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https://www.jns.org/despite-designated-a-terror-group-hamas-funding-thrives-in-europe/

The Hamas terror organization has managed to increase its fundraising efforts in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom since its terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, according to four reports that the European Leadership Network released this month.

The reports from ELNET, which convenes leaders to foster close relations between Europe and Israel, focus on the activities of Hamas-affiliated fundraising groups in the five countries.

“In all four reports, we have seen increasing levels of operations since Oct. 7,” Daniel Shadmy, an ELNET spokesman, told JNS.

The reports identify some 30 organizations, which operate under “civil fronts,” including nonprofits and lobbying groups, and people affiliated with Hamas who work in Europe.

Hamas’s funding operations are more deeply rooted in the United Kingdom and Germany than in the other countries upon which the report focuses. That makes them “harder to dismantle” in the two countries, according to Shadmy.

Hamas-affiliated groups operate relatively unscathed in Europe, despite European governments and the European Union designating Hamas a terror organization.

One way the groups stay ahead of authorities is by shifting operations to newer organizations, per the ELNET reports.

“One of the key findings of the report is that the Hamas-affiliated network has shut down three older, pan-European organizations, possibly in response to formal designations, and moved their operations to three newer organizations,” Shadmy told JNS.

https://quillette.com/2024/10/15/how-russia-beats-western-sanctions/

Russia currently exists in a state of economic purgatory. Since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Western powers seeking to limit his nation’s warmaking capacity have instituted one of the harshest sanction regimes the world has ever seen. Imports of Russian oil, above a certain price, have been outlawed, as have exports of sensitive materials, such as semiconductors, engine parts, and communications equipment,that might find their way into Russian weaponry. The country’s banks have been cut off from SWIFT—the main system banks use to coordinate international payments. And some $280 billion worth of Russian assets remain frozen in European banks. 

Despite this, Russia’s war continues. The Russian economy grew at a rate of around 4 percent in the second quarter of 2024, down from a first quarter high of 5.4 percent. And despite predictions that the Russian military would suffer crippling shortages, Putin’s war machine has proved surprisingly efficient at rearming itself. In fact, the Russian arms industry is booming. The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a UK defence think tank, estimates that Russia’s domestic production of Kh-101 cruise missiles has increased eightfold over the last year. And Russian military spokespeople have boasted of supply lines that deliver tanks, drones, and artillery shells in their thousands.  

Though the Russian boasts are surely hyperbole, Russia’s military resilience continues to embarrass the world’s economists. Shortly after Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine, the International Monetary Fund predicted that the sanctions would cause Russian GDP to shrink by more than a tenth by the end of 2023. The Economist speculated about the possibility of a coup. Analysts at Reuters opined that Russia would probably collapse under such financial pressures. How then, has the Russian war machine kept on rolling?

The answer is that trade flows of restricted goods have shifted in response to the global sanctions.

https://www.newsweek.com/new-european-zionism-viktor-orbans-hungary-opinion-1969603

“Zionism for the nations of Europe,” wrote Dutch anti-immigration crusader Geert Wilders in Breitbart this month. “The Europeans should follow the example of the Jewish people and safeguard the sovereignty of their nation-states.” Wilders’ party took first place in Holland’s national elections late last year, a portent of the so-called shift to the Right that propelled nationalist parties to electoral success this year in Germany, France, Austria, and the Czech Republic. But the first European “Zionist” and the inspiration for many European conservatives was Hungary’s long-serving Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Hungary is a small nation that is determined to survive the demographic winter that has crept across the industrial nations. It devotes nearly a tenth of its budget to support for families, but even more important than family subsidies is a renewed national spirit and resistance to the European Commission’s attempt to homogenize the nations of Europe into a supranational blur.

“Humans are about to enter a new era of history. Call it ‘the age of depopulation. For the first time since the Black Death in the 1300s, the planetary population will decline. But whereas the last implosion was caused by a deadly disease borne by fleas, the coming one will be entirely due to choices made by people,” economist Nicholas Eberstadt Oct. 10 in Foreign Affairs.

