RUTHFULLY YOURS

The scramble to acquire weapons comes amid an indisputable nationwide spike in migrant-driven crime, including rapes of German women and girls on a shocking scale, as well as physical assaults, stabbings, home invasions, robberies and burglaries — in cities and towns throughout the country.

German authorities, however, are going to great lengths to argue that the German citizenry’s sudden interest in self-defense has nothing whatsoever to do with mass migration into the country, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

The spike in violent crimes committed by migrants has been corroborated by a leaked confidential police report, which reveals that a record-breaking 38,000 asylum seekers were accused of committing crimes in the country in 2014. Analysts believe this figure — which works out to more than 100 crimes a day — is only a fragment: many crimes are not reported.

“Anyone who asks for the reasons for the surge in weapons purchases encounters silence.” — Süddeutsche Zeitung

Germans, facing an influx of more than one million asylum seekers from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, are rushing to arm themselves.

Give rap superstar Nicki Minaj credit for having not a sliver of shame.

After human-rights activists begged her not to sing at a Christmas show in the brutal African dictatorship of Angola for a reported $2 million, she flaunted her dealings with its regime. She posted photos of herself boarding a Gulfstream jet for Angola, another of her arriving, one of her in a sheer bodysuit prepping for the show, and one of her in concert with the caption Angola has my heart. And, obviously, the fat paycheck has her heart as well.

Minaj claims an interest in bettering people’s lives, and she and her managers have joined up with the Black Lives Matter movement. She even spent time last year lamenting to Rolling Stone that black celebrities are slow to speak out against injustice.

But Thor Halvorssen, president of the Human Rights Foundation, notes the hypocrisy in Minaj’s stance: “Minaj’s payday is all the more jarring given that she and her managers joined the chorus of the Black Lives Matter movement. It appears that when those black lives happen to be in Angola, their lives matter less than a paycheck from a dictator.”

Halvorssen’s watchdog group has been a singularly effective at tracking celebrities who cash in on dictator gigs. He has blown the whistle on Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, and Hilary Swank for cavorting with criminal regimes, whether it’s Qaddafi’s Libya (Beyoncé), Turkmenistan (Lopez), or Chechnya (Swank). When shamed by the Human Rights Foundation, all three singers apologized, and Beyoncé donated her fee to a charity in Haiti.

Let’s indulge optimism and hope for the sake of Western civilisation and, not least, for the wellbeing of coming generations of people born into Muslim societies that Islam can and does undergo a revolution. But I won’t hold my breath
Malcolm Turnbull, ASIO head Duncan Lewis, Sydney Mayor Clover Moore and Assistant Multiculturalism Minister Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, among others, apparently believe that it is discordant, dangerous even, to be too critical of Islam. So here we have a diseased ideology which we have to tiptoe around lest its adherents become upset. What the heck is happening to our civilisation?

OK, am I going too far in calling it a diseased ideology? Well there must something of the like at work. How else is it possible to explain so much symptomatic violence, hateful preaching and sheer intolerance wherever there are Muslim populations? Surely large numbers of Muslims were not born that way. Of course they were not. They have been infected.

The fault does not lie with Muslims as people. It lies fairly and squarely with Islam, and we have to say so unashamedly, loudly and often. But what about the moderate Muslims, the hand-wringers whine, don’t we need them onside? Hmm! First a question: What do moderate Muslims believe?

My concise OED defines “moderate” as “not radical or excessively right or left-wing.” I therefore buy the siren cry that most Muslims are “moderate”. It does not alter the fact that they are moderate Muslims, a qualifier we never hear in regard to “moderate Christians” or “moderate Hindus”. The evidence is that there a world of difference. That is why we don’t hear about ‘Hinduophobia’. The difference goes to their belief systems.

“Some of those women and girls have had to watch 7-, 8-, and 9-year-old children bleed to death before their eyes, after being raped by ISIS militia multiple times a day.” — Mirza Ismail, chairman of the Yazidi Human Rights Organization-International.

“An office has been established by ISIS members in Antep [Turkey]; and at that office, women and children kidnapped by ISIS are sold for high amounts of money. Where are the ministers and law enforcement officers of this county who are talking about stability?” — Reyhan Yalcindag, prominent Kurdish human rights lawyer.

“Five thousand people have been taken as captives. Women and children are raped, and then sold. These must be considered crimes.” — Leyla Ferman, Co-President of the Yazidi Federation of Europe.

“Turkey has signed several international treaties, but it is the number one country when it comes to professional non-compliance with human rights treaties.” — Reyhan Yalcindag.

This month, the German television station, ARD (Consortium of Public Broadcasters in Germany), produced footage documenting the slave trade being conducted by the Islamic State (ISIS) through a liaison office in the province of Gaziantep (also known as Antep) in Turkey, near the border with Syria.

In August 2014, Islamic State jihadists attacked Sinjar, home to over 400,000 Yazidis. The United Nations confirmed that 5,000 men were executed, and as many as 7,000 women and girls made sex slaves.

While some have escaped or been ransomed back, thousands of Yazidis remain missing.

This month marks the first anniversary of President Obama’s unilateral rapprochement with Cuba. Upon making the Dec. 17 announcement, the Obama administration immediately moved to ease restrictions on American travel to the island and, by extension, boost revenues for the owners of its tourist industry: the Cuban military.

