Thank God for the Olympics

by Geert Wilders • February 18, 2018 at 5:00 am

Patriotism is one of the biggest strengths of a nation. Waving the national flag is so much more than bringing a tribute to successful athletes. It also links us to a heritage and a tradition. Our national flag symbolizes ancient loyalties embodying the legacy of our fathers, which we want to bestow on our children.
A few weeks ago, I lodged an official complaint against the Prime Minister for discrimination on behalf of thousands of my Dutch compatriots. This week, the Public Prosecutor announced that he will not prosecute Mr Rutte because the government policy is one of "positive discrimination," which the Public Prosecutor considers permissible. I will now take the case directly to the court. A government that is positively discriminating in favor of foreigners is negatively discriminating against its own people.
Just as the millions of Dutch, who are currently watching the Olympics on their television sets, are cheering their own athletes, governments should be the cheerleaders of their own people. We need to bring the spirit of the Olympics to politics, the spirit of patriotism. The nation-state has the duty to positively discriminate in favor of its own people. It has to cheer them on, encourage them, be proud of them, as we now are of our athletes. And always will be.

Jorien Ter Mors of the Netherlands celebrates winning the gold medal during the Ladies' 1000m Speed Skating at the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics, February 14, 2018. (Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

My country, the Netherlands, is doing extremely well in the 2018 Winter Olympics. It is great to see how the Dutch successes are reinforcing feelings of national pride and patriotism. Thank God for the Olympics! Cheering one's own athletes over foreigners has nothing to do with discrimination, racism or jingoism. Sporting events are one of the few occasions where people can still unabashedly display feelings of national pride without being judged for it by the leftist cosmopolitan elites.

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Syria: Looking for Ways out of the Maze

by Amir Taheri • February 18, 2018 at 4:00 am

Pictured: The city center of Kobane, Syria on June 20, 2015, shortly after the Kurdish YPG militia wrested control of the city from ISIS. (Photo by Ahmet Sik/Getty Images)

In Western political and diplomatic circles, the received idea these days is that war in Syria has reached its end and that what one should now focus on is reconstruction.

However, like all other received ideas this one, too, is as full of holes and Swiss cheese.

The first hole is that what we have witnessed in Syria over the past seven years was not a war in any classical sense of the term. What we saw was several wars woven into each other, in the context of a humanitarian disaster sharpened by rivalry among a dozen cynical powers in pursuit of contradictory goals.

In that sense, far from being at the end of anything in Syria, we may be at the beginning of a new phase in this historic tragedy.

The second hole is that even if we focus on any of the parallel wars in Syria we would still find it hard to claim that we have reached the end.

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Infidel Women: Spoils of War

by Raymond Ibrahim • February 17, 2018 at 3:00 am

The treatment of non-Muslim women as subhuman by jihadi organizations, such as ISIS or Boko Haram in Nigeria -- where "infidel" females are bought, sold, gang-raped, mutilated, dismembered and burned alive — is relatively well known from ISIS videos. Less well known is that many of these practices are still taking place, often rampantly, across the Muslim world, as a 2016 report revealed...
Such incidents occur frequently. Christian girls are considered goods to be damaged at leisure. Abusing them is a right. According to the [Muslim] community's mentality it is not even a crime. Muslims regard them as spoils of war." -Local residents, Pakistan 2014
To put it differently, all the Hollywood stars, militant feminists and social-justice warriors who are forever raging against "sexism" in the West — but who have nothing to say about Islam's female victims — are not "defenders of women's rights," but "useful idiots" dedicated to subverting Western civilization no less than the terrorists they have been apologizing and covering for.

A victim of an acid attack. Many Islamists treat "infidel" women as if they are subhuman. Photo: Wikipedia.

One aspect of radical Islamist aggression that is overlooked – or purposely ignored – by Western liberals is that non-Muslim women tend to be its greatest victims. According to a recent Open Doors study, "Christian women are among the most violated in the world, in maybe a way that we haven't seen before." The study revealed that six women are raped every day simply for being Christian.

The reason for this is simple. As harsh as Islamic law (sharia) is for men, it is even more so for women. The Koran gives men the authority to beat women for disobedience (4:34), that the testimony of two women equals that of one man (2:282); most of hell's population consists of women; and women are likened to donkeys and dogs for distracting men from and annulling their prayer.

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