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June 2017

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Auto Da Fé Car-fire jihad comes to Oslo. Bruce Bawer

By on June 27th, 2017

As one major European city after another gives way to the invader, one measure of how far along the conquest has advanced is the frequency of car-burnings.

These acts of arson are especially common on one annual holiday – New Year’s Eve – and during one season, namely summer. Earlier this year Robert Spencer quoted an article that traced the “custom” of European car burnings back to “Strasbourg, Germany and eastern France during the 1990’s.” They’re since spread elsewhere, notably to Muslim neighborhoods in the Swedish cities of Stockholm Gothenburg, and Malmö. They’re also especially big in Paris and other French cities, where in on New Years Eve 2012-13, at least 1,193 cars were torched.

On January 3, 2013, Time ran a piece by Bruce Crumley that, bizarrely, made light of all the car-burning. “Burn out the old year; torch in the new,” Crumley began, joking that France had kicked off 2013 “in its uniquely pyromaniac fashion.” He quipped about “France’s distinctive car-burning penchant,” about its “auto roasts,” about “flame-happy France,” about France’s “flaming-auto fetish.” Although Crumley brushed up against the truth – referring euphemistically to the fact that all these acts were taking place in “disadvantaged areas” and the so-called “projects” – he was careful to avoid using the word “Islam” or “Muslim.” No, the whole point of his piece was to spin the annual car fires as a quirky French tradition.

But then it’s par for the course for journalists, politicians, and police spokespeople alike to treat these car fires as a joke, a quirk, a temporary problem, a minor inconvenience – and, most important, to pretend not to know who’s setting them and why. “This crime is very hard to investigate,” said Malmö cop Lars Forstell last January. “We don’t see any patterns and we don’t have any suspects.” Last August, responding to the fact that car-burning was now becoming a familiar activity in Copenhagen, police spokesman Rasmus Bernt Skovsgaard said, “It is still too early to say anything on the extent to which this could have a connection to the fires that have happened in Sweden.” A month later, in a report on the Copenhagen car-burnings, the New York Times quoted a Danish detective inspector, Jens Moller Jensen, as saying: “It is a mystery why this is happening, and there has been a big increase over the last few months and that is worrying.” Jensen added: “I am working on several hypotheses….One theory is that cars in Denmark are being burned by individuals from an angry underclass in a country where far-right groups have organized bitter protests against immigration, calling it a threat to the nation’s identity.” In other words, the firebugs are immigrants whose feelings have been hurt by far-right bigotry. So the fires are, ultimately, the fault of Islamophobes.

Routinely, the mainstream media attribute the car fires to unnamed perpetrators whom they vaguely identify as “youths” and “hooligans.” Last September, the Atlantic’s urban-policy website, CityLab, actually ran a piece headlined “The Mystery of Scandinavia’s Car-Burning Spree.” Noting that dozens of cars had been set ablaze over the summer in Stockholm, Gothenberg, and Malmö, and that Copenhagen was now not far behind, author Feargus O’Sullivan spent 500 words puzzling over the phenomenon. What could possibly be the cause of all this arson? After all, “no particular group [was] claiming responsibility.” Could car owners themselves be doing this to collect insurance money? Could these crimes be “an expression of rage from young men who see no other outlet for it, or find that the attention it gets them a kick”? Like Crumley, O’Sullivan then brushed against the truth, noting that the car burnings “have mainly been concentrated in relatively deprived areas such as Malmö’s Rosengård, neighborhoods where social and ethnic segregation and a perceived lack of opportunities have left many young people, especially those from a non-Swedish background, frustrated that their futures are being overlooked.” In short, the car burnings are a cry for help by those who’ve been “deprived” and “overlooked.”

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Our World: The PLO’s IDF lobbyists Caroline Glick

By on June 27th, 2017

Should the United States pay Palestinian terrorists? For the overwhelming majority of Americans and Israelis this is a rhetorical question.

The position of the American people was made clear – yet again – last week when US President Donald Trump’s senior envoys Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt met with Palestinian Authority chairman and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas and repeated Trump’s demand that the PA cut off the payments.
Not only did Abbas reject their demand, he reportedly accused the presidential envoys of working as Israeli agents.

