from an ultra-religious party and cheers from human rights advocates. Asia Bibi, a mother of four, had been living on death row since 2010 when she became the first woman to be sentenced to death by hanging under Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws. She was condemned for allegedly making derogatory remarks about Islam after Muslim co-workers objected to her drinking water from the same cup as they drank from because she was not Muslim. The case has been a source of division within Pakistan, where two politicians who sought to help Asia Bibi were assassinated. Supporters of the Islamist political party Tehreek-e-Labaik (TLP), which was founded to support blasphemy laws, immediately condemned the ruling and blocked roads in major cities, pelting police with stones in the eastern city of Lahore. The TLP’s leadership called for the death of Chief Justice Saqib Nasir and two other judges on the panel. Street protests and blockades of major roads were spreading by mid-afternoon, paralyzing parts of Islamabad, Lahore and other cities.

Chief Justice Saqib Nasir and the other two judges are brave men. Their lives are now in jeopardy.

BRITAIN’S LAST LION ROARS is the heading to James Delingpole’s article at Breitbart bringing the news that Tommy Robinson, again before the court today, was not sent back to prison.

He writes:

Tommy Robinson is free.

This was by no means certain when he walked into the courtroom at London’s Old Bailey this morning, That’s why he brought along his prison bag and why he had said goodbye to his wife and children, just in case.

Happily, instead the judge did what Robinson and his lawyers had hoped: he referred the case upwards to the Attorney General. Some call this buck-passing. I disagree. From where I was sitting, Nicholas Hilliard QC — the Recorder of London presiding over the case — appeared a decent, thoughtful sort, who considered the evidence carefully and without prejudice and reached the only sensible decision.

What moved Hilliard to this judgement was a long submission he had been given beforehand by Tommy Robinson. I suspect Hilliard was impressed by Robinson’s obvious integrity but more importantly by the rigour of his arguments. While I think it’s perfectly true that there are elements within the Establishment — up to and including the Prime Minister herself — who are out to get Tommy, it’s just not fair to say that the British legal system is broken altogether. Today it was working perfectly.

Robinson read his submission afterwards to the 2,000 or so well-wishers who had gathered outside the Old Bailey to cheer on their hero.

Essentially it is an explainer of all the things you never saw reported in the mainstream media. It describes, for example, the lengths to which Robinson went not to have himself had up for contempt of court.

When I arrived at Leeds Crown Court that morning I could not obtain any specific details of the reporting restriction order. I do not believe there is a website which holds such details, so I researched online and reviewed the reporting restriction guidelines provided.  They state that the court should include details of reporting restrictions on the court listings both online and in court and also provide a notice on the door of the court.  My solicitors have photographic evidence to show that the court did not follow these guidelines that day and had no details listed anywhere of a reporting restriction for that case. This is also in the bundle. The only time the notification about reporting restrictions was available was later that afternoon after the Court had convicted me and sent me to prison.  Only then did the Court follow the guidelines and list a reporting restriction against the court listings for both the grooming case and my subsequent case.

After my previous experience with contempt of court in Canterbury I went out of my way to ensure I would not fall foul of the law again. I privately paid for training with one of London’s leading law firms, Kingsley Napley, to cover all details regarding contempt of court.  There is documentation in relation to this in my bundle.

On that morning at Leeds Crown Court I had knowledge of the verdicts of the first phase of this grooming trial and many of the specific details discussed in court for this particular trial. I did not talk about these in my livestream on that day.  I had understood based on my training that the specifics of the case and the verdicts were off limits for reporting restrictions.

It also details the sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut sentencing Robinson received from the previous judge. This was so severe and unprecedented, it is hard not to form the suspicion that it was more a political decision than a strictly legal one.

It is my understanding that there is no individual in the last 60 years that has been sentenced to prison for a publication breach of a reporting order.  It would appear to me that my punishment is exceptional.  I would ask that I am treated in the same manner as every other journalist who has been charged with these allegations. The journalist Rod Liddle was writing for the Spectator magazine in relation to the Stephen Lawrence murder trial, and when he was sentenced for breaching the section 4 order, and risking prejudice to the trial, was given a fine.  Journalists at the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror published highly prejudicial material on the trail of Levi Bellfield who abducted and murdered an 11-year-old child.  This contempt of court led to the collapse of the entire case and discharge of the jury and robbed one of his victims of the chance for justice.  The reporters in this instance were not prosecuted and instead their employers were found guilty of contempt and fined £10,000.

