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ISIS is making it clear that it now has its eyes set on the Gaza Strip. By calling on Palestinians to rebel against Hamas, ISIS is hoping to facilitate its mission of infiltrating the Gaza Strip.

Ongoing attempts by ISIS to infiltrate the Palestinian area should worry not only Palestinians, but Israel and Egypt as well.

If ISIS manages to get a toehold in the Gaza Strip, they will be that much closer to Israel’s doorstep, with their jihadis minutes from Israeli towns and cities. For the Egyptians, this means that one day they will have to fight ISIS not only in the Sinai, but also inside the Gaza Strip. The biggest losers, once again: the Palestinians.

There is nothing more delightful than watching two Islamic terror groups fight each other to the death. For several years now, Hamas in the Gaza Strip and ISIS in Sinai have been cooperating with each other, especially in smuggling weapons and terrorists over the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. It was a win-win: Hamas supplied ISIS with terrorists; ISIS supplied Hamas with weapons that were smuggled into the Gaza Strip.

It appears, however, that the honeymoon between the two terror groups is over.

Last week, ISIS published a video documenting the execution of one of its men after he was found guilty of smuggling weapons to Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The execution of Musa Abu Zmat, a former Hamas terrorist who fled the Gaza Strip to join ISIS, took place in Sinai.

In the video, the ISIS terrorists accuse Abu Zmat of being an “apostate” for smuggling weapons to Hamas’s armed wing, Ezaddin Al-Qassam, in Gaza. They also accuse Abu Zmat of smuggling dozens of people from Al-Arish, in the Sinai, into the Gaza Strip.

The ISIS terrorist who carried out the execution by a single shot to the head has been identified as Mohammed Al-Dajni, who is also from the Gaza Strip but fled to Sinai to join ISIS. Al-Dajni’s father, Abu Rashed, is a senior Hamas official who previously held a top position in the health services in the Gaza Strip.

Another ISIS operative who appeared in the execution video has been identified as Abu Kathem Al-Makdisi. In the video, Al-Makdisi is referred to as a “sharia judge.” He is the one who read out verdict against Abu Zmat before the execution. Al-Makdisi also condemns Hamas in the video and calls on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to join ISIS.

Palestinian sources say that Al-Makdisi’s real name is Hamzeh Al-Zamli, a convicted thief who fled the Gaza Strip several years ago. The sources note that he had been convicted of robbing several businesses in Gaza before he crossed the border to Sinai.

While Al-Azhar’s informational campaign aims to promote “moderate” Islam, reinforce the values of citizenship and coexistence among Egyptians, and counter “deviant fatwas,” a recent study reveals that senior officials at Al-Azhar are still defending and promoting school curricula that contradict tolerance and acceptance of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority.

Al-Azhar officials, it turned out, removed the proposed content encouraging tolerance and acceptance of Christians from the school curricula, and the official who proposed that curricular “reform” was fired.

Why are Al-Azhar’s leaders not fully cooperating with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi? Factors include their extremist Islamic faith, and uncertainty regarding their public image and their popularity if they yield to Sisi’s demands. These reservations seem especially charged in the context of rivalries for religious leadership in Egypt, and signs of support for Al Azhar from the parliament, the media and the public. Possibly even more persuasive is the fear of gradually losing all power and the ability to use taqiyyah when needed if they yield to Sisi’s demands.

Al-Azhar University seemed to have either an ambivalent attitude or a two-faced, taqiyah [dissimulation] one regarding tolerance towards Christians in particular and Islamic moderation in general, according to a report, “Two Faces Of Egypt’s Al-Azhar: Promoting Goodwill, Tolerance Towards Christians In Informational Holiday Campaign – But Refusing To Do The Same In Its School Curricula,” disclosed by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

While Al-Azhar’s informational campaign, “Sharing the Homeland,” aims to promote “moderate” Islam, reinforce the values of citizenship and coexistence among Egyptians, and counter “deviant fatwas,” a recent study published in El-Watan News reveals that senior officials at Al-Azhar are still defending and promoting school curricula that contradict tolerance and acceptance of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority. Al-Azhar officials, it turned out, removed the proposed content encouraging tolerance and acceptance of Christians from the school curricula, and the official who proposed that curricular “reform” was fired.

