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The U.S. military on Wednesday carried out two airstrikes aimed at stopping hundreds of Islamic State militants evacuated from the Lebanese-Syrian border from relocating to an extremist stronghold in Syria near the border with Iraq.

The first of the airstrikes came shortly after the U.S. criticized a deal brokered by the Lebanese militia Hezbollah that allowed hundreds of Islamic State militants and their families free passage out of an area straddling Syria’s southwestern border with Lebanon. Their convoy left Monday and was headed to a part of eastern Syria’s Deir Ezzour province very close to the border with U.S. ally Iraq.
Syrian forces members standing on a tank next to a bus waiting to transport Islamic State fighters and their families on Monday. Photo: Louai Beshara/Agence France-Presse/Getty Image

“We created a crater. It was to block them so they could not continue on the road,” a U.S. defense official said on Wednesday, adding the coalition didn’t strike the buses because family members were present.

That airstrike, which also destroyed a bridge, took place after the convoy entered Deir Ezzour province, one of Islamic State’s last strongholds in Syria, from territory controlled by the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

U.S. Central Command said that within two hours of the first strike, it conducted a separate but related second strike west of Deir Ezzour on a handful of logistical vehicles that were known to be affiliated to Islamic State. That strike may have killed Islamic State fighters, the U.S. military said.

“Irreconcilable #ISIS terrorists should be killed on the battlefield, not bused across #Syria to the Iraqi border without #Iraq’s consent,” Brett McGurk, U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy for combating Islamic State, tweeted ahead of the airstrike. “Our @coalition will help ensure that these terrorists can never enter #Iraq or escape from what remains of their dwindling ‘caliphate.’”

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi also criticized the Hezbollah deal.

“We consider it an insult to the Iraqi people. Moving this number of terrorists for such a long distance through Syria is unacceptable,” Mr. Abadi told reporters on Tuesday night. “We are fighting terrorism in Iraq and we are killing them in Iraq. We don’t send them to Syria.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Residents of northern Japan awoke Tuesday to sirens and cellphone warnings to take cover as a North Korean rocket flew overhead. The intermediate-range missile test will further roil the politics of security in Northeast Asia and is another prod toward Japan acquiring its own nuclear deterrent.

Pyongyang tested long-range missiles over Japan in 1998 and 2009, claiming they were satellite launches. The first shocked Japanese and led to cooperation with the U.S. on theater missile defense. After the second, Tokyo curtailed the North’s funding sources within Japan’s ethnic Korean community. Tuesday’s launch is even more threatening because U.S. and allied intelligence agencies assess that North Korea now has the ability to hit Japan with a miniaturized nuclear warhead mounted on a missile.

Much of Japan is protected by its own missile defenses as well as systems operated by U.S. forces in the region. Japan also recently deployed four Patriot PAC-3 missile-defense batteries to the west of the country, but these didn’t cover the northern island of Hokkaido overflown by Tuesday’s missile.

Japan’s ultimate security is the U.S. defense and nuclear umbrella, with its treaty guarantee that the U.S. will respond if Japan is attacked. But the logic of deterrence depends on having a rational actor as an adversary, and rationality can’t be guaranteed in North Korea. Its recent development of an ICBM capable of hitting the U.S. mainland also changes the equation. If North Korea attacked Tokyo and the U.S. responded with an attack on Pyongyang, U.S. cities might then be endangered.

Japanese leaders have long resisted building their own nuclear arsenal, but that could change if they conclude America isn’t reliable in a crisis. Or Japanese may simply decide they can’t have their survival depend on even a faithful ally’s judgment. Some Japanese politicians are already talking about their own nuclear deterrent. And while public opinion currently opposes nuclear weapons, fear could change minds. Japan has enough plutonium from its civilian nuclear reactors for more than 1,000 nuclear warheads, and it has the know-how to build them in months.

This prospect should alarm China, which would suddenly face a nuclear-armed regional rival. The U.S. also has a strong interest in preventing a nuclear Japan, not least because South Korea might soon follow. East Asia would join the Middle East in a new era of nuclear proliferation, with grave risks to world order. This is one reason that acquiescing to a North Korea with nuclear missiles is so dangerous.

