The troll of Balfour Street

https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-troll-on-balfour-street/

Far from being bothered by controversial social media posts and scandals, Yair Netanyahu is basking in the attention and cultivating growing influence, say some close to the PM

By RAOUL WOOTLIFF

September 13, 2017, 6:17 am

When US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump arrived at the Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem during their visit to Israel this May, the couple were met at the entrance by an abashed-looking Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu.

After sarcastically welcoming their guests to “our palace,” and apologizing for the “modest” decor, the Netanyahus dropped their apparent irritation over the humble house on Balfour Street to proudly introduce their eldest son Yair. (Avner Netanyahu, the younger of the two children, was in the army at the time, the prime minister said.)

Versed in diplomatic etiquette from a young age, Yair, now 26, lavished the presidential guests with praise.

“Thank you for coming, it’s an honor to meet you. I’m a big big fan of you both, ” he told the president and first lady. “I have heard so much from my mother. She talks about you all the time,” he said to an elated Melania.

Then, before the two couples embarked on a tour of the residence surrounded by staffers and press, the younger Netanyahu offered a brief word of encouragement to the newly elected US first family and their 11-year-old son, Barron Trump, who had not joined his parents for the trip.

“You know, I can relate a lot to what Barron’s going through because I’ve been in his age in my dad’s first term,’ Yair said of the 1996-1999 premiership, when he was 5, in slightly broken English.

“And look how he turns out,” President Trump interjected, gesturing to the grown Yair Netanyahu, to the delight of the prime minister and his wife.

“It’s very, very hard,” Yair added bitterly. “You know, they [the media] were doing satires on me when I was 3 years old.”

The presence of Yair Netanyahu at the welcome reception, given that it was held at his home, was not unexpected or out of place.

But the prominence he was given in the on-camera introduction to the US president reflected his growing influence within Balfour Street and his burgeoning public profile over the past months and years. And his on-record dig at the media’s treatment of him and his family signified a tendency, much like that of his father, for cultivating (and hitting back hard against) public scandals.

“That was classic Yair,” said a Likud party activist who has worked with the prime minister’s son. “He knew exactly what to say to get everyone talking about what he wanted — him.”

Life in the public eye

Recent weeks have seen a slew of headlines over Yair Netanyahu’s personal life, his connection to a pair of corruption investigations against the prime minister, and a series of controversial social media posts that have landed him in hot water.

The most recent (and vociferous) scandal came after he posted a cartoon this weekend that appeared to have anti-Semitic themes and origins and had circulated on anti-Semitic websites.

The image, posted Saturday on Yair Netanyahu’s private Facebook profile, featured references to Jewish billionaire and philanthropist George Soros, the Illuminati and a some form of reptilian overlord. It took aim at his parents’ critics, including former prime minister Ehud Barak, lawyer and Labor party activist Eldad Yaniv, and Menny Naftali, a former caretaker at the Prime Minister’s Residence who is at the heart of allegations of wrongdoing over which Sara Netanyahu is facing indictment.

Screenshot of the cartoon posted by Yair Netanyahu, September 8, 2017. (Facebook)

The response to the image came hard and fast. US Jewish leaders decried the cartoon and its posting by the prime minister’s son. The Anti-Defamation League said it contained “blatantly anti-Semitic elements.” Political leaders in Israel also lashed out at Yair Netanyahu, calling on the prime minister to tell his son to remove the post immediately.

Just as bad, Yair Netanyahu was suddenly embraced by white supremacists and neo-Nazis, the very people his father has sworn to protect the Jewish people against. The Daily Stormer neo-Nazi website called him a “bro” and later declared itself “The World’s #1 Yair Netanyahu fansite.”

Following the widespread criticism, Yair Netanyahu did remove the meme from his Facebook page on Sunday night. But using that same Facebook account — under the name Yair Hun — that has launched numerous attacks against perceived enemies of his family, the prime minister’s son appeared unrepentant Monday, posting a number of messages slamming “left wing hypocrisy” over the response to the image.

Notably, there was no post offering an apology for the cartoon and his parents have refused to address the issue, despite numerous inquiries from the media.

The same Likud party activist, who asked to remain unnamed, said he was surprised to see Yair Netanyahu back down by removing the cartoon post. “He likes the controversy. And the thing is, he’s gotten good at playing it over the years. I guess this just caused too much of a stink,” he said.

Born in 1991 while his father served as deputy foreign minister in then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir’s government, Yair Netanyahu, as he told the Trumps, has known no other reality than the at times-harsh public exposure of political celebrity life.

When Benjamin Netanyahu ran for prime minister in 1996, Yair, along with his three-years-junior brother Avner, joined the campaign trail as his father traipsed across the country seeking the voters that would eventually make him premier for the first time.

After the narrow election victory over Shimon Peres, the Netanyahus chose for their sons to live with Sara Netanyahu’s parents, Hava and (famed Israeli poet and educator) Shmuel Ben Arzi, instead of at the official Prime Minister’s Residence.

But Yair and Avner were never far from the public eye, appearing in numerous photo ops depicting a loving and warm first family-in-the-making and being included, to some extent, in their father’s work.