Talks between North and South Korea Tuesday at the Demilitarized Zone have handed Kim Jong Un a propaganda victory. The two sides agreed that athletes from the North will compete in next month’s Winter Olympics in the South. The talks and the “Olympic truce” allow the young dictator to pose as a man of peace, even as he threatens to annihilate his enemies with nuclear weapons.

This is galling enough, but Kim has his eye on the bigger prize of driving a wedge between Seoul and Washington. In recent days U.S. officials have expressed confidence that this won’t happen because the talks would be limited to the Olympics. But the onus is now on South Korean President Moon Jae-in to make clear that the North can’t divide and conquer.

Kim’s New Year’s Day speech with its proposal of talks with the South was surprising given Pyongyang’s longstanding policy of dealing only with the U.S. on strategic matters. According to the North’s propaganda, Seoul has always been a puppet of the American imperialists. The biggest exception came in 2000, when South Korean President Kim Dae-jung secretly paid the North hundreds of millions of dollars to participate in a summit. That led to a brief period of entente known as the Sunshine Policy, lubricated with copious amounts of aid.

President Moon wants to revive some of the Sunshine Policy, including an industrial park that let the North earn about $100 million a year from South Korean companies. Contradicting U.S. policy that the North should first curtail its nuclear and missile programs, Mr. Moon has called for direct talks since taking office in May. The North snubbed those overtures as it sprinted to perfect its missiles, but now it thinks it can gain a political advantage by luring the South back into talks.

Mr. Moon now has his wish of talks, and the Trump Administration probably felt it had to oblige because of the Olympics. Seoul asked to postpone routine military exercises for fear the North might use them as an excuse to launch a conventional military strike during the games, and the U.S. acquiesced. In March 2010 the North sank a South Korean ship, killing 46 sailors, and in November of that year it shelled the island of Yeonpyeong in the South, killing two soldiers and two civilians.

North Korea may hope the South will continue talks after the Olympics and break ranks with the U.S. Stricter United Nations sanctions are now coming into force, cutting the flow of fuel imports and preventing North Korea from earning hard currency with exports. That makes the prospect of a reconciliation with South Korea especially appealing.

But even if Mr. Moon wants to help the North, he faces greater constraints than his predecessors. The sanctions restrict his ability to offer monetary aid, and the heightened tension on the Korean Peninsula as a result of the North’s dash to become a nuclear-weapons state has increased the South’s dependence on the U.S. security umbrella.

The U.S. military has announced that the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson and its battle group will deploy off the coast of Korea during the Olympics. Such deployments are a more reliable guarantor of peace than the gestures of a young dictator who pretends to want peace even as he threatens war.

The mullocracy in Iran is bragging that it has crushed the demonstrations against the regime that broke out on December 28. Regime change from within still remains a forlorn hope, as the theocratic police state has employed its usual brutal violence and intimidation to deny the protestors any momentum. Burning identification cards and electrical bills seem the last recourse for those brave Iranians abandoned by the so-called “global community” that averts its gaze from the destruction of human rights it pretends to worship.

So it goes in the 40-year history of bungling, indifference, greed, appeasement, and sheer stupidity that have defined the West’s response to the most consequential jihadist movement in modern times. A lot of blood has stained a lot of different guilty hands.

Start with Jimmy Carter and our terminally blinkered state department. Carter’s foreign policy team completely misinterpreted the Iranian revolution of 1979. Trapped in the fossilized narrative of anticolonialist resistance, nationalist self-determination, and hunger for human and political rights, our foreign policy savants missed the profoundly religious motives of the resistance to the Shah. The clerical class and the revolution’s godfather, the Ayatollah Khomeini, were driven by hatred of the modernizing, anti-Islamic program of the Shah and his father, such as the relaxation of sharia laws governing women, popular culture, and religious minorities, a program that Khomeini called the “abolition of the laws of Islam” and an existential threat to Islam itself. And they were particularly angered at the subsequent weakening of the clerics’ power and authority over social, private, and political life.