Born in Norway to Pakistani parents, Abid Q. Raja studied law, criminology, and psychology at the universities of Oslo, Southampton, and Oxford, and later worked in Norway at several law firms, the Immigration Appeals Board, and the Police Department’s Immigration Office. He was also active in groups with names like the Center against Ethnic Discrimination, the Council for Crime Prevention, and the Equality and Anti-Discrimination Tribunal.

In 1999, Raja began to appear frequently on Norwegian TV and in the newspaper op-ed pages as a commentator on immigration and integration issue and as a spokesman for the nation’s Muslims. As it happens, that was the same year I moved to Norway, so I’ve followed his entire public career. During those early years, Raja came off as angry and radical. In 2004, while serving as a spokesman for an Oslo mosque called World Islamic Mission, he argued that the Norwegian government should pay to build a school in Pakistan for the children of Pakistani Muslims living in Norway. (Many Muslims in Europe send their kids to schools “back home” to prevent their Westernization.) In 2005, after a Norwegian court found a father and son guilty of forcing a family member to marry, Raja wrote an article for Aftenposten in which he insisted that not all arranged marriages are forced marriages. Some young people, he risibly maintained, “can’t manage to find their own spouse,” while some “don’t want to find their own spouse” and therefore ask their parents to do the job for them. Yeah, right.

In 2004, after a TV2 discussion program called Holmgang addressed the recent jihadist slaughter in Amsterdam of Islam critic Theo van Gogh, Raja went on the warpath, making several TV appearances in which he charged that the show’s host, Oddvar Stenstrøm, had “stigmatized” Muslims. (Stenstrøm reacted angrily to what he described as Raja’s “purely personal attacks” and outright lies: “In my nearly forty years as a journalist I’ve never experienced anything like it.”) Three years later, when Holmgang addressed the question of whether radical Islam represented a threat to Western values (99% of viewers said “yes”), Raja wrote a furious op-ed demanding that Stenstrøm be fired. It’s not clear what happened behind the scenes at TV2, but Stenstrøm was gone within a few months.

At some point – I don’t remember exactly when – I noticed that Raja had tamed his rhetoric. He was trying to sound reasonable, trying to come off as cool and reasoned. He even made the occasional, very carefully worded criticism of this or that aspect of the Muslim subculture. I didn’t believe for a second that he had actually changed his opinion about anything. As far as I was concerned, it was all an act. Raja, I surmised, was cynically modifying his image. The only question was: why? The answer seemed obvious: he wanted to pursue a political career. And he wouldn’t be satisfied with just being a member of Parliament, representing a mostly Muslim constituency: if that was all he was after, he wouldn’t have to undergo any kind of makeover.

No, this was a guy who was determined to go straight to the top. I had no doubt whatsoever that he could make it. He’s articulate and can put on the charm. He has an extremely slick, lawyerly way of fielding ticklish questions – not that the Norwegian media ever ask him ticklish questions. No, they fawn over him and give him protection, the way the U.S. media did with Obama. Given this – and given Raja’s high level of name recognition, the rapid rise in Norway’s Muslim population, and the number of Norwegian voters who are eager to prove at the ballot box that they’re not Islamophobes – he could eventually be a shoo-in. In short, when I looked at the newly made-over Raja, I realized I was looking at the man who someday might well become Norway’s first Muslim prime minister.

Indeed, Raja did end up pursuing a political career. He became active in the smallish Venstre (Liberal) Party, which loves two things: the environment and mass Muslim immigration. In 2009 he won an “alternate” seat in Parliament; the next year he founded Minotenk, a think tank devoted to “minority politics.” He said he wanted to be a “bridge-builder.”

Until Obama became president, I was invited every year to the Fourth of July garden party at the residence of the American ambassador to Norway. At one of the last parties I attended, I noticed a familiar figure in the middle of the crowd. It was Raja. He was surrounded by a circle of admirers, holding court, shaking hands, flashing a big smile. Clearly, this was a man on the make, a star on the ascendant.

