RUTHFULLY YOURS

AMSTERDAM—Islamic State has created an industry from passports seized in Iraq, Syria and Libya, French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Monday.

At a meeting of interior ministers in Amsterdam, Mr. Cazeneuve made the case for setting up special task forces to be sent to Greece to assist the identification of fake or stolen passports.

“Daesh has managed to seize passports in Iraq, Syria and Libya and to set up a true industry of fake passports,” Mr. Cazeneuve said in a news conference after the meeting, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

He made the case for establishing this task force and for authorities in the European Union to upload any relevant information to the counterterrorism databases in the bloc.

At least two of the terrorists in the Paris attacks in November traveled on the migrant route through Greece using Syrian passports and posing as refugees, as over one million people arrived on the continent last year, mostly via Greece.

European companies are promising billions in new deals in Iran—€5.7 billion from Italian steelmaker Danieli and more than €300 million from French car builder PSA Peugeot Citroën, among others—as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani works to revive trade and political ties on the Continent this week.
Mr. Rouhani landed in Rome on Monday on his first overseas trip since the European Union lifted sanctions on Jan. 16 in return for Tehran’s implementation of key restrictions on its nuclear program.

The trip will take Mr. Rouhani from Vatican City—marking the first meeting between an Iranian president and a pope since 1999—to the gilded halls of Paris’s Élysée Palace.

With a number of U.S. sanctions still in place, European countries are moving quickly to re-establish ties to sell everything from consumer goods to aircraft.

Italian and Iranian companies signed deals valued at about €17 billion ($18.36 billion) late Monday ahead of a formal dinner between Mr. Rouhani and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. Earlier in the day, Italian steel firm Danieli said it would sign deals valued at about €5.7 billion during the visit. Other firms signing agreements on Monday included oil-field services company Saipem SpA, energy group Ansaldo Energia and ship maker Fincantieri SpA, but further details weren’t available.

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Riyadh | Saudi police officers in the district of Al-Mansuriyya in the branch municipality of Al-Shifa have arrested a man accused of having sex with his vacuum cleaner, reports the Riyadh Daily.

The man was caught in full action by his wife of 17 years before she reported her husband to authorities.

“After 17 years of loyalty, this is how this miscreant treats me,” she told local reporters. “I feel used, I feel dirty,” she added.

The suspect has denied any wrong doing and blames his wife for inventing the whole affair of which he could face 2 years in jail and 1,000 lashes for adultery

As adultery is a crime punishable by death in Islamic law, usually performed by stoning the person to death, experts believe the man’s condemnation is a light one.

I am deeply honored that my essay, “Does Have Europe Have a Future?,” elicited such substantial responses from four distinguished writers. All four have not only entered fair and useful comments on the essay but also contributed their own answers to the question posed in my title.

Peter Berkowitz and Wilfred McClay agree with me that the nation-state is not the source of Europe’s ills. And I agree with Berkowitz, following Alexis de Tocqueville, that European nations need to recover their tradition of freedom, just as I agree with McClay that such liberty must be limited by law, human or divine. It is refreshing to hear Americans encouraging Europeans to take pride in their patriotism and their national identities; in this respect, McClay rightly contrasts the grand traditions of European civilization, which gave birth to the United States and to so much else, with a European Union that is anything but united.

On this point, I part company with Claire Berlinski even as I’m grateful for her superb tour d’horizon and the weight she properly gives to the threat posed to Europe by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. To her, the only answer to the external threats menacing Europe is a single foreign and defense policy, which means strengthening and indeed uniting the European Union. I beg to differ: however much some European leaders may dream otherwise, the EU is not a military alliance. Nor do I recognize her description of German, French, and other EU military officers “eager” to “unleash” their forces against Europe’s enemies. That was not the case even during the cold war, much less now.

The only effective alliance we have is NATO, which implies an acceptance of U.S. leadership that the French still find unpalatable. France is indeed adept at launching policing operations in its former African colonies, but it is no more eager to support U.S. military operations in the Muslim world now than in 2003, when it refused to join the coalition against Saddam Hussein, or in 1986 when it denied President Reagan permission for American bombers to fly over France en route to Qaddafi’s Libya. True, the French are now bombing Islamic State (ISIS) forces in Syria and Iraq, but that is because ISIS poses a direct threat to France itself.

ISIS’s brutality knows no bounds. Early medieval style beheadings, crucifixions, enslavement and rapes of women and young girls are ISIS’s calling cards. They have slaughtered or abducted thousands of civilians and have committed systematic genocide against Yazidis and Christians. Yet when reports of such acts of barbarism began to emerge in 2014, the progressive left either ignored the worst demonstrations of pure evil in our time or pooh-poohed them.

For example, the far left feminist Naomi Wolf, pretending to be an objective journalist, has demanded proof of ISIS transgressions. She questioned whether the videos of beheadings by ISIS jihadists were real. “So much about ISIS seems hyped/spun,” she said on her Facebook page in August 2014. In response to accounts of ISIS jihadists’ sexual exploitation of women, she bizarrely warned us to “remember the fake accounts of ‘the HUN’ raping Belgian women that drove everyone else into World War One.” Recall that Naomi Wolf has argued in the past that Muslim women veiling themselves are doing so as an expression of their own free choice.

The proof of ISIS’s barbarism is told both in staggering numbers and heart rendering first person accounts of women beaten and raped by the ISIS predators. An estimated 3,500 people are being held by ISIS as sexual slaves in Iraq alone, according to a United Nations report issued on January 19th by the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq and the UN human rights office. “Those being held are predominantly women and children and come primarily from the Yezidi (sic) community, but a number are also from other ethnic and religious minority communities,” the report said.