That’s a death sentence for Europe’s smaller nations. When Orban came to office in 2010, government demographers gauged the total fertility (number of live births in a lifetime) for Magyar women at just 0.83, then the lowest in the world. Since then, Hungary’s TFR has roughly doubled to about 1.6, and a surge in the marriage rate portends further improvement.

Orban became a figure of controversy in 2016 when he refused to open Hungary’s borders to the millions of Middle Eastern migrants fleeing the Syrian civil war and other conflicts, defying migrant quotas assigned by the European Commission. It also put Orban in conflict with the world’s wealthiest Hungarian, George Soros, whose Open Society Foundation promotes free migration.

European nationalists look to Israel as a beacon of hope. It’s the only high-income country with a fertility rate above the 2.1 breakeven level—so far above breakeven at three children per female that its working-age population will more than double from today’s 4.5 million to 11 million by the end of this century, according to UN demographers. The same UN projections show that the working-age population of Turkey and Iran will fall by about half, and by three-quarters in Taiwan and South Korea.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21030/central-african-republic-islamic-militias

The Central African Republic is a tragic case of what happens when Islamic radicals take over a nation.

The UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) and government security forces have also not been able to exert effective control beyond the capital city.

This devastating war and its consequences need more media coverage. Why are activists and human rights groups concerned only with the Middle East? The horrific situation in CAR and elsewhere should also serve as an urgent warning about what happens to nations when Islamic radicals are not vetted or held accountable.

The Central African Republic is a tragic case of what happens when Islamic radicals take over a nation.

Much of the international community, human rights groups and media have ignored it, but the Central African Republic (CAR) has been struggling with an ongoing war launched by Seleka, an alliance of Islamic militias fighting against the country’s Christian and officially secular government.

Most of the country is today occupied by armed groups (both from within the country and foreign fighters), all of whom appear responsible for human rights abuses.

Russian mercenaries from The Wagner Group also arrived in the CAR after President Faustin-Archange Touadéra asked for help to tackle rebel groups in 2018. Wagner has since been fighting on the side of the CAR military against the Islamic militias and, while “protecting” the gold mines, has, at least for the time being, delivered “peace.” However, according to the BBC:

“Ms [Nathalia] Dukhan [a senior investigator at The Sentry investigative group] says the mercenaries are waging a ‘campaign of terror’ and are responsible for widespread human rights abuses including extrajudicial killings, torture and rape…. Wagner has taken advantage of weak institutions and a weak army to perfect ‘a blueprint for state capture.'”

https://quillette.com/2024/10/10/the-return-of-the-black-flags-isis-iraq-syria/

We seem to have reached a hinge moment in the long-running battle against the Islamic State. In recent months, the jihadist outfit has been mustering forces in Syria’s Badiya desert, recruiting and training a new band of holy warriors to resurrect its dream of ruling a caliphate. The rallying of jihadist forces and the corresponding outburst of violence have not been out of the ordinary in this vast ungoverned space, but they may yet prove combustible enough to engulf Syria and parts of Iraq.

This year, the number of attacks in Syria and Iraq has doubled. The primary targets of the growing insurgency have been US garrisons in Syria and units of the Syrian Democratic Forces, Kurdish-led troops whom the US helped to defeat the militant group five years ago. The jihadists’ immediate objective has been to curtail counter-terrorism patrols and free thousands of their confederates from jail, where they have languished since the SDF and US-led coalition recaptured the Islamic State’s last bastion.

Since laying waste to the caliphate in 2019, the US has maintained a small but robust military presence in Syria and Iraq, conducting a largely surreptitious campaign to suppress the remnants of IS. US warplanes carry out airstrikes and provide live aerial surveillance to SDF ground forces conducting raids on suspected Islamic State cells. Occasionally, American commandos undertake missions of their own to kill or capture senior Islamic State leaders. In 2024, the SDF has reportedly captured 233 Islamic State fighters in 28 operations while American aircraft have conducted three strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria and one in Iraq. This level of kinetic activity mirrors 2023, when the US carried out four strikes against Islamic State.