RUTHFULLY YOURS

Except in Africa and South Asia, the world’s population is aging rapidly. Between 2010 and 2050 the proportion of Americans over 65 will nearly double assuming constant fertility and immigration. By 2034 the Social Security Trust Funds will be depleted.1 By that time there will be two Americans over 65 for every five Americans of working age; if the government taxes earnings on a pay-as-you-go model, the burden on working Americans will be insupportable. The average American family has saved only $96,000 for retirement; more pertinent, the median family has saved just $5,000.2

There is another side to America’s inadequate savings rate, and that is a chronic current account deficit. Countries save by exporting more than they import and saving the balance. The economics literature documents the close relationship between rates of aging, savings, and current account balances.3 Older people lend to younger people to fund retirement, and younger people borrow from older people to start families and build enterprises. Countries with a higher proportion of aging people have a greater need for savings, and typically run a current account surplus with countries that have a younger population. The Nobel laureate Robert Mundell is one of the originators of this thesis. Without exports, we cannot save; with a chronic trade deficit, we cannot help but dissave at exactly the point when we require an increase in savings. Thus America is headed towards a catastrophe. Can it be averted?

The answer is affirmative, but it will require radical changes in U.S. economic policy. Trade competition from Asia in high-value-added manufactured goods presents a different kind of challenge than we have dealt with in the past. China and, to a lesser extent, other Asian competitors employ the full resources of state finances to fund capital-intensive manufacturing investment in the way that the West subsidizes basic infrastructure. In addition, China will commit $1 trillion to building infrastructure overseas to support its foreign trade, including exports as well as raw material supplies. The problem is not merely the dumping of artificially cheap goods into American markets, but a state-supported capital investment program that erodes returns for American investors. As a result, investment in the United States seeks capital-light venues such as software and avoids capital-intensive sectors such as chip production. We are being shut out of the global market for high-tech exports. By no means should we emulate China, whose model suffers from massive inefficiencies as well as suppression of political and economic liberty. But we do need to beat China at its own game, at least in some respects. Although America should not subsidize capital investment; it should subsidize fundamental research that leads to entrepreneurial innovation. And it should work with India, Japan, and other countries that want to resist China’s bid for Asian economic dominance to create markets for American high-tech exports.

The Archbishop of Strasbourg Luc Ravel, nominated by Pope Francis in February, just declared that “Muslim believers know very well that their fertility is such today, that they call it… the Great Replacement. They tell you in a very calm, very positive way: One day all this, all this will be ours…”.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán just warned against a “Muslimized Europe”. According to him, “the question of the upcoming decades is whether Europe will continue to belong to Europeans”.

“In the coming 30 years, the number of Africans will grow by more than one billion people. That is twice the population of the entire European Union… The demographic pressure will be enormous. Last year, more than 180,000 people crossed in shabby boats from Libya. And this is just the beginning. According to EU Commissioner Avramopoulos, at this very moment, 3 million migrants are waiting to enter Europe”. — Geert Wilders, MP, The Netherlands, and leader of the Party for Freedom and Democracy (PVV).

This week, yet another Islamic terrorist attack targeted the Spanish city of Barcelona. As it was for many years under Muslim rule, it is, therefore, like Israel, land which many Islamists believe they are entitled to repossess.

At the same time, far from Spain, elementary schools have been closing, shuttered by the state after the number of children dropped to less than 10% of the population. The government is converting these structures into hospices, providing care for the elderly in a country where 40% of the people are 65 or older. That is not a science-fiction novel. That is Japan, the world’s oldest and most sterile nation, where there is a popular expression: “ghost civilization”.

According to Japan’s National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, by 2040 most of the country’s smaller cities will see a dramatic drop of one-third to one-half of their population. Due to a dramatic demographic decrease, many Japanese councils can no longer operate and have been closed. Restaurants have decreased from 850,000 in 1990 to 350,000 today, pointing to a “drying up of vitality”. Predictions also suggest that in 15 years, Japan will have 20 million empty houses. Is that also the future of Europe?

Among the experts in demography, there is a tendency to call Europe “the new Japan”. Japan, however, is dealing with this demographic catastrophe with its own resources, and banning Muslim immigration to the country.

