RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16840/terrorism-iran-europe

Now they [the Europeans] find themselves locked into what they know is a phoney and highly dangerous nuclear agreement that simply consigns confrontation with a nuclear-armed Iran to future generations.

They [the Iranian leadership] look at Europeans, as well as Americans, with contempt, as weak and decadent, lacking the courage or resolve to stick up for their own interests…. President Trump gave them pause for thought, especially when he ordered the death of Qasem Soleimani…. They have higher hopes of Biden, whom they expect to be more supine.

We can be sure the Supreme Leader has rejoiced at the results of his message: cowering in Europe, with only weak and token response, accompanied by a desperate, pleading assurance that the targets of his aggression are still his friends. If ever there was a lesson that appeasement fails and strength succeeds, surely this is it.

European governments must now show their own strength or face continued Iranian coercion — coercion that will be witnessed by malign actors around the world from Moscow to Beijing to Pyongyang, with obvious implications.

Can the Europeans really afford to allow such an egregiously hostile and manipulative regime as Tehran to acquire nuclear weapons?

Last month the trial began in Belgium of Assadolah Assadi and three other Iranians accused of planning a bomb attack in Paris in 2018. Since 2015 Assadi had been the most senior officer of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Europe, at the time operating under diplomatic cover at the Iranian embassy in Vienna. He is the first Iranian government official to be tried by an EU country for terrorist offences, despite numerous attack attempts on EU soil ordered by Tehran.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16809/turkey-erdogan-threatens-europe

That a NATO member and European Union candidate, Turkey, is openly threatening the security of Westerners, is unprecedented.

One of the most abusive Ottoman practices was the institution of “devshirme,” also known as the “child levy” or “blood tax,” with which Christian boys were forcibly abducted from the conquered population, enslaved, converted to Islam and later trained as soldiers. Erdogan evidently sees the Ottoman occupation and abuse of European nations as Turkish “contributions” to Europe.

This current belligerence once again demonstrates major differences between Europe and Erdogan’s regime. It is a crisis between a mentality that respects a free press versus a mentality that jails critical journalists. It reveals a mentality that wants to preserve the safety of its citizens versus a mentality that aims to force others to submit to its demands through threats and use of terror. It is a mentality that stubbornly believes in violating and even trying to invade the territories of its neighbors versus one that tries to resolve issues through dialogue and negotiation.

It is Erdogan’s regime who targets the safety and freedoms of Europeans — as well as Armenians, Syrians, Iraqis, and many of his own Turks.

Europe has once again been targeted with Islamist terror attacks.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16818/france-under-attack

“If nothing changes, in a few decades, France will have submitted to Islam, and Islamic violence will probably be even greater than today. It is already almost impossible for the country’s leaders to react. They are hostages of a Muslim population that is less and less integrated and whose anger they do not want to arouse. They are under the gaze of groups that immediately denounce any criticism of Islam and under pressure from many countries in the Muslim world that France does not want to offend”. — Alan Wagner, “L’Europe face à l’islam”, interview on Tepa, August 2, 2020.

“For Muslims, Islamic law has God as its author. Any other legislator is illegitimate.” — Mohammed Hocine Benkheira, historian, Le Point, March 21, 2016.

“Macron… is still not able to pinpoint the real problem because it would be politically incorrect for him to do so… This is the problem with someone like Macron and what he’s saying… they can never acknowledge that what’s happening is integral or a part of authentic Islam….” — Raymond Ibrahim, “Islamic Terror in France”, SkyWatch TV, October 30, 2020.

“France still does not understand the reality it is facing. It believes that it has been struck by terrorists… but it is suffering a guerrilla war that is gradually gaining momentum…” — Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, lexpress.fr, October 18, 2020.

October 29. Nice, the main city on the French Riviera. A man in the Basilica of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption decapitates a woman and murders two other people while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” [“Allah is the greatest!”]

This is the second beheading in France by an extremist Muslim in less than a month. Two weeks earlier, on October 16, a middle school teacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded in the suburbs of Paris after showing his students some Mohammad cartoons during a discussion on freedom of speech.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16831/iran-fakhrizadeh-revenge

We may be proved wrong, but our guess is that Tehran will do nothing to raise the degree of tension even by one notch….

