RUTHFULLY YOURS

BRUSSELS—Belgian officials opened a terror investigation Friday after a man attacked soldiers in central Brussels with a knife shouting “Allahu akbar,” before being shot dead.

Authorities said Saturday the man was carrying two copies of the Quran and a replica firearm when he approached three soldiers on patrol from behind wielding a knife.

The soldiers shot the man, who died later of the wounds, prosecutors said. Two of the soldiers were lightly wounded. Police searched the man’s home overnight.

Belgium’s Crisis Center, which coordinates the federal terror response, said late Friday that the attack was being treated as a terrorist incident and the investigation would be taken over by federal prosecutors.

Belgian officials said that while the assailant was known to authorities for an alleged assault in February he had no previously known terrorist ties. The man wasn’t identified, but federal prosecutors said he was born in 1987 and was a Belgian national of Somali origin. He moved to Belgium in 2004 and became a citizen in 2015.

Investigators are trying to learn if the man had connections to terror groups that went undetected by authorities.

Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel said in a tweet Friday that security forces would remain attentive. Offering support for the military, he said he was following the situation closely with the Crisis Center.

Since the March 2016 terrorist attacks in Brussels there have been a number of knife attacks on police in Belgium. Some, like an attack on a police officer in Charleroi, Belgium, have been treated as a terrorist attack, while others haven’t.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was attacked by the media for not jumping on the bandwagon and condemning US President Donald Trump for his response to the far-right and far-left rioters in Charlottesville earlier this month. It may be that he held his tongue because he saw nothing to gain from attacking a friendly president. But it is also reasonable to assume that Netanyahu held his tongue because he empathizes with Trump. More than any leader in the world, Netanyahu understands what Trump is going through. He’s been there himself – and in many ways, is still there. Netanyahu has never enjoyed a day in office when Israel’s unelected elites weren’t at war with him. http://carolineglick.com/netanyahus-empathy-for-trump/

From a comparative perspective, Netanyahu’s experiences in his first term in office, from 1996 until 1999, are most similar to Trump’s current position. His 1996 victory over incumbent prime minister Shimon Peres shocked the political class no less than the American political class was stunned by Trump’s victory. And this makes sense. The historical context of Israel’s 1996 election and the US elections last year were strikingly similar.

In 1992, Israel’s elites, the doves who controlled all aspects of the governing apparatuses, including the security services, universities, government bureaucracies, state prosecution, Supreme Court, media and entertainment industry, were seized with collective euphoria when the Labor Party under the leadership of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres won Israel’s Left its first clear-cut political victory since 1974. Rabin and Peres proceeded to form the most dovish governing coalition in Israel’s history.

Then in 1993, after secret negotiations in Oslo, they shocked the public with the announcement that they had decided to cut a deal with Israel’s arch enemy, the PLO, a terrorist organization pledged to Israel’s destruction.

The elites, who fancied themselves the guardians of Israel’s democracy, had no problem with the fact that the most radical policy ever adopted by any government, one fraught with dangers for the nation and the state, was embarked upon with no public debate or deliberation.

To the contrary, they spent the next three years dancing around their campfire celebrating the imminent realization of their greatest dream. Israel would no longer live by its sword. It would be able to join a new, post-national world. In exchange for Jerusalem and a few other things that no one cared about, other than some fanatical religious people, Israel could join the Arab League or the European Union or both.

From 1993 through 1996, and particularly in the aftermath of Rabin’s assassination in November 1995, the media, the courts and every other aspect of Israel’s elite treated the fellow Israelis who reject- ed their positions as the moral and qualitative equivalent of terrorists. Like the murderers of innocents, these law-abiding Israelis were “enemies of peace.”

As for terrorism, the Oslo process ushered in not an era of peace, but an era of unprecedented violence. The first time Israelis were beset by suicide bombers in their midst was in April 1994, when the euphoria over the coming peace was at its height.

The 1996 election was the first opportunity the public had to vote on the Oslo process. Then, in spite of Rabin’s assassination and the beautiful ceremonies on the White House lawns with balloons and children holding flowers, the people of Israel said no thank you. We are Zionists, not post-Zionists. We don’t like to get blown to smithereens on buses, and we don’t appreciate being told that victims of terrorism are victims of peace.

