RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘This is for Syria!”

Echoing the Paris terrorists, a terrorist screamed that ISIS threat as he attacked passengers at a London Tube station Saturday. Fortunately, while he cut the throats of two innocent victims, police Tasered the 29-year-old terrorist before he could fatally wound anyone. Still, British counterterrorism authorities are rightly treating this incident very seriously. The attacker’s knife-wielding neck attacks evoke memories of the 2013 Lee Rigby atrocity in which jihadists decapitated an unarmed British soldier who happened to be walking on a London street. Moreover, although unsuccessful, the attack on Saturday is probably a harbinger of things to come. Unfortunately the U.K. faces a greater counterterrorism challenge today than it did in 2013.

As I’ve outlined over the past two years, the jihadist threat to Britain has been steadily growing. But while ISIS has accelerated this threat, its roots run deeper. The key factor is Britain’s small minority of Muslim young men. “Since the 1990s, they have “turned to hardline Wahhabi and, later, Salafi imams,” I wrote last year at NRO. “These imams manipulated the social discontentment toward a ‘purposeful’ cause of religious fundamentalism.” These extremist Imams preach that the West is guilty for all the injustices of the Islamic world.

Ironically, according to Islamic doctrine, many Muslims may well see themselves as lining up in Europe to supersede the Catholic Church as they pursue their dream to conquer the world for Allah.

Some suggest that if current population trends continue, prodded by the new migration and the extended families that are sure to follow, Islam will soon be the new majority . Such a demographic shift would not only leave Christians in jeopardy, but Jews in double jeopardy —antipathy from their own government and overt hostility from Islam.

While it was not French Christians per se who fired the gun on the Jewish shoppers outside Paris in January, it is legitimate to question the role that Christian anti-Semitism plays in creating this climate shift as Jews, yet again, become victims in their own homeland.

The “Supersessionist” DNA, hidden beneath the surface of the society, is what drives secularized Christian nations such as France, Britain and Sweden to appease Islamists, who are working to increase their influence, numbers and decibel levels.

“France does not really oppose Palestinian terrorism. On the contrary, France facilitates it. Every year, the French government pays millions of euros, dollars and shekels to Palestinian NGOs whose stated goal is to destroy Israel… Much of the current rhetoric used by the Palestinians to reject Israel’s legitimacy and justify violence against Jews is found in strategic documents that France paid Palestinian NGOs to write.” – Caroline Glick

The guiding principle of “Replacement Theology” is a silent permission slip to demonize and destroy the Jews and Israel.

The Islamization of France is peeking over the horizon.

In a stinging article commemorating the recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Charles Krauthammer noted,

“The rise of European anti-Semitism is, in reality, just a return to the norm. For a millennium, virulent Jew-hatred — persecution, expulsions, massacres — was the norm in Europe until the shame of the Holocaust created a temporary anomaly wherein anti-Semitism became socially unacceptable….

The publisher of a website for Australian Muslims has made some encouraging noises about the need to see his creed’s local leadership reformed. Alas, many of his readers aren’t so sanguine about the possibility — or, indeed, the need –for change, as their now-deleted comments demonstrate.
Did you happen to read reporter Paul Maley’s profile of Ahmed Kilani, “founder of Australia’s biggest Muslim media organisation” who, as the headline in The Australian put it, wants a “revolution” within the community of his Australian co-religionists. Good stuff, you may have thought: a genuine, flesh-and-blood incarnation of the “moderate” Muslims we hear so much about yet seldom see. Unlike the Mufti, he speaks English and, going by the quotes, who could quibble with his assertion that Muslim leaders are out of touch with the broader Australian society? When Koran-quoting butchers kill scores in Paris (and a few more for good measure in San Bernardino), spiritual leaders who attempt to place such slaughter in the context of grievances against Israel, ASIO and the cult of perpetual victimhood do not open the door to greater understanding.

Ah, but here’s the rub. While Kilani’s willingness to critique the Islamic leadership, or what passes for it, is undoubtedly a force for good, that same “Muslim media organisation” he founded can serve as a vehicle for airing that special brand of paranoid intolerance and aggression of which we have seen quite a bit.

Consider the history of an article posted on Kilani’s Muslim Village site even as he was being quoted about the need for reform, change and sweet reasonableness. Lifted from the UK’s Independent, the piece was headlined “White Supremacy Bigger Threat to US Than Radical Islam.” Spurious nonsense though the report may be, there is nothing unusual about it. Academic grant-snafflers, such as po-mo piffle-mongering “terrorism expert” Professor Anne Aly, preach that same line after every latest Islamist outrage. So does Barack Obama and, of course, our very own ABC.

DAKAR, Senegal—A triple suicide bombing at a market on an island in Lake Chad has killed at least 27 people and injured 90 others, a Chad security official said.

Paul Manka, a Chad police spokesman, said three females carried out Saturday’s attack on Koulfoua Island.

Gen. Banyaman Cossingar, Chad gendarmerie director general, confirmed the attack, saying Nigerian Islamic extremist group Boko Haram is suspected.

The Lake Chad region, which straddles the borders of Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria, has been regularly targeted by the extremists. Chad’s government has already imposed a state of emergency in the area.

“Politicians who deny the role of radical Islam have no answer to San Bernardino or to the next San Bernardino. As ISIS lures more radicalized Muslims to commit terrorism in infidel lands, refusing to confront the enemy for what it is becomes a form of suicide.”

