LCCC ENGLISH DAILY NEWS BULLETIN
April 10/2018
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani

The Bulletin's Link on the lccc Site
http://data.eliasbejjaninews.com/newselias18/english.april10.18.htm

News Bulletin Achieves Since 2006
Click Here to enter the LCCC Arabic/English news bulletins Achieves since 2006

Europe's Civilizational Exhaustion
Giulio Meotti/Gatestone Institute/April 09/18
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12093/europe-civilizational-exhaustion
Islam is filling the cultural vacuum of a society with no children and which believes -- wrongly -- it has no enemies.
In Sweden, by 2050, almost one in three people will be Muslim.
The European mainstream mindset now seems to believe that "evil" comes only from our own sins: racism, sexism, elitism, xenophobia, homophobia, the guilt of the heterosexual white Western male -- and never from non-European cultures. Europe now postulates an infinite idealization of the "other", above all the migrant.
A tiredness seems to be why these countries do not take meaningful measures to defeat jihadism, such as closing Salafist mosques or expelling radical imams.
Muslim extremists understand this advantage: so long as they avoid another enormous massacre like 9/11, they will be able to continue taking away human lives and undermining the West without awakening it from its inertia.
In a prophetic conference held in Vienna on May 7, 1935, the philosopher Edmund Husserl said, "The greatest danger to Europe is tiredness". Eighty years later, the same fatigue and passivity still dominate Western European societies.
It is the sort of exhaustion that we see in Europeans' falling birth rates, the mushrooming public debt, chaos in the streets, and Europe's refusal to invest resources in its security and military might. Last month, in a Paris suburb, the Basilica of Saint Denis, where France's Christian kings are buried, was occupied by 80 migrants and pro-illegal-immigration activists. The police had to intervene to free the site.
Pictured: French police eject some of the 80 migrants and pro-illegal-immigration activists who occupied the Basilica of Saint Denis, on March 18, 2018. (Image source: Video screenshot, YouTube/Kenyan News & Politics)
Stephen Bullivant, a professor of theology and the sociology of religion at St Mary's University in London, recently published a report, "Europe's Young Adults and Religion":
"Christianity as a default, as a norm, is gone, and probably gone for good – or at least for the next 100 years," Bullivant said.
According to Bullivant, many young Europeans "will have been baptised and then never darken the door of a church again. Cultural religious identities just aren't being passed on from parents to children. It just washes straight off them... "And we know the Muslim birthrate is higher than the general population, and they have much higher [religious] retention rates."
Richard Dawkins, an atheist and the author of The God Delusion, responded to the study's release by tweeting to his millions of Twitter followers:
Before we rejoice at the death throes of the relatively benign Christian religion, let's not forget Hilaire Belloc's menacing rhyme:
"Always keep a-hold of nurse
For fear of finding something worse."
Dawkins is apparently concerned that that after the demise of Christianity in Europe, there will not be an atheistic utopia, but a rising Islam.
That is the major point of what Philippe Bénéton in his book The Moral Disorder of the West ("Le dérèglement moral de l'Occident"): Islam is filling the cultural vacuum of a society with no children and which believes -- wrongly -- it has no enemies.
According to Radio Sweden, fewer newborns in that country are being baptized due to the demographic shift. By 2050, almost one in three people in Sweden will be Muslim, according to a recent Pew report
The European mainstream mindset now seems to believe that "evil" comes only from our own sins: racism, sexism, elitism, xenophobia, homophobia, the guilt of the heterosexual white Western male --and never from non-European cultures. So Europe now postulates an infinite idealization of the "other", above all the migrant. The heritage and legacy of Western civilization gets sectioned off piece by piece so that nothing remains; our values are mocked and our survival instinct is inhibited. It is a process of decomposition that Europe's political authorities seem to have decided to mediate, as if it were inevitable. Now, the European Union waits to receive the next surge of migrants, from Africa.
