Glazov Gang: Halloween Horror – What “Allahu Akbar” Really Means.
What the establishment media doesn’t want you to know.
WATCH VIDEO: CLICK HERE.
Glazov Gang: Halloween Horror – What “Allahu Akbar” Really Means.
What the establishment media doesn’t want you to know.
WATCH VIDEO: CLICK HERE.
JOSEPH PUDER INTERVIEWS THE ADMIRAL
The debate on the future of the Iran nuclear deal has had two overriding views, that of President Trump who is inclined to scrap it, and that of his close advisors who caution against it. Admiral James “Ace” Lyons, Jr. has an altogether different approach: “a regime change in Iran.”
Admiral James “Ace” Lyons Jr. was the keynote speaker at a memorial service held at the Bergen County Court House in Hackensack, NJ, for the 241 U.S. Marine peacekeepers, killed in Beirut, Lebanon on October 23, 1983 by terrorists, on orders from the Ayatollahs regime in Tehran. Beirut native Joseph Hakim, President of the International Christian Union, is the founder of the annual memorial service.
Adm. (Ret.) Lyons, the 90-year old naval hero, though frail in body, used his booming voice to enumerate the opportunities and failures of various U.S. administrations to depose the radical Islamist regime that was responsible for the death of numerous U.S. Marines and other U.S. servicemen in Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere throughout the world. He also reminded the audience of 200, mostly U.S. Marine veterans, of his personal plans of action to eliminate the oppressive Iranian regime.
As an officer of the U.S. Navy for thirty-six years, most recently as Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, the largest single military command in the world, his initiatives contributed directly to the economic stability and humanitarian understanding in the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions, and brought the U.S. Navy Fleet back to China. He also served as Senior U.S. Military Representative to the United Nations. As deputy Chief of Naval Operations from 1983-1985, he was principal advisor on all Joint Chiefs of Staff matters, and was the father of the Navy Red Cell, an anti-terrorism group comprised of Navy Seals. He established this in response to the Marine Barracks bombing in Beirut.
Admiral Lyons was also Commander of the U.S. Second Fleet and Commander of the NATO Striking Fleet, which were the principle fleets for implementing of the U.S. Maritime Strategy. Admiral Lyons has represented U.S. interests with the military and civilian leadership worldwide – including China, Japan and other Pacific Rim countries, the European continent and Russia. As Fleet Commander, he managed a budget of over $5 billion and controlled a force of 250,000 personnel. Key assignments preceding Flag rank included Chief of Staff, Commander Carrier Group Four, Commanding Officer, USS Richmond K, Turner (CG-20), and Commanding Officer, USS Charles S. Sperry (DD697).
Admiral Lyons has been recognized for his distinguished service by the United States, and several foreign governments. He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, and has received post graduate degrees from the U.S. Naval War College, and U.S. National Defense University. Currently Admiral Lyons is President/CEO of LION Associates LLC, a premier global consultancy providing technical expertise in the areas of international marketing and trade, enterprise risk including anti-terrorism, site and port security, foreign policy and security affairs along with defense and commercial procurement.
This reporter used the occasion to interview Admiral Lyons, nicknamed “Ace”.
Joseph Puder (JP): You had a plan of action in 1979 that would have done away with the Ayatollahs regime in Tehran. Please describe how it was derailed and by whom?
Admiral James Lyons, Jr. (JLJ): When the Ayatollah goons took over our Tehran embassy in November, 1979, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) called me up (I was the Director of political Military Affairs for the JCS at the time) and asked me what options do we have. I said our only good option was to take Kharg Island, Iran’s main exporting oil depot up in the Persian Gulf. I was probably the only senior officer that had been there and I knew what we could do. My plan involved taking control of the main control facilities building with a detachment of U.S. Navy Seals. I was going to give the Iranians 24 hours to get out of our embassy and release our diplomats or they were going to have the biggest ashtray in the Middle East. President Carter rejected the plan when I was told National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski brought it up to him. I attributed this to the influence of the powerful Washington Iran lobby group.
