RUTHFULLY YOURS

The conflict between Israel and Iran may be heating up after a half-decade simmer. On Friday night Iran dispatched a drone from Syria that penetrated Israeli airspace in the Golan Heights. Israel destroyed it with an Apache helicopter. Then on Saturday Israel sent eight F-16s across the border to strike the airfield in the Homs governorate, called the T-4 base, where the drone originated, as well as a handful of other Iranian targets. Although the mission was a success, one F-16 was shot down by Syrian antiaircraft fire—though the pilot made it back to Israel, where he and his navigator ejected successfully.

This was the most significant clash to date between Israel and the so-called Axis of Resistance—Iran, Syria’s Assad regime and Hezbollah—since Iran began deploying soldiers and proxies to Syria six years ago. Israel insists its response was limited and its intent is to contain this conflagration. Its critics worry that the skirmish could explode into one of the worst wars the Middle East has ever seen.

The Iranians have been exploiting the chaos of the Syrian civil war to build up military assets there that target Israel, all the while sending advanced weaponry to Lebanon by way of Damascus, also under the fog of war. The Israelis have been vigilant; they have destroyed some of this hardware in Syria with one-off strikes. In December they struck an Iranian base southwest of Damascus, some 30 miles from the Golan Heights. But they had never entered Syria with the kind of overwhelming force seen on Saturday morning.

What prompted this level of response is still unclear. Israeli military officials won’t say whether the Iranian unmanned aerial vehicle was armed. It would be a surprise, though, if Israel’s reprisal was prompted by an unarmed UAV. Indeed, this was not the first drone incursion into the Golan Heights. Last year, Israel’s missile defenses intercepted several Iranian-built drones, operated by Hezbollah, attempting to enter Israeli airspace from Syria.

The Israel Defense Forces had warned that the T-4 base was crawling with fighters from Iran’s Qods Force, an arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had paid multiple visits to Moscow hoping to convince President Vladimir Putin to curb the threatening activities of Iran and its proxies. Mr. Putin has established a formidable presence in Syria since 2015, when his forces entered the country ostensibly to combat Islamic State.

The Israelis took a significant risk Saturday of rankling the Russians, especially since they reportedly did not warn Moscow of the attack in advance. Russian personnel sometimes embed with Syrian air-defense units and are sometimes present at the T-4 base. Thus the strike might have been intended as a message to the Russians as much as to the Iranian axis.

Whether Russia had advance knowledge of the Iranian drone operation isn’t clear. Nor do we know whether Russia was involved in unleashing the Syrian surface-to-air missiles that downed the Israeli F-16. What we do know is that after many Israeli airstrikes in Syria over many months, this was the first time Syrian antiaircraft weapons managed to hit a target. That points toward Russian involvement. CONTINUE AT SITE

When Swedish authorities representing a Swedish left-wing government and media announce a project to prevent “fake news” from “decisively influencing” the 2018 elections, this ought to set off loud alarm bells among Swedes. Who determines what constitutes “fake news” anyway? Is it not the very essence of “fake news” when a media outlet refuses to report mass sexual assaults, because the perpetrators happen to be foreigners from third world countries?

A British Cabinet Office spokesperson told Sky News: “The Government is committed to tackling false information and the Government Communications Service plays a crucial role in this”. Perhaps their “rapid response fake news unit” should begin with Theresa May herself, who falsely and against all factual evidence continues to claim that Islam is a religion of peace and that ISIS is not Islamic.

Meanwhile, European citizens continue to face costly legal prosecution for refusing to accept the fake news about Islam propagated by people such as Theresa May.

“I also thought that Islam was just a normal religion, but then I read the Koran and became shocked by the hatred that exists there, the misogyny… The more Islam takes over, the more we compromise. Islam is a totalitarian ideology, which means dictatorship. So, I believe that our democratic system is in danger… I hate no people. What I hate is ideology, Islam. One can criticize fascism or Nazism, but why not Islam? Why should Islam have any protection status?” — Denny, on trial in Sweden for “incitement to hatred” for calling Islam “a fascist ideology” on Facebook. If found guilty, he faces up to two years in prison.

