RUTHFULLY YOURS

A Russian jet fighter conducted what the Pentagon described as an “unsafe,” close-range intercept of a U.S. Navy surveillance aircraft in international airspace over the Black Sea Wednesday, at one point closing to within 10 feet, U.S. officials said.

The maneuver came amid growing Washington-Moscow tensions over talks in Syria, a cease-fire in Ukraine and mountingU.S. concern that Russian hackers are targeting U.S. electoral systems.

Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said the intercept lasted about 19 minutes and described it as a potentially dangerous maneuver.

“These actions have the potential to unnecessarily escalate tensions, and could result in a miscalculation or accident,” Capt. Davis said.

A U.S. defense official said the Russian Su-27 maintained a 30-foot distance from the U.S. P-8A Poseidon aircraft before closing to within 10 feet, a perilously close brush.

‘Never forget” is the commitment the American people made after Sept. 11, 2001. Yet sometimes our leaders seem to have forgotten Iran’s role in that worst terror attack on American soil, and Iran’s continuing assistance to terror organizations and operations around the world.
In the last 15 years, aggressive U.S.-led military and intelligence operations have killed many of al Qaeda’s leaders and damaged the group’s ability to plan and execute a similar attack. But a key al Qaeda partner, Iran, has never been held responsible for its enabling role—even though the 9/11 Commission found that “there is strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were future 9/11 hijackers.”

The State Department says Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. What is not adequately understood, however, is the regime’s willingness to work with extremists of the Sunni sect in the Arab world and elsewhere—even though it views itself as the vanguard of the world’s Shiite community. Iran is aiding both Sunni and Shiite terror organizations—including Sunni Hamas and Sunni Islamic Jihad, and Shiite Hezbollah and Shiite Iraqi militias.

Iran’s link to al Qaeda goes back to Sudan in the early 1990s, when Osama bin Laden lived in the nation’s capital, Khartoum. The Sudanese religious scholar Ahmed Abdel Rahman Hamadabi brought Sheikh Nomani, an emissary of Iran, to meet bin Laden and the nascent al Qaeda leadership. According to an account by scholar Rohan Gunaratna, Sheikh Nomani “had access to the highest echelons of power in Tehran.”

As a result of these consultations, the Washington Institute’s Matthew Levitt and Michael Jacobson concluded, “Iran and al-Qaeda reached an informal agreement to cooperate, with Iran providing critical explosives, intelligence, and security training to bin Laden’s organization.” Because Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) already supported Hezbollah operationally and financially, a vehicle was in place through which they could support and influence al Qaeda.

Operating through Hezbollah gave Iran immense freedom to funnel money and weaponry and to train al Qaeda operatives in deadly tactics that would be employed around the world, including against the U.S. The coordinated 1998 truck bombings targeting the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were a direct result of the Iranian terror training, according to a finding by Judge John D. Bates of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in the 2011 case of James Owens et al. v. Republic of Sudan et al.

After 9/11, Iran became a more important haven for al Qaeda fighters who fled from Afghanistan as the Taliban collapsed. Iran claimed that these terrorists were under “house arrest.” In reality, Iran regularly granted the terrorists freedom to move within Iran and to cross into Iraq and Afghanistan to carry out attacks. From their safe base in Iran, al Qaeda members planned terrorist operations, including the 2003 attack in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia that killed 26 people, including eight Americans, and the 2008 attack on the American Embassy in Yemen that claimed 16 lives, including six terrorists. CONTINUE AT SITE

The offensive references to women, who are depicted as witches and demons in Palestinian school textbooks, should not come as a surprise. Recently, it was revealed here that several Palestinian lists contesting the October 8 local elections have replaced the names and photos of their female candidates with images of roses and pigeons.

“This is completely unacceptable because it presents women as the cause for all disputes and evil in Palestinian society.” — Lubna Al-Ashkar of the Women’s Technical Affairs Committee.

“This will create a negative image of women in the midst of our children — one that will be difficult to change in the future.” — Amal Khraisheh, chairwoman of the Palestinian Working Woman Society.

It is true that women as witches is a novel defamation for President Mahmoud Abbas and his crew. Yet Palestinian Authority defamation of others, including Israel, is far from new. This is stuff fed to Palestinian schoolchildren: lies about history, lies about geography, and now lies about Palestinian women.

Palestinian schoolchildren who returned to their schools last week are being taught that women are witches and Tel Aviv is an Arab city. They are also being exposed to maps that ignore Israel’s existence.