One of the members of the Iran lobby group, Gary Sick, was the Iranian desk officer at the National Security Council (NSC). According to reports, Sick leaked a story to the Boston Globe that there would be no military response to the atrocious action taken against our U.S. Embassy in Tehran, which is sovereign U.S. territory. Unbelievable!
JP: What was the role of Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger in thwarting your plan of retaliation against the Iranian directed Shiite Amal terrorist bombing of the U.S. Marine Barracks in Beirut?
JLJ: We had proof positive the orders for the bombing came from Tehran based on a National Security Agency intercept of the Iranian Ambassador in Damascus reporting back to the Foreign Ministry in Tehran. The orders he gave to the terrorists’ leadership (which he previously received from Tehran) were to concentrate the attack on the Multi-National Force, and specifically to take “spectacular action” against the U.S. Marines. That intercept was dated September 27, 1983, almost 4 weeks before the bombing. At the time, I was the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, and did not see that message until two days after the bombing, on October 25, 1983. I had the GAO do an investigation on where was that message. I never got a satisfactory answer. I personally talked to Colonel Gerrity, the Commanding Officer of the U.S. Marines Peacekeeping Force, and he said he never saw it either, nor did the Carrier Task Group Commander of the U.S. Sixth Fleet.
There is not a Bible, Jewish or Christian, containing such incendiary commentary as populates page after page of ‘The Noble Qur’an’, which for four years has preached to the faithful in Canberra Airport’s prayer room. The ideology it promotes is violent jihad. It is a book to start a war.
The Saudis, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt recently cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and imposed sanctions, accusing the Qataris of supporting terrorism. The Saudis have demanded that Qatar close Al-Jazeera and cut all ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and the Islamic State. Qatar’s long-standing and well-known support for the Muslim Brotherhood, which aims to unify Muslim nations under an Islamic caliphate and has networks of supporters across the Middle East, is now perceived as a serious threat its neighbours.
This is the pot calling the kettle black, for Saudi Arabia itself has a long record of exporting Islamic radicalism. Among its most notable exports are millions of Korans in translation, which, through commentary (mainly in footnotes) and accompanying materials, incite Muslims to wage violent jihad to establish an Islamic state.
Among the Saudis’ exported Korans is an English-language edition, The Noble Qur’an, which can be found in mosques, prayer rooms and meeting places around the world. Anyone who applies to the Saudi embassy in Canberra will be sent a copy gratis.
The Noble Qur’an can be found in the musallah or prayer room of Canberra’s airport. What is apparently the same edition, with “AIRPORT MUSALLAH” written in black marker pen on the page ends, has been sitting there for the past four years, ever since the new airport was built. The Noble Qur’an is also publicly available in other “multi-faith” spaces that have been springing up in institutions across Australia in recent years, in universities, hospitals and other public places.
Canberra airport’s Noble Qur’an was printed by the order of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who ruled from 2005 to 2015. It includes the Arabic text, and, side-by-side, the English translation by Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din al-Hilali and Muhammad Muhsin Khan. There is also an endorsement by Shaikh Abdul-Aziz ibn Baz, Chief Justice of Saudi Arabia from 1993 to 1999, and a foreword by Shaikh Salih ibn Abdul-Aziz al-Shaikh, the current Saudi Minister for Islamic Affairs. After the Koranic text there are a hundred pages or so of appendices, and under the text there are footnotes, which offer a commentary. There are also frequent interpolations in brackets to help clarify the meaning in translation.
Marked “not for sale”, vast numbers of The Noble Qur’an printed by the Saudis are exported around the world. The King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Qur’an in Medina has printed over one hundred million Korans in thirty-nine languages since it was established in 1985. The handsomely gilded Noble Qur’an is distributed as part of the Saudis’ global da’wa or effort to propagate Islam. It appears to target two kinds of readers.
First, The Noble Qur’an seeks to enlist Muslims in violent jihad against non-Muslims, to establish an Islamic caliphate. Second, it aims to engage with Christians. The longest essay in the appendices is an argument that Jesus was a prophet of Islam, and commentary throughout The Noble Qur’an—in the explanatory footnotes, the interpolations in brackets and the appendices—challenges and “corrects” Christian teachings.
