RUTHFULLY YOURS

Our allies are finally becoming force multipliers — joining with America to use its talent and technology finally to defeat the jihadist threat. We should assist and encourage the UAE and Saudi Arabia, not abandon them.

More than 7,000 miles from Washington and far from America’s headlines, a war in Yemen is rewriting America’s strategy against Iran and terrorism.

The three-sided civil war pits two radical Islamist forces — Al-Qaeda’s largest surviving army and Iran’s biggest proxy force — against each other and six of America’s Arab allies. U.S. Special forces carry out covert raids and CIA drones rain down missiles on terror leaders.

The outcome of the Yemen war matters: U.S. forces are fighting there and a new strategy against terrorism is now being tested in the Middle East’s poorest nation.

Since Britain’s Royal Marines marched out of their Aden Protectorate in November 1967, Yemenis have killed each other over nearly every international ideology: colonialism, communism, and radical Islamism. Add in the tribal rivalries and the religious divides between competing versions of Sunni and Shia Islam — and the stage is set for perpetual war. Indeed, Yemen, in every decade since the 1960s, saw bombings, bloodshed and barbarism.

Iran has also seemingly been trying to form a “Shi’ite Crescent” across the Middle East, through Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean.

According to nearly half a million computer files released by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency late last year, captured from Osama bin Laden’s compound, Iran had also offered “support to al-Qaeda in exchange for targeting the Gulf.”

In addition, Iran has been sponsoring Shia uprisings in Bahrain. The US ambassador to Bahrain during the Obama administration evidently turned a deaf ear to pleas from Bahraini officials for help; he presumably feared upsetting the president’s Iran deal, just as Obama had, by failing to act after his “red line” on the use of chemical weapons was crossed in Syria.

One of Germany’s leading economists, Hans-Werner Sinn, warned that the migrant crisis could end up costing German taxpayers more than one trillion euros: “The cost to the taxpayer could also be higher. So far, there are about 1.5 million migrants who have come to Germany since 2015. And no: They are not dentists, lawyers and nuclear scientists, but mostly underqualified immigrants, who have arrived in the promised land… where the standard of living without employment is higher than in many countries of origin with employment.”

In his first media interview as the new head of the influential GdP police union in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Michael Mertens was asked if there are any no-go zones in NRW, Germany’s most populous state. He replied: “There are areas where police do not go alone, only in large teams. Such areas are now present in almost all NRW cities.

“We now have new phenomenon in having refugees or people of Arab origin who are bringing another form of anti-Semitism back into the country. This dismays us.” — German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

April 1. Senior German officials, including Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, always quick to outdo each other with good wishes for Islamic festivals, failed to greet Germans for Easter, the most important Christian festival. By contrast, Aiman ​​Mazyek, the head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, did offer Easter greetings: “I wish you all peaceful and relaxing holidays. Happy Easter to the Christians, a happy ‘Passover’ to the Jews and a few contemplative days to the non-believers. #Variety makes you strong.”

April 2. German churches were sheltering 611 illegal migrants at the end of March, up from 530 at the end of December 2017. Many churches in Germany provide refuge for refugees who face deportation or fear social and psychological hardships. German authorities tolerate church asylum, although there is no legal basis for it, according to the newsmagazine, Focus.

April 4. Sohail A., a 34-year-old rejected Pakistani asylum seeker living in Hamburg, confessed to slitting his two-year-old daughter’s throat with a kitchen knife. Prosecutors said the man murdered his daughter out of “anger and revenge” because the girl’s mother refused to allow the child to be taken to Pakistan.

“As everybody is aware,” President Trump tweeted back on May 2 ,“the past administration has long been asking for three hostages to be released from a North Korean labor camp, but to no avail. Stay tuned!” Those who stayed tuned got the news from the president’s tweet Wednesday.

“I am pleased to inform you that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in the air and on his way back from North Korea with the 3 wonderful gentlemen that everyone is looking so forward to meeting. They seem to be in good health. Also, good meeting with Kim Jong Un. Date & Place set.”

North Korea released Kim Dong-chul, 64, who owned a business in Rason, a special economic zone of North Korea. The Communist regime arrested the businessman in October 2015 and sentenced him to 10 years in prison on charges of espionage and subversion.

Tony Kim, 59, was arrested during a month-long assignment as a guest lecturer at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST). In April, 2017, as he awaited to board a flight, Kim was arrested for “committing criminal acts of hostility” aimed to overthrow North Korea.

Agricultural consultant Kim Hak-song, who also taught at PUST, was detained about the same time. The regime provided no details of the charges, which to all but the willfully blind were bogus.

“We thank God, and all our families and friends who prayed for us and for our return,” the three U.S. citizens said in a statement. “God bless America, the greatest nation in the world.”

A United Nations prosecutor partly funded by the U.S. was supposed to be a cure for corruption in Guatemala. But the U.N. International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala—or CICIG by its Spanish initials—has had almost no oversight since it was established in 2006. Now it too is accused of corruption and politicizing the judiciary.

There’s nothing strange about absolute power run amuck. But it is weird that an army from the State Department, nonprofits and some business groups are resisting sunlight for a U.N. body that answers to no one.

