Friday, October 30, 2020

EUROPE FALLS TO THE MUSLIM BARBARIANS THEY BROUGHT IN FOR 'CHEAP' LABOR - “Islamism is a monstrous fanaticism which must be battled with force and determination,” wrote the Guinean cardinal, who leads the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship, invoking his own experience as an African.

 

Ex-PM of Malaysia’s ‘Muslims Have a Right to Kill Millions of French’ Rant Removed by Facebook, Twitter

Muslims
Arnold Jerocki/Getty Images
JACK MONTGOMERY
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2:17

Former Prime Minister of Malaysia Mahathir bin Mohamad’s extraordinary diatribe that “Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people” has been removed from Facebook and Twitter.

Mohamad, who led the Muslim-majority country as recently as March 2020, had said that “Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past” on the same day a gruesome terror attack took place at a church in Nice, which was itself something of an epilogue to the public beheading of teacher Samuel Paty near Paris.

Twitter ruled that Mohamad’s tweet violated its rules against “glorifying violence” but initially allowed it to remain visible to his 1.3 million followers, deciding it may be in the public interest to do so, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

It reversed this decision and took the tweet down amid significant public anger — but the rest of the thread remains available, including a subsequent tweet asserting: “Since you have blamed all Muslims and the Muslims’ religion for what was done by one angry person, the Muslims have a right to punish the French.”

Facebook has removed the rant in its entirety.

The belated action by Twitter to take down one of Mohamad’s tweets falls well short of the action demanded by the French government, which told the managing director of Twitter’s French operations that “The account must be immediately suspended. If not, Twitter would be an accomplice to a formal call for murder.”

The Malaysian elder statesman’s rant was also condemned by the Australian government, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison of the conservative-leaning Liberal Party branding his comments “absolutely absurd”.

“Of course [Muslims] don’t have that right,” he said, in reference to the Malaysian’s remarks that “Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people”.

“It’s just abhorrent to suggest anyone has such a right,” Morrison added, insisting that “the only human response to [the attack] is to be utterly devastated by it and stand with families who would be suffering so much.”

Follow Jack Montgomery on Twitter: @JackBMontgomery

‘Tell My Family I Love Them’: A Mother, a 60-Year-Old Woman, and a Church Layman Slain in Nice Terror Attack

NICE, FRANCE - OCTOBER 29: Police patrol at night in front of basilica on October 29, 2020 in Nice, France. A man armed with a knife fatally attacked three people in the church, located in the heart of the city. (Photo by Arnold Jerocki/Getty Images)
Arnold Jerocki/Getty Images
VICTORIA FRIEDMAN
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5:11

The victims of Thursday’s Islamist terror attack at the Basilica of Notre-Dame of Nice have been identified as a 60-year-old woman, a mother, and a church sacristan.

The assailant has also been identified as a 21-year-old Tunisian migrant, named, according to multiple sources speaking to French media, as Brahim Aouissaoui. Italian Red Cross documents also name the man as Aouissaoui. However, judicial sources have told L’Express that his identity has not been formally confirmed.

The Tunisian came to France just this month, after having arrived on September 20th on the Italian island of Lampedusa, which has become a landing ground for illegal aliens and asylum seekers from North Africa trying to enter Europe. Sources told L’Express that Italian authorities had put the suspect in quarantine, before releasing him and subjecting him to a deportation decree. He had reportedly not applied for asylum in France and was not known to French security services.

The knife attack occurred at around 9 am local time on the grounds of the church in the southern city of Nice. The suspect had killed three, nearly decapitating one, with a six-inch blade and injured several others, while reportedly shouting the Islamist war cry, “Allah hu Akbar!” ([my] god is greater [than yours]).

Municipal police shot and injured the man, who admitted to being called “Brahim” but claimed to be 25. Mayor of Nice Christian Estrosi told media that the terrorist would not stop uttering the “Allah hu Akbar” phrase even as he lay injured in the floor. He was then taken to hospital where he is still receiving medical treatment.

Authorities said they had discovered some of the terrorist’s belongings, including a copy of the Quran, two other unused knives, and two mobile phones.

The anti-terrorist prosecutor’s office confirmed that it had opened an investigation for “assassination in connection with a terrorist enterprise, attempted assassination in connection with a terrorist enterprise and criminal association of terrorist criminals”.

Suspicions have been raised that it was not a lone-wolf attack, with Nice-Matin reporting a suspected accomplice — a 47-year-old man — had also been taken into police custody after it was believed he had been in contact with Aouissaoui before the killings.

Police sources speaking to Le Figaro revealed that the first of the three victims is a woman aged around 60, who came to pray at the sunrise service. She was found “almost beheaded” near the font.

Canon Philippe Asso told the newspaper that the second victim killed inside the church was the sacristan, who is in charge of the day-to-day care and maintenance of the church plate and vestments. Vincent, 54, was a father of two daughters and had worked at Notre-Dame de Nice for ten years.

