RUTHFULLY YOURS

SEOUL—North Korea said it successfully staged its first test of a more powerful form of nuclear weapon, expanding the U.S.’s foreign-policy challenges and highlighting the limits of China’s ability to rein in its volatile ally.

North Korean state television said in a midday broadcast that scientists had successfully detonated a hydrogen bomb at around 10 a.m. local time.

The U.S. Geological Survey reported that it detected a magnitude 5.1 earthquake at that time near North Korea’s nuclear test site in the country’s northeast.

Experts have said it was unclear whether North Korea had developed the ability to build a hydrogen bomb. The magnitude of the latest explosion was the same as a 2013 test of an atomic bomb.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said the U.S. couldn’t confirm North Korea’s claims of a nuclear test but is monitoring the situation.

“We are aware of seismic activity on the Korean Peninsula in the vicinity of a known North Korean nuclear test site and have seen Pyongyang’s claims of a nuclear test,” Mr. Kirby said.

Arab and Muslim leaders publicly declare the same goals as BDS activists; to eliminate Israel as a non-Muslim entity from lands that “belong” to Islam.
Hamas, PLO groups and the Palestinian Authority exploit the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign as a tool of Islamic warfare.

Arab and Muslim leaders publicly declare the same goals as BDS activists; to eliminate Israel as a non-Muslim entity from lands that “belong” to Islam. Following the al-Aksa war of terrorism in 2001, leading Muslim Brotherhood scholar Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi published an Islamic legal ruling (fatwa) on boycotting Israeli goods. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei did the same. For Islamists, the reason is simple:

Since the existence of Israel is an affront to Islam, as former Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad, himself an Alawite and therefore not a true Muslim in Sunni eyes, declared throughout his life, any strategy and every tactic to rid the world of Israel is acceptable in service of advancing Islam as a victorious and conquering civilization.

Palestinian affairs analyst Khaled Abu Toameh reminds us of Hamas’s support for BDS. He writes in a Gatestone Institute brief that, “Senior Hamas official Izzat al-Risheq, heaping praise on BDS advocates and activists openly, admitted that the ultimate goal of the BDS campaign was to destroy Israel.” Risshek said, “We call for escalating the campaign to isolate the occupation and end the existence of its usurper entity.” Yair Lapid, former finance minister and head of the centrist Yesh Atid Party put it bluntly. He said, in June 2015, speech “the BDS movement is actually a puppet in a theater operated by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.”

Latest: Mayor of Cologne urges code of conduct for young women to prevent future assault

Police in Germany are investigating an alarming series of sexual assaults on women trying to celebrate the New Year by large groups of single men “of Arab or North African appearance”.Authorities in the city of Cologne are to hold a crisis meeting on Tuesday after police described a group of some 1,000 men who took over the area around the main station on New Year’s Eve.

Women were robbed, groped, and had their underwear torn from their bodies, while couples had fireworks thrown at them.Police have received 90 criminal complaints, around a quarter of them for sexual assault, including one case of rape.

Police in Hamburg say there was a series of similar incidents in the city’s Reeperbahn red-light area. Witnesses described groups of five to 15 men of who “hunted” women in the streets.

In Cologne, the attacks took place around the main station, opposite the cathedral, a traditional gathering spot to see in the New Year.

A 27-year-old witness named only as Anne told Spiegel magazine’s website she was shocked by the crowds when she arrived at the station with her boyfriend.

“The whole place was full and almost only with men,” she said. “Only a few frightened women, who were being stared at.”

A short time later, she said, she “felt the first hand on my behind”.

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YEARS AGO THEY CALLED COLOGNE A DILUTED PERFUME “TOILET WATER” RSK
MOSCOW – A perfume, whose creator says was inspired by Russian President Vladimir Putin, has gone on sale in Moscow.
The “Leaders Number One” scent, created by Belarussian-born perfumer Vladislav Rekunov, is sold in a black bottle featuring Putin’s profile at Moscow’s luxury GUM department store as well as online for 6,500 rubles, or $95.

Leftwing radical billionaire George Soros fancies himself as “some kind of god.” He believes in the delusion that he is endowed with special insight into what is best for the world, even as his declarations defy reality and any objective distinction between good and evil.

Soros’s latest example of self-righteous tripe was his op-ed article, appearing on December 28th in The Guardian, in which he blamed the “hysterical anti-Muslim reaction to terrorism” for helping jihadist groups recruit more fighters to their cause. He wrote that “the fear of death leads us and our leaders to think – and then behave – irrationally…when we are afraid for our lives, emotions take hold of our thoughts and actions, and we find it difficult to make rational judgments. Fear activates an older, more primitive part of the brain than that which formulates and sustains the abstract values and principles of open society.”

Sorry to pop Soros’s balloon, but open societies will not be “open” for long if the jihadists succeed in expanding their Islamic supremacist ideology to the West. It is both a rational judgment of free peoples and a perfectly understandable human emotion to want to fight and destroy those who want to kill us.

Professing dislike of the West and its culture and legacy is an industry on campus. The subtext of “white privilege” is that it consists of unearned status accorded those of European background. To listen to the anti-Westerners, you would think that the inventors of electrical generation, indoor plumbing, and vaccinations were enemies of the planet.

Multiculturalism, the orthodoxy of popular culture, and the current bite of the media and the arts are all predicated on the idea that Western civilization is more toxic than admirable. Citing the evils of the European tradition can also provide exemption from an occasional politically incorrect gaffe. And assuming a non-Western identity (ask Elizabeth Warren, Ward Churchill, Rachel Dolezal, or Shaun King) can offer career dividends.

American society lavished scholarships on the upper-middle-class prep-school graduate Barack Hussein Obama but perhaps would not have done so much for just another Barry Dunham. It is not surprising that when George Zimmerman had been in a fight with Trayvon Martin, his scars were photoshopped away and his 911 call racialized. Would that have happened had he chosen to go by the name of Jorge Mesa?

Paradoxes arise in attacking the West in general and the so-called European diaspora in particular. First, there is the obvious question: “Compared to what?” There are plenty of alternative cultures unstained by past Western imperialism and colonialism. Are their legacies more congenial to the present politically correct progressive agendas?