RUTHFULLY YOURS

Western officials believe the terror network behind last month’s massacre in Paris has links to people in the U.K., fueling concerns about the threat faced in Europe.

Several people suspected of having connections to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Islamic State operative and alleged ringleader of the Nov. 13 attacks, are based in the U.K., according to two Western officials. The officials said those people, including some of Moroccan heritage, are based in the Birmingham area, about 120 miles northwest of London.

At least one person connected to the attacks is believed to have traveled to the U.K. before the shootings, the officials said.

London’s Metropolitan Police, the lead service on counterterror issues in the U.K., declined to comment. Metropolitan Police officers stationed in Paris are helping with the French investigation.

According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik were linked to ISIS and Al Qaeda.The ISW is characterizing the San Bernardino massacre along the lines of Mumbai (2008), the Westgate Mall in Kenya (2013) and the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris (2015) and marking it as the first successful Al Qaeda/ISIS-related attack in the U.S. with skilled marksmen employing long guns and explosives.This assessment is based on reports that Tashfeen Malik pledged allegiance to ISIS, that Farook had contact with Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab and Jabhat Al Nusra as well as the very nature and preparation for the attack. It is particularly striking that the couple was able to acquire weapons, combat gear, ammunition and explosive devices without detection. They also developed technical expertise in the bomb-making techniques made available by Al Qaeda and affiliated groups.The ISW believes that more attacks are likely to follow the success of the San Bernardino incident.Follow the link to the timeline to better understand the various connections……Janet Levy

Key Take-away: The San Bernardino shooting of December 2, 2015 was a terrorist attack conducted by perpetrators inspired by the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) and possibly linked with and inspired by al Qaeda. The attack displays some of the sophistication and signatures of past al Qaeda attacks. Drawing a sharp dividing line between al Qaeda and ISIS threat groups when it comes to attacks on the homeland is difficult despite differences between them in the Middle East. The U.S. must expect that both groups will devote even greater resources to encouraging and supporting such attacks here and in Europe now that their feasibility has been demonstrated in both regions. American and Western efforts against al Qaeda and ISIS globally are failing and require fundamental reassessment.

View this timeline online here.

Individuals inspired by the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) and with links to al Qaeda conducted the terrorist attack in San Bernardino on December 2. This attack was the first al Qaeda- or ISIS-related in the U.S. by a skilled shooter team using both guns and explosives, a technique that both groups used in the attacks in Mumbai of November 2008; on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya in September 2013; on the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015; and on several targets in Paris on November 13, 2015. It marks a step-change in the threat that both al Qaeda and ISIS pose to the security of the American homeland.

Turkey shot down a Russian jet. No gain, but plenty of damage to its economy. Russia gave up one jet to Turkey and has made its military presence in Syria and the strategic eastern Mediterranean permanent.

Turkey can no longer speak to Russia about the possibility of ousting Assad.

Putin seems to be making sure that NATO will do nothing.

At this year’s G-20 summit in Antalya, Turkey, Russian President, Vladimir Putin, said that the radical jihadist Islamic State (IS) was being financed by donors from at least 40 countries, including some G-20 member states — clearly pointing his finger, without naming names, at Saudi Arabia and Turkey. A few days later, two Turkish F-16 jets shot down a Russian SU-24 warplane, and claimed that the Russian jet had violated Turkish airspace for 17 seconds on the country’s Syrian border — a violation Russia denies. This was the first time a Soviet or Russian military aircraft was shot down by a NATO air force since the end of WWII.

Anthony Daniels’s latest book, published under his pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple, is the essay collection Out into the Beautiful World (New English Review).

The social security system in Britain makes it possible, and perhaps even profitable, for parents — the word is used only in the biological sense — to bring children into the world without thought or care. That indifference is matched by the police.
One should not read too much into a single case, of course: but not too little either. A 24-year-old man in England called Lee James was sentenced to life imprisonment for having kicked the head of his victim so many times (while shouting “Have some of that!”) that he died. Then he and a neighbour dragged the body to a public place, doused it in white spirit and set fire to it.

