RUTHFULLY YOURS

“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

Leon Aron is the director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
As Russia deepens its involvement in Syria, it risks more than a military quagmire. Its intervention exacerbates a growing domestic threat, one that could destabilize the whole country. A new brand of radical Islam is rising in Russia, fueled by Russian fighters eager to perpetrate acts of terror at home.

Even a decade ago, the scope and depth of this emerging terrorist network would have seemed inconceivable. While Russia has suffered its share of domestic terrorism, those crimes were largely perpetrated by Chechen fighters based in the North Caucasus region. When Moscow declared victory in Chechnya in 2009, it suggested that the threat of radical violence had been largely contained.

But militant Islam didn’t disappear. In fact, the fundamentalist teachings have spread from Chechnya throughout central Russia. They’re propagated by Russian imams trained in the Middle East and are finding new audiences among the country’s native Muslims, as well as Central Asian migrants in Moscow. Even some younger and seemingly long-assimilated believers are becoming radicalized. Like their counterparts across Europe, they’re turning to Internet videos and social-media messages aimed at arousing anger at Western “crusaders.”

This is a real danger for Russia. The country has become a new front in the war against militant Islam, a battle that Europe’s largest Muslim country is largely unprepared to fight.

Russia is no stranger to Muslim radicalism. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Chechen independence movement became more militant, propelled by a growing belief in Islamic fundamentalism.

Moscow responded harshly. In 1999, newly appointed Prime Minister Vladi­mir Putin launched a scorched-earth campaign that made the Chechen capital, Grozny, look like the ruins of Stalingrad. Chechen fighters struck back, often with spectacularly gruesome terrorist attacks, such as the 2002 seizure of a Moscow theater and the 2004 attack on an elementary school in North Ossetia. But this didn’t derail Moscow. After a decade of brutal fighting (accompanied, often, by massive human rights violations), the Kremlin ended the antiterrorist operation in 2009.

Islamic fanatics struck another blow for cynicism last Friday night in Paris — wholesale and gratuitous slaughter in the name of their sanguinary Muslim god. History teaches few lessons these days.

We say “Muslim god” because most other religions forsook ritual religious slaughter centuries ago. Indeed, the nearest historical comparison is actually political. Before contemporary jihad, the Nazis were the last imperial movement to use industrial scale pogroms to underwrite an ideological message. Ironically, the EU now opens its borders to religious fascism more virulent than the political strain that led to the Holocaust and associated carnage of WWII. Angela Merkel does the ironic walk of shame here.

Alas, any distinction between politics and religion in a Muslim context is now moot. Politics are mostly religious in the Ummah and dystopic religion seems to be the only relevant politics permissible in much of the Muslim world.

Iranian military commanders, security chiefs and conservative media outlets are coming close to questioning the competence and loyalty of those in the Iranian regime who favor the JCPOA.

The surreal irony, of course, is that President Obama keeps assuring the world — as recently as last week again, when he met with Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu — that he is “preventing” Iran from getting nuclear weapons, while the truth is that his “deal” — if the Iranians ever sign it — not only green-lights Iran’s nuclear program, but in fact finances it.

Iran’s hardliners are pressing their attack on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which has not yet been approved by Iran. Iran’s opponents of the JCPOA have succeeded in halting any steps toward implementation of Tehran’s responsibilities under the July14 settlement reached in Vienna by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — the US, the UK, France, China and Russia, plus Germany (the so-called P5+1). But who appointed them?

While some reports indicated that Iran was beginning to take off the production line some of the uranium-enrichment centrifuges in the Natanz and Fordow facilities, contradictory reports suggested that any such action was halted due to pressure from Iran’s hardliners, and that dismantling the centrifuges had not been authorized by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and was therefore premature. Another report suggested that only a small number of outdated centrifuges had been decommissioned.

The United Nations, in 2000, advocated the “replacement” of Europe’s population by Muslim migrants.

There seems to be an economic premise underlying this view: that importing the Muslim world en masse into Europe is mutually beneficial. For decades, the mass immigration of Muslims into Europe has been labelled “enrichment.” Shouting “Islamophobia” does not negate how it is virtually impossible to think of a country actually made richer by it.

Even in a country with an established Islamic population such as Britain, Muslim unemployment languishes at 50% for men, and 75% for women.

Those using an economic rationale to implement Europe’s demographic transformation fail to recognize the complexities of Islam: they ignore the fundamentalist revival that has been ongoing for over a century. One feature of this growing embrace of literalism is a belief — validated by scripture — that Muslims are entitled to idly profit from the productivity of infidels.

The idea that with time, Islam’s religious tenets will somehow moderate and dissolve, merely by being lodged in Europe, is wishful thinking, especially in communities where Muslim migrants already outnumber indigenous Europeans.

When Islamist leaders condemned Friday night’s Paris attacks, which left more than 132 people dead and hundreds of others critically wounded, you just had to laugh through your tears.

Terror masters in Iran, Turkey, Syria and the Palestinian Authority actually had the gall to talk as if they themselves are not responsible for the ongoing murder of innocent people.

But hypocrisy, mendacity and lying as a matter of course are not the only reasons for their public expressions of solidarity with France during this frightful hour. In fact, what really bothers them is the fear that a rival group may be beating them at their own game. And hell hath no fury like a scorned, power-hungry radical Muslim with hegemonic aims and weapons with which to achieve them.

Such monsters, some in suits and ties to throw you off, are able to get away with playing the West for fools — particularly when the so-called leader of the free world keeps kowtowing to them, while espousing denial as a policy. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the bloodbath in Paris, U.S. President Barack Obama made a statement that put a smug smile on the faces of jihadists everywhere.

In the first place, he called the carnage “an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share.” This is an amazing assertion, since I don’t even share Obama’s values, let alone those of a great portion of “humanity” inside and out of Washington, D.C. You know, like the multimillions of anti-Semites, Christian-killers, women-subjugators and child-abusers who are trying to win the war over the world’s character and soul.

U.S. President Barack Obama had everyone’s attention with the major world leaders and international journalists attending the G-20 Summit in Antalya, Turkey on Monday, Nov. 16.

In the wake of Friday’s Paris massacres carried out by ISIS and its supporters which led to hundreds dead and wounded civilians, it is not an exaggeration to say that people were anticipating a statement of strength and resolve from a man in the position which has long been considered the leader of the free world.

That is not the message they heard from Obama.

Instead, Obama appeared to be digging in his heels, refusing to consider that he may have misjudged ISIS and may have pursued the wrong strategy thus far with the growing barbaric and now global threat to civilization, ISIS.

A day after the slaughter in Paris, Fusion.net blogger Manu Saadia lamented that the Isis murderers had added insult to injury by concentrating their attacks on neighborhoods where “young and hip Parisians gather to drink and socialize.” Struggling to understand the politics of the massacre, Saadia deployed every buzzword in the liberal handbook. He was indignant that neither “tolerant, progressive” views nor the amulet of political correctness had protected these “hipster socialists” against the violence. As if to chastise Isis for its gory faux pas, Saadia pointed to the “ethnically mixed” neighborhoods themselves, which had retained the “authenticity” of their “proletarian” origins.