RUTHFULLY YOURS

Lincolnshire is a largely rural, even isolated county at the far eastern end of the British Midlands. It is heavily Conservative and voted “Leave” in last year’s EU referendum by a margin of almost two to one. Its largest city, Lincoln, has a population of 120, 000, roughly equivalent to that of Fargo and less than half that of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Yet even in this quiet corner of the U.K., Islam is a headline story. After Drummer Lee Rigby was butchered by terrorists on a busy London street in May 2013, a Lincolnshire man was arrested and another was given a warning by county police. For aiding or supporting the killers? No. For mentioning online that the killers were Muslims. A summer 2014 entry on the blog of a prominent British Muslim records her presence at an Islamic Society of Britain-sponsored festival, “Living Islam,” at which “Lincolnshire Police had a tent and were face painting kids.” And in 2015, Lincolnshire Police warned the families of British soldiers to “stop sharing their personal details online” after one soldier’s wife received a death threat from a Muslim. Did the police make any effort to track down the source of the threat? If so, I can find no record of it online.

Now the Lincolnshire Police have produced a thirteen-minute video as part of “Hate Crime Awareness week.” It is directed at the county’s children, which presumably means that copies will be, or have been, distributed to schools so that teachers can screen it for their pupils and lead discussions afterwards.

Unsurprisingly, the video – described as the “brainchild” of constable Glenn Palmer – is pure propaganda. At the beginning, we see the following words onscreen: “British Muslims. How are they portrayed? Terrorists? Jihadis? Islamic State? Maybe the following people will give you a different perspective.” We’re then introduced to a series of people who have obviously been selected to represent the very best of the British Muslim community: a soldier, a police officer, a doctor, a Member of Parliament, the head of Bradford’s Muslim Women’s Council, and (not least) one Asim Hafiz, OBE, the first imam to serve as a Muslim chaplain in the British Armed Forces.

It’s the usual drill: terrorists, we’re told, “do not represent the views of normal Muslims.” The doctor (a woman in hijab) asserts that it was the compassionate principles of Islam that motivated her to be a doctor. And of course somebody reminds us that “we are stronger together.”

The Muslim who probably gets the most screen time is a leader of a Muslim aid organization called Al Imdaad. We hear a great deal from this fellow about how much good his group does. What he doesn’t mention is something Robert Spencer pointed out the other day in response to this video: Al Imdaad, based in South Africa, has Hamas fingerprints all over it. As Samuel Westrop reported three years ago, an Al Imdaad trustee named Qari Ziyaad Patel “has written and sung a nasheed [Islamic song] in praise of the Taliban.” In 2012-13, wrote Westrop, “Al-Imdaad’s British branch raised over £400,000 for the IHH, a Turkish charity widely accused of funding terrorism and that publicly supports Hamas. Al-Imdaad UK has also given over £50,000 (over $80,000) to the Zamzam Foundation, a Somali charity run by the Saudi-funded Somali Muslim Brotherhood.”

The Lincolnshire Police video doesn’t mention any of that, naturally. In its pretty, sanitized portrait of British Islam, there are no terrorists, no friends of terrorists, no supporters of terrorists, nobody who ever so much s met a terrorist. These Muslims are all do-gooders. They would all have us believe that they love Britain with all their hearts and that they thoroughly condemn acts of terror committed in the name of their religion.

The Islamic State just lost its capital at Raqqa, and with it the last of the terrorist group’s fantasies of establishing a Middle East caliphate.

In recent years, ISIS has horrified global audiences with video clips of unspeakable atrocities. What sort of humans could behead, incinerate, drown, torture, and blow up innocent civilians, mock and record such horror, and then narrate their macabre videos for a world audience?

How could such pre-modern psychopaths ever be defeated, given that in a matter of months ISIS had managed to overrun vast swathes of Iraq and Syria?

The zealotry of the Islamic State in celebrating the unthinkable added to its cult of invincibility. Young would-be jihadists from the Western world flocked to the group’s Middle East compounds, eager to engage in viciousness as if it were the latest video game.

