RUTHFULLY YOURS

Imran Awan is a Pakistani-born computer whiz who worked for Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and for dozens of Democrats in Congress. He and his wife have been indicted on four criminal counts of bank fraud and lying to investigators.

He was arrested at Dulles International Airport in suburban Virginia just as he was about to board a plane to Pakistan, his home of record, and just after he made a curious transfer of many thousands of dollars to an overseas bank account in his name.

This is a good story that you might think ambitious reporters would have leaped at, a story with all the making of a made-for-television spy thriller. But it was largely ignored by the mainstream media. Mrs. Wasserman-Schultz hired Imran Awan years ago as a technology technician, and he and two members of his family, who were hired to work with him, have collected $4 million of Democratic money.

Federal authorities began casting suspicious eyes at Mr. Awan several months ago, looking for evidence of double-billing, stealing equipment and with — and this is what frightens certain Democras, unauthorized access to the party’s computer systems. Mrs. Wasserman-Schultz kept him on the party payroll for months, even after FBI agents confiscated several smashed computer hard drives at his home. What was on the destroyed drives? Only Mr. Awan, and perhaps Mrs. Wasserman-Schultz, knows. She finally sacked him after his dramatic airport arrest. Why so enamored with him? We still don’t know this, either.

The answers may come by following the money, which has turned over many Washington rocks to reveal secrets of many kinds. The formal indictment from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia charges Mr. Awan and his wife, Hina Alvi, with engaging in a conspiracy to obtain home equity lines of credit from the Congressional Federal Credit Union by giving false information about properties. The indictment says the couple then sent those illegally collected proceeds to certain persons in Pakistan. The moving finger writes many tales from the Arabian nights, not many of them good.

With all the brouhaha over statues and Antifa…..Trump accomplished what no previous administration did. Yesterday on FOX Senator Ben Cardin (D-Maryland) was asked about that and he offered a dimwitted response. “Negotiations are what’s needed….”

SEOUL—North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has decided not to launch a threatened missile attack on Guam, Pyongyang’s state media reported on Tuesday, but warned that he could change his mind “if the Yankees persist in their extremely dangerous reckless actions.”

(For a deeper analysis of the issues in this story, please see “North Korea Backs Off Threat to Hit Guam”)

(CNN)North Korea leader Kim Jong Un appears to have backed away from a threat to fire missiles towards the US Pacific territory of Guam, opting instead to wait and see what the “foolish Yankees” do next. State media KCNA said Kim had reviewed a previously announced plan to fire four missiles on a trajectory over western Japan, but had decided not to go ahead with the proposal for now.
The comments came after US Secretary of Defense James Mattis warned that if North Korea fired on US territory it would be “game on.”

Speaking at the Pentagon Monday, Mattis told reporters: “You don’t shoot at people in this world unless you want to bear the consequences.”

Where is the Arab Middle East heading following the 2010-2017 disintegration of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and Sudan; the toppling of several Arab regimes; the estimated toll of 400,000 fatalities and six million refugees, resulting from intra-Arab conflicts; the proliferation of Islamic Sunni terrorism; the unprecedented power-projection surge by Iran’s Shiite Ayatollahs; the approaching Sunni and Shiite terrorist machetes to the throat of the House of Saud and all other pro-US Arab regimes; and the intensified squashing of human rights in every Arab country, all ruled by minority-regimes?

The raging Arab Tsunami of the last 6.5 years – referred to by the Western establishment as the Arab Spring – has further destabilized the one-bullet, provisional, Arab regimes, characterized by tenuous policies and uncertain bilateral and multilateral intra-Arab agreements.

This has added much fuel to the fire – raging since the 7th century – of the inherently unpredictable and intensely complex, non-nation-state, non-democratic Middle East, which has been systematically misperceived by the Western establishment.

Where is the Arab Tsunami heading? The chaotic intra-Arab roller-coaster may have shifted, temporarily, to a relatively-lower gear, but it is surging on brutally!

While the US has dealt a severe blow to ISIS terrorists in 2017 – without clipping the wings of Iran’s Ayatollahs – it has, therefore, provided a tailwind to Iran’s entrenchment in Syria, and increasingly in Lebanon. It has advanced the Ayatollahs’ domination of the critical area from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, which is a prelude to their megalomaniacal vision of denying the US “modern-day-Crusader” regional and global preeminence.

This could be a repeat of the US toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003, when the US elevated Iraq’s Shiites to the helm, dumping Iraq’s Sunnis, which reinforced the ranks of Sunni terrorism. This paved the way for the Ayatollahs’ dominance in Iraq – which intensified anti-US terrorism – and created a clear and present danger for every pro-US Arab regime in the Persian Gulf and beyond.

