RUTHFULLY YOURS

(CNN)Here is some background information on terror attacks involving vehicles used as deadly weapons by radicalized individuals or terror groups.
Facts:
Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch encouraged its Western recruits to use trucks as weapons. A 2010 webzine article, “The Ultimate Mowing Machine,” called for deploying a pickup truck as a “mowing machine, not to mow grass but mow down the enemies of Allah.”
In September 2014, ISIS spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani called for lone wolf attacks using improvised weaponry, “If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock or slaughter him with a knife or run him over with your car or throw him down from a high place or choke him or poison him.”
Timeline:
March 3, 2006 – Mohammed Taheri-azar, an Iranian-American, drives an SUV into an area crowded with students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Nine people sustain minor injuries during the attack, which Teheri-azar later says is retribution for the killing of Muslims overseas. He is convicted of attempted murder in 2008 and is sentenced to 33 years in prison.

October 22, 2014 – A three-month old girl and an Ecuadorian tourist are killed when a driver swerves into a crowd at a light rail station in Jerusalem. The driver, Abdel Rahman al-Shaludi is shot and killed by police. Israeli media reported he published militant writing on Facebook and supported Hamas, a fundamentalist Islamic group that has conducted attacks in Gaza and the West Bank, but his family denied he supported Hamas or any terror organization.
July 14, 2016 – After a Bastille Day fireworks display in Nice, France, a man drives a 20-ton rental truck into the crowd, striking and killing 86 people. The attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, a Tunisian national, drives nearly a mile on the beachfront promenade before he is shot and killed by authorities. French officials say Bouhlel seemed to become radicalized “very quickly” by ISIS propaganda before the attack. He also suffered from mental illness, according to his father.
November 28, 2016 – At Ohio State University, 11 people are injured when a student, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, 18, carries out a car and knife attack. A campus police officer shoots and kills Artan, whom police believe was inspired by ISIS and the radical cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki.

BERLIN — Authorities say a van crashed into a crowd Saturday outside a popular bar in the German city of Muenster, killing two people and injuring 20 others. The driver of the vehicle shot and killed himself after the crash, local police said. Six of the injured are listed in critical condition.

It’s not yet clear who the suspect is or what the motive is. Police said they are examining reports that other suspects may have fled the crash scene.

The incident is being treated as terrorism, but the suspect’s identification has not yet been transferred to the U.S., a U.S. intelligence source told CBS News.

Herbert Reul, the interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia state, said the driver was a German citizen. Reul stressed the investigation is at an early stage but said “at the moment, nothing speaks for there being any Islamist background.”

“We are investigating in all directions,” he explained, according to the Associated Press. Reul said two people were killed in the crash, lowering the previous figure provided by police.

Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reports that the suspect’s apartment was being searched for possible explosives.

On Twitter, local police warned residents to “avoid the area near the Kiepenkerl pub” in the city’s historic downtown area where a large-scale police operation was underway.

Police said a suspicious object was found in the van and they’re still examining it to see if it is dangerous. They told German news agency dpa that the object was the reason why a large area around the scene was sealed off after the crash.

Residents said they were enjoying the first warm afternoon in the area that features many shops and cafés, CBS News correspondent Roxana Saberi said on CBSN. People were outside enjoying themselves, many of them college students, enjoying the weather.

Today, France is the only country in the Western world where Jews are murdered simply for being Jews.

Jews may be the main victims, but they are not the only ones. In just five years, 250 people in France have been murdered by Islamic terrorists.

The main problem is the spread of hatred against Jews, France and the Western world. Many Muslim extremists incite murder; and more and more often, murders occur.

A year ago, in Paris, on April 4, 2017, Sarah Halimi, an elderly Jew, was horribly tortured and murdered in her home in Paris, then thrown from her window by a man shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the greatest”) . She had reported to the police several times that she was the victim of anti-Semitic threats — in vain.

Less than a year later in Paris, another elderly — and disabled — Jew, Mireille Knoll, was raped, tortured and murdered in her apartment by another Muslim extremist. Mrs. Knoll, a Holocaust survivor, had also contacted the police to say that she had been threatened. Again, the police did nothing.

For months, the French justice system tried to cover-up the anti-Semitic nature of Sarah Halimi’s murder; the judge in charge of Mireille Knoll’s case at least recognized the anti-Semitic nature of her murder at once.