In short, having read this, the Recorder of London Nicholas Hilliard — who has a reputation as one of Britain’s most brilliant jurists — decided there was sufficient merit in Robinson’s arguments for them to be heard either under the adversarial conditions of a full new court hearing or, at the Attorney General’s discretion, for the charges to be quashed altogether.

This was the statement Robinson’s previous lawyers had advised him not to make — which is one reason why they are no longer his lawyers. Robinson had been told that if he pleaded guilty to the contempt of court charges laid against him he would not go to prison. But Robinson wasn’t interested in bargaining for his skin. What he wanted was justice.

Robinson wanted justice for himself. But even more, he wanted justice for the many thousands of British girls who have been “groomed”, drugged, tortured, pimped, and raped by successions of mostly Muslim gangs over a period of several decades.

This, remember, was how he got into trouble in the first place. In his role as citizen journalist, he had gone to report on the trial of the Huddersfield 20 — the latest gang of child rapists to be brought to book, in the wake of numerous similar cases from Rotherham to Telford to Oxford and beyond.

In Robinson’s view, this is a national scandal which is still not getting nearly the attention it deserves.

His supporters outside the court appeared strongly to share this view. Perhaps it’s because the majority of them hail from the white working class communities which, along with Sikhs, include the people who’ve been hardest hit by the rape gang phenomenon.

They have long felt ignored by the authorities. Had it been middle-class girls who were being abused, drugged, multiply raped by these thugs it’s unlikely that this practice would have been allowed to continue for so long. Working class girls, on the other hand, appear to be acceptable collateral damage in the Establishment’s apparently much more important campaign to make us all comfortable with “diversity” and “cultural enrichment” regardless of the actual consequences.

This is wrong.

It amazes me that so few people are prepared to put their heads above the parapet and admit that this is wrong.

Perhaps it’s because they find the scale of the problem so frightening that they find it easier to shoot the messenger — Tommy Robinson — than they do to face up to its implications.

No, rape jihad is not a pretty concept. But it’s real, it’s happening now and instead of facing up to it honestly huge sections of our liberal establishment — including senior police, politicians, local authorities, and the vast majority of the media — prefer to duck the issue by blaming Tommy. …

Standing among the ordinary, decent people in the crowd as Tommy Robinson spoke I was struck by how completely at odds their behaviour was with the way they are portrayed in the media, especially at viciously partisan organs like the BBC and The Guardian, but even across much of the right-wing press.

These people are constantly being described as “fascist” or “far right” or “extremist”.

But I saw and heard no evidence of this whatsoever. They were vocal, yes, but peaceable and friendly. They were angry, yes, but it was controlled anger and intelligently directed. There was, for example, no hatred of Muslims — only of the creed that drives some of them to rape and murder.

How weird it is to think that we live in an age so blinkered that the man doing more than anybody to raise awareness of what’s going on receives more widespread censure from the Establishment than the actual monsters perpetrating these ugly deeds.

We need to wise up.

Hear the lion roaring, and see the crowds who waited for the verdict outside the court:

(Thanks to Chauncey Tinker, our British associate, editor of The Participator, for advance notice of this good news.)

James Delingpole predicts mutiny in the British army.

We hope he’s right. It cannot come too soon.

He writes at Breitbart:

Sooner or later there is going to be a mutiny in the British Army.

As exhibit a) I present this essay  — titled The Army Needs More Feminists — by some brown-nosing major, presumably written with a view to ingratiating himself with his PC superiors.

British Army Centre for Army Leadership@Army_Leadership

‘The Army Needs More Feminists’. Intrigued? Read our latest #Leadership Insight by Maj Tim Towler available for you to read now. https://www.army.mod.uk/umbraco/Surface/Download/Get/6840 …

Picture a hall with a stage. You are part of an audience consisting mostly of women. You don’t know how you got there, but now you are there you’ll stay for the entertainment. .

Enter Major T. of the Royal Scots regiment. He stands center stage. He smiles and nods acknowledgment of polite applause.

He is dressed in black pantyhose and red high-heeled shoes. A pink tulle tutu. His fingernails are painted blue. He has shaved carefully, and put on red lipstick. He is buttoned into the jacket of his regimental formal wear, with medals. They remind you that he is a member of the armed forces of a country that once ruled over the greatest empire in history, whose soldiers won famous battles on all inhabited continents. Let martial music sound in your memory, the drums, the pipes. And attend to Major T.

In a small high voice – put on for the occasion – he delivers his speech, the text of the article.