Despite all Palestinian Authority (PA) claims to the contrary, then, the new textbooks hardly promote peace and coexistence between Palestinians and Israel.

A new school curriculum published by the PA last week has drawn sharp criticism from many Palestinians, who say the textbooks demonize women and contain “factual and historical” errors.

The controversial version of the curriculum for grades 1-4 was launched by PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah during a ceremony in Ramallah, on the eve of beginning of the new school year.

Within hours, Palestinians, particularly female activists, voiced resentment over the new curriculum and called on the PA leadership to remove it immediately. Some Palestinians denounced the curriculum, which was drafted by a team of Palestinian educational experts, as a “scandal” and a “distortion of facts.” They said that a curriculum full of errors and “distortions of facts” was a guaranteed recipe for raising a new generation of illiterate and misinformed Palestinians.

Incitement to murder Jews was described by the French press as “mild mannered”.

In 2014, supposed anti-Israel protesters attacked a Paris synagogue and trapped the congregants inside. The attackers’ chants apparently included “Death to the Jews,” “Murderous Israel,” and “One Jew, Some Jews, All Jews are Terrorists.”

The terrorist attacks on Jews in France are the culmination of years of Jew-hatred tolerated with little official criticism.

With ISIS and Hamas banners and flags flying, groups in Paris pledged the genocide of the Jews with impunity. When chants of “Death to the Jews,” ring out publicly, is it surprising that people might actually begin to think that killing Jews is just fine?

During the past 15 years, it is estimated that tens of thousands of Jews have fled France.

Of these, approximately 40,000 have fled to Israel, according to Israeli figures. Many thousands of others have fled to Canada, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. France is increasingly becoming a nation in which it is no longer safe to be openly Jewish.

To explain why so many Jews are leaving Europe, it helps to understand the increasingly toxic context developing in France for Jews.

Synagogues and Jewish schools across France are regularly guarded by police officers and soldiers. Jews in Europe see their holy sites and places of worship under threat.

In December 2015, 14 Jews were poisoned by a toxic substance which had been smeared on to the keypad to access a Paris synagogue. No one was killed by the poison, but “25 firemen rushed to the synagogue, where they treated congregants and traced their condition to the daubed lock.”

At this fraught time in the history of Islamist radicalism, extremism and terrorism, it is important that Canadian authorities — especially the police and security services — not inadvertently confer legitimacy and credibility on organizations and individuals whose histories and associations raise legitimate questions about their ideological background, links and agendas.

According to a US court, “The Government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA and NAIT with HLF, the Islamic Association for Palestine (“IAP”), and with Hamas.” Under Canadian and US law, Hamas is a designated terrorist organization.

In July 2013, CAIR-CAN announced its change of name to the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM), some specialists regarding this as a way of masking the connection to CAIR or to its history as part of CAIR

Like its American mother organization, NCCM/CAIR-CAN has on occasion been thought to embrace a victimhood narrative that risks alienating Muslims in general — and Muslim youth, in particular — from their non-Muslim fellow citizens. The propagating of the word “Islamophobia” has been regarded as especially unhelpful, and condemned by some as a means of silencing Muslims and non-Muslims who would warn of the growing hazards of Islamist radicalism, extremism and terrorism.

At this fraught time in the history of Islamist radicalism, extremism and terrorism, it is important that Canadian public authorities — especially the police and security services — not inadvertently confer legitimacy and credibility on organizations and individuals whose histories and associations raise legitimate questions about their ideological background, links and agendas.

One way in which authorities unintentionally assist in building the credibility of undeserving groups and individuals is by sponsoring and attending meetings and events involving such persons and organizations. It is therefore important for those in positions of authority to acquit themselves properly of their responsibility to meet due diligence obligations, when it comes to screening those involved in such events.

In an important report issued yesterday, the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington, D.C. arms-control think tank, revealed that Iran was secretly granted exemptions to the July 2015 nuclear agreement (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA) so it could meet compliance requirements for what the agreement calls “Implementation Day” – when Iran was to receive an estimated $150 billion in sanctions relief.

Not coincidentally, the same day Implementation Day was announced (January 18), U.S. officials also announced a swap of 18 Iranian prisoners held by the United States for five U.S. citizens who had been illegally held by Iran. An additional 14 Iranians were removed from an INTERPOL wanted list.

The Institute report cites an unnamed official who said that without these exemptions, some of Iran’s nuclear facilities would not have been in compliance with the JCPOA by Implementation Day.