Sometimes it is said that when people use verses from the Koran to justify violence, they have taken them out of context. This criticism cannot be applied to The Noble Qur’an, which follows a traditional Islamic method of interpreting the Koran in the light of Muhammad’s example and teachings, known as the Sunna. In keeping with this tradition, citations from the Sunna supply the great bulk of the explanatory footnotes.
On non-Muslims
The footnotes in The Noble Qur’an are repeatedly derogatory of non-Muslims.
For example, a note to Sura 10:19 (p. 272, fn1) quotes Muhammad to say that human beings are born Muslims, and are “converted” away from Islam by non-Muslim parents. For Jewish or Christian parents to raise their child in their own faith is like mutilating them:
Every child is born on al-Fitrah, but his parents convert him to Judaism or Christianity … An animal gives birth to a perfect baby animal. Do you find it mutilated?
The Arabic phrase al-fitrah refers to the doctrine that the innate state of human beings is to be a Muslim.
The Arabic text of the Koran calls non-Muslims unclean (Sura 9:28), using a derogatory word (najas). The footnote to this verse explains about non-Muslims that:
Their impurity is spiritual and physical: spiritual because they don’t believe in Allah’s Oneness and in his Prophet Muhammad … and physical, because they lack personal hygiene (filthy as regards urine, stools and [menstrual] blood). [p. 248, fn 2]
German authorities have justified their failure to inform the public about the scale of the problem by citing the privacy rights of the criminal offenders.
Experts have long warned that the practice of housing migrants from different ethnic and religious backgrounds in tight accommodations is the ideal breeding ground for violence.
“A maintenance man who worked in a refugee shelter reported ‘mafia-like’ conditions. Refugees were required to pay for access to the electrical sockets there.” — Der Tagesspiegel.
Violent crime, including murder, rape and physical assault, is running rampant in German asylum shelters, according to a leaked intelligence report. German authorities, who appear powerless to stem the rising tide of violence, have justified their failure to inform the public about the scale of the problem by citing the privacy rights of the criminal offenders.
The report, leaked to the newspaper Bild, was prepared for Markus Ulbig, the interior minister of Saxony, where more than 40,000 migrants are being housed in refugee shelters. According to the report, there were ten murders or attempted murders at Saxon migrant shelters in 2016, as well as 960 physical assaults, 671 cases of grievous bodily injury, seven rapes, 10 sexual assaults of children and 268 cases of drug trafficking. The report also cited hundreds of incidents of theft, coercion, arson, brawls and attacks on police officers.
The violence at Saxon migrant shelters continued during the first six months of 2017: there were more than 500 physical assaults, several homicides and hundreds of reported thefts.
Experts have long warned that the practice of housing migrants from different ethnic and religious backgrounds in tight accommodations is the ideal breeding ground for violence.
In Germany as a whole, around 40,000 crimes — nearly 150 each day — were reported in refugee shelters during the first nine months of 2016, according to another leaked report by the Federal Criminal Police (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA). These crimes included 17,200 physical assaults, 6,500 thefts, 510 sexual assaults and 139 murders or attempted murders.
Observers say this is just the tip of the iceberg, as most crimes go unreported out of a fear of revenge. The BKA does not make public its data about migrant shelter criminality and there have been no additional leaks of such information. Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that migrant-on-migrant crime is endemic across Germany.In Saxony-Anhalt, for instance, a parliamentary inquiry into a stabbing between Afghans at an asylum shelter in Bernburg revealed that migrants have assaulted other migrants at shelters across the state, including in Aschersleben, Ballenstedet, Bitterfeld-Wolfen, Burg, Dessau-Rosslau, Eckartsberg, Genthin, Haldensleben, Halle, Harbke, Kemberg, Leuna, Lutherstadt Eisleben, Magdeburg, Naumburg, Oranienbaum, Oschersleben, Salzwedel, Sangerhausen, Seegebiet Mansfelder Land, Stassfurt, Wanzleben, Weissenfels, Wolmirstedt, Zeitz and Zerbst. The stabbings involved migrants from Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Benin, Bosnia, Burkina Faso, Eritrea, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, India, Iran, Iraq, Kosovo, Macedonia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Serbia, Somalia, Syria, Turkey and Ukraine.
