Germany: The Rise of Islam

by Giulio Meotti • September 12, 2017 at 5:00 am

Turkey controls 900 mosques in Germany and feels free to say that a "liberal mosque" in Germany is "incompatible" with Islam.
Can you imagine Germany offering Iraq, Syria and Egypt to build "200 new churches" to reconstruct the derelict and dispossessed Christian communities there? No, because in the Middle East, Christians have been eradicated in a forced de-Christianization.
Christians in Germany will become a minority in the next 20 years, according to Die Welt.
We risk losing not only our churches, but more importantly, our cultural strength and even confidence in the values of our own civilization.

The new mega-mosque in Cologne, Germany has a 1,200-person capacity and the tallest minaret of Europe. (Image source: Raimond Spekking/Wikimedia Commons)

Jan Fleischhauer, a journalist of the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, coined an expression to define the free fall of German Christianity: Selbstsäkularisierung ("self-secularization"). It is the Church being liquidated?

The German Bishops' Conference just released the data on the decline of Catholicism in Germany for 2016. In one year, the German Catholic Church lost 162,093,000 faithful and closed 537 parishes. From 1996 to today, one quarter of the Catholic communities have been closed. "The faith has evaporated," said Cardinal Friedrich Wetter, the Archbishop of Munich and Freising from 1982 to 2007.

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Iran: See a Pattern?

by Shoshana Bryen • September 12, 2017 at 4:30 am

Israel has conducted approximately 100 strikes inside Syria in the six years of civil war, not to change the course of battle or support one side over the other, but to eliminate weapons and facilities deemed unacceptable threats to Israel -- including missile factories, a nuclear reactor and now a chemical weapons factory.
Guterres, Kushner and Greenblatt focused on the narrowest threat in the Middle East -- the possibility that the Palestinians will continue to make low-level warfare against Israel. They ignored the role of Iran and its proxies. In effect, they performed the role of Nero with his fiddle.

With Russia hoping to not to leave a large military presence in Syria, and Iran planning to stay, Russia's leverage is questionable. (Photo by Alexey Filippov / Host Photo Agency/Ria Novosti via Getty Images)

If you have not been paying attention, the last thing you heard was that Syria had used sarin gas attack on civilians in 2013. President Obama's "red line" was washed pink in an agreement with Russia to remove the weapons and destroy them at sea. The U.N. Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) special coordinator Sigrid Kaang, in a remarkably precise statement, said 96% percent of Syria's declared chemical weapons were destroyed. Not 95% or 87% or 43.5%, but 96% on the nose. Secretary of State Kerry said: "In record time, even amid a civil war, we removed and have now destroyed the most dangerous chemicals in the regime's declared stockpiles."

It was good PR, but as a solution to a deadly violation of international law, it was a huge, gaping failure. The word "declared" is the giveaway -- Syria was allowed to tell inspectors what it had and where, and the inspectors were allowed only to touch those sites. It you think they cheated, you are right.

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Iran Deal Devotees Try in Vain to Save a Sinking Ship

by John R. Bolton • September 12, 2017 at 4:00 am

Staying in a bad agreement sends confusing signals to the Europeans, who are confused enough already on this issue, about how America intends to address the Iran threat. Pictured: Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (left) and German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel (right) at talks on June 27, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Supporters of Barack Obama's 2015 Iran nuclear agreement have, over the past two years, tried almost everything to sustain it.

Nonetheless, weaknesses in its terms, structure, implementation and basic strategic fallacy — i.e., that Iran's international behavior would "moderate" once it was adopted — are all increasingly apparent. For the deal's acolytes, however, continuing U.S. adherence has become a near-theological imperative.

At the most basic level, the agreement's adherents ignore how ambiguous and badly worded it is, allowing Iran enormous latitude to continue advancing its nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs without being even "technically" in violation.

The adherents ignore Iran's actual violations (exceeding limits on uranium enrichment, heavy-water production and advanced-centrifuge capacity, among others). Having first argued strenuously there were no violations, they now plead that the violations are "not significant."

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