RUTHFULLY YOURS

Is someone in the White House colluding with China? The Trump administration’s decision to impose tariffs on imported aluminum and steel lets China off the hook for its chronic and deliberate overproduction. Worse, it sets the stage for a trade war that would rob U.S. manufacturers of the advantages stemming from America’s recent transformation into the world’s hydrocarbon superpower.

From lifting restrictions on offshore drilling to ending the Obama administration’s war on coal, Mr. Trump’s robustly pro-growth energy policies have so far delighted American industry. Energy Secretary Rick Perry told an audience at February’s Conservative Political Action Conference that America has finally turned the page on the Jimmy Carter era of resource pessimism and energy shortages. Forecasters expect U.S. oil production to surpass Saudi Arabia’s output in 2018. Last year the U.S. produced 19.4% more natural gas than Russia.

Having freed itself from the Paris climate agreement and dumped the Clean Power Plan, the U.S. now has easy access to more low-cost energy than almost any other industrialized nation. American coal production, exports and employment rose in 2017 after years of decline. Thanks to technological innovations such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, the U.S. is awash in cheap, domestically produced natural gas. No other industrial nation comes close to matching America’s energy exceptionalism.

Normally all this would be great news for domestic manufacturers, which rely on energy-intensive aluminum and steel as inputs. In Europe, where green policies have pushed up energy costs, natural-gas and electricity prices are roughly double those in the U.S. Yet despite the low cost of domestic natural gas, U.S. primary production of aluminum has fallen by more than half since 2015.

The reason is simple: China. In 2000 China produced about 11% of primary aluminum; now Chinese aluminum accounts for more than half of world output. After the 2016 election, the Aluminum Association urged President-elect Trump to make China’s aluminum sector a top trade priority and force Beijing to the negotiating table. By adopting National Trade Council director Peter Navarro’s aluminum tariffs this month, the White House effectively kicked over the table instead. CONTINUE AT SITE

Recent analyses by experts on religious freedom cite the continued prejudicial declarations against Christians, Jews, and Western Civilization in Saudi educational textbooks as evidence that Saudi Arabia still bears ill will against the “infidel” West.

Saudi Arabia has failed to meet agreed-upon deadlines to remove objectionable language from educational texts.

The current Saudi Foreign Minister, Adel bin Ahmed al-Jubeir, seemed falsely to imply that hateful language appears only in past, discontinued textbooks and that current textbooks are being purged of any offensive language.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s May, 2017 Saudi Arabia trip and his address to leaders of Islamic nations may open a new era of cooperation between the United States and the world’s leading conservative Sunni Muslim states. Trump’s trip, along with reported warming relations between Israel and some Arab states, may suggest that the initial stages of an anti-Iranian, anti-terrorist alliance is in the offing.

In Saudi Arabia, Trump forcefully denounced Iran’s support for terrorism. This speech was welcomed especially by Arabian Peninsula Sunni state leaders, who could well be threatened by the aggressive policies of Shia Iran in the Persian Gulf and the Levant.

Unfortunately, however, the Saudi educational system’s textbooks, at least as of a year ago, remain rife with anti-Christian and anti-Jewish statements, as well as criticism of other Muslim sects. Perhaps one of the real litmus tests of the viability of a new era in relations between the United States and conservative Sunni Arab states will be whether the latter totally purge their abusive denunciations of peoples of other religious faiths.

If the gang members were “Asian,” records were not kept. Such is the cowardice and criminal negligence of the police involved.

These Sharia courts mean that the legal system of a foreign political ideology, Islam, has created a parallel legal system in which Sharia is placed above English common law. It is thought that some 30 to 85 Sharia courts are operating in England and Wales alone.

“The Muslim Brotherhood’s foundational texts call for the progressive moral purification of individuals and Muslim societies and their eventual political unification in a Caliphate under Sharia law. To this day the Muslim Brotherhood characterises Western societies and liberal Muslims as decadent and immoral. It can be seen primarily as a political project.” — Prime Minister David Cameron, 2014, regarding a report withheld from the public [Emphases added].

The United Kingdom, once an imperial power, now sounds more like a colonial vassal. The actions of British government officials suggest that the will of the government has collapsed in the face of terrorist and ideological assaults by the forces of political Islam. The ideology is being spread by, among others, the Muslims Brotherhood, according to a major report of the British government itself. A number of Muslim Brotherhood front groups have been identified as such by government reports such as those of the United Arab Emirates. These include the UK based Cordoba Foundation, the Muslim Association of Britain, and Islamic Relief UK. All three of these organization are listed as terrorist entities in the United Arab Emirates as well.

Salisbury is the perfect location for a very English type of murder. But what happened on the fourth of this month in the cathedral city was far from a bloodless Agatha Christie crime. The poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the center of the city has landed them in the hospital, where they remain critically ill. Also hospitalized was a police detective who was one of the first officials to enter the Skripal home after the attack. The discovery that the nerve agent Novichok was used in the assassination attempt has also led dozens of residents of Salisbury, including people who dined in the same restaurant as the Skripals, to face the possibility that they too have come into contact with the nerve agent.