Given North Korea’s nuclear lunacy, what exactly are the rules, formal or implicit, about which nations may have nuclear weapons and which may not?
It is complicated.
In the free-for-all environment of the 1940s and 1950s, the original nuclear club included only those countries with the technological know-how, size, and money to build nukes. Those realities meant that up until the early 1960s, only Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States had nuclear capabilities.
Members of this small club did not worry that many other nations would make such weapons, because it seemed far too expensive and difficult for most.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States adhered to an unspoken rule that their losing Axis enemies of World War II — Germany, Italy, and Japan — should not have nuclear weapons. Despite their financial and scientific ability to obtain them, all three former Axis powers had too much recent historical baggage to be allowed weapons of mass destruction. That tacit agreement apparently still remains.
The Soviet Union and the United States also informally agreed during the Cold War that their own dependent allies that had the ability to go nuclear — including eastern-bloc nations, most Western European countries, Australia, and Canada — would not. Instead, they would depend on their superpower patrons for nuclear deterrence.
By the 1970s, realities had changed again. Large and/or scientifically sophisticated nations such as China (1964), Israel (1967), and India (1974) went nuclear. Often, such countries did so with the help of pro-Western or pro-Soviet patrons and sponsors. The rest of the world apparently shrugged, believing it was inevitable that such nations would obtain nuclear weapons.
The next round of expansion of the nuclear club, however, was far sloppier and more dangerous. Proliferation hinged on whether poorer and more unstable nations could get away with enriching uranium or acquiring plutonium in secret.
Some nations, such as Iraq and Syria, let on that they were developing nuclear weapons and were stopped by preemptive military strikes. Others, including South Africa, Ukraine, and Libya, were persuaded to halt their nuclear projects.
Pakistan was the rare rogue that managed to hide its nuclear enrichment, shocking the world by testing a bomb in 1998. Pakistan rightly assumed that once a nation proves its nuclear capability, it is deemed too dangerous to walk it back through disarmament.
Nonetheless, until the official nuclearization of North Korea in 2006, the nuclear club remained small (eight nations) and was thought to be manageable. Why?
First, those nuclear countries that were relatively transparent and democratic (Britain, France, India, Israel, and the United States) were deemed unlikely to start a nuclear war.
Second, the advanced but autocratic nuclear nations (China and Russia) were thought to have too much at stake in globalized trade and national prosperity ever to start a lose/lose nuclear war.
Third, any unstable rogue nuclear nation (Pakistan) was assumed to be deterred and held in check by a nearby nuclear rival (India).
The nuclear capability of dictatorial North Korea (and likely soon, theocratic Iran) poses novel dangers far beyond the simple arithmetic of “the more nuclear nations, the more likely a nuclear war.”
Neither North Korea nor Iran is democratic. Neither is a stable country.
President Trump once again has enraged the left by suggesting, with colorful language no less, that NFL players who kneel during the national anthem should be fired by their teams. Progressives criticized Trump’s lack of presidential decorum, racial insensitivity, and disrespect of the players’ First Amendment rights—and the head of the NFL defended the players and rebuked the President for his tweet demanding the players be fired. At the same time, declining attendance at NFL stadiums and lower ratings for televised games suggest that many Americans are unhappy with privileged athletes disrespecting the country’s flag.
Though anti-patriotism is having a cultural moment in the United States, disliking and disrespecting one’s own country is nothing new. The origins of modern anti-patriotism lie in the continuing influence of Marxism on Western culture.
Marxist and socialist political movements intrinsically disdain patriotism for several reasons. As a political theory that transcends nations and peoples, Marxism is the natural enemy of particular ethnic or national identities and loyalties. These attachments create a “false consciousness” that obscures the true engine of history: the ownership of the means of production and the permanent conflict between workers and bosses. Pride in the success and power of the British Empire, for example, distracted the ordinary worker from the oppression under which he suffered, and which forestalled the collective ownership of the economy, and the egalitarian utopia promised by Marxist theory.