Trump likewise replaced the most radical president the US has ever known. Throughout Barack Obama’s eight years in office, despite his failure to restore America’s economic prosperity or secure its interests abroad, Obama enjoyed the sycophantic support of the media, whose leading lights worshiped him and made no bones about it.

In one memorable exchange after Obama’s June 2009 speech in Cairo, where he presented the US as the moral equivalent of its enemies, Newsweek editor Evan Thomas told MSNBC host Chris Mitchell that Obama was “kind of God.”

Obama’s job, Thomas explained, was not merely to lead the US as his predecessor Ronald Reagan had done. Obama was above “provincial nationalism.” His job was to teach morality to humanity.

In Thomas’s words, “He’s going to bring all different sides together… He’s all about ‘let us reason together’… He’s the teacher. He is going to say, ‘Now, children, stop fighting and quarreling with each other.’ And he has a kind of a moral authority that he – he can – he can do that.”

The American Left’s adoration of Obama was so all-encompassing, and its control of the mainstream US media so extensive, that it never occurred to its members that the public disagreed with them. They were certain that Hillary Clinton, Obama’s chosen successor, would win.

In 1996, the Israeli elite greeted Netanyahu’s victory with shock and grief. The “good, enlightened” Israel they thought would rule forever had just been defeated by the unwashed mob. Peres summed up the results by telling reporters that “the Israelis” voted for him. And “the Jews” voted for Netanyahu. His followers shook their heads in mildly antisemitic disgust.

Their mourning quickly was replaced by a spasm of hatred for Netanyahu and his supporters that hasn’t disappeared even now, 21 years later.

The media’s war against Netanyahu began immediately. It was unrelenting and more often than not unhinged. So it was that two weeks after his victory, Jerusalem’s Kol Ha’ir weekly published a cover story titled, “Who are you, John Jay Sullivan?” The report alleged that Netanyahu was a CIA spy who went by the alias “John Jay Sullivan.” It took all of five minutes to take the air out of that preposterous balloon, but the media didn’t care – and it was all downhill from there.

Netanyahu, the media insisted, was a crook. He incited Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. He may even have been the assassin. His wife, Sara, was mean to nannies. She was a bad mother. She was ill-mannered in general and probably crazy.

Any prominent politician or luminary who entered Netanyahu’s orbit was demonized and libeled. Authors who dared to have dinner with him, journalists who dared to write anything half- way supportive of him, were effectively excommunicated from their professional cliques.

His advisers and cabinet ministers found them- selves under criminal investigation over nothing, and so did Netanyahu and his wife.

Every action his government took that could in any way be interpreted as a step toward weakening the elite’s control of the country brought bombastic headlines day after day, accusing Netanyahu of seeking to undermine the rule of law.

Every disgruntled cabinet minister, every slight- ed aide who publicly criticized Netanyahu, was given instant celebrity and star-for-a-news-cycle status.

The dovish commanders of the IDF and the Shin Bet were openly disloyal to Netanyahu in every – thing relating to the peace process with the PLO. Every attempt Netanyahu made to abandon his predecessors’ blind and misplaced faith in PLO chief Yasser Arafat was immediately leaked to the media. “Security sources” blamed Netanyahu for terrorist attacks.

When the Mossad bungled the assassination of Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal in Amman, it was Netanyahu’s fault. When Arafat used Netanyahu’s authorization of the opening of a new entrance to the Western Wall tunnels to unleash a terrorist offensive against Israel that left 15 Israelis dead in a week, then-Shin Bet director Ami Ayalon blamed Netanyahu at a live press conference.

The purpose of the leaks and the misdirection was to box Netanyahu in with no option other than to continue his predecessors’ failed policy of appeasing and empowering Palestinian terrorists.

Just as the notion that Netanyahu – the man who rejected their post-Zionist euphoria and insisted that there would be no new Middle East – had beat- en their savior Peres blew the Israeli elites’ minds to bits, so the US elite has still refused to come to terms with the fact that Donald Trump, the man they view as nothing more than a nouveau riche vulgarian, beat the anointed successor of their idol Obama.