“Europe is committing demographic suicide, systematically depopulating itself in what British historian Niall Ferguson has called “the greatest sustained reduction in European population since the Black Death in the fourteenth century'”, as George Weigel recently noted.

Europe’s Muslims appear to be dreaming of filling this vacuum. The Archbishop of Strasbourg, Luc Ravel, nominated by Pope Francis in February, recently declared that “Muslim believers know very well that their fertility is such today, that they call it … the Great Replacement. They tell you in a very calm, very positive way: ‘One day all this, all this will be ours’ …”.

A new report by the Italian think tank Centro Machiavelli just revealed that if current trends continue, by 2065 first- and second-generation immigrants will exceed 22 million persons, or more than 40% of Italy’s total population. In Germany, as well, 36% of children under the age of five are being born to immigrant parents. In 13 of the 28 EU member countries, more people died than were born last year; without migration, the populations of Germany and Italy are expected to decline by 18% and 16%, respectively.

The impact of demographic free-fall is most visible in what was once called the “new Europe”, the countries of the former Soviet bloc such as Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, to distinguish these from the so called “old Europe”, France and Germany. Those Eastern countries are now the ones most exposed to the “depopulation bomb”, the devastating collapse in birth rate that the current-events analyst and author Mark Steyn has called “the biggest issue of our time”.

Islam denies the divinity of Christ while venerating a warlord of decidedly unsavoury disposition. That many Christian leaders prefer to swap warm and cuddly platitudes with representatives of a creed bent on their subjugation would make St Paul’s jaw drop.

I was reading an interesting article (The Future of Christianity) by Anglican priest and regular Quadrant contributor Michael Giffin, who stopped me in my tracks by saying the Bible is silent about the Islamic threat. He added that he was proud that “for the most part, the Church has remained consistently silent about the supposed Islamic threat and stuck to preaching the Gospel of Christ.”

Now I admit to wanting the Christian churches to be more muscular when it comes to Islam. First, what do I mean by being more muscular? Well there is a middle course between Pope John Paul II kissing the Koran, as he did, and poking imams in the eye with a burnt stick. It’s a question of balance. To my mind a proper balance is not struck when Christian Church leaders make overtures towards Islam. Interfaith dialogue is misconceived, in my view, when the other side is committed to taking over.

It is no accident that where Islam predominates Christianity and Christians are driven out. Christ was not a doormat and neither should be those whose job it is carry his message. And it is a grave mistake to think the Bible is silent on the Islamic issue. Christ was quite clear about false prophets arising. “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.”(Matthew 7:15-16)

How much clearer could He have been? St Paul was pretty clear as well in his letter to the Galatians:

…there are some who are confusing you to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven [even, I add, the Archangel Gabriel to Mohammed in a cave] should proclaim to you a different gospel contrary to what we have proclaimed, let that one be accursed! As we have said before, so now I repeat, if anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let that one be accursed!

This should be instructive and alerting for those Christians who have ears to hear. St Paul bears reiterating: Let those who proclaim a gospel contrary to the gospel of Christ be accursed. Not invited, you will notice, to morning tea by the Archbishop of Canterbury to discuss matters of common faith. There is no faith in common. Islam denies the divinity of Christ and places a man of unsavoury disposition above Him in the pecking order. It is just not tenable to sit down with these people as purveyors of a false gospel.

Nor is it tenable to ignore them and remain silent when the faith to which they owe allegiance is responsible for the persecution of Christians. Whether Edmund Burke said it or not, it is surely true that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. I cannot see that Christian churches are right to simply stand by and allow the propagation of hateful scripture to go directly unanswered and unchallenged.

If a number of Popes in history had not taken up the cudgels it is doubtful that Christianity would have survived the militaristic onslaught of Islam. The fight isn’t over until both sides disengage. The other side have not disengaged.

Police in Turku, Finland, shot and detained a man who they allege stabbed at least eight people in the city’s center, killing two. Authorities said it was unclear if it was terrorism.

The attacker was being treated for gunshot wounds, said Stephan Sundqvist, superintendent for the police in Finland’s southwest region. He didn’t name the attacker.

“It might be a terror attack, and it might not be,” said Mr. Sundqvist, describing the rampage in the port town a two-hour drive west of Helsinki. “We won’t speculate about that at this point.”

Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation was looking into the matter and would be responsible for classifying the incident as a terror attack, Mr. Sundqvist said.

Finnish Interior Minister Paula Risikko said the attacker didn’t appear to be a Finnish national. The police said this was still unconfirmed.

Nordic countries have largely avoided the kind of terror attacks that have struck other European countries such as Germany, France, the U.K. and, this week, Spain. But the Turku stabbings echoed recent attacks that were executed with improvised means and targeted random victims.

At the end of last month, a migrant in Germany allegedly committed a knife attack at a supermarket in Hamburg, killing one person and injuring six.

The largest terror attack in recent years in the Nordic region came in April when a rejected residency applicant from Uzbekistan allegedly plowed a hijacked beer truck into a Stockholm shopping promenade, killing four.

It turns out there were all sorts of ways to join the resistance against the Nazis during WWII. Even before Freddie Oversteegen and her sister Truus joined up at the request of the Dutch military, she and her family were hiding people – Jewish and Lithuanian – in their home. Her mother had divorced their father because he contributed little to the household (a pretty ballsy move for the time), so perhaps the fact that she allowed her 14 and 16-year-old daughters to decide for themselves whether they’d like to sign up to resist the Nazis shouldn’t come as a surprise.

http://didyouknowfacts.com/unseen-dutch-resistance-90-year-old-woman-seduced-nazis-teenager-led-deaths/?utm_source=Web&utm_medium=Partner&utm_campaign=AOLHP&utm_term=pubexchange-did_you_know-aol

And when a gentleman visited her family one day, arguing that no one would suspect two young girls of being resistance fighters, that’s exactly what Freddie and Truus Oversteegen did.

The teenaged girls said yes, and after some training in firearms and wilderness survival, the sisters began their missions – to flirt with or seduce Nazi collaborators in bars and restaurants and then invite them to walk in the woods…where resistance fighters would be waiting. Although the girls never shot anyone themselves, they led many a randy man to his death, and, according to Freddie, their naked corpses are likely still buried in those woods.

Freddie worked with the famous Hannie Schaft, the “girl with the red hair,” who had afeature film made about her life. Schaft was buried with honors in the presence of the King and Queen of the Netherlands, and over 15 Dutch streets are named after her.

Freddie’s sister Truus made the rounds as a public speaker at memorial services after the war, then became a well-known artist.

Freddie’s part in the story was more muted until recently, when Dutch filmmaker Thijs Zeeman made the Oversteegen sisters the subject of his latest documentary, Two Sisters in the Resistance. As far as her time in the war, Freddie and her sister, who is now suffering from dementia, talk about it often:

“We never had to say remember when,’ because it was always at the top of our minds.”

Here’s to all of the forgotten stories. May they all be told one day.

Images Courtesy of Vice Netherlands

On Wednesday, President Reuven Rivlin sent a letter of support to the American Jewish community in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last Saturday.

On the surface, his move made sense – the largest Diaspora community is concerned about the growing profile of viciously antisemitic forces on the Right. But at a deeper level, Rivlin’s move was detrimental.

Rivlin’s letter channeled a communal posture that ignores the actual state of the Jewish community. In so doing, it made it more difficult for Jewish Americans to recognize and surmount the dangers they face.

The American Jewish community is rightly concerned about neo-Nazis and other white supremacist groups that are gaining more and more attention these days. The fact that antisemitism was the dominant theme of a rally ostensibly organized to oppose the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a public park reveals the potency and centrality of Jew-hatred as an organizing tool for white supremacists in America.

President Donald Trump’s remarks on Tuesday, where he claimed that only some of the people participating in the protest were white supremacists and the rest were just there to protect a monument, were hurtful. On Thursday, The New York Times published interviews with rally participants that bore out Trump’s claims. They said they were only at the rally to protect the statue and do not harbor white supremacist views.

Maybe they were telling the truth. But it is hard to believe people who oppose white supremacism and Jew-hatred would willingly march under swastika flags to the roar of Nazi chants.

Whatever the case, Trump’s equivocation was distressing.

But then, it wasn’t unprecedented for a president to obfuscate the potency of antisemitism in political violence.

