RUTHFULLY YOURS

The truth is starting to emerge about a recent Russian attack on U.S. forces in eastern Syria, and it deserves more public attention. The assault looks increasingly like a botched attempt to bloody the U.S. and intimidate President Trump into withdrawing from Syria once Islamic State is defeated. The U.S. military won this round, but Vladimir Putin’s forces will surely look for a chance at revenge.

Here’s what we know. Several hundred men and materiel advanced on a U.S. Special Forces base near Deir al-Zour on the night of Feb. 7-8. Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White confirmed soon afterward that the “battalion-sized unit formation” was “supported by artillery, tanks, multiple-launch rocket systems and mortars.” U.S. forces responded in self-defense “with a combination of air and artillery strikes.”

Ms. White wouldn’t confirm how many attackers were killed or who was fighting, though the U.S. had “observed” the military buildup for a week. Defense Secretary James Mattis called the confrontation “perplexing,” adding that “I have no idea why they would attack there, the forces were known to be there, obviously the Russians knew.” He’s referring to the U.S.-Russia “deconfliction” agreement in which the Russians agreed to stay west of the Euphrates River.

Now we’re learning that Russian fighters were killed in the attack, and Lebanese Hezbollah was also involved. The Kremlin has tried to cover up the deaths, but that’s getting harder as the body bags come home and Russian social media spread the word. The Foreign Ministry finally admitted Tuesday that “several dozen” Russians were killed or wounded but claimed that “Russian service members did not take part in any capacity and Russian military equipment was not used.”

“While the brave Iranian women protested against hijab laws, Western feminists celebrated hijab”. — Rita Panahi, Herald Sun, Australia.

Instead of a celebration of Islamist discrimination against women, the West should promote a #MeToo in the mosque, the idea of an Egyptian, Mona Eltahawi. She would like to raise the issue of rape and sexual abuse suffered by Muslim women during the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

Will the Western advocates of women’s rights also stand for the rights of Muslim women, or, in the name of “multiculturalism”, the will they keep appeasing those who persecute them instead?

While the march for women’s rights in Washington this year took place under the banner of #MeToo against sexual harassment, in Iran dozens of women were taking to the streets to protest against theocracy and compulsory wearing of the hijab. The Iranian women waved white flags to fight against the mullahs’ obligation to veil. But the white flag was not a surrender; it was apparently a symbol of Western feminists. As the Australian Rita Panahi wrote, “while the brave Iranian women protested against hijab laws, Western feminists celebrated hijab”.

On February 1, many of these Iranian women were arrested for not wearing a hijab. On that very day, the World Hijab Day was celebrated in the West, and Western appeasers celebrated the veil. Even British PM Theresa May backed the claim that women should be “free” to wear hijab. A few days after that, the American department store Macy’s decided to sell the hijab as an item of fashion clothing. Unfortunately, in some Islamic countries, women are not “free” to wear the veil; they are obliged to wear the veil, as the arrests in Iran show us.

Instead of a celebration of Islamist discrimination against women, the West should promote a #MeToo in the mosque — the idea of an Egyptian, Mona Eltahawi. She would like to raise the issue of rape and sexual abuse suffered by Muslim women during the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

I’ve written many times over the last decade and a half about that rare bird the “moderate Muslim”. Surely one reason for his scarceness is that, whenever he pops his head above the parapet, he’s hung out to dry by craven infidel politicians and bureaucrats, who on the whole find the admirably straightforward demands of your average firebreathing imam more congenial. Hence the pandering to returning Isis warriors: Mods vs Raqqa’s – it’s no contest.

The latest examples are the headmistress and chairman of the board of governors of St Stephen’s Primary School in Newham, East London. St Stephen, you’ll recall, was the first Christian martyr, but observant Christians are thinner on the ground in today’s Newham than they were in first-century Jerusalem. So St Stephen’s School today is mostly Muslim. Nevertheless:

In June last year, [headmistress Neena] Lall removed the hijab from the school uniform for girls aged seven and under and tried to curb young children from fasting at school in case they became unwell.

Good for her. Hijabs for under-sevens? If you’re in most Muslim countries, you notice that the gals don’t disappear under the veil until puberty: Covered kindergartners is largely a western phenomenon.