A second woman, a 44-year-old mother of three, was stabbed several times and seriously injured before managing to escape Aouissaoui. She was a Brazilian national, according to the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, living in France. Taking refuge in a nearby bar, one witness reportedly said the woman’s dying words were: “Tell my family that I love them.”

Yesterday’s incidents saw a rash of other attacks on French interests. In Avignon, Provence, a man reportedly shouting “Allah hu Akbar” while pointing a gun was shot dead by police during an exchange of fire. The incident occurred just two hours after the Nice terror attack.

A potential copycat attack was foiled in Yvelines, as well, on Thursday.  The suspect, who had been on the country’s terrorist ‘S-File’ list, was taken into custody after his father informed authorities that he wanted to “do as in Nice”.

Yvelines is significant, as it is the French department outside of Paris where 18-year-old Islamist Chechen refugee Aboulakh Anzorov beheaded teacher Samuel Paty for showing satirical cartoons of the Muslim prophet, Mohammed, during a freedom of speech lesson earlier this month.

In Lyon, authorities arrested a 26-year-old Afghan migrant, some two and a half hours after the Nice attack, for brandishing a 12-inch knife near a tram station. The suspect is known to security services for his connections to radical Islam. Media claims he has mental health issues.

While in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, a guard at the French consulate was stabbed. The guard is said to be in a stable condition, with the assailant having been arrested.

All these incidents come in the wake of rising anger in the Muslim world over French President Emmanuel Macron’s staunch defence of secular values, including freedom of speech, following the murder of Mr Paty.

On Thursday, the former prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, declared on social media that “Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.” Facebook and Twitter later took down the posts. However, despite calls from the French government, Mohamad’s Twitter account has not been suspended.

Vatican Cardinal Calls for Battle Against ‘Monstrous’ Islamism

LONDON - FEBRUARY 03: Muslim demonstrators hold banners at the Danish Embassy on February 3, 2006 in London. British muslims have condemned newspaper cartoons which first appeared in a Danish newspaper, some of which depict the Prophet Mohammed wearing a turban shaped like a bomb. The cartoons have sparked worldwide …
Peter Macdiarmid/Getty
THOMAS D. WILLIAMS, PH.D.
170
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ROME — Vatican Cardinal Robert Sarah denounced Islamism Thursday following a lethal terror attack in a French church, calling it a “monstrous fanaticism.”

“Islamism is a monstrous fanaticism which must be battled with force and determination,” wrote the Guinean cardinal, who leads the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship, invoking his own experience as an African.

“It will not stop its war. Unfortunately, we Africans know this only too well,” the cardinal wrote on Twitter. “The barbarians are always the enemies of peace.”

“The West, today France, must understand this. Let us pray,” he said.

On Thursday morning, a Muslim man entered the Notre Dame Basilica in Nice armed with a knife, and proceeded to kill three people, including the church sacristan. Shouting “Allahu akbar” as he attacked his victims, the assailant was eventually apprehended by French police and is now in the hospital with gunshot wounds sustained during the encounter.
France’s national antiterrorist prosecution announced the opening of an investigation for “assassination and attempted assassination in connection with a terrorist enterprise” and “criminal terrorist association,” French media reported.

The mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, wrote on Twitter that all indications are that the incident was, in fact, a terrorist attack.

For his part, Pope Francis also expressed his closeness to the Catholic community of Nice, joining “in mourning after the attack which sowed death in a place of prayer and consolation.”

“I pray for the victims, for their families and for the beloved French people, so that they can respond to evil with good,” he also wrote on Twitter.

On Thursday, the pontiff sent a telegram to the Catholic bishop of Nice, saying he condemned “in the most forceful way such violent acts of terror.”

Video: French Beheading with Raymond Ibrahim in Stephen Bannon’s War Room

A succinct encapsulation of the situation in France.

 
Raymond Ibrahim
 
6

Raymond Ibrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the Freedom Center, was recently in the War Room with Stephen Bannon, discussing blasphemy and beheadings in France. The segment begins around the 51:06 mark below. Check it out:

How a Fiercely Christian Nation Became Fanatically Islamic

By Raymond Ibrahim

 

One of the benefits of Adel Guindy’s new book, A Sword Over the Nile: A Brief History of the Copts Under Islamic Rule, is that it implicitly answers an important question: how and why did non-Muslim nations become Islamic?  In this case, how did Egypt go from being overwhelmingly Christian in the seventh century to being overwhelmingly Muslim in the twenty-first century? 

To understand the significance of this question -- and because pre-Islamic Egypt’s profoundly Christian nature is often forgotten -- a brief primer is in order:

Before Islam invaded, Egypt was home to some of Christendom’s earliest theological giants and church fathers, including Clement of Alexandria (b. 150), Origen the Great (b. 184), Anthony the Great, father of monasticism (b. 251), and Athanasius of Alexandria (b. 297), the chief defender of the Nicene Creed, which is still professed by all major Christian denominations. The Catechetical School of Alexandria was the most important ecclesiastical and learning center of ancient Christendom.  

