RUTHFULLY YOURS

On August 20, a suicide bomber detonated his explosive vest at a wedding ceremony attended by supporters of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, or HDP. The blast occurred in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep near the restive Syrian border and claimed the lives of at least 54. The death toll will likely rise given that many of those wounded in the bombing were in critical condition. Nearly half of those killed were under the age of 14. The bomber is believed to be a boy between the ages of 12 and 14. Turkish officials initially blamed their traditional nemesis, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK but now believe that the bomber was affiliated with ISIS.

Turkey, led by its increasingly unbalanced and unhinged president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is a nation teetering on the brink. The country has been wracked by a pandemic of bombings and shootings principally carried out by the PKK, which generally targets the military and security forces, and ISIS, which deliberately seeks out soft targets and aims to maximize civilian carnage. The wedding bombing is typical of its modus operandi.

Last week, the PKK carried out a string of bombings in eastern and southeastern Turkey killing at least 14 and injuring more than 200. The attacks were directed at Turkish military and police forces but civilians were counted among the dead and injured. Under Erdogan’s direction, Turkey is currently waging a vicious counter-insurgency campaign against the guerillas who are seeking greater autonomy. Human rights groups have accused both sides of human rights abuses.

In June, ISIS terrorists attacked Istanbul’s Ataturk airport with bombs and AK-47 assault rifles killing at least 36. ISIS terrorists were responsible for at least two other bombings in Turkey this year that claimed the lives of several foreign nationals including Germans, Israelis and a Peruvian.

On July 15, elements of the Turkish military staged a failed coup in which nearly 300 were killed and some 2,200 were wounded. The coup plotters were frustrated with Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian style and Islamist bent. Erdogan then used the coup attempt to lash out at his enemies (real and imagined) and crush internal dissent. He blamed the coup on followers of the US-based cleric, Fethullah Gulen. Gulen and Erdogan had once been close allies but the two had a falling out and are now bitter rivals.

The first thing that we see is the megalomaniacal nature of Soros’s philanthropic project. No corner of the globe is unaffected by his efforts. No policy area is left untouched.

Major media outlets in the US have ignored the leak of thousands of emails from billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundation by the activist hacker group DCLeaks. The OSF is the vehicle through which Soros has funneled billions of dollars over the past two decades to non-profit organizations in the US and throughout the world.

According to the documents, Soros has given more than $30 million to groups working for Hillary Clinton’s election in November, making him her largest single donor. So it is likely the case that the media’s support for Clinton has played some role in the mainstream media’s bid to bury the story.

It is also likely however, that at least some news editors failed to understand why the leaked documents were worth covering. Most of the information was already public knowledge. Soros’s massive funding of far-left groups in the US and throughout the world has been documented for more than a decade.

But failing to see the significance of the wider story because many of the details were already known is a case of missing the forest for the trees. The DCLeaks document dump is a major story because it exposes the forest of Soros’s funding networks.

The first thing that we see is the megalomaniacal nature of Soros’s philanthropic project. No corner of the globe is unaffected by his efforts. No policy area is left untouched.

On the surface, the vast number of groups and people he supports seem unrelated. After all, what does climate change have to do with illegal African immigration to Israel? What does Occupy Wall Street have to do with Greek immigration policies? But the fact is that Soros-backed projects share basic common attributes.

They all work to weaken the ability of national and local authorities in Western democracies to uphold the laws and values of their nations and communities.

They all work to hinder free markets, whether those markets are financial, ideological, political or scientific. They do so in the name of democracy, human rights, economic, racial and sexual justice and other lofty terms.

In each horrifying operation executed by ISIS, the radical terrorist group uses every possible way to convey its Islamic identity. They make sure the world sees and hears what they believe and seek, emphasizing plainly their religious motivation.

However, in each of these instances, we immediately, and almost automatically, hear some Western “scholars” insist that everything about ISIS is un-Islamic: ISIS reflects “societal ills, not Islamic doctrine,” as it “hijacks religion in order to legitimate, mobilize and recruit.” We also hear that ISIS’s version of Islam “is not in accordance with the Quran, the traditions of the Prophet or even with Islamic Law,” and that “No religion, including Islam, preaches indiscriminate violence against innocents.”

