RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

There are perhaps three all engulfing observations to be made from the horrific events in France this past Friday evening as the Muslim day of prayer and rest ended:

The enemy we face is as barbarous as has been seen in human history, even compared with the terrible atrocities of the 20th century in their contempt for all human values.
Our effort to eradicate them has so far failed – and particularly our intelligence when such a massive and coordinated attack could occur in a major world city without its interception.
We must spare no effort now – no half measures as the Obama Administration has perpetuated against Daesh [ISIS or ISIL] — in crushing them with the kind of all-out war we pursued during World War II when the Nazi foe represented the same kind of all-encompassing evil.

As the French and their allies, most of all the United States, continue to gather information about the attacks, we will no doubt discover interesting and informative details. They must be shared among the allies. We have a suspicion that all sorts of relatively minor considerations have prevented that being done adequately so far.

On Nov. 11, while Islamic terrorists were preparing for their Friday night massacre in Paris that would leave 129 people dead and 352 injured, one of the big news items was the European initiative to put special labels on Israeli goods that originate from disputed Israeli-occupied territory.

As the European Commission explained in a fact sheet, this is not new legislation but a clarification of existing legislation dating back to 2012. In other words, the European obsession with singling out Israel for special punishment didn’t just start last week. It’s been an ongoing affair.

Politicians and the media in Europe and the United States are talking about the latest terrorist attacks as if they are a new phenomenon. They are not. Israelis have been confronting similar terrorist attacks, including shooting at and blowing up innocent diners at Pizzerias and coffee shops in Jerusalem, restaurants in Tel-Aviv, stabbing passengers at bus and train stations, or running over them with a car.

However, European and other governments, including the Obama administration, look upon Palestinians killing Israelis with a rather sympathetic eye. They, like Palestinian leaders justify the attacks as expressions of frustration with Israeli real or fictional occupation. And as the latest wave of Palestinian killing of Israelis increased, the European Union decided to support the Palestinians by declaring an economic warfare against Israel. Anything produced in territory “occupied by Israel” is now subject to special labeling and often banned altogether (per the demands of the BDS movement and the Palestinians).

The Sunday after the shootings at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, I attended Mass at a Catholic church in a very conservative suburb in a Western state where gun rights are in the main unquestioned. As he spoke about the massacre in Charleston, the priest, who showed no sign of indulging himself in ecclesiastical theatrics, grew genuinely angry — that such a thing had been done at all, and that it had been done in a sanctuary among Christians at prayer. Later I asked him what he would have done if it had been his church. “This congregation?” he asked with a little smile that was meaner than you want a priest’s to be. “Probably administer his last rites.”

I thought about that good pastor as reports of the horrors in Paris came in. There was the usual sentimental outpouring on social media, the tricolors and the invocations of the Marquis de Lafayette and the Empire State Building lit in honorary blue, white, and red. Professor Ebony Elizabeth Thomas of the University of Pennsylvania chidingly reminded no one in particular to report anybody who was engaging in anti-Muslim rhetoric on Twitter. All of that is useless, of course, but one feels the need to do something. But the only thing one can really do is the one thing that Parisians cannot do: shoot back.

By constantly endorsing pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli policies, France has obviously been seeking to appease Islamic countries. France seems convinced that such policies will keep Muslim terrorists from targeting French nationals and interests. The French are now in grave danger of mistakenly believing that the November 13 attacks occurred because France did not appease the Muslim terrorists enough.

When the terrorists see that pressure works — increasing the pressure should work even more!

The French and Europeans would do well to understand that there is no difference between a young Palestinian who takes a knife and sets out to murder Jews, and an Islamic State terrorist who murders dozens of innocent people in Paris.

The reason Muslim extremists want to destroy Israel is not because of the settlements or checkpoints it is because they believe that Jews have no right to be in the Middle East whatsoever. And they want to destroy Europe because they believe that Christians — and everyone — have no right to be anything other than Muslim.

The terrorists attacking Jews also seek to destroy France, Germany, Britain and, of course, the United States. These countries need to be reminded that the Islamist terrorists’ ultimate goal is to force all non-Muslims to submit to Islam or face death.

Security procedures and background checks were top topics on news programs after Russian Metrojet Flight 9268 crashed October 31 shortly after taking off from the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, destined for St. Petersburg, Russia.

Yesterday’s attacks in Paris, believed to have been conducted by ISIS terrorists, have now eclipsed coverage of the downing of the Russian airliner, but this post will focus on the airline disaster, also believed attributable to ISIS.

The most recent speculation is that a bomb had been planted onboard the airliner before takeoff which, if true, begs the question how the bomb was put on the doomed airliner. There are two apparent ways that this could have happened. A passenger could have secreted the device in luggage (either in checked luggage or in something brought into the cabin of the airliner), or someone who serviced the airplane before departure might have hidden the device in the cargo hold beneath passengers’ feet.

Immediately news programs turned to the question of how carefully airport workers with access to aircraft are vetted, both overseas and inside the United States.

Clearly terrorists want to bring down airliners, so those who have access to airplanes must be effectively vetted. We must not lose sight, though, of the fact that a terrorist who enters the U.S. is not unlike a child turned loose in a toy store with a platinum credit card. Airplanes may be obvious targets but hardly the only vulnerability.

Just as people in Paris were murdered one day last week, Jews in Israel are murdered virtually every day.

Undoubtedly, Rabin wanted peace — virtually all Israelis want peace — but not at any price. He never envisaged the creation of a Palestinian state: the Oslo Accords provided for the establishment of a “provisional self-government,” not a state.

Rabin did not contemplate infinite and unconditional negotiations: the Oslo Accords call for a five-year period of negotiations, and include the possibility of breaking off the talks if one of the parties does not respect the spirit in which the Accords were to be implemented.

In addition, Rabin, seeing the rise of violence, wanted during the last weeks of his life to break off the talks. If the Oslo talks did not live up to their expectations, it was in continuing to pursue the vain and useless negotiations — exactly the opposite of what Rabin had envisioned.

Palestinian leaders have an overwhelming responsibility for what has happened during the last twenty years. Not only have they continued to make the very demands that Rabin rejected — and that no leader in a comparable situation could ever accept; they have done worse.

Israel cannot make peace, because there is no one to make peace with.

Peace implies conditions. One of the first is that those with whom a country intends to make peace also want to make peace. Nothing, however, indicates that Palestinian leaders have the slightest intention of making anything that even resembles peace.

One hopes the French will not surrender to terrorists; neither should the Israelis.

First, let me say how much I sympathize with the Parisians. I lived there for 16 months, in the 12th arrondissement (district), doing odds and ends, helping out a couple of churches.

We all sense it, and AT has posted blogs about it. Here’s the chain of responsibility for the Paris massacre, in causal order, as far as the U.S. is concerned:

1. The proximate cause: the eight or so killers who pulled the triggers.

2. Then come Islamic planners behind the scenes (obviously a military hit squad that came into France recently, but with homegrown help).

3. ISIS, who swept into the void and conflict, taking territory the size of Indiana.

4. Obama policy and his campaign promise, coming out of his misguided beliefs, that said Iraq is at peace so we can withdraw from the region. Do I need to mention the red line that got blown away by the desert sands and poison gas? Iraq may have been at peace, but his generals told him not to withdraw.

5. The left’s ideology that consistently misreads the world.