Abbas’s treatment of Kushner and Greenblatt was in line with his refusal to even meet with US Ambassador David Friedman, reportedly because he doesn’t like Friedman’s views.

The most amazing aspect of Abbas’s contemptuous treatment of the Trump administration is that he abuses Trump and his senior advisers while demanding that Trump continue funding him in excess of half a billion dollars a year, and do so in contravention of the will of the Republican-controlled Congress.

Abbas’s meeting last week took place as the Taylor Force Act makes its way through Congress.

Named for Taylor Force, the West Point graduate and US army veteran who was murdered in March 2016 in Tel Aviv by a Palestinian terrorist, the Taylor Force Act will end US funding of the PA until it ends its payments to terrorists and their families – including the family of Force’s murderer Bashar Masalha.

The Taylor Force Act enjoys bipartisan majority support in both the House and the Senate. It is also supported by the Israeli government.

Given the stakes, what could possibly have possessed Abbas to believe he can get away with mistreating Trump and his envoys? Who does he think will save him from Congress and the White House? Enter Commanders for Israel’s Security (CIS), stage left.

CIS is a consortium of 260 left-wing retired security brass. It formed just before the 2015 elections. CIS refuses to reveal its funding sources. Several of its most visible members worked with the Obama administration through the George Soros-funded Center for a New American Security.

Since its inception, CIS has effectively served as a PLO lobby. It supports Israeli land giveaways and insists that Israel can do without a defensible eastern border.

Last Wednesday CIS released a common-sense defying statement opposing the Taylor Force Act.

The generals mind-numbingly insisted the US must continue paying the terrorism-financing PA because Israel needs the help of the terrorism-incentivizing PA to fight the terrorists the PA incentivizes. If the US cuts off funding to the PA because it incentivizes terrorism, then the PA will refuse to cooperate with Israel in fighting the terrorism it incentivizes.

If you fail to follow this logic, well, you don’t have what it takes to be an Israeli general.

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Time for a U.S.–India Rebalance Trump and Modi could forge a defining partnership for the next century. By Arthur Herman & Husain Haqqani

By on June 27th, 2017

The meeting this week between President Trump and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi could be one of the most important of the Trump presidency. Certainly the time is ripe for a major transformation of U.S.–Indian relations, and both Modi and Trump are uniquely positioned to bring it about. They must overcome domestic political distractions to forge what could be a defining partnership for the next century.

Both men are deeply committed to the interests of their countries, and both see the need to expand the economic opportunities that flow from modern post-industrial growth (in India’s case, estimated to be almost 7.5 percent this year) to the entire society. Both also lead countries that share many of the common cultural characteristics of the Anglosphere, including the English language and a belief in the rule of law and constitutional democracy. Both countries combine rich ethnic and religious diversity with a strong sense of national pride.

The U.S. and India also confront similar challenges on the international front. Both face the daily threat of Islamist terrorism, with the horrors of 9/11 and the attacks in San Bernardino and Orlando paralleled by the deadly assault in Mumbai in 2008 that killed or injured more than 500 people, including several Americans. The terrorists who threaten both countries also share a sanctuary — namely, Pakistan — that has provided safe haven for groups responsible for terrorist strikes in India as well as for attacks on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

Both also confront the rise of an aggressive, militarized China. Beijing’s efforts to push the U.S. Navy out of the East China and South China Seas are matched by its growing geopolitical presence in the Indian Ocean. In addition to massing formidable military forces on its common border with India, China has plans for a major naval base at Gwadar, Pakistan, which would bring it to the doorstep of the Persian Gulf. China’s multi-billion-dollar infrastructure projects in Pakistan, part of the “One Belt, One Road” initiative, also expand China’s reach to India’s western doorstep.

Fortunately, Prime Minister Modi fully understands the extent of the China challenge and the importance of the U.S. strategic partnership as a counterbalance. Now it’s time for the U.S. to step up and assume the role of partner and guide.

