RUTHFULLY YOURS

Whatever you think of President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, it points to the most important strategic reality in the Middle East: Arab power has collapsed in the face of low oil prices and competition from American frackers.

The devastating oil-price shocks of the 1970s, orchestrated by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, nearly wrecked the world economy. Ever since, the U.S. has looked for ways to break OPEC’s parasitic and rent-seeking grip on the oil market—and thereby to reduce America’s geopolitical vulnerability to events in the Middle East.

Victory did not come easily. Intense conservation efforts made the U.S. much more energy-efficient. New oil discoveries in Africa and elsewhere significantly broadened the available supply. Renewable energy sources added to the diversification. But the most decisive development was that decades of public and private research and investment unleashed an American oil-and-gas boom, leading to a revolution in energy markets that has sent geopolitical shocks through world affairs. The consequences reverberate in the Middle East and beyond. Future oil revenues to countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, Russia and Iraq will fall trillions of dollars short of what once might have been expected. The shift in energy markets will benefit consumer economies like Japan, China, India and the nations of the European Union. The U.S. and similarly situated nations, like Australia and Canada, can look forward to faster growth and greater foreign investment, since they will capture much of the oil revenue that Russia and OPEC lose.

Low energy prices already have given the EU’s struggling southern countries a chance to return to growth. They have limited Russia’s prospects and forced Vladimir Putin onto a tight budget. They have largely offset the gains Iran had hoped to make from signing the nuclear deal and escaping Western sanctions.CONTINUE AT SITE

Amsterdam’s HaCarmel restaurant sits between two other restaurants. The Jewish kosher eatery whose big blue sign boasts fish, meat and vegetarian options is sandwiched between a sidewalk café with its inevitable Heineken umbrellas on one corner of Amstelveenseweg and an ice cream place on the other corner. There’s an Italian restaurant across the street with some very nice front windows.

If the Muslim refugee had wanted to smash up any eatery, he had plenty of options. But he went to the Kosher restaurant. Inside were wooden chairs, white tablecloths and red roses. Outside came the guttural shriek of, “Allahu Akbar.” This was the battle cry with which Mohammed had inaugurated his massacre and enslavement of the Jews. The cuisine inside HaCarmel is Middle Eastern, but the attack showed why there are few Jews (or Christians) left in the Middle East outside Israel.

The Amsterdam cops had plenty of warning. The “Palestinian” was wearing a Keffiyah on his head, waving a large PLO flag in one hand and brandishing a club in the other while shouting, “Allahu akbar.”

Even in a city where 1 in 4 are Muslim, the attacker was putting on a hell of a display. He had done everything but put an ad in the paper announcing that he’s an Islamic terrorist. And so the police were already on the scene by the time the Islamic thug reached the Jewish restaurant.

Synagogues, kosher restaurants and any recognizably Jewish buildings in Europe are at risk of being attacked. Police officers and, in some countries, soldiers usually aren’t too far away from potential targets in nicer areas. But being there and actually stopping the attack is not at all the same thing.

Video shows the police officer arriving on the scene just in time. The Muslim refugee goes on shouting. Then he smashes HaCarmel’s front windows. The police, in typically European fashion, do nothing. Instead they stand there watching the Muslim thug as he smashes the glass with blow after blow as if they were attending the opening of an interesting art exhibit instead of a violent racist attack.

He starts smashing the door and the Amsterdam cops amble over for a better view. Their body language is casual and loose. They’re interested in the attack in the way that sightseers are. Maybe they’re admiring his Kosher restaurant window smashing techniques. But they’re not about to intervene.

If you want to root out a Hindu family from its ancestral home in Bangladesh, just accuse one of its members of insulting the Islamic Prophet Muhammad. You will find thousands of Muslims rushing to burn the Hindu family’s whole neighborhood down, without hesitation or evidence.

In a horrible twist, an investigation into the Facebook post that ostensibly sparked the riots revealed that the user who wrote the supposedly offensive comments was MD Titu, not Titu Roy.

Within 30 years, there will be no Hindus left in Bangladesh, based on “the rate of exodus over the past 49 years.” — Dr. Abul Barkat, Dhaka University.

If you want to punish a non-Muslim, especially a poor Christian in Pakistan, point your index finger at him and utter the word “blasphemy.” You will soon find thousands of Islamic hardliners beside you chanting, “Death to blasphemers!” Similarly, if you want to root out a Hindu family from its ancestral home in Bangladesh, just accuse one of its members of insulting the Islamic Prophet Muhammad. You will soon find thousands of Muslims rushing to burn the Hindu family’s whole neighborhood down, without hesitation or evidence.