In February 2015, a terrorist aligned with Islamic State entered the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris on a Friday afternoon and held the Jewish shoppers hostage while killing four of them.

When asked about the event, then-president Barack Obama denied the massacre was an antisemitic attack. He referred to the victims as “a bunch of guys in a deli.” The perpetrators were merely “a bunch of violent, vicious zealots.”

When asked to clarify if Obama really meant to deny the attack was an antisemitic assault, both the White House and State Department spokespeople insisted, repeatedly, that the attack was not antisemitic.

The administration only deigned to acknowledge the truth in clarifications on Twitter, which it belatedly released, and which included the outright lie that the administration had said the attack was antisemitic all along.

The Obama administration’s mind-melting refusal to acknowledge the attack was anti-Jewish bespoke its larger policy of denying that Jews are specifically targeted for annihilation by Islamic terrorists. The implications of the policy of denial for the safety of Jews throughout the world, including in the US, were self-evident.

And yet, the American Jewish community preferred to ignore the whole thing.

Jeffrey Goldberg, Obama’s favored Jewish journalist, tweeted, “FWIW [for what it’s worth], the Obama Administration has been pretty clear in its condemnations of European antisemitism over time.”

Today, the same Goldberg who underplayed and denied what can at best be called Obama’s diffident response to anti-Jewish violence, has been leading the charge against Trump.

Among other things, Goldberg likened the counterprotesters at Charlottesville to the American soldiers who stormed the beaches at Normandy.

In Goldberg’s conflation of neo-Nazis with real Nazis and the far-left counterprotesters in Charlottesville to US forces, we see the real issue at the heart of the maelstrom now dominating US public life.

The real taboo Trump broke in his remarks following last weekend’s deadly riot was not his equivocation about the relative badness of the neo-Nazis. His real offense was his insistence that the counterprotesters – the ones Goldberg and his colleagues liken to World War II partisans and Allied forces – were also violent.

And yet they were. And Goldberg and his colleagues know they were.

In an ironic twist of history’s knife, the day of the riots, the September issue of The Atlantic monthly, where Goldberg serves as editor, hit the newsstands. The cover story, written by Peter Beinart, one of the stars of the American Jewish Left, was inconveniently titled, “The rise of the violent Left.”

Beinart’s article chronicled the violence and lawlessness of Antifa, the radical group that organized the counterprotest in Charlottesville. Antifa is a group of radical goons who stand behind the violence that has plagued US college campuses for the past several years. All the violent protests – from Vermont to California – where conservative speakers were blocked from addressing students by rioting students who burned buildings and assaulted their fellow students who wished to attend the lectures – were Antifa productions.

And Antifa’s operations go well beyond the walls of campuses. As Beinart notes, it was Antifa rioters who physically assaulted Trump supporters as they walked to their cars at the end of a Trump rally in San Jose, California, last summer.

The purpose of Antifa’s violence is not merely to deny freedom of speech to those whose positions it opposes. It is also to prevent normal relations between Democrats and Republicans and between progressives and conservatives.

Hence, as Beinart noted, this past April, Antifa threatened to use physical violence against participants in Portland, Oregon’s annual Rose Festival parade where the local Republican Party was, as usual, scheduled to march along with their Democratic counterparts. The event, which has taken place annually since 1907, was canceled.

Antifa is problematic for American Jews specifically because it operates in a coalition of far-left groups that all hate Israel and believe that just as Republicans and conservatives should be banned from participating in public life, so American Jews who support Israel should be silenced. All of its coalition partners support the destruction of Israel and castigate the Jewish state as criminal. All bar Jews who support Israel – or even are proud of their Jewish identity – from participating in their events.

Hence, Linda Sarsour, the BDS leader who was elevated to the top of the US feminist movement when she served as co-chairwoman of the Women’s March against Trump, insists that Zionists cannot be feminists.

Hence Black Lives Matter, the anti-police group that is a core member of the Antifa coalition, libeled Israel in its mission statement. Israel, BLM declared, is an “apartheid” state which is carrying out a “genocide” against the Palestinians.

Hence, Democratic Socialists of America, another core group in the Antifa coalition, just passed a resolution at its annual convention to officially join the BDS movement. The vote was reportedly greeted with jubilant chants of “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.”