The idea that patriotism camouflages the injustice of capitalism became increasingly widespread in England before World War I. In 1907, J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study influenced Vladimir Lenin’s 1916 Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Hobson reduced Victorian imperialism to what he called “economic parasitism,” or the exploitation of the labor, resources, and markets of colonial peoples. War was the inevitable outcome of imperialism, as competing empires fought over control of foreign markets and resources. The belief that World War I was driven by capitalist bosses and fought for the sake of patriotism and nationalism reinforced this interpretation. Loss of faith in the empire created a loss of faith in England.
By the 1930s, such attitudes of “unwarranted self-abasement,” as Winston Churchill called them, were common among the British intelligentsia. The newspaper cartoonist David Low created Colonel Blimp, a caricature of the blustering, xenophobic, patriotic imperialist. The poet Wilfred Owen, who served in France during World War I and was killed a week before the armistice was signed, called patriotism “The Old Lie” in the most famous piece of literature to come out of the war, “Dulce et Decorum,” an ironic reference to the Roman poet Horace’s famous line, “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.” The popular writer H. G. Wells protested against the “teaching of patriotic histories” that promote a “poisonous war-making tradition,” and novelist J. B. Priestly called patriotism “a mighty force, chiefly used for evil.”
The influential Bloomsbury group of writers, artists, and intellectuals were instrumental in propagating such attitudes and making them status symbols of intellectual sophistication. The draft-dodging Lytton Strachey attacked Victorian imperialist heroes like Florence Nightingale and General Charles “Chinese” Gordon in his 1917 book Eminent Victorians. In 1939, as England was facing down Nazism, the novelist E. M. Forster epitomized this fashionable set of attitudes when he said, “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country” (emphases in original). By 1941, anti-patriotism was so prevalent that socialist George Orwell wrote disapprovingly, “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles, it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.”
This animus against patriotism among the intellectual elite survived World War II, and became even more widespread in the postwar period. One factor was the left’s analysis of the war, which did not distinguish between the extreme ethno-nationalism of Nazism and fascism, and the liberal democratic nationalism that had destroyed those regimes. Patriotism thus became associated with Hitler and Mussolini, who exploited it in order to gain support. Nationalism was redefined as diseased patriotism, as in Charles de Gaulle’s statement, “Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.”
Among leftists, patriotism has always been considered dangerous for another reason. Liberal democratic nations––especially the United States––were successful in achieving all of the social, economic, and political boons communism had promised but failed to deliver. As French philosopher Raymond Aron wrote in 1957, leftists have “a grudge against the United States mainly because the latter had succeeded by means which were not laid down in the revolutionary code. Prosperity, power, the tendency toward uniformity of economic conditions––these results have been achieved by private initiative, by competition rather than State intervention, in other words by capitalism, which every well-brought up intellectual has been taught to despise.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-the-turn-to-tyranny-1509487287?mod=nwsrl_review_outlook_u_s_&cx_refModule=nwsrl#cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=ctrl&cx_artPos=11
In the aftermath of Lenin’s death in January 1924, Joseph Stalin —already secretary-general of the Communist Party—emerged as the outright leader of the Soviet Union. “Right through 1927,” Stephen Kotkin notes, Stalin “had not appeared to be a sociopath in the eyes of those who worked most closely with him.” But by 1929-30, he “was exhibiting an intense dark side.” Mr. Kotkin’s “Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941,” the second volume of a planned three-volume biography, tracks the Soviet leader’s transformation during these crucial years. “Impatient with dictatorship,” Mr. Kotkin says, Stalin set out to forge “a despotism in mass bloodshed.”
The three central episodes of Mr. Kotkin’s narrative, all from the 1930s, are indeed violent and catastrophic, if in different ways: the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture; the atrocities of the Great Terror, when Stalin “arrested and murdered immense numbers of loyal people”; and the rise of Adolf Hitler, the man who would become Stalin’s ally and then, as Mr. Kotkin puts it, his “principal nemesis.” In each case, as Mr. Kotkin shows, Stalin’s personal character—a combination of ruthlessness and paranoia—played a key role in the unfolding of events.
