RUTHFULLY YOURS

At this point, it’s a sad joke — a form of gallows humor shared in times of trouble. When there’s a shooting, and the hours tick by without any identification of the suspect, one can presume that it’s a jihadist. When there’s a riot in Europe, and the perpetrators are described as “youths,” one can presume it’s Muslim men. When an Islamist goes on a shooting spree or stabbing spree or beheads a coworker, authorities will latch onto any explanation but the obvious.

But now even gallows humor is inappropriate. Western denial of Islamic crimes is so common, so systematic, that we can no longer have any confidence that we understand the true dimensions of the jihadist threat. Consider the following:

In Germany, police actively “tried to obfuscate” what happened on New Year’s Eve, when thousands of Muslim men systematically sexually assaulted hundreds of German women — an act that my colleague Andrew McCarthy has aptly termed a “rape jihad.”

The New York Times reported yesterday that Swedish authorities now stand accused of covering up a wave of sexual assaults at a concert last summer. A Swedish newspaper wrote today that national media refused at the time to report factual accounts from the concert assaults, claiming they were nothing but far-right “propaganda.”

A preview by Benghazi security officer Kris “Tanto” Paronto of 13 Hours, the block-buster Michael Bay film that premieres on Thursday, raises dramatic new questions about the refusal by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to authorize a military rescue of the besieged U.S. diplomatic facility and the nearby CIA Annex on Sept 11-12, 2012.

In a presentation at a conference organized by the Maryland Citizen Action Network last weekend, Paronto revealed that two AC-130H “Spectre” gunships were “on call” that night, both within range of Benghazi.

One of them was a six-hour flight away, co-located with a U.S. special operations team in Djibouti.

The other was at Naval Air Station Sigonella, in Sicily. “That’s a 45-minute flight,” Paronto said.

The Spectre gunship with its 25mm rapid-fire gatling guns, its 40 mm precision Bofors gun, and its 105mm canon is “good in urban warfare because you have little collateral damage,” Paronto explained.

In fact, it was just what the beleaguered security team needed. They could see the jihadis advancing on the Annex compound throughout the night and lit them up with lasers, which the airborne crew could have used for precision targeting purposes. On-line videos of the Spectre gunship in operation show that it can walk its cannons up narrow streets, killing fighters while leaving the surrounding buildings intact and people inside them unharmed.

The hype for the last State of the Union address had been building for months. There was a countdown, special Muslim guest stars and a pre-show featuring a mediocre indie band and Joe Biden.

And all Iran had to do to steal the show was take two Navy boats and ten sailors hostage.

Then, when Obama puffed out his chest and declared, “No nation dares to attack us or our allies because they know that’s the path to ruin”, it took good manners not to laugh.

That would come as news to Iran which three days ago fired rockets near the USS Harry S Truman and then decided to seize two American naval vessels, or to North Korea, which celebrated the State of the Union early with a major nuclear test, or to China, which threatened us with war in October.

Never mind Russia, which invaded and annexed part of one of our allies. Or all the Islamic terrorists.

In what’s just more proof that ISIS is by far the most diabolical terrorist organization in the world, Fox News reports that its leaders burned their own jihadists alive because they fled when the Iraqi city of Mosul was attacked by the Iraqi army.

ISIS fighters who fled to the terror group’s Iraqi stronghold of Mosul after being defeated in Ramadi were burned alive in the town square, sources told FoxNews.com, in an unmistakable message to fighters who may soon be defending the northern city from government forces.

Several residents of Mosul recounted the grisly story for stateside relatives, describing the deadly reception black clad jihadists got when they made it to Mosul, some 250 miles north of the city retaken by Iraqi forces operating with cover from U.S. air power.

A former resident of Mosul who now lives in the U.S. says that his family back home told him what happened:

They were grouped together and made to stand in a circle, and set on fire to die.

Seven years into the presidency that promised America a 21st century golden age, born of the Audacity of Hope and Change, audacity is not going America’s way. Just before the State of the Union address, Jan. 12, 2016, news breaks that Iran has seized and detained 10 American Navy sailors (though we are told they will be promptly returned).

This follows last week’s in-our-face announcement by North Korea that it had just tested a hydrogen bomb (though maybe it was merely an atomic bomb) — its third nuclear test on President Obama’s watch. That followed Iran’s brazen, sanctions-violating test launches in recent months of ballistic missiles, despite the “exclusively peaceful” refrain of the Iran nuclear deal so fervently sought and perversely praised by the Obama administration.

Add to this scene the December terrorist massacre in San Bernardino, in which an ISIS-inspired couple, an American-born jihadi and his Islamist immigrant bride, murdered 14 people and wounded 22 at an office Christmas party.

Here’s the real State of the Union, which is inextricably linked to the increasingly alarming state of the world: It is open season on America.

“It is a shame for Sweden to have a Foreign Minister who creates a diplomatic crisis as soon as she opens her mouth, and who so one-sidedly allies herself with anti-democratic forces against Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East.” — Political analyst Mathias Sundin, in Aftonbladet.

