RUTHFULLY YOURS

If Mikhail Bulgakov had come back to life and written a Levantine sequel to The Master and Margarita, he could not have devised a scenario more lurid than what we now observe in Syria. Russian President Vladimir Putin is now the leader of the Free World against Islamist terrorism, directing the efforts of France and Germany and setting terms for American involvement. Reeling from last week’s massacre in Paris, France lacks both the backbone and the brute force to avenge itself against ISIS, but in alliance with Russia it will make a more than symbolic contribution.

In 2008 I endorsed Putin for the American presidency, in jest, of course. Now he is leading America’s president by the nose and directing the anti-terror efforts of France and Germany. No-one could have anticipated Putin’s sudden ascent to global leadership during the past several weeks. Russia is in the position of a a vulture fund, buying the distressed assets of the Western alliance for pennies on the dollar. Faced with an American president who will not fight, and his European allies whose military capacity has shrunk to near insignificance, the Russian Federation seized the helm with the deployment of a mere three dozen war planes and an expeditionary force of 5,000 men. One searches in vain through diplomatic history to find another case where so much was done with so little. As an American, I feel a deep humiliation at this turn of events, assuaged only slightly by Schadenfreude at the even deeper humiliation of America’s foreign policy establishment.

The jihad is raging in Paris. President Hollande repeatedly declares that France is at war, and press reporting has highlighted the French military’s combat operations against ISIS in Syria. But what the French are most worried about — and what the Obama-friendly media are happy to gloss over while the president is pushing to import thousands of Middle Eastern Muslims into our country — is fifth-column activity, meaning French Islamists supportive of violent jihadists.

Early Wednesday morning, French police conducted a raid in Saint-Denis, on the northern edge of Paris, where operatives of the jihadist enemy were holed up in an apartment. In the ensuing shootout involving several jihadists, Kalashnikovs were fired at police who stormed the hideaway. A woman detonated an explosive suicide vest. Several police were wounded; the woman and a male terrorist were killed.

Turkish supporters attending an international football friendly against Greece on Nov. 17 refused to participate in a minute of silence following the recent jihadist attacks on France, choosing instead to boo the commemoration.

A section of the crowd at Fatih Terim Stadium in Istanbul’s Başakşehir district had first whistled during the playing of the Greek national anthem, prompting Turkish star Arda Turan to remonstrate with the crowd. Arda’s intervention, however, failed to stop the booing.

During the subsequent moment of silence, supporters also whistled their disapproval while a section of the crowed also reportedly shouted “Allah-u Akbar” and “Martyrs don’t die, the homeland will not be divided” – a common nationalist slogan.

French President Francois Hollande today promised that “France will remain a country of freedom,” defending his decision to honor a commitment to accept migrants and refugees despite Friday’s deadly terrorist attacks in Paris.

“Life should resume fully,” Hollande told a gathering of the country’s mayors, who gave him a standing ovation. “What would France be without its museums, without its terraces, its concerts, its sports competitions?

“France should remain as it is. Our duty is to carry on our lives.”

In the same spirit, he added, “30,000 refugees will be welcomed over the next two years. Our country has the duty to respect this commitment,” explaining that they will undergo vigorous security checks.

Hollande noted that “some people say the tragic events of the last few days have sown doubts in their minds,” but called it a “humanitarian duty” to help those people … but one that will go hand in hand with “our duty to protect our people.”

“We have to reinforce our borders while remaining true to our values,” he said.

It is like the death of a loved one. The death of our city that we love despite its failings, misdeeds, and particular misbehavior that I have been chronicling over the past fifteen years. A city is more than its current events. And today the heart of our city is broken. We do not have the fibre of Israelis who live with miraculous vitality in a permanent state of war & peace, but Parisians are not entirely devoid of courage and sharp instincts in the face of utmost danger. Anecdotes and eyewitness testimony are slowly emerging. The hard facts are at a minimum.

A soft spoken young man in an elegant overcoat describes the scene at the café on Rue de Charonne. He was present, he saw people picked off like sitting ducks. “They didn’t have a chance.” And yet he himself cannot believe what he saw. The Public Prosecutor delivers official information in an appropriately neutral tone. A hundred shell casings are left at each of the cafés attacked. No one was spared. Those who are not dead are in desperate condition.

Al Gore was a few hours into his 24-hour global warming telethon in Paris, designed to fire up the faithful for the coming climate change conference in Paris in December, when ISIS mass murderers chose that evening to massacre as many innocents as they could find in the city. Gore’s global warming faithful are a large club at this point, attracting all who think the planet faces one primary threat — an apocalyptic overheated future in the next few decades if too much carbon is burned. After all, if one looks at the doctored temperature records, one might think the world has warmed by 0.8 degrees centigrade since the Industrial Revolution began 165 years ago. The “climate change is very scary” club includes Democratic presidential candidates among its ranks, as well as U.S. President Barack Obama. Gore, a former presidential candidate himself, is, of course, the author of “An Inconvenient Truth,” in which he laid out the climate problem as he understood it. The timing of the attacks in Paris was inconvenient for Gore’s broadcast, but also for the climate change army headed to Paris in two weeks, who wanted no distraction from their single minded focus on their issue. International media outlets expected to make Paris and climate change the association that stuck with their audiences, but now it will be Paris and Islamic terror.

Environmentalists have warned of future climate refugees, forced to leave their coastal homes soon to be overrun by rising seas and travel to new lands to find new homes. However, to add one more inconvenient truth, refugees are already on their way, in the millions, and not due to climate change, but rather due to wars in the Islamic world which have driven them out, and the compassionate instincts of many Europeans, who encourage them to migrate in, signaling they will be welcomed and supported by their new societies.

