RUTHFULLY YOURS

Michael Auslin is a resident scholar and the director of Japan Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he specializes in Asian regional security and political issues. Before joining AEI, Auslin was an associate professor of history at Yale University.
There is a real threat here to peace in Asia, and the U.S. must not allow allies such as the Philippines to be browbeaten.
“Expect more.” That is the succinct response of a senior U.S. defense official when asked informally whether the dispatch in October of a U.S. Navy ship within 12 nautical miles of one of China’s newly constructed islands in the Spratly Island chainwas a one-off event.

Officials in the Obama Administration seem well aware that failure to follow on with their highly publicized freedom of navigation operations will send a signal of irresolve to China and Asia. The sail-through did little to settle the issue of Sino-U.S. tussling over the South China Sea, and the question now, is how will China respond.

From one perspective, the length of time that it took Washington to make the decision to send the USS Lassen near Subi and Mischief Reefs itself is an admission that the Obama Administration remains wary of provoking China. Months of public comments by officials from the president on down resulted in no action until last week, and even then, it was but a lone U.S. destroyer sent to transit what until a few months ago had always been considered international waters.

Even worse, claims that the destroyer engaged simply in “innocent passage” as opposed to any legally-allowed military activity on the high-seas further undermines the administration’s argument that it is not tacitly conceding China’s territorial claims.

Because (per Obama’s latest complaint) of “how decentralized power is in this system”, over 30 American governors have told the President they don’t want him shipping battalions of “Syrian” “refugees” to their states. He, in turn, has sneered that his critics are scared of “widows and orphans”. With his usual brilliant comic timing, he said this a couple of hours before a female suicide bomber self-detonated in St Denis.

Nonetheless, the presidential-gubernatorial split is an interesting development. Obama has responded with a brand new hashtag: #RefugeesWelcome. If you live in Hashtagistan, this is another great hashtag to add to such invincible hashtags as #PeaceForParis, #JeSuisCharlie, #UnitedForUkraine and, of course, #BringBackOurGirls. If you live in the real world, the magic hashtags don’t seem to work so well, and these governors seem to think #RefugeesWelcome will perform no better for New Mexico and New Hampshire than the others have worked out for Paris, Ukraine and Boko Haram-infested West Africa.

It’s frighteningly easy for an aspiring ISIS terrorist to obtain the documents needed to gain asylum in Europe, a Daily Mail reporter recently discovered. According to the Mail’s Nick Fagge, it took only four days and $2,000 to obtain a Syrian passport, ID card, and driver’s license at a Turkish border town:

The genuine documents were stolen from Syria when they were blank. The forger added our reporter’s picture and gave him the identity of a Syrian man from Aleppo killed last year. The documents, on sale for around $2,000, would help an asylum claim in Europe.

The forger who sold us the papers said that they are being used by ISIS fanatics to travel undetected across borders into Europe hidden among tens of thousands of genuine refugees fleeing the terror and destruction.

The forger told Fagge:

ISIS fighters are among the people going to Europe in this way. They are going to wait for the right time to become a fighter for ISIS again.

One day, maybe, Muslims who have fled their Syrian homelands might return. No such option exists for the region’s persecuted religious minorities. Yet even as they are massacred, raped and enslaved, the West rejects their priority claims to resettlement as “discriminatory”
“If you look a little closer, the scene becomes a horror show. Clumps of hair and fragments of bone poke grotesquely out of the ditch. It is estimated that almost 80 women are buried in this mass grave, aged between 40 and 80-years-old. The bodies are of Yazidi women, murdered by Islamic State butchers.” — UK Telegraph

They were butchered because they were non-Muslims and considered too old to be used for sex or sold as sexual slaves by Islamic State. Meanwhile, their daughters and younger sisters were raped, often many times a day. And then, like other stolen loot and war booty, they were listed on social media for sale. The going price was nominal, frequently no more than a packet of cigarettes, and the Islamic State thugs that bought them were promised a great bargain. “Brothers,” proclaimed one such ad, “you won’t be disappointed!”

