RUTHFULLY YOURS

What you find is that behind every jihadist, who usually starts out as a young, often angry, Muslim seeking a purpose, lies a pulpit ideologue promising rewards and threatening punishments both on earth and in the afterlife.

Violent jihad may be postponed not out of concern for its victims, but rather if it might adversely affect a Muslim community. This view is frequently mistaken as “moderate.”

Use the press and social media to expose young Muslims to facts other than those they are fed in mosques and the textbooks of their native countries, including the humanistic values of the West, such as freedom of speech and of the press; equal justice under the law — especially due process and the presumption of innocence; property rights; separation of religion and state; an independent judiciary; an independent educational system and freedom of religion and from religion — for a start.

On March 22, when Khalid Masood rammed his vehicle into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge in London before attempting to stab his way to the Parliament building, it was as if the heart and soul of British democracy were under assault.

As horrifying as the terrorist attack was, however — murdering four innocent people and wounding scores of others — it belied the magnitude of a much larger problem that has been plaguing Europe and creeping up on the rest of the West. Jihadists committing murder in the name of Islam have left a trail of blood across North America, the Middle East, Australia, the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Africa and Europe.In November 2015, a suicide-bombing and shooting spree in Paris left 130 people dead and hundreds wounded; in March 2016, three coordinated suicide bombings targeting travelers in Brussels killed 32 and wounded hundreds; and last December, a truck-ramming at the Christmas market in Berlin left 12 people dead and another 56 injured.

These were just a few of the successful attacks; those thwarted were more numerous.

France’s prime minister said last September that authorities were foiling plots “daily,” while some 15,000 people “in the process of radicalization” were being monitored. Last year, British security services prevented no fewer than 12 other assaults.

The average European now knows the names of Masood and those of other publicized terrorists. But few in the West are familiar with the many people who put those terrorists on their path by leading them up the rungs of a ladder of radicalization.

The Manchester attack – and the widespread abuse of girls throughout the UK by Muslim rape gangs – would also have been avoided if she had used Tommy Robinson as an adviser instead of finding ever more devious ways to criminalise him.

See also:

Manchester attack – media follows script again
Manchester – what happens next
UK bans Spencer and Geller: free speech is dead in the UK and the ban was supported by the Board of Deputies
Geller and Spencer were banned from the UK because of their ‘pro-Israel views’
A Statement on behalf of the UK Jewish Board of Deputies on the banning of Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller from entering the UK

Our “Destiny”? As Europeans? Angela Merkel’s brain is on some kind of drug. Perhaps she should also lay off the quart-sized glasses of Bavarian suds.

The New York Post’s story “Merkel: Europe can’t rely on allies anymore” of May 28th reported:

Just days after President Trump lectured NATO members about ponying up more money for defense , German leader Angela Merkel said Europe could no longer count on its allies.

“The times in which we could completely depend on others are on the way out,” Merkel said during an appearance at a beer tent in Munich on Sunday. “I’ve experienced that in the last few days.”

“But we have to know that we must fight for our future on our own, for our destiny as Europeans,” she added.

Oh, yes. The plentiful times when Europe could mooch on the U.S. are past. But is Europe’s future to be a European one or an Islamic one? Germany and other European governments want to ensure that the transition from European to Islamic submission is smooth without any speed bumps that would frustrate the conquerors.

The Daily Caller reported on May 19th, “Germany Considers Million Dollar Hate Speech Fines”:

The German parliament is debating a proposal to force social media platforms to either delete hate speech quickly or risk hefty fines.

The problems that many critics point out are the vague definitions of the term “hate speech” and the restrictions that the proposed law may have on freedom of speech. Justice Minister Heiko Maas disagrees, arguing it will only help protect freedom of speech in Germany.

It is welcome news that President Trump will pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement. The pact promises to damage the economy while surrendering American sovereignty over climate policy to yet another international, largely anti-American enterprise.

It is unwelcome news, nevertheless, that so much was riding on the president’s decision to withdraw the assent of his predecessor, Barack Obama — America’s first post-American president.

In reality, Trump’s decision is monumental only because America, in the Obama mold, has become post-constitutional.

The Paris climate agreement is a treaty. We are not talking here about a bob-and-weave farce like the Iran nuclear deal. That arrangement, the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” was shrewdly packaged as an “unsigned understanding” — concurrently spun, depending on its apologists’ need of the moment, as a non-treaty (in order to evade the Constitution’s requirements), or as a binding international commitment (in order to intimidate the new American administration into retaining it).