“Wallström portrays [Palestinian President Mahmoud] Abbas as a pacifist who has denounced terrorism…. He has not condemned a single one of the murders of 20 Israelis during the last few months. On the contrary … Abbas said in September, regarding the violence against Israelis, that ‘We bless every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem’, and we know that every Palestinian assassin apprehended by Israel is rewarded by the Palestinian Authority. So how can Wallström claim that he denounces terrorism, when he is actually rewarding it with money from the Swedish taxpayers? … Is Wallström aware of the praising of terrorism? Is Wallström aware of the rewards paid to terrorists? Yes or no?” — Kent Ekeroth, Sweden Democrats Party.

It seems that pretty much everything is going wrong for Sweden’s Foreign Minister these days.

Margot Wallström, of the Social Democratic Party, ascended with much fanfare to the post of Foreign Minister in the fall of 2014. She had introduced a completely new concept: a feminist foreign policy. In the Statement of Foreign Policy of 2015, she asserted that “A feminist foreign policy is now being formulated, the purpose of which is to combat discrimination against women, improve conditions for women and contribute to peace and development.”

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on Wednesday said it had released 10 U.S. sailors detained after their boats wandered into Iranian waters following an equipment malfunction.

“After technical examinations, interaction with our political and national security officials and clarification that their entrance into [our] waters was unintentional… it was decided that they should be released,” an IRGC statement said.

The U.S. didn’t immediately confirm the sailors’ release.

The sailors were set free in international waters under the supervision of IRGC vessels, the Iranian statement added.

Two 20-to-25-foot-long Navy boats were taken into custody late Tuesday in Iranian waters near Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf. U.S. officials said they were investigating the possibility that a mechanical issue led them to drift into Iranian territory during a trip from Kuwait to Bahrain.

One of the great lessons of the 20th century, paid for with the suffering and blood of hundreds of millions, is that communism was a failure in both economy and governance. This was demonstrated repeatedly with the fall of the Soviet Union, the switch in China from communes and central planning to capitalism, the vast slaughter of the Khmer Rouge, the breakdown of the Cuban economy, and the starving prison house that is North Korea.

The one place that Marxism has succeeded is in conquering academia in Europe and North America. Marxism-Leninism is now the dominant model of history and society being taught in Western universities and colleges. Faculties of social science and humanities disguise their Marxism under the label “postcolonialism,” anti-neoliberalism, and the quest for equality and “social justice.” And while our educational institutions laud “diversity” in gender, race, sexual preference, religion, national origin, etc., diversity in opinion, theory, and political view is nowhere to be seen. So our students hear only the Marxist view, and take it to be established truth.

The reports of the death of Polish democracy, to paraphrase the oft told line of the eminent American writer, satirist, and political critic Mark Twain, have been greatly exaggerated.

Contrary to the alarmist media reports emanating from the media mandarins of the mainstream Western press, most Poles on the ground, constituting a silent majority as clearly indicated by the recent Presidential and Parliamentary elections, want to reassure those in the West that in Poland today the threats to democracy being “spun” by the global media complex are grossly mischaracterized and even wholly manufactured.

Democracy in Poland is the healthiest it has ever been in the post-1989, modern era.

The mainstream Western press apparatus however, taking its cues from the Polish mainstream press and those connected to the last government – freshly ejected from office due to its brazen, systemic corruption and its agenda of deeper EU integration – continues to criticise the recently and democratically elected new government and to deliver egregiously incomplete accounts of the actions on the ground; well parsed to ensure no inconvenient truths make it to the Western reader.

This active “spin” is meant to obfuscate the truth about the last eight years as well as to “poison the well” for those elected with the largest democratic mandate in modern Polish history, the former opposition party, Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc– PiS).

It is a testament to the precarious state of the world today that in a week that saw North Korea carry out a possible test of a hydrogen bomb, the most frightening statement uttered did not come from Pyongyang.

It came from Pakistan.

Speaking in the military garrison town of Rawalpindi, Pakistani Army chief Gen. Raheel Sharif said that any Iranian threat to Saudi Arabia’s territorial integrity will “wipe Iran off the map.”

Sharif made the statement following his meeting with Saudi Arabia’s defense minister and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. According to media reports, Salman was the second senior Saudi official to visit Pakistan in the past week amid growing tensions between Iran and the kingdom.

Salman’s trip and Sharif’s nuclear threat make clear that following the US’s all-but-official abandonment of its role as protector of the world’s largest oil producer, the Saudis have cast their lots with nuclear-armed Pakistan.

When last October, the USS Harry Truman exited the Persian Gulf, the move marked the first time since 2007 that the US lacked an aircraft carrier in the region. Nine years ago, the US naval move was not viewed as a major statement of strategic withdrawal, given that back then the US had some one hundred thousand troops in Iraq.

While the USS Truman returned to the Gulf late last month, its return gave little solace to America’s frightened and spurned Arab allies. The Obama administration’s weak-kneed response to Iran’s live-fire exercises on December 26, during which an Iranian Revolutionary Guards vessel fired rockets a mere 1,370 meters from the aircraft carrier as it transited the Straits of Hormuz, signaled that the US is not even willing to make a show of force to deter Iranian aggression.

And so the Saudis have turned to Pakistan.

It would be foolish to view Sharif’s nuclear threat as mere bluster.