A Good Time To Be A Girl [by Helena Morrissey] is not a title that will immediately draw soldiers to grab this book off the shelf. Ashamedly, I would not have read it a couple of years ago. Perhaps it is this shame that is forcing me to write now, or, the shame that previously I might not have acted when I should have done; a guilt knowing that I have let objectifying and discriminatory comments go by unchallenged in the past. As an infantry officer, my experience of working with women is limited, a poor excuse, but my recent roles alongside diplomats and business leaders have been a turning point. They have opened my eyes to some of the challenges and biases that still exist and have made me feel empowered and duty bound to act. I had not considered feminism a leadership issue before, but if 2 leadership is truly about enabling others to succeed, then feminism (and diversity more broadly) is critical. Embracing diversity, standing up for what is right, and maximizing everyone’s potential is vital to leading at all levels, and especially to leading through change. …

If leadership is truly about enabling others to succeed, then feminism is crucial … I felt ashamed … I felt guilty … now I feel empowered and duty bound to act … work towards a truly inclusive modern society …

Burble, burble, burble.

Feminism is a fight for equality … equal but different … celebrate the difference between genders … we need to embrace diversity  … change the patriarchal society … for the good of us all …

He raises a shoulder and looks at you coyly. He sways his hips.

He does not know that he is clowning. He is serious. He believes that what he is doing is virtuous. Very, very virtuous because politically correct and à la mode.

Do you leave feeling ashamed, guilty, determined to do better, to become a feminist? Or shaking your head, laughing bitterly?

Let’s return to Delingpole.

He comments on the article:

After [the first paragrpah, quoted above], it gets worse. Much worse. Apart from being badly written (“Ashamedly”??), it is simply not the kind of wheedling, breast-beating milquetoastery one would expect of an officer charged with defending Britain from her myriad enemies.

What, in heaven’s name, is this pantywaist pillock doing reading feminist tracts anyway? Surely, if he’s going to be remotely effective at his job, he should be reading Clausewitz. Or Sun Tzu. Or Churchill. Or Napoleon. Or, if he’s not up to those, tattered copies of War Picture Library and Commando.

That essay — or, more to the point, the fact that the Army’s PR department felt it was worth boasting about on Twitter — embodies so much of what is wrong with Britain’s armed forces. (And the United States’s, and Australia’s and the rest — for they’re all susceptible to the same social pressures): their emasculation and near-ruination by political correctness.

He proceeds to his “exhibit b)”:

As exhibit b) I present this video of a bunch of squaddies protesting at the fact that one of their ex-comrades has been chucked out of the Army for the ‘crime’ of posing for a selfie with Tommy Robinson. 

Please go there and watch the 30 second video. The laughing happiness of Tommy and the soldiers is wonderful to see.

Mutiny is not something you associate with the British Army and its proud traditions of discipline and loyalty to the Crown. But I see after a quick search that there was one as recently as 2013 when 16 soldiers of the Yorkshire Regiment were court-martialled for “disobeying a lawful command” after staging a sit-down at a parade.

Their complaint — apparently in response to an unpopular captain and colour sergeant — was that they were being “led by muppets”.

Since that incident, the number of muppets in senior positions in the Army has increased exponentially.

Hence, for example, the toe-curling recruitment ad the Army released earlier this year showing soldiers on exercise in the mountains pausing reverently, mid-patrol, to observe a Muslim comrade ritually wash himself in a stream, whip out his prayer mat, don his prayer hat and bow down in prayer. “Keeping my faith”, the ad was titled.

This rampant PC is causing huge damage to Army morale (not to mention operational effectiveness) and may go some way to explaining why the Army is having such problems attracting new recruits.

After all, who wants to sign their life away for a minimum of four years service if it’s going to entail endless lectures from [officers] on the vital importance of racial sensitivity and the valuable contribution to society made by women? You join the Army to be the best, prove your manhood and see the elephant. Everything else is for the birds.

You join the army to kill your country’s enemies.  

At the weekend, I attended a panel event on this very subject at the Battle of Ideas. It was called The Military: Muscle or Mindfulness — and one of the panelists was an obviously very pissed off ex-soldier called Beverley Henshaw. She clearly had no truck with all the New Age, touchy-feelie nonsense which her superiors think is the way forward. She wanted the Army to get on with its core business: defending the realm and — I’m guessing — killing the nation’s enemies.