So they hate him and cannot stop demonizing him. Whether it’s Obama’s director of national intelligence James Clapper, who insisted that the Muslim Brotherhood is a “largely secular organization,” saying that Trump is insane, or Bob Costa from CNN calling him a white supremacist and antisemite, there is no lunatic depth the American Left will not plumb to attack, demonize and dehumanize Trump and his supporters.

So how is a leader to respond to this sort of onslaught? Netanyahu for his part gave up fighting at some point in his first term. Faced with the implacable animosity of an empowered elite that boxed him in at every turn, Netanyahu decided to try to give them what they wanted in the hope of surviving in office.

He made a deal with Arafat and Bill Clinton at Wye Plantation. He handed Hebron over to PLO control. He surrendered government control over selection of the attorney-general to a committee controlled by the elites and so sank Israeli democracy into the hole it is still in.

Since 1997, unelected lawyers unaccountable to elected officials have the power to dismantle democratically elected governments, essentially at will.

Netanyahu got nothing for his efforts. The media, prosecution, state bureaucracy and security services continued to wage political war against him until, with the help of the Clinton administration, they overthrew his government in 1999 and brought Ehud Barak to power. Barak presided over a government so radical that the Rabin-Peres government looked hawkish in comparison.

Before Israel could move past its elites, the fruits of their radical policies first had to be ingested. In the event, the fruits of those policies were 1,500 Israelis killed in the Palestinian terrorist war and the emergence of strategic threats and repeated wars from post-withdrawal Gaza and Lebanon.

Today it is clear that Trump is wrestling with how to proceed in governing, as the American elites openly seek his political and even personal destruction. One day he tacks to the establishment in the hopes of appeasing those who hate him, and the next day he embraces his supporters and repeats his campaign pledges to “drain the swamp.”

The lessons of Netanyahu’s first term – and to a degree, his subsequent terms in office as well – are clear enough and Trump would do well to apply them.

You cannot appease people who want to destroy you. And you cannot succeed by embracing the failed policies of your predecessors that you were elected to roll back. The elites who reject you will never embrace you. The only way to govern successfully when you are under relentless assault is to empower your supporters and keep faith with them.

Russia’s ambassador to Sudan was found floating dead in a swimming pool in his Khartoum home on Wednesday.

Mirgayas Shirinskiy, 63, “was found in his residence with evidence of an acute heart attack,” Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian foreign ministry,told BBC on Thursday.

While the cause of death is initially being considered natural, since Shirinskiysuffered from high blood pressure, seven Russian ambassadors have died in mysterious ways over the last two years.

Two of them died from heart attacks, and Shirinsky would be the third.

Most notable was former Russian ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, who died of a heart attack in February in New York. The US State Department asked the New York City medical examiner’s office to not release his autopsy.

Roman Skrynikov, the former Russian ambassador to Kazakhstan, also died of an apparent heart attack in December 2016.

Five other prominent Russians, besides the three ambassadors, have also died of apparent heart attacks in the last 14 years, Buzzfeed News and USA Today previously reported, and Russia is possibly behind dozens of other mysterious deaths outside its borders in that time.

What’s concerning here is that Russia, according to Richard Walton, Scotland Yard’s former counter-terror commander, is skilled at “disguising murder” by using biological or chemical agents that leave no trace.

Like Alexander Perepilichnyy, a former Russian financier who was about to shed light on a $230 million money laundering operation perpretated by the Russian mafia and government officials.

His 2012 death in Great Britain has initially ruled a heart attack by the police, but an investigator later found trace amounts of Himalayan gelsemium elegans plant in his system, which can cause cardiac arrest.

Still, natural causes could easily be the cause in any number of these cases, given Russia’s demographics.

“There are simply a lot of really weird coincidences in this world,” Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, an intelligence expert at the Harvard Kennedy School, told the Washington Post.

“That said, I think there’s a story here that deserves deeper investigation,” Mowatt-Larssen told the Post, adding that while “eliminating a diplomat is rare … Putin might love the fact that his diplomats are fearful of him — he might find that quite convenient.”