The Swedish government’s innovation agency, Vinnova, is financing a project led by the combined forces of Swedish mainstream media to, in the words of Vinnova, “prevent fake news and unfounded statements from spreading and playing a decisive role in the Swedish elections in 2018”. The next elections, which take place every four years, are scheduled to take place on September 9, 2018. The Swedish media giants involved in the project consist of Swedish State Television, Swedish State Radio, Bonnier, Schibsted Sverige, and NTM. Together, these media companies effectively own Swedish mainstream media in the form of newspapers, online news outlets, and state and private television and radio. The Swedish state is financing the technical aspects of the project with 1.9 million Swedish kroner ($240,000), while the Swedish mainstream media is financing the remaining project costs themselves. The “fake news” project was originally launched in October 2017.

For the past decade, February, part of which coincides with the month of Bahman on the Iranian calendar, has been marked by febrile political activities in Iran under the Khomeinist regime. February 1 marks the anniversary of the late ayatollah’s return to Tehran after 16 years in exile. And February 11, regarded as the crescendo of the Iranian Revolution, marks the day that Shapour Bakhtiar, the last Prime Minister to be named by the Shah, went into hiding, leaving a vacuum quickly filled by Khomeini’s supporters visibly surprised by the ease with which they had won power.

There were no revolutionary battles, no dramatic ups-and-downs, and, on a personal level, no opportunity for heroic shenanigans.

The Khomeinist revolution took around four months to achieve victory, not long enough to allow a lot of people to conjure a heroic biography for themselves.

Just a year before the “final victory” on 11 February some of the mullahs who emerged as grandees of the revolution, among them Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati who now heads the all-powerful Council of Guardians of the Islamic Constitution, were kissing the Shah’s hands during audiences for clerics. Other grandees of the revolution like Hojat al-Islam Morteza Motahari were on Empress Farah’s payroll as members of the “philosophical” boutique she had set up as solace from boredom.

The revolution had not lasted long enough to establish its ideological colors.

One of the women arrested in Iran for removing her hijab in protest refuses to repent to authorities even if that means she spends the next decade behind bars, her attorney said.

Narges Hosseini was arrested Jan. 29 after she posted a photo on social media in which she was waving her hijab on the street. She was first taken to Shahr-e Rey Prison, south of Tehran, with bail set too high for her family to afford.

She was one of the women in Tehran and Isfahan inspired to protest by Vida Movahed, whose image of waving a white hijab on a stick while standing on a platform on Revolution Street in Tehran at the end of December went viral. Movahed, 31, disappeared into an Iranian jail for a month.

Hosseini, 32, snubbed the regime officials who have levied charges against her that could carry up to 10 years in prison: “openly committing a harām [sinful] act,” “violating public prudency” and “encouraging immorality or prostitution.”

“Ms. Hosseini did not even appear in court to express remorse for her action,” Hosseini’s lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, told the Center for Human Rights in Iran on Monday. “She said she objects to the forced hijab and considers it her legal right to express her protest.”

BRUSSELS—This week’s trial of the only surviving assailant from the November 2015 Paris attacks has refocused attention on the Brussels district of Molenbeek where he grew up and was captured.

Salah Abdeslam’s trial for attempted murder is a painful reminder for the neighborhood of its role as the breeding ground of the terror cell that killed 130 people in those attacks and another 32 in Brussels in suicide bombings on March 22, 2016.Molenbeek Mayor Françoise Schepmans, who has lived in the neighborhood for over 50 years, keeps the memory of those attacks alive, among other things with a monument to Brussels victims installed in front of the district’s opulent 19th-century town hall. “This is part of our history,” she said. “Molenbeek was a fertile ground for terrorism.”

Now she says her office is working to make it less so, both by stepping up policing and by promoting efforts to improve cultural and economic opportunities for Molenbeek’s residents.