In 2011, a US-led coalition, toppled Gaddafi’s rogue regime in Libya, in spite of the fact that Gaddafi was involved in a ferocious war on Islamic terrorism in Libya and Africa. Moreover, in 2003, Gaddafi transferred his infrastructure of weapons of mass destruction to the US. The toppling of Gaddafi accelerated the disintegration of Libya, transforming the huge country (680,000sqm, three times larger than Texas) into a major safe haven and breeding ground of Islamic terrorism.

While the US military power-projection and posture of deterrence are prerequisites for the western battle against Islamic terrorism – and keeping Islamic terrorism away from the US mainland – a misguided US policy has tolerated the Ayatollahs’ imperialism, subversion and terrorism, allowing them to surge on the coattails of the 2015 non-ratified(!) Iran nuclear deal, further destabilizing the Middle East.

Standing up to political correctness and facing death threats, the Muslim apostate writers Ibn Warraq and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have honored our increasingly endangered Western heritage of free thought, which includes the right—indeed, the obligation—to subject religious dogma to criticism and reason. In a series of provocative books and personal testimonies over two decades, they have educated us about the historical and religious roots of the Islamist onslaught against democratic institutions.

In his 1995 book Why I Am Not a Muslim (modeled after Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian), Ibn Warraq reported that, as a young man thinking about abandoning his religious upbringing, he was inspired by the philosophical defenses of free speech of John Stuart Mill and Friedrich A. Hayek. Those mainstays of Western thought led Ibn Warraq eventually to take “an uncompromising and critical look at almost all the fundamental tenets of Islam.”

In a similar way, in her 2015 book Heretic, Ayaan Hirsi Ali recalls how she came to realize the price that she would have to pay for exercising her free-speech rights: “From the moment I first began to argue that there was an unavoidable connection between the religion I was raised in and the violence of organizations such as al-Qaida and the self-styled Islamic State . . . I have been subjected to a sustained effort to silence my voice.” In 2004, Theo van Gogh, Hirsi Ali’s collaborator on a Dutch film about Islam’s oppression of women, was stabbed to death on a street in Amsterdam, where she was then living. The Islamist killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, left a note warning that Hirsi Ali was next. She now travels with bodyguards, while Ibn Warraq writes under a pseudonym—prudent precautions, since apostasy remains a capital crime in 13 Muslim-majority nations, including Somalia and Pakistan, the native countries of the two writers.

Outrageously, Ibn Warraq and Hirsi Ali have found no sanctuary in America’s centers of higher learning, where they regularly find themselves denounced as “Islamophobes.” But they have shrugged off the calumnies and continued to think about the most serious threat facing the Western democracies since the end of the Cold War. Their two recent works, Ibn Warraq’s The Islam in Islamic Terrorism: The Importance of Beliefs, Ideas, and Ideology and Hirsi Ali’s The Challenge of Dawa: Political Islam as Ideology and Movement and How to Counter It, encourage readers to reflect on the striking parallels between the ideological challenges that America and its allies confronted during the long struggle against international Communism and the current battle against jihadist terrorism.

It might seem counterintuitive to see similarities between an avowedly atheistic revolutionary movement, promising salvation on earth, and the religion of Islam, which guarantees its adherents a sweet afterlife. In reality, Communism was a quasi-religion for its true believers, and Islam has doubled as a totalitarian political system. The West’s victory over Communism was achieved primarily not on battlefields but through a war of civilizational ideas. Millions of people in the free world were once seduced by the utopian allure of Marxism and its kindred ideologies. Communism’s progressive apologists finally had to face the truth in part because of the testimonies of courageous men and women who had witnessed totalitarian movements from the inside. Like today’s Muslim dissidents, Communism’s apostates were denounced by many Western liberals as “reactionaries” and “warmongers.”

A signal event in what historians came to call “the cultural Cold War” was the 1947 publication of The God That Failed, a collection of compelling personal essays by prominent literary figures who had broken with Communism, among them Arthur Koestler, André Gide, and Ignacio Silone. Their manifestos about the spiritual and material catastrophe of Communism came out less than a year after Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, the opening rhetorical shot of the Cold War. Ex-Communists did essential work unmasking the apologists for Soviet imperialism—those Lenin referred to as “useful idiots.”

Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle. 1,477 people live in this little corner of Quebec with its apple orchards, elderberry fields and small wineries. But now 400 migrants can cross the border in a single day.

On the other side of the border is New York. There the language is English. In Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, the language of choice is French. But these days you’re a more likely to hear Arabic, Urdu or Haitian French being spoken here as Roxham Road fills with clots of migrants scampering out of America.

They’re not the leftist American celebs who threaten to leave for Canada if their side doesn’t win the election. Instead they’re the illegal and dubiously legal who got the message from President Trump.