Forced collectivization was the linchpin of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan. With the peasants living mostly on small-scale plots, he compelled millions of households to move onto collective farms and sought to turn many peasants into the industrial workers who would build the factories and electric stations needed for crash industrialization. To enforce his plan, he set draconian quotas for the confiscation of “surplus” food and violently repressed millions of so-called kulaks (supposedly better-off peasants), whom he wanted to exterminate as a class.
The consequent famine killed more than five million people in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Russia’s North Caucasus region. Scholars continue to debate whether the famine in Ukraine, which killed some 3.5 million, was a deliberate aim of Stalin’s policies—intended to destroy Ukraine’s national spirit and culture—or the unforeseen result of his war on the peasantry. Although Mr. Kotkin argues that the famine was “not intentional,” his book makes it clear that Stalin was well aware of widespread starvation and that he responded with remarkable cruelty, sealing Ukraine’s borders to make escape impossible. The Kremlin allowed the famine to deepen, accepting a high number of victims rather than ameliorate its most calamitous effects.
Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941
By Stephen Kotkin
Penguin Press, 1,154 pages, $40
Another crisis erupted after the assassination of the Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov in December 1934. Although many historians, including Robert Conquest and Amy Knight, have argued that Stalin almost certainly orchestrated the crime, Mr. Kotkin accepts the current scholarly consensus that Stalin was not behind Kirov’s murder and that Leonid Nikolayev, a disaffected young worker, carried it out on his own.
There is no debate, however, over how Stalin exploited the murder. He had always insisted that the country “was honeycombed with wreckers,” as Mr. Kotkin writes, and beset by conspiracies to subvert Bolshevik rule. In the wake of Kirov’s death, Stalin first accused thousands of Communist Party figures of engaging in a conspiracy to kill Kirov and then expanded the purge to encompass tens of thousands of military commanders, state-security personnel and party officials, including leaders of the revolution like Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev. Mr. Kotkin argues that Stalin carried out the purge to “smash his inner circle” and avenge elements within the party that had opposed collectivization, but he doesn’t provide sufficient documentation to buttress the claim. Stalin probably regarded army and state-security officers as the only force that could dislodge him.
With the purges under way, Stalin embarked on the Great Terror, a wave of violence that killed more than 800,000 people in the space of 16 months. Among those targeted were the members of ethnic groups—Poles, Koreans, Germans—whom Stalin regarded as unreliable elements, a fifth column that could threaten the regime in case of war. As with all great crimes, we may never truly know what degree of personal obsession, political calculation and ideological fanaticism drove Stalin to order the execution and imprisonment of so many. CONTINUE AT SITE
October 24th marked the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in Russia. The rise of Communism gave birth to the world’s deadliest ideology – far worse than Nazism and Fascism, in terms of the number of people subjected to imprisonment, terror and death. Yet does the world associate Communism with evil commensurate with its history? I think not. In the Soviet Union alone, subtracting the number of Soviet soldiers and citizens killed in World II, an estimated twenty million were killed by Stalin. About forty-five million were killed in China by Mao Zedong. Between seven and ten million Ukrainians died during the Soviet-inspired “Holodomor,” in 1932-33. Approximately two million Cambodians – almost a third of the population – died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Millions were killed in North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, East Germany, Rumania, Bulgaria, Ethiopia and other places. Communism killed as many people as died in the two world wars of the last century. As Bruce Thornton, classicist and Hoover research fellow recently put it, its history is a “…road to utopia [that] runs over mountains of corpses.” Today, it is not Communism that concerns us, but its half-brother Socialism. Despite its failure in places like Venezuela and in Europe where unrestrained Muslim immigration has created segregated neighborhoods and increased government dependency, it has become popular in the U.S. among followers of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
During the month, elections were held in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South America, and a re-run, in Africa (Kenya). Elections in Austria and the Czech Republic moved both countries to the right, meaning people are still concerned about terrorism, immigration and economic growth. Sebastian Kurz will become, at age 31, Europe’s youngest leader, when he assumes the Chancellorship of Austria. In the Czech Republic, Andrei Babis, former finance minister, populist and billionaire businessman, won a “thumping” victory, as Prime Minister-designate. The Catalans declared independence, and Spain’s parliament granted Prime Minister Rajoy powers to enforce union. Catalonia has simmered a long time. In 2006, Madrid promised the region increased autonomy. Four years later – amidst recession and financial crisis – they reneged on that promise. This is a story of disillusionment with bureaucratic and distant administrative governments run by elites. While immigration was pivotal in Brexit, the bigger problem is politicians who are deaf to the people they represent and who are unaffected by the policies they promote. We are witnessing a backlash against hypocrisy, arrogance and authoritarianism, in Brussels, Madrid and other capitals.