Such behavior towards minorities — Christians in Pakistan and Hindus in Bangladesh — has become commonplace among fundamentalist Muslims in both countries, whose governments have surrendered to Islamists.

On November 5, for instance, a Bangladeshi Muslim, Alomgir Hossein, filed a complaint against a Hindu, Titu Roy, for allegedly posting derogatory remarks about the Islamic Prophet Muhammed on Facebook. The Muslims of Titu Roy’s hometown of Thakurpara (a Hindu-dominated village in Rangpur) gave police a 24-hour ultimatum to arrest the “blasphemer,” or they would take action.

Although Titu Roy lives with his wife and two children 500 miles away in Narayanganj, a few days later, after Friday prayers, around 20,000 Muslims from neighboring villages descended upon Thakurpara to take “revenge.” Ignoring police attempts at dissuasion, the mob set fire to at least 30 Hindu homes, and looted and vandalized others.

When police intervened, clashes erupted. One man was killed and 20 others were injured, including four policemen. The police claimed it was activists from the Islamic party Jamaat-e-Islami who led the arson attacks to create unrest ahead of the parliamentary elections.

In a horrible twist, an investigation into the Facebook post that ostensibly sparked the riots revealed an apparent case of mistaken identity. It turned out that the user who wrote the supposedly offensive comments was MD Titu, not Titu Roy. (MD is an abbreviation for Muhammed, used by millions of Muslims across the world; Titu is one of the rare names that is used by both Muslims and Hindus.)

This was also not the first time that Muslims used social media pots as an excuse to attack Hindus in Bangladesh. According to the U.S. State Department’s International Religious Freedom report for 2016:

“There were a significant number of attacks against religious minorities [in Bangladesh], particularly Hindus. In October hundreds of villagers in the eastern part of the country vandalized more than 50 Hindu family homes and 15 Hindu temples, following a Facebook post believed by some to be offensive to Islam. High levels of election-related violence in June resulted in the death of 126 individuals and injuries to 9,000 others. In one attack in a suburb of Dhaka, the media reported hundreds of attackers used sticks and bamboo poles to beat a group of Catholics and vandalize their homes and shops, injuring an estimated 60 people.”

On Friday night, an anti-Trump rally in Malmö drew about 200 people, many of whom shouted anti-Jewish remarks and threatened to “shoot the Jews.”

Saturday’s attack on the Gothenburg synagogue may have been immediately triggered by Trump’s recognition of Israel’s capital, but it is part of a pattern of persecution and savagery that has been in place, and that has been systematically ignored, denied or played down by the news media and public officials, ever since the Islamization of Western Europe began.

On Saturday, December 9, masked men threw firebombs at a synagogue in Gothenburg, Sweden. The attack took place shortly after 10:00 pm, at a time when about thirty children and teenagers (the Swedish word “ungdomar”, used in media reports, suggests they were teens, but could be younger or both) were attending a party at the Jewish Center adjoining the main building. When the assault began, the guards rushed them into the cellar, and finally allowed them to go home at about 11:30 pm. (Guards, of course, are a fixture at European synagogues these days.) A mother of one of the girls at the party received a text message from her daughter saying that she was scared and that there was a smell of gasoline.

Yes, in Western Europe, in 2017, a group of young Jews stood huddled in a basement, helpless, amid the gasoline fumes from firebombs. (It is not clear whether the people guarding them were armed, or why, facing the threat of a possible conflagration, they chose to send them into a cellar.)

Gothenburg, by the way, is the same city in which, as we reported recently, the churches will be opening their doors every night this winter to provide shelter for homeless immigrants — whether legal or illegal — but not for homeless Swedes. There is probably no direct connection whatsoever here, but it is hard not to find a certain dark irony in this juxtaposition of events.

A small fire did indeed spread out at the synagogue, but was soon extinguished by firefighters. Fortunately, there were no injuries; alas, there were only three arrests. When asked by the daily Expressen to say something about the identity of the suspects, a police spokesperson would say only that the three persons taken into custody were about 20 years old. In the aftermath of the attack, Swedish police have intensified security arrangements around the handful of other synagogues in the country.

An apparent terror attack occurred overnight in Sweden’s second largest city, as a mob of masked men firebombed a synagogue in Gothenberg during a youth event.

This happened just a day after Palestinian protesters in Malmo, Sweden’s third largest city, shouted “Shoot the Jews” and chanted taunts about killing Jews.

Sweden has been leading the international diplomatic effort against President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, which was announced last Wednesday.

JTA reports that at least a dozen masked men approached the synagogue last night and hurled firebombs as synagogue officials rushed the youths gathered inside into the basement until police arrived.

According to one Jewish community official, rains prevented the fire from spreading and causing more damage.

