RUTHFULLY YOURS

The United States runs its air operations against ISIS in Iraq from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. The base, used by other NATO forces as well, is not American. It is Turkish, and the U.S. needs government permission to fly from there. Since the 15 July coup attempt in Ankara, U.S. forces at Incirlik are essentially hostages to the Turkish government. The Turkish base commander and his aides have been arrested; U.S. personnel are confined to base; outside power has been cut off; and while the U.S. has been permitted to resume operations over Iraq and Syria, it is working under adverse conditions, to say the least. Most worrisome, about 50 hydrogen bombs are stored by the U.S. at Incirlik, ostensibly on behalf of NATO. These bombs are “protected” by Turkish troops and to some degree their potential use is shared with the Turkish Air Force.

The deployment goes back more than 50 years, begun as an effort to counter the Soviet military buildup as an offset to quantitatively larger Soviet ground forces facing Europe. But by the mid-1980s the U.S. put more emphasis on “tactical” missiles, largely to counter the Soviet Union’s deployment of SS-20’s, a short to medium range missile with multiple, independently targeted warheads (MIRV) in the second and third versions of the SS-20. In 1987 the Intermediate and Short-range Missile Nuclear Treaty (INF) was signed and the Russians and the U.S. began removing their missiles. By 1991, all the missiles of concern on both sides were eliminated.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the expansion of NATO, one can ask why tactical nuclear weapons in NATO were retained as times and conditions have changed. The U.S. now finds itself escalating operations out of Incirlik as it increases the fight against ISIS, al Nusra, and al Qaeda. Turkey itself is increasingly authoritarian and increasingly involved in the wars in Syria and Iraq as well as fighting Kurdish separatists. But only late in 2015 did Incirlik see the beginning of security upgrades for its nuclear stockpile.

“All the bullying happens in Arabic… The hierarchy of the Arab boys creates a very violent environment. … I have filmed the particularly vile bullying of a Somali boy. You can see the tears in his eyes. They are destroying him; it is very violent. ” — From a dissertation by Jalal El Derbas, Ph.D.

Danish teachers are the least respected and are spoken of in denigrating and humiliating terms.

“I am not saying that all the Arab children did ugly things, but we witnessed on a regular basis… using derogatory Arabic language towards Somalis and girls.” — Lise Egholm, former head of the Rådmandsgade school in Copenhagen.

Whether Danish parliamentarians wish to acknowledge this problem or not, they are up against far wider issues than that of religious incitement in mosques by radical preachers.

After the television documentary, “Sharia in Denmark”, embarrassed Danish authorities by revealing how widespread the preaching of sharia is in mosques in Denmark, the Danish government, in May, concluded a political agreement about “initiatives directed against religious preachers who seek to undermine Danish laws and values and who support parallel legal systems”.

“We are doing everything we can without compromising the constitution and international agreements,” Bertel Haarder, the Minister for Culture and Church, said about the political agreement.

The agreement centers on a number of initiatives, which are supposed to compensate for the detrimental effects of all the years in which sharia was allowed to spread in Denmark while most authorities paid only scant attention to what was happening. Part of the new effort, therefore, will be the mapping of all existing mosques in Denmark.

It will now be obligatory, according to the agreement, for all priests, imams and others who are not part of the Church of Denmark, and who wish to be able to perform weddings — as well as for foreign preachers who apply for residence permits — to learn about Danish family law, freedom and democracy. At the end of the course, all will have to sign a statement that they will accept Danish law, including freedom of speech and religion, gender equality, freedom of sexual orientation, non-discrimination and women’s rights.

The government will examine how to create more transparency in foreign donations to faith communities in Denmark, including controlling and, if necessary, preventing such donations. As part of this work, on May 4 the government presented a law making it a crime to receive funding from a terror organization to establish or run an institution in Denmark, including schools and mosques.

With the prospect of another Labour leadership election now gathering pace, tens of thousands more activists have joined the Labour party. It seems unlikely that they will be “moderates.”

The election of an Islamist-sympathising, terrorist-sympathising, Israel-bashing hardliner at the head of the second largest party in the House of Commons undoubtedly changes the parameters of political discourse in the UK.

However solidly Theresa May’s new Conservative government performs, it will always seem the point — so long as Corbyn is in office — that you are either for Britain or against it, for the Conservative party or against the country.

A fractured and in-fighting opposition also means that there is no meaningful, organised voice challenging the government in Parliament. That principle — the principle on which our system is based — needs to work well even (perhaps especially) if you support the government of the day, because the government of the day needs to be kept alert to error and on top of sensible criticisms if it is going to pass the best legislation it can for the country.

Herbert Stein’s law, “Things that cannot go on, won’t,” is one of the best laws of politics. It works for fiscal issues and it usually works for politics as a whole. The British Labour party, however, is currently working to try to disprove this rule. To do them justice they are having a good stab at doing so, which suggests that the maxim should perhaps be re-written: “Things that cannot go on sometimes do.”

Consider the latest developments in the party’s recent unhappy history. Earlier this month the party’s specially commissioned inquiry into anti-Semitism within the party found the party not guilty of this bigotry for the second time in six months. Yet at the launch of these findings, a grassroots member of Jeremy Corbyn’s wing of the party verbally bullied a female Jewish Labour MP until she left in tears, and Jeremy Corbyn himself appeared to compare the Jewish state with ISIS. Although this episode captured some headlines, it was a mere footnote alongside the other catastrophes in the Labour party.

