RUTHFULLY YOURS

Islamist extremist Harry S. wasn’t in Syria for long. But during his stay there, he claims, Islamic State leaders repeatedly tried to recruit him to commit terror attacks in Germany. Security officials believe he could be telling the truth.

It was an early summer morning in the Syrian desert, with not a cloud in the sky, when Mohamed Mahmoud asked those gathered around him: “Here are some prisoners. Which of you wants to waste them?”

Not long before, Islamic State (IS) had taken the city of Palmyra, and now jihadists from Germany and Austria were to participate in the executions of some of the prisoners taken in the operation. They drove to the site of the executions in Toyota pick-ups, bringing along an IS camera team in order to document the atrocity in the city of antique ruins. Even then, Mohamed Mahmoud was known to German security officials for his repeated propaganda-video calls to join the jihad. On that early summer day in Palmyra, though, he didn’t just incite others. He grabbed a Kalashnikov himself and began firing. That day, Mahmoud and his group of executioners are thought to have killed six or seven prisoners.

The story comes from someone who was in Palmyra on that day: Harry S., a 27-year-old from Bremen. “I saw it all,” he says.

Harry S. returned to Germany from Syria and is now in investigative custody. He has told security officials everything about the brief time he spent with Islamic State and has also demonstrated his readiness to deliver extensive testimony to German public prosecutors. He stands accused of membership in a terrorist group. His lawyer Udo Würtz declined to offer a detailed response when contacted, but said of his client: “He wants to come clean.”

Obama is betting the last of his foreign policy cred on beating ISIS by fixing Syria through a peace process that brings together Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and just about everybody who is anybody in the international terrorism and regime change racket to fight the ISIS war that he doesn’t want to fight.

There’s just one little problem. Nobody on the guest list wants to fix Syria. They want to control it.

The reason that ISIS exists is the same reason that Syria can’t be fixed. ISIS didn’t get so big because Muslims are angry about our foreign policy. It got huge because Sunni Muslims hate Shiite Muslims.

Al Qaeda in Iraq didn’t become popular because it killed American soldiers, but because it suicide bombed Iraqi Shiites. It really took off once there was a civil war underway between Syrian Shiites and Sunni Islamists.

Osama bin Laden wanted Al Qaeda in Iraq to focus on Americans, not Shiites. Zarqawi knew better. Al Qaeda’s base in Iraq was a Sunni population that hated their Shiite and Kurdish neighbors even more than they hated the American soldiers trying to keep the peace between them. By massacring Shiites, Al Qaeda in Iraq stopped being another franchise of a goofy Saudi rich kid making snuff videos for Qatar’s fake Al Jazeera news network and instead became the protectors of the Sunni minority.

Tensions are running high in the northern English town of Ashton-under-Lyne after a video circulating online showed a gang of what is reported as British-Pakistani youths attacking young “white girls” at a bus stop.

The incident, which occured in the town just outside of Manchester, has led to a number of groups calling for a ‘march’ or ‘rally’ in the town this coming Saturday, with the English Defence League quickly setting up an ‘Ashton-Under-Lyne’ branch of the group.

The video, which has been removed from YouTube but can still be found on LiveLeak, describes the incident last night as, “This is a video that has been taken in Ashton Under Lyne, England that shows a gang of Muslim youths attacking a group of white kids. Just before the filming had started one of the muslim youths had punched one of the white girls in the face. This is becoming a regular occurence on the streets of the UK.”

China and Russia rattle nuclear sabers at sea, while the US Navy’s newest ship breaks down.

For what appears to be the first time, Beijing has sent one of its nuclear missile subs on an actual deterrence patrol:

China has advanced its nuclear deterrent capabilities by sending a Type 094 (‘Jin’-class) nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) out on its first deterrent patrol and by conducting a fifth reported test of its mobile, solid-fuel, multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle (MIRV)-capable DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), according to US officials.

Although China’s first second-generation Type 094 was launched in 2004, according to IHS Jane’s Fighting Ships , US officials have not acknowledged that its premier deterrent patrol had occurred until this month.

“Given China’s known capabilities and their efforts to develop a sea-based deterrent, in absence of indicators to the contrary it is prudent to assume that patrols are occurring,” said US Strategic Command spokesperson US Navy captain Pamela Kunzein in a statement to The Washington Times published on 10 December.

Finland, a country sandwiched between Sweden and Russia, and which basically wants nothing more than to be left alone, is not happy to find itself suddenly on the front lines of Merkel’s Folly:

There is a sense of tension in the pretty, snow-covered Finnish town — an underlying fear which makes parents hold their children a little closer, and angry resentment towards the group of young men who arrived just a month ago. Kempele, almost 400 miles north of Helsinki, is usually a place where 17,000 unassuming townfolk while away the hours playing ice hockey. But that peaceful existence has been ripped apart by the rape of a 14-year-old girl as she walked home on a Monday night a fortnight ago.

The alleged culprit is one of the young men living at a migrant centre, which locals did not want in the first place.

But far from being an anomaly, Kempele – which saw hundreds take to the streets in an anti-immigration march last weekend — has become a snapshot of a country where people patrol the streets in vigilante mobs, block people crossing the border and even dress as the Ku Klux Klan at angry protests against the influx of refugees.

We still have not encountered one case — ever — where a terrorist complained about the absence of a two-state solution. Also, contrary to Abbas’s claim, none of the terrorists has ever complained about checkpoints or settlements. This latest wave of terrorism is not about “despair,” unemployment, poor living conditions or freedom of movement. Instead, it is another attempt by Palestinian “youths” to eliminate Israel, by again using the false excuse that Jew are “desecrating” and “destroying” Islamic holy sites.