The fact is that the rhetoric of white supremacists on Israel and Jews is largely indistinguishable from the language of the far Left. Both insist that “Zionists” control the US government, media and banking system and use their control to advance the fortunes of the illegitimate “Jewish ethno-state.”

David Duke, one of the leaders of the white supremacists in the US, wrote a fan letter to Roger Waters, the far-left, openly antisemitic musician who leads the BDS movement.

So from the American Jewish community’s perspective, there ought to be no distinction between its abhorrence and concern over the white supremacists and its concerns and abhorrence of the radical Left. Indeed, the community should be more concerned over the latter because its assaults are more direct and more frequent.

And even more ominously, whereas no Republican leaders – including Trump – wish to be associated with white supremacists, mainstream Democratic leaders are increasingly supportive of the BDS movement and other anti-Israel groups. So it is that formerly pro-Israel New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and formerly pro-Israel New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker are embracing the BDS movement.

And yet, rather than sound the alarms or fight the growing power and influence of the anti-Jewish far Left in their political home, the American Jewish leadership is ignoring the danger and devoting itself to criminalizing Trump, his advisers and supporters.

Whereas the Anti-Defamation League had nearly nothing to say about either Sarsour or Cong. Keith Ellison, with his anti-Jewish record of statements from his service in the antisemitic Nation of Islam, ADL leader Jonathan Greenblatt insisted Monday that Trump must investigate his closest advisers for alleged ties to white supremacists.

The alleged “ties” of the likes of Trump aides Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka to white supremacists are the invention of The Forward newspaper, which has relentlessly libeled both men – and particularly Gorka – without ever producing a shred of evidence to back up its allegations.

Rather than acknowledge its errors, this month the Forward took its campaign a step further when it published an extraordinary op-ed titled “19 people Jews should worry about more than Sarsour.”

Prominently placed between Gorka and Bannon and the neo-Nazis on the one side and the leaders of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, and Trump himself on the other, was Mort Klein, the president of the Zionist Organization of America.

In other words, for the Forward, pro-Israel American Jews of the type assaulted by Antifa and its comrades, and pro-Israel presidential advisers are more dangerous to the community than Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and of course, Sarsour herself who embraces Jew-killing terrorists and says that Jewish Israel-supporters must be shunned.

Trump’s electoral victory was a revolutionary event in US history. Tens of millions of American voters supported Trump because he promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington and serve the needs of the people who the swamp cast asunder.

A big part of that swamp is the Left that insists it is above criticism while its opponents on the Right are deplorable racists unworthy of consideration. When Trump called out the far Left along with the neo-Nazis for their violence at Charlottesville, he was keeping his pledge to his voters and upending one of the most cherished myths of the hated “establishment.”

Given that the white supremacists and radical leftists converge in their hatred of Jews, it is important for the American Jewish community and for America as a whole to embrace Trump’s actions. He is not engaging in moral equivalence between good and evil. He is exercising moral clarity. Without such clarity, the forces of Jew-hatred in the US will never be defeated. Without such clarity, the political position, security and freedom of American Jews will grow increasingly imperiled.

Israel’s job, to the extent it has one in the current fight plaguing the US, is to point out this truth, not join the bandwagon in obfuscating it. Trump is far from a perfect mouthpiece for this essential battle against Jew-haters on the Right and the Left.

But at least he is using his mouth to sound the battle cry. For this he should be applauded by Israelis and American Jews alike.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

From my friend Nidra Poller journalist and novelist: ”
“One of t most interesting details were the Facebook pages of Driss Oubakir Soprano. Anti-Zionist with a vengeance! Including the business about how the Jews kill Palestinian children. And Zionism lets them kill Christians like dogs.The panel truck ended its 500-meter killing spree right next to a kosher restaurant, the Maccabi. It couldn’t drive into the restaurant, it smashed into a kiosque. And here is more about a linked attack in Cambrils…..N.Poller

BARCELONA, Spain — The Catalan government said an attack in the seaside resort town of Cambrils was linked to the vehicle attack on a popular Barcelona promenade that killed 13 people, as a new arrest was made amid a manhunt for the driver in the first attack.

The region’s Interior Minister Joaquin Forn told local radio RAC1 early Friday that the Cambrils attack “follows the same trail. There is a connection.”