Things are unfolding rapidly in Syria as relentless offensives, undertaken by the joint might of Iran, Russia and Hezbollah against a plethora of rival Sunni militias, have taken their toll on the rebels. Analysts are fearful that the pending fall of Islamic State, which seems likely, will create a vacuum that the Islamic Republic will rush to fill. This coupled with the recent revelation that the United States terminated a covert military aid program to rebels seeking to topple Assad, virtually ensures that Iran will remain a dominant power in Syria. A troubling consequence of this development is that Iran will have essentially succeeded in creating a land bridge of sorts that travels through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea, a prospect that is inimical to both U.S and Israeli interests.

Israel is cognizant of the fact that as a result of the leadership vacuum created by the Obama administration, Moscow now pulls the strings in Syria. It also understands that the U.S. decision to terminate funding for certain Syrian rebel groups signals that the U.S. has limited its immediate aims in Syria to toppling the Islamic State. Malign Iranian and Hezbollah influences appear to have become secondary concerns. For good reason, Israel views Iran’s entrenchment in Syria as a direct strategic threat and regional challenge. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his concerns to Vladimir Putin in a meeting between the two leaders which took place on Wednesday in Sochi. Russia’s ambassador to Israel, Alexander Petrovich Shein, noted that Russia would take Israeli interests into consideration when dealing with Syria.

While Iran’s cancerous spread of its hegemony is disconcerting, equally alarming is its continued violation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also informally known as the Iran deal. The disastrous and dangerous Iran deal, mendaciously orchestrated by the Obama administration and sold to the American public through half-truths, cynical exploitation of the media and use of “echo chambers,” poses serious challenges to the Trump administration.

Twice since the signing of the accord, Iran has exceeded the JCPOA’s prescribed limitations on heavy water production, and according to German intelligence, Iran continues to utilize front companies in efforts to purchase high-tech equipment for use in nuclear weapon and ballistic missile development. Moreover, Iran’s secretive Parchin facility, where the Islamic Republic conducts its most secretive nuclear experiments, continues to remain off limits to international inspectors. But Iranian malfeasance does not end there.

According to a report compiled by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Iran, in flagrant violation of the JCPOA, has been using commercial airliners to transport Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen and proxy militias to various Mideast hotspots including Syria. Photos obtained by the FDD, and forwarded to congressional leaders show militia fighters affiliated with the Fatemiyoun Brigade, an Afghan Shiite militia, seated in an Iranian commercial airliner bound for Syria. The aircraft belongs to Iran Air, a purported Iranian civilian airliner, and its logo is clearly visible in the photo.

The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, acting under its “Early Warning and Urgent Action Procedures,” intervened in the ongoing controversy over the deadly violence in Charlottesville and the Trump administration’s response. The urgent warning procedure is supposed to short circuit the normal periodic country human rights review process, which takes place about every five years. It is to be invoked only in those situations that could “spiral into terrible events” and require immediate action, according to Anastasia Crickley, chair of the committee, which monitors implementation of the global convention on prohibiting racial discrimination.

The early warning procedure has been used only 20 times since 2003. It was invoked two times regarding Sudan in 2004 and 2005 without any specific condemnation of the Sudanese leaders for their racist incitements and ethnic cleaning. It was used twice to condemn a law in Israel, the UN’s perennial punching bag, which restricted marriage between an Israeli citizen and a person residing in the West Bank or Gaza. The procedure was used once before in 2006 regarding the United States when the committee criticized the U.S. government for not respecting the alleged rights of an Indian tribe. Moral equivalence was the UN committee’s calling card then and it remains so today.

Indeed, the UN committee was so anxious to pillory the Trump administration that it decided to lump the United States together with Burundi, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Kyrgyzstan and Nigeria as the only UN member states, out of a total of 193 states, meriting its “early warning” notice during the last decade.

“We are alarmed by the racist demonstrations, with overtly racist slogans, chants and salutes by white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan, promoting white supremacy and inciting racial discrimination and hatred,” said Ms. Crickley. “We call on the US Government to investigate thoroughly the phenomenon of racial discrimination targeting, in particular, people of African descent, ethnic or ethno-religious minorities, and migrants,” she added.

The UN committee demanded that the “highest level politicians and officers” of the United States government “unequivocally and unconditionally reject and condemn racist hate speech and racist crimes in Charlottesville and throughout the country.” While not mentioning President Trump by name, he was the committee’s obvious target of criticism for not going far enough in “unequivocally condemning” the events in Charlottesville, as Ms. Crickley herself declared.

