A statement released on October 28^th by the office of the High Representative for the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) claimed that the republishing in France of satirical caricatures depicting Prophet Muhammed was responsible for provoking “acts of violence against innocent civilians who were attacked for their sheer religion, belief or ethnicity.” The UNAOC statement went on to say that “insulting religions and sacred religious symbols provokes hatred and violent extremism leading to polarization and fragmentation of the society.” This statement, which UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has endorsed, was issued 12 days after a jihadist beheaded a French teacher, Samuel Paty, who had shown his students the Muhammed caricatures. It’s no coincidence that Islamist Turkey is the UNAOC’s largest donor.

French President Emmanuel Macron correctly called the brutal killing an “Islamist terrorist attack.” More recently, another jihadist stabbed two women and a man to death at the Notre-Dame Basilica in Nice, which once again Macron linked to Islamist terrorism. Macron upheld one of Western civilization’s most important values by defending free speech against extremist violence from whatever source. “Samuel Paty … became the face of the Republic, of our will to shatter terrorists, to (do away with) Islamists, to live like a community of free citizens in our country,” Macron said. “We will continue.” Macron added that “Samuel Paty was the victim of a conspiracy of stupidity, hate, lies … hate of the other … hate of what we profoundly are.”

The Muslim world was enraged at Macron’s defense of the right of free speech. The anger spilled over into the streets and led to calls for the boycott of French goods. The so-called human rights body of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) condemned the “remarks of French politicians encouraging publishing blasphemous caricatures under the guise of a distorted version of the right to freedom of expression which manifestly prohibits incitement to hatred, discrimination and respect for rights of others protected under International Human Rights Law.”

Islamic jihadists demand that the West embrace Islamic law prohibiting “defamation” of Islam. Some Islamists have justified the beheading of Samuel Paty as righteous punishment for insulting their prophet or have called it just a pretext for hate speech against Islam. It is such jihadists as these who are inciting hatred and violence, not a teacher who was simply trying to teach his students about the value of free speech.

Exercising the right to criticize any religion or satirize its beliefs does not prevent Muslims from exercising their right to freely worship their faith and to honor Islam’s prophet. Criticizing or satirizing a religion or its symbols is not religious persecution. However, the United Nations, much less the OIC with which the UN is a strategic partner, does not see the difference. The world’s leading globalist organization would subordinate the fundamental right of free speech in the service of avoiding any critical expression that adherents of Islam find “insulting and deeply offensive.” This attitude gives cover for Islamists to cower people into silence through intimidation. Islamic terror in the West is again on the march, as seen not only in France but also in Vienna in recent days with the killing of at least four people.

Real religious persecution of Christians and Jews occurs regularly in the very same Muslim countries that are protesting “defamation” of their religion. Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping has escaped any meaningful criticism from the UN and the OIC as he relentlessly carries out his vow to ‘Sinicise’ religion in his country.

Under Xi’s direction, the Chinese regime is purging from Chinese society any religious beliefs that deviate from official Chinese Communist Party doctrine. Yet UN leaders have rarely called out the Chinese regime for real religious persecution and for repressing religious minorities in China, who simply seek to freely worship their faith. Instead, the UN bureaucracy would rather focus on so-called “hate speech” in the West.

The Chinese regime, for example, strictly governs which Christian churches are permitted to operate. Unauthorized churches have been closed. Christian pastors deemed “subversive” have been detained. Chinese church pastor Huang Xiaoning, who has been persecuted by Chinese authorities and shut out of his own church, said: “In substance, the theories of Christianity and Communism are at great odds with each other, so persecution against Christianity is a given.”

The Chinese regime has gone after other religious minorities as well. “Whether it’s the Dalai Lama or the Pope, or it’s the head of Falun Gong [a spiritual group], the state won’t tolerate it,” explained professor Dru Gladney, an expert in China’s ethnic minority groups.

Uighurs and other Muslims in China have been subjected to prolonged detention, surveillance, political indoctrination, systematic torture, and forced labor. French President Macron is one of several Western leaders who have raised concerns about the Chinese regime’s abuses against China’s Muslim Uighur minority. Macron did so during a meeting he held last summer with China’s State Councillor and Foreign Minister. But the Muslim world has been largely silent regarding such real abuses against people of their own faith. Instead, they have gone after Macron for hurting their feelings. Turkey’s Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who fancies himself as a major leader of the Muslim world, said Macron was being intolerant and needs “mental checks.”

Erdogan is a self-righteous hypocrite who should have his own head checked for delusions of grandeur. While Macron has confronted China about its treatment of Muslim Uighurs, Erdogan has sold out the Uighurs who have sought refuge in Turkey. Erdogan has been helping the Chinese regime to repatriate Uighur Muslims back to China. Turkish policemen reportedly arrested a refugee for speaking out against China’s treatment of Uighurs. While Erdogan had criticized China’s treatment of Uighurs in the past, the Chinese regime has evidently bought his betrayal of Muslim Uighurs with economic assistance.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation has not only turned a deaf ear to the suffering of the Uighurs. It abandoned them to curry favor with the Chinese regime, with which it has developed a close relationship. Just last year the Council of Foreign Ministers under the Organization of Islamic Cooperation adopted a resolution commending “the efforts of the People’s Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens.”

