RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

“This is a matter of life or death. I need you to be an intermediary with Argentina to get help for my country’s nuclear program. We need Argentina to share its nuclear technology with us. It will be impossible to advance with our program without Argentina’s cooperation.” – Iran’s former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

According to Venezuelan informants, whitewashing Iran’s accused from the AMIA attack was only a secondary objective in its outreach to Argentina. The primary objective was to gain access to Argentina’s nuclear technology and materials — a goal Iran has for more than three decades.

During the last 32 years, Iran has achieved a resounding success in promoting an anti-US and anti-Israel message in Latin America. Its state-owned television network, HispanTV, broadcasts in Spanish 24 hours a day, seven days a week in at least 16 countries throughout the region.

The lifting of sanctions and influx of billions of dollars as a result of Iran’s nuclear deal will undoubtedly help Iran in Latin America, where many countries face economic turmoil and can use an Iranian “stimulus.”

While Latin America is often regarded as a foreign policy backwater for the United States, it is the geopolitical prize for the Islamic Republic of Iran.

During the last couple months, Iran and Saudi Arabia have been playing a political tug of war over Latin America. On November 10, 2015, Iran’s deputy foreign minister held a private meeting with ambassadors from nine Latin American countries to reaffirm the Islamic Republic’s desire to “enhance and deepen ties” with the region. This was followed by similar statements from Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) in Tehran later that month.

A nation ruled by an extremist Islamic sect known as the Wahhabis announced that it has formed a grand coalition of mostly Muslim countries to fight terrorism. Saudi Arabia and 33 other nations will coordinate their efforts to end terrorism – they say.

Presumably, the government of Saudi Arabia and the coalition won’t fight any of the Islamist militias the Saudis are currently supporting in Syria. And Pakistan, a member of the coalition, will somehow forget that it is supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The fact is, many members of this coalition are supporting their own pet terrorist outfits to advance their own interests.

Fox News:

The announcement published by the state-run Saudi Press Agency said the alliance will be Saudi-led and is being established because terrorism “should be fought by all means and collaboration should be made to eliminate it.” The statement said Islam forbids “corruption and destruction in the world” and that terrorism constitutes “a serious violation of human dignity and rights, especially the right to life and the right to security.”

Little Kim goes unchallenged in human rights abuses…after the dismal policies of Clinton and Dubya Bush which supposedly “reset” relations with the thugs of North Korea…..rsk
SEOUL—North Korea’s Supreme Court sentenced Korean-Canadian pastor Lim Hyeon-soo, who had been in detention since February, to life in prison with hard labor.

Mr. Lim, the pastor of Light Korean Presbyterian Church in Mississauga, Ontario, is the latest in a string of Christian missionaries who have been detained and sentenced to hard labor in North Korea, which worships its founder, Kim Il Sung, as a deity and views the spread of organized religion as a threat to the ruling family’s grip on power.

Mr. Lim was accused of committing “state subversive plots and activities,” according to North Korea’s official mouthpiece, the Korea Central News Agency.

The agency said Mr. Lim had “committed anti-DPRK religious activities” and acted with U.S. and South Korean authorities “to lure and abduct DPRK citizens,” using the acronym for North Korea’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Iran violated a United Nations Security Council resolution by testing a new ballistic missile in October, a panel of experts found in a confidential report, increasing pressure on the Obama administration as it moves to implement a separate international nuclear deal with Tehran.

U.S. officials asked the Security Council on Tuesday to address the Oct. 10 test and a second launch on Nov. 21 of a ballistic missile capable of delivering atomic weapons. The council, however, adjourned without taking action.

The developments are part of a complicated welter of sanctions on Iran from the U.N. and individual countries over its ballistic missile and nuclear programs. The U.S. and five world powers struck a deal with Iran to lift economic sanctions on Tehran in exchange for limits on its nuclear program, which Iran has always maintained is peaceful.

On Monday, President Barack Obama opened a rare meeting of his National Security Council at the Pentagon, in an effort to put “lipstick on the pig” which is his strategy for fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) abroad and its sympathizers at home. During his press briefing he gave few details about his meeting at the Pentagon, and didn’t even mention that Germany’s leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, on Sunday turned down a request from the United States to provide even more military involvement in the fight against ISIS.

“I believe Germany is fulfilling its part and we don’t need to talk about new issues related to this question at the moment,” Merkel told the German news media about her response to Obama’s request on Saturday.

The German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter sent a letter to Chancellor Merkel asking for an additional military commitment from Germany, just one week after parliament approved a plan to join the anti-terrorism campaign in Syria.