Five days before ISIS terrorists struck in Paris, I warned that ISIS operatives and war criminals were entering Europe disguised as asylum seekers. I quoted Salem Kurdi, who said in an interview with the Dutch TV news program EenVandaag that there are “war criminals and members of militias, Assad warriors as well as ISIS jihadists who apply for asylum in Europe.”

There are now very strong indications that one of the Paris attackers entered Europe as an asylum seeker. Suicide bomber Ahmed Almohammad, who blew himself up near the football stadium “Stade de France,” entered the small Greek island of Leros on October 3, 2015 – on a raft together with 198 refugees. He was accompanied by Mohammed Almuhmed, another man suspected of terrorist links, the Paris newspaper Le Figaro and Forocoches, a Spanish source, reported. Ahmed’s (forged?) Syrian passport was found near the place where he blew himself up on November 13.

The distance from Leros to Turkey is only seven miles. It was on October 7, that Ahmed Almohammad arrived in Serbia, one day later he was in Croatia, and from Croatia he traveled to Hungary and Austria and finally arrived in France where he joined the other ISIS terrorists who struck in Paris on November 13, on a Friday evening, that is. Le Figaro quotes Bavaria’s Finance Minister Markus Söder from the Christian Social Union (CSU) who said: “Not all refugees are terrorists from ISIS. But it is naive to believe that there is not one fighter among the refugees.”

“Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step, and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it (Islam) has vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”

Maybe there is another, kindly Koran that only the Islamists’ apologists and so-called ‘moderate Muslims’ know about, but that seems even less likely than a leaderless West muddling largely unscathed through the jihadis’ escalating offensive.
I was struck by the contrast of Parisians defiantly singing the La Marseillaise and then running like frightened rabbits, trampling a commemorative flower display, at the sound of firecrackers. Don’t mistake me, I would have sung and run too. Religious fanatics with guns, explosives and a death wish tend to produce fear and panic among unarmed ordinary folk.

Singing national anthems will not deter the bad guys. They have to be killed. The current crop of Western political leaders talk tough (Obama excepted) but inspire little confidence (Obama not excepted) that they will do what it takes to win. Populations largely acquiesce to this weakness. Prosperity and the promise of scientific and technological advances have sapped or marginalized survival instincts.

The political centre in France must shoulder the blame for refusing to address Islamic revivalism with liberal — but nevertheless genuine — policies. Yet again, the folly of draping real problems in feel-good euphemism and has been made bloodily apparent.
On Friday November 13, 2015, three teams of armed Salafi jihadists did what soldiers are supposed to do in a war—they attacked the enemy. The targeted enemy, in this particular case, happened to be the defenceless civilians of Paris. Latest estimates at the time of writing are at least 128 murdered, with as many as 300 wounded, many critically.

French President Francois Hollande has declared this latest atrocity in Paris to be an “act of war”, although many in the West are not sure to what war he refers. Ever since the Salafi jihadist attacks on America on September 11, 2001, the political class in basically every Western nation has been keen to play down the notion of an emerging civilisational war between the apocalyptic millennialism of Sunni revivalism and the democratic and secular sensibilities of modernity. President George W. Bush addressed himself to “Global War on Terror”, a deeply ambiguous expression at best, while President Barack Obama’s use of the term “Overseas Contingency Operations” is not so much evasive as downright obfuscatory.

President Hollande has accurately portrayed the events of Friday 13 as “an abomination and a barbaric act”. He pledges that France will be “determined, unified and together” and “ruthless in its response to Islamic State”, and yet the question remains—for both the political class and the intelligentsia in most Western countries—what, exactly, is the Islamic State and how can it be fought?

The first problem is that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s would-be caliphate in Mesopotamia constitutes but one manifestation of the concept of “Islamic State”. The terrorist organisation Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement), according to its own covenant and propaganda, seeks to fashion “an Islamic state”; Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is hell-bent on transfiguring the Republic of Turkey into his own neo-Ottoman version of an Islamic state; Nigeria’s Boko Haram has an African model in mind; the Nusra Front has a Syrian rendering; Jemaah Islamiyah is a South-East Asian adaptation—and the list goes on.

PARIS—Heavy gunfire rang out in a suburb north of the city through the morning Wednesday as French police laid siege to an apartment with terror suspects inside, potentially including the presumed mastermind of the deadly Paris attacks.

A woman blew herself up at the start of a dawn raid in Saint-Denis, close to the national soccer stadium that was targeted in Friday night’s attacks, and police said another terror suspect was killed.
What We Know About the Paris Attack PerpetratorsFrench authorities have named some of the perpetrators of the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris. Officials believe the assailants carried out the atrocities on behalf of Islamic State. Here’s what we know so far.

The government said at about noon that the siege had ended.

The Paris prosecutor’s office said investigators raided the apartment acting on suspicion that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian-born senior Islamic State operative may have been there.
French Police Raid Saint-Denis Suburb in Paris
Gunfire was heard intermittently in the area beginning at about 4:30 a.m. local time.

SAMU members and French police participate in a raid in Saint-Denis. Etienne Laurent/European Pressphoto Agency
Hooded police officers walked on a street in Saint-Denis Wednesday. A woman wearing an explosive suicide vest blew herself up as heavily armed police tried to storm a suburban …
French special police forces secured the area as shots were exchanged in Saint-Denis early Wednesday, during an operation to catch suspects related to Friday night’s deadly attacks in the French capital. Christian Hartmann/Reuters