It’s what? ten? no, eleven days since the attacks in Spain that left 14 people dead in Barcelona plus one woman in the nearby seaside town of Cambrils. For once there wasn’t even the pretense that this was a “lone wolf” terrorist. It was an extremely large cell, organized by an imam called Abdelbaki es Satty, who prematurely self-detonated the night before when he and his conspirators accidentally blew up the house they’d filled with TATP.

I thought these novel aspects might hold the attention of the media. The imam/cell leader would seem to belie the view of the US National Security Advisor H R McMaster that Muslim terrorists who commit terror in the name of Islam do so out of “ignorance” of their faith – a view so fiercely held by Mr McMaster that it has resulted in the systematic cleansing from the White House of all those who dissent therefrom. And had Imam es Satty managed to get the TATP into the back of the van the death toll would have been many times higher.

But he didn’t, so it wasn’t. And fifteen dead on a glamorous and glittering European boulevard at the height of the tourist season now barely rates a #JeSuisWhatever hashtag, never mind an all-star pop concert with an audience of sorrowful, tilty-headed locals promising that no matter how often you blow us up we won’t change – by, say, adopting a less tilty-headed and sorrowful expression. The imam’s plan – to destroy the spectacular landmark church of the Sagrada Família – is oddly similar to the plot of Brad Thor’s new thriller, Use of Force, where the equivalent Spanish target is the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. Indeed, the imam’s van driver has the same name as Mr Thor’s key plotter: Younes. But what’s thrilling in a thriller in now just the humdrum background music of real life in the new Europe.

So Barcelona came and went before I had a chance to write about it. So did Finland. You don’t remember that one? No imams, no TATP. Just a lone stabber going full Allahu Akbar in a shopping mall in Turku. Two women dead, eight injured. As it happens, I was in Turku last year, driving up the west coast of Finland all the way to Kemi, a somewhat unprepossessing burg at the top of the Bay of Bothnia, where I’d had an extensive conversation, in the pedestrian shopping arcade, with an elderly “refugee” in a dingy dishdash. And I’d intended to write something about how absurd it was that clothing designed for the deserts of Araby was now a not unfamiliar sight in southern Lapland, in a town that’s more or less the last stop before Santa’s Grotto.

But ten stabbing victims in Finland barely makes the papers at all: Foot-of-page-27 “News in Brief” stuff. Just the umpteenth confused fellow acting out of “ignorance” of his religion. If only H R McMaster had become a bigshot ayatollah and opened a seminary in Qom or Cairo, all this “ignorance” could have been avoided.

There was more “ignorance” afoot in Europe last night. On the boulevard Émile Jacqmain in the heart of Brussels a Somali was shot dead after yelling “Allahu Akbar” and taking his machete to a bunch of soldiers, and Buckingham Palace was reported to be in “lockdown” after another guy with another machete and another cry of “Allahu Akbar” took on another security detail. As A A Milne put it:

They’re stabbing the guard at Buckingham Palace
Christopher Mahmoud went down to kill Alice…

Lest you detect a pattern of behavior here, the Palace perp is reported to be “a 26-year-old man from Luton”. The Brussels stabber is not from Luton. So no general conclusions can be drawn: It’s not like Charlottesville, where one Caucasian in an automobile is an indictment of the entirety of American history necessitating the demolition of Stone Mountain and Mount Rushmore.

The Queen is older than almost all those around her, certainly older than her guards and the 26-year-old Lutonians lunging at them with machetes. And she must occasionally reflect that not so long ago one didn’t hear words like “machete” and “lockdown” in connection with Buckingham Palace: “baldachin”, “porte-cochère” certainly; but not “lockdown”. Yet, if such thoughts should rise unbidden in one’s mind, it is prudent to suppress them. Consider the cautionary tale of Sarah Champion, Member of Parliament for Rotherham and spokesperson for “Women and Equalities” in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. Ms Champion penned a column for The Sun earlier this month:

Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.

There. I said it. Does that make me a racist? Or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is?

This is the first installment of a small RealClearWorld series on the crisis in Venezuela. The views expressed are the author’s own.

Left-wing commentators are struggling to come to grips with Venezuela’s economic collapse. In early August, Stanford University professor Terry Lynn Karl joined the chorus claiming that falling oil prices are the problem. It’s true that the price of oil fell from around $100 per barrel in 2014 to around $50 in 2017. But socialist policies exacerbated the oil crisis and created the poverty we see in Venezuela today.