A senior officer on the panel — Lt Gen Sir Simon Mayall — clearly sympathized with this view. But when I asked which of the top brass were to blame for the Army’s cuckolding he was too politic to name names. (I’m told privately that the rot goes right to the top with Sir Nick Carter, the Chief of Defence Staff, who apparently can’t get enough of all this PC stuff. He was educated at Winchester, the school which traditionally trains all our diplomats to suck up to and sell out to foreigners, so that explains a lot.)

The problem, of course, is that the people who get to the very top of the military tend to be creatures of the Establishment. And the current political Establishment, as we know, right now, is very, very squishily PC and excruciatingly risk averse.

This would explain the Army’s massive overreaction when some of the squaddies posed for photos with Tommy Robinson. The Army felt compelled to issue the following statement:

Far-right ideology is completely at odds with the values and ethos of the armed forces. The armed forces have robust measures in place to ensure those exhibiting extremist views are neither tolerated nor permitted to serve. Anyone who is in breach of the army’s values and standards will face administrative action.

But this says more about the Establishment’s prejudice than it does about who the real Tommy Robinson is or what he stands for. He is only “far right” or “extremist” in the Guardian sense of “anyone to the right of Jeremy Corbyn”. But it suits the Establishment — led by his arch nemesis Theresa May — to pretend that Tommy Robinson is representative of some terrible far-right threat to Britain. In this, he performs the function of Emmanuel Goldstein in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – as the state’s officially designated hate figure on whom everyone can pour their righteous scorn in order to show their virtue and cement societal solidarity.

Ordinary people aren’t buying this. They just can’t see what’s wrong with a working-class lad making a fuss about all the Muslim gangs which, over a period of twenty years or more, have been raping the girls in mostly working-class areas. Also, they think he’s right to stand up for our troops and right to express his disgust when those troops come back from active service in hellholes like Afghanistan and Iraq only to be jeered at by the kind of jihadist sympathizers who, given half the chance, would be blowing up little girls at pop concerts or massacring kufar in shopping malls. They know what Britain’s enemies look like — and they don’t look like Tommy Robinson.

Since it’s ordinary people from whose ranks Britain’s soldiers are mostly recruited you can see why there’s a problem. The Army’s Top Brass are where the rest of the Establishment are: terrified of doing anything that might upset the Religion of Peace; painfully eager to give the Army some kind of post-conflict-era relevance as an agency for diversity and gender outreach and mindfulness.

And the squaddies are all thinking: sod this for a game of soldiers — I didn’t join the Army for this bollocks.

A Turkish-Saudi Washington Post columnist named Jamal Khashoggi, a close friend of the late Osama bin Laden of 9/11 infamy, has disappeared possibly because he has been violently murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

The American media, and the Western media generally, are distraught over his disappearance.

Why? Who is/was he?

He is or was the nephew of a very rich arms dealer named Adnan Khashoggi, who declared as he looked back over his life shortly before he died:

What did I do wrong?  Nothing.  I behaved unethically, for ethical reasons.

Whatever the cause of Jamal’s disappearance, his absence is not to be regretted if he is judged by common ethical standards.

Daniel Greenfield has written about him at Front Page. Here are some of the things he tells us:

In high school, Jamal Khashoggi had a good friend. His name was Osama bin Laden.

“We were hoping to establish an Islamic state anywhere,” Khashoggi reminisced about their time together in the Muslim Brotherhood. “We believed that the first one would lead to another, and that would have a domino effect which could reverse the history of mankind.” 

The friendship endured with Jamal Khashoggi following Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan. Khashoggi credited Adel Batterjee, listed at one time as one of “the world’s foremost terrorist financiers” by the Treasury Department, with bringing him to Afghanistan to report on the fighting.

The media calls Khashoggi a journalist, but his writings from 80s Afghanistan read as Jihadist propaganda with titles like, Arab Mujahadeen in Afghanistan II: Exemplifies the Unity of Islamic Ummah.

And when Osama bin Laden set up Al Qaeda, he called Khashoggi with the details.

After Afghanistan, Jamal Khashoggi went to work as a media adviser for former Saudi intel boss, Prince Turki bin Faisal, alleged to have links to Al Qaeda.

“The real Khashoggi”, Greenfield writes, is/was …

… a cynical and manipulative apologist for Islamic terrorism, not the mythical martyred dissident whose disappearance the media has spent the worst part of a week raving about. …

Like his old friend, Jamal Khashoggi went into exile in a friendly Islamist country. Osama bin Laden found refuge in Pakistan and Khashoggi ended up in Turkey. The Khashoggi family had originated from Turkey. And Turkey was swiftly becoming the leading Sunni Islamist power in the region. Living in Turkey put Khashoggi at the intersection of the Turkish-Qatari backers of the Brotherhood and the Western media.