This is puzzling. But, no, it should not be.

When some Western scholars deny that ISIS is “in any way” driven by rigorous Islamic ideology, this could hardly be attested, especially if you consider the insistence of prestigious Islamic institutes, like Egypt’s al-Azhar, on identifying the members of ISIS as true Muslims who are committing wrong deeds. For al-Azhar, ISIS’s members cannot be identified as unbelievers as long as they do not reject Allah’s strict monotheism and the apostleship of Muhammad.

Contrary to arguments set forth by these Western scholars, ISIS reflects a specific interpretation of Islam that is both legitimate and consistent with Muslim sacred texts and classical exegesis. Claiming that ISIS’s members are lunatics driven by lust or social evil is hardly plausible, and at best fanciful. Its members can establish rigorous convincing arguments based on the Quran and Islamic tradition to justify each action they take, as they affirm: “This is a fight against Muslims and Islam.” They rely on what Muslims consider divinely inspired and authoritative texts. Ideology establishes convictions and drives behavior.

While there are, of course, various political, sociological, and economic dimensions of the ISIS identity that make its radical image appealing, the religious appeal is exceptionally powerful and unmatched.

The AOH is an ephemeral (every Oct-Nov) thinning of stratospheric ozone at an altitude of 20-25 km, roughly covering the Antarctic continent; unanticipated, it was discovered serendipitously in 1985 but is now tracked with satellite-borne ozone meters. Its discovery created much panic about an epidemic of skin cancers that led directly to passage of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an international treaty stopping the manufacture and release into the atmosphere of ozone-depleting chemicals, including CFCs used in refrigeration and bromine-containing fire suppressants.

Recently, there have been many voices, suggesting that the AOH is shrinking, presumably as a result of the Protocol. I am somewhat skeptical of the evidence, but also for theoretical reasons. I am inclined to blame wishful thinking –- a desire to justify post facto the 1987 Montreal Protocol and the economic losses it has produced around the world since then. By implication also, this tends to support the concept of a (largely unrelated) global climate treaty that would severely reduce the release of the greenhouse gas CO2.

For evidence, I refer to a well-written semi-popular story in Eos of 15 August 2016, which relies mainly on a paper in Science magazine [of 30 June, 2016] by MIT chemist Susan Solomon et al. The credibility of the paper derives from the fact that its lead author had identified the correct mechanism for creating the AOH at a time when there was much dispute about its cause; it turned out to be ‘heterogeneous’ reactions of chlorine compounds on the surfaces of polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs), made up of ice particles created from stratospheric moisture by the extremely cold local temperatures. [Heterogeneous reactions involve both gas molecules and solid particles, while ‘homogeneous’ reactions involve only gas molecules.]

These reactions eventually release free chlorine atoms (able to destroy ozone catalytically) from the existing stratospheric chlorine reservoir, gaseous HCl –hydrogen chloride. The relevant chemical reactions commence when solar radiation reaches the Antarctic stratosphere in the beginning of Spring, i.e., in October, after a winter darkness lasting up to six months.

But the same Eos story also quotes NASA atmospheric scientist Susan Strahan, who points to the difficulty of identifying a trend in the presence of “noise,” the year-to-year variation in geographic extent of the AOH. Worse still, the AOH can also be characterized by other varying parameters, like depth of depletion and by its duration. Nevertheless, Solomon extrapolates the somewhat uncertain geographic trend and boldly estimates that the AOH will seal up and disappear by mid-century.

In the American Geophysical Union journal Earth Future, atmospheric chemist Guy Brasseur and colleagues suggest a faster way to “heal” the AOH – by actively releasing ice particles in the stratosphere to deplete HCl, the main reservoir of stratospheric chlorine. But they do not consider the continued existence of natural sources of chlorine compounds: frequent volcanic injections and possibly also oceanic salt spray carried into the stratosphere by convection. Worse still, they ignore the risks of their proposed geo-engineering scheme – the strong greenhouse effects of their ice particles, which would absorb and then re-emit (albeit at a much lower temperature) most of the outgoing long-wave radiation from earth into space, covering even the normally open atmospheric infrared “window” region (of 8 – 12 microns).