The exemptions were granted by the JCPOA’s “Joint Commission,” composed of the parties to the agreement: Iran, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, China, and Russia. Some of the exemptions were significant and allowed Iran to not report activities with nuclear weapons-related applications. These exemptions were:

Allowing Iran to violate a cap of 300 kg for its enriched-uranium stockpile under certain circumstances. The Commission gave Iran an exemption for reactor-grade enriched UF6 (uranium hexafluoride, the feed material for enrichment centrifuges) in the form of low-level and sludge waste. This may have been a minor violation although the report said the amount of this material is unknown.

Ignoring “lab contaminant” UF6 enriched to 20 percent uranium-235 judged as “unrecoverable.” Although this may also be a minor violation, the report says the amount of this material and how it was judged unrecoverable is not known.

Exemption for large “hot cells.” The JCPOA allows Iran to operate or build hot cells (shielded chambers used to handle radioactive substances), but to ensure they are used for peaceful purposes such as producing medical radionuclides, Iran agreed that for 15 years these cells will be limited to no more than six cubic meters. The Commission gave Iran an exemption to operate 22 larger hot cells. According to the Institute report, these larger cells could be secretly misused for plutonium-separation experiments. The Institute also raised concerns that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is not adequately monitoring Iran’s hot cells and that Iran is exploiting this exemption to win approval to operate more hot cells with volumes greater than six cubic meters. This is a potentially serious exemption because plutonium-separation experiments have only one purpose: developing the capability to produce plutonium nuclear-weapons fuel. The report also noted two other secret decisions by the Joint Commission.

The fifteen years following September 11, 2001, demonstrate that the free world is still struggling to understand the various jihadist threats that achieved such global notoriety in this day’s mother of all terrorist attacks. Yet slowly but surely citizens are comprehending centuries-old Islamic ideologies that are once again assaulting free societies, a sign of hope after years of policy mistakes and politically correct “Islamophobia” taboos..

Al Qaeda’s hijackings in this black September awoke wrenched America from a halcyon “holiday from history” derided by many like former CIA Director James Woolsey. While many who have come of age since 9/11 condemn an ensuing “endless war,” he complained that his commander-in-chief, President William Clinton, payed little attention to national security. Yet his notorious playboy manners inside and outside of the Oval Office seemed to befit the relative peace and prosperity of the long decade from the Berlin Wall’s fall on 11/9/1989 to 9/11/2001.

Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, was thankfully made of sterner stuff for what would soon be sterner times, but history would pass critical judgment upon his neo-Wilsonian strategies for dealing with the Islamic world’s various dangers. Perhaps giddy with American “hyperpower” in a historic “unipolor moment,” this evangelical Texan sought to replicate Republican icon Ronald Reagan, whose Cold War defeat of Communism liberated millions. Efforts to extend a Kantian zone of peace would attract supposedly huddling Muslim masses yearning to breathe free away from the poverty and perils of dictatorships and religious fanaticism.

Costly expenditures of blood and treasure in Afghanistan and Iraq with little result dashed any hope of these countries celebrating Francis Fukuyama’s End of History. His often misunderstood and maligned thesis rightfully noted that free societies had proven their superiority in good governance over all ideological competitors like Communism. Yet as his own reservations about the Iraq war indicated, many Muslims presently eschew such empirical evidence in favor of faith-based adherence to various sharia-supremacist illiberal beliefs.

Although Bush’s experience seemed to influence little President Barack Obama’s disastrous Libyan humanitarian intervention that left behind a jihadist-dominated country, his disengagement policies often personified an anti-Bush. Obama’s Vice President Joe Biden incongruously declared Iraq an Obama Administration success before Obama’s troop withdrawal helped unravel a dearly-won tenuous peace there. Meanwhile his lesson from Bush’s Iraq war of “don’t do stupid s-t” hardly produced any discernibly better results as Iraq’s neighbor Syria broke apart in a bloody regional war between Shiites and Sunnis. Most importantly, Obama’s enablement of Iran’s power and nuclear ambitions is only strengthening the Middle East’s most dangerous jihadist state.

Israeli researchers: Notes from USSR archivist who defected indicate PA president was working for Soviets in Damascus in 1980s while Putin’s current Mideast envoy was stationed there

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was a Soviet spy in Damascus in the 1980s, Israel’s Channel 1 television reported Wednesday, citing information it said was included in an archive smuggled out of the USSR.