The UN committee also recommended that there be some constraints on the rights of free speech and assembly so that they are not abused to promote “racist hate speech” or used to destroy the rights of others to “equality and non-discrimination.” The committee chair, Ms. Crickley, elaborated on this point in remarks quoted by the New York Times.

“We believe it is time that the United States considered these matters and considered seriously that balance, between freedom of expression and hate speech,” Ms. Crickley said. “Whether freedom to publicly and collectively express neo-Nazi views and to chant racist hate speech in effect constitutes freedom of expression — I think that’s a question that needs to be seriously addressed in the U.S.A.”

Examining statistics from France, Britain, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Russia, Enstad points out that one of these seven countries “clearly stands out with a very low number” of anti-Semitic incidents despite its “relatively large Jewish population…”

Absurdly, whenever a perpetrator draws a swastika, the Swedish government automatically considers it a “right-wing” act.

Enstad concludes that right-wingers, in all four of the major Western European countries in his study, “constitute a clear minority of perpetrators.” Indeed, “in France, Sweden and the UK (but not in Germany) the perpetrator was perceived to be left-wing more often than right-wing.”

To some of us, it is hardly a secret that anti-Semitic violence is on the rise in Europe, or that the chief perpetrators are Muslims. But many politicians and news media have been so indefatigable in their efforts to obscure this uncomfortable fact that one is always grateful for official — or, at least, semi-official — confirmation of what everyone already knows.

It is a pleasure, then, to report that a new study, Antisemitic Violence in Europe, 2005-2015 — written by Johannes Due Enstad of the Oslo-based Center for Studies of the Holocaust and the University of Oslo, and jointly published by both institutions — is refreshingly, even startlingly, honest about its subject. Enstad notes that while anti-Semitic violence has declined in the U.S. since 1994, it has been on the rise worldwide. That, of course, includes Europe — most of it, anyway.

Examining statistics from France, Britain, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Russia, Enstad points out that one of these seven countries “clearly stands out with a very low number” of anti-Semitic incidents despite its “relatively large Jewish population”; the country in question, he adds, “is also the only case in which there is little to indicate that Jews avoid displaying their identity in public.” In addition, it is the only one of the six countries in which the majority of perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence are not Muslims. Which country is Enstad referring to? Russia.

That Russia is relatively free of anti-Semitic violence may sound surprising to anyone familiar with the words Cossack and refusenik, but it actually makes sense. Would-be Jew-bashers in Russia know that if they’re arrested for committing acts of violence, the consequences won’t be pretty. In western Europe, by contrast, the courts are lenient, the terms of confinement short, and the prisons extremely comfortable. And while Muslims know that they are a protected class in Western Europe, able to commit all kinds of transgressions with near-impunity, that is far from being the case in Putin’s Russia.

If Muslims do not dominate the anti-Semitic crime statistics in Russia, who does? The answer: right-wing extremists. Although politicians and the media in Western Europe like to talk as if Jews (and others) in their countries are principally endangered by the far-right, Russia is, in fact, the only one of the seven countries in Enstad’s study in which that group does play a significant role in anti-Semitic acts.

What about the other countries? Denmark has few Jews, and Norway even fewer, so these two countries play a relatively minor role in Enstad’s study. That leaves Germany, Britain, France, and Sweden. Nearly 10% of French Jews say they have been physically attacked for being Jewish during the past five years; in Germany and Sweden the figure is about 7.5%, in Britain nearly 5%. Asked how often they “avoid visiting Jewish events or sites” for fear of danger, 7.9% of Jews in Sweden say they do so frequently, followed by their coreligionists in France, Germany, and Britain (where the number is only 1.2%). Asked if they “avoid wearing, carrying or displaying things” in public that would identify them as Jews, 60% of Swedish Jews say they do so “all the time” or “frequently,” with, again, France, Germany, and Britain following in that order.

Almost 50% of French Jews have considered emigrating because they feel imperiled in their own country; for Germany the figure is 25%, and for Sweden and Britain it is just under 20%.

