RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israelis live under constant threat of attacks that can occur anywhere, anytime, any way – from suicide bombings to stabbings to being run over with cars. (And this doesn’t even address the threat of large-scale attacks that loom on the horizon.)

The West has had the relative luxury of looking at Israel from afar and feeling a sense of how different life is here, compared to there. But times are changing as evil gains ground. Westerners can no longer cast their eyes to Israel and sense a great divide between us and them anymore. The Israeli reality has become the West’s reality as we face increasing terror attacks that crop up anywhere, anytime, any way.

These events are no longer occasional (though that would be bad enough). They’re not even every month or two (though that would be bad enough). Jihad has become a daily reality. Here is a sampling from just last week of some of the horror that the religion of horrors served up.

Bavaria: A group of Nigerian “refugee” women attacked a refugee center worker, attempting to strangle him while they held their babies in front as human shields so the man would not fight back. (here)

Brussels: Muslim adolescent boys sexually assaulted a teenage girl on a train. (here)

Denmark: A 15-year-old convert to Islam was arrested for possessing explosives. (here)

Canada: Two Muslims attempted to shoot up a nightclub full of people. A Muslim serial rapist was arrested after having raped at least ten teenage girls. (here, here, and here)

Germany: Three Muslim teenagers stoned two “transgender” people. (There really is no such thing as a “transgender” person, but for the sake of this report, the term is being used.) The attackers were apprehended and told the police: “such persons must be stoned.” Teenage girls were sexually assaulted and raped by “Syrian migrants” at a swimming pool. A Muslim man kicked a woman in her face and broke her cheekbone while attempting to rape her. Christians continued to be targeted by Muslims at asylum centers. (here, here, here, and here)

France: A Muslim teenager attacked a Jewish teacher with a machete and a knife, stating that he was acting in allegiance with the Islamic State. (Life for Jews in France has become so perilous that Jewish men are being urged not to wear yarmulkes in public.) Women continued to come forward to report sexual assaults from New Year’s eve. (here, here, and here)

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is yet another toothless U.N. body that is in for a whirlwind of frustration when it inspects Iran’s nuclear program sites. The provisions of the agreement negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry and his team of sycophants make Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” negotiations with Hitler look like a stroke of genius.

Iran’s Islamic regime is an incredibly dangerous foe. Like ISIS (or Daesh, a moniker that group loathes), Iran has an apocalyptic view of current and near-future events. But this time around, a group of believers in Shia Iran, with tremendous resources, are intent upon forcing the issue, making the conditions so dire that they leave the reluctant Saheb-ul-Zaman, the Lord of the Age, the Mahdi, their messianic myth, no choice but to appear and assume his universal reign.

Devotees drive both, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic State, to quicken the End Times apocalypse. Iranian leaders hold to a Shia brand. ISIS leaders hold to a Sunni brand. But both are obsessed by a belief that their messiah is coming. The Iran Shiites believe they must lay the groundwork for the messiah (Mahdi) to come and build their Kingdom or Imamate. ISIS isn’t really waiting. They have propelled a jihadist storm to build the Caliphate now, so that the Mahdi will come soon.

TAIPEI — Taiwan’s first female president, Tsai Ing-wen, takes a novel approach to politics on an island renowned for its legislative brawls and fiery standoffs with Beijing.

The 59-year-old former law professor, who won a landslide election victory on Saturday, shuns confrontation, listens rather than lectures, and is happiest poring over policy details, say people who know her.

Even so, in over two decades in politics and government, they say she has proven to be a tough negotiator, having shepherded Taiwan’s entry to the World Trade Organization, and she’s a passionate believer in Taiwan’s democracy as its defining feature — rather than its divisive relations with China, which sees the island as its territory.

Her quiet pragmatism struck a chord with voters, winning the presidency and helping secure a legislative majority for her Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, which espouses independence from the mainland.

The presidential nominee for Taiwan’s pro-independence opposition defeated rival Eric Chu, of the ruling Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, in Saturday’s election. The KMT also lost control of the legislature for the first time.

Tsai Ing-wen easily won Taiwan’s presidential election on Saturday, as expected, and her Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) took its first-ever majority in the legislature. The party platform stressed Taiwan’s right to democratic self-government, and the victory margins received a last-minute boost from an unexpected source: the political bullying of a teen pop star.

Hours before voting began, Taiwanese social media exploded with anger over a video in which Chou Tzu-yu, a 16-year-old Taiwanese member of a South Korean “K-pop” group, was forced by her management to apologize for waving Taiwan’s flag on a TV show. “There is only one China and the two sides of the Strait are one,” she read from a script, promising to “seriously reflect” on her behavior. The glum scene resembled a hostage video.