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria—Dozens of schoolgirls remained missing two days after a jihadist raid on a boarding school in northeastern Nigeria raised fears of a repeat of the mass kidnapping in Chibok in 2014.

A convoy of fighters in machine-gun-mounted trucks from the Boko Haram Islamist insurgency rolled into the Government Girls Science Technical College in the town of Dapchi, Yobe state, on Monday evening, local officials and Western diplomats said.

Police officers and teachers initially said they believed the 800-member student body was safe after fleeing to their homes and nearby villages. But dozens still remained unaccounted for, Yobe state police commissioner Summonu Abdulmalik said.

Nigeria’s government confirmed late Wednesday that the attackers were from the militant group that also carried out the Chibok raid.

The Nigerian military said it saved “some of the girls from the terrorists who abducted them” in an operation, without giving figures. Residents of Dapchi reached by telephone in Dapchi, a remote and dust-caked village less than 50 miles from Nigeria’s border with Niger, said they were celebrating the return of some of the girls, adding that not all had returned home.

President Muhammadu Buhari said on Twitter that he had dispatched his defense minister to Yobe and directed military and police “to mobilize immediately to ensure that all the missing girls…are found.”

One of the most troubling aspects of this rapidly spreading dhimmitude, is the de-facto enforcement of Islamic blasphemy laws. Local European authorities have been utilizing “hate speech” laws to prohibit criticism of Islam, even though Islam represents an idea, not a nationality or an ethnicity. The conventional purpose of most hate-speech laws is to protect people from hatred, not ideas.

The British Foreign Office, which has ignored Iranian women’s desperate fight for freedom and stayed shamefully silent during the Iranian people’s recent protests against Iran’s regime, unbelievably handed out free headscarves to its staff. Meanwhile, at least 29 Iranian women were arrested for shedding the hijab, and were likely subjected to rape and other torture, as is common in Iranian prisons. Yet British MPs and Foreign Office employees were perversely celebrating the hijab as some sort of twisted tool of “female empowerment”.

Counter-jihad measures have been obstructed by Western leaders everywhere since immediately after 9/11. President George W. Bush declared that “Islam is peace”. President Obama removed all references to Islam in FBI terror training manuals that Muslims deemed offensive. New York City’s current leadership threatened New Yorkers, immediately after the October terror attack in Manhattan, not to link the terror attack to Islam. UK Prime Minister Theresa May claimed that Islam is a “religion of peace”.

Although Europe is not part of the Muslim world, many European authorities nevertheless seem to feel obliged to submit to Islam in more or less subtle ways. This voluntary submission appears to be unprecedented: Dhimmi, historically speaking, is the Arabic term for the conquered non-Muslim, who agrees to live as a second-rate, “tolerated” citizen, under Islamic rule, submitting to a separate, demeaning set of laws and the demands of his Islamic masters.

In Europe, submitting to the demands of Islam, in the name of “diversity” and “human rights”, has also been happening voluntarily. This submission to Islam is, of course, highly ironic, as the Western concepts of “diversity” and “human rights” do not exist within the foundational texts of Islam. On the contrary, these texts denounce in the strongest – and supremacist – terms those who refuse to submit to the Islamic concept of divinity, Allah, as infidels who must either convert, pay the jizya [“protection”] tax or die.

Abandoned by Washington and under bombardment by the Turkish army, the beleaguered Kurdish forces in the northern Syrian town of Afrin asked for, and received, help from Russia. A spokesman for the Kurdish YPG militia announced on February 20 that the Russian-backed government of Bashar al-Assad would send reinforcements to Afrin to assist the Kurds. France24reported that a convoy of pro-Assad forces entering Afrin came under Turkish artillery fire, and Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan claimed the government forces had to turn back.

The situation on the ground is unclear, but what is painfully clear is that Kurds have been abandoned by the United States less than a month after the Pentagon announced the formation of a 30,000-man ‘Border Security Force’ in northern Syria composed mainly of Kurdish fighters who had pushed ISIS out of the area. Turkey responded to the American initiative by invading northern Syria and bombing the Kurds, reportedly killing several hundred civilians. In deference to Turkey, the United States did nothing, so the Kurds asked for help from Russia.