He did not explain what connected the attacks. He confirmed the driver in the Barcelona attack remains at large.

Forn told Catalunya Radio later Friday that a third person was arrested in connection with the Barcelona van attack that killed at least 13 people.

The suspect was taken into custody in the northern Catalan town of Ripoll, he said.

The Cambrils attack involved five suspects who carried bomb belts. Police shot and killed the suspects and detonated their explosives in a controlled blast.

Media reports said a car crashed into a police vehicle and nearby civilians and police shot the attackers, one of whom was brandishing a knife.

Police did not immediately say how the attack was carried out.

A police officer and five civilians were injured; two were in serious condition.

Police are working on the theory that the Cambrils and Barcelona attacks are connected, as well as a Wednesday night explosion in the town of Alcanar in which one person was killed.

Mayor Cami Mendoza said the suspects centered their attack on the narrow path to Cambrils’s boardwalk.

Meanwhile, a manhunt is continuing for the driver in the Barcelona attack who drove his van onto a sidewalk along the popular Las Ramblas boulevard, killing 13 and injuring over 100.

One need not go back centuries to the Muslim conquest of the Christian late classical world — the medieval Barbary corsair raids, the Ottoman yoke in Central and Eastern Europe or the slave markets of Kaffa in Tatar Muslim Crimea — to understand that this violence clearly predates the European colonial era, the creation of the modern state of Israel, or the issue of climate change.

Countries such as China, Nigeria or Kenya that are not Western, not “imperialist”, not whatever the excuses that Islamists make, are still spectacularly attacked by similar stabbings. Month on month, there seems almost nowhere that Islamic terror did not strike.

Volumes of revered Islamic texts establish in great detail the grounds of violence and oppression of non-believers and those deemed heretical. These supposed grounds — made alive daily in madrassas and mosques across the world before being acted upon by religiously-trained terrorists — are childishly dismissed by Western liberals as immaterial.

The first step towards a solution is to question the received knowledge tirelessly dished out by media pundits in the West. What is lacking is simply seeing a huge body of evidence of theological justification for Islamist terror.

How thin can excuses wear every time an atrocity is committed in the name of Islam?

When 13 people were killed and scores more injured this week in a vehicle-ramming attack in Barcelona, Spain, and stabbing men shouting “This is for Allah!” on London Bridge and in Borough Market in June, what the victims least cared about was the Western elite pontificating that the latest atrocity “had nothing to do with Islam”.

British Prime Minister Theresa May said, “It is time to say enough is enough” and promised a review of her country’s counter-terrorism strategy.

In the absence, however, of an honest and tempered look at the root causes of this terrorism, sacred or not, and a painful soul-searching by Muslims themselves of the grounds in their religion that give rise to such violence, it will never be “enough”.

On June 4, British PM Theresa May said, “It is time to say enough is enough” and promised a review of her country’s counter-terrorism strategy. In the absence, however, of an honest look at the root causes of this terrorism, and a painful soul-searching by Muslims of the grounds in their religion that give rise to such violence, it will never be “enough”. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

One need not go back centuries to the Muslim conquest of the Christian late classical world — the medieval Barbary corsair raids, the Ottoman yoke in Central and Eastern Europe or the slave markets of Kaffa in Tatar Muslim Crimea — to understand that this violence clearly predates the European colonial era, the creation of the modern state of Israel, or the issue of climate change.

Only a fortnight ago, 29 Christian Copts were killed for refusing to say, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet” while on a trip to an Egyptian monastery on May 26. Separately, an unconfirmed number of Christians were killed and taken hostage by a mix of Saudi, Pakistani, Chechen, Moroccan and local jihadists in the southern Philippines during the past few weeks. In addition, 90 people were killed in a bombing in Kabul on May 31, and 26 people were killed at an ice cream parlor in Baghdad during Ramadan. None of these massacres had anything to do with “Bush’s war” in Iraq or U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s proposed “Muslim ban”.