Free market societies are less affected by falling commodity prices, in part because their wealth does not rely on raw materials. Hong Kong and Singapore are two of the wealthiest economies in the world, with a 2016 gross domestic product per capita of $57,676 and $84,821, respectively.

What turned these resource-barren spits of land into thriving metropolises, with bustling commerce and a prosperous middle class? Economic freedom. It takes an average of just two days to start a company in Hong Kong — three in Singapore. Singapore has one business per 350 people, which means competitive enterprises constantly vie for consumers’ money with innovations and excellent service. Both economies encourage investment and trade, which allows consumers and businesses to benefit from the wealth and ideas of other nations.

According to the Fraser Institute’s “Economic Freedom of the World: 2016 Annual Report,” Hong Kong and Singapore are the two most free economies on earth. As the Fraser economists note, “countries with institutions and policies more consistent with economic freedom have higher investment rates, more rapid economic growth, higher income levels, and a more rapid reduction in poverty rates.” Free markets encourage trade, entrepreneurship, and investment, which create wealth.

By contrast, the poorest economies in the world are characterized by oppressive government intervention. In 2014, the 40 least economically free nations had an average per capita GDP of $5,471 (in 2011 dollars). Compare that to $41,228 for the freest 40 nations. Abundant natural resources cannot make up for a lack of freedom. Iran has over 150 billion barrels of oil reserves but is one of the 10 least economically free nations in the world. Price controls and industry subsidies crippled their economy for decades, and the government strictly limits access to financing for business. Iran’s GDP per capita in 2014, before oil prices fell, was just $6,007.

In Venezuela’s case, a government takeover of the oil industry reduced supply, sowing the seeds of future impoverishment. The oil industry was nationalized in 1976, but, wary of the mismanagement and corruption of other nationalized oil companies like Pemex, Venezuela let Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) operate as a mostly private company with decision-making freedom and competent business managers.

When Hugo Chavez took power in 1999, he curtailed this freedom. Chavez closed Venezuela’s oil fields to foreign investment and stopped reinvesting oil proceeds in the company. He fired 18,000 workers at PDVSA, replacing professional oil employees with inept but politically loyal workers. Bids started taking months longer to complete as staff kept changing their technical specifications. Fatal accidents and fires became more common, because Chavez’ yes-men didn’t understand how to safely run an oil refinery. PDVSA middle managers required Rolex bribes to schedule meetings.

Chavez pushed for a natural gas pipeline from Venezuela to Brazil. According to Luis Giusti, who competently ran the pre-Chavez PDVSA, this would, “bring gas that does not exist to markets that do not exist.”

Predictably, oil production collapsed: The Washington Post notes that production fell 25 percent from 1999 to 2013. PDVSA made its decisions based on politics rather than the needs of consumers, and output plummeted as a result.

Had Chavez instead privatized the oil industry, Venezuela would have enjoyed more oil, delivered more efficiently, and would have suffered less waste and corruption. When China privatized its agriculture industry, agricultural yields increased. In a working paper for the World Bank, economists Sunita Kikeri and John Nellis explain that privatization improves performance. When private companies compete and innovate, they can reduce waste and more efficiently manage resources to create more value.

WASHINGTON—A grand jury in the U.S. capital has issued indictments for 19 people, including 15 identified as Turkish security officials, who are accused of attacking protesters in May.

The indictments, announced Tuesday, charge the defendants with attacking peaceful demonstrators who were protesting the visit of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Washington on May 17.

All 19 are charged with conspiracy to commit a crime of violence, a felony punishable by a statutory maximum of 15 years in prison. Several face additional charges of assault with a deadly weapon.

Sixteen of the defendants had already been charged in June; Tuesday’s indictment adds three new defendants, all Turkish security officials.

Two of the defendants were arrested in June and face an initial court hearing on Sept. 7. The rest remain at large.

While taking money from Swiss taxpayers, Abu Ramadan, a well-known Salafist, called for the introduction of Sharia law in Switzerland and urged Muslims to avoid integrating into Swiss society. He also said that Muslims who commit crimes in Switzerland should not be subject to Swiss laws.