The good news is that Republican Sens. Roger Wicker (Miss.), Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Mike Lee (Utah) and Rep. Chris Smith (R., N.J.) are more insistent. On Monday they sent a letter to the Chairman of the House subcommittee on state and foreign operations, Rep. Hal Rogers (R., Ky.), requesting a hold on a $6 million disbursement for CICIG until “Congress has conducted appropriate oversight.”

Their grandfather was said to be Nazi Germany’s richest man after building a weapons empire on the backs of slave labor.Their father was involved in one of postwar Germany’s biggest political scandals. He almost frittered away the family fortune.
Enough remained for Viktoria-Katharina Flick and twin brother Karl-Friedrich Flick to lay claim, at 19, to being the world’s youngest billionaires. Each has $1.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Behind the riches, discreetly managed by their family office in Austria, lies a dark history of one of Germany’s wealthiest industrial dynasties.

The Flicks’ wealth traces its roots to Friedrich Flick, who spent three years in prison after he was convicted by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal of using slave labor to produce armaments for the Nazis, among other crimes. He created a steel empire, which expanded by seizing companies in Nazi-occupied territories and in Germany through Aryanizations—the expropriation and forced sale of Jewish-owned businesses. As many as 40,000 laborers may have died working for Flick companies, according to a study of his Nazi-era businesses published in 2008.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif went on a tour of six Latin American nations in 2016. Iran’s diplomatic efforts resulted in, among other things, access to the use of Venezuelan territory to advance Iran’s solid rocket-fuel production.

Culturally, Iran has helped Hezbollah establish itself as the dominant force among Shia Muslim communities throughout Latin America, and has taken control of their mosques, schools and cultural institutions.

In 2012, there were 32 Iranian cultural centers across Latin America, to facilitate the spread of the Iranian Islamic revolution; today, less than a decade later, the number of centers has grown to more than 100.

Iran and Hezbollah have been operating in Latin America since the 1980s, effectively undisturbed. During this time, Iran and its proxy, the terrorist organization Hezbollah, have been Islamizing Latin America, seemingly to create a forward base of operations for the Islamic Republic in the backyard of the United States.

No Latin American country has designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization: Hezbollah can operate with relative impunity there. In April 2017, a Hezbollah operative, Mohamad Hamdar, arrested in Peru, was acquitted of all terrorism-related charges. The Peruvian court found that Hamdar’s role within Hezbollah was in itself insufficient to consider him a terrorist[1]. This legal vacuum regarding Hezbollah might also be why Islamic terrorism, drug-trafficking and organized crime in the region is frequently underestimated.

Malaysians go to the polls on Wednesday, and in a normal democracy the ruling coalition of Prime Minister Najib Razak would lose in a rout amid scandals and widespread defections. But the latest polling suggests the opposition in this important Southeast Asian nation will again win the popular vote but fall short of a parliamentary majority.

This would be a repeat of the 2013 election, after which Mr. Najib carried on as Prime Minister and the leader of the ruling United Malays National Organization, or UMNO. The result would show how much Mr. Najib and his party have corrupted Malaysia’s democracy with gerrymandered districts, control of the media, and race-based demagoguery.

In 2015 this newspaper broke the news that nearly $700 million from the state-owned investment fund 1MDB transited through Mr. Najib’s personal bank accounts. He said the money was a legal political donation from a Saudi royal and that most of it was returned. Malaysia’s Attorney General cleared him of wrongdoing, and no charges have been brought in Malaysia.

That didn’t stop six nations from investigating the laundering of $4.5 billion allegedly embezzled from 1MDB. The U.S. Department of Justice filed civil lawsuits to freeze more than $1.6 billion of assets, much of which was held by the friends and family of “Malaysian Official No. 1.” U.S. officials have told the Journal that Official No. 1 refers to Mr. Najib.

President Trump has made containing Iran’s regional ambitions a cornerstone of his foreign policy, and by that measure Sunday’s election in Lebanon is a setback. Not that anyone in Washington seems to have noticed.

Preliminary results indicate that Iran’s proxy Hezbollah and its allies won more than half the seats in Lebanon’s 128-seat parliament, consolidating the Shiite militia’s political grip on the country. Thanks to Lebanon’s sectarian political system, Prime Minister Saad Hariri, a Sunni, will likely keep his job, but his clout will be considerably weakened given the clobbering his Future Movement took at the polls.

Voter turnout fell five percentage points from the 2009 election, mostly because Lebanese citizens didn’t have much of a choice between Hezbollah and Hezbollah-lite. Mr. Hariri threw his lot in with the terror group when he accepted a power-sharing arrangement in 2016 with former general Michel Aoun, a Hezbollah ally, to break a political stalemate. The country is overwhelmed with Syrian refugees and its economy is stagnating.

The Trump Administration seems to have adopted a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil approach regarding Hezbollah’s influence on Mr. Hariri and his government. Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited the country in February and tried to distinguish between Hezbollah, the terrorist organization, and Hezbollah, the political party. They share the same principles. Mr. Trump compounded the confusion in April by commending “the government of Lebanon’s progress” in passing a budget, deploying Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) on the Syrian border and fighting Islamic State. The LAF is outmanned and outgunned by Hezbollah.