In 1998, when King Hussein of Jordan fell ill with Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a 7-year-old Yair even sent the Hashemite monarch a self-illustrated get-well card.

As the years went by and Netanyahu senior went from prime minister to political outsider to finance minister to leader of the opposition and then back again to prime minister in 2009, Avner Netanyahu — and to an even greater extent Benjamin Netanyahu’s daughter Noa, born to his first wife Miriam Weitzman in 1978 — sought a life away from the cameras, rarely appearing at public events.

But Yair appeared to thrive on the attention, and as he gained his own public persona, scandals began to emerge.

In 2012, he was sentenced to 21 days of military detention after leaving his base without permission and lying to his commander about his whereabouts. Serving on the international desk of the IDF Spokesperson’s Office, Yair Netanyahu was supposed to be on duty over the weekend when he decided to leave the base for a few hours and go home for the family’s Friday night dinner.

Two weeks later, after presenting his commanding officer a letter in which he expressed his regret and asked for forgiveness, the army decided to shorten his sentence and allow him to go home to attend the Passover seder.

After the army, while he was studying international relations at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya — he would later switch to Hebrew University in Jerusalem — the Norwegian daily Dagen broke the news that Yair Netanyahu was dating fellow student 25-year-old Sandra Leikanger.

The romantic pursuits of the prime minister’s son would not normally have made headlines. But when it was later discovered that Leikanger was not Jewish and hailed from an Evangelical Christian family, the story triggered a small public storm, with several religious groups and figures criticizing the relationship as one that promotes intermarriage and assimilation. The young couple was said to have later split. (Benjamin Netanyahu’s own second wife, Fleur Cates, was a non-Jewish woman of British origin.)

Facebook posts, and libel lawsuits

As a student, Yair Netanyahu initially kept his social media interactions secret, joining Instagram under the pseudonym Yair Hun and keeping the account “private.” When he joined Facebook in 2014, however, he turned off all the privacy settings, allowing anyone to read his posts, and making no effort to hide the fact of his true identity as the prime minister’s son, though he rarely posted until a few months ago. Once an alias to stay under the radar, Yair Hun became his nom de guerre.

Two months ago, as Hun, he made international waves by saying in a post that American left-wing groups are more dangerous than neo-Nazis, following deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, during a far-right march, and US President Donald Trump’s controversial statements that “both sides were to blame” for the violence.

In July, he lashed out at a group called Sixty One, accusing it of serving an anti-Israel left-wing agenda after it criticized his lifestyle in a Facebook post of its own.

Under the headline “5 facts about Yair Netanyahu, our national son,” and accompanied by a photo of him doctored to look like he was wearing a clown suit, the organization castigated the premier’s son for living with his parents at the taxpayer’s expense, taking lavish vacations, seeking to influence his father, and encouraging a boycott of Arab-owned businesses.

The group also quoted several of Hun’s Facebook posts in which he called Arab business owners “bastards” and slammed the “left-wing authorities” for turning a blind eye to Arab-on-Jewish crime.

Hun accused Sixty One, which is run by the dovish Molad NGO, of being a “radical, anti-Zionist organization funded by the Foundation for the Destruction of Israel [a reference to the New Israel Fund, in a Hebrew play on words] and the European Union.”

“How nice that your side is always going on about incitement, demonization, character assassination and crossing of all red lines,” he wrote, before signing off with a character of a middle finger and poop emoji.

In response, Molad sued Yair Netanyahu for libel. The case is expected in court later this year.

A few days before the online brawl, Yair Netanyahu made the news over an incident in which he reportedly refused to clean up after his dog. A woman, also writing on Facebook, said Netanyahu junior flipped her the bird after she asked him to collect the family dog’s excrement in a Jerusalem park. Her accusations were also met with a bitter attack from Hun.

In September, Yair Netanyahu filed his own libel suit for NIS 140,000 ($40,000) over a Facebook post that claimed the prime minister asked the Mossad to issue Netanyahu junior a passport in a different name, which he then used to hide money offshore. The implications of the post were that the Netanyahu family were involved in money laundering or tax evasion.

Growing influence, and suspicions

In addition to highlighting the aggressive social media messages and accusing Yair Netanyahu of living a lavish lifestyle at the expense of the Israeli tax payer — it was claimed that a ski vacation abroad last year, which required a full security detail, was the most expensive trip ever paid for by the Defense Ministry — the post by Sixty One claimed that the younger Netanyahu wields growing influence over his father, particularly regarding media matters.

According to Sixty One, Yair Netanyahu was responsible for his father’s softened stance toward Elor Azaria, the IDF soldier convicted of manslaughter for shooting dead a disarmed Palestinian attacker in Hebron last year.

Several reports have pointed to Yair Netanyahu as an unrestrained voice in the Balfour residence, often edging his father to the right on key issues.

In April last year he was said to have played a central role in pushing for the controversial appointment of a media spokesman who had called President Barack Obama anti-Semitic.

A month later Yair Netanyahu was reportedly instrumental in advancing the controversial bill banning mosques from using loudspeaker systems for the Muslim call to prayer. According to reports at the time, the prime minister had told several associates that as a resident of Caesarea, where the Netanyahu’s own a house, his eldest son could not bear the noise from a nearby mosque in the neighboring Arab town of Jisr al-Zarqa.