Under the authority of zoning regulations, district authorities have launched periodic checks to ensure Molenbeek’s mosques aren’t fostering militant versions of Islam. Five of the neighborhood’s 25 mosques and Quranic schools have been shut down on those grounds over the past two years.

Law-enforcement efforts have also increased since 2016, with a doubling of surveillance cameras and a beefed-up police force. Molenbeek now has three rather than just one security official charged with keeping tabs on two-dozen families suspected of radicalism.

Belgian prosecutors on Thursday asked that Mr. Abdeslam be given 20 years in prison for his involvement in a shoot-out with police officers in Brussels days before the Brussels attacks. Mr. Abdeslam’s lawyer on Thursday demanded his acquittal on procedural grounds and said there was no evidence his client opened fire. The trial will resume on March 29.Molenbeek, once home to Mr. Abdeslam and many of the dead men alleged to have been his co-conspirators, faces daunting economic challenges. Located just west of central Brussels, it is among the poorest of Belgium’s 589 districts, and its 27% unemployment rate in 2016—the latest year with available data—was more than triple the 7.8% national level. Youth unemployment was 38%, compared with 20% nationally, and youth workers say a third of local students are two or more years behind in school. CONTINUE AT SITE

“Merkel will govern…but her government will be under the heading ‘this will not be long.’ This refers to Merkel, and also to the fact that in many parts of the country there is the feeling that ‘this’ should not continue.” — Kurt Kister, Editor-in-Chief, Süddeutsche Zeitung.

“The CDU retains control of the beautiful-sounding, but in fact powerless, Ministry of Economy, the unpopular Ministry of Health, the crisis-prone Ministry of Defense and the shadowy existence of ministerial posts in the Chancellery, for education and agriculture. That is little for the strongest faction in the Bundestag.” — Editorial, Münchner Merkur.

“The CDU was transformed into Merkel’s own personal political party. On the way, though, the competition of political ideas—the policy conflicts that are the lifeblood of democracy and which provide voters with direction—was lost.” — René Pfister, head of the Berlin bureau, Der Spiegel.

Negotiators from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), their Bavarian partners, the Christian Social Union (CSU), and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) have agreed in principle on a deal for a new “grand coalition” government—one that, in fact, is the same as the one that governed prior to the last election in September 2017.

The deal, if formally ratified by the SPD’s rank and file members at a special party congress on March 4, would ensure that Germany has a new government by Easter—and that Merkel, already in power for 12 years, will remain in office for a fourth tenure as chancellor, albeit in a much-weakened position.

Unusually, the 177-page agreement, reached on February 7, is subject to review in two years, when the parties will reassess the coalition. Analysts have speculated that it may be an opportunity for Merkel finally to step down.

To ensure the deal, the three parties made concessions to each other, all in an effort to prevent fresh elections, in which the anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (AfD), riding high in the polls, would almost strengthen its position in the German parliament, where it already is the main opposition party.

~I commented recently on Tucker that I preferred the Internet of a decade ago to the increasingly totalitarian social-media cartel of today: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter. Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, feels the same way:

I think that the old blogosphere was superior to “social media” like Twitter and Facebook for a number of reasons. First, as a loosely-coupled system, instead of the tightly-coupled systems built by retweets and shares, it was less prone to cascading failure in the form of waves of hysteria. Second, because there was no central point of control, there was no way to ban people. And you didn’t need one, since bloggers had only the audience that deliberately chose to visit their blogs.

The Internet of the post-9/11 years already seems like a lost Golden Age. Twitter in particular seems to have no purpose other than cascading “waves of hysteria”. I mentioned on air both Facebook’s viral snuff videos, and the suicide of a Canadian porn actress after a Tweetstorm of homophobia accusations from LGBTQWERTY types who subsequently gloated over her passing. “Social media” plays a role in more deaths than, say, America’s supposedly all-powerful “white supremacist” movement. But, unlike the latter, nobody seems bothered about the former.