Like the Christians and Jews throughout the Middle East, the Yazidi people are treated as infidels, devil-worshippers, polytheists and non-persons, lacking any rights or even any status as human beings. Instead, they are being exterminated and subjected to ethnic cleansing. Masses of people whose faith and residence in their ancestral homelands goes back 2000 years are being systematically expunged from the earth.

Could Putin ever be trusted as an ally in the jihad war?

Here are some thoughts.

1) Putin can be trusted to act in his own self-interest. If we elect a patriotic American next year (i.e., never a Democrat), a win-win arrangement might be achieved with Russia. Europe and the democratic nations of Asia would follow.

2) Putin was trained as a KGB agent and a fast-rising career star before the Soviet Empire fell apart. He specialized in studying and infiltrating the West, particularly (West) Germany. He is personally sophisticated, speaks fluent German, and understands Europe and the Middle East as well as any national leader today.

In his words and public actions Putin presents as a classical Russian nationalist leader, using the Russian Orthodox Church as his main ideological support. What the Communist Party used to do for the Kremlin — creating domestic direction and credibility — the Patriarch of Moscow is now doing. If you doubt that, please check the web.

It is always possible that Putin is faking it, but he is a Russian nationalist, and those people have always allied with the Orthodox Church.

Eurosocialists like Obama will never understand it, but Russians know that Putin’s strong support for the Church — building hundreds of new churches and monasteries — creates deep credibility among the Russian people. As far as ordinary Russians are concerned, whether they are atheists or not, Putin’s support of the Church puts him on their side.

After the fall of the Communist delusion, the Russian Church and the state know they must work together. Putin believes that the Soviet Union was a noble experiment that failed, and he experienced the breakdown personally. That was traumatic period, with his own career at risk for years. Putin does not believe in Marxism, except as a way to sucker the Obamas of this world. He learns from the disasters of the past.

We are back where we came in. After 9/11, 98 U.S. senators voted to pass the USA Patriot Act. In time, the political and moral solidarity of that moment dissolved. The words “Patriot Act” became anathema on the global left—a moral affront. How long will the solidarity of Paris last?

Before Islamic terrorists murdered 132 people in Paris last Friday, the biggest news story in the U.S. was the bonfire of the academy. Protesters at the University of Missouri forced the resignation of the president of the 35,000-student campus. They said his efforts to reduce racism were “inadequate.” University officials at other campuses expressed solidarity with the Missouri protesters’ goals.

Missouri and Paris have something important in common. Both represent the inability of primary social institutions to defend themselves. American institutions of higher learning are beset by an intellectual anarchy that is eroding their reason for being. In the Middle East, unchecked anarchy has caused millions of refugees to flow into a Europe incapable of handling that crisis and now reeling from its vulnerability to terrorist attacks on normal life.

How has this happened?

Europe and the U.S. can follow the Israeli playbook to defeat Islamist terror. Here’s how we did it.

On March 27, 2002, a suicide bomber walked into the Park Hotel in the Israeli city of Netanya and blew up the explosives belt he had strapped around his waist. Thirty people, who moments earlier were sitting down for the Passover Seder, were murdered. A celebratory and civilized scene, like those in Paris last week, had suddenly become a field of carnage.

The Park Hotel attack came at the height of the Second Intifada, a conflict that would ultimately claim the lives of more than 1,000 Israelis. More than 130 people were killed that March, and by then there had already been thousands of terror attacks.

My country, Israel, seemed paralyzed and the national sentiment was that the military would be unable to defeat the terror campaign. The only real way to stop the attacks, many supposed experts said, was by political means.

By David Gauthier-Villars and Stacy Meichtry in Paris and Matt Bradley in Beirut

PARIS—In targeting Abdelhamid Abaaoud in a raid, French authorities aimed to remove from Islamic State’s ranks a prominent figure who they said blended his battlefield experience in Syria with a network of associates in Europe to mastermind one of the bloodiest terror attacks in French history.