In German Chancellor Angela Merkel's major speech in the Bundestag after the unprecedentedly long and difficult process of forming a new government, she struck a conciliatory tone on immigration while offering an inclusive message on Islam. "With 4.5 million Muslims living with us, their religion, Islam, has also become a part of Germany", she said.
The most powerful politician in Europe capitulated: she evidently forgot (again) the difference between the civil rights of individuals, which Muslim citizens enjoy in Germany, and the sources of a national identity, on which Europe is based: humanistic, Judeo-Christian values. This realization may why a week earlier the new German Interior minister, Horst Seehofer, said that "Germany has been shaped by Christianity" and not by Islam.
Europe's tiredness can also be seen in a generational conflict embodied in the alarming rise of public debt. In Italy, the political establishment was recently shaken up by the election of two major populist parties. It is a country with a public debt of 40,000 euros per capita, and a tax burden equal to 43.3% of GDP. The average age of the population is the third oldest in the world, together with one of the lowest birthrates on the planet, one of the lowest retirement ages in Europe and the highest social security spending-to-GDP ratio in the Western world. It is also a country where pensions account for one-third of all public spending and where the percentage of pensioners in proportion to workers will rise from 37% today to 65% in 2040 (from three workers who support one pensioner to three workers who support two pensioners).
An Islamist challenge to this tired and decaying society could be a decisive one. Only Europe's Christian population is barren and aging. The Muslim population is fertile and young. "In most European countries—including England, Germany, Italy and Russia, Christian deaths outnumbered Christian births from 2010 to 2015," writes the Wall Street Journal.
Terrorist attacks will continue in Europe. Recently, in Trèbes, southern France, a jihadist took hostages in a supermarket and claimed allegiance to ISIS. It seems that Europe's societies consider themselves so strong and their ability to absorb mass immigration so extensive, that nothing will prevent them from believing they can assimilate and manage terrorist acts as they have automobile fatalities or natural disasters. A tiredness also seems to be why these countries do not take meaningful measures to defeat jihadism, such as closing Salafist mosques or expelling radical imams.
Muslim extremists understand this advantage: so long as they avoid another enormous massacre like 9/11, they will be able to continue murdering people and undermining the West without awakening it from its inertia. The most likely scenario is that everything will continue: the internal fracture of Europe, two parallel societies and the debasement of Western culture. Piece by piece, European society seems to be coming irreparably apart.
**Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.
© 2018 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

Iran's Nobel Laureate is Done with Reform. She Wants Regime Change.
Eli Lake/Bloomberg/April, 09/18
Shirin Ebadi, Iran's Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights lawyer, has had enough. For years she represented her country's dissidents in the Republic's corrupt courts. She spoke out for the rights of women, minorities and students abroad. But she never called for the end of the regime she was fighting to reform. Until now. "Reform is useless in Iran," Ebadi told me in an interview Thursday. "The Iranian people are very dissatisfied with their current government. They have reached the point and realized this system is not reformable."
For Ebadi the means of ending Iranian tyranny should be a UN-monitored referendum on the constitution that proposes a basic change: the elimination of the unelected office of supreme leader. The Iranian people, she said, "want to change our regime, by changing our constitution to a secular constitution based on the universal declaration of human rights."
Ebadi told me she never believed Rouhani was a reformer. Nonetheless, she also said she was reluctant to call for the end of the regime, because the 1979 revolution was so traumatic. This is why she says the current uprising has no single leader. "In the course of the struggle the leaders will emerge," she told me. "When we have free elections in Iran, the leaders will show themselves."
Ebadi first made her views known in a statement published in February with 13 other dissidents and human rights advocates to call for the referendum. In her interview with me however she for the first time got more specific about what Western governments and particularly the Trump administration can do to assist the Iranian people in their struggle.
To start, she made it clear that she was not calling for a military invasion of Iran or any kind of US interference with the movement itself. "The regime change in Iran should take place inside Iran and by the people of Iran," she said. "But you can help the people of Iran reach their own goal."