~This week’s Spectator contains a piece with the following headline:

Do the Americans know who they’re fighting in Afghanistan — or why?

What follows doesn’t really ask that question – in part because we all know what the answer is. One of President Trump’s great contributions to the public discourse is that he sees people as winners (him) or losers (Crooked Hillary. Sad!), and that he would prefer America to be in the former category. That’s why his decision to string along with existing Afghan policy is so unTrumpian: If there is any US strategy left in the Hindu Kush, it’s to lose so slowly no one back home notices.

Jason Burke’s Speccie piece is a review of a new book by Steve Coll called Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret War in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016. As old Islamabad hands will know, “Directorate S” is the secret unit dealing with Afghan affairs in Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), which itself celebrates its seventieth birthday this year. The ISI was set up by Sir Robert Cawthorne, then Deputy Chief of Staff of the fledgling Pakistani Army, and like so many bright ideas of well-intentioned men in that part of the world it jumped the tracks fairly spectacularly. But the very fact that a book about “America’s longest war” is named after a malign Pakistani black-ops racket tells you something about the tenuous grasp Washington has of the situation. In his review, Mr Burke writes of Afghanistan before the US intervention:

Bagram had been captured by the Taliban, who then exercised nominal control over 80 per cent of Afghanistan.

The world’s most lethal evil-doers are the NGOs that fly under a false flag, claiming to be champions of human rights. Their potency comes from the fact that unlike other of the world’s worst actors—think Kim Jung Un—they are not feared and despised but admired and treated as moral arbiters. A billion dollar a year industry, these NGOs reinforce their moral with financial muscle. Gerald Steinberg, founder and director of NGO Monitor, has been alone in following these outfits for the last fifteen years. He observes that human rights NGOs show “that soft power can sometimes be more dangerous than hard power.”

And while Israel is their most obvious target, they have bigger game in their sights—the transformation of Western societies and culture through mass immigration.

Human rights NGOs bear a major responsibility for the demonizing of Israel in the West. In Catch the Jew Tuvia Tenenbom, masquerading as Tobi the German, focuses on the hundreds of so-called human rights NGOs that infest Israel and the Palestinian-controlled territories in search of Israeli misdeeds—and fabricate them (sometimes stage them) as they come up short. Many of these NGOs are basically front groups for terrorists and assorted destroy-Israel groups. In 1917 Steinberg finally was able to persuade the Danish government to stop funding the Human Rights International Humanitarian Law Secretariat, an NGO framework established in 2013 at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah with an annual budget of millions of euros paid for by the governments of Sweden, Holland, Denmark and Switzerland. In an interview with journalist Ruthie Blum, Steinberg says that his research has shown that of the 24 core NGOs funded by the Secretariat, six had ties to the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (on the EU’s official list of terrorist organizations) and 15 were involved in world-wide campaigns to destroy Israel by economic means.

We live in an age of ideological self-awareness, a world of identity politics and human rights activism, where those among us with any common characteristic or condition, or particular cause or opinion, can coalesce into active pressure groups each demanding recognition of its perceived “cotton wool” rights.

It is often claimed that the law is now soft on crime and weak on social and civil wrongdoing. By comparison with what it was like during the life and times of nineteenth-century Australia, our present-day laws are indeed very soft.

Stealing a sheep in the 1820s invited the death penalty.[1] Convicts were flogged for being rude to an official;[2] and when George Howe was given permission to publish Australia’s first newspaper, the Sydney Gazette in 1803, the country was not ready for a free press—it had to be “passed by the governor’s inspector”.[3]

All of that changed with the moving times and the development of an enlightened democratic system of government. Steal sheep now and you might get away with a community service order;[4] be rude to whoever you like and so what; while the media can report and criticise anyone or anything it believes to be deserving of it.[5]

Well, that is unless you offend, insult or humiliate someone who claims their sensibilities and feelings have been hurt. I’m referring, of course, to the long-running debate over section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975[6] in respect of which several trivial complaints with a racial connotation, as dealt with by the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), have given rise to public controversy and concern.