China has effectively used its “Belt and Road” global infrastructure initiative as a means to buy support from the beneficiary countries for the Chinese regime’s anti-human rights agenda. The Chinese regime has also used its increasing contributions to various UN bodies to keep the UN bureaucracy on its side, all the way up to UN Secretary General Guterres.

Satiric cartoons draw OIC’s harsh condemnation, but never mind about the abusive Chinese regime’s mass persecution of Muslims. It is obvious that the OIC, Erdogan and the United Nations bureaucracy do not want to ruffle the feathers of the Chinese Communist leadership.

13. 

Defiant President

Will the election end up in the Supreme Court?

Wed Nov 4, 2020 

I suppose some people need this to be spelled out explicitly, about what really matters to “Black Lives Matter”. It’s not about blacks, it’s not about caring about black lives, it’s not about anything that the leftist media, socialist media, and leftist-run corporations who $ponsor this black supremacist terrorist group tell us it’s about. It’s about cold-blooded Anti-American Marxism, just as its black communist founders explicitly stated. And because they then scrubbed that fact from their official website, after they realized it hurt their “cause”, my cartoon is an explicit reminder.

Although I’ve lived in Europe since 1998 and traveled widely on the continent ever since, I’d never set foot in Austria until November of two years ago, when I spent a few days in Vienna. I enjoyed the visit so much that I went back in September of last year. I’d hoped to make these visits an annual practice, but the pandemic got in the way.

Meanwhile, I found myself writing a great deal about the U.S. presidential campaign, which shifted my focus away from my longtime principal topic, Islam in Europe. Also contributing to this shift was the fact that terrorism in Europe went through something of a lull. Yes, there were those horrible beheadings in France, which I wrote about. But for the most part I was preoccupied with Trump vs. Biden.

Then, on Monday evening, in an effort to clear my mind of all thoughts about the election, I sat down with my partner to re-watch The Americans, the best drama series in the history of American television. While we were watching it, he said that something had happened in Vienna. I replied that he must have misunderstood: nothing in the entire series has ever had anything to do with Vienna. He said no, he was talking about the real world. I looked over to see that he’d been checking the news on his phone.

Vienna! Multiple shooters, it was reported, had opened fire at several locations in the city center. Latest reports from the BBC indicate that two men and two women were killed and twenty-two more wounded, most of them apparently shot outside of bars and restaurants.

One of the terrorists, a 20-year-old with dual North Macedonian and Austrian citizenship who carried a rifle, a pistol, and a machete, was shot dead by police; reports are that he was imprisoned in April of last year “after trying to get to war-torn Syria to join Islamic State (IS) jihadists,” but was given early release in December “under more lenient terms for young adults.” Home searches in Vienna led to the arrests of several suspects; two others were arrested in a nearby town. As of Tuesday afternoon, Vienna time, people were being urged to stay inside, and to keep children out of school, while the police hunt down other suspects; 90% of stores in downtown Vienna were closed.

In its report, the BBC noted that in recent years Austria had largely been spared the kind of terrorist acts that have taken place elsewhere in Western Europe. Let it be remembered, however, that it was in Vienna, 337 years, seven weeks, and four days ago, that the united forces of much of Christendom, under the command of Polish king Jan III Sobieski turned back the army of the Ottoman Empire, thereby effectively quashing an Islamic threat to Europe that has been revived only in the last few decades.

Eastern European leaders have long made clear their determination to stand up to Islam; in an October 2 speech, French President Emmanuel Macron, formerly wishy-washy on the topic, seemed to channel his own Jan Sobieski, issuing a ringing affirmation of French secularism and condemning decades of creeping Islamization in French institutions. And Austria’s own chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, is arguably tougher on the enemy within than any other head of state in Western Europe, closing foreign-funded mosques, deporting dangerous imams, and spearheading an initiative to uproot the influence of “political Islam” in Austria.

All very good, but not enough. If Western Europe is to survive, its leaders need to get on the same page – defending human freedom and civilization against a barbaric ideology of violent conquest and oppression. So do the Western European media, such as the Financial Times, which only hours after the attacks in Vienna posted a ridiculous article in which Brussels correspondent Mehreen Khan accused Macron of “stok[ing] moral panic about the ‘Muslim question,’” and the Guardian, which on November 1 ran a despicable column in which Simon Tisdall essentially blamed the recent beheadings in Paris and Nice on Macron’s October 2 speech.

What are the chances that Western Europe will straighten up and fly right? Well, consider this: yesterday afternoon, according to Reuters, police in seven European countries – the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Norway, and the Czech Republic – took part in “coordinated raids.” They searched 83 apartments and questioned 96 suspects. What were those suspects suspected of? Planning jihadist attacks? No. Of writing “hateful posts…online” about guess who.