Enstad weighs official statistics from all of the countries under examination, but finds that while those from most of the countries essentially jibe with the results of independent studies, those published by both Germany and Sweden are fishy, in some cases betraying an apparent effort by officials to massage the numbers to avoid certain uncomfortable facts. While an independent survey, for example, concludes that right-wing extremists make up a small minority of perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence in Germany, German police statistics blame most such violence on just right-wingers. Enstad, in his polite way, suggests that this discrepancy is the result of “a categorisation problem.” Could it be possible, Enstad wonders, that “German police considers antisemitism a right-wing type of ideology and thus categorises most anti-Semitic attacks as right-wing, regardless of the perpetrator’s ethnic or religious background?” Another problem is that German officials categorize some incidents — including the fire-bombing of a synagogue — as anti-Israeli, not anti-Semitic.

Earlier this year, a 7-year-old girl from Minnesota entered an examination room at a clinic just outside of Detroit. Thinking this was a regular visit, she allowed the doctor to remove her pants and underwear and place her on the examination table. Suddenly, while two women in the clinic held her hands, the physician spread her legs and cut her clitoris. Two months later she told investigators the pain ran down to her ankles and she could barely walk.

In April Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, who allegedly performed the procedure, was charged with conspiracy to commit female genital mutilation. Dr. Fakhruddin Attar, the owner of the since-closed clinic, was also charged. Investigators suspect Ms. Nagarwala may be involved in 100 other cases, and the trial starts in October. This marks the first time a female genital mutilation case is going to federal court. The lawyers for the Michigan physician will argue the girl “underwent a benign religious procedure.” This is a dangerous hypocrisy with far-reaching consequences.

Female genital mutilation has been illegal in the U.S. since 1996. Yet a 2012 study in the journal Public Health Reports estimates that more than 500,000 girls in the U.S. have undergone the procedure or are at risk. These girls live all over the country, with larger concentrations in California, New York and Minnesota. Most go through this process in secret, and only 25 states have laws that criminalize the procedure. In Maine, the American Civil Liberties Union has opposed a bill to do so on the ground that “the risk of mutilation isn’t worth expanding Maine’s criminal code.”

Female genital mutilation, most often performed on girls under 13, has serious medical and psychological repercussions. The cutting ranges from a clitoridectomy, partial to total removal of the clitoris, to infibulation, removal of all the external genitalia. The latter is so severe that “healing” often involves binding the girl from ankle to waist until the scar tissue closes. This kind of cutting leaves an opening the width of a pencil for urination, menstruation, sex and childbirth.

In 2015 a U.N. official estimated that 20% of parents take their daughters to physicians but the rest use improvised sharp objects. This spring, an Ethiopian man in Georgia was deported for performing female genital mutilation with a pair of scissors on his 2-year-old daughter. Parents fearing prosecution sometimes take their girls out of the country for “vacation cutting.” A report from Unicef suggests at least 200 million girls and women alive today, in 30 countries, have undergone some form of it. (The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, of which I am vice chairwoman, does not take an official position on female genital mutilation.)

Whether this practice is religious or cultural is debatable. In the Michigan case, the victims belong to an Indian Shiite Muslim sect called the Dawoodi Bohra, whose members refer to the clitoris as a sinful lump of flesh. The cutting, khatna, is considered a religious observance to prevent girls from becoming promiscuous. Yet female genital mutilation predates Christianity and Islam. No religious text requires it. Many imams have issued fatwas against the practice and Christian leaders like Pope Francis have denounced it.

The physician’s lawyers announced they will craft a religious-freedom defense. And they may be astute enough to get away with it. The all-star team includes constitutional law scholar and O.J. Simpson lawyer Alan Dershowitz, along with Mayer Morganroth, who represented assisted-suicide champion Dr. Jack Kevorkian for more than 15 years. They are funded by an international Muslim organization called Dawat-e-Hadiyah. CONTINUE AT SITE

Authorities in the Netherlands foiled an apparent Muslim terrorist plot to attack a concert venue in Rotterdam while an American rock band with an Islamic-sounding name was performing there.

Authorities shut down the scheduled performance by Los Angeles act Allah-Las at a 1,000-person capacity club called Maassilo. The band’s name has attracted some unwanted attention in the Muslim world. Band members say they selected the name Allah, Arabic for the Muslim deity, because they wanted something that sounded “holy.” Lead singer Miles Michaud said: “We get emails from Muslims, here in the U.S. and around the world, saying they’re offended, but that absolutely wasn’t our intention.”

