RUTHFULLY YOURS

Our French feminine newscasters are attractive, charming, refined, and fashionably dressed. (Though a few have disfigured themselves with silicone lips that interfere with their ability to speak). Compared to their American and British counterparts, they are stunningly beautiful. And it just might have something to do with French culture, because women on the French channel of Israel’s i24 news are in general better looking than their colleagues on the English channel.

I’m not sure of the appropriate vocabulary for their profession. Some are simple newsreaders, others are full-fledged journalists. They don’t go into the grimy field like the American and British big names that stood up, rain or shine, at Place de la République for hours on end last week. Decades ago they were called “speakerines,” a word that has been dumped, along with “concierge” for custodian and “garcon” for waiter. For some reason that escapes me, our indoor journalists have taken to baring their arms to the shoulder when temperatures drop and normal people are bundled up in sweaters and jackets. In my experience, TV studios are more likely to be cool than overheated. But I was surprised to see a sweet young thing on the 14th of November dressed in a summery pastel sleeveless top reciting press releases filled with shock and gore. By the end of the day the word had apparently gone out. Since then, it’s jackets or long sleeves, all black for the first week, now varied but still appropriate to a grieving nation.

Since Paris was attacked, these anchors have been asking invited guests, “What do they want?” Well, if they’re terrorists it follows that they want to terrorize us and résistance consists of not being afraid. We’ll go to concerts, restaurants, cafés, and shopping centers. The terrorists will not prevail. Then, since they are all Muslim, it means they want to divide our society, turn us against all Muslims, so we will resist by holding hands, forming human chains, and proclaiming friendship with our Muslim fellow citizens. TV cameras focused on a blindfolded man at Place de la République carrying a sign that said “I’m Muslim, give me a hug.” Of course he got lots of hugs. No one seemed to notice that the blindfold was a keffieh… like the ones worn by the caliphators that brought the jihad flag to the statue of Marianne in the summer of 2014.

U.S. Lawmakers this week will be pushing the Pentagon and other administration officials to come up with a tougher policy against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) even though President Barack Obama refuses to make any adjustments or revision following the Paris Islamic terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, the head of Britain’s government, who always appeared to be decisive in contrast to Obama, promulgated the United Kingdom’s strategy for both ISIS and Syria’s oppressive regime.

The government of the United Kingdom on Thursday released a strategy detailing the arguments for why it would be “militarily, legally, and morally right for Britain to join the U.S.-led coalition in attacking Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) targets in (President Bashar al-Assad’s] Syria,” according to Friday’s Homeland Security News Wire.

The 38-page dossier was released just before Prime Minister David Cameron delivered a speech in front of the House of Commons in which he called on all House members to vote for authorization to conduct the proposed anti-ISIS campaign that includes the removal of Assad and his regime.

Horrific footage has emerged of the moment an Islamist rebel fighter and his Syrian activist cameraman were killed by a Syrian Arab Army artillery shell in northern Hama, Syria.

The horrific 40-second video begins with a bearded fighter, believed to be fighting with the Islamist allied Ajnad al-Sham, describing his joy at capturing Tal Sukayk in the Hama countryside.

Just a short while after he begins talking, an artillery shell fatally crashes down directly on to the fighter and his cameraman, who is named as Ahmed Abu Hamza.

Final moments: The unnamed fighter gives a short speech just before the shell hits their position

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Final moments: The unnamed fighter gives a short speech just before the shell hits their position

The telling example of Palestinian death cult.

“An attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share,” was what President Obama called the Paris terror attack. As commentators have pointed out, it’s unfortunately not so; Western values, even including the sanctity of life, are not shared by all of humanity and do not necessarily prevail in some parts of the world.

Here in Israel, where we’ve been under an assault variously dubbed the Knives Intifada or the Children’s Intifada for two months, it’s impossible not to be aware of a lack of universality of values. Many, but not all, of the examples I give below (which, of course, are far from comprehensive) are taken from Palestinian warfare.