The first step would be to encourage more energy trade and cooperation, so that the U.S.’s new oil and natural-gas export boom can flow directly to the benefit of India. Differences over trade deficits and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) have masked both countries’ interest in increasing the bilateral trade of energy. India would much rather get its oil and natural gas from the United States than from Russia and Iran, while India’s own rich natural energy resources, including its shale-gas reserves, could benefit from cooperation with U.S. energy companies.

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In Texas, a Mental-Health Measure That Left and Right Should Support The Sandra Bland Act diverts care for the mentally ill from the police to medical professionals. By Nick Selby —

By on June 27th, 2017

Here’s an issue on which liberals and conservatives agree: policing the mentally ill. The two sides may have arrived at that position through different underlying beliefs, but they got there. Here’s a problem: In Texas, a conservative legislature passed, and a conservative governor just signed, the Sandra Bland Act, a law that sets a high, national bar for policies and procedures in mental health and criminal justice, and progressives haven’t yet noticed just how much this bill advances their cause. In fact, they’re complaining.

That’s not a surprise. Progressives (especially in the Northeast and California) often look down on Texas. It’s not that Texas doesn’t sometimes deserve it. A few recent bills in the state legislature rode one stop too far on the crazy train, using conservative language to describe laws that would have vastly expanded government in the service of dodgy goals.

But on the whole, the laws that Texas passes laws on police reform, limited government, and open records are remarkable and serve as models for “progressive states” like California, whose open-records and police-transparency laws are vastly inferior.

Conservative Texans support law and order, and their expectations are high. This support is deep, so when a cop goes bad, Texans are not forgiving. Brian T. Encinia, the Texas state trooper who was so unnecessarily rude to Sandra Bland, over so little, and who later lied about the encounter in which he arrested her, was told exactly why his performance was unacceptable, charged with perjury, and then unceremoniously sacked. That wasn’t because the media were watching.

It was because that’s how Texas troopers roll.

Bland’s death in a Waller County jail cell, three days after her arrest, was ruled to have been a suicide. Yet nationally, in nearly every debate about policing, activists raise Sandra Bland’s case to demonstrate just how untenable the system is.

Regardless of why or how she was arrested, Bland was incarcerated for three days in conditions wholly inappropriate for her detention. I believe she would be alive today had someone brought her for a psychiatric evaluation after Bland told them, as she was admitted to the jail, that she had recently attempted suicide.

That’s part of what the Sandra Bland Act, signed by Governor Abbott this month, does. It requires managers in jails to determine whether inmates suffer from mental illness, and it diverts those who do to a mental-health facility. The law goes further: It also calls for all Texas peace officers to undergo every two years training in de-escalation, crisis intervention, and means of evaluating whether they are dealing with someone with mental illness. This will ensure that officers have the tools to divert people to treatment before they’re arrested. Finally, the law calls for steps to ensure that jail cells are properly inspected and requires that all jail deaths be investigated independently.

That sounds like a lot of regulation and government — why should conservatives be happy?

Because if it is done right, the law will result in less police involvement in situations with the mentally ill, and fewer mentally ill people will get caught up in the criminal-justice system. This will save taxpayers money. The National Alliance on Mental Illness reckons that jailing a mentally ill person can be three times more expensive than hospitalization. But — and it’s not often we get to say this — that’s not even the best part.

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On Migration, Europe Is Admitting the Truth to Itself Europeans are realizing that the immigration policy is unsustainable. By Michael Brendan Dougherty

By on June 27th, 2017

The migration crisis that has been central to the European political drama since 2014 is rapidly changing. You can see signs of change everywhere, from subtle intensifications of bureaucratic language to an increasing frankness about what the migration crisis has done to Europe’s nations and societies. It also shows up in the numbers. The overall rate of migration into Europe is starting to decline, but the number of migrants who are dying in their attempt is going up. But you can see it most of all in the willingness of European leaders to tell the truth.