A review of the Facebook accounts of most of the terrorists shows that their main intention was to murder as many Jews as possible in order to become “martyrs” — to impose a reign of terror Jews, to force them to leave Israel.

Abbas is well aware that the “youths” are not complaining about the “occupation.” The “occupation” these ” youths” have a problem with is the one that began with the creation of Israel in 1948.

A new generation of Palestinians has once again been deceived into believing that the Jews are plotting to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque. In the “Al-Aqsa Intifada” (2000-2005), the Palestinians knew — they saw — that the Jews had not destroyed the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas now wants us to believe that the Palestinian “youths,” who are sent out to murder Jewish soldiers and civilians, are acting out of “despair.” He wants us to believe that these “youths” decided to murder Jews because their dream of a two-state solution has not been realized. Abbas is also trying to convince us that these “youths” are upset about the Israeli checkpoints, continued construction in the settlements, and visits by Jews to the Noble Sanctuary (Temple Mount).

ISTANBUL—Thousands of Turkish security forces are converging on the country’s Kurdish heartland for what the government is calling a “decisive” military campaign against militants fighting for autonomy.

Nearly 200,000 people have fled their homes and hundreds have been killed in parts of southeastern Turkey, the epicenter of clashes since a two-year cease-fire between the government and Kurdish militants collapsed five months ago, according to humanitarian groups.

Turkish security forces in tanks and armored personnel carriers are now seeking to tighten their hold on strongholds of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party—the militant group better known as the PKK—in residential neighborhoods of seven Kurdish-majority cities, officials said.

“The Islamists are growing in numbers, in part through immigration, but they are still a minority within a minority. Yet they have succeeded in reducing freedom of speech throughout Europe, and in local areas where the Islamists dominate they impose rules such as “no alcohol” and a “modest” dress code for women through threats and beatings. By contrast liberal governments tell Muslim pupils that they need not sing the national anthem if it offends them, and neurotically avoid giving the slightest offence to supposed Muslim sensitivities.”
Malcolm Turnbull is fond of proclaiming that Australia is a multicultural society, but this is loose talk. A multicultural society is a contradiction in terms, since common cultural understandings are the glue that holds a society together. Just look at France and the way its very fabric is ripped asunder
We were about thirty hours from sending this issue of Quadrant to the printers when the news broke that terrorist attacks in Paris had killed more than a hundred people. It seemed an important enough event, throwing light on both European and Australian concerns, to justify commissioning serious commentaries on it. That in turn pushed us into re-shaping this Quadrant around the concept of France’s emerging civil war.

Chance favours the prepared mind, it is said, and that concept had been planted in our minds the previous week when we received an article from our perceptive cultural critic Michael Connor titled “Paris, at Five Minutes to Midnight”. On a visit to France, Michael was struck by the unstable jostling blend of joyful cultural entertainments, car-burnings in resentful anti-white suburbs, the smart bookshops running out of republished Occupation-era fascist novels, all within a few stops on the Metro. “Nowhere in Paris is far from possible danger,” he writes. “The theatres and museums operate under strict security. Armed soldiers punctuate the street outside the Shoah Memorial, as they do outside Sacré Cœur.”

THE MASS MURDERS in Paris took place following a summer that had seen a vast non-military invasion of Europe, mainly by young men from the Middle East and Africa sweeping over Europe’s external and internal borders under the guise, not false in all cases, of refugees from the Syrian civil war.

Even more than most other first-world nations modern Europe suffers from a potentially fatal cognitive dissonance. All the time we hold two wholly contradictory ideas in our heads.

The first idea is that our countries are multicultural paradises where anyone from anywhere in the world can come and deserves to settle if they so wish. We believe that those who come here will assimilate, but at the same time we do not especially mind if they do not, and offer no incentives for them to do so. Indeed if they do not wish to assimilate we respect them for holding on to their own culture. At the same time it is natural that we should decry as “racist” anyone who wants to hold on to what is left of our own culture. This part of our brain talks about “integration” and “radicalisation” and “violent extremism” and all the other weakly euphemisms of our time.

Yet all the time our brains hold another idea—ordinarily pushed to the very recess of our minds but always capable of breaking out. This holds the possibility that this is all nonsense. That integration if it does ever happen takes centuries to occur and has certainly not happened in present-day Europe. This part of the brain knows from observation and from an awareness of history that a strong religious culture when placed into a weak and relativistic culture will make itself felt long before it will significantly adapt. If there is a reason why we repress this instinct and favour the wilfully optimistic version of events it is because the consequences of accepting this truth are so utterly calamitous and damn the majority beliefs of a whole generation.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan fancies himself as the protector of Sunni Islam. As such, he has been known as a major supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and Hamas in Gaza. The recent accusation Putin’s Russia leveled at Erdogan that he is aiding and abetting the Sunni Islamic State (IS) is not far-fetched.

Saudi Arabian-based Arab News (December 7, 2015) reported that “Turkey was astonished by Iranian accusation that Ankara is supporting IS and involved in oil dealing with the terrorists in Iraq and Syria.” The Turkish Foreign Ministry responded by saying that “there was nothing in Tehran’s accusations to take seriously.”

In a statement Erdogan issued last Thursday, he warned his Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani over media reports that alleged that he and his family were involved in oil trade with IS terrorists. Erdogan stated that he spoke to Rouhani on the telephone and told him, “You will pay a high price if it continues like that.” He was referring to the Iranian media reports that accused Erdogan of dealing with IS.