RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last week, two Syrian government Su-24 airplanes bombed the Kurdish-held areas of the city of Hasakah. The attack was unexpected.

The Kurds have operated semi-autonomously in Syria because their pressure on ISIS has been helpful to Damascus, and because the Kurdish agenda has been primarily regional autonomy rather than deposing Assad. U.S. Special Forces on the ground assisting the Kurds were in the range of fire, prompting a warning to Russia and Syria from the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria.

It was unexpected, too, because Russian President Vladimir Putin had previously demonstrated strong support for Kurdish interests. Even before the decline in Russian-Turkish relations when Turkey shot down a Russian Sukhoi jet, Putin went out of his way to praise the Kurds and indicate Russian support for them. The Russians allowed the Kurdish administration in Syria to open an office in Moscow, signaling that Kurdish interests would be included in any settlement of the civil war.

Turkey, naturally, sees all Kurdish military activity as threatening, and found both Syrian and Russian – not to mention American – support for or “hands off” attitude toward the Kurds as a continuing aggravation. To change the dynamic, Turkish President Erdogan’s rapprochement with Israel included an apology to Russia. Erdogan then visited Moscow, leading some commentators to seize on the Hasakah bombing as evidence that Turkey and Russia have made a deal at the expense of the Kurds.

How do the Syrian, Russian, Kurdish, Turkish and American positions intersect?

The Syrian attack on Hasakah wasn’t in independent effort. It needed Russian backing because five separate Kurdish positions were targeted. Surveillance of sites so far north in the country would have needed airborne assets and satellites; the Syrian air force has neither, but Russia does. Notably, although U.S forces were in the area, they were not directly targeted; as far back as February the U.S. had provided Russia with information about the location of American forces.

Furthermore, the attack on Hasakah had almost no military significance for the Assad regime. Syrian forces were located far from the targets, and there is no tactical military benefit to Syria from flying a mission against a town that is firmly in Kurdish control. Other motives for the bombings, which killed a large number of civilians, might have been an overture by Russia to Turkey. Or a warning from Russia to the United States. Or a mistake by Russia.

Daniel Greenfield comments on how the authorities (East, West, South, and North) engage in tongue-twisting, mental gymnastics to avoid “offending” the Islamic Ummah by ascribing the latest stabbing, rape, or murder by a member of the Muslim flock to “mental illness” or lack of employment opportunities, and other external drivers. The Press complies with the explanations also for fear of raising the lice-ridden hackles of Muslims. The latest episode from Australia.

The media is describing the Muslim terrorist as a French man. Because if it’s anything the French are known for, it’s shouting “Allahu Akbar”. and stabbing random non-Muslims.

A French national allegedly shouted “Allahu akbar” during and after a stabbing attack that left a British woman dead and another Briton fighting for his life at a backpackers hostel outside of Townsville last night.

Possible extremist motivations for the attack are now being investigated by Queensland Police and the Australian Federal Police, with the man yet to be questioned by investigators.

Queensland Police Service Deputy Commissioner Steve Gollschewski said the 29 -year-old French man shouted the phrase following the attack at the hostel at Home Hill, south of Townsville, but police had not determined whether the incident was terror related.

Who knows? Maybe the “French” stabber was expressing his Francophonic distaste of Brits by shouting Allahu Akbar.

“While this information will be factored into the investigation, we are not ruling out any motivations at this stage, whether they be political or criminal,” he told reporters in Brisbane.

“Investigators will also consider whether mental health or drug misuse factors are involved in this incident.”

Many stones will not be overturned in the search for a motive, particularly those marked with the telltale symbol of “Islam.” We don’t want to offend Muslims by blaming Islam for horrendous crimes randomly committed by a “radicalized” Muslim. “Allahu Akbar” just might be his misspoken utterance of “I’m a little teapot!” and the fellow had a speech impediment that aggravated his emotional outbreak!

So, heads are being scratched in Australia – call it a kind of infectious, epistemological psoriasis – in France, Britain, Germany, and in the U.S. because, you see, anyone shouting “Allahu Akbar” as he stabs away at a “random non-Muslim” cannot be said to be a jihadi or an “immigrant” or a “refugee.” That would be a defamation of the man’s character, and would come automatically under the rubric of “hate speech” and/or “Islamophobia,” which is by PC definition a “crime.” But if the evidence is overwhelming concerning his “motivation” and individuals refuse to grant it any role in the crime, who is the actual mentally ill person? Or is he a kind of mental doppelganger of the criminal?

The mental illness being reported has two classes of the afflicted: Muslims, who are by definition mentally ill (who else but someone not in his right mind would exalt a killer, rapist, bandit, all in the name of AllahWall – Wallah for short – as a moral ideal, and expect everyone else to acknowledge and defer to the sanity of the insanity, or else), and the Mainstream Media (MSM) or the Massagers of the Seven Mongoloids.

On Sunday afternoon, as residents of southern Israel were enjoying the last days of summer before the start of the school year, a Qassam rocket struck a yard in Sderot. Miraculously, nobody was hurt.

Though the attack was not perpetrated by Hamas specifically, Israel made good on its oft-repeated promise to hold the organization that rules the Gaza Strip responsible for any terrorist activity aimed at the Jewish state from its territory.

This was among the first tests put to Israel’s new defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who recently announced the implementation of a “carrot-and-stick” policy toward the Palestinians.

Lieberman did not disappoint. Throughout Sunday night, the IDF bombarded terrorist targets in Gaza. It was, according to Israeli families living near the border, the largest military sortie since Operation Protective Edge two years ago.

The terrorist attack and retaliation took place two days after the Turkish parliament ratified the rapprochement agreement with Israel reached in June. Six years ago, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a Hamas loyalist, sparked the diplomatic schism that ostensibly is being overturned now.

Yet, even as Jerusalem and Ankara began to prepare for the exchange of ambassadors, Erdogan’s Foreign Ministry ripped into Israel, “strongly condemning” its “disproportionate attacks, unacceptable whatever prompted them.”

Leading Canadian politicians have been proclaiming that, despite what former prime minister Stephen Harper contended, Islamic extremism is rare or nonexistent in Canada’s mosques, and that to believe otherwise is racist or Islamophobic. On the other hand, an investigation by two experts finds that in some Canadian mosques and school libraries, extremist Islamic literature is the only brand available.

That is the contention of “The Lovers of Death”? Islamist Extremism in Our Mosques, Schools and Libraries, a recent study by Thomas Quiggin, formerly an intelligence analyst with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Privy Council Office. Quiggin is also a court-qualified expert on the structure of jihadist terrorism. Co-author Saied Shoaaib, a journalist originally from Egypt, has written extensively on Islamic extremism in the Middle East and in Canada.

“It is not the presence of extremist literature in the mosque libraries that is worrisome,” the new report contends. “The problem is that there was nothing but extremist literature in the mosque libraries.”

Examples include In the Shade of the Qur’an and Milestones by Sayyid Qutb, an author al-Qaida leaders found inspirational, as Lawrence Wright noted in The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Quiggin and Shoaaib also found prevalent the complete works of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, perhaps the most extremist form of Islam, heavily promoted by Saudi Arabia.

This type of material, the authors argue, has eclipsed Canadian Muslims with humanist and modernist outlooks. At certain mosques in Montreal and Toronto, authors Quiggin and Shoaaib found statements that promoted jihad and homophobia. Likewise, Canada’s CIJ news found that some Islamic private schools in Canada use textbooks produced by the Saudi Ministry of Education. In two textbooks homosexuality is depicted as “one of the most heinous sins” and punishable by death.