RUTHFULLY YOURS

[Notes by Tom Gross]

The attack in front of a bar in the center of the Bavarian town of Ansbach last night appears to be Germany’s first suicide bomb. It was the fourth terror attack in Germany within a week and the second just yesterday. Both yesterday’s attacks were carried out by Syrian refugees.

The other attacks in Germany during the last week were carried out on random civilians by a 17-year old axe-wielding Afghan migrant who hacked passengers on a train, and who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, and by an Iranian-German who it seems was not an Islamist, but German police now say had an Afghan accomplice whom they have arrested.

We do know now, however, that the train attacker last week and the machete attacker yesterday afternoon (who killed a pregnant woman in the street and injured several other people) were both self-confessed Islamists, as was the Tunisian who carried out the Nice attack on July 14 and was aided by four accomplices.

Despite the efforts of letter writers in The Guardian and elsewhere to claim it might have been a random spontaneous attack the French authorities also say CCTV video footage shows the Bastille Day terrorist, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, made 12 separate reconnaissance trips along the Nice seafront in his lorry before the massacre.

Having searched his apartment, French investigators say the Nice attack was a carefully orchestrated Islamic attack planned for up to a year.

Yesterday morning my friend Jonathan Spyer wrote the following on Facebook. I was going to send it out yesterday with the proviso that it might be slightly exaggerated. Now I’m not sure it is.

“To reiterate what I have said a number of times before: what is taking place in Western Europe is best understood as a (still relatively small-scale) Islamist insurgency. Once this reality is internalized, resources and assets in the policy, political and intelligence fields can begin to be properly mobilized to combat the insurgency. Failure by the current political elites to draw the correct conclusions at this stage is likely to lead to the growth of alternative elites willing to do so. These will not necessarily come from the liberal or democratic parts of the European tradition.”

Another commentator accused of exaggeration is Melanie Phillips. Last time I had lunch with Melanie in London, I told her that I had perhaps been wrong to say at the end of my review of her book “Londonistan” in 2006 (for the New York Post) that “she occasionally overstates her case.” No, she corrected me, “I greatly understated it.”

(I also reviewed in 2005 Bat Ye’or’s “Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis” – who like Phillips was pilloried for providing warnings which many people in retrospect would say had much credence to them.)

Regarding the Munich shopping mall killer, the BBC reported “His name has not been officially released but he is being named locally as David Sonboly.”

In fact, the first name of this Iranian-German perpetrator is Ali.

After a wave of criticism of the BBC on social media, the BBC altered their report to let people know his first name was Ali.

Among some of the online mockery was this comment: “Is this a new thing where everyone from now on will be known by their middle names? Great. So it’ll be ‘Jefferson Clinton,’ ‘Vissarionovich Stalin,’ ‘Hussein Obama.’ oh, no, wait, not that last one.”

Update: In recent minutes, I have heard the BBC Radio 4 flagship Today program news reader again omit his first name Ali, and call him David.

There has also been a wave of attacks by Islamists shouting “Allah Akbar” using knives, axes, guns and vehicles to kill and injure civilians in Israel, including several children, in recent weeks.

But after the Nice attack, CNN listed terrorist attacks committed over the past 30 days. It cited attacks in Chad, France, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon, Malaysia, Turkey, Kenya, Bangladesh, Iraq and Indonesia – but omitted Israel.

CNN has now changed this on its website following criticism. I also corresponded by email about this with a senior executive at CNN who subscribes to this list who took steps to see that an online correction was made.

After the Nice truck attack, Agence France-Presse reported that car ramming had transformed vehicles into “weapons of terror” in attacks in Britain and Canada.

But AFP made no mention of Israel, where since last September there have been over 40 such vehicular terroristic attacks.

In a separate case, French police have discovered explosives and an ISIS image at home of a Parisian taxi driver after they raided his apartment following a tip-off.

Former U.S. congresswoman for the Democrat party Cynthia McKinney has approvingly publicized a video claiming to “prove” Israel was responsible for the Nice and Munich attacks on the basis that a German photographer, who was supposedly at both scenes, is married to former Israeli Labour party Knesset member Einat Wilf.

“There’s no way it’s a coincidence,” the video alleges. It says that it is “100% clear that Israel’s fingerprints are all over these events… Nice is a false flag and Munich is either a false flag or a hoax.”

84 people were murdered in Nice and nine young people were murdered in the Munich shopping mall, (including French Jews who died in the Nice attack that McKinney appears to think Israel killed).

In fact Richard Gutjahr, the German news reporter married to Wilf, only covered one of the attacks in his role as a journalist. Einat Wilf (who I know) tells me her husband is not Jewish, nor Israeli.

McKinney, former a Democrat member of the US House of Representatives in the state of Georgia, posted a message: “Same Israeli photographer captures Nice and Munich tragedies. How likely is that? Remember the Dancing Israelis?”

The reference to “Dancing Israelis” refers to the false anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that five Israelis were arrested in New Jersey on September 11, 2001, after supposedly being seen celebrating the 9/11 attacks which they had supposedly been involved with.

In another past tweet, McKinney wrote “why were they [the imaginary Israelis] dancing in the park as Americans were dying? Why were they in the park in the first place?”

Speaking in a House of Lords debate a few days ago, Baroness Jenny Tonge, the (left-wing) Liberal Democrat British politician — who was promoted to the House of Lords by her then party leader — claimed Israel is a “major cause” of the rise of Islamist terrorism and Isis. She accused Israel of creating a “generation of terrorists [in Europe] with a justified grudge”.

In fact, almost none of the terrorists in Europe in recent years have mentioned Israel or the Palestinians in their Islamist reasoning.

Fascists in the 1920s and 1930s also blamed the Jews for all that was supposedly going wrong in Europe.

The London-based Campaign Against Anti-Semitism called for Tonge to be expelled from the Lib Dems and parliament following her remarks in the Lords last week:

“Having previously suggested an investigation into supposed Israeli organ harvesting which is the modern-day incarnation of the mediaeval anti-Semitic blood libel, she is now… effectively [blaming Jews for] the terrorism that is carried out around the world.”

In the past Tonge, who was a medical doctor before becoming a politician, has said she would consider becoming a suicide bomber herself.

After that remark, the BBC decided to invite her on TV and radio more often to air her anti-Israeli views.

In the past Tonge has written letters to The Guardian criticizing me, for example, here.

Meanwhile, if the West wants to try and stop a further wave of refugees from Syria, they need (as I have argued consistently since the conflict began) to forcibly put into place a policy of stopping the Assad regime and providing a safe area for civilians by creating a no fly zone.

The killing in Syria of civilians in recent days by the Assad regime and its Iranian and Hizbullah allies has reached unprecedented levels, although it is barely being reported in the west.

As I have repeatedly said, there is not much point in attacking only the Islamic state when the vast bulk of the killing is being perpetrated by the Assad regime and the vast majority of refugees are feeling Assad, not the Islamic state.

A little humor…

Other past dispatches can be read here.