“This scandal is so huge that it is difficult to believe. Imams who preach hate towards Christians and Jews, and who criticize the depravity of the West, are granted asylum and are living comfortably as refugees on social welfare. All this with the complicity of cowardly and incompetent authorities who give carte blanche to the complacent and naive assistants of the asylum and social welfare system.” — Adrian Amstutz, Swiss parliamentarian.

City officials in Lund remain undeterred: They have launched a pilot project aimed at providing Swedish jihadists who are returning from Syria with housing, employment, education and other financial support — all thanks to the Swedish taxpayers.

A Libyan imam who called on Allah to “destroy” all non-Muslims received more than $600,000 in welfare payments from the Swiss government, according to the Swiss broadcaster SRF.

Abu Ramadan arrived in Switzerland in 1998 and was granted asylum in 2004 after claiming that the Libyan government was persecuting him for his affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood. Since then, Ramadan has collected 600,000 Swiss Francs ($620,000) in social welfare payments, according to SRF.

Although Ramadan has lived in Switzerland for nearly 20 years, he can barely speak French or German, and has never held a steady job. Ramadan, 64, will soon be entitled to receive a Swiss state pension.

While taking money from Swiss taxpayers, Ramadan, a well-known Salafist, called for the introduction of Sharia law in Switzerland and urged Muslims to avoid integrating into Swiss society. He also said that Muslims who commit crimes in Switzerland should not be subject to Swiss laws. In a sermon Ramadan recently preached at a mosque near Bern, he said:

“Oh, Allah, I ask you to destroy the enemies of our religion, destroy the Jews, the Christians, the Hindus, the Russians and the Shiites. God, I ask you to destroy them all and to return to Islam its ancient glory.”

Saïda Keller-Messahli, a Swiss-Tunisian human rights activist, said that Ramadan is dangerous because of his opposition to Muslim integration: “This is someone who does not call directly to jihad but creates the mental breeding ground for it.”

Adrian Amstutz, a federal parliamentarian, blamed the situation on Swiss multiculturalism:

“This scandal is so huge that it is difficult to believe. Imams who preach hate towards Christians and Jews, and who criticize the depravity of the West, are granted asylum and are living comfortably as refugees on social welfare. All this with the complicity of cowardly and incompetent authorities who give carte blanche to the complacent and naive assistants of the asylum and social welfare system.”

Beat Feurer, a municipal counselor in Biel, the Swiss town where Ramadan has lived for 20 years, called on Swiss authorities to open an investigation: “Personally, I am of the opinion that such people have nothing to do here. They should be expelled.”

The Ramadan scandal is being repeated in countries across Europe, where potentially thousands of violent and non-violent jihadists are using welfare payments to finance their activities. A guide for jihadists in the West — “How to Survive in the West” — issued by the Islamic State in 2015 advised: “If you can claim extra benefits from a government, then do so.”

In Austria, more than a dozen jihadists collected welfare payments to finance their trips to Syria. Among those detained was Mirsad Omerovic, 32, an extremist Islamic preacher who police say raised several hundred thousand euros for the war in Syria. Omerovic, a father of six who lives exclusively off the Austrian welfare state, benefited from additional payments for paternity leave.

In Belgium, several of the jihadists in the Brussels and Paris attacks that killed 162 people in 2015 and 2016 received more than €50,000 ($59,000) in social welfare benefits, which they used to finance their terror plots. Fred Cauderlier, a spokesman for the Belgian prime minister, defended the payments: “This is a democracy. We have no tools to check how people spend their benefits.”

In Flemish Brabant and Brussels alone, dozens of jihadists who fought in Syria received at least €123,898 ($150,000) in unlawful benefits, according to the Justice Ministry.

The government of Iraq as well as the internationally recognized Syrian government in exile sounded the alarm about negotiations between the coalition of Hezbollah and the regime of Bashar al-Assad and the Islamic State that allowed safe passage to more than 300 ISIS terrorists.