The dead man was called Bijan Ebrahimi, an immigrant from Iran who had become disabled through disease of his back. He was subjected to a long campaign of abuse by neighbours who accused him of being a paedophile. This was because Mr Ebrahimi filmed some local children destroying his flower-pots and also James drinking and smoking while in charge of one of his children on the lawn just outside his, Ebrahimi’s, window.

James complained to a passing police patrol of Ebrahimi’s “paedophilia”, and though James almost certainly had a criminal record, was known to be a violent “partner” of the mother of his children, and had a visage of inspissated malignity that could have been used by Lombroso as evidence for the plausibility of his theories, the police arrested Ebrahimi, who had long complained to them about the abuse he had suffered from James and others. James, who openly threatened that he would take the law into his own hands if something was not done about Ebrahimi, told the police that he was prepared to go to prison if he attacked Ebrahimi, and that his children would, when they were old enough, be proud of what he had done to protect them. A mob of local people cheered and shouted abuse as Ebrahimi was taken away by the police.

The lands that once housed Jewish settlements were supposed to transform the Gaza Strip into the Middle East’s Singapore.

Instead, all the grandiose and ambitious plans went down the drain when Hamas seized control over the Gaza Strip in 2007. Since then, the entire Gaza Strip has been transformed into a base for various Islamist groups, which have used Gaza to launch terror attacks against Israel and threaten Egypt’s national security.

By stealing their people’s land and distributing it among their followers, Hamas and Fatah are further undermining the Palestinian dream of establishing a proper state based on the principles of democracy, accountability, transparency and the rule of law.

The beleaguered Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas, has found an original way to solve its financial crisis. The movement is now planning to pay its unpaid civil servants with former Israeli settlement land in the Gaza Strip.

Abandoned by Israel in 2005 as part of the “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip, the land was supposed to provide a solution to the severe housing crisis in the Palestinian-controlled area. Back then, there was much talk about building new housing projects for thousands of Palestinian families in the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli “disengagement” prompted some oil-rich Arab countries to propose plans to help solve the severe housing crisis in the Gaza Strip. The lands that once housed Jewish settlements were supposed to transform the Gaza Strip into the Middle East’s Singapore.

NIAMEY, Niger—Just over a month ago, Ibrahim Foukori’s home village of Baroua in eastern Niger was a bustling farming community of 3,000 people. Now, it is burned to the ground and abandoned.

The villagers, like hundreds of thousands of others in the region, have escaped the advances of Boko Haram—the West African affiliate of Islamic State that is infamous for its unrestrained butchery and enslavement of hundreds of teenage schoolgirls.

“Every man took their children and wives and just ran for their lives,” said Mr. Foukori, who represents the area on the western shores of Lake Chad in the parliament of Niger. “Boko Haram first pillaged everything, and then came back to torch what was left of my village.”

Boko Haram—which is usually translated as “Western education is forbidden”—started out as radical Islamist sect in northern Nigeria’s Borno province more than a decade ago. For most of the time since then, it focused on battling the Nigerian state, which it considers illegitimate.

This year, however, Boko Haram dramatically expanded its campaign of killings and bombings far beyond Nigeria’s borders. It attacked the three other countries in the Lake Chad area—the former French colonies of Niger, Cameroon and Chad.

— Turkey often appeals to the West for support, given its longtime membership in NATO. Now, Turkish leadership is in a shouting match with Russia’s provocative president, Vladimir Putin, over Turkey’s downing of a Russian jet in probable Turkish airspace. Each country has accused the other of helping terrorists in Syria.

The problem with Turkey and the West, however, is that their relationship is decades out of date. What was once an alliance is now nothing special at all.