In May the U.S. removed Cuba from its list of state sponsors of terrorism, even though the dictator Gen. Raúl Castro harbors known terrorists, including the U.S. fugitive Joanne Chesimard, once a member of the now defunct Black Liberation Army and a convicted cop-killer.

In August the U.S. reopened an embassy in Havana. Last week it announced a bilateral agreement to restore direct flights between the U.S. and Cuba.

Cuba’s dissidents have been hard hit. Days after the new U.S. policy was announced, Danilo Maldonado, the Cuban performance artist known as El Sexto, was arrested for mocking the Castros. He spent 10 months in jail, and Amnesty International named him a prisoner of conscience.

The terrorist threat posed by Islamic State morphed from an uncertain menace confined largely to the Middle East into one of the biggest global security challenges since the end of the Cold War.

For the first time the militant group launched major terror attacks from its strongholds against distant targets, including the deadliest-ever on French soil. A couple killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in the worst attack in the U.S. since Sept. 11, 2001; the wife had pledged allegiance to Islamic State.

Islamic State consistently urged sympathizers to strike the West, but until recently the group devoted its energy to seizing territory in Syria and Iraq for a so-called caliphate to be ruled according to its puritanical version of Islam.

“It was clear the group was calling for attacks,” said Raffaello Pantucci, a counterterrorism expert at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London. “But it wasn’t clear there was anything strategic to it. It was more about throwing sand in our eyes.”

That changed with a string of lethal attacks directed at some of the group’s main enemies, including Turkey, Hezbollah and possibly Russia as well as the West.

Growing Iranian involvement in the war in Syria is about to be officially requested by Basher Assad in Tehran later this month.

To assure his safe arrival in and departure through Iraqi airspace, his plane will be guarded by “four strategic Russian fighter jets,” said the Lebanese daily al-Diyar. It also reported that “the US-led international coalition’s air command has been warned not to approach…Assad’s plane to avoid engagement.”

The Iranians claim Assad’s visit aims to celebrate “recent victories of the Syrian army against the Takfiri terrorist groups.” However, they seem to follow in Moscow’s footstep in the charade that their presence and direct involvement in the Syrian war are legitimate.

Why now? It has never been a secret that Iran has been Assad’s main supporter all along.

Thursday marks a bitter anniversary in the Arab world. On Dec. 17, 2010, a Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after the authorities confiscated his goods and beat him. The incident sparked an uprising that within weeks would topple Tunisia’s venal autocracy. Protests spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria. Despots from Morocco to Mesopotamia felt the heat of popular anger. Many couldn’t withstand it.

Yet today the Middle East is less stable, and less hopeful, than it was before the Arab Spring. Five years ago, the denim-clad, smartphone-wielding Arab liberal became the region’s avatar. Now the knife-wielding jihadist and the refugee have risen to prominence instead.

Each Arab Spring country is unhappy in its own way. Tunisia is the only success story among the bunch, having adopted a secular constitution and completed several peaceful power transfers. As Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia’s moderate Islamic Ennahda party, recently told me, “We’ve remained on the bridge of democratic transition while others have fallen off.” True, but the birthplace of the Arab Spring is also the world’s top exporter of fighters for Islamic State, or ISIS.

Richard Prasquier is President of Keren Hayesod France and Honorary Chairman of the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France). This article first appeared in a slightly different form in French. Gatestone thanks the author for his kind permission to publish it in English.

Our reaction should be directed not against the terrorists, but against those who indoctrinate, train and finance them — and on working to eradicate this virus of the mind.

Where are the demands to boycott those who fund ISIS? Their names are well-known.

The “Crusaders” now seem exhausted. They simply do not want enemies.

These attacks — like those before them — were simply meant to sow terror: go kill as many people as you can.

The Pope can insist all he likes that we have entered a Third World War; it is so much more comforting to repeat that the main problem is “Israel’s occupation” is the problem.

After the November 13 attacks in Paris, there were concerns in the media that Europe did not fully understand the gravity of the threats posed by radical Islam. Frances’s Minister of the Interior, Bernard Cazeneuve, however, certainly did not hide his prediction that, this year, a large scale attack would take place in France. It was not a matter of “if,” but “when” and “where.”

Thoughts first were for the victims, for those who will suffer all their lives — young people who went out just to enjoy some music or eat with friends.

Next came the questions: about the claim of responsibility by ISIS, and how the coordinated attacks would nullify the “lone wolf” theory — a hypothesis largely refuted anyway. These were commandos trained to kill, and to kill themselves too.

Israel’s Channel 10 broke a story Thursday night that is the kind of scoop journalists celebrate. Unfortunately, however, this one is very bad news.

According to sources in the Prime Minister’s Office, Israel and Turkey are on the verge of restoring full diplomatic relations. Translated into plain English, this means that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is about to make a deal with the devil.

The demon in question, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had already hinted on Monday that he was sniffing around his Jewish nemesis when he said that renewed ties between the two countries would have “a lot to offer to us, to Israel, to Palestine and also to the region.”

So it probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise to learn that a secret meeting was held on Wednesday in Switzerland between Turkish Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioglu and newly appointed Mossad chief Yossi Cohen, accompanied by Netanyahu’s long-time special envoy to Turkey, Yossi Ciechanover, for the purpose of reaching an agreement.

Nor is Erdogan’s timing due to a gradual change of heart. Rather, it is because the Ankara Islamist with hegemonic fantasies has become a pariah in the Muslim world he dreamed of ruling, while Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready, willing and able to pummel him into oblivion.