In Syria, the Belgian was a military commander, or “emir of war,” in eastern Deir Ezzour province, according to local activists and news reports, an unusually high rank for a fighter who hailed from Europe. Friends from his early life in Brussels, in the predominantly Muslim district of Molenbeek, recall a “nice guy” who played soccer.

In Paris, officials say the 28-year-old militant assembled a potent arsenal that he planned to deploy against multiple additional targets—including Paris’ La Defense business district—following the attacks that investigators say he coordinated against a stadium, concert hall and other locales, killing 129 people.
A look at the 27-year-old Belgian citizen suspected by French authorities of having a role in the Paris terror attacks, and who they also believe masterminded failed attacks on a high-speed train and a church. Mark Kelly reports.

Its strength was on full display Wednesday in an hourslong resistance to a raid in search of him in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. French police late Wednesday were working to establish if Mr. Abaaoud was among those killed in the action.

If Kurds left their homes, they would be shot. If they stayed in their homes, they would be bombed.

In 1990s, the Turkish military used to burn down Kurdish villages; today they burn down Kurdish towns.

This month, three neighborhoods in the Kurdish city of Silvan in Diyarbakir Province — Tekel, Konak and Mescit — were put under military curfew and then attacked from November 3 to November 14. Telephone lines, water, and electricity were cut.

The neighborhoods, besieged by armored police vehicles, were then bombarded by tanks and artillery shooting from the hills. Many houses were hit by bullets and bombs; some houses were burned. [1]

Representatives of the governor’s office in Diyarbakir claimed that the military operations aimed to “remove the ditches and barricades” set up by some Kurdish youths, but reports coming from the town showed that the operation actually seemed to aim at ethnically cleansing the town from its indigenous population for more than two thousand years, the Kurds. [2]

“We cannot get information from those neighborhoods in any way.” Firat Anli, the co-mayor of Diyarbakir, told Firat News Agency (ANF). “We cannot send in any food or humanitarian aid. Dialysis patients, children, the elderly… We have no information about their situation. They have been disconnected from the rest of the world.”

Edip Erk, a former deputy of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, HDP, told the Bianet News agency:

“Three HDP deputies have been in those neighborhoods. They say there are many wounded. Even martial law permits the wounded to be taken to hospitals but in Silvan they [Turkish officials] are not allowing that.

“The public institutions in those neighborhoods, such as the health care center, are closed. There is a huge food shortage. We have informed the authorities that we would like to send in a truck with but we have not yet received their response. So the truck is still waiting.

“The chief of police of the city told us he is not administering the operation. The Ministry is. It is a military operation. Here, it used to be like an open prison; now it is an open torture center.”[3]

The EU alleges that the “Interpretive Notice” has nothing to do with a boycott of Israel, and the U.S. has officially concurred in that assessment. The EU says the Interpretive Notice merely responds to “a demand for clarity from consumers, economic operators and national authorities.” But this is disingenuous.

There is a long list of separatist movements in the EU, some demanding independence, others demanding greater autonomy. It is easy to imagine that some Jews in Israel have corresponding sympathies with such movements and “demands for clarity” about the products of the respective European states. Surely some Israeli Jews would like to buy Scotch Whisky only from the few firms that are still in Scottish hands. How can Israelis’ right to know fairly be denied? Israel is entitled to request that Europeans label their products accordingly.

What has happened is another manifestation of the infuriating zeal of the European Commission to issue endless directives to all member states in order to impose uniformity in cases where most Europeans never imagined that uniformity was necessary,

On November 11, 2015, the Commission of the European Union (EU) issued the “final” version of its “Interpretative Notice on indication of origin of goods from the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967” (which can be read here and here). It recommends the labeling of all such goods as originating in an “Israeli settlement.” The decision aroused dismay and anger not just in the parties constituting the current Israeli government but also in most of the parliamentary opposition in the Knesset.