2015.11.05 (Arsal, Lebanon) – Five Muslim scholars are taken out by a suicide blast from a Religion of Peace rival.
2015.11.04 (al-Arish, Egypt) – A suicide bomber plows into a police club, killing at least five others.
2015.11.03 (Tank, Afghanistan) – A journalist and father of five is shot to death by Sunni fundamentalists.
2015.11.02 (Badush, Iraq) – Three female doctors are put against a wall and shot in the head by the Islamic State.
2015.11.01 (Mogadishu, Somalia) – a dozen people at a hotel are massacred by suicide bombers, followed by gunfire.
2015.10.31 (Mosul, Iraq) – A dozen teenagers forced into a terror training camp are executed for attempting to flee.
On the tenth anniversary of the publication of the Danish cartoons the country’s Free Speech Society invited four speakers, including Mark Steyn and me, to commemorate the occasion. After the deadly attack on a free speech event in Copenhagen last February, the only place secure enough to house the event was the country’s Parliament. Afterwards I learned that in anticipation of the now traditional terrorist attack, both the US State Department and UK Foreign Office issued official warnings to their citizens not to go near the Parliament building on the day — not a piece of advice they had passed on to the speakers. In any case all fears were unnecessary and several hours of discussion on free speech, cartoons, Islam and the migration crisis played to a full and happily secure house.
I told the audience that apart from the realisation that free speech isn’t that popular, the other thing I had learnt in the last ten years is how rapidly fear spreads. As if on cue, the restaurant we were meant to be having dinner at cancelled when the police went around to do a preliminary security check. We all ended up at a party in a bar that felt slightly like a party at the end of the world — and none the worse for it. Shots of a quite foul Danish spirit, much beer and wine, the dense, uncommon smog of cigarette and cigar smoke, and at some point the opening of a bottle of champagne with a sword all played their part. Only the security guards at the door remained unmoved.
***
A few days later I was at Wellesley College near Boston for more of the same (discussion, that is). One major issue was the now heightened form of student sensibility which demands “trigger warnings” before reading anything and a “safe space” to protect students against uncomfortable ideas. This phenomenon assumes that a very large number of students suffer some form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A girl who was hospitalised after reading a novel is cited by way of example. One professor says that 56 per cent of American students have self-referred for stress, depression, PTSD and other mental illnesses. I feel unsympathetic towards this societal breakdown, and say so.
Report: Pope Francis Tells Jewish Delegation to Vatican Joke About Antisemitic Priest
Pope Francis told a joke about an antisemitic Catholic priest to a group of Latin American Jews visiting the Vatican last week, the UK’s Jewish Chronicle reported on Thursday.
Claudio Epelman, executive director of the Latin American Jewish Congress (LAJC), recounted the pontiff’s stab at humor: “One day during his sermon, the priest found a way to attack Jews as usual, in a vicious way. During a pause, Jesus got down from his cross, looked at the Virgin Mary and said, ‘Let’s get out of here, Mum, they don’t seem to like us.’”
The group, which included leaders of the Jewish World Congress, reportedly found the joke funny and Epelman later told the Argentinian newspaper La Nación, “It’s incredible that the Pope would tell a joke like this. It says so much about the wonderful relationship he has with Jews.”
Epelman said the Pope then prayed that God would “bring us closer together as brothers and make us better at serving those in need.”
He also said he had known the pontiff when he was Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, and that Francis always had an informal style of getting to know people, which in the end helped him connect with them.
An international conference in Vienna on 30 October – attended by all five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council – America, China, France, Russia and the United Kingdom – has made an important breakthrough towards defeating Islamic State and ending the conflict in Syria and Iraq.
Together with Egypt, the EU, Germany, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and the United Nations – the Permanent Members reached a mutual understanding that
“Da’esh (Islamic State), and other terrorist groups, as designated by the U.N. Security Council, and further, as agreed by the participants, must be defeated.”
This is the first time the five Permanent Members have reached such a consensus – acknowledging that prior measures not involving the use of armed force under Security Council Resolutions 2170 and 2178 have failed to defeat Islamic State and other designated terrorist groups – a prerequisite before there can be any hope of restoring stability and reaching lasting political solutions in Syria and Iraq.
International co-operation to defeat Islamic State through a Security Council Resolution authorising the use of armed force had previously risked being vetoed by either Russia or America in the face of earlier American objections against co-operating with any armed force which included President Assad’s troops. Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, had declared as recently as 29 September.
What crashed the Russian Airbus A321 in the Sinai Peninsula is yet to be determined. At the time of this writing the British Telegraph reported an ISIS “bomb plot was uncovered by British spies,” and ISIS’s claim it downed the Russian plane flying at 30,000 feet with a MANPAD (Man Portable Air Defense System), was dismissed outright by counterterrorism and aviation experts. Strangely there seems to be a consensus that “Terrorist groups cannot have such capacities by definition.”