On December 2, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik murdered 14 people in San Bernardino, California. That horrific terrorist attack, the worst since 9/11, overshadowed another story that emerged the same day and on the same theme: the true nature of Islamic terrorism.

On September 5, 1972, during the Olympic Games in Munich, Palestinian terrorists took 11 Israeli athletes hostage. They shot weightlifter Yossef Romano when he fought back, and as the December 2, 2015 New York Times noted, “he was then left to die in front of the other hostages and castrated. Other hostages were beaten and sustained serious injuries, including broken bones.”

The Black September terrorists, a branch of the PLO, killed Romano and another hostage at the Olympic village and the others during a failed rescue attempt at an airport. The attack dominated the news but not all the details emerged. The German authorities knew about the mutilation of Yossef Romano and the savage beatings of others but kept this information under wraps.

Twenty years later in 1992, as the New York Times story charted, Israeli widows Ilana Romano and Ankie Spitzer, whose husband Andre was a fencing coach, met with their lawyer, Pinchas Zeltzer. On a trip to Munich Zeltzer had gone through hundreds of pages of reports the German authorities had declined to reveal. The attorney gained possession of some photographs which the women, against his advice, insisted on viewing. The lawyer even wanted a doctor present when they did view the pictures.

“What they did is that they cut off his genitals through his underwear and abused him,” Ilano Romano told the Times. “Can you imagine the nine others sitting around tied up? They watched this.” For Ankie Spitzer, the mutilation resolved a key issue.

Saving the planet has never been so easy.

The Paris climate talks concluded in a rousing round of self-congratulation over an agreement that, we are told, is the first step toward keeping Earth habitable. If generating headlines and press releases about making history were the metric for anything, Paris might be as consequential — if misbegotten — as advertised.

The fact is that Paris is very meta. The agreement is about the agreement, never mind what’s in it or what its true legal force is — namely, nil. Paris is a legally binding agreement not to have legally binding limits on emissions. It might be the most worthless piece of paper since the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawed war — about a decade prior to the outbreak of World War II.

Politico reported that the talks were almost derailed at the last minute by the accidental insertion of the word “shall” deep in the text, which, by implying a legal obligation, was to be avoided at all costs (the U.S. Senate would never give its assent to a legally binding treaty). The U.S. scrambled to change the offending word to “should.”

The Paris summit operated on the principle of CBDRILONCWRC, or “Common but Differentiated Responsibility in Light of National Circumstances With Respective Capability.” That means nothing was actually mandated on anyone because that proved — understandably enough, dealing with all the countries in the world — completely unworkable.

Instead, countries came up with so-called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions. That’s climate bureaucratese for “You make up your emissions target, whatever it is, and we will pretend to take it seriously.” Thus, do the waters recede and Earth is saved from looming climate catastrophe.

Even if you believe the extremely dubious proposition that somehow the climate “consensus” perfectly understands perhaps the most complicated system on the planet, and can forecast with certitude and in detail what the global temperature will be a century from now, Paris is a charade. The best estimates are that, accepting the premises of the consensus, the deal will reduce warming 0.0 to 0.2 degrees Celsius.

This is a pithy comment left by a reader of Standpoint “But Israel’s normal has become Europe’s normal — a fact that is difficult to accept.” Difficult to accept, but easy to understand. Both regions are enriched by the Religion of Peace. That was inevitable in Israel’s case, but came about in Europe because of the treachery of our politicians, media and academics, who ignored the wishes of the electorate and insisted that only ignorant racists and xenophobes could object to huge numbers of people moving to Europe from the Third World. What could possibly go wrong, you plebs?”

This is how it happens these days, isn’t it? Last February it was during an interval at the theatre, turning on my mobile phone to find a text from a friend in Copenhagen saying the bullets had just missed her but that she was alive. A few weeks earlier, it had been a broadcaster asking for reaction on Paris before I had heard anything about it or whether any friends had been killed. This time it was a text from a close family member at a dinner in Paris I had chosen to miss in order to try to finish my book on Islam and Europe. They said there had been shooting nearby but they were fine. I texted back that perhaps they should get the bill and go home. Soon the phone began to ring and snapshots of the horror in Paris began to flood in.

The crazy ring-arounds have become a feature of modern European life. Then the lucky ones have the stories of the near-misses: friends who left before the attack, those who survived because they chose to drop their bag off at home before heading to the restaurant. Facebook has a new feature where people can signal themselves “safe” after a major incident anywhere. There is something comforting and horrifying about this. It’s not a surprise to me because I know this is normal life in Israel. But Israel’s normal has become Europe’s normal — a fact that is difficult to accept.