The release of such a deadly nerve agent in a crowded city has done many things, not the least of which is to throw a clear line into the middle of Great Britain’s political and public life. Prime Minister Theresa May and her government swiftly concluded (at the advice of the intelligence agencies) that the only possible culprits could be the Russians. But the leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, was never going to give up a life of allegiances that easily. Both Corbyn and his closest adviser and spokesman, Seumas Milne, are the sort of leftists who do not so much hate modern Russia as feel let down by it — failing, as it did, to hold together in its glorious USSR form.

Since becoming leader of his party, Corbyn has done a great deal to try to recast himself as ready for his potential incarnation as prime minister. Corbyn and his camp present his years of chumming up to IRA terrorists as “peace-making.” He is pals with every available anti-Semite at home and in the Middle East — but this is only evidence of yet more “peace-making.” As for his unyielding fealty to every Marxist despot from Castro to Chávez — it’s just part of his endless search for equality and fairness for all.

Of course the hard beliefs that actually lurk beneath such bromides occasionally become apparent. In recent days they have risen to the surface.

Perhaps the most dramatic Saudi reform is the one that has received virtually no attention in America. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has led an effort to sweep out the Muslim Brotherhood from teaching and leadership positions in elementary, middle and high schools as well as colleges and universities.

MBS is kicking a dragon and he knows it.

The stakes of his fight with the Brotherhood could not be higher. If MBS succeeds, Saudi Arabia returns to pre-1979 roots, with movie theaters, women in the workplace, and features of a modern developing country. If MBS fails, he will be killed by the Brotherhood and Saudi Arabia will become more repressive than ever.

The global stakes of MBS’s internal fight with the Brotherhood are large, too. If the crown price wins, nearly all Saudi funding for violent Islamic radicals ends — and if he dies, it grows to new heights.

His “Vision 2030” is the biggest planned change in any country since Turkey’s Ataturk or Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew. With America’s encouragement, Saudi Arabia could lead a regional transformation that would be truly historic.

Saudi Arabia, with the visit of the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the United States this week, opens a new front in its war with Iran.

The director of the Criminal Police Association, André Schulz, estimates that up to 90% of the sex crimes committed in Germany do not appear in the official statistics.

“There is a strict order by the authorities to not report on crimes committed by refugees,” a high-ranking police official in Frankfurt told Bild. “Only specific requests from media representatives about such acts are to be answered.”

Germany’s migrant sex-crime problem is being exacerbated by its lenient legal system, in which offenders receive relatively light sentences, even for serious crimes. In many instances, individuals who are arrested for sex crimes are released after questioning from police. This practice allows suspects to continue committing crimes with virtual impunity.

Germany’s migrant rape crisis continues unabated. Preliminary statistics show that migrants committed more than a dozen rapes or sexual assaults every day in 2017, a four-fold increase since 2014, the year before Chancellor Angela Merkel allowed into Germany more than a million mostly Muslim male migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

A quarterly report — Criminality in the Context of Migration (Kriminalität im Kontext von Zuwanderung) — published by the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA) showed that migrants (Zuwanderer, defined as asylum seekers, refugees and illegal immigrants) committed 3,466 sex crimes during the first nine months of 2017 — or around 13 a day. (Final crime statistics for 2017 will not be publicly available until the second quarter of 2018.) By comparison, in all of 2016 migrants committed 3,404 sex crimes, or around nine a day; in 2015, 1,683 sex crimes, or around five a day; in 2014, 949 sex crimes, or around three a day; and in 2013, 599 sex crimes, or around two a day.

The actual number of migrant-related sex crimes in Germany, however, is believed to be far higher than the official number. For instance, the BKA data includes only crimes that have been solved (aufgeklärten Straftaten). On average only around half of all crimes committed in Germany in any given year are solved (Aufklärungsquote), according to police statistics.

The director of the Criminal Police Association (Bund Deutscher Kriminalbeamter, BDK), André Schulz, estimates that up to 90% of the sex crimes committed in Germany do not appear in the official statistics.

German police frequently omit any references to migrants in crime reports. When they do, they often refer to migrant criminals with politically correct euphemisms such as “southerners” (Südländer), men with “dark skin” (dunkelhäutig, dunklere Gesichtsfarbe, dunklem Hauttyp) or a combination of the two: “southern skin color” (südländische Hautfarbe). This practice, apparently aimed at delinking the attackers with Islam, makes it virtually impossible for German citizens to help police identify suspects.

The remaining 17 groups that make up the Syrian portion of Operation Olive Branch are a combination of Salafist, jihadist and ultra-extremist militants who have been either formed or supported by Turkey at various stages of Syria’s seven-year civil war.

In its offensive launched on January 20 against Kurdish fighters in northern Syria, Turkey has deployed more than 25,000 Syrian rebel fighters who have been equipped and trained by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s powerful military.