Just in the past ten days, you can see a shift. European Council president Donald Tusk admitted that most of the people coming in have no right to do so: “In most of the cases, and that is actually the case on the central Mediterranean route, we’re talking clearly and manifestly about economic migrants.” He added, “They get to Europe illegally, they do not have any documents which would allow them to enter the European soil.” In other words, these primarily aren’t refugees fleeing war, they’re economic migrants, who are coming in to countries along the southern Mediterranean that already suffer massive unemployment.

The reality is sinking in within the member states as well. Aydan Ozoguz, the German commissioner for immigration, refugees, and integration, admitted this week that three-quarters of the refugees Germany took in recently will still be unemployed in five years.

Just a year ago, pundits were holding out that Europe would find economic salvation in the “warm bodies” crossing the Mediterranean. It was an argument that never made sense, given the millions of unemployed but educated youth already in the European Union. Instead of a new round of guest workers, Germany has added hundreds of thousands of new dependents on the state, most with few job skills and no language preparation. The latter problem now taxes police departments, whoich have to find Pashto translators to investigate crimes such as the murder of Muslims for apostasy.

For years, Australia’s government had told the EU that they would have to look at Australia’s model for successful border enforcement. EU officials dismissed this, often with criticism of Australia’s approach. But earlier this year, just as Australian prime minister Tony Abbott had predicted, EU officials came to Australia for help.

On Friday, the European Union member states agreed to restrict visas for foreign countries that refuse to take back their own nationals who do not qualify as refugees.

Germany’s deal with Turkey, along with the enforcement position of Viktor Orban’s Hungary (which Germany still pretends to deplore) has mostly closed the land route into Europe through the Middle East – but now the Libyan coast is the main source of migration. The EU’s President Tusk described a 26 percent rise in the number of migrants arriving in Italy from Europe over the Mediterranean.

But it may finally be dawning on Europe’s elites that their attempts to rescue people at sea are endangering migrants as often as saving them. Migrants hoping for a European rescue are put on inflatable rafts (or worse) and launched off the coast of Tripoli. They make about one-sixth of the journey toward Sicily, and sometimes even less. Once they cross out of Libyan waters they enter what is commonly known as the “Search and Rescue” Zone or just “SAR Zone.” They then signal their distress and get European rides the rest of the way — or they collapse and capsize and the migrants drown. Over the weekend, the Irish navy, and its ship LÉ Eithne, took more than 700 migrants. The composition tells you the nature of the migration: a score of children, some pregnant women . . . and over 500 adult males.

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What Is the Alternative to Trump Derangement? If they weren’t trying to destroy the president, Democrats would have to focus on an agenda most Americans don’t support. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on June 27th, 2017

By 1968, voters had tired of the failed Great Society of Lyndon Johnson. Four year later, the 1972 Nixon reelection re-emphasized that a doubled-down McGovern liberalism was even less of a viable agenda.

In that context, in 1974, obsessing on Watergate and a demonized Nixon were wise liberal alternatives to running on a positive left-wing vision, given the growing conservative backlash of the 1970s.

After Watergate and the Ford pardon, Jimmy Carter squeaked to a close victory and a one-term presidency — before the country tired of his strident liberalism poorly cloaked in conservative clothing. Bill Clinton’s third-way centrism eventually was a winning Democratic alternative to regain the presidency — albeit with help from two Ross Perot third-party candidacies. Given these historical reminders, the current efforts at Trump character assassination may be the best — or only — progressive pathway back to political power.

In the last few days, the Democratic party lost its fourth special House election; most of the four were billed in advance as likely negative referenda on the contentious first six months of the Trump presidency. Post facto, the uniformly unwelcomed results were written off as idiosyncratic outliers of no importance.

Shortly before the Georgia election, a hard-left-wing killer attacked the players at a congressional baseball practice, intent on the assassination of Republican legislators, whom he had targeted on his hit list. The shooter was foiled, but not before seriously wounding Steve Scalise, the current Republican majority whip in the House.