In Japan, Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party won its third landslide victory. Abe, an ally of the U.S. and a friend of President Trump, is an advocate for more defense spending. He benefitted from North Korea’s militant rhetoric and an improved economy. In Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif returned as Prime Minister and as head of the Pakistan Muslim League two months after being disqualified on charges of corruption. In Argentina, President Mauricio Macri’s Republican Proposal Party increased its seats in both the legislature and the senate, while former president Christina Kirchner’s Justicialist Party lost seats. A re-run of August’s race in Kenya was won again by current president Uhuru Kenyatta.
U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces took back the Al-Omar oil fields – Syria’s most productive – from ISIS forces, fields that had been captured in 2014. Elsewhere, Islamic terrorists persisted in their work. Almost 400 people died in Somalia, when separate truck and car bombs exploded, the work of al-Shabaab militants. In Marseilles, two women were stabbed to death by a man shouting “Allahu Akbar.” The assailant was shot dead. At least seventeen died in Cameroon, in two provinces bordering Nigeria. In all, over 700 people died during the month at the hands of Islamic extremists. Good news came toward the end of the month, when 32-year-old Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salmon said his country would return to “moderate Islam that is open to all religions and to the world.” It should be remembered that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi citizens.
The United Nations has made a deal with the Palestinians to fund a 65 million dollar legal pogrom directed at Israel. The party on the Palestinian side was referred to as the “Government of the State of Palestine.”
More specifically, the “United Nations System in the occupied Palestinian territory” plans to pay eight UN bodies $64,838,510 between the years of 2018 and 2022 to hunt down individual Israelis and smear Israel as a criminal state.
The eight UN bodies or agencies to receive the funds are: the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, UNICEF (the children’s fund), the UN Development Program, UN Women, UNESCO, UN Habitat, the World Health Organization, and UNRWA (the Palestinian refugee agency). Except for UNESCO, which the United States no longer supports, 22% of the money will come from American taxpayers.
The deal, first signed and disseminated in Arabic back on June 15, 2017, is part of the “UN Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) for the occupied Palestinian territory for 2018-2022.”
Lawfare at the UN, in Israel’s case, goes by the stage name of “accountability.” It includes accusing Israel of war crimes, apartheid, and crimes against humanity; sending spurious cases to the International Criminal Court; engaging in boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaigns to destroy the economic well-being of Israel, and making false accusations of violations of fabricated “international law” – in particular criminalizing Israel’s right of self-defense.
The goal is unambiguous: the demonization and destruction of the Jewish state. Lawfare is the converse of a negotiated, peaceful resolution of Israeli-Palestinian disputes, as required by existing agreements between the parties.
According to the report that details the deal, the outcome was a product of consultations that involved non-governmental organizations (NGOs) well-known for their extremist ideologies, including the promotion of terrorism and overt antisemitism.
An Annex lists some of the specific NGOs consulted, such as Al-Haq, Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights, Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, and the Palestinian NGO Network, while keeping others confidential.
Here is some of the language from the UN Development Assistance Framework:
“Strategic Priority 1: Supporting Palestine’s path to Independence
The new law authorizes prefects to order the closure of mosques or other places of worship for a period of up to six months if preachers are deemed to express “ideas or theories” that “incite violence, hatred or discrimination, provoke the commission of acts of terrorism or express praise for such acts.”
French police and intelligence services are surveilling around 15,000 jihadists living on French soil, Le Journal du Dimanche reported on October 9. Of these, some 4,000 are at “the top of the spectrum” and most likely to carry out an attack.
