RUTHFULLY YOURS

The sophistication, resources and scale of Friday’s attacks in the heart of Paris underscored to officials across the globe that the challenges of containing extremist violence have reached a new level, and that the calculus of the Western effort against terrorism had fundamentally changed.

European governments in the past few months have sought various means to guard against national security threats, with some erecting barbed-wire fences to stem the flow of migrants, while others, including France, devoted hundreds of millions of euros to strengthening electronic surveillance systems.

Friday’s attacks highlight the weakness of those strategies in a world where global extremism flows across nations. It also raises questions about transnational agreements on open-border travel that have been a bedrock of modern Europe. In his first comments to the nation after the attack, French President François Hollande announced the closing of his country’s borders.

French authorities didn’t immediately name a culprit, but the nature of the attacks left little doubt they were the work of a well-organized terrorist group. A French official said Friday the attacks were “unfortunately well-prepared and coordinated.” The apparent use of explosives and the likelihood that a significant number of people were involved were particularly alarming to U.S. counterterrorism officials.

The international campaign to degrade and defeat the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria is showing its first signs of real life in nearly a year. And not a moment too soon. As we went to press Friday night, a wave of shooting and bombing attacks in the streets of Paris was another grim reminder that what used to be called the war on terror is escalating—and still global.

On Friday the Pentagon reported that it was “reasonably certain” it had killed Mohammed Emwazi, the ISIS executioner better known as Jihadi John, in an airstrike in eastern Syria. Among Emwazi’s many victims were American journalists Steve Sotloff and James Foley, Japanese reporters Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto, and British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning.

If confirmed, Emwazi’s death will deprive ISIS of its most notorious spokesman and puncture jihadi illusions that their Mideast strongholds are immune to U.S. reprisals. It also comes on the heels of ISIS’s loss of the Iraqi city of Sinjar after an assault by Kurdish Peshmerga fighters supported by U.S. air power. The Yazidi city had been mostly empty of inhabitants after ISIS massacred some 2,000 of its people, causing a mass exodus. Retaking the city will help Kurds sever the links between the ISIS strongholds of Raqqa in eastern Syria and Mosul in northern Iraq.

“If only we Arabs,” they wrote, “who kill people cruelly and wholesale, cared as much about people as the Jews care about animals.” We often hear Arabs privately saying, “the Zionists have never done to us what we do to ourselves.”

Every Palestinian youth knows that the weekly riots at the “traditional friction points” serve as social events, later used by Palestinians operatives for propaganda.

As our elders have said for years: “Falastin [‘Palestine’ in Arabic] begins with falas [bankruptcy] and ends with teen [mud].”

Palestinian bloggers were amazed when Israelis protested the cruel slaughter of chickens in poultry-packing plants, and during epidemics. “If only we Arabs,” they wrote, “who kill people cruelly and wholesale, cared as much about people as the Jews care about animals.”

Civilian cameras often record events of startling cruelty carried out in Arab countries, in areas of conflict. We often hear Arabs privately saying, “The Zionists have never done to us what we do to ourselves.” This is usually said by Syrians, who have hated the Jews for generations, when they give their thanks for the medical treatment they receive in Israel. Despite the hatred fostered by Hamas, after the most recent military operation, many Gazans admitted that the IDF did in fact warn civilians before attacking terrorist targets protected by “human shields.”

The secret text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement has finally been made public. No time has been lost in debating its terms. Congress adopted a “fast track” procedure that limits floor debate and bans the filibuster and any consideration of amendments to the legislation required to implement the agreement by changing American law. President Barack Obama would like a vote by the end of this year. However, due to a short and crowded schedule, Congress is unlikely to get to the issue until next year. Thus, everyone will have time to voice opinions and interpretations.

Before getting into the specific details of the text, one thing must be understood from the outset. TPP is not about “free trade” in the sense of that great sophistry of economic theory. If this was about academic notions it would not have taken diplomats from 11 countries six years to negotiate its terms (after earlier attempts collapsed). As Alexander Hamilton noted, “There are some who maintain that trade will regulate itself [but] this is one of those speculative paradoxes…rejected by every man acquainted with commercial history.” Each nation entered the talks with the objective of gaining an advantage for its own interests. The verdict on the TPP should rest entirely on whether sober analysis concludes that the agreement promises net gains to U.S.-based producers.

The man is an absolute cretin!!! rsk
Marking 40 years since Chaim Herzog tore up the “Zionism is racism” resolution before the United Nations, Secretary of State John Kerry vowed to resolve to “do all in our power to prevent the hijacking of this great forum for malicious intent.”

He also said the “Zionist dream” of Israel “as a Jewish democracy” won’t be realized without a peace deal with the Palestinians.

The event was organized by the nonprofit Yad Chaim Herzog and Israel’s Mission to the UN. In addition to Kerry, UN Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon was there along with Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, and Herzog’s sons opposition leader Isaac Herzog and Brigadier-General (Res.) Michael Herzog.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recorded a video that was played at the event, saying the high point of the distinguished service of the late ambassador and president was the speech in which he tore up the resolution. “His response to that UN obscenity was both right and just,” Netanyahu said. “Because that resolution was designed to undermine the very legitimacy of Israel. And this just 30 years after the end of the Second World War and the Holocaust. So the very organization that was born in the fight against Nazism had betrayed its own sacred mission.”

