RUTHFULLY YOURS

In terms of population size, the 129 persons murdered in Paris were equivalent to losing 1,000 Americans in our nation’s capital. With echoes of 9/11, President Hollande declared the massacre an “act of war,” pledging to fight with “all the necessary means, and on all terrains, inside and outside, in coordination with our allies.” Allies include America. An attack on one member of NATO is an attack on all. France stood with us in Afghanistan. Will the U.S. join with France in going to war? And what does war mean?

President Obama’s Options. A few days ago, President Obama claimed that ISIS had been “contained.” Now the Islamists have called him out. He has no choice; he has to do something. He has three options.

Option 1. Do nothing, with a flourish. Given his track record of the past seven years, the odds are that he will create a fog of rhetoric and a thicket of high-level meetings, while substantive military actions will be slight. There will be an uptick in videos of laser-bomb strikes released by the White House. Public attention will fade after a few months.

Option 2. A defensive no-fly zone. The second option is to create a no-fly zone in northern Syria. To date, he has firmly declared that he will not do this. Our military would need substantial air-related assets, costing in the billions. The odds are overwhelming that both the Russians and Assad’s air force would stay away from the zone, not least because they stand no chance against our air.

However, a no-fly zone by itself is a defensive move that gets us into a war without the resolve or resources to win it. The zone would still be vulnerable to ground-based attacks. To prevent that and to apply pressure against ISIS, the allies would have to turn the zone into a forward operating base, moving in tanks, artillery, helicopter gunships, trainers, logistics, etc. To do that requires a major force numbering more than 10,000. At that point, the no-fly zone has morphed into a ground war.

Option 3. An Arab-NATO ground offensive. That brings us to Obama’s third option: pulling together a NATO-Sunni Arab coalition to prosecute a land campaign. By themselves, the rebels in Syria cannot destroy either the Assad regime or ISIS. A Sunni Arab army composed of forces from Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf states, backed by American advisers and forward air controllers, is needed.

NEW YORK — News of the terrorist attacks in Paris reached New York around sunset, as people rode home on buses and subways, and began to fill bars and restaurants. But the way such news breaks these days is no longer communal — we no longer have to gather around a ticker in Times Square or even a TV set showing CNN, as so many Americans remember doing on 9/11.

Now, we find out about tragedies first from our cell phones, one by one. The best way to follow the developing story was on Twitter, where eyewitnesses from Paris were being retweeted by journalists in the U.S. On Facebook, New Yorkers who had friends in Paris checked in to make sure they had survived.

There was grief, and horror, and fear — surely it is only a matter of time before the kind of coordinated terrorist attacks that have shaken Madrid and London, Mumbai and Paris, come to New York and Washington as well. What was missing — and this is a part of the horror — was any real sense of surprise.

If ever there was an atrocity foretold, it was these mass murders in Paris, following as they do on the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the Hyper Cacher killings at the beginning of the year.

It was all of 1400 years ago that Muhammad went to his Maker or some other entity prepared to accept receipt of his warlord’s soul, but the intolerant and expansionists babblings of the man who must surely rank as the world’s worst-ever neighbour draw blood now as then

We infidels are only just beginning to understand the flexibility of the Koran. There is a ready-made verse for every occasion – to prove the peacefulness of Islam or, more frequently, to proclaim the wrath and terrible vengeance of Allah to be visited on idolators and kafirs (despised unbelievers).

Most recently, Islamic State chose Al-Hashr:2, the 59th “exile surah” as the lesson for the day to headline its murderous attacks in Paris:

The Almighty said: “And they thought that their strongholds would defend them from the wrath of Allah! But Allah’s (wrath) reached them from a way whereof they expected it not, and He cast terror into their hearts so that they destroyed their own dwellings with their own hands and the hands of the believers. Then take admonition, O you with eyes to see.”

What the Paris atrocity reveals yet again is that the people our leaders are most worried about managing is us, not the local and imported jihadist cells and homicidal lone wolves who want nothing more than to achieve martyrdom by murdering infidels in job lots
Our leaders have failed us. Paris confirms it. Make no mistake, at the end of the day their loyalties lie not with the people who elected them, nor with the societies that they govern or the civilisation of the West that has dragged the world out of poverty and barbarism and onto the path of progress. What loyalty they possess is only to their own careers and ambitions and to the special-interest groups they serve.

The latest atrocity in Paris exemplifies this failure. The knee-jerk reaction of Malcolm Turnbull was to follow the lead of the predictably craven Barak Obama and mouth meaningless platitudes about “attacks on humanity” and other abstractions, carefully avoiding any real acknowledgement that the cowardly perpetrators of this latest episode of jihadist mass murder were Muslims and that the hideous ideology they follow is a widely accepted interpretation of Islam. Meanwhile, NSW Premier Mike Baird tried to demonstrate resolve by declaring that NSW was so outraged that authorities would fly a big French flag over the Harbour Bridge and bathe the Sydney Opera House in the Tricolour’s red, white and blue. The leadership of Islamic State must be shaking in their sandals at such a display of defiance and intestinal fortitude!

Why shouldn’t Islamists believe that just a few more bloody nudges will see the West teeter, topple and surrender the last of the values it has not already repudiated in the name of “diversity” and non-judgmental amity? If we won’t defend liberty’s core principles the game is as good as over

The shocking events in Paris should come as no surprise. The earlier massacre at the editorial office of Charlie Hebdo achieved strategically all that the Islamic Jihad would have desired. That was the climax of Stage I. Mission accomplished.