His disappearance has touched off fury and anger from the Islamist regime that harbored him.

And it has also set off an unprecedented firestorm of rage and grief by the American media which adored him. …

Before the summer coup of 2016, Turkey was said to have 50,000 political prisoners. Many of them were members of the country’s oppressed Kurdish minority which is deprived of its most basic civil rights. These include even the use of their own language. Doing so can carry a prison sentence.

In that terrible summer, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s Islamic tyrant, finished securing his absolute hold on power with the coup as his Reichstag fire. The alleged coup became a [pretext] for the mass arrest and torture of countless thousands of political prisoners. Amnesty International estimated that 50,000 had been detained. … They included 300 journalists. …

Erdogan went after professors, judges, law enforcement, the military and the last remnants of a free press. A Human Rights Watch report documented electric shocks, beatings with truncheons and rubber hoses, and rape by Erdogan’s Islamic thugs. Heads were banged against walls. Men were forced to kneel on burning hot asphalt. Medical reports showed skull fractures, damage to testicles and dehydration.

The media didn’t show any of the hysterical outrage at these crimes that it has over the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi. The media cares more about Khashoggi, a former media mouthpiece of the Saudi regime before it turned on his Muslim Brotherhood brothers, than about 300 Turkish reporters.

It’s not hypocrisy, it’s consistency.

Erdogan and Khashoggi are both militant Islamic activists. [And] the  media will always take the side of Islamists over non-Islamists. That’s why it bleeds for Khashoggi. …

This is about Islam.

The struggle between Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the one hand, and Turkey, Qatar and Iran on the other, is the next stage of the Arab Spring. And, from Yemen to Turkey, the media has made no secret of being on the Islamist side. Its outrage over Khashoggi … [is] not journalism, [but] political spin of the Islamist axis. …

Before the media and the politicians who listen to it drag the United States into a conflict with Saudi Arabia over a Muslim Brotherhood activist based on the word of an enemy country still holding Americans hostage, we deserve the context.

And we deserve the truth.

The media wants the Saudis to answer questions about Jamal Khashoggi. But maybe the media should be forced to answer why the Washington Post was working with a Muslim Brotherhood propagandist?

The real mystery isn’t Khashoggi’s disappearance. It’s why Republicans aren’t asking those questions.

The media’s relationship with Khashoggi is far more damning than anything the Saudis might have done to him. And the media should be held accountable for its relationship with Osama bin Laden’s old friend.

To whom will the media ever be accountable?

Islam and the media are happily married. If either of them does, or both of them together do unethical things, it is for their own good ethical reasons.

As the word “humane” means to be merciful, it implies that human beings are by nature merciful beings.

Is human nature innately merciful, kind, compassionate? We know it is not. People are not only commonly unmoved by suffering; people deliberately hurt other people.

Perhaps the fact that cruelty often requires an excuse – a claim that the cruel act was committed to serve a higher virtue – suggests an intuitive recognition that it is wrong to be cruel?

What are such higher virtues?

They lie in those fantasies of fulfilled desires: religions.

To do this or that for a god, on the command of a god, in the name of a god; to help realize the great promises a god has made for all mankind – to abolish all suffering forever, to put an end to death, to lay a path to eternal bliss … that is the higher calling, such ends are the higher ends, the goodness that serves those purposes of that god, is the higher – the highest – virtue, says religion.

But don’t religions teach that to be good to other people is the highest service their acolytes can render to divinity?

No. Very few teach “humaneness” as a principle.

One religion that does not, is the religion with the second-largest following in the world: Islam.

Oh, it implies that “mercy” is highly valued by calling Allah, its god, “the Merciful” (“Bismillah al Rahman al Rahim” – “In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful”.) But it commands Muslims to be merciless to non-Muslims. A multitude of surahs in the Koran order Muslims to do violence against “unbelievers”. (“Fight those of the unbelievers who are near you and let them find ruthlessness in you.” 9:1123. “Muhammad is the messenger of Allah and those with him are ruthless against the unbelievers and merciful among themselves.” 48:29. “Enmity and hate shall reign between us until you believe in Allah alone.” 60:4.)