Dejected Middle Eastern armies seemed to have no answer for the medieval violence of ISIS. Impotent Western leaders either ignored or denied the group’s homicidal appeal. Indeed, in 2014, pessimistic analysts were predicting that ISIS might soon carve out enough oil-rich parts of Iraq and Syria to spread its barbarism throughout region.

But recently, the entire Islamic State project began going up in smoke almost as abruptly as it was born. It turned out that squadrons of American bombers were not impressed by ISIS threats and bombed to smithereens its command centers and headquarters.

Secretary of Defense James Mattis relaxed the rules of U.S. engagement and made it a veritable open season on Islamic State jihadists, while American forces trained entire new cadres of anti-ISIS fighters. Specialized drones and GPS-guided Western munitions made it almost impossible for ISIS leaders to escape constant attack.

Their past horrors had earned Islamic State jihadists only ill will. Tens of thousands of Iraqi and Syrian victims volunteered to fight ISIS with a ferocity that they had rarely exhibited in the past.

The net result is now mass ISIS surrenders. Half-starved jihadists in rags and in tears beg their captors for forgiveness — and not to show them the same savagery that had so often fueled ISIS slaughtering.

The fate of ISIS reminds us that throughout history those who posed as superhuman savages, without any limitations to their cruelty, were often bullies who could not stand up to the determined payback of their finally aroused and outraged victims.

After 9/11, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden frightened Westerners with his tough talk about the “strong horse” of radical Islam, for whose brutality and cruelty a supposedly weak and decadent West had no antidote. But after years of the U.S. and its allies whittling away al-Qaeda from Afghanistan to Iraq, and bombing its ringleaders wherever they appeared, bin Laden was killed in a dingy Pakistan compound.

In the early 1940s, the most feared killers in the world were Nazi kingpin Heinrich Himmler’s SS elite. The SS claimed they were the new racial supermen, overseeing extermination camps and spearheading the German army by executing prisoners and civilians alike.

The pipe dream of peacefully integrating self-proclaimed “refugees” from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other terrorist prone countries into European society is falling apart. Germany, which led the way in opening the floodgates to such refugees, has become a leading incubator of jihadist-inspired terrorism in Europe. Prosecutors in Germany have opened up approximately four times as many terrorism-related cases this year so far than during all of 2016, and more than ten times than in 2013. There are at least 705 Islamists in the country said to be willing to carry out a terrorist attack, with thousands of more Islamists also present in the country. Germany’s federal police (BKA) chief, Holger Münch, has said that the terrorist threat posed by jihadists is far graver than any threat from domestic terrorists on the left or the right.

Sex crimes have also risen in areas of Germany inhabited by refugees. The mayor of one town told his constituents, who were upset by the increase in sexual harassment from the migrants, “Just don’t provoke them and don’t walk in these areas.” German citizens are being told to cede their freedom of movement in their own city to refugees who refuse to accept the legal and cultural norms of their host country.

A parallel system of Sharia law has emerged in Germany, the Gatestone Institute has documented. Islamist morality police patrol some German streets, enforcing Sharia law. One example involves Salafists from Chechnya. “The vigilantes,” according to another Gatestone Institute report, “are using threats of violence to discourage Chechen migrants from integrating into German society; they are also promoting the establishment of a parallel Islamic legal system in Germany.”

Germany continues to spend billions of Euros in an effort to help refugees integrate into German society with little to show for it. The German government has allocated 21.3 billion Euros to refugee assistance in 2017, which constitutes six percent of its 2017 annual operating budget and more than half of Germany’s annual defense budget. Language, religious and cultural differences cannot be overcome by simply throwing money at the problem.

