5780: The year so far.

Germany: 'A 23-year-old Syrian armed with a knife on Friday ran into a Berlin synagogue, and was arrested at the entrance. According to eyewitnesses, the Syrian yelled "Allahu akhbar" and anti-Israel statements. ...' He was questioned and released.

France: 'A staffer at Paris police headquarters who stabbed four colleagues to death on Thursday adhered to "a radical vision of Islam", an anti-terror prosecutor said Saturday, according to AFP. The 45-year-old computer expert had been in contact with members of Salafism, an ultra-conservative branch of Sunni Islam, and defended "atrocities committed in the name of that religion", Jean-Francois Ricard was quoted as having told reporters. ... The assailant, named as Mickael Harpon, was shot dead by a policeman, who was a trainee at the police headquarters. ... Harpon held a high-level "defense secrets" security clearance, which authorized him to handle sensitive information of national defense importance and would have subjected him to regular, stringent security checks.'

Australia: Twelve-year-old Jewish boy harassed, beaten, forced to kiss feet of Muslim boy. 'AFTER term two began, so did the antisemitic name-calling. “Jewish ape”, “Jewish n****r” and “Jewish gimp” were just some of the slurs hurled towards Taylor. He silently took the verbal abuse. ... BUT it was the reaction of the school – both immediately and in the ensuing weeks – that left Karen bemused and ultimately, devastated. They refused to label the incidents as antisemitic. ...'

Canada: 'On 29 Sept., 2019, antifa and allied left-wing protesters rioted outside an event in Hamilton, Ontario featuring Dave Rubin and conservative politician Maxime Bernier. "She was crying, hands were shaking," queer activist Jackson Gates tells me. "She was petrified."' Via my friend Andy Ngo.

Paris Terror Attacks

On 2015 November 13, Paris was attacked by Muslim terrorists, and 130 innocent people were killed.

Regie Hamm:
I work in the world of entertainment. My colleagues and I live a life of creativity, philosophizing and experimentation. We build nothing, feed no one, serve no one and provide nothing of life-sustaining value. We are the singers and dancers and circus clowns. And even as we bask in this pointless existence, we have the audacity to pontificate and issue decrees and tell the world where it has gone wrong. Some of us even have the unmitigated gaul to do this from bed (are you listening Russell Brand?)

Most of my contemporaries in the entertainment business are liberal progressives. I’m pretty used to it and I get along with them fine. They are, for the most part, harmless. But what I know that many of them seem to not be able to get their heads around is that we all get to be peevish punks for one reason only …We. Are. Protected.

Free societies don’t just happen on their own. ...

Sam Harris:
Understanding and criticizing the doctrine of Islam—and finding some way to inspire Muslims to reform it—is one of the most important challenges the civilized world now faces. But the task isn’t as simple as discrediting the false doctrines of Muslim “extremists,” because most of their views are not false by the light of scripture. A hatred of infidels is arguably the central message of the Koran. The reality of martyrdom and the sanctity of armed jihad are about as controversial under Islam as the resurrection of Jesus is under Christianity. It is not an accident that millions of Muslims recite the shahadah or make pilgrimage to Mecca. Neither is it an accident that horrific footage of infidels and apostates being decapitated has become a popular form of pornography throughout the Muslim world. Each of these practices, including this ghastly method of murder, find explicit support in scripture.

But there is now a large industry of obfuscation designed to protect Muslims from having to grapple with these truths. Our humanities and social science departments are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars deemed to be experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other diverse fields, who claim that where Muslim intolerance and violence are concerned, nothing is ever what it seems. ...

Bret Stephens:
We live in the age of the sanctified tantrum—the political and religious furies we dare not name or shame, much less confront.

Students bully college administrators with contrived political demands. The administrators plead they can do better, then capitulate. Incompetent writers pen trite racial screeds aimed at the very society that lifts them above their ability. They are hailed as geniuses. Donald Trump’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination epitomizes the politics of the tantrum. He’s angry as hell, and so is his base. We’re supposed to respect this.

And then there is the tantrum of Islam, another eruption of rage that feeds off our astonishing willingness to indulge it. ...

Naftali Bennett:
Europe, the U.S. and their allies can defeat the terrorists of Islamic State, or ISIS. The first step is making the decision to fight back. The next step is understanding that drones and standoff missiles will not be enough. Ground troops will be needed.

In 2002 Israel went on the offensive in the West Bank cities of Nablus, Jenin, Jericho and Tulkarm, going house-to-house and door-to-door to hunt down Palestinian terror suspects. ...

Some people are going to quibble about the phrase 'Muslim terrorists'. That's just tough. These are invariably the same people who never hesitate to generalize about the people they don't like politically: Republicans, Conservatives, whatever. So you can skip the lecture.

In Norway, Da'wah Hits a Rough Spot

Remarkable video highlights the difficulties facing Muslim missionaries in Norway. Salient theme: People - and religions - are judged by their actions. Also, at 4:50, discover the insidious threat that is sapping the da'wa community's spirits.

Five Problems for Europe

Walter Russell Mead on five things standing between Europe and recovery.

Mead on German - Russian Relations

Via Meadia:

Putin is certainly likely to enjoy some geopolitical benefits as the European Union writhes in its currency woes. But it takes more than weakened neighbors to make a great power. Putin’s Russia is essentially a limited and secondary power in the sense that its own wealth depends large on the prosperity of others. If the world economy slows, the price of oil and gas fall, and the position of whoever rules Russia weakens. The EU might suffer in such a scenario but Russia’s ability to capitalize on its neighbors’ distress will be limited by its own financial weakness. ...