Islam is plainly a great horror afflicting the human race. But it was a late-comer among the world’s religions. It lit its flame from Christianity and Judaism, both of which did actually order that kindness be shown to both neighbor and stranger as a principle, but prescribed mercilessly cruel punishments for disobediance of their laws. Judaism commanded stoning to death for blasphemy; and blasphemy was an unforgivable sin in Christianity, punishable by an eternity in Hell. (“And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the Lord, shall be put to death.” Leviticus 24: 6. “But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin.” Mark 3:29.)

Believers must fear the criticism they call blasphemy. Criticism threatens the very existence of their religion.

The Enlightenment woke the West out of the nightmare of religion, and led slowly to the abolition, in the 20th century, of blasphemy as a crime in most Western countries. Notable exceptions still being, in 2017: Spain, Italy, Greece, Austria, Germany, Canada, and Ireland (which is holding a referendum this month, October 2018, on whether its blasphemy laws should be repealed).

No one in any of those countries or anywhere in Western Europe has been put to death by the state for blasphemy since 1765, when – to quote RealClear Politics:

A young man named François-Jean de la Barre … became the last person executed for blasphemy in Europe. … For a long time, this tragic tale was a distant chapter in the story of Western civilization’s road to a secular, pluralistic society; the issues it raised had long been settled in favor of freedom of speech. … [But] twelve people — artists and journalists from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo — [were] killed in the heart of Paris for perceived blasphemy against Islam [on January 7, 2015].

Islam, yes. In Islamic states blasphemers can still be sentenced to death.

In our post Thirst: a story of religious injustice, May 10, 2016, we told the story of Aasiya Noreen, brought to trial in Pakistan for blasphemy.

We tell it here again, with some changes and additions to bring the story up to date:

Aasiya Noreen is called “Asia Bibi” in the court and the press. That means “Asia Woman” – the common way women are named and titled in the Islamic culture which systematically demeans women.

Aasiya Noreen (aka “Asia Bibi”)

She was a poor, illiterate woman who worked in the fields to help support her family of five children, two of them her own and three of them her husband’s from a former marriage.

She was a Christian. A Catholic. Her  family were the only Christians in the small village where she lived some thirty miles outside Lahore, the capital of the Punjab in the Islamic state of Pakistan. The Christians of the region were an underclass, traditionally assigned to menial jobs.

One hot summer’s day in June, 2009, Aasiya was harvesting berries along with some Muslim women. They all became thirsty. The Muslim women sent Aasiya to fetch water from a well. Aasiya found a battered tin cup abandoned near the well, and had a drink from it  before refilling it and carrying it to her fellow workers. One of them accused her of drinking from the cup and so making it unclean. Christian lips should not contaminate a cup that Muslims drink from. All the Muslim women agreed on that.  

A dispute arose. Which was the one true religion? The Muslim women knew that Islam was the truth. Aasiya knew that Christianity was the truth. She dared to say (according to her own account), “Jesus Christ died on the cross for the sins of mankind. What did your Prophet Muhammed ever do to save mankind?”

The Muslim women were deeply offended. They went to their imam and told him that the Christian woman Aasiya Noreen had insulted the Prophet Muhammad.

The imam took action. He gathered together a number of good Muslims willing to defend the Prophet and the true faith of Islam, and led them to the house where Aasiya and her family lived. They set upon her and her husband and her children with righteous blows. The police arrived in time to save the Christian family from being beaten to death. The avenging mob agreed to spare them on condition that the police laid a charge of blasphemy against the woman. The police duly arrested her and put her in jail, where she waited until November, 2012 to be brought to trial.

Aasiya told the court that the woman who accused her of blasphemy had a grudge against her, resulting from an old quarrel, and the accusation was made out of a desire for revenge. The judge did not accept her story as a defense. He also chose to overlook inconsistencies in the testimony of the witnesses against her. He decided that she was guilty of blasphemy and sentenced her to death.

The description in Pakistani law of the crime she was fund guilty of, is: “Use of derogatory remarks, spoken, written, directly or indirectly, … defiles the name of Muhammad 1986.” The prescribed penalty is: “Mandatory Death and fine (Feb. 1990).” And the law stipulates that the judge must be a Muslim.

She was to be hanged for blaspheming against the Prophet Muhammad. 

She was the first woman ever to be condemned to death in Pakistan for blasphemy – her crime being considered so heinous that even death was not sufficient punishment. She was also to pay a fine equivalent to $1,100. She and her family had never in all their lives possessed a sum approaching $1,100. Nor did they know of any way they could raise it.