The Local-Sweden reports that at least three of the attackers were arrested by police this morning.

No motive has been identified for the attack, but The Local reported anti-Semitic incidents in Malmo and Stockholm over the weekend during protests against the U.S. recognition of Jerusalem.

According to Sveiriges Radio, protesters in Malmo chanted: “We have announced the intifada from Malmo. We want our freedom back, and we will shoot the Jews.”

Video of the event also shows the crowd being led in the “Khaybar, Khaybar” chant calling for the genocide of Jews:

A 2007 report by the Rand Corporation advised Western governments to “harness” Sufism, saying its adherents were “natural allies of the West.”

In the end, the Sufi parties are outnumbered by those of their Salafi opponents, meaning that the brotherhoods and the wider Sufi-oriented public must look to the state for protection. In that context, it is important to stress that the massacre in Sinai was not simply another Islamic State attack on people it considered heretics (effectively, in their interpretation of Shari’a law, non-believers), but an assault on everyday mainstream Islam in Egypt, a declaration of apostasy for the vast majority of Egyptian Muslims.

The massive November 24 terrorist attack by Islamic State on a Sufi mosque in a town of little importance, Bir al-Abd, in northern Sinai, resounded across the world. Despite the presence of members of the security services, the al-Rawda mosque also serves as the local headquarters of a prominent Sufi Brotherhood founded by the local al-Jarir clan, a branch of the powerful Al-Sawarkah tribe. The number of dead, somewhat over 300, were shockingly high, yet not higher than the tolls in two earlier Islamic State massacres. In 2014, IS fighters killed 700 men of the Shu’aytat tribe in Dayr al-Zur. “Over a three-day period, vengeful fighters shelled, beheaded, crucified and shot hundreds of members of the Shaitat tribe after they dared to rise up against the extremists.” In 2016, a series of bombings in Karrada, a Shi’i district of Baghdad, took some 347 lives.

Islamic State — though defeated in Syria and Iraq — remains a major threat in many parts of the world. Its fighters returning to Europe have carried out attacks in Brussels and Paris, and yet others have been welcomed back by naïve government agencies who hope to make them into innocent citizens again by rewarding them with benefits and housing.

In a stunning list of attacks, CNN has identified Islamic State as a global threat: Since declaring itself a caliphate in June 2014, the self-proclaimed “State” has conducted or inspired over 140 terrorist attacks in 29 countries in addition to Iraq and Syria, where its carnage has taken a much deadlier toll. Those attacks have killed at least 2000,43 people and injured thousands more.

The massacre at Bir al-Abed is not the first time Islamic State has attacked a Sufi shrine or mosque, nor is it the first time Sufi Muslims have been attacked by Salafi hardliners. Everything and everyone deemed by IS leaders to be “unIslamic” or “insufficiently Islamic” are eligible to be killed or demolished. Ancient sites in Syria; Shi’i Muslims, their mosques and shrines in Iraq; and Yazidis in northern Syria and Iraq have all been the objects of major attacks, in many ways echoing similar massacres by the Wahhabis of Arabia in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

TEL AVIV—Israel launched airstrikes early Saturday at Hamas positions in response to rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, as tensions simmer between Palestinians and Israeli forces over a White House policy change on Jerusalem.

​The strikes overnight targeted two weapons-manufacturing sites, an arms warehouse and a military compound, the Israeli military said. Three people were killed in the strikes and more than 20 were injured, Gazan health authorities said, according to the Palestinian Authority’s state news agency. Hamas said two of the dead were members of its armed wing.

Israel was responding to rockets fired on Israeli communities on the border of the strip. One of the rockets fired from Gaza exploded in the Israeli town of Sderot on Friday night, causing damage to several parked cars, Israeli media reported.

Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip, didn’t claim responsibility for the rocket fire directed at Israel. A number of small jihadist groups in Gaza instead said they were responsible for the rockets.

However, Hamas this week called for a Palestinian uprising against Israel after President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and said he would plan to move the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv.

While exchanges of rockets and strikes aren’t uncommon between Israel and the Gaza Strip, the timing is sensitive because it comes during heightened tensions between the two sides. Israel and Hamas have fought three wars over the past 10 years, in part because both sides escalated fire from smaller exchanges. CONTINUE AT SITE

Last month alone in Brussels, there were three separate outbreaks of rioting and looting on a major scale.

If you penetrate the thick cloud of professional indignation to scrutinize the reality of the “capital of Europe”, what you see in many respects is actually a hell hole, one where socialism, Islamism, riots and looting are the new normal.