Khamenei promised “hard revenge” for Soleimani’s death but has vowed nothing but “prosecution and punishment” of perpetrators. His emphasis is on “the continuation” of Fakhrizadeh’s work.

In other words, as long as our progress towards the “threshold” isn’t halted, we can grin and bear Fakhrizadeh’s martyrdom.

To hit back, or not to hit back?

This is the question that has heated up debate within Tehran’s ruling Khomeinist circles for almost a week. The debate was triggered by the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a shadowy figure in the top echelons of Tehran’s murky establishment.

Despite an avalanche of obituaries and reports on the event, it is not yet quite clear who Fakhrizadeh was and what he was doing.

The official narrative started by introducing him as a military figure. He was, we were told, a brigadier-general and bore that title of Deputy Defense Minister. Then the Defense Minister, Brig. Gen. Amir Hatami spoke as if he hardly knew Fakhrizadeh while praising him for his unspecified “immense services”. The narrative then switched to presenting Fakhrizadeh as a nuclear scientist and thus a victim of “enemies who do not wish to slow down Iran’s progress in peaceful use of nuclear science.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/12/17/the-new-middle-east/

From Israel to the Gulf States to Iran, the troubled region is changing

‘Normalization” is the rather cumbersome jargon for what seems to be happening in the Middle East. For the time being, it’s to do with expectations. Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have signed peace treaties with Israel. At the signing ceremony in the White House, the Arab foreign ministers looked like officials going about their business. The expression on the face of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was beatific.

For the Arabs, it is taboo to normalize anything with Israel. The sole exceptions are Egypt and Jordan, which signed peace treaties to mitigate their wartime losses. When Islamist soldiers then assassinated the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian treaty pretty much fell by the wayside. More to the point, the peace process known as the “Oslo Accords” had been negotiated in secret, and in 1993 a party was held on the White House lawn to mark that at last the Palestinians were coming to terms with Israel. Yasser Arafat signed for the Palestinians, but the ink was hardly dry on the page before he gave orders for an intifada, which translated into violent civil disobedience and cost hundreds of Israelis their lives. That’s not going to be repeated; times have changed, the look on Netanyahu’s face plainly signified. Bahrain and the UAE are too insignificant to be independent actors and too marginal to be harmed if normalization goes wrong. They are testing the waters. A grand reversal of alliances is getting under way.

It has long been common knowledge that Saudi Arabia and Israel are holding confidential talks. That is extraordinary enough. The Saudi Arabian public has a perception that Jews are as pernicious a people as any in the wide world. Learned imams appear on Saudi television to recite the age-old anti-Semitic fantasies, Hitler’s Mein Kampf is in the bookshops, and Jews are not allowed to enter the country. The supposition is that participants in these confidential talks are considering the conditions that might oblige Israel to intervene in a strictly Muslim struggle for supremacy between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has taken the Islamist position against the infidel Christians and the Jews. Iran de­vised the anti-American war cry “Death to the Great Satan” and the corresponding anti-Israeli war-cry “Death to the Little Satan.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16797/erdogan-bogus-democratic-reforms

Erdoğan’s new reform pledge came at a time when a former leader of a pro-Kurdish party, along with dozens of others, remains in jail for the past years. Almost all the elected Kurdish mayors have been replaced by government-appointed administrators. Hundreds of journalists, politicians and intellectuals spend jail time on absurdly flimsy charges.

Pro-government judges announce rulings in defiance of rulings from superior Turkish courts, including the Constitutional Court, and from the European Court of Human Rights. Those judges who dare make “undesirable verdicts” are probed and often get disciplinary punishments.

Erdoğan’s new charm offensive is deeply problematic. It is not genuine. It is too little too late. Just a few days after he launched his reform campaign, he refused calls for the release of a jailed Kurdish politician and a civil rights activist. “Erdoğan’s reform program survived only nine days,” said Bekir Ağırdır, a prominent political analyst and director of the research company KONDA.