The mainstream media in Germany tried to cover up the problem, acting as cheerleaders for Chancellor Merkel’s policies. A team of researchers at the Otto Brenner Institute concluded, according to a study reported on in The Local Europe AB, that journalists “put moral pressure on citizens to contribute to the cause of supporting refugees” and treated citizens who were critical of government open door policies as “suspect” and “potentially racist.” Journalists were criticized in the study for echoing “the slogans of the political elite” and not reporting honestly on the reasons underlying the concerns of citizens and some experts. In short, Germany has experienced the same type of condescending media bias so prevalent in the United States.

Despite the press bias, the German people have demonstrated that they do not like the direction their country has been taking. Indeed, the parliamentary election success of the Alternative for Germany party is directly attributable to Chancellor Merkel’s “open door” refugee policy that opened the door to jihadist terrorists. As a result, her party failed to secure an outright majority, forcing it into negotiations to form a coalition government. Although unrepentant for her colossal blunder in allowing more than one million migrants into Germany in 2015, Chancellor Merkel has bowed to political reality. She agreed to a cap of 200,000 on the number of refugees Germany continues to accept each year in order to secure the support of Bavaria’s Christian Social Union as a coalition partner. She may have problems persuading another potential coalition partner, the Greens, to go along with such a cap, however. “When you throw together asylum seekers, refugee contingents, resettlement programs and family members joining refugees all in one pot, and then set a limit of 200,000, one group will be thrown under the bus,” said Simone Peter, a co-leader of the Greens.

There is a global contest underway between two economic and political models. One model is liberty and democracy, and the other is state control and totalitarianism. Fortunately (and hopefully not too late), U.S. policymakers have awakened to the nature of the current challenge.

During an October 18 speech about the U.S-India relationship, secretary of state Rex Tillerson sought to build ties with Asian democracies. He argued that “[t]he emerging Delhi-Washington strategic partnership stands upon a shared commitment upholding the rule of law, freedom of navigation, universal values, and free trade” and criticized China’s “predatory economics.”

According to Tillerson, the Chinese government has been lending money to developing countries in a way that gives their victims debt, but not jobs, and sometimes ends up with their assets being owned by China. Specifically, Tillerson said:

We have watched the activities and actions of others in the region, in particular China, and the financing mechanisms it brings to many of these countries [in the Indo-Pacific region] which result in saddling them with enormous levels of debt. They don’t often create the jobs, which infrastructure projects should be tremendous job creators in these economies, but too often, foreign workers are brought in to execute these infrastructure projects. Financing is structured in a way that makes it very difficult for them to obtain future financing, and oftentimes has very subtle triggers in the financing that results in financial default and the conversion of debt to equity.

China’s predatory policies in the Third World are of a piece with its approach to the United States. Like a pusher seeking to entrap an addict, China provides cheap loans and subsidized products in order to achieve long-term objectives, expand its power, and create dependency.

Chinese predatory economics has had similar negative effects upon the United States.

Loans. China has been lending the proceeds of its trade surplus to the U.S. in order to keep the dollar-yuan exchange rate from falling to a trade-balancing level.
Debt. As a result of these loans to the United States, the U.S. owes the Chinese government trillions of dollars. The exact amount is not known, since China lends us money using foreign banks as intermediaries, taking advantage of a tax loophole that Congress should close.
Jobs. American manufacturing workers produce about $120,000’s worth of product each. Thus, if our $320-billion trade deficit with China were balanced, American workers would gain about 2.7 million productive jobs.
Assets. China has been using the proceeds of its trade surpluses with the U.S. to buy up U.S. assets and acquire U.S. technology – literally buying our comparative advantage. We will be paying dividends, rents, and interest to China for generations.
Power. China has displaced or soon will displace (depending upon your metric) the U.S. as the world’s largest economy.

A centerpiece of China’s predatory economic policy toward the United States is an enormous trade imbalance. The graph below shows the U.S. trade deficit in goods and services with China for the year ending with the quarter specified:

Although no one is recommending the horrors of mass-expulsions, little attention has been paid to Rohingya ties to international Islamic terrorism.