But two former employees of the Prime Minister’s Office, speaking with the Times of Israel on condition of anonymity, both said the notion that Yair Netanyahu is a powerful influence over his father has been grossly exaggerated.

“Of course he [Benjamin Netanyahu] discusses some policies and strategies with Yair and his family, and Yair, being his son, gives his opinion,” one former employee said. “But he’s no puppet master pulling Bibi’s strings. Lots of people give him [Benjamin Netanyahu] advice. Yair is one of them. But it’s just advice.”

The other ex-staff member said that the media played up Yair Netanyahu’s role to create “a narrative of mystery and late night scheming.”

But he added that he thought Yair Netanyahu “probably likes this portrayal, even if it is bullshit.”

Yair Netanyahu’s controversial “anti-Semitic” cartoon post came in response to Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit’s announcement last week that Sara Netanyahu was to be indicted, pending a hearing, for fraud, for allegedly diverting some NIS 360,000 ($102,000) in public funds for her own use, with the specific intention of avoiding payment of personal expenses over private meals ordered to the Prime Minister’s Residence.

The looming indictment comes at the conclusion of just one in a series of graft investigations against the Netanyahu family, including two that appear to have links to the eldest son, even if he is not “at the center of things.”

In January, Yair Netanyahu gave testimony to police as part of an investigation into suspicions against his father in “Case 1000.”

His hours-long testimony focused on the allegations that the Netanyahu family received hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of illicit cigars, champagne and other gifts, including hotel rooms for Yair — from billionaire benefactors, among them Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan and Australian gambling billionaire James Packer.

The prime minister is reported to have helped Packer in seeking permanent residency status in Israel, despite him not being Jewish, so he can benefit from a tax exemption on his foreign earnings designed for new immigrants.

Yair Netanyahu was reported to have told investigators that Packer is his friend, 

and that any gifts he received were on the basis of their friendship.

Late last year, Channel 10 reported that Packer had lavished Yair with gifts that included extended stays at luxury hotels in Tel Aviv, New York and Aspen, Colorado, the use of his private jet, and dozens of tickets for concerts by Packer’s former fiancee, Mariah Carey.

The younger Netanyahu has also been linked to “Case 2000,” which explores suspicions the prime minister promised to advance legislation to hobble the Israel Hayom daily in exchange for more favorable coverage from its main competitor, the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

Negotiations between Netanyahu and Yedioth publisher Arnon “Noni” Mozes were said to have begun over the prime minister’s efforts to prevent the publication of a story about Yair.

Yair Netanyahu’s removal of his cartoon post is unlikely to keep him out of the headlines for long, with investigations ongoing and his social media activity still in full sway.

According to one former staffer in the Prime Minister’s Office, Yair Netanyahu is probably fine with that.

“From what I know of [Yair],” the former staffer said cautiously, “he’s not going to deny that he’s at the center of things, because he likes to be.”

Editor of neo-Nazi site praises Yair Netanyahu for ‘standing against the Jews’

https://www.timesofisrael.com/editor-of-neo-nazi-site-praises-yair-netanyahu-for-standing-against-the-jews/

Daily Stormer's Andew Anglin says he's happy to learn there's an Israeli 'alt-right' fighting the 'corrosive influence of the Jewish people'

By TAMAR PILEGGI September 13, 2017, 10:49 am 

The editor of a prominent American neo-Nazi website has expressed support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son Yair, who posted a meme online over the weekend that was rife with anti-Semitic imagery.

“I stand with Yair and his meme and I’m glad to see that there’s an alt-right in Israel who are standing against the corrosive influence in the West of the Jewish people,” Andrew Anglin, the editor of the Daily Stormer, told Channel 2 on Tuesday night.

“Yair is under attack here. I mean, the man cannot be judged by his father, the man is being attacked by everyone in the world,” he said in a video call.

Over the weekend, Yair Netanyahu posted a meme depicting American Jewish billionaire George Soros and a figure that resembles Nazi depictions of world Jewry manipulating former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and two leaders of weekly protests calling on Netanyahu to step down over corruption allegations.

Netanyahu’s post sparked an outcryfrom Israeli and US Jewish leaders.

“All the American Jews are coming out and attacking him, all these leftist Israeli papers are calling him an anti-Semite,” Anglin said, adding that “what he is doing is standing up against George Soros and the liberal Jews.”

“I’m defending Yair Netanyahu because he stood up against the Jews,” he said.

“I’ve just become informed that there is a Jewish-Israeli alt-right. I’m happy to see this; they’re using some of our memes that are based on our movement,” Anglin added. “They are bothered sick by the same people in the same way.”

Yair Netanyahu took down the offending caricature on Sunday, but not before the post was shared by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and other known anti-Semites.

On Saturday, Anglin’s Daily Stormer praised the prime minister’s son for posting the image.

In an article titled “Netanyahu’s Son Posts Awesome Meme Blaming the Jews for Bringing Down His Jew Father,” the website wrote, “Yair Netanyahu is a total bro.”