Hang on there, you may object. Yes, the massacre was awful, but then Charlie Hebdo had overstepped the bounds of polite discourse. Maybe those cartoonists and writers provoked the attack? This, so the reasoning goes, was a warning to others not to engage in “hate speech”, whatever that is supposed to mean. In Western countries, supposedly the bastions of free speech, the definition has been left in the hands of un-elected quasi-judicial bodies, which are ever-so-sensitive to the hurt feelings of Muslims. As we should recall, the staged march of solidarity on a Paris street by world leaders in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre included not only representatives from Islamic states committed to the advance of Sharia and the elimination of free speech, but also Western leaders, who despite their hypocritical protestations for the occasion had presided over a shrinkage of Western freedoms and values — curtailments of traditional liberties inflicted in the interests of appeasing a vocal and permanently aggrieved minority.

France’s President Lied, Frenchmen Died

Last month, French President Francois Hollande ridiculed the idea that the massive numbers of Muslim migrants entering his country were any kind of threat.

“Those who argue that we are being invaded are manipulators and falsifiers, who do this only for political reasons, to scare,” the left-wing politician huffed.

And then the pudgy little Socialist had to be rapidly evacuated from France’s national soccer stadium after one of those refugees blew himself up trying to reach Monsieur le Président, and Merkel’s Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Minister Steinmeier had urged rejecting “barriers, fences” when it came to the Muslim migrants, but it was a barrier and the security in front of it that kept one of his beloved refugees from reaching him.

The ordinary people who didn’t have and don’t have the security measures that protect Hollande and Steinemeier died in Paris, blown up and gunned down where they sat, lay and stood.

Before the man carrying a passport in the name of Ahmed Almohammad blew himself up at France’s national soccer stadium, he came on a boat from Turkey with hundreds of other refugees. He passed through Greece, Serbia and Croatia, along with countless other migrants, accompanied no doubt by journalists and human rights workers eager to document the plight of the “refugees”.

French President François Hollande declared the Nov. 13 terrorist attack in Paris an “act of war” by Islamic State, and he was right, if belated, in recognizing that the jihadists have been at war with the West for years. Islamic State, or ISIS, is vowing more attacks in Europe, and so Europe itself—not just France—must get on a war footing, uniting to do whatever it takes militarily to destroy ISIS and its so-called caliphate in Syria and Iraq. Not “contain,” not “degrade”—destroy, period.

But even if ISIS is completely destroyed, Islamic extremism itself will not go away. If anything, the destruction of ISIS would increase the religious fervor of those within Europe who long for a caliphate.

European leaders must make some major political decisions, and perhaps France can lead the way. A shift in mentality is needed to avoid more terror attacks on an even bigger scale and the resulting civil strife. Islamic extremists will never succeed in turning Europe into a Muslim continent. What they may well do is provoke a civil war so that parts of Europe end up looking like the Balkans in the early 1990s.

The Paris attacks are transforming Europe’s migration crisis into a security debate, spurring calls for a clampdown on free movement across borders, and putting proponents of an open door for refugees on the defensive.

France’s firm belief that Islamic State militants planned the attacks—and the possibility that at least one assailant may have posed as a Syrian refugee—are fueling arguments over whether Europe is doing enough to protect itself from terrorists who might infiltrate the thousands of migrants arriving daily from the Middle East and elsewhere.

Evidence that some of the attackers crossed internal European Union boundaries to get to Paris have also brought more demands from EU-skeptic politicians to abolish the continent’s system of open borders.

To proponents of European integration, the attacks highlight the need for more EU cooperation on security and better joint protection of the bloc’s external frontier. But those voices, led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, are now likely to face even stronger opposition from politicians who want to show they are taking national security more seriously than lofty European ideals.

The Paris terror attacks suggest that the U.S. and its allies overestimated recent successes against Islamic State while underestimating the group’s ability to strike far from its Middle East stronghold, according to U.S. lawmakers, analysts and former senior intelligence officials.

Islamic State now challenges Western intelligence agencies and policy makers not as a growing regional threat, but as a terrorist group with a long and deadly reach, despite a U.S.-led military campaign in Syria and Iraq.

“With an enemy that has developed a proto-state in the heart of the Middle East with such proximity to Europe and so many foreign fighters, including those from Europe, it is just really a matter of time before something like this happens even with good, or even great, intelligence,” said Hank Crumpton, a former Central Intelligence Agency official.

In President Erdogan’s mindset, his party’s landslide election victory not only gives him a mandate to rule, but also to crush “the other.”

Meanwhile, Erdogan’s Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, wants to clean up Turkey’s worsening image in the West. But not by upholding universal values, protecting civil liberties and media freedoms and respecting pluralism. He wants to do it by hiring a Western public relations firm.

A recent study found that 80% of minorities in Turkey cannot openly express themselves on social media; and 35% say they are subject to hate speech.

Erdogan cannot “buy” respect or “force” others to respect him. He can only “earn” respect — something he clearly has no intention of doing.

On November 1, nearly half the Turks (49.4%) gave President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist government a ballot box license to strangle the other half. He will be only too happy to use that license aggressively.