It would have been hard to concoct a display more likely to reinforce Taiwanese fears that China’s economic and military power threatens their democratic way of life. Candidates across the political spectrum defended Ms. Chou, but the episode was bad news for the ruling Nationalist Party (KMT), which since 2008 has prioritized closer ties with China. Several tight legislative races may have tipped for the DPP as a result.

SOLO, Indonesia—This city in central Java is ground zero in Indonesia’s fight against extremism.

One man—a native of this community of half a million people—financed and encouraged the terrorists who carried out the gun and bomb attacks against the capital, Jakarta, on Jan. 14. It wasn’t the first time Solo had incubated violent radicals.

Police said Bahrun Naim, an Islamic State adherent now based in Syria, sent money to the Jakarta attackers. Radicals from Solo, also known as Surakarta, were prominent in a wave of attacks against Western targets at the turn of the century, including the bombings on the resort island of Bali in 2002 that killed 202 people, mostly tourists.

Mr. Naim became radicalized while attending an Islamic school in Solo, local police and a person who knew him said. Over the past decade, Indonesian police have arrested or killed scores of local terrorists from a generation inspired by and linked to al Qaeda. Some had been to Afghanistan pre-9/11; many had studied in Solo. Improved policing eviscerated the leadership until only scattered cells capable of little more than drive-by shootings remained, experts said. Until last week there had been no major attack on Jakarta since 2009.

But the emergence of a new cohort of militants impressed as youngsters by the previous heyday of terror here demonstrates the deep roots of radicalization.

Odds are after this weekend’s Jan. 16 presidential election, Taiwan (an island which Beijing says is officially part of one China but de facto self-governing), will be ruled by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Tsai Ing-wen.

The DPP is an organization created decades go to push for the formal independence of Taiwan. Beijing has for years made clear that any such move would be tantamount to a declaration of war.

Yet even without such a rupture, which seems far-fetched in the current upbeat mood on the both sides of the Straits, Beijing is especially wary of any step that might rock the region’s very delicate political balance. With the Chinese economy hitting a speed bump in the past months, with a Hong Kong anti-communist student movement still brewing, tensions in the South/East China Sea and with Japan still high, any “wrong” development in Taipei about Beijing or in Beijing about Taipei could kindle dangerous chain reactions.
Benjamin Lim

Benjamin Lim

An authoritative and comprehensive book that was recently published in Taiwan, Bamai zhongguo (“Taking the Pulse of China”), offers some key insights on the sensitive conundrum facing China and Taiwan. It was written by Reuters Beijing correspondent Benjamin Lim and deals with everything that Taiwan deeply worries about — Xi Jinping, Taiwan, Sino-US relations, and the future of China.

Born in Manila to Chinese parents, Lim studied engineering in the Philippines and Chinese in Taiwan. He has been a journalist for more than 30 years.

According to Lim, the Taiwan elections aren’t simply a contest between old-fashioned Nationalists of the KMT and the newly ambitious DPP. The huge elephant in the room is China, with its potentially enormous impact on the future of the island and the rest of the world.

News Flash: When the rich and mighty meet next week at the World Economic Forum’s annual pow-wow, Jan 20-23, in the ski resort of Davos, Switzerland, North Korea will have no envoy among them. If that sounds intuitively obvious, think again. It was only this Wednesday, following North Korea’s Jan. 6 nuclear test, that the WEF organizers of the Davos conference told the press they had disinvited North Korea’s delegation.

Well done. Except this leaves us with the question of why the World Economic Forum decided to invite North Korea in the first place.

Until Kim Jong Un’s regime carried out its Jan. 6 underground nuclear test, with the added frill of advertising it — true or not — as a hydrogen bomb, North Korea’s Foreign Minister Ri Su Yong and his entourage were comfortably ensconced on the WEF guest list for Davos. At this international pajama party for the global elite, they were going to be welcomed to rub shoulders with such luminaries as Bono, Leonardo DiCaprio, Secretary of State John Kerry, Vice President Joe Biden, more than 40 heads of state and government, 1,500 business leaders and the heads of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

They were going to be included in the Forum’s 2016 effort, as described in the WEF mission statement, “to demonstrate entrepreneurship in the global public interest while upholding the highest standards of governance.”

Secretary of State John Kerry declared that the world became a safer place today as the Obama administration repealed sanctions on Iran.

Implementation Day came as the International Atomic Energy Agency released a report “confirming that Iran has completed the necessary preparatory steps to start the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.”

