RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Barcelona Process, promoted by the EU, has helped to facilitate a greater presence of Islam and Muslim immigrants in Western Europe — thereby also increasing the Islamic terror threat there. That result was perfectly foreseeable.

When the number of people who believe in Islamic Jihad doctrines rises, the likelihood of experiencing jihadist attacks increases as well.

It is unlikely, though, that European political leaders will point to this connection. Doing so would be an indirect admission that Europe’s leaders have actively increased the Islamic terror threat against European citizens. This is the brutal truth they do not want exposed.

The murders on the pedestrian street of La Rambla in Barcelona on August 17, 2017 were not the first Islamic terrorist attack in Spain. On March 11, 2004, 192 people were killed, and around two thousand injured, in the Madrid train bombings.

In hindsight, that attack marked a new phase in the modern Islamic Jihad against Europe. After the Madrid bombings, London was hit with deadly bombings on July 7, 2005. In recent years, the frequency of jihadist attacks on European soil has increased dramatically.

It is probably not a coincidence that Spain was an early target of Islamic terror. The Iberian Peninsula, present-day Portugal and Spain, was for centuries under Islamic rule. Militant Muslims have repeatedly made it clear that for them, reconquering Spain is a priority.

The murders on the pedestrian street of La Rambla in Barcelona on August 17, 2017 were not the first Islamic terrorist attack in Spain. (Image source: JT Curses/Wikimedia Commons)

Ironically, some people in Barcelona seem to view tourists who pay for short-term visits as a greater threat than Muslim immigrants who come to stay permanently. One can hear similar reactions among some radical left-wing activists, for instance, in Greece.

Mass tourism can potentially cause problems such as overcrowding and local pollution. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that only a few days before the terror attack in Barcelona, some locals were complaining about an invasion of tourists. One radical left-wing group, Arran, published footage of tourist bikes in the city having their tires punctured in acts of deliberate sabotage. Of course, the problem might be even greater if there were too few tourists.

Meanwhile, a real invasion of Spain and Europe is taking place. For years, huge numbers of illegal immigrants from the Islamic world and Africa have been entering, especially through Greece or Italy. Spain, too, has seen a spike in the number of illegal immigrants. The Spanish-controlled enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa are under increasing pressure as points of departure for migrants.

https://wp.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/

WANTED FOR GENOCIDE

[Notes by Tom Gross]

I attach five unrelated pieces below.

In the first, the New York Post reports that police were forced to release a Sudanese Arab UN diplomat, Hassan Salih, for groping a woman’s breasts at 2:25 am in a New York bar because he enjoys diplomatic immunity.

(Alcohol was outlawed in Sudan under Muslim Sharia law in 1983, and the penalty for drinking alcohol there is 40 lashes.)

In May Hassan Salih was elected (by fellow Arab nations and third world countries) as vice-chair of the UN committee that oversees the work of 4,500 human rights NGOs, including groups that defend the rights of women.

I have previously drawn attention to the election of Sudan as Vice-Chair of this UN committee overseeing human rights groups, on the grounds that the Sudanese regime is one of the worst persecutors of human rights activists in the world, and Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir is wanted for genocide at the International Criminal Court.

This is the second time this year a Sudanese diplomat at the UN has claimed diplomatic immunity. Mohammad Abdalla Ali was arrested in January for grinding his crotch on a 38-year-old woman aboard an uptown 4 subway train in the middle of the afternoon.

Last week leaders of the Senate intelligence committee, senators Richard Burr and Mark Warner, gave a press conference in which they announced they are eager to speak with Christopher Steele, the former British MI6 officer believed to have compiled the controversial dossier of allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia. Steele reportedly spoke with special counselor Robert Mueller about the dossier, but the committee has yet to hear from the man who laid the foundations for the theory that Trump or his campaign team colluded with Russian officials to fix the 2016 presidential election for him.

One reporter, however, claims that the Senate intelligence committee has verified “some of the Steele dossier.” Ken Dilanian of NBC News told MSNBC Thursday morning that “Burr said they had been able to corroborate some aspects of it.”

But in the 40-minute-long press conference, neither Burr nor Warner suggested anything of the sort. Rather, Burr said “the committee cannot really decide the credibility of the dossier without understanding things like who paid for it, who are your sources and subsources?” Dilanian explained that “two sources told NBC News the committee has corroborated parts of the dossier.”