“Next he’s going [sic] call for gassings,” it added.

On Tuesday, the Daily Stormer featured Yair Netanyahu on its homepage banner, declaring website to be the “The World’s #1 Yair Netanyahu fansite.”

The 26-year-old Netanyahu has drawn criticism for living a life of privilege at taxpayers’ expense and for his crude social media posts.

The Netanyahu family is facing a slew of corruption allegations. The prime minister has been questioned about his ties to executives in media, international business and Hollywood. His associates have been engulfed in a probe relating to a possible conflict of interest involving the $2 billion purchase of German submarines. Israel’s attorney general has said he intends to indict the prime minister’s wife, Sara, for fraud over her bloated household expenses.

The younger Netanyahu, who has reportedly taken a leading role in his father’s aggressive social media strategy, has also been drawn into the scandals.

Screen capture of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, showing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son Yair on the site banner, September 12, 2017.

Australian billionaire James Packer has reportedly lavished Yair with gifts that included extended stays at luxury hotels in Tel Aviv, New York and Aspen, Colorado, as well as the use of his private jet and dozens of tickets for concerts by Packer’s former fiancee, Mariah Carey.

Police are trying to determine whether these constitute bribes, since Packer is reportedly seeking Israeli residency status for tax purposes.

The prime minister has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, portraying the accusations as a witch hunt against him and his family by a hostile media. He has resisted increasingly vocal calls by opposition MKs to step down.

Agencies and Times of Israel staff contributed to this report

Trump’s ‘fake news’ attack lost its power this week

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/09/16/trumps-fake-news-attack-lost-its-power-this-week

By Callum Borchers September 16 at 8:30 AM

An amazing thing happened this week.

News outlets that President Trump has branded “fake news” reported Trump agreed in principle to grant long-term legal status to DACA recipients — a big item on Democrats' wish list — without securing funding for a Southern border wall in return. Trump said the media and the Democrats who say they negotiated with him were mischaracterizing the situation.

Given a choice of whom to believe, reliably pro-Trump commentators, such as Tucker Carlson, Ann Coulter and Mike Cernovich chose the media, Charles E. Schumer and Nancy Pelosi over the president.

Mark it down: This is the week that Trump's “fake news” attack lost its power.

In the past, Trump's boosters would have rushed to assure his supporters that the president is totally committed to the wall and claimed that the media are trying to drive a wedge between Trump and his base by manufacturing a narrative about supposed flimsiness.

That was Breitbart News's contention last month, when The Washington Post published the transcript of a telephone conversation between Trump and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto in which Trump said the wall is “the least important thing we are talking about, but politically this might be the most important.”

“Very fake news: Trump didn't say the wall wasn't important,” read a Breitbart headline. The accompanying article asserted that “instead, the new president of the United States (POTUS) shows an indefatigable commitment to his 'Make America Great Again' agenda — which included toughness on immigration, crime, trade and the border wall.”

That was some astounding spin. Now, even Breitbart is echoing the mainstream media and reporting that Trump is, indeed, waffling on the wall.

About 4 p.m. Thursday, Trump's reelection campaign sent an email to supporters that was signed by the president.

“Let me set the record straight in the simplest language possible,” he said in the email. “We will build a wall (not a fence) along the Southern border of the United States of America to help stop illegal immigration and keep America safe. Apparently, liberals in Congress and the mainstream media need one more reminder that building the wall is nonnegotiable.”

On Friday afternoon, the Trump campaign sent this text message to supporters:

Notice that Trump didn't deny that funding for the wall is not part of a tentative DACA deal in either message. He merely said that he will build the wall at some point; in fact, he told reporters on Thursday that “the wall will come later.”

Breitbart was not assuaged by the president's words. This is what the site's homepage looked like on Friday:

On Fox News, Carlson led off his Thursday night show with a stinging rejection of Trump's position that allowing hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants to remain in the United States does not amount to “amnesty.”

“It would be a massive amnesty,” Carlson said. “It would be the biggest ever granted in American history. This is thrilling news for Democrats and for open-borders advocates everywhere. In return for this concession, the president receives nothing — no reduction in overall immigration totals, no tightened restriction on foreign workers who take jobs from Americans, no E-Verify to prevent illegal immigrants from working under the table, no end to chain migration.

“The president isn't even getting a border wall, though he insisted he will somehow get one later, possibly. … Well, the president seems confident it will all work out in the end, but there's no reason to be optimistic. The fate of DACA recipients is, by far, the best piece of leverage he has or ever will have. If he gives it away for free, none of his other immigration priorities — the priorities he ran on and won the presidency with — will even be considered.”

On Twitter, Coulter fumed that Trump was “easily rolled” by Democratic leaders. Cernovich, an Infowars host, tweeted that it was “insane” for Trump to let DACA recipients stay in the country without demanding money for the border wall.

In a truly head-spinning exchange, Cernovich fired back at a Trump supporter who dismissed a New York Times report by Maggie Haberman as “fake news.”

“Pretty much any Haberman-Trump story is good to go,” Cernovich tweeted. “That's reality.”

You read that right: An Infowars host told a Trump supporter that the New York Times is not fake news.

