RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15456/sahel-region-islamic-state

Even if violent attacks are now mostly concentrated around the border of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, the unstable area subject to terrorism covers a huge area — equivalent to half of Europe or the United States — and is spread over five countries…. Because it involves such a huge territory, and because Europeans simply do not have the air support and intelligence capabilities of the United States, American support in the fight against terrorism in the Sahel is critical.

US President Donald J. Trump would understandably like the Europeans to do more to fight the Islamic State in the Middle East and Africa. He is right. Europe is more directly concerned by the destabilization of these regions than the United States. The continent is still dependent on the Persian Gulf for its energy supply, and a destabilization of the Sahel countries would lead to vast new migratory pressures on Europe. Most European Union countries, however, starting with Germany, refuse to draw conclusions about the consequences of the situation and increase their military spending and involvement in operations abroad.

In the short term, an American withdrawal would have disastrous consequences. US air support is absolutely crucial in the fight against terrorism…. The ideal would be for these five African countries to be able to fend for themselves in the fight against terrorism with Western material and logistical support, but without deploying troops from outside the African continent. I am a fervent advocate of letting Africa solve its problems as much as possible within an African framework, but it must be acknowledged that in several conflicts, this is still not realistic and possible.

On January 13, French President Emmanuel Macron convened a summit of the G5 Sahel, a group of five Sahelian countries (Chad, Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali and Mauritania) that are affected by Islamist terrorism. The location of the summit, the small city of Pau in the south of France, was not chosen at random: it hosts the base of France’s 5th Combat Helicopter Regiment. Seven of the thirteen French soldiers who died in a November 25, 2019 helicopter accident in Mali belonged to this unit. Since 2013, France has lost 44 soldiers in the Sahel.

According to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies:

“The Sahel has experienced the most rapid increase in militant Islamist group activity of any region in Africa in recent years. Violent events involving extremist groups in the region have doubled every year since 2015. In 2019, there have been more than 700 such violent episodes. Fatalities linked to these events have increased from 225 to 2,000 during the same period. This surge in violence has uprooted more than 900,000 people, including 500,000 in Burkina Faso in 2019 alone.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/16/mendacity-hubris-and-the-tragedy-of-afghanistan/

The very same collection of intelligence, national security, military, diplomatic, and political experts rubbing their hands in eager anticipation of Trump’s ouster is responsible for mismanaging our longest war, a debacle that continues to cost American lives.

A cynic might start to suspect that the current impeachment fervor roiling Capitol Hill is nothing more than a ruse by Washington’s aristocracy to camouflage revelations about their own incompetence, corruption, and abuse of power over the past few decades.

Could it be, a cynic might wonder, that all the accusations leveled against President Trump merely are projections to deflect from the bad behavior of Beltway royalty?

After all, Trump lies, we are told. Trump is clueless when it comes to the delicate affairs of war and diplomacy, we are warned. His recklessness jeopardizes national security and World War III, we are cautioned, is just around the corner.

State Department snobs, supremely confident in their own skills and irreplaceable value to the nation, demeaned the president during the House’s impeachment inquiry. Former and current inhabitants of the intelligence community are key accomplices in the attempt to oust Trump from the White House. Opinion columns authored by former national security officials routinely describe the president as the world’s biggest threat to world peace. (More on that next week.)

And they ease any fears about the president’s instinctive approach to foreign relations with promises that these very stable geniuses on both sides of the aisle will be back in business once Donald Trump vacates the Oval Office.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/ignoring-child-rape-britain-bruce-bawer/

It started in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, where the scandal made headlines in 2012, and where about 1500 victims have since been identified. Then came Rochdale, in Greater Manchester. There followed revelations from Lancashire, Birmingham, Surrey, Leeds, Bradford, and Gloucestershire, with the number of victims in each of these areas numbering in the hundreds or more.

Now an inquiry in Manchester proper has shown that – surprise! – that city isn’t immune to the predations of grooming gangs, either.