Enlightenment and Its Discontents

In thus projecting a doctrine of human dignity, Rassvyet [published 1907-1934] did not only confront the Czarist regime and Russian society. It threw down the gauntlet to the Jewish liberals, socialists and assimilationists whose conventional policy was one of apology and self justification, accepting by implication the notion that if the Jews were not ultra-virtuous, not ultra-talented, and not ultra-blessed with ultra-civilized ancestors, they would not be entitled to the ordinary rights enjoyed or striven for by their non-Jewish fellow citizens. They thus openly accepted the double standard which was (and has remained) one of the hallmarks of anti-semitism throughout the world.

Standing alone among the organs of Jewish opinion, the Rassvyet editors applied their extraordinary intellectual resources to warn the Jewish community against the illusion that the "emancipation", which all demanded, would solve the essential Jewish problem. Emancipation had come to progressive Western Europe and what had been achieved? Virulent German anti-semitism, "scientific" Austrian anti-semitism were as alive as ever. Most dramatically of all, its monstrous face had appeared in France precisely in the age of vaunted liberalism: Dreyfus languishing on Devil's Island was a very recent memory. The idea that precisely in Russia, Russia of the pogroms, an emancipatory sun would melt the hearts of the endemic Jew-haters was a snare and an illusion: those who preached it were leading their people to the edge of despair.

- Shmuel Katz. Lone Wolf: A biography of Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky.

When the winds of Emancipation began to blow through Europe, Jews were presented with a choice. They could become equal citizens but only by keeping their Jewish identity restricted to private life. Many Jews, understandably eager to break free of generations of persecution, embraced the offer. Judaism was reformed to meet the demands of this civic invisibility, with the German Reform movement leading the way. By instituting a number of significant changes, from translating the Hebrew liturgy into German to celebrating the Jewish Sabbath on Sunday rather than Saturday to abolishing traditional dietary restrictions, Reform leaders hoped to help the Jews become full partners in German life, to be what one Enlightenment thinker would later call "a Jew at home and a man on the street." Significantly, the German Reform movement did not see Jews as a separate nation but rather considered themselves to be "Germans of Mosaic persuasion."

But the Enlightenment strategy of fading out of view was deeply and tragically unsuccessful. Enlightenment and emancipation promised to treat Jews as equal citizens provided they remained invisible as Jews. But what started with eliminating Jewishness from the public square culminated in an attempt to eliminate Jews altogether. The country where Reform was born would also be the country that would condemn the Jews to extermination.

Europe's democratic ideals would leave no room for Jewish identity. On this point, there was little that separated the philosophical ends and ideologies associated with the Right or the Left. Each had a dream of sameness and unity, whether it entailed a fascistic single identity or imagined the dissolution of all identity.

- Natan Sharansky. Defending identity.

In Europe, and not just there, a new kind of politics did seem to be stirring, which sometimes called itself left-wing and sometimes right-wing -- a demagogic politics, irrational, authoritarian, and insanely murderous, a politics of mass mobilization for unachievable ends. Mussolini had embraced the word "totalitarian" to describe his own movement; and "totalitarian" in its stuttery sharp syllables seemed to fit the new kind of politics in each of its versions, right-wing and left-wing alike. The implications did seem fairly obvious. During the whole of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth, a great many enlightened and progressive thinkers had supposed that a main danger, perhaps the principal danger, to modern civilization came from a single political tendency, which was the extreme right, and mostly from a single country, which was Germany, the sworn foe of the French Revolution. But that sort of outlook seemed hopelessly antique by 1950. In the new era, no one doubted that political movements on the extreme right could still make you worry. No one felt much confidence in Germany and its political traditions.

But the midcentury writers saw all too plainly that a danger to civilization had meanwhile cropped up in Russia and among the hard-bitten Stalinists, and among other people, too. The writers worried about the many mush-headed liberals and fellow travelers all over the world who, without being Stalinists themselves, managed to admire the Stalinist enterprise. ...

- Paul Berman. Terror and liberalism.

Cross-posted at DiL - TypePad.

Muslim children trash classroom; anti-Semitic attack in France.

Via IRIS:

Nine year-old Muslim children destroy a Dutch classroom because of a discussion of a pig on a farm and the only response is to expunge pigs from the curriculum.
A school in Amsterdam has halted lessons on rural life because the Islamic children refused to talk about pigs. Reporting this, Alderman Lodewijk Asscher said he wants to take "tough measures." Subsidies for all kinds of dubious groups must stop and parents of unruly children penalised financially.

Asscher told newspaper De Volkskrant: "A primary school in Amsterdam-Noord has decided no longer to teach about living on a farm. Various pupils began to demolish the classroom when the pig came up for discussion. Apparently it has gone that far. These children, 9, 10 years old, have not been given even the most elementary rules at home about why they must go to school."

Vicious anti-Jewish attack in France.
A 22-year-old Jewish woman suffered a vicious anti-Semitic attack by two men of Middle Eastern appearance in a train station in Marseille, France on Thursday night.

The attackers tore the Star of David chain from around the young woman’s neck, lifted up her shirt, painted a swastika on her stomach and then fled the scene.

Local police opened an investigation into the attack but had not yet found the assailants.