To this end, Ebadi had some recommendations. The basic idea is that the West should implement sanctions that weaken the regime, but do not hurt the people themselves. For example, Ebadi says the US and European governments should sanction the Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB). This conglomerate controls the media in Iran, and also manages Iran's external foreign propaganda such as the English-language PressTV and the Arabic al-Alam.
There are few entities more deserving of censure and sanction. Inside Iran, the IRIB broadcasts a weekly television show that airs the coerced confessions of political prisoners.
Ebadi said targeting IRIB is a good way of crippling the regime's ability to attack its opponents and spread its propaganda. The concept is simple. She said no Western satellite provider should allow IRIB to broadcast its propaganda abroad.
Ebadi told me she was wary of reimposing some of the most crippling sanctions that were lifted in 2016 in the implementation of the Iran nuclear deal. The secondary sanctions on Iran's central bank, she said, benefitted figures close to the regime who made a fortune in hiding the money of regime elites. Meanwhile, average Iranians suffered hyper-inflation.
That said, Ebadi said European businesses were wise to hold off on striking deals. "They are reluctant to invest in a country with no political stability," she said. "How could you trust a government when every day in several corners of the country people are demonstrating and are unhappy?
For now Ebadi thinks it is important for the US to establish a channel to the legitimate and independent Iranian opposition. This however is trickier than it sounds.
She warned the regime had established all kinds of fake nongovernment organizations and groups overseas that appear independent, but really do the government's bidding.
One example is a group known as the Organization for Defending Victims of Violence, which has represented Iranian civil society at the annual meetings of the UN Human Rights Council. In 2011, the Center for Human Rights in Iran described it as "an NGO that in spite of its name, has not done anything during the session to defend the rights of Iranian victims of violence.
Another example Ebadi pointed to was the National Iranian American Council, or NIAC. NIAC played an important role in advocating for President Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran. Ebadi told me she regrets participating in an event with NIAC in 2011. "When I analyzed what they say and do," Ebadi said, "I realize what they say is closer to what the government says than what the people want."
Ebadi said she would support a new organization of Iranian-Americans to support her country's freedom movement -- "an organization that would be independent from the Iranian government and the US government."
Ebadi's proposals pose a real challenge for Western liberals who still hope engaging the regime will lead to reform. Ebadi has lost that hope. " People spontaneously came out onto the streets in 70 cities and called for a referendum," she said. "As a human rights defender, I have the duty of helping our people reach these goals."
That goal is a referendum to reject the rule by a supreme clerical leader. Ebadi is asking for solidarity. Will Western liberals join her?

Save Your Grandchildren, Don’t Avenge Your Ancestors
Ghassan Charbel/Asharq Al Awsat/April 09/18
On the way from San Francisco to Paris, questions hunt you no matter how hard you try to escape: When will the Arabs have a modern city which contributes to shaping their future? When will they have a vibrant city with its economy, education and services? A city that offers them a normal life, which meets their needs and respects their humanity?
In San Francisco, you feel as though the future of the world is being made here, with enormous investments, extraordinary fantasies and exceptional abilities to innovate and develop, as if the people of these giant companies were the poets of the coming days, making the impossible a reality, broadening the boundaries of mind and knowledge, and changing the economy, the people’s lives, culture, and all aspects of life on this planet.
The wars of the future are happening here with ferocity and relentlessness. The numbers are merciless. You have to succeed. And you have to win. Your failure means you are out of the race. The failure of your company entails its disintegration. It is a permanent test for the president and the subordinate. He, who masters swimming and generating new ideas, can survive the waves. There is no room for sagginess, laziness and pausing at turning points.
Army generals used to draw the fate of maps and nations. That time has gone. You are now in the hands of the Silicon Valley generals. Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and others… Do not try to evade this change by saying that you are from another world. You are part of the global village, whether you like it or not. The longer you delay your engagement in the storm of progress, the more costly the consequences are.