The Infowars website also highlighted MAGA hat-burning on Friday and questioned Trump's dedication to his “America First” agenda.

None of this means the term “fake news” is dead or that every single Trump booster is calling BS on the president's claim that he is as determined as ever to build the wall.

“There hasn't been a cave yet,” Rush Limbaugh told his radio audience on Thursday, urging patience, “but it looks like there might be.”

The significance of this week is that Trump can no longer cry “fake news” when the media reports on a broken promise, and count on his boosters to help keep the faith. In a credibility war with the media, Trump's victory is not automatic, even in the eyes of his most ardent admirers.

‘Strange’ and ‘Strangers’

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/244808/strange-and-strangers

Two new studies of Islam portray recent outbursts of coordinated violence and oppression not as a reaction to Western liberalism but instead as fundamental to the religion itself
By Edward N. Luttwak

The Europe that conquered much of the world from the 15th century onward was empowered by its violent disunity. Its quarreling states large and small were sharpened in war and diplomacy by fighting one another at frequent intervals. Each war brought its share of death and destruction, but each was followed by vigorous procreation and reconstruction, so that Europe kept growing from war to war, in population and in wealth, while advancing in the arts, the sciences, and in technology. That Europe was still Christian except for its Jews, privileged survivors when the pagans were exterminated, but its very un-Christian central ideology was the Iliad’s: men love war, women love warriors. European wars over the centuries were fought by volunteers, whose urge to fight was far more widely admired than deplored, not least by women desirous of virile mates.

Europe’s tragedy is that while the Iliad’s ideology would now be deemed absurdly archaic, the sum total of the ideas that have replaced it does not permit its survival: The average fertility rate is far below the 2.1 replacement rate, so that it is only the aging of the population that prevents its disappearance, with a palpable loss of energy and creative vitality. As to why Europeans are producing so few babies—and they would be fewer still without the high fertility of the small percentage of Muslim mothers—there can be no definite answer, because in each country and each region there seems to be a different prevalence and different mix of refusals: men’s refusal of the responsibilities of fatherhood, women’s refusal of the burdens of motherhood.

As for the post-heroic ideas that have largely displaced the Iliad’s elemental prescriptions, they are varied and changeable and drifting right-ward of late, but among the better-educated anti-racism, feminism, post-colonial guilt, and a pacifist presumption remain the dominant mix, perhaps best exemplified by the Norwegian politician Karsten Nordal Hauken. In both a TV appearance and an April 6, 2016 article, Hauken proclaimed his own strong feelings of guilt and responsibility, because a male Somali asylum-seeker was being deported after serving four-and-a-half years in prison for rape: “I was the reason that he would not be in Norway anymore but rather sent to a dark, uncertain future in Somalia. … I see him mostly as a product of an unfair world, a product of an upbringing marked by war and despair.”

Hauken’s guilty plea may seem strange because he did not capture, prosecute, or judge the Somali. Yet there can be no doubt about his personal connection to the case: Karsten Nordal Hauken, self-described as “male, heterosexual, young Socialist Left Party member, feminist and anti-racist” was himself the object of the rape.

***

Hauken’s sentiments are by no means unusual: Many elite Europeans hold that Somalis have the right to leave the cruelties of Somalia, inflicted by fellow Somalis, to come to Europe with or without travel documents, as do all other Africans and, indeed, non-Africans—not to mention war refugees from Syria, even though the right of asylum which they truly do have under international treaties only applies to the first country they reach, and no country of Europe shares a border with Syria. That would be dismissed as a mere technicality by many contemporary Europeans,including Mario Bergoglio, the bishop of Rome, aka Pope Francis, who vehemently insists that all immigrants must be welcomed with open arms—a sharp departure from the views of his predecessor, Benedict.

With the pope easily outranking the prime minister in Italy, it is unsurprising that the Italian authorities have blithely ignored their own laws, including the acquired Schengen Treaty admission rules, by making no attempt whatever to separate and send home the vast mass of illegal migrants from the relatively few war refugees. Instead they did the opposite by sending their coast guard to collect them from the traffickers’ barges just off the Libyan coast. Germany does not have a Mediterranean coastline, yet in 2015, the still-very-popular Chancellor Angela Merkel took it upon herself to violate the Schengen rules (treaties outrank domestic laws) to invite Syrian war refugees without limit, and without any form of identity controls, thereby ensuring that many Afghans, Iranians, Eritreans, and Kurds set out for Germany. To do so, they had to cross all the countries in between, some of which attracted opprobrium by refusing transit. The European Commission threatened harsh economic retaliation, but, of course, it too is afflicted by the intersecting European maladies that make it as impotent as the national governments in dealing with immigration, or with Putin’s Russia, or with the subversion of national cultures by relatively small numbers of Muslim immigrants.

How large a threat do Muslim immigrants pose to a dying Europe? In 2016 they were only 4.6 percent of the population in the U.K. But their powerful Islamizing impact on schools, local governments, and police practices merits extended treatment in Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, whereby one learns that the death in question is not so strange after all, for it is merely a case of suicide—or, more precisely, attempted suicide, because there is an increasing resistance underway, which is even reversing Islamization in some European countries, at least in some respects. For example, in Italy, so lax with illegal immigration, there is no laxity at all when it comes to Islamist violence, with summary deportations and many arrests of would-be terrorists, and not a single fatality since it all started, in sharp contrast to France next door. More than 160 imams are in Italian prisons, some merely self-appointed to their ministries post-imprisonment, but others for preaching what others proclaim with impunity elsewhere in Europe.