Combatants and noncombatants. This is a Western distinction that is often conspicuously lacking in other parts of the world. While Palestinians sometimes attack Israeli security personnel, they more often attack Israeli civilians. Age and gender, of course, are of no consequence; the concept of the “enemy” is tribal and includes any and all Israeli Jews at any and all times. The principle of tribal assault applies, of course, in surrounding countries as well. The only reason Israelis are not massacred on the same scale as Syrians, Iraqis, Sudanese, and others is Israel’s military and security capability. What happened in Paris was a Middle Eastern tribal assault, not just an attack by lone “terrorists.”

What if the terrorists had been targeting “just Americans,” or “just diplomats” — would that be “understandable terrorism” in John Kerry’s thinking?

“If we should stop drawing cartoons, should we also stop having synagogues? Should they be converted into something else? Should we ask the Jewish people to leave?” — Organizer of a targeted fee speech event, in response to the question if they had brought the attack on themselves.

Much of the world may only have been just bragging or emoting in saying, “Je Suis Charlie” or “Je Suis Juif” in January. But it turns out not to matter: the terrorists of ISIS think we are all cartoonists and Jews anyway.

Since we cannot live with ISIS and similar groups, we had better do whatever it takes to speed up an end of our choosing before they speed up an end of their choosing.

When the truth is revealed, it can be not merely unpleasant but often accidental. There have been several striking examples of this since the massacre in Paris earlier this month. In the days immediately after the attack, The Times of London interviewed residents of Paris. Referring to the latest attacks, one 46-year old resident also referred back to the attacks in January on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket. “Every Parisian has been touched by these attacks,” she said, referring to the latest attacks. “Before it was just the Jews, the writers or cartoonists.”

More than a decade ago I wrote my first novel, Enemies Foreign and Domestic. Part of my motivation was to establish my bona fides at forecasting social, political and military trends. I didn’t like the direction America was heading, and I wanted to warn as many readers as possible about some of the dangers I saw coming. At the end of 2015, I hope that my past success at prognostication will encourage people to pay heed to this essay.

As we roll into the New Year, we are witnessing the prelude to the culmination of a titanic struggle between three great actors. Three great social forces are now set in motion for a 2016 showdown and collision that will, in historical terms, be on par with the First and Second World Wars.

Two of these great social forces are currently allied in a de facto coalition against the third. They have forged an unwritten agreement to jointly murder the weakest of the three forces while it is in their combined power to do so. One of these two social forces would be content to share totalitarian control over large swaths of the globe with the other remaining social force. One of these social forces will never be satisfied until it achieves complete domination of the entire planet. So what are these three great social forces? They are Islam, international socialism, and nationalism.

Allow me to explain the salient aspects of each, and how they relate to the coming 2016 cataclysm.

BERLIN—The Paris attacks have raised fears of terrorists slipping into Europe by posing as refugees. But in Germany, the top migrant destination, security officials have another worry: Local extremists will recruit the newcomers to join the Islamist cause once they arrive.

German authorities warn that migrants seeking out Arabic-language mosques in search of the familiar are increasingly ending up at those attended by Islamist radicals. In interviews, security officials from Berlin to the southwest German state of Saarland said they have registered a sharp rise in the number of asylum-seekers attending mosques they believed attracted extremists.

Federal officials said they have counted more than 100 cases in which Islamists known to them have tried to establish contact with refugees. According to state and local agencies across the country, Islamists have offered migrants rides, food, shelter and translation help. In some cases, they have invited them to soccer games and grill parties, or brought them copies of the Quran and conservative Muslim clothing.

PARIS (AFP) –

French police and airport authorities said Saturday graffiti, much of it in Arabic, had been found sprayed on four aircraft belonging to British carrier Easyjet and a plane from Spanish airline Vueling at two airports.

Three of the jets had been defaced at Lyon airport in eastern France with two others sprayed at the Paris hub of Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle, police said.

A police source added authorities believed the graffiti had been painted on prior to the jets’ arrival in France, but that the issue posed questions about airport security.

The words “Allah Akbar” were found to have been scrawled on a fuel tank hatch of one Easyjet plane at Charles de Gaulle airport on Tuesday, a day after the aircraft arrived from Budapest, an airport source said, adding it was scrubbed off before the next passengers embarked.