Both women were victims of an anti-Semitic hatred that is rising quickly in France.

French Jews live in constant insecurity. The men who murder them evidently do not hesitate to break into homes and attack elderly women; they seem to know they can threaten their future victims without fear of arrest. More often than not, the police do not even record the complaints of Jews who go to the police station, but simply note in the daybook that a Jew claiming threats came and went.

The cultural-Marxist Left’s war on Western civilization and American society is conducted on many fronts, including the courts and the streets, but also on a daily basis in the arena of public opinion, via the language. One prominent example has been their transformation of the two human sexes, male and female, first into “genders” (a term drawn from English grammar, and of which there are three, including neuter) and then into multiple genders. This of course demands a new set of pronouns which promptly are given “identity” characteristics, the better to tribalize and thus weaponize these hitherto unknown species of human beings.

Another example is the transformation of the words “immigrants” and “asylum,” which in the space of a decade or so have now acquired a host of subtextual signifiers of race and class in order to change their meaning. To those of us who are the descendants of the last great wave of genuine immigration, which ended around 1920, the words have a sentimental patina about them, recalling the great-grandparents from the old countries of Europe still glimpsed in sepia-toned photographs—the folks who arrived with nothing, worked hard, married either within or without their ethnic group, built houses, started families, moved up and moved out into the mainstream of American society and disappeared into history.

They are our familial heroes who arrived with no entitlement chips on their shoulders, and asked for nothing but an opportunity to work hard and do well. And in exchange, they promised allegiance to their new land, swore to put aside, insofar as possible, the old ways, customs, and conflicts, endure nativist tribulations, and subsume themselves into something larger called the United States of America. None of them arrived with a “right” to enter the country, none expected either a handout or the immediate right to vote, and all understood they were here at the sufferance of the American people.

THESE ARE EXCERPTS FROM JOSH FRYDENBERG’S IMPRESSIVE FIRST SPEECH AS AN ELECTED OFFICIAL IN 2010

Standing before the parliament of our great country, I see my journey to this place in the continuum of my family’s story.

My grandparents on both sides were migrants from Europe. In the late 1930s Morrie and Leah Frydenberg came from Poland to Australia to seek a better life. They arrived while Europe was plunging into darkness.

The experience was different for my maternal grandparents, Sam and Ethel Strauss, and their young daughters, including my mother, who were interned in the Budapest ghetto by the Hungarian fascists. They survived and eventually made their way through displaced persons camps to Australia.

My great‐grandparents, and many relatives on both sides, perished in the Holocaust, but one who survived is with us today.

My great‐aunt Mary Frydenberg spent two years at Auschwitz. She was transferred back to Germany by the Nazis and then sent on a death march, but she escaped with the assistance of a humane German guard. In her run for freedom, she was given shelter by a Catholic priest—at great risk to him—before making her way to Australia.

Mary’s story serves us all as a constant reminder of hope, even in the presence of tragedy.

What drives us as Liberals are notions of individual liberty, individual responsibility and a fairness borne out of a particular kind of equality.

The equality which Liberals seek in a society is the equality of opportunity, not the other kind of equality—the equality of outcomes.

By mandating outcomes, the state removes responsibility from individuals and denies the worker, the student and the patient the opportunity to be the best that they can be. It seems to me that these two notions of equality reflect the fundamental fault lines between us and the members opposite. It is not a thin divide.

“How can we all be better off when the government targets independent and Catholic schools merely because parents are exercising choice?”

“The opportunity to prosper is given its best chance through competitive markets—the insight reached by Adam Smith more than two centuries ago.”

“It may appear a paradox but the first of my large thoughts is that we need to limit the government. Our government is too big.”

“We must always remember that whenever we create a new arm of bureaucracy or expand a field of activity, we are not spending our own money; we are spending the money of our citizens who look to us as the guardians of their wealth.”

“The reduction of our per capita consumption of energy and non‐renewable resources is necessary … but part of being responsible is knowing what it will cost, who it will impact and how communities and businesses will need to react.”

“There has never been a better time for innovative technologies, practices and solutions.It seems inexplicable that in Australia we have yet to have a constructive and thorough debate about nuclear power, the only baseload, carbon neutral energy source.”

“How can we all be better off when the government discourages private health insurance at a time when the public system is overburdened?