Murray is very effective in fully identifying the deformed, guilt-ridden liberalism à la Karsten Nordal Hauken that generates illiberal concessions to intolerance—and to violence. He rightly gives extended treatment to the Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who once held a seat in the Netherlands parliament and whose denunciations of female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and polygamy were themselves denounced as extremist, even racist, by many leaders of Dutch society, while the Dutch police professed their inability to protect her from local Muslims, forcing her into exile.

When it comes to Sweden, Murray rightly presents the rape scandal as emblematic while also surveying the territorial loss of control manifest in Malmö, among other places. But it is not clear if the Swedish rape phenomenon can properly be called a “scandal,” because it continues to be blandly denied by the government and, indeed, the entire establishment—there was an outpouring of much-applauded ridicule when Trump mentioned it. Yet the numbers are simple enough: In 1975, there were 421 rapes reported to the police; in 2014, the number was 6,620. Given that most migrants are young Muslim males brought up in places where any uncovered woman is fair prey, the numbers are no great surprise.

What is surprising is the eagerness of the press to cover up the facts. On Feb. 2, 2015, the Swedish press reported the gang-rape of a Swedish woman on the ferry Amorella under the headline “Eight Swedes questioned over ferry ‘gang rape.’”

When it turned out that the men were not, in fact, ethnically Swedes but rather Somalis, the Swedish press (Aftonbladed, Expressen, etc.) merely changed the headlines to read “Swedish citizens questioned over ferry ‘gang rape,’” When the investigative and right-wing Nya Tider published the fact that they were not Swedish citizens but rather asylum seekers and therefore could only be described as Somalis, the Aftonbladed and Expressen simply ignored the correction. Their fear, of course, is that publishing the truth would trigger a backlash against Muslim immigrants. That has been a widely shared fear since Sept. 11: Every time Islamists commit some outrage, there is a frenzy not over the victims but rather over the imminent danger of attacks on Muslims at large—and that is curious indeed, because there were hardly attacks on Muslims, even in violent America, after 2,983 were killed.

***

Murray is at his best in presenting Michel Houellebecq, the French author whose novels have been steadily decoding Europe’s post-heroic and feebly sexual nihilism since his Extension du Domaine de la Lutte of 1994. Houellebecq has been widely famous in the West since his best-seller, Plateforme, of 2001. His Soumission(Submission) of 2015 profoundly agitated French politics by presenting a totally plausible sequence of events that result in the Islamization of France, with a cynical, opportunistic, and feeble academic as the protagonist. French is one of my native languages and I became a Houellebecq devotee years ago (since Plateforme) because I was captivated by his style as well as by his subject matter (including the perils of too much self-realization). Even his fiercest critics—some were agitated years ago by his offhand remark that Islam is “nonetheless” the most stupid of religions—concede that Houellebecq has single-handedly invented a new prose splendidly classical in its cadenced tonalities, yet utterly modern, hence a perfect fit with his utterly realistic contemporary tales, and Soumission is certainly that.

“Submission” is of course an exact translation of the Arabic word “Islam,” a religion far more often willfully misrepresented than ignorantly misunderstood (you will hear professors of Middle East studies and such assert that it means “peace”): To cite one example among a thousand or more, Verso has just published Suleiman Mourad’s The Mosaic of Islam, which is squarely aimed at the U.S. collegiate market (Mourad teaches at Smith College), wherein we learn that the Quran’s more murderous verses count for nothing, because along with the entire corpus of Muhammad’s sayings it has “always” been subject to change, interpretation and “rigorous” debate. When the Quran says “kill” you should therefore instead read: admonish, or persuade, or plead, or “swim backstroke,” I suppose. In any case, he adds: “The Quran legitimizes a lot of things that modern Muslims consider embarrassing: slavery, military jihad, control of women.”

Yet unreconstructed interpretations of “jihad” continue to have wide appeal beyond the confines of Smith College, as countless polls testify, and, more to the point, as the ubiquity of jihadi violence across the world from Nigeria to Mindanao demonstrates. The control of women is both an overwhelming reality in Muslim countries—and any dense Muslim community anywhere—and is often reaffirmed by state-salaried preachers. Slavery, yes, is only an exotic survival (I saw slaves in Qatar eight years ago)—or was, until its revival with the capture of Yazidi women; the men were killed when they refused to convert, in strict accordance with Quranic injunctions.

Mourad’s short book is replete with misrepresentations, yet can scarcely be criticized as especially misleading. Simple, bare-faced lying pervades the approved textbooks of what might be called “American Collegiate Islam”—the mildest of religions, in which apostasy is not— repeat, not—a capital crime (notwithstanding laws in some 20 countries), and has nothing, but really nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the Islamic state; or al-Qaida, of course; or Boko Haram; or Laskar-i-Islam; or Abu Sayaf; or the Taliban; or any of the other 60 or 70 really sizable jihadi organizations around the world, which could not exist if they did not have substantial approval among many more Muslims.

