RUTHFULLY YOURS

“The essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never escape from it,” said Joseph Goebbels.

Charlie Brown. Lucy. Football.

North Korea says it will blow up the tunnels and dismantle its nuclear test site prior to the Trump-Kim summit later this month

It’s a coup for peace! Trump triumphant! Novus ordo seclorum!

Is it?

AP:

Kim had already revealed plans to shut down the test site by the end of May during his summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in last month. Analysts say that while the closure of the site is important, it doesn’t represent a material step toward full denuclearization.

“A ceremony for dismantling the nuclear test ground is now scheduled between May 23 and 25,” depending on weather conditions, the Foreign Ministry’s statement said.

It said the North will invite journalists from the United States, South Korea, China, Russia and Britain to witness the dismantling process.

The journalists will be provided with a charter flight from Beijing to the North Korean coastal city of Wonsan, from where they will travel by train to the test site, the statement said.

The ministry said the North will continue to “promote close contacts and dialogue with the neighboring countries and the international society so as to safeguard peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and over the globe.”

Following the Moon-Kim summit, Moon’s office said Kim was willing to disclose the process to international experts, but the North’s statement Saturday didn’t include any mention about allowing experts on the site.

South Korea had no immediate response to the statement.

There’s a reason they were closing the test site anyway: it’s honeycombed with holes made by nuclear explosions.

Sirwan Kajjo is a Syrian-Kurdish Washington-based journalist and author.

At the onset of the Turkish offensive, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government declared it a “jihad” against Syrian Kurds. Turkish preachers gave sermons justifying the assault as a “holy war.”

Turkey and jihadist groups are now forcing non-Muslim minorities in Afrin to convert to Islam. Yazidi temples, for example, have been destroyed by militants. Yazidi residents have been forcibly taken to mosques to convert to Islam.

Kurdish groups have accused the government of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of carrying out a campaign to create a demographic change aiming at dislodging native Kurdish civilians from their lands and replacing them with Sunni Arabs from Turkish-based refugees camps.

After little more than a month since capturing the Kurdish city of Afrin in northwestern Syria, the Turkish government and its jihadist allies are discussing plans to rule the city by Islamic sharia law.

A meeting recently took place between Turkish authorities and rebel leaders of the al-Rahman Legion to decide how to build an Islamic police force, sharia courts and other religious centers.

Al-Rahman Legion is one of the largest Islamist rebel groups that was in control of the eastern Ghouta, the last rebel-held area in Damascus. The group was recently expelled from the area after a Turkish- and Russian-brokered deal between the Syrian regime and groups rebelling against it, such as Al-Rahman. It has since resettled in the city of Afrin, along with hundreds of families from the Damascus suburban area.

Since 2012, Afrin had been run by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), a U.S.-backed group that had a secular system of governance which rejected political Islam and promoted relatively liberal ideals.

No-go zones are growing rapidly in the suburbs of all of France’s main cities. Shanty towns built by illegal migrants from Africa and the Middle East have sprung up in parts of Marseilles and Paris in the last few years. Islamization is everywhere. In hundreds of mosques, imams deliver fiery anti-Western speeches. Churches are vandalized. The number of rapes is rapidly increasing. Groups of veiled women roam the streets and insult the “immodest”, unveiled, women.

Macron’s most important project since he was elected has been the creation of new Islamic institutions destined to adapt France to Islam — not to adapt Islam to France. Many more mosques will be built, financed with taxpayer money; departments of Islamic culture will open in universities, and imam training centers created.

Macron’s main advisor on this subject is Hakim El Karoui, the author of a book (“Islam, a French Religion”) explaining that Islam is now the main religion in the country; that prejudices of non-Muslims are the source of most troubles, and that helping Muslims to have access to more important positions in French society is of the utmost urgency.

Sadly, it will also be difficult for President Macron, Prime Minister May and Chancellor Merkel to hide that they are appeasers of Islam and the weak commanders of countries they are allowing to decay.

During his recent State visit in Washington, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke of the “long friendship” between France and the United States, and tried to present himself as a reliable ally. His statements, essentially empty words, should be taken with extreme caution.

Dr. Majid Rafizadeh, is a business strategist and advisor, Harvard-educated scholar, political scientist, board member of Harvard International Review, and president of the International American Council on the Middle East. He has authored several books on Islam and US Foreign Policy. He can be reached at

Many extremist Muslims believe that their religious desire is coming true in in the US. Religiously speaking, for extremist Muslims, ruling America is Allah’s (God’s) word. To them, a sacred promise is coming to fruition.

What does being the second-largest religion in a country mean? Voters impact local and national politics, swing domestic elections, elect more representatives from the same religious affiliation, are influential enough to determine who the next president of the United States may be, and change the laws of the land.

This sense of immunity and dismissal led to the downfall of many countries throughout time.

“Soon,” said the letter, “America Will Be Ours”.

“Ours?”

The writer, it became clear, was an extremist Muslim in the U.S. who claimed to be a reputable religious preacher. With each new word, concern grew.

He pointed out, throughout the letter, the “sinful” ways of the West: dancing, drinking, dating…

He expressed disgust that most women did not wear the hijab or participate in prayer five times a day. Then he got straight to the point: “Ours,” he explained, represented Muslims like him.

The sentiment is hardly a new one. A person hears similar proclamations from many Muslim extremists throughout the years. The real shock was not letter but the reaction of many Americans after seeing it.

Such a thing, they said, could never happen. The writer’s words were “just bluster,” nothing to be taken seriously. Most surprisingly, they stated — honestly — that Muslims who speak of such intentions do not really mean what they say, so these threats should not be cause for concern.

The history of the two nations where I grew up — Iran and Syria — taught all of us there a big lesson about living in this kind of ignorance: the reality of how quickly a nation can be consumed by the philosophies of a religious state. An authoritarian and malicious regime, as exists now in Iran — the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism and brutal even to its own people — is something we cannot forget.

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.