When the verdict was pronounced, the crowd in the court rose to its feet, applauding and shouting “Yes, kill her! Kill her! Allahu Akbar!”. And yet more enthusiasts for justice, more celebrants of the glory of God, broke down the doors to swarm into the court, their furious, triumphant shouts swelling the chorus of “Allahu Akbar!”  The greatness of their merciful God could hardly have been more passionately attested.

Aasiya’s husband, Ashiq Masih, appealed the verdict. He and Aasiya hoped that the High Court would at least suspend the sentence.

There were humane men in authority; men who felt compassion, cared about justice, and wanted mercy for Aasiya Noreen.

There was a man in a high position who was deeply moved by the fate of Aasiya and determined to do all he could for her. He was Salmaan Taseer, the governor of the Punjab. He persuaded the president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, to come to her rescue. In December 2012, Taseer publicly announced that if the High Court did not suspend her sentence, the president would pardon her. And Zardari would have done so, but the Lahore High Court hastened to issue a stay order against a presidential pardon.

So Aasiya remained in prison in Lahore, in solitary confinement in an 8 by 10 foot dark windowless cell, for another six years.

At first the governor would visit her, with his wife and daughter. But then the court ruled that only her husband and lawyer (not her children) could see her.

On January 4, 2011, Salmaan Taseer was assassinated by one Mumtaz Qadri who resented the governor’s concern for the blasphemer. (He was hanged for the crime in February 2016.) 

The Minister of Minority Affairs, Shahbaz Bhatti – himself a Christian, and the only Christian member of the cabinet – was so disturbed by the case that he set about doing all he could to get the laws of blasphemy changed. He announced that he was prepared to die fighting for Aasiya Noreen’s release. He received many death threats, and on March 2, 2011, he was shot dead in his car near his home.

Many times Aasiya’s appeal was postponed. In October 2014, the High Court finally heard her case – and upheld her death sentence. Her husband then appealed to the President. But he was restrained from issuing a pardon, so her lawyers appealed to Pakistan’s Supreme Court. In July, 2015, the Supreme Court suspended her death sentence “for the duration of the appeals process”.

On Monday October 8 this year, 2018, the Supreme Court, after long delay, heard her last appeal and said it had reached a judgment, but has not yet announced what it is.

The judges have reason to fear for their lives if they do not sentence her to death. Will that fact ensure her execution?

And after men in high places have been killed for sympathizing with her, what chance would she herself have of surviving the killers’ indignation if she were to be acquitted? Her family have gone into hiding, and they fear for her safety and survival if she were to be released.

Hundreds of Pakistanis have publicly protested against her being still alive. An imam offered $10,000 reward to anyone who would kill her, and apparently some 10 million citizens declared themselves ready and willing to do the noble deed. 

And, Reuters reports:

The ultra-religious Tehreek-e-Labaik Pakistan (TLP) party, which makes punishing blasphemy its main campaign rallying cry and lionizes the bodyguard who killed Taseer, warned the court against any “concession or softness” for Bibi.

“If there is any attempt to hand her over to a foreign country, there will be terrible consequences,” TLP said in a statement.

Are Christians doing anything to help save Aasiya Noreen?

The British Pakistan Christian Association reported on the eve of the appeal hearing: 

BPCA Outreach Officer Leighton Medley, who is in Pakistan on his 6 monthly mission has told us that many churches in Lahore, particularly in Bahar Colony, have declared a day of fasting and prayer as Christian communities seek justice for Asia Bibi. He tells us that many were praying throughout the churches, asking for the final release of this innocent woman and the end of this sordid chapter in Pakistan’s history. … Leighton spends time encouraging Christians to respond peacefully, and take to take in acting in a peaceful way, proclaiming non-violence the way that Jesus Christ did. [He says:]

We must have faith that God can intervene in this situation and this mountain will be removed. It is very much like going into the lion’s den.

For nine years, prayers for Aasiya Noreen have been prayed: by herself, by her family, by quite a lot of fellow Christians, for her acquittal and release. The praying has not resulted in her acquittal and release. So why not go on doing it?

One way or another, this long-suffering woman, Aasiya Noreen, is most likely to be killed soon.

She is under sentence of death for taking a drink of water from a cup that was afterwards used to quench the thirst of other working women on a hot day, and for saying something she had been taught to believe to the other women who had been taught that it was something that should not be believed and should not be said.

Because of fantastic rumors about a man called “Jesus” and a man called “Muhammad”, who lived (if at all) many hundreds of years ago; because of religion, lives are ruined, lives are lost. Cruelty and injustice reign. Again. 