“Our alliance with the United States is the cornerstone of our national security strategy. It must be protected and defended by both sides of the House.Our friendship and common purpose rests upon more than Realpolitik; it reflects our values, traditions and commitment to the democratic ideal.”

My vision is to achieve what Menzies termed ‘civilised capitalism’, unleashing the power of the individual and his enterprise while always providing a safety net for those who despite their best efforts are unable to cope.

These are my motivations, my cause and my way, and they not negotiable.

In its effort to gather evidence against the Burmese government for its ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims, the international community must not let the dire circumstances of the Hindu Rohingyas go unnoticed.

On March 11, 2018, the UN Special Advisor on Genocide Prevention told the chairman of the National Human Rights Commission of Bangladesh that the United Nations is planning to amass evidence of genocide against the Rohingyas in Myanmar (formerly Burma) through a judicial investigation.

The persecution of Muslims in Myanmar has been condemned by Western policymakers, international human rights organizations and the United Nations for the past year. Since August alone, more than 600,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh to escape atrocities committed against them by the Burmese army.

During the same period, however, more than 100,000 Hindu Rohingyas have also sought refuge in Bangladesh, but for a different reason: to escape the brutality of the members of Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a Muslim terrorist outfit fighting against the Myanmar government.

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria—Boko Haram insurgents launched coordinated assaults on a Nigerian military base and villages close to this regional capital on Monday, a brazen operation that left at least 20 people dead just weeks after the government confirmed it was in talks with a breakaway faction of the extremist group.

The dawn raids—which saw insurgents deploy suicide bombers, mortars and truck-mounted machine guns—sparked a protracted battle with Nigerian soldiers at a military base on the edge of Maiduguri, an army spokesman said. Local officials, still tallying the dead and injured Monday afternoon, said the jihadists were attempting to infiltrate the city.

The attack left at least 20 people dead and 63 injured, according to Kashim Shettima, the governor of surrounding Borno State. “We will continue to intensify our efforts to safeguard lives and properties,” Mr. Shettima said. “Terrorists bask in the oxygen of publicity, they are aiming at soft targets and senselessly opening fire on innocent citizens, but we will stop them.”

The brazen operation came after Nigeria’s government revealed it was in peace talks with a Boko Haram breakaway faction allied with the Islamic State terror group and led by a mysterious young commander called Abu Musab al-Barnawi. CONTINUE AT SITE

More evidence is emerging about last month’s chemical attack in Salisbury, England. A British government lab has determined that only a state actor could have produced the military-grade nerve agent used in the attempted assassination of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

This is a crucial thread tying Russia to the attack, not that you’d know it from the media and political chatter. Russia’s defenders have seized on the statement by Gary Aitkenhead, head of the Porton Down military lab, that “we have not identified the precise source” of the chemical. Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn mocked Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson for saying last month that the lab had confirmed the chemical was Russian. Diane Abbott, one of Mr. Corbyn’s deputies in Parliament, claimed Labour’s “more thoughtful approach” to Salisbury had been vindicated.

That spin is at best disingenuous. Although the molecules don’t have “Made in Russia” stamps on them, Porton Down has confirmed the chemical is Novichok, which is known to be produced in Russia and nowhere else. The lab says it required “extremely sophisticated methods to create, something only in the capabilities of a state actor,” as Mr. Aitkenhead told Sky News. He was clear that his conclusion is only one piece of evidence to be evaluated.

This finding bolsters Prime Minister Theresa May’s case that Vladimir Putin’s government is responsible for the first use of a chemical weapon on European soil since World War II. Other evidence includes intelligence that Russia has experimented with chemical agents for assassinations and previously targeted former Russian agents—including Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned with radioactive polonium in London in 2006.

Mr. Putin would love nothing better than for Western politicians to fall into the rabbit hole of playing molecular “CSI” while ignoring other evidence of Russian culpability. That’s one reason the Kremlin has staged such histrionics at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in the Hague, calling for a special session this week to discuss Salisbury and demanding a joint Russian-British investigation to distract from the group’s work on the case.

Voters should be asking why politicians such as Mr. Corbyn are so eager to apologize for Mr. Putin. The war of words over the Porton Down analysis comes at an especially sensitive time, since Britain is debating additional responses to the attack.