The two events in saner times might have prompted introspection about why the Democrats keep losing elections and why a hard-core progressive supporter would seek to assassinate key Republican leaders. Indeed, for a brief moment, there were calls on both sides of the aisle to scale back inflammatory rhetoric that in theory might push such politicized would-be shooters over the edge. One might have hoped that self-reflective Democrats could begin to grasp why voters distrusted them more than they feared Trump.

Such moments quickly vanished. Progressives saw any remedies to identity politics as worse than the disease of electoral defeat. Elizabeth Warren, with her trademark rancor, was once again talking about Republican “blood money” — as if her opponents in the Congress were legislative assassins rather than the recent targets of such. An increasingly addled Hillary Clinton (she had loudly joined the “Resistance”) accused the GOP of becoming the “death party,” reminding the country why progressive fanatics such as James Hodgkinson might think rifle fire is the only answer to conservatives who traffic in blood.

Meanwhile, another day, another Hollywood celebrity dreaming of, or advocating, the assassination of Donald Trump: This time a disturbed Johnny Depp (playing the role of Kathy Griffin or Snoop Dogg) mused out loud about repeating a John Wilkes Booth–style shooting. Since January, left-wing pundits and celebrities have alluded that Trump might be decapitated, stabbed by a mob, shot, punched, hit with a bat, blown up, strung up, and flipped off. Incineration and drowning are about the last modes of Trump mayhem left unsaid.

Barack Obama, amid the assassination chic and the obscenity of key Democrats such as Kamala Harris, Tom Perez, and Kirsten Gillibrand, recently remonstrated about the evils of inequality and the need for more diversity — at $10,000 a minute to largely white, Wall Street audiences, while wining about the ongoing recalibration of his failed Obamacare project. That is what passes for 21st-century progressive community organizing.

Left unsaid was that Obama had virtually destroyed the Democratic party, which during his tenure lost more than 1,000 state and local elections and both the House and the Senate. Obama left a personal legacy of a party agenda that had no popular support, an incoming Republican presidency, a conservative Supreme Court, a tenure to be systematically overturned, and a one-time progressive electoral paradigm that could work only for himself while imploding almost any other candidate foolish enough to try to replicate it.

And progressives oddly loved him for all that.

It is said that Democrats are in an existential crisis because of their obsessions with Donald Trump — suing over the election, trying to subvert the Electoral College, dreaming of impeachment and the 25th Amendment, filing briefs under the emoluments clause of the Constitution, stalling appointments, relying on deep-state insurrectionary bureaucrats, cherry-picking liberal judges for obstructive passes, and going from one conspiracy theory to the next as collusion begat obstruction that begat witness tampering. More outsider advice is for Democrats to focus instead on their agenda.

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The Supreme Court Order Is Not Much of a Victory for Trump The High Court postponed and may never resolve the most contentious issues related to the so-called travel ban. By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on June 27th, 2017

The positive part of this morning’s Supreme Court order, which narrows the stays lower courts have imposed to block President Trump’s so-called travel ban, is the part you don’t see. Implicit in the Court’s unsigned ruling is a rejection of the anti-Trump presumption adopted by the lower courts. Those tribunals (in the Fourth and Ninth Circuits) essentially based their rulings on the novel premise that Trump’s executive orders should not be considered on their face — i.e., on the terms set forth in the four corners of the travel ban. Rather, they must be seen through the prism of anti-Muslim animus said to radiate from the campaign rhetoric of candidate Trump and his surrogates.

As Justice Clarence Thomas points out in his separate opinion (joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch), when the Court reviews a stay, it is essentially assessing whether lower-court rulings will be ultimately reversed on the merits. There would be no reason for the Supreme Court to narrow the lower-court stays of the travel ban if the justices were of a mind to concur in the lower courts’ reasoning.

The short per curiam opinion does not delve into the most controversial aspect of the travel-ban litigation to date, namely: whether there ought to be what I’ve called a new “jurisprudence of Trump,” in which this president’s orders and actions are judged differently than would the same orders and actions if carried out by other presidents. Still, it seems likely after today that a majority of the justices would resolve that issue in the president’s favor. That is worth celebrating.

So why not celebrate?