Not new (published August, 2010), but persistently topical.

… which you will if you live in Western Europe, and you possibly will if you live in the United States.

Amil Imani writes (in part) at American Thinker:

Islam is religious fascism.  Both the beliefs and practices of Islam amply prove my assertion. … There is a whole raft of teachings and laws that clearly describe non-Muslims in all manner of derogatory terms and grant them no or few rights.

If you are not a Muslim, and you happened, by some misfortune, to be living in a place ruled by sharia, you want to be at least either a Christian or a Jew. If you are anything else or nothing at all religious-wise, then you are just that: nothing. Jews and Christians enjoy a measure of second-class citizenship under Islam as long as they pay heavy religious taxes (jizya), mandated in Quran 9.29, and behave themselves as docile subservient subjects.

Islam’s maltreatment of non-Muslims is … very sad, inhumane and tragic.

Having said that, I readily admit that there are many Muslims who are decent people by any measure. There are, in fact, some Muslims whose humanity transcends their Muslimness. Not all 1.5 billion Muslims are horrible people. We all can attest to that. In fact, it is Islamic ideology that forces Muslims to behave barbarically.

Below is a tragic case that demonstrates my point.

A year or so ago, an elderly Bahá’í woman in the Islamic Republic of Iran remained behind when her children, in desperation, escaped from their ancestral home for other lands because of the official genocide policy of the Islamic government.

The lone old woman had a Muslim tenant living in her house. The Muslim tenant demanded that the women give him her house. The rent money from the house provided her with a modest income for her to survive.

The old woman refused. The Muslim man threatened to kill her if she did not give him the house. The woman corresponded with her children and explained her predicament. She also tried to seek justice from the authorities.

The Muslim man made good on his threat and murdered the old lone woman and took possession of her house. Under sharia law, only Jews and Christians (of course, in the [early, later largely abrogated] Meccan Quran) are tolerated as members of sanctioned religions who enjoy a modicum of rights.  Members of the Bahá’í faith are declared heretics by law and are halal-ul-dam (free blood, meaning they can be murdered with no compensations or legal penalties). Bahá’ís in the Islamic Republic are completely disenfranchised from all rights of citizenship.

A Muslim female attorney, at significant risk to her reputation and her person, consented to represent this family for redress. This attorney is one of those numerous truly upstanding human beings who holds her own humanity above Muslimness.

Islamic societies box women into their “place” of subservience to men, obediently docile. A woman daring to take up the cause of a dead kefir in a vicious theocracy of the Islamic Republic of Iran? That’s true courage. That’s the litmusy test of a sterling human being.  I salute her and salute all Muslim women who are breaking out of their horribly unjust “place” in Islam.

The attorney petitioned the court on behalf of the children of the murdered old woman. She sought redress by taking a folder of documents and correspondence to a judge. The moment the judge learned that the documents had been touched by a Bahá’í, he took out a box of tissue papers from his desk drawer and used the tissue to handle the folder. This man who was supposed to be an unbiased upholder of justice considered the murdered Bahá’í woman najes (unclean, untouchable, simply for being Bahá’í).  He was following his religious duty not to even touch anything handled by a Bahá’í.  Would this bigot be the kind of impartial agent of law to administer justice?

The dead woman and her children got nothing.  The murderous Muslim got the house.  It is sadly reminiscent of the time of Muhammad, when kefirs (infidels) were always treated as fair game and entitled to little or nothing.

The writer ends with a warning to non-Muslims:

It is this kind of treatment that awaits you if Muslims take over and, in obedience to their belief, institute horrific sharia.

You will not be without moral guidance.

Here is some from the Ayatollah Khomeini, “the Father of the Iranian Republic”:

A man can marry a girl younger than nine years of age, even if the girl is still a baby being breastfed. A man, however is prohibited from having intercourse with a girl younger than nine, other sexual act such as forplay, rubbing, kissing and sodomy is allowed.

If one commits the act of sodomy with a cow, an ewe, or a camel, their urine and their excrements become impure, and even their milk may no longer be consumed. The animal must then be killed and as quickly as possible and burned.

A man can have sex with animals such as sheep, cows, camels and so on. However, he should kill the animal after he has his orgasm. He should not sell the meat to the people in his own village; however, selling the meat to the next door village should be fine.

And be aware that he said this:

An Islamic regime must be serious in every field,
There are no jokes in Islam.
There is no humour in Islam.
There is no fun in Islam.

About that he is right.