Writing around the year 400, and further indicative of how thoroughly Christian pre-Islamic Egypt was, John Cassian, a European, observed that “the traveler from Alexandria in the north to Luxor in the south would have in his ears along the whole journey, the sounds of prayers and hymns of the monks, scattered in the desert, from the monasteries and from the caves, from monks, hermits, and anchorites.” 

Some Europeans, such as the British historian and archaeologist Stanley Lane-Poole (d. 1931), even claim that Coptic missionaries were first to bring the Gospel to distant regions of Europe, including Switzerland, Britain, and especially Ireland.  Most recently, both the oldest parchment to contain words from the Gospel (dating to the first century) and the oldest image of Christ were discovered in separate regions of Egypt. 

Accordingly, something very dramatic, very cataclysmic -- namely, violent persecution, as made clear by page after page of A Sword Over the Nile, which chronicles fourteen centuries of Islamic rule -- was responsible for transforming Christian Egypt into Muslim Egypt.

Should anyone consider the Coptic sources of being biased against Islam, it is worth noting that Muslim sources often confirm them.  For instance, in Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi’s (d. 1442) authoritative history of Egypt, anecdote after anecdote is recorded of Muslims burning churches, slaughtering Christians, and enslaving Coptic women and children -- often with the compliance if not outright cooperation of the authorities.  The only escape then -- as sometimes today -- was for Christians to convert to Islam. 

Indeed, after recording one particularly egregious bout of persecution in the eleventh century, when, along with countless massacres, some 30,000 churches, according to Maqrizi, were destroyed or turned into mosques -- a staggering number that further indicates how Christian pre-Islamic Egypt was -- the Muslim historian makes an interesting observation: “Under these circumstances a great many Christians became Muslims.”  (One can almost hear the triumphant “Allahu Akbars”.)

Yet physical violence was not alone in making such a fiercely Christian nation become Islamic.  The dhimma system, Islam’s discriminatory rules for governing Christian and Jewish subjects (based largely on Koran 9:29 and the so-called Conditions of Omar), while providing some religious freedom, also stipulated a number of fiscal burdens (jizya), social inequality, and a host of other disabilities that, decade after decade, century after century, saw more and more Copts convert to Islam to alleviate their burdens and achieve some semblance of equality.

Thus, in his The Arab Conquest of Egypt (1902), historian Alfred Butler mentions the “vicious system of bribing the Christians into conversion,” before elaborating:

[A]lthough religious freedom was in theory secured for the Copts under the capitulation, it soon proved in fact to be shadowy and illusory. For a religious freedom which became identified with social bondage and with financial bondage could have neither substance nor vitality.  As Islam spread, the social pressure upon the Copts became enormous, while the financial pressure at least seemed harder to resist, as the number of Christians or Jews who were liable for the poll-tax [jizya] diminished year by year, and their isolation became more conspicuous... [T]he burdens of the Christians grew heavier in proportion as their numbers lessened [that is, the more Christians converted to Islam, the more the burdens on the remaining few grew]. The wonder, therefore, is not that so many Copts yielded to the current which bore them with sweeping force over to Islam, but that so great a multitude of Christians stood firmly against the stream, nor have all the storms of thirteen centuries moved their faith from the rock of its foundation.

Such is the forgotten history of the Copts’ diminution: that ten percent of Egypt is still Christian is not a reflection of Muslim tolerance, as many apologists claim, but intolerance.  While the lives of many Christians were snuffed out over centuries of violence, the spiritual and cultural identities of exponentially more were wiped out in their conversion to Islam.  (Such is the sad and ironic cycle that plagues modern Egypt: those Muslims who persecute Christians are themselves often distant descendants of Copts who first embraced Islam to evade their own persecution.) 

In short, if it were not for the Copts’ stubborn resilience and endurance, Christianity would have been wiped out altogether from Egypt -- just as it was in the rest of North Africa, which, before the seventh-century Islamic conquests, was also thoroughly Christian.

In connection, it is interesting to note that, according to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (adopted by Resolution 260 (III) A of the U.N. General Assembly on December 9, 1948), both violent and nonviolent pressures are deemed factors of genocide.  “Killing” and causing “serious bodily or mental harm” to members of any group of people -- in this case, “infidel” Copts -- are the first two legal definitions of genocide.  The  third definition of Resolution 260 encapsulates the “slow-motion genocide” that typifies Coptic history under Islam:  “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” (emphasis added).

That is precisely what the aptly called Conditions of Omar does. It imposes negative “conditions of life calculated” to prompt the Copts to abandon their Christian identities/heritage in order to reap the benefits of joining Islam -- which includes the cessation of persecution and discrimination, as abundantly A Sword Over the Nile makes abundantly clear. 

Raymond Ibrahim is author of Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West (2018); Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013); and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007).  He is a fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the Middle East Forum, and the Gatestone Institute.

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