The Muslim terrorist sect known as Boko Haram continues to direct its deadly attacks in Nigeria, especially against Christians, as part of its aim to create an entirely Muslim government in the oil-rich African nation. Among the acts Boko Haram’s terror was a suicide bombing by two women in October of this year that killed eleven. Boko Haram has also abducted scores of Nigerian girls and women, subjecting them to rape and forced conversion to Islam. It has conducted attacks on schools, churches, universities, while also engaging Nigerian security forces in a withering campaign of destruction, especially in the northern segment of the country.

So far, Boko Haram is responsible for displacing 2.1 million people, some of whom have fled to neighboring countries, as has been the case with refugees from the violence unleashed by the Islamic State (ISIS) – allies of Boko Haram – in the Middle East. In six year, Boko Haram has murdered more than 150,000 people, most of whom were Christians.

The Catholic Bishop of Maiduguri Oliver Dash Doeme, whose diocese is located in northern Nigeria, has welcomed the intervention of Nigerian security forces. In his diocese, 60,000 of the original 125,000 Christians have fled. In addition, at least 50 churches and chapels have been destroyed by the terrorists.

“You have to understand that Swedes are really scared when an asylum house opens in their village. They can see what has happened in other places.” — Salesman for alarm systems.

Since Parliament decided in 1975 that Sweden should be multicultural and not Swedish, crime has exploded. Violent crime has increased by over 300% and rapes have increased by an unbelievable 1,472%.

Many Swedes see the mass immigration as a forced marriage: Sweden is forced to marry a man she did not choose, yet she is expected to love and honor him, even though he beats her and treats her badly. Her parents (the government) tell her to be warm and show solidarity with him.

“Are the State and I now in agreement that our mutual contract is being renegotiated?” — Alexandra von Schwerin, whose farm who was robbed three times. Police refused to help.

Once upon a time, there was a safe welfare state called Sweden, where people rarely locked their doors.

Melbourne teen-turned-suicide bomber Jake Bilardi’s blog did not long survive its author, immediately suppressed and deleted when he atomised himself in Syria. Quadrant Online preserved a copy, however, as both an illustration and indictment of where the left’s anti-West agit-prop can lead
Make no mistake, the much vaunted and extremely expensive ‘deradicalization’ of suspected jihadist converts and sympathisers will fail miserably. This can be guaranteed unless it is complemented by a systematic challenge to the anti-Western ideology that dominates the universities, the education system, much of the media (especially the ABC), and the Internet. It is this radical narrative of Western treachery and wickedness that engulfs the minds of young would-be jihadists and provides the ideological rationale for their self-destructive embrace of terrorism.

Consciously of not, jihadists and their supporters and sympathizers all parrot a modified version of the Marxist-Leninist narrative of Western imperialism, exploitation, oppression, racism, war crimes, murder, rape, and atrocity that was the centrepiece of communist bloc agit-prop campaigns throughout the Cold War and had a particular impact on the Middle-East. As Barry Rubin,editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs observes:

‘A statesman,” quipped Harry S. Truman, “is a politician who’s been dead 10 or 15 years.” That wasn’t true for the “little haberdasher” who built an American-led global order from scratch in the 1940s. Nor is it true for Helmut Schmidt, the chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982. Mr. Schmidt died Tuesday at the age of 96.

Statesmen—think Churchill or Lincoln—are born in adversity, halfway between triumph and tragedy. Mr. Schmidt faced his first test in 1977 when West Germany, assaulted by homegrown terrorism, was tottering on the edge of internal war. The Baader-Meinhof Gang, the self-styled “Red Army Faction,” was murdering bankers, industrialists and prosecutors.

The RAF’s strategy was a classic one: provoke the state into shedding its liberal-democratic mask by forcing it into an unchecked repression that would unleash a revolution. The climax was the hijacking of a Lufthansa plane to Somalia. The terrorists had stuffed the aircraft with explosives, and Mr. Schmidt confronted a deadly demand: Release our jailed comrades, or you will have the blood of 86 hostages on your hands.

“[H]alf any given year’s total migrants arrive by the start of October. The other half arrives between October and the end of December… If these tendencies remain relevant, we should expect the very opposite of a winter break, and should prepare instead for an increasing flood of people.” — Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary, September 21, 2015.

The UN High Commission for Refugees announced on Nov. 2 that the number of people who illegally migrated to Europe in October alone (218,394) nearly outstripped the number of those who entered throughout the whole of 2014 (219,000).

The reality at Hungary’s central railway station in Budapest had to be seen to be believed. Hungarians were easily outnumbered 200 to 1 by predominantly young Muslim males. These newcomers engaged in sporadic violence, rioted at the sight of camera crews, and left the station littered with human excrement.

According to Björn Höcke, of the populist Alternative for Germany Party (AfD), by the end of 2016 there will be as many Muslim males of military age in Germany (5.5 million), as there are young German men of that age.

On Nov. 2, Libya threatened to send to Europe millions of migrants from Africa, unless the EU recognizes its self-declared (Islamist) government.