Barack Obama used to lecture reluctant Europeans about why they should accept Turkey into the European Union as its first Islamic member. Obama boasted of a “special friendship” with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. As president, Obama suddenly forgot the promise he made as a senator to formally acknowledge the Armenian genocide committed by the Turks in the early 1900s.

Turkey has become a favorite stop abroad for Obama to lecture his fellow Americans about their ethical shortcomings, from past treatment of Native Americans to their present supposed xenophobia over not accepting Syrian refugees en masse.

There are two countries that I once regarded as home: Canada, where I have spent most of my life, and Greece, where I lived for five years. Both are now lost to me. Governed by a leftist administration and effectively submitting to the adhan—the call of the muezzin—each is now under siege.

Greece has become a way-station for a vast press of Muslim refugees sowing disorder and mayhem in their wake. Fishermen on the island of Lesbos, which I know well, have seen their livelihoods disrupted, and are unable to navigate through the filth and garbage littering their shores. Elsewhere the migrants reward their hosts by going on rampages. A graphic video shows what lies in wait for this once anti-Islamic country, which endured over 400 years of Ottoman oppression. As one Greek respondent says, “We are under occupation.”

As for Canada, the future augurs poorly. Under the partisan and incompetent administration of Justin Trudeau—like Barack Obama the most unqualified and dangerous person ever to occupy his nation’s highest office—we are witnessing the importation of a veritable Muslim army that will ultimately change the face of the country beyond recognition. Trudeau, who has ended Canada’s military contribution to the war against ISIS and vowed to weaken anti-terrorist Bill C-51, is opening the gates with intemperate haste to 25,000 Muslim refugees, aka “Syrians,” a number proportionately equivalent, as author Howard Rotberg points out, to 225,000 Muslims flooding in short order into the U.S. CTV News reports that up to 900 Syrians a day are set to land in Montreal and Toronto, starting December 1.

LONDON—The U.K. has begun airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria, only hours after lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in favor of extending Britain’s bombing campaign into the war-torn country.

“Four British Tornados were in action after the vote last night attacking oil fields in Eastern Syria,” British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon told the BBC. All four jets have arrived back at their base in Cyprus, with an assessment of the strikes now ongoing.

“Our initial analysis of the operation indicates that the strikes were successful,” the British Defense Ministry said in a statement hours after the raid.

U.K. lawmakers voted 397 to 223 in favor of a government motion to extend airstrikes to Syria from Iraq, where the U.K. military has been conducting bombing campaigns for more than a year.

“The vote last night freed the [Royal Air Force] up. They have been able to attack these terrorists from one side of the border, now they’ve been able to attack some of their key targets on the other side of the border as well,” Mr. Fallon said.

If you want to make a big noise and rattle a bigger cup at the latest climate fest, it pays to be a dictator with a history of bloodshed, oppression, graft and ballot-rigging. Just ask Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe or the Maldives’ Abdulla Yameen Gayoom
Two important blocs posturing at the Paris climate talks are the Alliance of Small Island States bloc ( AOSIS, 44 countries) and the African bloc (54 countries). The island-states’ representative since January is the strongman president of the Maldives, Abdulla Yameen Gayoom, whose democracy-friendly predecessor, Mahomed Nasheed, is now doing a 13-year term in an insanitary Maldives prison. The African bloc’s spokesman is Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, who needs no introduction.

It’s hard to plumb the depths of the hypocrisy involved, especially about the proposed $US100 billion annual green handouts to Third World despots and kleptocrats. But I’ll give it a try.

Maldives President Yameen has sent a message to Paris describing AOSIS as the “moral voice” of the UN Paris talks, and he has called for the $US100 billion per annum to be “scaled up in the years to come”. And that not all that he and his AOSIS team want. In 2013, the Warsaw climate conference waffled about an extra fund for the likes of Maldives, called “an international mechanism on Loss & Damage”. This will require further ratification in 2016 and Yameen is very keen on it.