After being tipped off by Spanish police, on Wednesday Rotterdam police and counter-terrorism personnel located a van near the Maassilo venue bearing Spanish license plates and that reportedly contained “gas bottles.” The driver, a Spaniard, was detained, after he was observed by police going to and from the concert site repeatedly.

About 120 gas canisters were found at the suspected lair of the terrorist cell that used a rented van to mow down pedestrians last week in Barcelona, Spain. The night before the August 17 vehicular attack, two members of the terrorist cell are thought to have inadvertently blown themselves up in Alcanar, Spain, possibly while preparing terror materiel. At least 15 people were killed and 130 injured in a series of attacks by the cell.

According to one British media outlet,

It has since been claimed that the 12-strong terror cell planned to rent three large lorry-type vehicles, pack them each full of butane gas and TATP plastic explosive, and drive them into busy hotspots in Barcelona city. One van was to be driven into the Sagrada Familia, another was to be detonated on Las Ramblas, and the third was going to be blown up in Barcelona’s port area.

Of course, the foreign-born Muslim mayor of Rotterdam urged people not to connect the dots.

Ahmed Aboutaleb told a presser that there was no proven connection between the Spanish tip and the van. “We should not draw conclusions too fast.”

The Islamist attacks against Spain, Finland and Germany unmasked the central problem: Pacifism will not protect Europe from either Islamization or terror attacks. Spain and Germany were, in fact, among the most reluctant countries in Europe to take an active role in the anti-ISIS coalition.

The Spanish press did not participate in a discussion of the Mohammed cartoons; no Spanish writer was accused of “Islamophobia” and no Spanish personality was put under police protection for “criticizing Islam”. It seemed as if Spain were not even interested in what was at stake in Islamist attacks on Europe’s very existence. No Spanish city made headlines for having multicultural ghettos, as in France and Britain. The attack in Barcelona should have ended this illusion. Terrorists do not need an excuse to butcher “infidels”.

The sad conclusion seems to be that that jihadists do not need a “reason” to kill Westerners. They attack equally France, which conducts military operations in the Middle East and North Africa, and countries such as Spain and Germany, which are neutral.

In 24 hours, Spain suffered two major terror attacks. A jihadist cell killed 15 people in Barcelona and the seaside resort of Cambrils. In the past year, Germany was the other European country hit hard by armed Islamists. First, a jihadist plowed a large truck through a Christmas market in central Berlin and murdered 12 people. Then a man wielding a knife murdered one person during an attack at a supermarket in Hamburg.

One day after the carnage in Barcelona, another terror attack took place in Turku, Finland. Two women were murdered in the market square of the country’s oldest city. Jihad — in Finland?

Jihad — in Finland? Terrorists do not need an excuse to butcher “infidels”. On August 18, an Islamic terrorist murdered two women in in Turku, Finland, during a stabbing spree in the city’s market square. Pictured: The Aura River in Turku. (Image source: Arthur Kho Caayon/Wikimedia Commons)

The Islamist attacks against Spain, Germany and Finland unmasked the central problem: Pacifism will not protect Europe from either Islamization or terror attacks. Spain and Germany were, in fact, among the most reluctant countries in Europe to take an active role in the anti-ISIS coalition.

John Vinocur of the Wall Street Journal recently defined Germany as “a country where the army and air force basically do not fight”. And Spanish politicians, since the 2004 train bombings, have not backed U.S. and NATO operations in countries such as Libya and Mali. Spain has been described as a “reluctant partner” in the anti-ISIS coalition.

Spain and Germany contribute less than others to NATO’s efforts. US President Donald Trump has made clear that the existence of NATO is contingent on members meeting their agreed-upon obligations of spending 2% of GDP on defense. Spain spends less than half of that — 0.91 percent. Germany does only a little better — at 1.19 percent. Finland never even joined NATO.

The surprise of the Finnish élite over the Turku attack was noted by The Financial Times:

“The Nordic country of 5m people does not feature prominently in jihadi invective against the west. Despite Finland’s armed forces having occasionally supported Nato missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the country’s longstanding nonaligned and peaceable military status has insulated it from most blowback from crises in the Middle East.”