The agreement between the parties, following a Sunday ceasefire between Lebanese government forces and the Hezbollah-Assad forces, allowed ISIS fighters to get on tour buses that shipped them and their families from the Syria-Lebanon border to Deir ez-Zor province southeast of Raqqa. The final destination, the Associated Press reported, where they were traveling today and where housing was being prepared, was Al-Bukamal — a mere 13-minute drive from the Iraq border crossing.

In return, ISIS pointed to the burial location of several Lebanese soldiers kidnapped by the terror group in 2014. Bodies have been located and DNA tests are being conducted on the remains.

ISIS documents found in Qalamoun indicated that some of the fighters there were from Chechnya. Syrian state media released images of a fleet of air-conditioned tour buses waiting to load up with jihadists.

“Honestly speaking, we are unhappy and consider it incorrect,” Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi told reporters. “Transferring terrorists from Qalamoun to the Iraqi-Syrian border is worrying and an insult to the [Iraqi] people.”

“There must be no chance for Daesh to breath,” the Iraqi leader added.

Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah claimed in a Monday televised address that ISIS “had asked for a ceasefire in order to negotiate, something that was out of question for us, but as Daesh found itself cornered it surrendered and collapsed — they had no choice but to accept our terms.”

“We have made a deal to which we must commit; we do not stab in the back and we do not betray,” he said of the pact.

The Lebanese military wasn’t so quick to declare ISIS flushed out of their territory, noting the need to clear affected areas and ensure ISIS didn’t leave mines behind.

According to pro-Assad Al-Masdar News, Nasrallah said ISIS was “made by the western intelligence services to serve Israel, and they fought for the sake of the Israeli scheme and the U.S. hegemony.”

Hezbollah began sending fighters to aid Assad in 2012, after the Arab Spring revolution began. CONTINUE AT SITE

This tale of Islamoprivilege comes to us from sunny Australia.

Justice Roslyn Atkinson had asked for information on prison conditions during the sentencing Muhumed Samow Ali, a Somali-born man accused of trying to kill his partner with a machete in 2015.

More accurately, he was convicted of it.

He drove his car head-on into his former partner’s vehicle near a train station and struck her in the head with a machete as she tried to flee.

Here’s how bad the attack really was.

Crown prosecutor Sarah Farnden showed the jury a photograph of the woman’s cut to the back of her head.

“It was 6 centimetres in length, it went through a head covering that she was wearing, a hijab, it went to the bone,” Ms Farnden said.

The court heard how after 7:30am on September 10, 2015, the woman was driving home from the train station when the accused drove head on into her car.

He then got out and grabbed the machete from his car, while the woman ran down the street screaming for help.

The prosecutor said the woman recalled being struck on the back of the head and the shoulder and fell to the ground.

Ms Farnden said the attack ended with the “intervention of a number of neighbours who threw items at him” and used “wheelie bins to push him away”.

“It relates to an attack on a completely vulnerable women, it relates to an attack where she is struck on the head and she is struck repeatedly on the back while she lay face down, defenceless on the ground,” Mr Power said.

Members of the Somali community were also in court, supporting the accused, who has an interpreter.

Of course they were. They always do. And he blamed PTSD.

Prior to his sentencing the court has been told Ali suffers from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder related to horrific experiences in Somalia before he came to Australia as a refugee.

Don’t they all. They’re just poor traumatized refugees. With a bad habit of grabbing a machete and hacking away at people.

On the safe side, let’s avoid bringing in anyone from Somalia with traumatic experiences. They might be suffering from PTSD.

But the Somali Muslim refugee has found a sympathetic judge.

His lawyer, Ben Power, said he also had problems observing his religion in jail.

“The situation is there are also very few Muslims in jail; he has real problems with the food in the jail … Ramadan is very difficult because they don’t make allowances for fasting so he has to store up his food in order to eat it after dusk or dawn in order to observe Ramadan,” Mr Power said.

“He says he is often taunted during his required prayers.”

Taunted? That’s almost as bad as taking a machete to your ex-girlfriend’s head while she’s lying on the ground until it reaches the bone.

She said English lessons should also be investigated for Ali “so he is not so isolated”.

We wouldn’t want the psychotic monster to feel isolated. And in ten years, when he’s allowed to rejoin society, he should be able to speak English. How else is he supposed to buy his next machete?