According to Channel 1’s foreign news editor Oren Nahari, the famed Mitrokhin archive, kept by KGB defector Vasily Mitrokhin, revealed that Abbas was a Soviet mole in Damascus in 1983.The documents — obtained by Israeli researchers Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez — purportedly show that Abbas, code-named Krotov (mole), was involved with the Soviets while Mikhail Bogdanov, today Vladimir Putin’s envoy to the Middle East. was stationed in Damascus.

Bogdanov was caught in a diplomatic tussle earlier this week after trying to broker a summit between Abbas and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Moscow, who both claimed a willingness to meet while decrying the other for allegedly refusing.

Mitrokhin was a senior KGB archivist who defected to the UK in 1992, and his edited notes on various KGB operations were released in 2014. His handwritten notes remain classified by MI5.

The archivist’s notes on the KGB are considered among the most complete information available on Soviet intelligence operations. He claimed that the KGB recruited the then head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Wadi Haddad, as an agent in the 1970s.

His writings also revealed that Haddad, operating under the code name NATSIONALIST, was given Soviet assistance in funding and arming the PFLP.

The canonical definition of the Yiddish word chutzpah involves a man who murders his parents and then asks for clemency because he is an orphan. An unprecedented degree of chutzpah informs the machinations of radical Muslims, who engineer humanitarian disasters and then demand that the West intervene to save them. In his recent book Mission Failure, Prof. Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins University points to the first instance of this tactic: the Kosovo Liberation Army persuaded Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright to make war on the Serbs by provoking them into killing a hundred or two civilians.

Most of Clinton’s cabinet didn’t want to support the KLA, which made its money in narcotics and human trafficking, and they didn’t want to divide the sovereign state of Serbia—a precedent that Russia later used to justify its seizure of the Crimea. Nonetheless the moral blackmail succeeded, and Muslim radicals learned how to push the guilt button of the West.

My review-essay on Mandelbaum’s book appears in the Summer 2016 issue of Claremont Review of Books. Although I find much to disagree with, his reading of the salient events is incisive. His argument intersects with my warning just after the 9/11 attacks that radical Islam intended to horrify the West—not only by committing atrocities against Western civilians, but by causing massive civilian casualties among Muslims.

To a great extent they have succeeded. The fragile conscience of the Germans could not bear the suffering of Syrian refugees streamed towards its border with the connivance of Turkey. As Giulio Meotti reported for the Gatestone Institute, the refugee invasion will radically alter Europe’s demographic balance.

Hamas fought the Gaza War in order to maximize civilian casualties among its own population, and thereby entice the West into forcing Israel to withdraw from the West Bank, where short-range rockets could devastate the national airport as well as Tel Aviv. This has not succeeded—yet—because Americans support Israel over the Palestinians by a 4:1 margin. But Palestinian leaders are patient; as the Palestinian journalist Mohammed Daraghmeh wrote (translate by the Times of Israel), the war with Israel “will end only when the world understands it has a duty to intervene and to draw borders and lines, as it did in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in Kosovo.”

This macabre pantomime should be transparent, but such is the squeamishness of the West that enlightened opinion shudders at the prospect of more dead Palestinian civilians. The world forgets that the Allies killed 1 million German civilians and between a quarter and half a million Japanese, mostly through aerial bombardments. This sacrifice was justified by the need to destroy wicked governments that killed tens of millions of civilians in Europe and Asia. States have the right to defend themselves against artillery attacks. Israel’s right of self-defense is generally acknowledged, but with the caveat the self-defense should be “proportionate,” that is, ineffective.

Frequently the “proportionality” canard is linked to a demand for Israeli concessions that have nothing to do with the issue at hand. Oxford University theologian Nigel Biggar for example writes in the Summer 2016 issue of the Christian strategy journal Providence: “It was within Israel’s power to take diplomatic, confidence-building initiatives. Uniterally, she could have stopped and reversed the illegal settlements in the West Bank. Since she didn’t do so, her military assaults on Gaza were inapt and therefore disproportionate.” Prof. Biggar forgets that Israel’s unilateral “confidence-building” withdrawal from Gaza put Hamas rockets on its borders. Logic is beside the point. The West is horrified and wants the horror to stop, and that is just what Hamas counts on.

Worse is yet to come. On Israel’s northern border, Hezbollah now has 150,000 rockets, by far the largest such inventory in the world, including many precision-guided missiles which can be programmed for evasive flight paths and are more difficult to shoot down with the Iron Dome air defense system, as I warned two years ago. Many of these are emplaced in civilian homes in the Shi’ite towns of southern Lebanon. To destroy them would entail civilian casualties one or two orders of magnitude greater than the collateral damage in Gaza.