Financial sanctions belong at the top of the list. A parliamentary committee is looking at ways to limit Russian financial activity in Britain, perhaps blocking Russian government bond sales in London. Home Secretary Amber Rudd has said her office may re-evaluate some of the hundreds of visas issued to Russians under a program that allows anyone to move to Britain—with a path to eventual citizenship—in return for a £2 million investment in risk-free U.K. government bonds.

Any financial sanctions will be politically difficult to pass given the profits British banks, law firms, investment advisories and others earn serving wealthy Russians. And to truly bite, sanctions against individuals linked to Mr. Putin’s government would require international coordination. That coordination already is difficult in a European Union where pro-Kremlin states such as Greece and Hungary enjoy vetoes on EU foreign policy. False confusion about facts such as the Porton Down conclusions gives political cover to Mr. Putin’s enablers.

Mrs. May has won important diplomatic victories by patiently presenting evidence to allies and, as far as possible, to the public. One result was a show of solidarity from French, German and U.S. leaders. Another was last month’s mass expulsion of Russian spies from Western countries. The best way to keep up the pressure on Mr. Putin is to continue treating the Salisbury attack as the strategic threat it was, rather than as a plot in a “Law & Order” episode.

Britain’s next prime minister might well be an anti-Semite. No one can say for certain whether Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitism is a sincerely held prejudice or merely a matter of electoral calculation: there are now more than ten times as many Muslims in Britain as Jews, and it therefore makes electoral sense to appeal more to Muslims than to Jews. But either way, his failure to condemn anti-Semitism in his own party, his penchant for consorting in friendly fashion with extremist anti-Zionists of genocidal instincts, and his defense of a mural depicting lupine Jewish bankers playing Monopoly on the backs of naked minorities are cause for anxiety among British Jews unknown since the rise—and thankfully swift fall—of Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British fascists in the 1930s.

In all the commentary about Corbyn’s anti-Semitism, real or feigned, no one seems to have noticed that anti-Semitism is perfectly logical for someone of Corbyn’s cast of mind. It has often been said that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools; it would be more accurate to say that socialism is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals (at least in modern conditions). Anti-Semitism and socialism proceed along the same lines, using the same kind of presuppositions and evidence.

A few years ago, a survey appeared breaking down household wealth in Britain by religious affiliation, and Jews came first. For someone as suspicious of and hostile to wealth and the wealthy as Corbyn, whose fundamental economic idea is that money is the product of exploitation, and that equality of outcome is desirable, attainable, and just, it is only natural to suppose that both wealthy individuals and groups must have been up to no good, grabbing by illicit means a larger slice of the economic cake than is theirs, according to his own conception of justice. It is therefore perfectly reasonable, or at least in keeping, for him to be anti-Semitic: he hates none more than the independently successful.

For now, we have a Saudi ally in the young crown prince. So long as no one in Israel loses his head, and no one in Saudi Arabia exploits the alliance to chop off Muhammad’s head.

Have we entered a new period of sweetness and light with our Arab neighbors? On Monday The Atlantic published an interview the magazine’s editor Jeffrey Goldberg conducted with Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman.

The basic line, repeated by all major newspapers, is that the Saudi crown prince recognized Israel’s right to exist. Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt gushed about it on his Twitter feed.

Referring to the interview as “amazing,” Greenblatt wrote that “all should watch [Muhammad bin Salman].

He is far from perfect [and] there is a long road ahead, but in a region long dominated by hateful despots, [the prince] envisions a very different future for Muslims, Jews, Christians and all in the Middle East.”

Other commentators were even more exhilarated.

Are the prince’s fans correct? Is his ascendance to the Saudi crown the harbinger of a reformation of Islam and the beginning of a new era in Islamic relations with the Jews and the world as a whole? Not really.

Most of the reports on the interview have focused on the prince’s remarks in which he ostensibly recognized Israel’s right to exist. But did he actually recognize Israel’s right to exist? Did he distinguish himself from all the other Arab leaders who to date have recognized that Israel exists but not admitted it has a right to exist? Let’s check the text.

Goldberg asked the prince, “Do you believe the Jewish people have a right to a nation-state in at least part of their ancestral homeland?” Muhammad replied, “I believe that each people, anywhere, has a right to live in their peaceful nation. I believe the Palestinians and the Israelis have the right to have their own land. But we have to have a peace agreement to assure the stability for everyone and to have normal relations.”

Does this mean that he recognized Israel’s right to exist in the Land of Israel? Maybe. Maybe not.