Dilanian did not explain to viewers what Burr was clearly hinting at—namely, that the Steele dossier is the paid product of a private information company called Fusion GPS, which has become notorious for inventing sleazy and often fact-free attacks on democratic whistleblowers and political figures and feeding them to journalists. Dilanian himself is no stranger to Fusion GPS.
Who Is Fusion GPS?

In summer 2016, Fusion GPS distributed the dossier under Steele’s name to a number of major news organizations. All refrained from publishing a document they couldn’t verify. It was finally published by BuzzFeed in January after CNN reported U.S. intelligence agencies had briefed outgoing president Barack Obama and his incoming successor Donald Trump on the existence of the dossier.

It was Fusion GPS that also spearheaded a campaign to dismantle the Magnitsky Act, the 2012 legislation that imposes sanctions on Russian officials and figures associated with the regime of Vladimir Putin who are known to have played a role in the 2009 death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. Fusion GPS’ effort, according to William Browder, the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act and head of the Magnitsky Global Justice Campaign, included a smear campaign against him and his late friend and lawyer.

In his explosive July 27 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Browder, the 53-year-old CEO and founder of Hermitage Capital Management, alleged Fusion GPS may have violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by spreading Russian state propaganda. Washington DC journalists, Browder added, were in on the game—getting stories from the company that first tried to torque American law to benefit Putin and his cronies then spread the salacious Steele dossier.

“I suspect that a number of journalists,” Browder testified, “and one in particular here in Washington was operating so far outside the bounds of normal journalistic integrity that there must have been some incentive for them to be doing it coming from Fusion GPS.”

The journalist Browder alluded to is NBC News’ intelligence and national security reporter: Ken Dilanian. In extensive interviews, Browder alleged to me that a number of journalists, including Dilanian, were beholden to Fusion GPS and its principals, including former Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson, for supplying them with stories in the past. Reporters, Browder argued, were therefore reluctant to look too deeply into Fusion GPS’s smear campaign against him and Magnitsky. Multiple attempts to reach Dilanian for comment went unanswered.

To back up his assertion about NBC and Dilanian, Browder showed me documents that chronicled Dilanian’s reporting on the Magnitsky Act—reporting that Browder believes moved in tandem with Fusion GPS’s campaign to discredit both himself and Magnitsky in the hope of repealing the law and lifting sanctions against Russia.
Russia’s Target: Corrupting the American Press

What these records and other accompanying documents also suggest is that Russia’s attempt to “hack” the 2016 election was hardly just about the election, and that a main target and beneficiary of that effort—which is ongoing—is the American press.

In an email hacked from the account of a U.S. foreign service officer, Dilanian asked Sen. Ben Cardin’s office if the senior Democratic member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wanted to comment on the story about Magnitsky that he was reporting. “There is no evidence he was beaten in prison, as Browder has alleged,” Dilanian declares:

and it’s clear from police and court records that he wasn’t detained because he blew the whistle on an alleged fraud scheme. He was detained over tax evasion by Browder’s companies. In fact, there are credible allegations in court documents that Browder and his associates are suspects in the fraud—and that Browder concocted the whistleblower story to cover that up.

We plan to publish something about this next week, and I wanted to give Sen. Cardin a chance to comment on it. He is not a large part of the story, and if these allegations are true, he is one of many smart and influential people who were misled, obviously.

Another email, hacked from the same cache, written by a Democratic staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, dismisses Dilanian’s thesis: “There is overwhelming evidence that Sergei Magnitsky was beaten in prison”—after which the staffer makes his case clearly:

Photographs of his beaten body were available to us, which show physical evidence of him having been beaten. … We reviewed the detention center protocol, which reports that Magnitsky was beaten with rubber batons by guards on the evening of November 16, 2009—the night he died. … Magnitsky’s Death Certificate refers to a cerebral cranial injury. … The forensic postmortem conducted by Russian state experts refers to injuries on Magnitsky’s body consistent with the use of rubber batons.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan is right when he complains that Turkey is threatened by terrorists who kill innocent citizens and want to bring down his government. But when Turkish authorities tar innocent journalists for abetting terrorism, they confirm to the world that Turkey’s President has turned his country into an authoritarian state.

On Tuesday a Turkish court falsely convicted Wall Street Journal reporter Ayla Albayrak of propagandizing on behalf of an outlawed Kurdish terror group. The evidence for Ms. Albayrak’s “crime”: An Aug. 19, 2015, Wall Street Journal news story about the bitter fighting in a remote, Kurdish-majority, Turkish city called Silopi that borders Syria and Iraq. Turkish forces fought there with the outlawed PKK, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party.