You have no choice but to participate. Every other option means that you become dependent on the world. You remain on the margin, your economy collapses and your cities keep aging. It is either that your country gets involved, or everything in it regresses, including universities, hospitals, the army and the postal service. You will be completely wrong if you try to take shelter under the glories of history and sleep its splendors. The winner is the one who writes the history of the future, not the past.
I am not saying that the journey is easy, and boarding the train will not lead to ruptures, but we have experiences that we can learn from. Europe has gone through the same situation that’s now happening in the Middle East: some men emerged believing to have received a firm mandate from the spirit of the nation or the depth of history… A mandate without borders that allows them to impose their color on the Continent, to uphold a nation and to violate another, to impose the rule of a certain race over other races, to spread a culture and erase others… A mandate that allows them to remove international borders, to play with maps and demographic balances, to remake cities and manipulate their role, history and present time. A mandate based on subordination or suppression of the other, where coexistence is considered an obstacle or an impossible achievement.
Europe has witnessed scenes it had never expected to see. It saw Adolf Hitler display his pride on the Champs-Elysées avenue. It has seen the Europeans scramble to be deployed on the barricades of the Spanish Civil War. It saw convoys of displaced and immigrants, burned neighborhoods, and capitals filled with fear and rubble. It has witnessed oppression, darkness and horror and the rupture of countries and families. The Old Continent was the theater that saw the spark of two world wars, but the guns were silenced in the end. From the pile of corpses and pools of blood, the Europeans had to conclude what helped to prevent the tragedy from recurring. They had to decide: either use the truce to prepare for a new war or use it to arrange conditions for coexistence. Coexistence does not eliminate differences but prohibits the use of war as a means of resolving them.
Europe has seen all sorts of wars in the past centuries. It has experienced the wars of roles and control. It also went through religious and sectarian wars. It saw the wars of uprooting and erasing features. Following the horrors of two world wars, Europe understood that the future cannot be built with stones of the past. If you succumbed to the logic of open revenge, the French-German blood waterfall would still be pouring. If the memory of the French and British vessels were still being traded, artillery would still be exchanged, stamped with sailors’ blood.
Europe was soaked in blood, tears and rubble… A mass of ​​widows, orphans and people with no source of living... Damaged cities and devastated economies… One of the harshest feelings was that Europe did not learn from the lessons of World War I and fell into hell again. Politicians, diplomats and writers had to make a choice at the turning point. The Europeans chose to distance themselves from the path that gave rise to the disaster. They chose stability, reconstruction and coexistence on the Continent and within their countries. Although the Continent was partitioned by the world of the two camps, the Europeans did not allow themselves to slip into a war that this time could have destroyed the world, not only Europe.
Europe has developed the choice of stability to find prosperity. It has turned the walls of international borders into gates for the passage of people, goods and ideas. Ideas for the search for economic exchange, political coordination and cooperation in the face of challenges. Hence, your neighbor is no longer your enemy, he is your partner, with whom you discuss the expansion of common areas, not rushing the dates of divorce. Competition replaced fighting, cooperation replaced discord, and the differences were settled under the umbrella of concern for stability and aspiration to prosperity. Reasonable policies have replaced reckless strategies. People with practical minds have taken the place of those selling illusions.
The only solution is to be part of the world that is heading towards the future… to learn, train and adapt, to free hands and imaginations, and to enable your countrymen to benefit from the rewards of great technological developments to improve your economy, maintain your stability, and create conditions for your prosperity… to engage, attract expertise and training, and provide the right environment for investors and tourists alike. The only solution is to have a plan, to bet on the abilities of the younger generations, and to get them out of the wars of ancient history and the road to slow destruction.
Do not try to escape the challenges by resorting to the caves of history. Others have a history that matches or surpasses yours. If they had chosen to surrender to the past, Vienna would not have been Vienna, Berlin would not have become Berlin, Paris would not have been Paris… Belonging to the future saves your history from extinction. It turns your history into the fuel for the locomotive of progress. Do not delay or hesitate. It is your battle. Your duty is to save your grandchildren not to avenge your ancestors.

