RUTHFULLY YOURS

BRUSSELS—Belgian authorities said Tuesday they arrested two people on terrorism charges and broke up a plan for attacks during the holiday period, underlining fears of further mayhem in a Europe still unsettled over Islamic State’s deadly attacks in Paris last month.

Police seized Islamic State propaganda and military-style clothing but no explosives or arms in a series of raids Sunday and Monday in Brussels, Liège and the Flanders region of Belgium, prosecutors said.

The arrests were made amid stepped-up antiterrorism operations by Belgian authorities in the aftermath of the Nov. 13 Paris attacks, which were planned by a Belgian national and carried out by a team that included several others with ties to Belgium, including the fugitive Salah Abdeslam, a French citizen who was born and lived in Brussels.

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/12/29/how-language-shapes-freedom-and-tyranny-on-the-glazov-gang-3/

In this special edition of The Glazov Gang we are running two of our blockbuster episodes that featured two freedom fighters from totalitarian environments who unveiled the fascinating links between linguistics and liberty/slavery.

In the first episode, Kai Chen, China’s Basketball Superstar and the author of One In A Billion: Journey Toward Freedom, discussed How Language Shapes Freedom and Tyranny.

In the second episode, Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know: The Dark Side of Revolutions in the Middle East, revealed How Arabic Stifles Individualism and Freedom, shedding light on how the Arabic language impedes psychological growth and sabotages the path to democracy.

Don’t miss these two episodes!

The curfews are accompanied by military assaults against civilian populations — their homes, businesses, offices, historical monuments, reservoirs and infrastructure are being bombed and destroyed.

“No one can go outside. Our water is running out. The food at homes is running out. The telephone lines have been cut. The situation here is terrible. … After declaring the curfew, they [the Turks] deploy soldiers, police and snipers in the evacuated schools. They have piled up their ammunition inside the schools.” — Osman Tetik, a representative in Cizre of the Education and Science Workers’ Union.

“They are shooting bullets at hospitals and ambulances. The Ministry of Health is standing by as hospitals are turned into military quarters and as health institutions and employees become targets.” — Gonul Erden, co-President of the Trade Union of Public Employees in Health and Social Services.

“All those towns will be cleansed of terror elements. If necessary, neighborhood by neighborhood, house by house, street by street.” — Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, December 15.

The curfews and military assaults against Kurdish civilians have reportedly forced at least 200,000 Kurds to flee.

Some 30 Muslim men thought that the woman was in violation of Islamic sharia law, by being in Sweden unaccompanied by a man. They thought that she should therefore be raped and her teenage son killed.

Two Swedish citizens were convicted by a Gothenburg Court of joining an Islamist terror group in Syria and murdering two captives. Video evidence showed one victim being beheaded. “Every night when I have gone to bed, I have seen a head hanging in the air.” — Court Chairman Ralf G. Larsson.

Sometime during the night, the victim was awakened by the Iraqi as he raped her. The woman managed to break free and locate a train attendant. At first, the woman did not want to call the police. “She felt sorry for him [the rapist] … and was afraid he would be deported back to Iraq.”

One week after Sweden raised its terror alert level to the highest ever, the police raised another alarm — saying their weapons are simply not good enough to prevent a potential terror attack.

November 4: The Swedish Immigration Service sent out a press release, saying that it had hired close to a thousand additional employees since June. The Immigration Service now has over 7,000 employees, including hourly workers and consultants — double the 3,350 employees who worked there in 2012. Most of the new recruits work with the legal processing of asylum applications, but the units dealing with receiving migrants and filing their initial applications have also expanded considerably. As if the record influx of migrants this autumn were not crushing enough, the Immigration Service also had trouble retaining its staff. Employees complain about being badly treated: they are always expected to be on call, and possibly even work Christmas Eve.

The most striking thing about that speech — the one given by Hilary Benn in the Commons Syria debate on December 2 — was not that it gave dozens of Labour MPs the courage to rebel against the party line laid down by Jeremy Corbyn, nor that it catapulted this hitherto most shadowy of shadow Foreign Secretaries into the role of Labour leader-in-waiting. It was not even the reminder that great oratory still matters in politics — especially when it comes from an unexpected quarter, the orator in this case having been accustomed all his life to belittling comparisons with his father, Tony Benn. No, it was the revelation that words with a strong moral charge (“fascist” and “evil”), when applied to Islamic State, still have the power to shock, just as the appeal to a sense of duty (“time for us to do our bit”) can still inspire.

In his peroration, which was specifically addressed to his own party, seated behind him, Mr Benn used the f-word twice: “And we are here faced by fascists. Not just their calculated brutality, but their belief that they are superior to every single one of us in this chamber tonight, and all of the people that we represent. They hold us in contempt. They hold our values in contempt. They hold our belief in tolerance and decency in contempt. They hold our democracy, the means by which we will make our decision tonight, in contempt. And what we know about fascists is that they need to be defeated.” He then reminded his colleagues of their forebears’ resistance to Franco, Mussolini and Hitler. (Never mind that from 1931 to 1935 Labour was led by the pacifist George Lansbury and the party voted against conscription as late as April 1939, four months before war broke out.) Mr Benn ended with a straightforward moral choice, cast in a very British idiom: “And my view, Mr Speaker, is that we must now confront this evil. It is now time for us to do our bit in Syria.”