Well, it seems highly unlikely that the Court’s left-wing bloc (Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan) is averse to a jurisprudence of Trump — indeed, Justice Ginsburg was stunningly intemperate and inappropriate in her pre-election remarks about the GOP nominee. So the question is: Why did they go along with today’s ruling?

For the same reason that caused Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch to file a partial dissent: This ruling is unworkable and actually doesn’t much narrow the lower-court stays.

Let’s try to keep it simple here. The lower courts granted standing to challenge the travel ban to American persons and entities that had special relationships with aliens outside the United States. Ostensibly, the lower courts claimed that the rights of these Americans were harmed by the travel ban’s exclusion of aliens — specifically, aliens who a) are close relatives whose exclusion would deny family reunification to an American; or b) are scholars whose exclusion would deprive their contributions to American universities that had extended offers to them. In effect, however, the lower courts were vicariously granting American legal rights to aliens outside the United States, despite the judges’ grudging admission that the aliens technically had no such rights.

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What happens when famous novelists ‘confront the Occupation’ in the West Bank By Matti Friedman ****

By on June 27th, 2017

“What it’s really about is the writers. Most of the essays aren’t journalism but a kind of selfie in which the author poses in front of the symbolic moral issue of the time: Here I am at an Israeli checkpoint! Here I am with a shepherd! That’s why the very first page of the book finds Chabon and Waldman talking not about the occupation, but about Chabon and Waldman. After a while I felt trapped in a wordy kind of Kardashian Instagram feed, without the self-awareness.”

Matti Friedman is a journalist in Jerusalem and the author, most recently, of “Pumpkinflowers.”

Last year, the American novelists Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman and Dave Eggers led a group of writers to “bear witness” to the crisis in Iraq, confronting the fate of that country during and since the American occupation — the hundreds of thousands of dead, the vanished minorities, the chaos spreading across the region. The resulting anthology adds up to a piercing, introspective look at what it means to be American in the 21st century.

I’m kidding! Reporting on Iraq is bothersome, and so is introspection. Instead, they came to “bear witness” to the crisis in the West Bank and Gaza, where thousands of reporters, nongovernmental organization staffers, activists and diplomats hover around a conflict with a death toll last year that was about a third of the homicide number in Baltimore. It’s the kind of Mideast conflagration where writers can sally forth in an air-conditioned bus, safely observe the natives for a few hours and make it back to a nice hotel for drinks.

The resulting anthology, “Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation,” includes essays by American and international authors such as Eggers, Mario Vargas Llosa, Colum McCann and Colm Toibin — an impressive list — with a few locals thrown in. The visitors were shown around by anti-occupation activists and wrote up their experiences. Edited by Chabon and Waldman, the 26 essays here constitute a chorus of condemnation of Israel.

Chabon, for example, interviews a Palestinian American businessman about life in the West Bank — the byzantine permit system, the 1,001 humiliations of undemocratic rule. Another essay looks at a village of impoverished shepherds, Susiya, in the shadow of an Israeli settlement. Geraldine Brooks describes a stabbing in Jerusalem. We meet children detained by troops, people made to wait at checkpoints and others scarred in different ways by the military occupation that began here after the 1967 war.

I’ve seen the West Bank from many angles over more than two decades in Israel, as a soldier at checkpoints and as a reporter passing through them with Palestinians, and I know the injustices of the situation are real and worth attention from knowledgeable observers. What we get here, though, is a peculiar product. The visiting writers aren’t experts — most seem to have been here for only a few days, and some appear quite lost.

Chabon and Waldman tell us on the very first page of a visit to Israel in 1992, which they remember vividly as a time of optimism, when the “Oslo accords were fresh and untested.” But their memory must be playing tricks, because the Oslo accords happened in the fall of 1993. Chabon and Waldman, who live in Berkeley, Calif., are accomplished writers, but the reader needs a few words about what they’re up to here. Do they have special expertise to offer? Israel is probably the biggest international news story over the past 50 years, so is there a reason they decided the world needs to know more about it and not, say, Kandahar, Guantanamo, Congo or Baltimore?