Commissioned by Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, the inquiry found that at least 57 girls, many of whom lived in government-run children’s care homes, “were raped and abused by up to 100 members of a Manchester grooming gang sixteen years ago – but despite police and social workers knowing what was happening they weren’t stopped.” The girls, wrote Jennifer Williams in the Manchester Evening News on January 14, “were hooked on drugs, groomed, raped and emotionally broken.” Much of this, moreover, went on “‘in plain sight’ of officials”; indeed, “Greater Manchester Police dropped an operation that identified up to 97 potential suspects,” at least eight of whom went on to commit more assaults, and in August 2018, the city’s Chief Constable “refused to reopen the dropped operation.” At least one of the rape victims, Victoria Agoglia, who “had repeatedly told social workers she was being injected with drugs and raped,” was given no help whatsoever, and ended up dying in 2003, at the age of fifteen, of a heroin overdose, with the then coroner, Simon Nelson, concluding (in the face of massive evidence to the contrary) that “her death could not have been foreseen by the authorities,” and with records showing that Agoglia had, at age 13, been dismissed by social workers as a prostitute.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-west-mourns-the-jewish-dead-but-what-about-the-living/

At Yad Vashem in Jerusalem on Jan. 23, some 46 political leaders and royals, including Britain’s Prince Charles, will be attending the fifth World Holocaust Forum to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

At this and doubtless other such memorial events, many eloquent, important and heartfelt observations will be made about the evils of Nazism and Jew-hatred. In today’s climate, however, there’s something disquieting about such memorializing.

Given the eruption of physical and verbal attacks on Jews in Britain, America and Europe, it might be said that it’s never been so important to remember the horrors of the Holocaust.

But the West is now teeming with Holocaust memorials and museums, while schools have been imparting Holocaust education since the 1980s. And yet never since the defeat of Nazism has there been such an epidemic of Jew-hatred in Western society.

Moreover, some of the countries that will be represented at Yad Vashem support people who want to kill Jews. They fund the Palestinians, who pump out murderous anti-Jewish and anti-Israel incitement.

Some of these countries have also turned a blind eye for years to the Iranian regime’s genocidal agenda towards Israel and the Jewish diaspora, and have even been trying to continue to funnel billions of dollars into Iran in defiance of U.S. sanctions.

A critical battle takes place among Middle East observers, researchers and policy makers in Western democracies: the reality-driven, politically-incorrect worldview vs. the wishful-thinking/oversimplification-driven, politically-correct worldview.

The reality-driven worldview recognizes the potency of the inherently frustrating domestic/regional features of intra-Arab/Muslim relations in the Middle East:

*Unpredictability
*Instability
*Complexity
*Fragmented societies
*Local rather than national allegiance
*Violent intolerance
*Terrorism and subversion
*Minority, repressive, one-bullet tenuous regimes, policy and accords
*Absence of intra-Arab/Muslim peaceful-coexistence
*Islam-driven goals and values (including the subservient “infidel”)
*Anti-Infidel hate education and religious incitement  
*“On words one does not pay custom”

The reality-driven school of thought hopes for a best-case scenario, but recognizes that in the Middle East it is the bad/worst-case scenario which tends to prevail, requiring extra precaution and added security requirements in order to ensure one’s survival and advance general interests.  

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15455/europe-palestinians-agenda

The foreign media and human rights organizations seem quite uninterested in Palestinians who are arrested or tortured to death by PA security forces. After all, they have not been arrested by Israel for security-related offences.

The European Union is said to be pressuring the Palestinians to hold long overdue presidential and parliamentary elections. It is not clear, however, how the Palestinians would hold new elections at a time when the PA and Hamas are busy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip locking up their political opponents.

The “political arrests” are yet another indication of human rights violations perpetrated by Palestinian leaders against their own people. Inexplicably, though, the EU appears unfazed by them. Instead of pressuring the PA and Hamas to hold elections — that in any case neither side seeks, as it would almost certainly hand a further victory to the terrorist group Hamas — it would be better for the EU to encourage Palestinian leaders, as a first step towards holding free elections, at least to cease and desist making political arrests.

Failing to hold Palestinian leaders accountable for their human rights violations casts serious doubt on the EU’s desire to hold new elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and their deeper, seemingly malign desires for the region as a whole.

For many years, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and other Palestinian parties have been reporting on a daily basis about Palestinians who are arrested by the Israeli authorities in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. These Palestinians are arrested on suspicion of involvement in anti-Israel security offences. There is nothing unusual about these arrests, which have been taking place for decades and are even publicly announced by the Israeli authorities.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15447/iran-negotiations-nuclear-deal

Speaking in his first interview since his impressive victory in last month’s general election, Mr Johnson said he recognised US concerns about the 2015 deal, but insisted there had to be a way of stopping Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. “If we are going to get rid (of the 2015 deal), we need a replacement,” he told the BBC. “Let’s replace it with the Trump deal.”

Mr Johnson’s comments came shortly after the three European signatories to the deal — Britain, France and Germany — announced that they were triggering a dispute mechanism in the deal following Iran’s recent violations of the deal.