Spies Tracking Our Phones? Don't Be So Shocked
Stephen Carter/Bloomberg View/April 09, 2018/
The press has been in a lather of late over reports that the Department of Homeland Security had discovered evidence that cellphone tracking tools were being used by “unauthorized” parties in and around Washington.
Formally known as International Mobile Subscriber Identity catchers, and often called stingrays, these devices fool your phone’s baseband into believing it is in contact with a cell tower. IMSI catchers can use your phone’s signal to track your movements and contacts. In some cases they might persuade your phone to turn off its encryption. It’s a powerful, scary technology. Scarier still, federal officials admit that although they can detect the devices, they can’t find them. Still, here are three reasons that the excitement over the news from Washington is a little overdone.
In the first place, the use of IMSI catchers by unauthorized parties isn’t news. Privacy advocates have long fought to reduce reliance on the devices by law enforcement, on the ground that they sweep up too much data from those suspected of nothing. But techies have been warning for years that stingrays could be used by criminals and foreign governments. A 2014 article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology was succinct: “Hostile foreign intelligence services can and, almost certainly, are using the technology in this country for espionage.”
In other words, the concern that’s suddenly making headlines has been around for a while -- so long that entrepreneurs have been developing tools to help us detect their presence. Remember that IMSI-catchers trap mobile phone signals by mimicking cell towers. One means for uncovering stingrays, then, is to use algorithms that identify what would seem to be towers except that they switch frequency too often or actually change location. Last year, researchers at the University of Washington announced that they had used exactly these techniques to uncover hidden IMSI catchers in and around Seattle.
All of which is to say that although it’s useful to have longstanding suspicions confirmed, the widespread use of stingrays, with or without authorization, should hardly be considered newsworthy.
In the second place, to borrow from John le Carré, spying is eternal. We shouldn’t profess such surprise that foreign powers try to use against us the same tools we would use against them if we didn’t have anything better. Americans are always shocked to learn that we’re not invulnerable to espionage. But spying is tit for tat, and the phones to which we as a nation seem addicted are a natural and tempting target. For our own convenience, we constantly send vulnerable packets of data into the ether. We should hardly be surprised that foreign governments (or whoever the unauthorized users are) yield to the temptation to study what we so casually broadcast.
But in the third place, we should never allow ourselves to forget that lots of people who don’t happen to be spies are already spying on us. Like our cellphone carriers. Like just about every website we visit. (Although not all to the same extent. A 2016 Princeton University study of the 1 million most visited sites found that news sites tend to be the most intrusive, and sites maintained by government and educational institutions the least.) True, the data most sites collect is formally anonymous, but de-anonymizing might not be all that hard, particularly with social media. In a 2017 paper, researchers from Stanford and Princeton universities showed how, given 30 anonymized links originating from Twitter Inc., they could deduce the underlying Twitter account with 50 percent accuracy.
And that’s before we even get to Facebook Inc. Now, I have zero interest in kicking a good company when it’s down, so let me start out by saying that users who are howling about their (anonymyized) data falling into the wrong hands may not have spent much time perusing Facebook’s terms of service. The challenge for the privacy-conscious user isn’t third parties; the challenge is Facebook itself, which exists not to connect you with friends but to package data about your online activities and use it to sell targeted advertising. Happily, the company has recently translated the list of what it admittedly collects about its users from legalese into something approaching English, and anybody with an account (all 2 billion-plus of us) should take a gander at the remarkable result.
It’s natural that we worry about digital privacy -- and we do worry about it, apparently a lot -- but we need to stop acting like babes in the woods. We can’t go squalling for our parents whenever some new set of prying eyes sets its sights on our data. Not when we allow all sorts of corporate strangers to rummage through our digital lives, and rarely raise a peep.