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A Month of Islam and Multiculturalism in Britain: May 2017 by Soeren Kern

By on June 27th, 2017

“The whole system failed and that is what has been happening for the last 30 years. And it is PC. People are just too, too afraid to, you know, just too, too afraid to speak the truth.” — Mohan Singh, founder of the Sikh Awareness Society.

MI5, Britain’s domestic security agency, revealed that it has identified 23,000 jihadist extremists living in the country.

Manchester bomber Salman Abedi used taxpayer-funded student loans and benefits to bankroll the terror plot, according to the Telegraph. Abedi is believed to have received thousands of pounds in state funding in the run-up to the attack even while he was overseas receiving bomb-making training. It also emerged that the chief imam of Abedi’s mosque fought with militants in Libya. The mosque was also reported to have hosted hate preachers who called for British soldiers to be killed and non-believers to be stoned to death.

“It is no secret that Saudi Arabia in particular provides funding to hundreds of mosques in the UK, espousing a very hardline Wahhabist interpretation of Islam. It is often in these institutions that British extremism takes root.” — Tom Brake, Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman.

May 1. Army cadets in Scotland were warned not to wear their uniforms in public because they could be targeted by jihadists.

May 1. Three female teenagers were arrested in East London on terrorism charges. The arrests were in connection with an anti-terror operation in London on April 27 in which a woman wearing a burqa was shot by police. Police said that an active terror plot had been foiled.

May 2. Samata Ullah, a 34-year-old jihadist from Cardiff, was sentenced to eight years in prison for five terror offenses, including membership of the Islamic State, as well being involved in training terrorists and preparing for terrorist acts. Ullah, a British national of Bangladeshi origin, was a key member of a group calling itself the “Cyber Caliphate Army” and gave other members of IS advice on how to communicate using sophisticated encryption techniques.

May 3. Damon Smith, a 20-year-old convert to Islam, was found guilty of making a bomb filled with ball bearings and leaving it on a subway train in London. Jurors at the Old Baily court were told that Smith had downloaded an al-Qaeda article entitled, “Make a bomb in the kitchen of your Mom,” which contained step-by-step instructions on how to make a homemade bomb. The court also heard that Smith had a keen interest in Islam, guns and explosives, and had collected pictures of extremists, including the alleged mastermind of the 2015 Paris terror attacks. Smith, who suffers from autism, admitted to making the device but claimed he only meant it as a prank.

May 3. The trial began of four Muslim men who gang-raped a 16-year-old girl in Ramsgate, Kent. The girl was attacked when she got lost after a night out and asked for directions at a Kebab shop. Restaurant owner Tamin Rahani, 37, Rafiullah Hamidy, 24, Shershah Muslimyar, 20, and an unnamed teenager are accused of taking turns raping the girl in an apartment above the restaurant.

May 9. Aine Davis, a 33-year-old British convert to Islam, was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison by a court in Turkey for being a member of the Islamic State. The BBC reported that Davis was one of a four-man IS cell nicknamed “The Beatles” responsible for beheading more than two dozen hostages in Syria. Davis, the only one of the group to face a trial, had denied the charges against him. Davis left his home in West London in 2013 to join the Islamic State. His wife, Amal El-Wahabi, after a trial at the Old Bailey court, was jailed in November 2014 for funding his terrorism.

May 11. A mother and daughter, along with another woman, appeared at Westminster magistrates’ court on charges of plotting a jihadist attack near the British Parliament. Mina Dich, 43, her daughter Rizlaine Boular, 21, and Khawla Barghouthi, 20, are accused of plotting a random knife attack. Dich and Boular appeared in court wearing burkas covering their faces. Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot asked them to lift their veils to reveal their eyes when they were identified in the dock. Barghouthi wore a niqab with her face showing. All three are accused of conspiracy to murder.

May 12. Female drivers in Stockport were warned about a gang of young Muslim males who have been attempting to get into cars stopped at intersections. Several women in the area reported that they had been approached by the men while waiting for traffic lights to change.