Ms. Albayrak quoted some members of the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Group, which Turkish authorities say is affiliated with the PKK. But she also quoted government officials, local residents and the mayor—and explicitly identified the PKK as designated by both Ankara and Washington as a terrorist outfit. Nowhere in her balanced dispatch did she praise either the PKK or the youth group, and everything she did to report this story as fairly and objectively as possible was within the bounds of good journalism and Turkish law.

The indictment noted that some Turkish-language websites lifted parts of her story and an accompanying video for their own purposes. But they used selective quotes, and none are affiliated with the Journal and none were authorized by either the Journal or Ms. Albayrak.

There is no evidence Mr. Erdogan initiated these charges against our reporter. Yet they are surely a consequence of the repressive atmosphere he has created in Turkey, especially after a failed military coup in 2016. The Turkish president has taken advantage of the state of emergency to solidify his hold on power by cracking down on anyone his government doesn’t like.

This repression is now extending to the foreign media, and even beyond Turkey’s borders. In February Deniz Yücel, a reporter for Germany’s Die Welt, was arrested in Istanbul and remains detained without charges. Amnesty International notes Turkey now has more journalists in jail than any other country.

Ms. Albayrak, a dual Turkish and Finnish national, is now in New York. But that doesn’t mean the conviction isn’t damaging. The Erdogan government has already abused Interpol, the international police network, by issuing “red notices” to have journalists and critics arrested in other countries until they can be extradited. In this way a system meant to target criminals is turned on good journalists like Ms. Albayrak and makes it dangerous for them to travel and do their jobs.

When any local Turkish official can create an international incident by freelancing a political prosecution, it underscores Turkey’s descent under Mr. Erdogan and creates unnecessary rifts with other countries. Ms. Albayrak plans to appeal, which gives Ankara a path out of this injustice. But it requires a Turkish judiciary willing to assert itself by standing up for the rule of law and tossing this shameful and dishonest prosecution.

Iraqi Kurdistan’s recent referendum on whether to declare independence from Baghdad garnered only slight attention in the U.S. Even the overwhelming vote (93 percent favored independence) and America’s long involvement in the region did not make the story more prominent.

Nonetheless, we would be badly mistaken to underestimate its importance for U.S. policy throughout the Middle East.

Protecting American interests in that tumultuous region has never been easy. Not only does Iran’s nuclear-weapons threat loom ever larger, but the struggle against terrorism, whether from Hezbollah, ISIS, al-Qaida or any number of new splinter groups, seems unending.

Less visible but nonetheless significant forces are also at work. Existing state structures across the Middle East are breaking down and new ones are emerging, exacerbating the spreading anarchy caused by radical Islamic terrorism. Non-ideological factors such as ethnicity and cultural differences are enormously powerful and best understood as movements in the region’s “tectonic plates,” stirring beneath the surface of the more apparent threats of terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

None of these tectonic plates has more immediate implications for America’s Middle East policy than the Kurdish people’s long-standing determination to have their own nation-state. Modern-era Kurdish aspirations for statehood emerged during the Ottoman Empire’s post-World War I collapse, as European powers redrew the region’s map. The Kurds were unsuccessful in pressing their case, however, and their lands were split among Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria.

Nonetheless Kurdish longing for a separate state never dissipated, leading to considerable conflict, most visibly in Turkey. The West largely was unsympathetic in recent years because separatists in Turkish Kurdistan channeled their major efforts through the Marxist Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Obviously, during the Cold War, Washington and the West generally had no interest in weakening Turkey and its critical geostrategic role as NATO’s southeast anchor against Soviet adventurism.

Outside Turkey, however, especially in Iraq, Kurds played a much more constructive role, helping the United States in both Persian Gulf wars.

Iraqi Kurdistan became de facto independent from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991, protected by the U.S-led operation known as “Northern Comfort,” which included massive humanitarian assistance and a no-fly zone over northern Iraq. Saddam’s 2003 overthrow opened the prospect of reunifying the country, but Iranian subversion, using Iraq’s Shia majority to turn the country into its satellite, refueled Kurdish separatism.