The overloaded Mounties at the border crossing are being forced to cope with the jabbering illegals, grifters and fake refugees of Trump’s migrant surge. But where Obama’s migrant surge swelled America’s southern border with incoming migrants, Trump’s migrant surge is expelling them north.

The Syrians, or anyone claiming to be, are coming. So are the Sudanese, Somalis and Haitians. This is an informal border crossing and so the rules that might protect Canada from this horde don’t apply. Quebec has become the weakest link in the Canadian border with the vast majority of border migrants invading the “True North” through vulnerable points like the dead end of Roxham Road.

The same thing is happening in Emerson, a town of 689 people named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Minnesota whose Somali settler population is invading and victimizing this peaceful community. At night Somalis can be seen walking up to Emerson to take advantage of a new country and her people.

In a town where once no one locked their doors, locals now check their bolts and turn out the lights. And then they wake up to the nightmare of migrant mobs pounding on their doors and peering through their windows in the middle of the night.

“They banged pretty hard, then ‘ring ring ring’ the doorbell,” a mother of two young girls said. “It was scary.”

Muhammad, a Somali migrant, heard that President Trump had deported a bunch of Somali asylum seekers. And so he headed for Emerson with ten others. He claims he no longer feels secure in America. And he wants to bring the rest of his family along.

Unfortunately, Muhammad and all those like him feel all too secure invading Canada.

At Hemmingford, a Quebec town near New York with less than 1,000 people, Syrians, Yemenis, Bangladeshis, Sudanese and Turks swarm to get across. Women in burkas and hijabs ignore the commands to stop. Before they used to furtively cross the border at night. Now they openly march across it in broad daylight. They know that the Canadian authorities can’t do anything to stop them.

The emergence of ISIS-inspired groups in the Gaza Strip has long been an open known secret. This is the inconvenient truth that Hamas has been working hard to conceal for the past few years.

Obstinately holding on to an imaginary dream, some political analysts and journalists have misinterpreted the Hamas document as a sign of “moderation” and “pragmatism,” and argued falsely that the Islamist movement is ready to join a peace process with Israel. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar could not be clearer on this point.

Hamas, as we all know, is hardly opposed to suicide bombings. Yet when the boomerang returns, suddenly the attacks become “cowardly terror” actions perpetrated by “outlaws” and “intellectually and religiously and morally deviant” terrorists. Hamas, Islamic Jihad and ISIS may disagree on many issues, but targeting Jews and “infidels” is not one of them. On that point, they are in savage agreement.

The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas is finally getting a dose of its own medicine — in the form of a suicide bombing targeting its members in the Gaza Strip.

During the past two decades, Hamas was responsible for dozens of suicide attacks that maimed and killed hundreds of Israelis, particularly during the Second Intifada between 2000 and 2006. Hamas is famous for its suicide attacks and hails the perpetrators as “heroes” and “martyrs.”

For Hamas, suicide bombings are a noble deed when they are carried out by its members and the victims are Jews.

In their own words, Hamas leaders and spokesmen continue to defend their suicide attacks against Israel as a “legitimate tool of resistance” against Israel.

Hamas is famous for its suicide attacks and hails the perpetrators as “heroes” and “martyrs.” Pictured: Masked Palestinian members of Hamas dress as suicide bombers during an anti-Israel rally on June 4, 2004 at the Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. (Photo by Ahmad Khateib/Getty Images)

Recent events, however, may have left a bad taste for suicide attacks in Hamas’s mouth.

On August 17, Nidal Al-Ja’fari, a member of Hamas’s military wing, Ezaddin Al-Kassam, was killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. The suicide bomber was identified as Mustafa Kallab, a member of a jihadi group that is affiliated with the Islamic State (ISIS) terror group.

According to Hamas, Kallab detonated the explosive belt he was wearing as he and another jihadi tried to cross from the Gaza Strip into Egypt. The slain Hamas security officer, Al-Ja’fari, was among a border security patrol that intercepted the jihadis and attempted to stop them from infiltrating into Egypt. It was the first time a suicide bomber had ever targeted Hamas members.

The gutless response of world leaders to so many terrorist attacks suggest that the world has apparently bought into the “victim narrative” of these extremists, who first set their own countries on fire and then entered Europe with the baggage of their totalitarian ideology, aiming to enslave the masses here too.

The free world, if it would like to win this war, will first have to give up its duplicity. It will have to target the nurseries of terror indoctrination without cherry-picking and keeping favorites. If not, the global security organizations will find themselves exhausted running after the individual suspects, but each time looking just at the “minnows”, never the pond they swim in.

Europe bleeds again as terrorists in Spain plowed their vehicles into crowds of pedestrians in tourist areas in Barcelona and Cambrils. The men killed 14 people and injured more than 100.

