RUTHFULLY YOURS

There’s much to be said for love, but watch out when it’s a moralizing rock star doing the talking — and the subject is not romance, but matters of life and death in a time of accelerating jihadi slaughter.

In the aftermath of the terrorist atrocity in Nice — which ISIS has claimed for its own — the headlines now include reports that Bono, lead singer of the U2 rock band, was dining on the terrace of La Petite Maison restaurant, about half a mile from the Nice seafront Promenade des Anglais, when Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove a truck for more than a mile through the festive Bastille Day crowd, wounding more than 200 people and killing 84, including 10 children.

Armed counter-terrorism police “rescued” Bono, along with a number of other celebrities, including Elton John and a former mayor of Nice, who were also dining at the restaurant.

The next day, U2 put out a tweet, signed by all four members of the band, including Bono:

Love is bigger than anything in its way.

No doubt they meant well. But it ought to be clear by now that “love,” for all its virtues, is not enough to stop a terrorist driving a 21-ton truck. That was done by the heroic French police, who risked their lives to approach the truck and used their guns to fire a volley of bullets into the the cab, killing Bouhlel.

Nor, as far as Bono and his celebrity companions needed rescuing, were they rescued by love. They were rescued and escorted from the area near the killing zone by counter-terrorism police armed with guns.

One might cavil that the police who stopped Bouhlel acted out of love — love of country, love of decency, love of honor, love of their fellow man. Surely that figured in their actions. It took a lot more than love, however, to end Bouhlel’s killing spree. CONTINUE AT SITE

It may be expected that in the coming months, the Syrian efforts to implement “ethnic cleansing” of Sunnis in the north will continue and even escalate, resulting in a growing stream of refugees into Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. This will continue to destabilize these countries and to pose a challenge to a weakened Europe.

The overt American support for the Iranian involvement in Iraq will also serve to rally Sunnis to an anti-American position, while actually exacerbating the main problem — the sectarian divide. Therefore, the American involvement in the Fallujah campaign will not buy it Sunni gratitude.

Iran is entering a new stage of war in Syria which evokes the situation that the Soviet Union found itself in in Afghanistan in 1985. Like the Soviet Union in that stage of the Afghan war, Iran has achieved no decisive victory, but has incurred significant domestic opposition to the war and has no additional resources that could tip the scales.

The explanation put forward by the American administration that the attacks reflect the Islamic State’s “despair” in the face of its defeats in Syria and Iraq over the last months is specious. International terrorism “to strike fear in the hearts of Allah’s enemies” has been a hallmark of the Islamic State since its beginning and it does not need the excuse of military defeat in Syria and Iraq to continue to carry out such attacks.

Saudi Arabia

Approval of the National Transformation Plan

The Saudi Cabinet approved (June 6) the National Transformation Program (NTP), part of Saudi Vision 2030, led by Deputy Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman. The NTP is supposed to be the basis for laying out targets to be met by government ministries and departments. The NTP was well received not only be the Saudi mainstream media (to be expected) but by the Saudi social media that represents to a great degree the public opinion of the younger Saudi generation. It may be expected that Prince Mohammad bin Salman will continue to take steps in the framework of his initiative that will, at least, preserve the sense of momentum and the public support he is enjoying.

New HJS publication examines key areas where the Iran Deal has failed to live up to its objectives

On the anniversary of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the so-called ‘nuclear deal’ with Iran, a new publication – The Iran Deal a Year On: Assessing Iranian Ambitions by The Henry Jackson Society and the Friends of Israel Initiative called into life by former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and Lord Trimble, among others, lays bare the failure of the P5+1 strategy to normalise Iran’s international relations.

Despite the lofty promises and high hopes on the part of the deal’s supporters, a year after the nuclear deal, far from being better, the resulting situation is worse. Worse for international security, worse for nuclear non-proliferation, worse for regional stability, and above all worse for the people of Iran themselves. Iran has not become a regular nation-state in the international community, has breached the JCPOA and associated agreements, and has neither changed its course in the region nor made any significant steps towards easing repression domestically.

The new paper released today – The Iran Deal a Year On: Assessing Iranian Ambitions – is a compendium of essays by key experts that examines these angles through the lens of the implementation of the agreement, Iran’s regional ambitions and its human rights record over the last year in detail.

Every bit as predictable as the next Islamist massacre are the responses that outrage will bring. The perpetrators might be said to have pickled their brains with steroids, hate gays or have enjoyed too-easy access to guns, knives and/or big trucks. Not mentioned will be Islam’s role in Islamic terror.
Did he say it? Did she say it? It must be one of those fabricated memories that psychologists talk about. I thought I heard the French Ambassador say that the perpetrator of the attack in Nice, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, didn’t fit the Islamic terrorist profile because he had a night life and was a gym junkie or some such. I thought I heard Julie Bishop express a “hope” that this would be the last of such incidents. Clearly I am going around the bend; inventing comments that are clearly so inane that they could not possibly have been made.