The Muslim world’s condemnation of Myanmar should give the West pause before it joins in the widespread criticism of Myanmar. Al-Qaeda’s call “upon all Mujahidin in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and the Philippines to set out for Burma to help their Muslim brothers” is accompanied with a threat that the Myanmar government “shall be made to taste what our Muslim brothers have tasted.”

In addition to fighting atrocities against innocent people, it is critical to protect the Free World, which, until the Rohingya crisis, Myanmar had made great progress toward joining.

Although the media has extensively covered the Burmese Army’s expulsion of Muslim Rohingya people from Rakhine Province in Myanmar — and although no one is recommending the horrors of mass expulsions — little attention has been paid to Rohingya ties to international Islamic terrorism.

Aided by foreign terrorist networks in Pakistan and support from Rohingya exiles in Arab Gulf States, Myanmar’s Islamists and their foreign backers ultimately may want to establish a sharia state in Rakhine.

Approximately 1.1 million Rohingya live in Rakhine, a coastal province in Myanmar (Burma). Almost all are Muslim; their language closely resembles Bengali, the tongue of Bangladesh, to their north. Some Rohingya have lived in Rakhine since the 15th century. Most, however, trace their residency in Myanmar to the late 19th century, as descendants of Muslim Bengalis who were moved there by British colonial decree.

On August 25, 2017, the Burmese military launched what human rights organizations have called an “ethnic cleansing” campaign — something Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi has denied — against Rohingya Muslims in northern Rakhine, a week after Muslim rebels attacked a military base, police barracks, and border guard posts, killing at least 71 people. The attackers were members of the Islamist Arakan Rohingya Salvation Group (ARSA). Some of these operatives likely received training in terrorist camps in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Myanmar’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has denied allegations that the country’s security forces launched an “ethnic cleansing” campaign. Pictured: Then U.S. President Barack Obama with Aung San Suu Kyi, in Rangoon, Myanmar, on November 14, 2014. (Image source: U.S. State Department)

According to the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, the Rohingya diaspora in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan is also providing financial assistance to their religious cousins in Myanmar. Additionally, many of the more than 50,000 Rohingya émigrés in the United Arab Emirates send back money to their ethnic relations in Myanmar. The Emir of Sharjah in the UAE, Sultan bin Muhammad al-Qasimi, also financially supports Myanmar’s Rohingya.

Arab Gulf States, too, grant sanctuary to Islamists from the ethnic Rohingya diaspora. For instance, Ata Ullah, ARSA’s founder, was born to Rohingya exiles in Karachi, Pakistan, before immigrating to Saudi Arabia. There, he created ARSA in 2012, after a series of clashes between the Rohingya and government security forces in Myanmar. But this tension between Rohingya and ethnic Burmese did not originate in contemporary times.

This animosity dates to 1886, when what is today’s Rakhine State was detached from the rest of Burmese territory and incorporated into the British Crown Colony of India. This was the price Britain exacted from Burma after losing two wars against the British Empire.

After the integration of northernmost Burma into India, the British colonial government organized a mass migration of Muslims from the Bengali-dominated region of the sub-continent (today’s Bangladesh) to what is now Myanmar’s Rakhine State. Britain’s decision greatly offended the Burmese, as Myanmar (Burma) had been an overwhelmingly Buddhist state. The migration sparked immediate inter-religious tensions, and subsequent periods of religious warfare.

It’s a topsy-turvy world when an elected leader enforcing a democratic constitution gets accused of staging a coup, but then that’s Catalonia this month. Separatists are furious that Spanish Prime Minister Rajoy might suspend autonomous government and force a new election to resolve a separatist crisis in the northeastern region.

Separatists, led by regional President Carles Puigdemont, claim Catalonia voted for independence from Spain in a referendum this month. No such thing happened. A majority of the minority of Catalans who participated in a publicity stunt dressed up as an election said they want to secede. A constitutional court had ruled the exercise illegal before it happened. It was an attempt at mob rule.