It is in its determined violation of this unique regime of voluntarily induced cognitive dissonance that Graeme Wood’s The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State has caused such a scandal. Instead of synthesizing his own version of American Collegiate Islam to be assigned to hapless students by U.S. college teachers of Islam, Wood has interviewed as many active supporters of the now-almost-defunct Islamic state as he could find in Cairo and elsewhere, without actually going to Mosul or Raqqah, to find out what they believed and why.

Wood interviewed many very different believers (one a Japanese academic) yet obtained very consistent answers. First, it is evident that Wood’s believers cannot be described as mindless fanatics—they had arrived at their faith in the necessity of a caliphate by a logical process once they adopted Islam (or took it seriously, if born in it), demonstrating that the Islamic State was no anomaly. Rather, it was a fulfillment of a rigorous form of Islam that is supported not only by the tens of thousands who went to fight, but by the 100 million or so Deobandis of India and Pakistan (and Birmingham) and “Wahhabis” of Qatar (yes) and Saudi Arabia, aka the followers of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792), who revived the strict Islam ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328). Though Wood does discuss this Islam at length, he wholly omits the Deobandis, who now control at least 30,000(!) mosques around the world through preachers sent out from their immense (and tax-exempt) Darul Uloom seminary in Deoband, India. (In spite of its pervasive extremism—it was a fatwa from Deoband that mandated the Taliban destruction of the immense Buddhas of Bamiyan in March 2001—Darul Uloom is well protected in India … because of its extremism: It opposes Pakistan on the grounds that Muslims should rule all parts of India!)

All of the above concur with ibn Taymiyyah that insufficiently devout Muslims should be flogged into submission and that heretical or hypocritical Muslims (including the Shi’a) are much worse than properly submissive Christians or Jews—only disagreeing on whether they should be given a chance to renounce heresy or killed outright. Because Iran’s clerics have greatly intensified the cult of Ali and of their 12 Imams at the expense of sole devotion to Muhammad, and also because (to them) bizarre Shi’a ceremonies are now broadcast for them to see, very many Sunnis now agree that Shi’ism is indeed a heresy and thus subject to the death penalty, even if they do not support the Islamic State’s summary roadside executions (though in Pakistan, deadly attacks on Shi’a at prayer are an almost daily occurrence).

In other words, Islamic violence against non-Muslims is, in fact, peripheral to the greater violence directed at fellow Muslims—which really varies only in degree between the routine oppression of women (explicitly enjoined in the Quran) to the periodic outbursts of mass extremist violence, such as that of the Almohads who drove Maimonides into exile to find refuge in Fatimid Egypt in 1168 or so (esoteric Shi’a Sevener Ismailis themselves, the Fatimids had to be tolerant, and in fact were).

Wood’s central finding is therefore that the extremism of the Islamic State, though very modern in some ways, was not a reaction to modern events, such as U.S. invasion of Iraq (as has been endlessly argued by apologists). It was, instead, the latest in a long series of such outbursts of mass violence that have marked Islam since its birth: Muhammad, after all, lived by the sword, before and after preaching his religion, yet he is still Islam’s perfect man whom all should strive to imitate.

But the more serious problem for non-Muslims is not violence, but rather the West’s own internal encounter with unreconstructed mainstream Islamic beliefs. Both Houellebecq’s Submission and Murray’s book are not optimistic about the result. Not many Muslims outside the Middle East support jihadi violence. Yet the latest Pew survey, issued Aug. 9, shows that support for the imposition of Sharia—complete with hand-chopping and the ritual humiliation of non-believers—is at least substantial (from 37 percent) or overwhelming in every country with a large Muslim population (including Russia), with the solitary exception of Azerbaijan, whose secularism is daily reinforced by the immediate proximity of Iran’s extremism to the south and jihadism in Dagestan to the north. In Afghanistan, that support is 99 percent.

In the United States, the number of Muslims has increased by a million in the last decade. Those who believe that routine versions of Islamic fundamentalism must dissolve on contact with American conditions had better consider the demographic expansion of American Chassidim and the Amish—bearing in mind that jihad is as integral to Islam as pacifism is to the Amish.

***

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Edward N. Luttwak, a military strategist and senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is the author of, most recently, The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy.

Australian Catholic Church Falls Short on Safeguards for Children, Study Finds

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/world/australia/australia-catholic-church-child-abuse.html

By JACQUELINE WILLIAMS
Sept. 12, 2017

MELBOURNE, Australia — A study that examines child sexual abuse worldwide in the Roman Catholic Church has found that the Australian church has done less to safeguard children in its care than its counterparts in similar countries have.

The report, released on Wednesday by the Center for Global Research at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, also found that the church’s requirement that priests be celibate was a major risk factor for abuse. And it said that the possibility of abuse in Catholic residential institutions, like orphanages, should be getting more attention, especially in developing countries.