May 13. A divorce practice that allows Muslim men instantly to terminate an Islamic marriage simply by repeating the word talaq, meaning divorce, three times to his wife, has been described as “really common” among Muslims in Britain, according to the Times. Women cannot use the method, known as “triple talaq.” Under civil law in Britain, Islamic marriages are not acknowledged, leaving women with little power to escape an unhappy or abusive marriage, or to defend their interests in court when a marriage breaks down. Women often face homelessness and a loss of financial support after divorce. Campaigners have called for an update to Marriage Act 1949 to demand the civil registration of all religious marriages. Christian, Jewish or Quaker marriages must be registered under the law, but Muslim, Hindu and Sikh unions do not. Qari Asim, an imam at the Leeds Makkah mosque, suggested that talaq should initially be uttered just once, and only spoken a second and third time after cooling-off periods of at least three months.

May 14. Mohan Singh, founder of the Sikh Awareness Society, said that Muslim grooming gangs have been allowed to prosper in Britain because the authorities are afraid they will be labelled racist if they speak out. In an interview with Katie Hopkins at LCB radio, Singh said that political correctness had allowed the gangs to succeed:

“I think it is due to political correctness, but it is also down to nobody wants to be called a racist…. Nobody really is grabbing the bull by the horns and saying ‘No, abuse is abuse.’ But they do not want to be labeled that we are after one community, we are targeting one community. We can see all the reports coming out Rotherham, the failings of the police, the failings of the local councilors. The whole system failed and that is what has been happening for the last 30 years. And it is PC. People are just too, too afraid to, you know, just too, too afraid to speak the truth.”

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Looking the Wrong Way on Iran by Shoshana Bryen

By on June 27th, 2017

How will Iraq get rid of the Iranians? Or will it? The chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Qassem Soleimani, has been seen several times in Iraq, most recently near the Syrian border, an indication that Iran has bigger plans than the liberation of Mosul.

The Sunni part of Iraq actually is an essential part of the land bridge being built from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea. There is a second and equally compelling issue for Iran to the southwest: encircling Saudi Arabia in the water.

If Iran is allowed to solidify its Shiite Crescent and its naval obstructionism, American allies across the Middle East and North Africa will pay a heavy price.

We have been looking in the wrong direction. While the West was hoping temporarily to check Iran’s nuclear aspirations, Iran was making plans to advance on the ground and in the water — and the plans are unfolding nicely. For Iran.

After the U.S. withdrew from Iraq in 2011, large swaths of Iraqi territory were easily brought under Islamic State (ISIS) control, culminating in the proclamation in 2014 of “The Caliphate” with its seat in Mosul. Having denigrated its capabilities as “the JV team,” the Obama administration was desperate to get rid of ISIS, but the Iraqi army (trained and armed at a cost of $26 billion between 2006 and 2015 with another $1.6 billion spent in 2016) was unable to handle the job, even with American air power and Kurdish fighters as allies.

The Iraqi army has since been improved, but in the Sunni heartland of Iraq, Shiite “militias” have become America’s ally in the battle for Mosul. Some militias are Iraqi Arab Shiites and some are sponsored and commanded by Persian Shiite Iran. There is no love between the two, and certainly no love between any of the Shiite militias and the U.S.-sponsored Iraqi military. But the battle has largely gone against ISIS. Militias on one side and Iraqi forces on the other are recapturing territory amid evidence of outrageous human rights abuses against Iraqi civilians by all sides. At some point soon, Iraqis (army and militias), Iranians, Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and Americans will be eyeball-to-eyeball in Mosul. This run-in raises two questions:

Could Sunni Iraqi civilians prefer ISIS to Shiite militias, whether Iraqi or Iranian? If they do, Mosul may be liberated, but ISIS may still find havens from which to conduct a grinding guerrilla war.
How will Iraq get rid of the Iranians? Or will it? Some Iraqi Shiite militias have been loosely but legally incorporated into the Iraqi military; the Iranian ones have not. The chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Qassem Soleimani, has been seen several times in Iraq, most recently near the Syrian border, an indication that Iran has bigger plans than the liberation of Mosul.

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