Here are the latest updates:

Spanish Prime Minister Marian Rajoy said the attack was “jihadi terrorism.”
A few hours ago, Spanish police killed 5 suspected terrorists in Cambrils, 120km south of Barcelona. They were reportedly wearing explosives and believed to be plotting a follow-up attack. Six civilians and one police officer were injured.
Two suspects are under arrest but neither is believed to be the driver of the van who ran down the pedestrians in the Las Ramblas shopping district popular with tourists. One is from Morocco, the other from Melilla — a Spanish enclave across the Strait of Gibraltar.
Reports reveal that victims of the attack come from 18 different countries. At least one fatality has been confirmed to be a Belgian tourist.
One of the terrorists, Moussa Oukabir, had posted on social media: “Kill all the infidels and leave only Muslims.”
His brother, Driss Oukabir, claims that Moussa stole his identity to rent the vans and that he wasn’t involved.
The explosion at a house yesterday in Alcanar which killed two is believed to be related to the attack. It was originally attributed to a gas line explosion, but police are saying the house was being used as an IED factory. Twenty-plus gas canisters were found at the scene. The premature explosion may have prompted the terror cell to act earlier than planned. Two VBIEDs could have killed considerably more.
ISIS’ Amaq news agency claimed its “soldiers” committed the attack. They are encouraging more vehicle attacks via their official social media channels.
The CIA had reportedly told Spanish police that Las Ramblas was a likely terror target two months ago.
Fog of war: Early reports that the terrorists had taken hostages in a restaurant proved to be false. A driver who drove through a police checkpoint injuring two police officers before being shot and killed is not believed to be involved in the terror attack.

This is the sixth Islamic terror attack since July 2016 in which civilians were targeted by terrorists driving vehicles: Nice, France; Berlin, Germany; Stockholm, Sweden; and twice in London.
As I reported here at PJ Media earlier this month, there have already been **eight** terror attacks this year in France.
Barcelona has been an active hub of jihadist activity in Spain. More than 30 percent of Spanish ISIS supporters radicalized and detained are from the Barcelona area. In January 2008, a major terror cell plotting to target Barcelona’s public transit system was disrupted by police.

China’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s opposition escalated Thursday as a court jailed student pro-democracy leaders. By imprisoning the three popular figures, the government is blocking them from running in the next legislative by-elections and it marks another step in the slow but relentless strangulation of Hong Kong’s freedoms.

Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow received sentences of six to eight months for leading hundreds of thousands of protesters who occupied the city’s downtown for 75 days in late 2014. Hong Kongers were angry that Beijing reneged on its promise to allow the city to elect its chief executive by universal suffrage. Instead of allowing an open system of nominations, Chinese authorities wanted to pick a lineup of candidates based on their loyalty to the central government.

For their role in the civil disobedience, the student leaders were sentenced last year to community service and a suspended jail term by a lower court. They completed their punishments and the case seemed to be closed. But then this year the government appealed to the High Court for tougher sentences, including jail time.

This is part of a wider effort to marginalize the opposition after September’s legislative election. Beijing was alarmed that opposition candidates, including some who called for greater autonomy for the city, won 58% of the popular vote and secured 30 of the 70 seats. The opposition had the votes and the mandate to filibuster legislation and pressure the government for more democracy.

In May, China’s third-ranking Politburo Member, Zhang Dejiang, said in a speech that Beijing was determined to consolidate its control over Hong Kong. First the National People’s Congress reinterpreted the city’s constitution, the Basic Law, to disqualify six opposition legislators, with eight more at risk of losing their seats.

With the opposition now lacking the votes to filibuster, pro-Beijing lawmakers changed the legislature’s rules to prevent future blocking of new laws. One Chinese official hailed these decisions as “the rainbow after the storm.”

Mr. Zhang also reiterated Beijing’s stand that the judiciary is subordinate to the executive branch and judges should “learn the Basic Law.” Other officials criticized Hong Kong’s use of foreign judges, who are supposedly too sympathetic to separatist elements.

Chinese officials have stepped up pressure for the city to pass antisubversion laws that would make advocating greater autonomy a crime. That would make it easier to suppress opposition politicians and their supporters.

Hong Kong now has its first political prisoners, and if Beijing has its way they will be followed by many more. That will force the city’s residents into a stark choice of whether to continue fighting for the rights China promised when it guaranteed 50 years of Hong Kong autonomy or accept that the former British colony’s special status is fading into history.