As Alfred Hackenberger wrote in the German daily Die Welt, on February 19: “Russia would belong to the winners in the case of a Syrian-Kurdish military alliance. It would expand Russia’s military control of the country markedly. And Turkey would have to stop its invasion of Afrin, because a confrontation with Syrian soldiers would bring it directly into conflict with Russia.”

The siege of Afrin, to be sure, seems a minor episode in the long and miserable course of Syria’s civil war, but it may turn out to demarcate the point that American influence in the region collapsed beyond repair. Trained by the US and German armed forces, the Kurds represented the only effective force on the ground independent of the Russian-backed Assad regime following the defeat of Sunni militias backed by the US, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The Kurdish resurgence in Syria, though, drew a ferocious response from Turkey, which fears that Kurdish self-government spanning Iraq and Syria on its southeastern border would link up with its own rapidly-growing Kurdish population. More than half of Turkey’s population under 30 will be ethnic Kurds by the mid-2040s.

Hill’s aim to ban the term “Islamist terrorism” indicates that political correctness is more important to him than strengthening Britain’s counter-terrorist efforts.

His recommendation comes despite the fact that Hill himself, whose official title is Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, referred to the “threats from Islamist terrorism” in his first report, released in January.

Britain’s terrorism watchdog, Max Hill QC (Queen’s Counsel), recently told a parliamentary committee that it is “fundamentally wrong to attach the word ‘terrorism’ to any of the world religions,” and suggested that the term “Daesh-inspired terrorism” should be used instead of “Islamist terrorism” to refer to attacks carried out by Muslims (“Daesh” is the Arabic acronym for ISIS). His recommendation comes despite the fact that Hill himself, whose official title is Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, referred to the “threats from Islamist terrorism” in his first report, released in January. In that first report, Hill also argued that “what [Islamic terrorists] claim to do in the name of religion is actually born from an absence of real understanding about the nature of the religion they claim to follow.” How impressive that he knows more about their religion than they do, despite the fact that the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, received a PhD in Koranic Studies from Saddam University for Islamic Studies in 2007.

Although Hill’s statements ostensibly put him at odds with Prime Minister Theresa May, she too has mystifyingly called terrorism “a perversion of Islam.”

There are two problems with this expression of political correctness. One is that although the Quran and Sunnah contain inherently contradictory texts, most jihadi leaders and ideologues follow and act upon the most extremist and violent interpretation of them. Therefore, constantly apologizing for the religion is worse than counter-productive: it is incorrect. The other, related, problem is that British policy is forged and implemented on the basis of ideas; so when those ideas stem from a fear of offending Muslims, the policy is necessarily flawed.

Islamists seem to be influencing the British school system with ease: there is simply no solid opposition to them. The government even stays silent about the harassment and intimidation.

Islamists in Britain seem to be intent on establishing regressive requirements, such as the hijab for young girls, wife beating, making homosexuality illegal, death for apostates, halala rituals in divorce, and exploitation of women and children through Sharia courts as part and parcel of British culture.

That St. Stephen’s School allowed itself to be blackmailed in this way bodes ill for both Britain and its education system.

St. Stephen’s School in East London recently imposed a ban on hijabs (Islamic headscarves), but reversed its decision after administrators received hundreds of threats from enraged Muslims.

Among the targeted officials from the primary school was the head of governors, Arif Qawi, who had supported the ban on the grounds that the girls wearing hijabs were less likely to integrate socially with their peers. As a result of the outcry, Qawi submitted his resignation, saying that members of the staff were afraid to come to the school.

Head teacher Neena Lall, whose educational philosophy has turned St. Stephen’s into one of the best secular primary schools in Britain’s capital — in spite of its being in Newham, a poor neighborhood where English is spoken predominantly as a second language — was bombarded with e-mails calling her a “pedophile” who “deserved what she had coming.” Lall, of Punjabi origin, was even compared to Hitler in a video uploaded to YouTube.

It is not the first time that British educators have been intimidated by Muslim extremists. The head of Anderton Park School in Birmingham, Ms. Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson, received similar threats on social media.

Anderton Park School was inspected as part of the “Trojan Horse” scandal, in which the British government discovered that Muslim extremists had been trying to take over Britain’s secular school system.