However, in October 2011, after rebels killed Moammar Gaddafi in Libya, some 20,000 MAENADS went missing. Months later only 5,000 were reportedly destroyed. Where the remaining 15,000 missiles went is unclear. This however, did not stop then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from issuing a statement assuring Americans that most of Libya’s weapons, including MANPADS, had been secured. But NATO’s then-military committee chairman, Admiral Giampaolo di Paola, was not so sure. His fear that the missing MAENADS could be scattered “from Kenya to Kunduz [Afghanistan],” subsequently materialized. Especially so, since ISIS has captured sophisticated MANPADS in Iraq and Syria.
Secretary of State John Kerry’s new diplomatic process for dealing with Syria’s harrowing civil war involves convening a series of talks in Vienna. The effort is probably well-intentioned. But I cannot conceive of what he expects to accomplish.
Does anyone really believe that Syria can be put back together again and then revived through democratic elections? The danger is that the all-purpose diplomatic resort to “process” will lead the United States to ignore realities and even make them worse.
America faces two interconnected perils in the region: the expansion of Islamic State and the breakdown of the Middle East’s century-old security order. The Obama administration’s fear of involvement and denial of the fundamental struggle for dominance in the region increases the risks for the U.S., Europe, Africa and Asia. The conference in Vienna last week—involving at least a dozen interested parties, including Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia—was escapism, not a serious strategy. The next gathering in a week or so will be more of the same.
The old state borders and authorities of the Middle East, established during and after World War I, are disintegrating. The Arab lands are now the scene of a terrible contest for power. As former U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus explained to Congress in September, “almost every Middle Eastern country is now a battleground or a combatant in one or more wars.”
“They attacked even the wounded. Many people throughout Kurdistan have been arrested wholesale lately. Some of them participated in the election campaigns for our party. Many Turkish mainstream media outlets distort the facts and put the blame of the conflicts on Kurds. But it was the police that started the violence and conflicts. This much is clear: they murdered civilians knowingly and intentionally” — Ferhat Encu, Kurdish member of parliament for the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP)
“The police broke F.A.’s teeth, tortured him, beat him and inserted a gun in his anus. He fainted during the torture. Then he was taken to hospital. When we saw him, there were bruises and marks of torture all over his body.” — Zozan Acar, his lawyer.
“We sent ambulances, but the police opened fire even at the ambulances. They open fire at anyone who go outside.” — Seyfettin Aydemir, the co-mayor of Silopi, to newspaper Evrensel
Even though the AKP won the majority of votes this week, on November 3 a new curfew was imposed on the Kurdish town of Silvan —for the sixth time since August 17. Just before the curfew, Muslum Tayar, 22, was killed by the police. They shot him from their armored vehicle.
It could have been a coincidence. A Russian airbus with 224 people – mainly tourists – flying from Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt to St. Petersburg, Russia could simply have come apart in midair, killing all aboard. It would have been one heck of a coincidence, though, considering the players who would have wanted it to disintegrate and the constellation of agendas that would be advanced by a well-placed bomb.
It is almost impossible that the plane was hit from the ground. It was flying too high for a shoulder-fired missile. Although it isn’t clear whether there are mobile missile launchers in Sinai, assume for a moment that one or more exist. The missile would have to have been programmed – it needs radar and target designation – and therefore it needs a) to know the flight path of a particular plane if it plans to hit a particular plane and b) an operator with the right skills. (The list of requirements for a successful takedown of an airliner is what leads some to believe that it was a Russian operator in Ukraine who fired on Malaysian Air Flight 17 a year ago.)
A bomb inside the plane, however, would account for the widespread wreckage.
As organizations like CAIR and their allies wax indignant over “Islamophobia” in America, Muslims around the globe are visiting the worst sort of cruelty upon the Christian minorities in their midst.
For instance, over a span of four days, from October 19-23, the Indonesian government succumbed to the demand of Islamic “extremists” and demolished nine churches. Six days earlier, on October 13, Muslims unleashed a torrent of violence that left a church burned to the ground and a person dead.
And in the course of this single day, 8,000 Christians found themselves displaced from their homes.
The government has deported them.
According to a local church activist, someone who self-identified only as “Rudy,” Islamic militants issued an ultimatum to the Indonesian government: Either raze these Christian churches to the ground or “the radicals will deploy around 7,000 people” to besiege this Christian community.
The organization Open Doors, a group dedicated to “serving persecuted Christians worldwide,” reports: “Church members wept as they watched in despair [as] civil police officers [began] hammering down their worship houses.” As of this juncture, over 1,000 “churchless believers are prohibited from raising temporary tents to hold Sunday worship services.”
U.S. and European intelligence agencies now believe that the Russian airliner downed in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on the weekend was probably taken out by a bomb planted onboard by an Islamic State-affiliated terrorist group, according to media reports.
The Russian airplane may have been attacked by Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh) because Russia is waging war against it.
British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Philip Hammond said yesterday it appears a bomb ripped apart the Airbus A321M on Saturday, Oct. 31, killing all 224 souls onboard. It is reportedly Russia’s worst air disaster on record. The Russian-operated plane that was registered in Ireland had taken off earlier from the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh bound for St. Petersburg, Russia.
“We have concluded that there is a significant possibility that the crash was caused by an explosive device on board the aircraft,” Hammond said as his government gears up for a British visit today by Egypt’s anti-Islamist president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