Iraq’s Sunni Arabs were also unwilling to be ruled by a Baghdad regime dominated by Shia adherents, who were little more than Iranian puppets. The rise of ISIS in Iraq occurred in part from this hostility, just as in Syria, ISIS capitalized on the anti-Assad feelings of Sunni Arabs, who felt excluded and oppressed by the dominant Alawite elite in Damascus.

With the destruction of the ISIS caliphate in Syria, the question of what comes next is unavoidably before us. The United States needs to recognize that Iraq and Syria as we have known them have ceased to exist as functioning states. They are broken and cannot be fixed.

This disintegration reflects the Middle East’s broader, spreading anarchy, and it provides the context for Kurdish Iraq’s overwhelming support for independence from Baghdad.

I have previously suggested that disaffected Sunni Arabs in Iraq and Syria might combine to form their own secular (but religiously Sunni) state, which the Gulf Arabs could help support financially. Indeed, while substantial issues remain about allocating the Iraqi cities of Mosul and Kirkuk between Kurds and Arabs, the Kurds themselves are largely Sunni, which suggests considerable confluence of interest with their Arab fellow Sunnis. Helping a new Kurdistan and a new Sunni state might overcome the current split among the Arabian peninsula’s oil-producing monarchies and focus their attention on Iran, the real threat to their security.

Unfortunately, but entirely predictably, our State Department opposed even holding the referendum and firmly rejects Kurdish independence. This policy needs to be reversed immediately, turning U.S. obstructionism into leadership. Kurdish independence efforts did not create regional instability but instead reflect the unstable reality.

Independence could well promote greater Middle Eastern security and stability than the collapsing post-World War I order.

Recognizing that full Kurdish independence is far from easy, these issues today are no longer abstract and visionary but all too concrete. This is no time to be locked into outdated strategic thinking.

“Israel ought to offer her services to Spain and the EU as an “honest broker,” and negotiate an end to the Catalonian crisis on the basis of “land for peace.”

Buried in all of the other international news is the following tidbit: the Spanish “autonomous region” of Catalonia held a referendum on independence from Spain, in which some 90% of participants voted for independence.

Catalonia is located in the northeastern corner of Spain, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Its capital is Barcelona, a major industrial and tourist center, and the region has a long history of off-again, on-again independence dating back at least to the Eighth Century. The Catalan people speak a unique Romance language which has more in common with the Occitan language of southern France than it does with Spanish and, obviously, they have not lost their sense of distinctiveness from the Spanish.

The Spanish government in Madrid reacted to this latest attempt to apply the Wilsonian principle of self-determination for small peoples in much the same way that the Baghdad government reacted to the recent referendum on Kurdish independence. It first declared the referendum unconstitutional, then demanded it be withdrawn when it became obvious that the referendum had gone against continued union with the Spanish state. In other words, the “autonomous region” is demonstrating a little too much autonomy.

People formed long queues in order to vote in the “unconstitutional” referendum, often waiting patiently for hours. They then lingered afterwards in the polling places, fearing the Spanish national police, the Guardia Nacional, would attempt to seize the ballot boxes. As it turned out, their fears were not groundless.

Members of the Guardia Nacional were brought in from other regions of Spain (apparently the locals weren’t considered reliable) to engage in violent suppression of the referendum, which quickly descended into chaos. Dressed in riot gear, they used rubber bullets and truncheons to disperse the voters. Over 750 people were injured in the ensuing riots, according to Catalan officials. The Madrid government countered with the report that dozens of police officers had been injured.

Pursuant to the crackdown, the Spanish state also engaged in some heavy-handed, if futile, political censorship, shutting down the website of the National Catalan Assembly. The website was quickly redirected to an EU domain, which is beyond the ability of the Spanish authorities to suppress.

The fact is that Spain is not a unitary, national state, but rather a conglomeration of regions speaking at least eleven distinct languages.

The various regions were united, by force and through dynastic marriages, under the kings of Aragon and Castile during the Renaissance. This caused Castilian to be recognized as the modern language commonly referred to as “Spanish.” However, some of the regions have long been restive. In particular, there was a decades-long Basque insurgency in northwestern Spain. Now we have the unrest in Catalonia.

It appears likely that not only is the recent referendum the most serious test of Spanish democracy since the end of the Francoist dictatorship in the 1970s, but it may also put Spain in violation of European Union laws. This will put even more strain on the structure of the EU. The Catalonian regional government has sent a letter to the European Commission complaining of the suppression of the website mentioned above, as well as the alleged suppression of individual internet accounts of various members of the Catalonian government who supported the referendum.