Indeed, the revolution was in fact a classic jihad against those modernizing “apostate” Muslim leaders who whored after Western “idols,” a dynamic that polluted the purity of the faith with anti-Koranic “innovations” derived from infidel culture. A cursory knowledge of Islamic history could have shown our analysts that such violent conflicts have consistently characterized Islamic history and its clash with Muslim traitors influenced by Christian rivals, from the Kharajites of the 7th century to the Wahhabis of the 18th to the Muslim Brothers of the 20th and to al Qaeda and ISIS of the 21st. Instead, we reacted in terms of our modern Western models of the inevitable progress of human rights, secularism, economic development, and political self-determination. We assumed that after the revolution, liberals, leftists, and technocrats would take over and start creating a Western-style state and integrating it into the global community on the basis of “shared interests” and “mutual respect.”

A silent war against French police and firefighters is in full swing. “2,280 firefighters were assaulted in 2016… As a result, the police are called to certain areas just to protect the firefighters.” — National Observatory of Delinquency, Radio Europe 1.

Two Paris police officers, who risked their lives to save children from a burning apartment, were attacked and stoned by a mob when they emerged from the blaze carrying the children in their arms.

As usual, politicians are minimizing the problem. The government does not consider the spread of urban violence to be terrorism. As usual, the government will try to buy peace with money.

France’s Minister of the Interior, Gerard Collomb, was clearly happy on January 1st. Why? No terrorist attack had occurred on New Year’s Eve. Collomb warmly thanked the 140,000 police officers, soldiers, firefighters, and civil security associations who had been mobilized to block any potential terrorist attack. To give just an inkling of the size of this security deployment on New Year’s Eve, consider that the entire French army (land forces only) consists of only about 117,000 active-duty soldiers.

All French governments since 2015 have denied that Islam is at war with France, but the Ministry of the Interior nevertheless mobilized higher numbers of security personnel than the French army has soldiers, to make sure that this New Year’s Eve would be a peaceful event.

In a press release, Minister Collomb said:

“Because of the strong police presence combined with efficiency of protection measures, the festivities of New Year’s Eve were able to happen peacefully for everyone in France.”

Although no terrorist attack took place on New Year’s Eve, calling it a “peaceful” night is, at best, a stretch. In keeping with the annual “tradition,” 1031 vehicles were intentionally burned (compared to 935 in 2016) in the majority-Muslim suburbs of many big cities.

250 cars were torched in the Paris area alone, and eight police officers and three soldiers of the Gendarmerie were attacked and wounded. A video went viral on the internet, showing a mob of “youths” (the euphemism used by the media for African and Arab young men) assaulting and savagely beating a female police officer. She had been trying to disperse a crowd of “youths” attacking a private party in the Champigny suburb of Paris.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada has an nine-year long record of supporting the Islamist cause while refusing to engage with reformist Muslims.

Perhaps most disturbing were Trudeau’s comments to a gathering of Islamist front groups: he told them that he shared their beliefs, their set of values and their shared vision.

Canada will not be able to plead ignorance or inability while facing accusations of complicity from any future American terrorist victims.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada has an nine-year long record of supporting the Islamist cause while refusing to engage with reformist Muslims. With respect to ISIS fighters returning to Canada, Trudeau has argued that they will be a “powerful voice for deradicalization” and that those who oppose their return are “Islamophobic.” Furthermore, the Government of Canada is not adding the names of returning ISIS fighters to the UN committee responsible for the listing of international jihadists.

Many Canadians (and others) are starting to believe that Prime Minister Trudeau’s position on reintegrating and deradicalizing ISIS fighters is unreasonable, if not delusional. Canada’s “Centre for Community Engagement and Deradicalization” has no leader and no deradicalization centre. Nor does it appear to have plans for a program which could operate inside or outside of government. It is also not clear that the law of Canada could force a returning ISIS fighter to attend such a program, even if it did exist. In France, a similar government sponsored program was a failure.

The “Lawrence of Arabia” syndrome goes back to Old Europe. It is the snobbery of people who become enamored with exotic cultures. There is a romanticism surrounding the Middle East, associated with magic carpets and Aladdin lamps. But with that romanticism comes fear, as well – fear of… invading Islamists who slit people’s throats.