“It was issued after Agency inspectors on the ground verified that Iran has carried out all measures required under the JCPOA to enable Implementation Day to occur,” IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano said. “This paves the way for the IAEA to begin verifying and monitoring Iran’s nuclear-related commitments under the agreement, as requested by the U.N. Security Council and authorised by the IAEA Board.”

In releasing guidance on the lifting of sanctions, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said the administration “will continue to target sanctionable activities outside of the JCPOA – including those related to Iran’s support for terrorism, regional destabilization, human rights abuses, and ballistic missile development.”

Members of Congress, particularly a group of Senate Democrats, have been pressuring the administration to act against Iran’s missile program in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions.

The Long Shadow Of Malthus

For more than 200 years, a disturbingly vicious thread has run through Western history, based on biology and justifying cruelty on an almost unimaginable scale. It centres on the question of how to control human population growth and it answers that question by saying we must be cruel to be kind, that ends justify means. It is still around today; and it could not be more wrong. It is the continuing misuse of Malthus.

According to his epitaph in Bath Abbey, the Rev Thomas Robert Malthus, author of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), was noted for “his sweetness of temper, urbanity of manners and tenderness of heart, his benevolence and his piety”. Yet his ideas have justified some of the greatest crimes in history. By saying that, if people could not be persuaded to delay marriage, we would have to encourage famine and “reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases”, he inadvertently gave birth to a series of heartless policies — the poor laws, the British government’s approach to famine in Ireland and India, social Darwinism, eugenics, the Holocaust, India’s forced sterilisations and China’s one-child policy. All derived their logic more or less directly from a partial reading of Malthus.

To this day if you write or speak about falling child mortality in Africa, you can be sure of getting the following Malthusian response: but surely it’s a bad thing if you stop poor people’s babies dying? Better to be cruel to be kind. Yet actually we now know, this argument is wrong. The way to get population growth to slow, it turns out, is to keep babies alive so people plan smaller families: to bring health, prosperity and education to all.

Britain’s Poor Law of 1834, which attempted to ensure that the very poor were not helped except in workhouses, and that conditions in workhouses were not better than the worst in the outside world, was based explicitly on Malthusian ideas — that too much charity only encouraged breeding, especially illegitimacy, or “bastardy”. The Irish potato famine of the 1840s was made infinitely worse by Malthusian prejudice shared by the British politicians in positions of power. The Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, was motivated by “a Malthusian fear about the long-term effect of relief”, according to a biographer. The Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, Charles Trevelyan, had been a pupil of Malthus at the East India Company College: famine, he thought, was an “effective mechanism for reducing surplus population” and a “direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence” sent to teach the “selfish, perverse and turbulent” Irish a lesson. Trevelyan added: “Supreme Wisdom has educed permanent good out of transient evil.”

“Our fellow Muslims have been happy to use us as a pretext, to have something to point at and complain about: We are waging war; it is because of the Palestinians. We refuse to fight; it is because of the Palestinians. We cannot do what you want; it is because of the Palestinians. At no time did they ever seriously seek to resolve the conflict, nor did they ever want to.The great benefit we have is that the Israelis no longer rule us. We now have an autonomy. If the Americans and Europeans continue meddling and pressuring one side or the other in our conflict with the Israelis, eventually the stable but still fragile Palestinian social fabric in the West Bank will tear, and at the first sign of weakness Hamas and ISIS will rush in — as they have long been planning — to take over.”

If the Americans and Europeans continue meddling, the stable but still fragile Palestinian social fabric in the West Bank will tear, and at the first sign of weakness, Hamas and ISIS will rush in — as they have long been planning — to take over.

Every Arab regime has, at one time or another, used the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an excuse to oppress its people. Our fellow Muslims have been happy to use us as a pretext: We are waging war because of the Palestinians. We refuse to fight because of the Palestinians. We cannot do what you want because of the Palestinians. At no time did they ever seriously seek to resolve the conflict — nor did they ever want to.

The sheikhs who claimed it was forbidden for Muslims to live under the shadow of infidel European Christianity now have to watch as Muslims grovel at Europe’s feet and beg the infidel Christians for a safe haven and shelter from… other Muslims.

According to Islamic sources, one of the signs of yawm al-qiyamah (Judgment Day) and redemption is the appearance of the False Messiah, masih dajjal, sent by Satan in the guise of the True Messiah. He is charismatic and powerful, his skin is the color of bronze, his hair is curly and his eyes flash fire. He pretends to do good deeds, drawing people to him and making them blindly follow him.