Spanish police are currently investigating a local imam for possibly having radicalized the terrorists. The imam had apparently been preaching at a mosque in the town of Ripoll for two years, but stopped just a few months ago. The question has arisen if the mosque administration may have found out something about the imam and fired him, but never bothered to report the information to the local police and to clear the mosque of blame.

The day after the attacks in Spain, two people in Finland were hacked to death in another Islamist terrorist attack, leaving some eight injured.

We hear yet again the promises to root out the terrorism, with a warning from security agencies that they cannot stop each and every terrorist attack — words that translate into the admission that terror has gone beyond the control of European governments.

Yes, there were candlelight vigils for the victims; flags of Spain and Finland on social media profiles; there might even be a “Je Suis Barcelona” campaign — and then the long silence as if we are all in a loop, waiting for another terrorist attack..

We have seen — and these are just the recent ones — Islamist-inspired attacks in London, Manchester, Paris, Brussels, Nice, Berlin and Stockholm, all of the violence leaving scores of women, children and men dead, and even more injured and possibly disabled for life.

It does not take much common sense to understand that individuals cannot commit mass murder without any training, support and most importantly, indoctrination.

The gutless response of world leaders to so many terrorist attacks suggest that the world has apparently bought into the “victim narrative” of these extremists, who first set their own countries on fire and then entered Europe with the baggage of their totalitarian ideology, aiming to enslave the masses here too.

As kids, we heard the stories of Cuban political prisoners. Our family dinner table was a classroom with my parents telling us about communism or reading the latest letter from Cuba.

I grew up admiring the men and women who risked their lives to fight for freedom.

Among these men were Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary, the heroes who tried to cross the Berlin Wall, the guerrillas who fought Castro in the Escambray Mountains in the forgotten war of the 1960s that Enrique Escinosa wrote about, and those who tried reforms inside the Soviet bloc.
Back in August 1968, the Rascals were riding high with a song called “People got to be Free”.

It was a pop hit in the U.S. It was reality in the streets of Prague:

“On August 21, 1968, more than 200,000 troops of the Warsaw Pact crossed into Czechoslovakia in response to democratic and free market reforms being instituted by Czech Communist Party General Secretary Alexander Dubcek. Negotiations between Dubcek and Soviet bloc leaders failed to convince the Czech leader to back away from his reformist platform. The military intervention on August 21 indicated that the Soviets believed that Dubcek was going too far and needed to be restrained. On August 22, thousands of Czechs gathered in central Prague to protest the Soviet action and demand the withdrawal of foreign troops. Although it was designed to be a peaceful protest, violence often flared and several protesters were killed on August 22 and in the days to come.”

Alexander Dubcek’s mistake is that he called for reforms:

“On January 5th 1968, the party’s central committee nominated Dubček to succeed Novotný after the Czechoslovak Party Central Committee passed a vote of no confidence in Novotný.

What happened next must have come as a great surprise to the communist leaders in Moscow. Dubček announced that he wanted the Czech Communist Party to remain the predominant party in Czechoslovakia, but that he wanted the totalitarian aspects of the party to be reduced. Communist Party members in Czechoslovakia were given the right to challenge party policy as opposed to the traditional acceptance of all government policy. Party members were given the right to act “according to their conscience”. In what became known as the ‘Prague Spring’, he also announced the end of censorship and the right of Czech citizens to criticise the government. Newspapers took the opportunity to produce scathing reports about government incompetence and corruption.

The death of Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo in state custody last month briefly focused world attention on Chinese repression under President Xi Jinping. Now human-rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng has disappeared, perhaps into the state-security maw that presided over Mr. Liu’s death.

Family members in exile in the U.S., who talk to him regularly on the phone, say Mr. Gao disappeared from his home in remote Shaanxi province earlier this month. Mr. Gao has been living under house arrest since 2014, surveilled by Chinese security forces. Local police say they don’t know where he is.

Mr. Gao has been incarcerated, tortured and released several times since 2006, when he was charged for “inciting subversion” for defending such clients as Falun Gong worshippers and factory workers. Yet Mr. Gao remained unbowed, thanks in part to his Christian faith. He went public with gruesome details of his torture, called for the removal of the Communist Party and advocated for a democratic China.

Mr. Gao may have been detained because he recently gave an interview to a Hong Kong magazine reiterating his political beliefs. Or the regime could be rounding up dissidents before the Party Congress this fall to avoid dissent about corruption or the lack of freedom during what is supposed to be a celebration of Mr. Xi’s consolidation of power.

Human-rights lawyers like Mr. Gao have been a particular target of state suppression, perhaps because they make their case by citing the words of Chinese law that embarrass the regime’s claims to legitimacy. The world should keep shining a light on these Chinese patriots, not least during the Party Congress.