This fear has led European states to try and do business with terrorist groups. In the early 1980s, for example, Italian officials forged a secret deal with Palestinian terrorists, which culminated not in cooperation, but in a series of deadly attacks…

Too many lies have been the basis of international relations. These include “dialogue” between religions to counter Islamist terrorism; the false notion of the “peaceful aspirations” of the Palestinians; the view that Turkey is a “bridge” to the Muslim world; the ridiculous view of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani as a “moderate”; the belief in a “united Europe” as the future of the old continent; and faith in the U.N. as a legal arbiter for international affairs. Policies based on these lies are not only fruitless; they are dangerous.

As an expert in global terrorism, anti-Semitism, Middle East wars and European policy, Fiamma Nirenstein has been following the popular uprising in Iran with particular interest. Nirenstein – award-winning journalist, best-selling author, former MP of the Italian Parliament and a fellow at the JCPA and says that just as former U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s election and foreign policy were instrumental in the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, President Donald Trump is probably responsible for the street demonstrations across Iran that could lead to the downfall of the ayatollah-led Islamic Republic.

Nirenstein says that Europe, which has been silent on the uprisings in Iran, can no more take credit for this welcome turn of events than it could for the defeat of the U.S.S.R. — or even of Hitler’s Third Reich. It is America, she asserts, that has always been at the forefront of the struggle for freedom from the bondage of dictators; it is America that always saves Europe.

Gatestone: Why is it not the other way around? Europe, after all, is geographically closer to those struggles than America.

Fiamma Nirenstein: Europe’s key approach always has been one of appeasement, because when you are weak, you try not to interfere too much, not say what you think. Deep in its heart, Europe probably would have liked to stop Hitler from the beginning, and see the Soviet Union collapse earlier, but it did not have the courage to voice this opinion loudly or strongly enough. The same applies to the situation with Iran today.

Gatestone: But hasn’t Europe been expressing, loudly and clearly, its antipathy to fascism? And hasn’t America exhibited what you call “weakness”?

FN: Europe is split. It has been both fascist and communist, and also has fought against fascism and communism – if not early enough. It therefore might suffer from guilt and humiliation relating to its past. The United States, too, seems to have guilt and humiliation relating to racism in its history. But there is a difference between Europe and America: As is the case with individuals, nations must confront and untangle their feelings. When a person does this, he becomes an adult. One could say that while America matured into adulthood, Europe never did.

The protests in Iran send a cogent message: The clerical regime stands on shaky ground, and the Iranian people are unwavering in their quest to bring it down. Slogans against velayat-e faqih, or absolute clerical rule, called for a real republic and explicitly targeted the regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani. This dispels the myth, still harbored by some governments, that Iranians distinguish between moderates and hard-liners in Tehran. It also undercuts flawed arguments depicting a stable regime.

Millions of Iranians live in poverty. Yet Tehran has spent upward of $100 billion on the massacre in Syria, according to reports obtained by the National Council of Resistance of Iran. The chants of “Death to Hezbollah” and “Leave Syria, think about us instead” clearly demonstrate the people’s opposition to the regime’s belligerent regional schemes.

The country’s official budget this year allocates more than $26.8 billion to military and security affairs and the export of terrorism. This is in addition to the $27.5 billion in military spending from institutions controlled by Mr. Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The budget for health care is a mere $16.3 billion. Weak and vulnerable, the regime spends such astronomical sums on regional meddling as part of its strategy for survival.

Skeptics might point out that Iran has faced protests before. What makes the current uprising different from the 2009 protests?

Iran’s new offensive against social media is showing signs of backfiring.

Authorities in Tehran have ratcheted up their policing of the internet in the past week and a half, part of an attempt to stamp out the most far-reaching protests in Iran since 2009.

But the crackdown is driving millions of Iranians to tech tools that can help them evade censors, according to activists and developers of the tools. Some of the tools were attracting three or four times more unique users a day than they were before the internet crackdown, potentially weakening government efforts to control access to information online.

“By the time they wake up, the government will have lost control of the internet,” said Mehdi Yahyanejad, executive director of NetFreedom Pioneers, a California-based technology nonprofit that largely focuses on Iran and develops educational and freedom of information tools.

An official at Iran’s United Nations mission didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

In recent days, Iran has said it has contained days of public demonstrations against the regime. Protesters used social media to spread the word about, or bear witness to, the protests, as people did during the Green Movement in 2009.

Iran blocked major social-media sites, such as Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc., in 2009. CONTINUE AT SITE