Which means that Tehran now faces a stark choice: either it reenters negotiations and addresses the serious flaws in the deal agreed by Mr Obama, or it faces yet further international isolation.

Iran’s belated admission that it was, after all, responsible for shooting down Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752, killing all 176 people on board, could ultimately pave the way for a fresh round of negotiations on the controversial issue of its nuclear programme.

The fact that Tehran has now been forced to admit that the Ukrainian aircraft was shot down by an Iranian anti-aircraft missile, and that the disaster was not the result, as Iranian aviation experts had initially claimed, of a catastrophic engine failure, represents a major setback for the regime’s hardliners, who have ultimate authority over the country’s military.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/how-fragile-is-irans-theocracy/

Iran’s people barely can scrape together enough calories to keep body and soul together in the big cities, while entire parts of rural Iran are emptying out as rivers and wells go dry. Things are so bad that the number of babies born in Iran has fallen by nearly 25% in the past five years. Only Venezuela is worse off — but the wicked Maduro government remains in power. Regimes that are willing to shoot their people dead in the streets (as Iran shot 1,500 protesters last November) can cling to power even under desperate material circumstances.

As I wrote at Asia Times yesterday:

One average salary pays for a small apartment outside the center, utilities, enough calories to keep body and soul together, and bus fare, which is subsidized. Throw in cell phone service, clothing, fruits and vegetables, and one or two meat meals a month, and an Iranian couple will require two average salaries. According to official data, food price inflation was 28% year-on-year as of December.

Medicine is another matter. Some imported items, for example, insulin pens, can’t be found at pharmacies in some provinces, according to a Persian-language report by IRNA. The Chancellor of the University of Isfahan told the national news agency that imported medicine such as chemotherapy drugs was in short supply, but that most other medication was available.

Import controls to spare foreign exchange have put autos outside the range of most Iranians. A VW Golf costs the local-currency equivalent of $48,000, according to Numbeo, or about 14 years’ average pay.

Reduced consumption has taken a toll on Iranian family life. According to the Tehran Times, citing Mohammed Javad Mahmoudi, head of the committee on population studies of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution. According to Mahmoudi, the number of babies born in Iran fell by nearly 25% between 2015 and 2019.

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/energy-paradoxes-put-europe-in-a-precarious-position/

Despite its cool Green parties and ambitious wind and solar agendas, Europe remains by far the world’s largest importer of oil and natural gas.

Oil output in the North Sea and off the coast of Norway is declining, and the European Union is quietly looking for fossil fuel energy anywhere it can find it.

Europe itself is naturally rich in fossil fuels. It likely has more reserves of shale gas than the United States, currently the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas. Yet in most European countries, horizontal drilling and fracking to extract gas and oil are either illegal or face so many court challenges and popular protests that they are neither culturally nor economically feasible.

The result is that Europe is almost entirely dependent on Russian, Middle Eastern, and African sources of energy.

The American-Iranian standoff in the Middle East, coupled with radical drop-offs in Iranian and Venezuelan oil production, has terrified Europe — and for understandable reasons.

The European Union has almost no ability to guarantee the delivery of critical oil and gas supplies from the Middle East should Iran close the Strait of Hormuz or harass ships in the Persian Gulf.

Europe’s only maritime security is the NATO fleet — a synonym for the U.S. Navy.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/01/sound-an-alarm-gender-activism-is-about-to-silence-us/

The Victorian government intends to pass a law very soon that may see ordinary citizens imprisoned if they speak up against the chemical, psychological and physical mutilation of confused adolescents. Labor Attorney-General-Hennessey wants to outlaw conversion practices. They are defined in her discussion paper about the proposed Bill as

…any practice or treatment that seeks to change, suppress or eliminate an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to reduce or eliminate sexual and/or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same gender, or efforts to change gender expressions.

Queensland already has a similar bill before its parliament. It would authorise imprisonment for those who perform what is called conversion “therapy” in that state. Such therapy is defined as a treatment or other practice that attempts to change or suppress a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. That’s very broad. While it is directed to those who provide a health service it includes “alternative” ones, and  will very arguably capture pastors, concerned family members, or other lay people who attempt to dissuade a young person they know from embarking upon a “transition” from their natal sex to its opposite.

Transitioning, in the parlance of the new medico-legal commissariat who run the clinics that administer these treatments, means, firstly, a child taking a drug that blocks the release of testosterone (in boys) or oestrogen (in girls) and then, in the next phase, loading them up with doses of the other sex’s natural hormone; physical mutilation is only involved if it moves to a third phase. It often does.