Churchill himself could not have put it better. It was refreshing to see and hear the electric effect that such old-fashioned language can still have. If we are to defeat the enemies of Western civilisation, we have to find the right words and ideas. When George W. Bush used the terms “Islamofascism” and “Islamic fascists” in 2006, he provoked protests from American Muslim organisations. No Western politician has used them since. But the ideology of jihadist organisations such as Islamic State has a great deal in common with fascism — not least its implacable hostility to the West. Historians have even found direct historical connections between the Nazis and the rise of Islamism. And so when Hilary Benn called the IS butchers “fascists” and their ideology “evil”, he struck a chord.

Among many other things 2015 may well be remembered as the year that “social justice warriors” suffered over-reach. The year saw some truly remarkable breakdowns in their movement.

For instance, who will forget Rachel Dolezal? She was the regional head of a national black people’s organisation in America who, not content with campaigning for black rights (a perfectly good thing to do), pretended to be black (not a good thing to do). She managed this by the careful application of bronzer, a somewhat stereotypical frizzing of her hair and the advantage of living in a society too terrified to say, “But aren’t you white?”

Dolezal was “outed” as white when her parents appeared on television to show that they are not only Caucasians but Caucasians of German-Czech descent. After some months of denial their daughter finally admitted she was indeed born to them, though she still regards herself as black. Not least among the case’s fascination were the divides it caused, and not only among those who fell on the floor laughing when they heard about it versus those who managed to remain in their seat. A divide also occurred among black activists: “Do we celebrate any sister who argues for our cause, or in the 21st century should we disapprove of people blacking up?” was the nub. Most interesting was the response of one black commentator on MSNBC, Michael Eric Dyson, who stood up for Dolezal, saying, “She’s taking on the ideas, the identities, the struggles. She’s identified with them. I bet a lot more black people would support Rachel Dolezal than would support, say, Clarence Thomas.” All of which suggested that the civil rights movement some time ago morphed into a left-wing politics movement where a white girl who is left-wing is more “black” than a black man who is a conservative Supreme Court Justice.

Germany is basking in a warm glow of self-congratulation, after Chancellor Merkel’s decision to accept up to 500,000 Syrian and other refugees per annum for the next few years. As we go to press, Berlin had abruptly closed its borders, in effect suspending the Schengen agreement, to restore order. Assuming her policy endures, at least two million migrants will make their homes in Germany, adding to the five million German Muslims mainly of Turkish heritage. Thus Muslims, as a proportion of the German population, will have doubled in a decade to some 10 per cent. In England, the proportion of Muslims now exceeds 5 per cent, having likewise doubled in a decade. France is already around the 10 per cent mark. The ultimate demographic impact on Europe of the present wave of migration is totally unpredictable, but the newcomers are on average much younger than the host population.

Over the next generation, Muslims in Europe are certain to multiply rapidly, due not only to migration but to higher birthrates. It is true that Muslim fertility is gradually falling in Western countries, but it has so far remained consistently well above that of non-Muslims. Another factor of growing importance is conversion. A Pew report estimates that Muslims will number “more than 10 per cent” of Europe’s population by 2050, but in France, Germany and England the figure is bound to be much higher. The Islamisation of Europe is no longer a far-Right fantasy, but a real possibility. As the migration crisis unfolds, it becomes more likely by the day.

The retaking of central Ramadi on Monday by Iraqi security forces is good news by itself but even better if it signals an overdue revival of the moderate Sunni forces in Iraq and the region.

The Ramadi victory was accomplished largely by the Iraqi military, mainly by its Sunni forces with the help of local Sunni tribes, who were aided by U.S. training and weapons. That formula could be a model for success in clearing Islamic State (ISIS) from the rest of Western Iraq and Syria.

The U.S. has helped by picking up the pace of its assistance in recent weeks, inserting more special forces into the theater and supplying more arms. Tactical bombing by the U.S. has limited Islamic State movement, and shoulder-fired antitank weapons have been able to stop ISIS truck bombs from a distance. Recapturing Ramadi, which Islamic State captured last May as the Iraqi army fled, also removes an immediate ISIS threat to Baghdad.

Vadim Nikitim is the genius who last week proposed not only that we treat ISIS as a state, but that we grant ISIS diplomatic recognition.

Rather than realizing that the Soviet Union collapsed because of its economic system, Nikitim seems to think it fell apart because countries such as the US and UK recognized it diplomatically — demonstrating that there is no better way to get the present wrong than by getting the past wrong.

The case of Saudi prince Saud bin Abdulaziz Bin Nasir might give the impression that you can rape and kill a manservant in a London hotel and get away with only the lightest of sentences.

Ambassadors from ISIS, on the other hand, will need to prove themselves somewhat, and first funnel many lucrative contracts our way before behavior like this becomes acceptable.

Of course, there is always that pesky problem: What if militant Islam (or Iran) does not want to “forge a long (or short) peace” with us? Is there a Plan B?

It is that Dumb Idea of the Year Award time again, and among the many stellar contenders, one in particular stands out.