The regional regime that is in the best position to threaten the drive for a free Kurdish state is that of Iran.

The country that has the most to lose in the event of an independent Kurdistan is Turkey, due to its huge population of ethnic Kurds, some of whom support the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has battled Turkey’s military for decades.

Ironically and thankfully, this combination of recently acquired combat experience on the part of the Kurds — plus widespread unrest in the region, still reeling from the “Arab Spring,” and the loss of Syrian and Iraqi sovereignty over swaths of their territories — improves the chance of a peaceful secession of Kurdistan from Iraq.

On September 25, 2017, the people of Iraqi Kurdistan will vote overwhelmingly in favor of establishing an independent nation-state. All ethnic groups, from Erbil to Zakho — and in other disputed areas claimed by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), such as Kirkuk, Sinjar and Makmoor — are eligible to take part in the referendum.

Although the result of the plebiscite will not be binding, it is likely to enhance existing secessionist sentiment among the populace and increase pressure on KRG officials.

The Kurds’ dream of a separate state is more than a century old. Yet geography and the imperialist designs of outside forces have conspired to render that goal a nightmare. Predictably, the most vehement opposition to the establishment of an independent state for the Kurds comes from the major powers with large Kurdish minorities — including Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. Apparently fearing that a Kurdish state would heighten irredentist sentiment among the Kurdish minorities within their territories to merge with a “Greater Kurdistan,” the governments of these countries view any form of Kurdish independence as a national-security threat. It is thus quite possible that one or more of the KRG’s neighbors will move militarily to prevent a Kurdish secession from Iraq.

The regional regime that is in the best position to threaten the drive for a Kurdish Free State is that of Iran. It already employs small pro-Iranian militias — the Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq and the Badr Organization — on KRG territory, operating under the rubric of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). Should Iran decide to take military action to prevent a Kurdish secession from Iraq, it will likely deploy the PMF to do so.

However, while the political and military asymmetry between Iraq’s Kurdish region and outside regional powers have seemed fixed, the historical inequality no longer exists. Currently, in fact, no state in the region easily could crush a determined effort by the Kurds to sever the artificial ties that have bound them, disadvantageously, to the Arab people of Mesopotamia.

This is chiefly due to the Peshmerga (“those who defy death”), Kurdish fighters who have become combat-hardened warriors; so much so that, with NATO air support in August 2014, they fought the Islamic State fighters to a standstill outside the gates of their regional capital, Erbil. In the event of a confrontation against the Peshmerga, even the pro-Iran PMF militias would pay a heavy price.

Greater Zab River near Erbil Iraqi Kurdistan. (Image source: jamesdale10/Wikimedia Commons)

Most of Iran’s Kurds live in the western part of the Islamic Republic, in Kordestan, West Azerbaijan and the Kermanshah provinces. Although regionally concentrated, they are not in a position to secede from Iran, due mainly to the efforts of Tehran’s intelligence services to suppress Kurdish irredentism by eviscerating rebel organizations. That could change, however, if Iraq’s Kurds are successful in seceding from the central government in Baghdad. For one thing, it might buoy Iran-based Kurdish groups — such as the Komela (Society of Revolutionary Toilers of Kordestan), the Kurd Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) and the Free Life Party of Kordestan (PJAK) — and spur them to rise up against the regime in Tehran.

The country that has the most to lose in the event of an independent Kurdistan is Turkey, due to its huge population of ethnic Kurds, some of whom support the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has battled Turkey’s military for decades.

Although Turkey is also the greatest obstacle to Kurdish independence, Turkish troops have become entangled in the Syrian civil war. They have also not recuperated from the failed coup attempt against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the summer of 2016, an act that resulted, among other things, in a massive purge within the Turkish military.

To allay Istanbul’s apprehensions that an independent Kurdish state on its borders might energize Turkey’s Kurds to seek autonomy, KRG political leaders are likely to forswear any assistance to the PKK, at least publicly. Kurdish spokesmen will probably also point out that Turks could benefit from a stable Kurdistan’s pledge to keep the oil flowing to Turkey from Kurdish fields around Kirkuk.