Erdoğan has a serious predicament: He wants his country to keep suffering as a third world democracy while he hopes to lure foreign investment at the same amounts and terms as a Western democracy. That will not happen.

It is his favorite cycle: President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recklessly widens Turkey’s democratic deficit, weakens institutions, refuses to acknowledge democratic checks and balances. He isolates Turkey mostly from its Western alliances and follows an irredentist foreign policy of trying to reclaim supposedly “lost” land. Turkey is at odds with both the United States and Europe.

Inevitably, political isolation causes economic isolation. The economy is on a downfall. Investors flee the country. Voters start to complain about the double-digit inflation and interest rates; the lira falls and falls; unemployment rises sharply. Erdogan rediscovers his reformist self and promises to democratize — presumably hoping, in vain, that he can reverse the economic downfall.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16817/eu-mourns-iranian-scientist

“There is no gloating about death, but the Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh…. was not the scientist who discovered the anti-coronavirus vaccine, but the scientist called the father of the Iranian nuclear bomb…” — Tareq Al-Hameed, Saudi author, Okaz, November 30, 2020.

“[H]ow can they condemn the killing of a man who devoted his life to making a sinister bomb for an evil regime, but they do not condemn Iran’s killing of innocent people in the region. Iran kills Syrians, Iraqis, and Lebanese, and destroys Yemen, and sponsors all terrorist groups…” — Al-Hameed, Saudi author Okaz, November 30, 2020.

“[D]isrupting the Iranian regime’s access to nuclear weapons is a long-term service to humanity.” Iran… sees nuclear weapons as a tool “that enables it to occupy the rest of the world….” — Mohammed Al-Saaed, Saudi political analyst, Okaz, November 30, 2020.

“We are talking about a gang that hijacked Iran, and its defeated people became its captive. It seeks to hijack the entire region, fueled by intense hatred for the Arab. Is it acceptable to allow it to produce nuclear weapons and use them to kill millions of people?” — Mohammed Al-Saaed, Saudi political analyst, Okaz, November 30, 2020.

While the European Union has condemned the killing of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, widely regarded as the father of Iran’s modern nuclear program, many Arabs and Muslims expressed relief over the assassination.

By condemning the killing of Fakhrizadeh, the EU has found itself on the side of Palestinian terror groups such as the Iran-backed Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. These factions, together with Lebanon’s Hezbollah terror group, another Iran proxy, and the Muslim Brotherhood, have also voiced outrage over the killing of the scientist.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/macron-seeks-an-enlightened-islam-11607037298?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Emmanuel Macron has resolved to be the president who finally eases tensions over France’s young and growing Muslim population. Every president since Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in the 1970s has resolved to do that. None succeeded, and the stakes have risen with each failure.

On Oct. 16, a Chechen-born 18-year-old living west of Paris decapitated the schoolteacher Samuel Paty, who had lately shown cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad to junior-high-age kids in a civics class on free speech. On Oct. 29, a 20-year-old Tunisian, who had been refused asylum in Italy after arriving by boat the month before, showed up in the south of France. He stabbed to death two worshipers and a sacristan in the Notre Dame Basilica in Nice.

Even before the incidents Mr. Macron had made a major speech about Islamist “separatism.” He aims to limit the sponsoring of imams by foreign governments. He has dissolved organizations allegedly sympathetic to Islamic radicalism, such as the charity BarakaCity and the “antiracist” Collective against Islamophobia. He plans to ban home schooling, popular among religious Muslims.

Mr. Macron is putting almost all his eggs in the basket of laïcité, the 115-year-old French system for regulating religion. (The word means “secularism.”) At a meeting with the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), an official Islamic umbrella group created almost two decades ago by then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, Mr. Macron added more detail. The CFCM would create a “national council of imams.” Preachers would be accredited, or licensed, like doctors and lawyers. By next week the CFCM is expected to create a “Charter of Republican Values” to which the organizations that make it up will adhere. “Some will sign and some will not,” the president reportedly said at the meeting. “We will be watching. Either you are with the Republic or you are not.”