But one thing is clear even to befuddled minds. Numbers of politicians and commentators are again wondering aloud about the motives of the perpetrator. He was a petty thief, we are told. Well that is illuminating! It is a well known fact that petty thieves are more likely than most to run a truck through hundreds of men, women and children with the aim of killing as many as possible.

I am going to take a guess. With his Tunisian heritage and a name like Mohamed, I bet he was a Muslim. And his motive — another shot in the dark — was to kill infidels. And to complete this exercise in wild supposition, his inspiration was his poisonous religion. At one level he might have been directed or inspired by ISIS or by Al-Qaeda or Ansar al-Sharia or Al-Shabaab or Boko Haram, the list goes depressingly on and on. It doesn’t matter; there is a common factor and a common foe. It is Islam. And some fools think it will end once ISIS is defeated.

Conservatives chide President Obama for refusing to say ‘radical Islamic terror’. They should be chiding him for refusing to say ‘Islamic terror’. Islam is one, according to no less an authority than President Erdogan (unfortunately still in power): “Turkey is not a country where moderate Islam prevails. This expression is wrong. The word Islam is uninflected, it is only Islam.” Let’s take his devout Islamic word for it.

I have said this before and will say it again. Not one so-called moderate Muslim will disavow one word of the very words of Allah in the Koran. All round good guy [Mohamed] Zuhdi Jasser, American medical doctor and former lieutenant commander in the US navy, rejects what he calls political Islam. But, as he has said, he “loves his religion.” So to the question he never seems to be asked: does he embrace or disavow those parts of the Koran which instruct violence against unbelievers (e.g., 9.29) or which relegate women (e.g., 4.34) to subordinate status in perpetuity?

Jasser and other moderates are contortionists. They embrace Western values of tolerance and equality while remaining shackled to a scripture which preaches intolerance and supremacism. It would be fine if all devout Muslims were as flexible. Most aren’t. They are steadfastly Muslim inside and outside their mosques.

““When you are motivated by fear, you seek to preserve demography by giving away geography,” explained Yoram Ettinger, a former Israeli ambassador and right-wing activist who has been active in publicizing the impact of Israel’s rising birthrate. “But if you examine Israel’s demographics realistically, there is no need to think in such terms.”

JERUSALEM—Israel’s peace camp and its international backers have long used one crude but powerful argument: Arabs make more babies than Jews and unless a separate Palestinian state is created, a demographic time bomb will turn Jews into a dwindling minority akin to white South Africans.

That prospect certainly seemed real when the Oslo peace process began in the 1990s. Fertility among Israeli Jews stood at an average of 2.6 children per woman, compared with 4.7 among Muslims in Israel and East Jerusalem and 6.0 among Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Yasser Arafat at the time famously declared that the womb of the Palestinian woman was his people’s most potent weapon.

Yet over the past decade, a demographic revolution with long-lasting political consequences has occurred. Jewish birthrates in Israel have spiked while Arab birthrates in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere in the Middle East have declined. This unlikely baby boom has made many Israeli Jews a lot less afraid of being outnumbered—one of the underappreciated reasons why the country’s voters have consistently rewarded politicians opposed to Palestinian statehood and to relinquishing land.

Israeli statisticians bemoan “inflated” Palestinian figures, which suggest Arabs outnumber Jews across Israel and the Palestinian territories.
New official statistics from the Palestinian Authority (PA) suggest that Jews are a shrinking minority between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, however Israeli statisticians firmly disagree.
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday reported that there are approximately 4.81 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, with 2.93 million in the West Bank and 1.88 million in the increasingly densely populated Gaza Strip.
According to their calculations, when taking into account the Israeli Arab population, which the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS) estimated to be around 1.77 million in May 2016, the total number of Arabs across Israel and the Palestinian territories reaches 6.58 million.
According to the ICBS, the Jewish population stands at 6.34 million, and despite falling birth rates among Arabs across the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, the statistics also seem to suggest that the overall gap is only growing.

The issue of demographics acts as motivator for supporters of varied political solutions to the conflict. While many on both sides cite the demographic trends as a justification for a two-state-solution, others mitigate the divides differently. These include some right-wing Israelis, who support a partial annexation of Jewish majority areas in the West Bank, but no full independence for the Palestinians who remain outside. Others yet call for a fedaralized, European style state for both peoples.