“Five years since the launch of the Arab Spring, between five and seven million people live under the yoke of the Islamic State in parts of Iraq, Syria and Libya, a further two million under the rule of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Gaza, and a total of at least another million are under Insag control in Lebanon, Sinai and parts of the Sahel region — all in all between eight and ten million human beings, in what is already the world’s least politically stable region. Whatever the fate of one Insag or another may be, the phenomenon is here to stay. Should they continue their territorial gains and entrenchment among the local populations, they will inculcate millions of children in various forms of militant jihadism, gradually acquire more state-like military and financial assets, and increasingly transform the nature of international terrorism and challenge the state-based international order itself.”

When the Arab Spring erupted five years ago, observers of the Arab world asked themselves mostly what kind of state governments would emerge from the popular revolts and anti-regime uprisings sweeping large parts of the Middle East and North Africa.

Some, like the late Fouad Ajami, read the unrest as the birth pangs of a region-wide struggle towards modernity. A long-silenced Arab world was finally clamouring to be heard, eager to find its place in the modern, possibly even democratic, order of nations. Others, like Khaled Abu Toameh, were less sanguine. Looking at the balance of power between liberals and Islamists in key Arab states, they warned that the Arab Spring was the mother of all misnomers, and that a harsh Islamist Winter was coming. Viewed through their prism, the electoral victories of the AKP in Turkey in 2002 and Hamas in Gaza in 2006 were the early precursors to a tsunami of Muslim Brotherhood wins in Tunisia, Egypt and beyond. Those “old” Arab autocrats — statist, socialist, secular, and sclerotic — who would prove unable to effectively co-opt or suppress the Islamists, would face wholesale replacement at the hands of a new breed of assertive Islamist dictatorships.

Once the Islamists actually came to power in Tunisia (2011) and Egypt (2012), the question “what kind of state governments will emerge in the Middle East?” morphed and acquired new meanings. Would the Islamists seek to monopolise their grip on state, society and the markets, or would they tolerate spheres of autonomy for the old guard and other opposition groups? Would the Achayun (Brothers) of Tunisia and Egypt follow the Turkish model of incremental, largely non-violent Islamisation of society and (at least for the time being) the preservation of democracy, or would they quickly turn towards the more coercive methods of forced Islamisation favored in Iran and Gaza? Did the fact that only Arab “republics”, not monarchies, collapsed in the regional earthquake, point to some genuine monarchical stability-advantage — and therefore portend well for regime durability in Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia — or is this a statistical fluke that is bound to be corrected sooner or later? And in the international sphere, would the untested new Islamist leaders (most importantly Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi) accept the existing rules of the game — honouring previous agreements with the United States and Israel — or veer towards some truculent new “Islamist foreign policy” whose features were not yet defined?

“Your values are our values,” intoned a sombre British Prime Minister in solidarité with the people of France on the morning after the bloodbath in Paris last month. Maybe, but until recently the two countries have taken a markedly different approach to trying to prevent such massacres, the second in Paris this year.

The Paris attacks mark the latest in a series of increasingly successful strikes by French jihadists since 2012. Less sensitive to Muslim sentiment than Britain, the French have sought to counter jihadi terrorism with more draconian legislation than us, while expecting the country’s almost 5 million Muslims to assert the robustly secular values of la République française.

The Cameron government, by contrast, has taken a more interventionist approach when it comes to Britain’s “precious” progressive values. Permanent agitation by Islamists to inject ever more of their version of Islam into public life, overpowering more mainstream Muslim voices, means tolerance, freedom of speech, free religion, free thinking, democracy, and gender and sexual equality can no longer be taken for granted.

Even as the IS slaughterers in France were strapping on their suicide belts, that same night on this side of the Channel British values were being dismissed as “junk” at a debate about Islam at the Corn Exchange in Bedford. “Every single one of these speakers is a caliphate-advocating Islamist,” commented Maajid Nawaz, the co-founder and chairman of the counter-terrorism think-tank Quilliam.