Now Mr. Rajoy wants to protect the rights of the non-secessionist majority. The national Senate will vote Friday on Mr. Rajoy’s plan to invoke a constitutional clause suspending autonomous local government until new elections for a regional parliament can be held, perhaps in six months. In the interim, Madrid would take over responsibility for policing, taxation and most public administration.

It’s a draconian step, but Mr. Rajoy has little choice. The regional government abandoned its obligation to uphold Spain’s constitution when it authorized the phony vote. Mr. Puigdemont claims to want negotiations between Barcelona and Madrid, but he won’t say what he wants to negotiate. He has refused even to say whether he is declaring independence.

Mr. Rajoy owes it to loyal Catalans to call time on this farce. Though he may need to deploy a heavy police presence to quell violent protests, the focus should be on keeping streets safe, schools open and other public services functioning while preparing quickly for regional elections. The courts will weigh sedition prosecutions against individual Catalan officials in some cases. Two local police officials are under investigation for their failures to stop the illegal vote, charges they deny. Madrid should be judicious but not shy about enforcing the laws.

There is nothing undemocratic about this. A duly elected national leader is trying to afford all citizens the protection of the national constitution against a minority of rabble-rousers. The biggest threat to Spain—and to Europe—would be to set a precedent for allowing fake votes to tear real countries apart.

The virtue of Mr. Rajoy’s approach is that it would put Catalan voters firmly back in control, through a legal election. Those voters say they want to remain within Spain but they keep electing separatist local officials, presumably as a protest and on the assumption Madrid would hold the country together anyway. A new ballot offers Catalans a path out of this crisis by taking political responsibility for the union.

Europe has an imperial problem. Put simply, the European Union, formed as a political union to prevent war on the continent, is slowly morphing into a liberal utopian empire, undermining Westphalian nation-states with its open migration policy and fiscal meddling. Inevitably, this has resulted in the rise of pre-Westphalian ethno-nationalist sentiments. The imperial character of the EU has long term ramifications for great maritime powers such as the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as for revanchist land powers like Russia. Put simply, the EU imperium, which started as a prospective solution to the problems of a continent ravaged by centuries of war, is now turning out to be the cause of new and predictable troubles.

As Catalonia stands on the brink of secession from Spain after a controversial referendum, with Spain poised to send in troops to restore “constitutional order,” and terrorism and migration on mass scale result in ethno-nationalist backlashes, their is an increasing and urgent need in for policymakers in the United States and the United Kingdom, to engage in a serious reflection upon and reassessment of the character of EU.

The Forces of Ethno-Nationalism

Historically, Europe was never united, either culturally, linguistically, or tribally. The only way Europe was unified, in temporal phases, was through imperium. But those forced attempts at imperium also resulted in nationalist reaction and inevitable backlash. The Romans fell prey to imperial overstretch, which resulted in differing ethnic tribes waging war against the central authority and, eventually, the dissolution of the Roman empire. From Bonaparte to the Habsburgs, Kaiser to Hitler, all of them tried to dominate continental Europe through sheer strength of arms. Similarly, during the last days of the Cold War, contrary to what liberal historians preached for the last quarter century, it was not liberalism that saw off the Soviet empire, but conservative nationalism in Eastern Europe against Soviet imperium. There’s a reason some countries like Poland are skeptical of a European superstate run from Brussels and similar attempts at social engineering through forced migration and settlements. They hear echoes of the past in this attempt to create a new and benign EU-SSR.

The European Union, however, seemed a necessary idea when it started, after years of conflict ravaging the continent. As Churchill wrote, the aim of British foreign policy for 500 years has been to see that there’s no single dominating hegemony or empire in Europe. After the fall of the British empire, the United States carried on the same balancing principle, which resulted in the United States confronting the Soviet Union. The geopolitical logic behind that was simple. Any single hegemon that controls the entire European landmass is bound to be powerful enough, militarily and economically, to dominate other great powers across the globe.