The offensive, code-named Operation Olive Branch, aims at dislodging the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) from the Kurdish enclave of Afrin. On March 18, Turkish military and allied jihadist rebels took control of Afrin’s city center. Turkey views the YPG as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an insurgent group that has been fighting for greater Kurdish autonomy in Turkey’s southeast. Backed by the United States, the YPG has been instrumental in the U.S.-led war on terror in Syria since 2014.

Nine days after the start of the operation, the pro-Turkish government website, Suriye Gundemi, published an infographic showing the Syrian rebel groups involved in the Afrin offensive. The website says that three divisions are part of the National Army that is under the command of the Syrian interim government, an anti-Syrian regime body based in Turkey.

This so-called army consists mainly of Islamist militants who were part of the most radical Islamic factions of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) at some point during the Syrian conflict, and was formed only two weeks prior to the Afrin operation. Most of these fighters fled to Turkey after they were defeated in battles across Syria, including in Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Idlib and Hama. While in Turkey, they were recruited by Turkish intelligence agencies to be part of forces invading the Kurdish-held Afrin.

The crown prince charts a course toward moderation, which ​prevailed before the 1979 attack on Mecca.

One can welcome reforms without air-brushing the harsh, sharia driven rule of his predecessors. rsk
The year 1979 was a watershed for the Middle East. Iranian revolutionaries overthrew the shah, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and Sunni Islamic extremists tried to take over the Grand Mosque of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, Islam’s holiest shrine. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman hadn’t been born, but he is fighting the ghosts of 1979 as he dramatically reforms the kingdom.

The attempted takeover of Mecca was a defining event in my country, mainly because of what happened next. Saudi rulers, fearing Iran’s revolutionary example, decided to give more space to the Salafi clerical establishment in hope of countering the radicals. Traditional Salafi preachers are neither violent nor political, but they hold a rigid view of Islam. Their legal rulings and attempts to police morals made the kingdom increasingly intolerant, setting back the gradual opening up that had occurred in the 1960s and ’70s.

In Saudi schools, education was largely in the hands of foreign nationals, many with Muslim Brotherhood backgrounds. In the 1960s and ’70s, Saudi Arabia was more concerned with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab nationalism than with Islamist radicalism. Thus the Muslim Brotherhood wasn’t much of a worry. But the combination of the brotherhood’s political outlook and the rigid Salafi doctrine injected a virus into the Saudi education system. That virus allowed Osama bin Laden to recruit 15 Saudis to take part in that terrible deed on Sept. 11, 2001. We Saudis failed those young men, and that failure had global implications.

Turkey Islamized northern Cyprus through a military invasion in 1974. To Islamize the much more powerful European continent, however, Turkey has been promoting demographic, rather than military, jihad.

“The places where you work and live are your homelands and new countries now… Drive the best cars. Live in the most beautiful houses. Make five children — not just three. For you are the future of Europe.” — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, 2017.

Yesterday, while many Europeans are still pilloried for viewing mass migration from Muslim-majority countries as a threat to Western culture — and are still accused of “xenophobia,” “Islamophobia” and “fear-mongering” — the city of Afrin, in the Kurdish area of Syria, fell to Turkey.

At the same time, a prominent Turkish government official has been openly and proudly declaring that the demography of Europe is changing in favor of Muslims.

MP Alparslan Kavaklıoğlu, a member of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the head of the parliament’s Security and Intelligence Commission, recently stated:

“The fortune and wealth of the world is moving from the West to the East. Europe is going through a time that is out of the ordinary. Its population is declining and aging. It has a very old population. So, people coming from outside get the jobs there. But Europe has this problem. All of the newcomers are Muslim. From Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. Those who come from these places are Muslim. It is now at such a level that the most popular name in Brussels, Belgium is Mohammed. The second most popular name is Melih [Malih] and the third one is Ayşe [Aisha].”

According to Kavaklıoğlu, if this trend continues,

“the Muslim population will outnumber the Christian population in Europe. This… has increased the nationalistic, xenophobic and anti-Islam rhetoric there. Hence, marginal, small parties have started to get large numbers of votes… But there is no remedy for it. Europe will be Muslim. We will be effective there, Allah willing. I am sure of that.”

Kavaklıoğlu is not the first Turkish official to stress the importance of population growth. In 2009, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was prime minister at the time, called on the public to have at least three children per family. The greater our numbers, he said, “the stronger we will be.” Since then, Erdoğan has been trying to encourage Turkish nationals to multiply. In 2013, he reiterated his plea:

“We need a young and dynamic population… Right now, the West is in trouble. But we do not want to put Turkey in the same trouble. I am calling on my country through mothers: Do not take this sensitivity of ours lightly. We need to make this widespread, in waves. We need to make this happen. The [value] of this cannot be measured with money or any other physical wealth.”

In 2017, Erdoğan called on Turks residing in Europe to have even more children:

“The places where you work and live are your homelands and new countries now. Lay a tight claim to those places. Open more businesses and enroll your children in better schools. Live with your families in better neighborhoods. Drive the best cars. Live in the most beautiful houses. Make five children — not just three. For you are the future of Europe.”