When then-candidate Donald Trump noted in January 2016 that, thanks to mass immigration, Brussels was turning into a hell hole, Belgian and European politicians presented a united front at the (media) barricades: How dare he say such a thing? Brussels, capital of the European Union, the very quintessence of the post-modern world, the avant-garde of the coming new “global civilization,” a hell hole? Of course assimilating newcomers is not always easy, and there may be friction from time to time. But never mind, they said: Trump is a buffoon, and anyway, he has zero chance of getting elected. Such were the thoughts of those avid readers of The New York Times International Edition and regular watchers of CNN International.

However, Donald Trump, in his unmistakable, brash style, was quite simply right: Brussels is rapidly descending into chaos and anarchy. Exactly two months after that dramatic Trumpism, Brussels was eviscerated by a horrific Islamic terror attack that left 32 people dead. And that was only the tip of the monstrous iceberg that has built up over three decades of mass immigration and socialist madness.

Last month alone in Brussels, there were three separate outbreaks of rioting and looting on a major scale.

First, there was the qualification of the Moroccan team to the soccer World Cup: between 300 and 500 “youths” of foreign origin took to the streets of Brussels to “celebrate” the event in their own way, looting dozens of shops in the historical center of Brussels, wreaking havoc in the deserted avenues of the “capital of civilization” and, during their riot, injuring 22 police officers.

Three days later, a social media rap music star nicknamed “Vargasss 92,” who is a French citizen of foreign origin, decided to organize another unauthorized “celebration” in the center of Brussels, which quickly turned into another riot. Again, shops were destroyed and people assaulted for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Short clips of the event streamed onto the social networks, showing the world (and Belgians) the true face of Brussels without the politicians’ makeover. No wonder the European political elite hate social media from the depths of their hearts; they prefer the sanitized (and, in both France and francophone Belgium, heavily subsidized) traditional press.

Angela Merkel’s leftward drift cost her center-right party seats in September’s German election, and her center-left coalition partners fared even worse for having governed with her. Yet now she proposes to move even further left at the behest of that losing partner so she can form another unpopular coalition with them? Go figure.

Mrs. Merkel has failed to form a government since September’s murky result in which her center-right Christian Democrats (the CDU and Bavarian CSU) lost 65 seats. Her first try at a coalition, with the free-market Free Democrats (FDP) and the urban leftist Greens, fell apart when the FDP refused to bend on energy policy and migration.

Yet Mrs. Merkel is resisting a new election or a minority government, on the theory that either would be a post-War novelty in Germany and would echo a less stable and more frightening time in the country’s history. Instead she’s trying to browbeat the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) into negotiating another grand coalition after months of SPD resistance.

The SPD has participated in such coalitions for eight of the 12 years that Mrs. Merkel has been in office and seemed to have concluded after winning their lowest post-1949 vote share in September that voters want an opposition party that opposes.

On the policy merits a grand coalition is likely to be a bad deal. Some SPD leaders think the party can mitigate the political fallout from cooperation with Mrs. Merkel by striking a harder bargain than it has in the past, and Mrs. Merkel might go along to keep power.

That would mean less tax relief than the €15 billion ($18 billion) cuts to personal income taxes Mrs. Merkel promised before the election, or a further retreat from modest pension reforms that raised the retirement age. The SPD also could pull Mrs. Merkel away from a more realistic approach to Middle Eastern migration.

The bigger consequences of another grand coalition would be political. Mrs. Merkel, having been punished by voters for her milquetoast centrism, would be bowing to the policy wishes of a center-left party that now has even less of a mandate than it did before the election. This will be worse than the instability of a minority government or another election because it signals that voter dissatisfaction doesn’t matter in Berlin. That, and not a second election, is what creates opportunity for political extremists on the left and right.

How Shariah Law Handles Family Cases
Some Muslims in Greece are subject to rules based on the Quran governing marriages and legacies

Marriage
In a form of premarital agreement, the groom stipulates a specific amount of gold to be given to the bride in case of a divorce.
How Shariah Law Handles Family Cases
Some Muslims in Greece are subject to rules based on the Quran governing marriages and legacies

Divorce

The wife gets the gold set under premarital agreement, as well as three months of alimony payments. If the husband can’t fulfill the agreement, the couple has to stay married until he has the means to do so.
Inheritance
A dead person’s estate is distributed to all the legal heirs as set forth in Quran. A wife gets a 1/3 share, which drops to 1/8 if there are no children. Two-thirds of the assets are to be distributed among children at a ratio of 2:1 for sons and daughters. Other provisions apply to brothers, sisters and other relatives of the deceased.
Child custody
In case of a divorce, girls are to live with their mothers until age 10, boys until age 8. Thereafter they move in with their fathers, who are deemed more suited to teaching them how to behave. If the mother is found to be sinful, the mufti can decide that boys should live with the father from an earlier age.