Of the 1,900 French jihadists fighting with the Islamic State, as many as one-fifth have received as much as €500,000 ($580,000) in social welfare payments from the French state, Le Figaro revealed on October 26.
French President Emmanuel Macron has formally signed a new counter-terrorism law which gives prefects, police and security forces wide-ranging powers — without the need to seek prior approval from a judge — to search homes, place people under house arrest and close places of worship. The measure also authorizes police to perform identity checks at French borders.
The new law, adopted by the French Senate on October 18, makes permanent many of the previously exceptional measures imposed under a two-year-old state of emergency, which was introduced after the jihadist attacks in Paris in November 2015. That state of emergency was slated to expire on November 1.
During a signing ceremony at the Élysée Palace on October 30, Macron said the compromise measure strikes the right balance between security and respect for civil liberties. Hardliners counter that the new law does not go far enough, while human rights groups complain that it will leave France in a permanent state of emergency.
The new law — Law to Strengthen Internal Security and the Fight Against Terrorism (Loi renforçant la sécurité intérieure et la lutte contre le terrorisme) — consists of seven main parts:
Security Zones. The new law gives prefects, the top government official in each of France’s departments or regions, the power to designate public areas and sporting or cultural events, including music concerts, that are deemed to be at risk of terrorism, as security zones. The law authorizes police to search all persons or vehicles attempting to enter such areas or events. Anyone refusing to submit to such searches will be denied access.
Closing Places of Worship. The new law authorizes prefects to order the closure of mosques or other places of worship for a period of up to six months if preachers are deemed to express “ideas or theories” that “incite violence, hatred or discrimination, provoke the commission of acts of terrorism or express praise for such acts.” Violations are punishable by six months in prison and a fine of €7,500 ($8,750). Opponents of the law argue that “ideas” and “theories” are subjective and therefore open to abuse.
House Arrest. The new law authorizes the Minister of the Interior to confine suspected Islamists, even those who are not accused of a specific crime, to the town or city of their domicile. Any individual for whom there are “serious reasons to believe that his or her conduct constitutes a particularly serious threat to public security and public order,” may be placed under house arrest — without the prior approval of a judge — for a period of three months, renewable for additional periods of three months to a maximum period of one year. Individuals subject to such confinement will be required to report to their local police station once a day. Alternatively, individuals may be placed under mobile electronic surveillance. The Minister of the Interior may also prohibit individuals from being in direct or indirect contact with certain persons, named by name, who are believed to pose a threat to public security. Violations of the measures are punishable by three years in prison and a fine of €45,000 ($52,500).
Search and Seizure. The new law authorizes a prefect to ask a judge for a warrant to search the home of anyone suspected of posing a threat to public security. The individual being searched may be detained for up to four hours if he or she represents “a threat of particular gravity for security and public order” and has “habitual contact to persons or organizations with terrorist aims” or supports and adheres to ideas inciting to such acts. The law also authorizes police to seize any documents, objects or electronic data at the place being searched.
Radicalized Public Servants. A civil servant working in fields related to national security or defense can be transferred or even dismissed from the public service if he or she is found to hold beliefs that are “incompatible with the exercise of his or her duties.” Soldiers can also be discharged for similar motives.
Electronic Surveillance and Data Collection. The new law authorizes the Minister of the Interior, the Minister of Defense and the Minister of Transport to collect the telephone and email communications of suspicious individuals “for the prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of terrorist offenses and serious crimes.” The law also allows security services to access travel information, including from travel agencies, about airline and maritime passengers. Data collection “shall exclude personal data that may reveal a person’s racial or ethnic origin, religious or philosophical beliefs, political opinions, trade union membership, or data relating to the health or sexual life of the person concerned.”
Border Checks. The new law authorizes police to conduct warrantless identity checks at more than 118 border areas and 373 airports, seaports and train stations, as well as the surrounding areas up to a radius of 20 kilometers. This encompasses 28.6% of French territory and 67% of the French population, according to Le Monde. Critics say this includes many mainly immigrant suburbs and could lead to harassment of ethnic minorities.