Experts said the report could put pressure on Pope Francis, and particularly the church in Australia, to do more to prevent abuse. The Australian church was rocked in June when Cardinal George Pell, an Australian who is one of the pope’s top advisers, became the highest-ranking Roman Catholic prelate to be formally charged with sexual offenses.

Desmond Cahill, the report’s lead author, said its findings pointed to an urgent need to rethink the priesthood in the 21st century. A professor of intercultural studies at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, he said the church should reconsider the celibacy requirement for priests.

"The Catholic Church is in a state of crisis, and pressure has to be put on the Holy See to take the necessary steps to change,” Professor Cahill said.

In nearly 400 pages, the report traces the history of child sexual abuse in the global church and tries to identify factors that have contributed to it, with a particular focus on Australia.

Professor Cahill and the report’s co-author, Dr. Peter Wilkinson, a researcher in Catholic culture, are both ordained priests who resigned from church ministry in the 1970s but remain practicing Catholics. Professor Cahill said that while in the ministry, he worked alongside some of Australia’s most abusive priests, but did not realize it until decades later.

“Our backgrounds have allowed us not only to understand in depth the workings of the church in Australia, but also the Holy See in Rome, where we both studied at postgraduate level in pontifical universities,” he said.

The authors acknowledge that the Australian church has made progress in dealing with abuse, particularly in its schools, but the report found that it had “lagged significantly behind other comparable countries in relation to developing safeguarding policies and protocols” to protect children.

For example, the Australian church has not appointed representatives in each parish charged with safeguarding children or provided “safe environment training” to all Catholic employees, the report said.

“Any suggestion that the Catholic Church in Australia has led the way in child protection is not sustainable in face of the initiatives in other countries nor has there been much accountability or evaluation in Australia,” the report said.

Last month, a commission that has been investigating the Australian church’s response to sexual abuse recommended a series of legislative and policy changes, one of which would require priests who are told about sexual abuse in confessions to report it to the authorities.

That proposal began a heated debate, in which Archbishop Denis Hart of Melbourne said he would rather go to jail than violate the confidentiality of the confessional. The report released on Wednesday cites several historical instances in which the church allowed exceptions to that confidentiality requirement.

Professor Cahill and Dr. Wilkinson have been consultants for the Australian commission, the Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It is due to release the final report from its yearslong inquiry later this year, and is expected to recommend further measures for protecting children.

Dr. Wilkinson said that the Australian church was in dire need of self-examination. He said it was “going nowhere except possibly down.”

“To regain trust, not only within the Catholic community, but trust in the church within the nation, the church has to undertake a metanoia — that’s a complete transformation, a change of heart and culture,” he said.

As the global church’s sex abuse scandal has unfolded, attention has tended to focus on offending priests in parishes, the report by Professor Cahill and Dr. Wilkinson said. But it said a “parallel tragedy” in Catholic residential institutions, like orphanages and boarding schools, was a cause for major concern, especially in the developing world. The church operates more than 9,000 orphanages worldwide.

The report documents patterns of past abuse at such facilities in Australia, where the church no longer runs orphanages, and in other countries, based on inquiries conducted by governments and the church. It concludes that if such trends prevail elsewhere, “one must fear for the safety” of children at Catholic residential institutions.

“The Holy See does not seem to be aware of the issue or chooses to ignore it,” the report said. It singles out India and Italy, where the church operates many residential centers, mainly orphanages.

The celibacy requirement for priests is a “major precipitating risk factor for child sexual abuse,” according to the report. In Eastern Rite churches where priests are allowed to marry, though only before ordination, the “offending rate is low, probably negligible,” the report said.

The Rev. Joseph Palacios, a Catholic priest and sociology professor at the University of Southern California, called the report a “highly professional study” with “a very good grasp of the historical and theological undercurrents of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.”

He praised the study for its analysis of schools and residential institutions run by religious orders, which he said could “provide a safe space” for potential abusers. “Coupled with the psychological trust that children have with teachers and providers, these institutions become very dangerous places for sexually and psychologically underdeveloped religious personnel,” he said.

Professor Cahill said he began work on the report in 2012, and expanded its scope in 2014 after participating in an international workshop in northern Spain, which brought together leading researchers into child sex abuse in Catholic settings. Dr. Wilkinson joined the study in 2015.

Kieran Tapsell, a retired lawyer who wrote a book about the church’s abuse scandals, said the report was noteworthy for synthesizing a great deal of material and viewing it from sociological, psychological and theological perspectives.

“That hasn’t been brought together before,” he said.

Seventeen Year Sentence for Jerusalem Educator Found Guilty of rape

https://www.inn.co.il/News/News.aspx/354925

The Mashgiach of a Jerusalem yeshiva was sentenced to 17 years in jail after he admitted and was found guilty of heinous acts of molestation and child rape.  The victims were spared having to come forward and publicly testify following a plea bargain.

In addition to the jail sentence, he was fined 145 thousand shekel which was deposited with the court.

About a year and a half ago, this Mashgiach from Jerusalem (Bayit Vegan) was arrested and was found guilty of a long list of acts of rape
which he perpetrated for many years against three young girls [nieces].

One of the girls was only six years old when he began to molest her. He continued this for many years, including two more nieces, using religious manipulation and "mind games" as part of his tactics.