Last week a liberal politician named Hilary broke a taboo by calling Islamist terrorism by its proper name. Shocking things happened: Members of the politician’s political party broke with their leader’s policy. Legislators switched their votes to create a large majority supporting military attacks against Islamic State, or ISIS, in Syria. A conservative newspaper called the liberal politician statesmanlike enough to be head of the government.

This politician was in Britain, not in the U.S., and the speaker was Hilary Benn, not Hillary Clinton. Following the ISIS-inspired massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., perhaps more liberals in the U.S. can also start speaking forthrightly about terrorism and get smarter about stopping it.

BAGHDAD—Islamic State is laying sophisticated booby traps in Ramadi to thwart an Iraqi offensive, with devices that can trigger an explosive domino effect and snipers who target bomb-disposal experts, military officials said on Sunday.

After seizing Ramadi in May, the militants connected large, scattered webs of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, to one trigger wire, expanding the reach of an individual bomb. Iraqi military officials said the booby traps are delaying an offensive to retake the city.

“All of the delays we’re having, the reason was the heavy planting of IEDs,” said Gen. Hattem Al Magsosi, the head of the army’s Explosive Ordnance Division.

Islamic State’s use of IEDs has allowed small groups of insurgents to maintain control of cities against overwhelming numbers of troops, Iraqi military officials said.

Here she goes again. Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom, demonising Israel.

‘According to the Swedish newspaper Expressen, Wallstrom – who has triggered several diplomatic incidents with Israel since taking up her post in October 2014 – was asked in the Swedish parliament by Liberal MP Mathias Sundin why she has not condemned in strong terms the recent wave of terrorism in Israel.

Wallstrom said that the attacks were “terrible” and “must not happen,” and added that Israel has “the right to defend itself.”But then she went on to say that the response cannot be “extrajudicial executions” or a reaction that is “disproportionate” so that the “numbers of dead on the other side” is several times greater.
Israeli Ambassador to Sweden Isaac Bachman immediately responded, telling Expressen that “To focus on the actions terrorism victims take in self-defense only serves to draw attention away from the horrors of terrorism. Instead, we should condemn and act to stop the perpetrators, the financiers and the inciters of terrorism.”

He added that Israel has a better record than any other Western country in minimizing civilian casualties while fighting terrorism.

The British Labour party recently elected its most left-wing leader in decades, Jeremy Corbyn. So it was a remarkable moment this week when the Labour Party’s shadow foreign secretary, Hilary Benn, broke with Corbyn and gave an impassioned speech in Parliament supporting the conservative government’s motion to extend its bombing campaign against ISIS into Syria.

Conservative Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond called Benn’s remarks “one of the greatest speeches” ever delivered in the British House of Commons.

Benn delivered a clear-eyed assessment of the danger posed by ISIS (aka “Daesh”):

“The carnage in Paris brought home to us the clear and present danger we face from them. It could have just as easily been London, or Glasgow, or Leeds or Birmingham and it could still be. …

We are part of a coalition of over 60 countries, standing together shoulder-to-shoulder to oppose their ideology and their brutality….

Now Mr Speaker, no-one in this debate doubts the deadly serious threat we face from Daesh and what they do, although sometimes we find it hard to live with the reality. We know that in June four gay men were thrown off the fifth storey of a building in the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor. We know that in August the 82-year-old guardian of the antiquities of Palmyra, Professor Khaled al-Assad, was beheaded, and his headless body was hung from a traffic light. And we know that in recent weeks there has been the discovery of mass graves in Sinjar, one said to contain the bodies of older Yazidi women murdered by Daesh because they were judged too old to be sold for sex.

This form of terrorism-really a mini jihad has been going on in Israel on an almost daily basis….imagine of the thugs had guns…rsk

LONDON—Three people were stabbed in a London underground station Saturday night, in an attack that British police said they are treating as a terrorist incident.

The attack, about 7 p.m., left one person with serious, but not life-threatening, stab wounds, and two others with minor wounds, the police said in a statement.

The police arrested a male suspect at the station.

“We are treating this as a terrorist incident,” Commander Richard Walton, who leads the Metropolitan Police’s counterterrorism force, said in the statement.

The U.K. remains on high alert after terrorist attacks in Paris left 130 dead last month. London has been the target of a number of terrorist attacks, including the stabbing–and attempted decapitation–of a soldier in the city in 2013 and the 2005 bombing of the city’s transport system. The government says its intelligence services have thwarted a number of terror attacks this year.

Michel Gurfinkiel, a French journalist and public intellectual, served as editor-in-chief of Valeurs Actuelles from 1985 to 2006, and authored several books on geopolitics, international relations and culture. He is the Founder and President of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, a conservative think thank, and a Shillman/Ginsburg Fellow at Middle East Forum.

France faces a future of ethnic civil war at worst, and periodic terrorist attacks and political tumult at minimum. Yet its difficulties—both geopolitical and demographic—can be overcome with patience and determination.
“For all that, the long-term consequences may not be positive for Jews, and French-Jewish emigration, either to Israel or North America, will likely not subside.”

The November 13 killing spree in Paris came as no surprise. The Islamic State had threatened France explicitly and repeatedly for more than a year, and French government officials high and low issued warnings as well. Most pointedly, Judge Marc Trevidic, who was in charge of antiterrorist investigations in France for ten years, disclosed in September that IS was planning “something big” against France. He spoke of an “overbid logic” among competing jihadi groups: “Each group is eager to strike further and in a heavier way than other groups. They all want to win the Pulitzer prize of terrorism–that is to say to do something as grand and as lethal as 9/11.” Hence ISIS in Paris on November 13, and al-Qaeda in Bamako on November 20.