“Why have jihadist terrorists made France Europe’s bloodiest battlefield? Simple answer: Because France let in the most Muslims.”

So writes Australia’s most-read (and most controversial) columnist, conservative Andrew Boltin the wake of the Nice atrocity. He goes on, inter alia, in the Herald-Sun:

“This link between immigration policies and terrorism largely explains why the French are the greatest victims of Europe’s jihadists.

It also explains why we are fools not to change our own immigration policies to protect ourselves.

No European Union country has a higher proportion of Muslims than France — up to 10 per cent of its population, or six million people, though statistics are vague, and vary.

Yes, numbers don’t tell the whole story, but they do count….

France has the most Muslims, and that is why four people were killed, three of them children, in an Islamist attack on a Jewish day school in Toulouse four years ago.

There on the ABC, right on schedule after the Nice massacre, was an argument for moral equivalence being presented by no less than a full-blown academic from the University of Sydney. It takes that sort of mind to grasp that the US is no different from its Islamist adversaries.

I have a strong suspicion that some of the most pointless people in this country have PhDs in the Social Sciences. Of course, I don’t really mean to say that these people are unintelligent; obviously they know a good deal about Derrida, Foucault, Butler, and the rest of the gang. It’s their moral relativism that irks me, as well as the cultivated grudges against their own societies and culture. I’m thinking of the insistence that Australia was ‘invaded’, for example, or the tendency to self-blame after each attack by our Islamist enemies. In a way, one has to admire their industriousness: every day they manage to find brand new ways of hating themselves.

When it comes, then, to questions about the upkeep of Western civilisation, the university lecturer is not the person one first thinks to consult. Once upon a time, I have heard, his thoughts and recommendations were confined to the mercifully recondite and unreadable journals of the academic Left. No longer, though. This means I have to update my earlier suspicion: if I am right (and let’s face it, I am), all these useless people will appear, at some stage of their careers, on the ABC.

For a measure of proof, I invite the reader to consider last Friday’s episode of ABC’s The Drum, which featured Peter Chen (above), a senior lecturer in politics at University of Sydney. The topic was the ongoing assault on French civil society, but Chen seemed to wonder if this was a conversation worth having at all. He argued that what happened in Nice was awful, of course, but it was hardly new: the conversion of trucks into weapons of suicide terror happens every day in other parts of the world. For Chen, shock was an invalid emotional response. It proved that Westerners only care about their own. He sneered: “Why are we shocked about this? Because it occurred in France.”

Really? This type of teaching jihad and hatred to kiddies has been going on for decades among the Palarabs….rsk

President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran has a sunset clause, with almost every restriction on the mullahs’ nuclear program expiring in 15 years. So it’s worth paying attention to what the next generation of Iranians are being taught about their country’s mission in the world.

Our best look so far comes thanks to a new report from Impact-se, a Jerusalem-based institute that monitors the content of textbooks across the Middle East. A ninth-grade social-education textbook reads: “All are submissive and obedient to the Guardian-Jurist,” that is, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Regime leaders are presented as infallible, divinely inspired and beyond criticism.

A third-grade religion textbook’s section on cleanliness includes an illustration of Iranian children chasing away a filthy, mucuslike blob with a Star of David on its back. A fifth-grade text for the 2016-17 academic year shows Palestinian children attacking Israeli soldiers with rocks and slingshots. It’s accompanied by regime founder Ayatollah Khomeini’s portrait and his injunction that “Israel must be wiped out.” America is portrayed as an aggressive hegemon.

As for the types of weapons Iran may use, a 12th-grade religion textbook instructs that “Islamic learning is such that religious experts can extract from it new laws concerning . . . procurement and use of new weapons, in accordance with the new needs of society.”

Part of Mr. Obama’s bet in signing the nuclear deal is that Iranian youth will be more moderate than the religious fundamentalists who now rule the country. This curriculum suggests that’s not a bet he’s likely to win. CONTINUE AT SITE

BRUSSELS—European arrests in terrorism cases were up sharply last year, as law enforcement moved to address a shift by jihadist groups to carry out mass casualty attacks on the continent, according to a new report.

The threat of terrorism in Europe remains on an upward trajectory, as jihadist terrorists have shifted to a strategy that seeks to inflict high numbers of deaths, a report by Europol, the European Union police agency, said.

“The attacks in Paris in January and November 2015 represented a clear shift in the intent and capability of jihadist terrorists to inflict mass casualties on urban populations,” the report said.

Europol estimated that terrorist attacks in Europe resulted in 151 fatalities in 2015, all but three in France. In 2014, Europol reported only four people were killed in terror attacks.

According to the report, 1,077 people were arrested for terrorism-related offenses in 2015, up from 774 in 2014. The bulk of the arrests were in France, followed by Spain and the U.K.

Jihadist terror attacks in Europe in 2015 were plotted by people who had returned from fighting in Syria, used local recruits to carry out the attacks and likely received direction from Islamic State leaders, according to the Europol report. CONTINUE AT SITE