The climate agreement, to the contrary, is a formal international agreement. Indeed, backers claim this “Convention” entered into force — i.e., became internationally binding — upon the adoption of “instruments of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession” by a mere 55 of the 197 parties.

For all these global governance pretensions, though, why should we care? Why should the Paris agreement affect Americans?

Yes, President Obama gave his assent to the agreement in his characteristically cagey manner: He waited until late 2016 to “adopt” the convention — when there would be no practical opportunity to seek Senate approval before he left office. But Senate consent is still required, by a two-thirds’ supermajority, before a treaty is binding on the United States.

At least that’s what the Constitution says.

Poet, novelist, essayist, translator and winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, Czeslaw Milosz died on August 14, 2004. He was born in Lithuania of Polish parents and lived under two totalitarian systems of modern history — national socialism and communism. In his 1953 work titled The Captive Mind he was asked

‘Are Americans really stupid?’ The question reveals the attitude of the average person in the people’s democracies toward the West: it is despair mixed with a residue of hope.

During the last few years, the West has given these people a number of reasons to despair politically.

World War II “destroyed not only [Eastern European] economies, but also a great many values which had seemed till then unshakable.”

Milosz describes how the average European during wartime was not accustomed “to thinking of his native city as divided into segregated living areas, but a single decree can force him to this new pattern of life and thought.” Thus, “Quarter A may suddenly be designated for one race; B, for a second; C, for a third.” And “…men, women, and children are loaded into wagons that take them off to specially constructed factories where they are scientifically slaughtered and their bodies burned.”

As these conditions worsen and “last for years, everyone gradually comes to look upon the city as a jungle, and upon the fate of twentieth-century man as identical with that of a caveman living in the midst of powerful monsters.”

Milosz asserts that the “man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because [Americans] have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are.”

Although America suffered losses in the two world wars, mostly she was spared the experiences at home. Thus, according to Milosz, Americans take for granted that the natural order of things as we come to understand them, exists. The war and its attendant horrors were not in our backyard.

Yet, almost 80 years later, I humbly posit a different question: “Are Europeans really stupid?” With Islamic jihadist violence besetting their natural order on a daily basis, how can so many countries across the pond forget that totalitarianism comes in many different forms — with Islamic jihadism its latest manifestation?

At the site Bare Naked Islam, one learns that in 2017 alone, a terror attack has been attempted in Europe every nine days. In fact, “the UK Government reports that there are approximately 23,000 Islamic jihadists in Britain, not 3,000 as previously reported.”

But will the British government act upon the “recommendation of Anthony Glees, the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies director… to double the size of MI5, as [they] did in World War Two, and expand the number of intelligence-led police by thousands?”

In fact, “Colonel Richard Kemp, a former member of the COBRA committee and Joint Intelligence Committee, as well as commander of British forces in Helmand, Afghanistan, has also called for robust action, saying that all foreign nationals on the terror watch list who cannot be prosecuted should be deported or interned.” Will this occur?

Instead we hear that this is the “new normal” throughout Europe. In fact, the threat level is “Very Likely” in France, Belgium, Germany, Turkey, Austria, and Macedonia. Paul Sperry writes that the “Manchester suicide bomber was on the British radar as a Muslim extremist, but they failed to stop him before he massacred girls at a pop concert. It’s a recurring problem on both sides of the pond.”

Chancellor Angela Merkel, campaigning at a Munich beer garden this Memorial Day weekend, certainly delighted American citizens as they paused to remember their sacred war dead, including the 236,000 men who died in Europe’s 20th-century wars. “The times in which we can fully count on others are somewhat over, as I have experienced in the past few days,” Merkel said. “We Europeans must really take our destiny into our own hands.” Although Merkel meekly attempted to walk her initial statement back in the face of American complaints, she clearly intended it as a forceful response to the tongue-lashing the American president, Donald J. Trump, gave alliance members regarding their low levels of defense spending during their meeting at NATO’s new headquarters in Brussels last week.

Such a statement by the German chancellor would normally be viewed with concern by members of the American foreign-policy and national-security establishments, who view the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a cornerstone of the post-war global order. But coming from Merkel, it was the height of arrogance.

Germany and the other European members of NATO have chronically underfunded the alliance for the past generation, as their defense spending dropped precipitously from an already low average range of 2–4 percent of GDP in 1991 to 1.2–2.5 percent today. Europe has spent the past 25 years focused on growing its social safety net and attracting new immigrants to offset lower birth rates, rather than on the more traditional threats to its east. Merkel’s Germany, the largest and most robust economy in Europe with a GDP of $3.8 trillion, could be contributing significantly to the alliance’s defense if it met the 2 percent of GDP defense-spending goal established at NATO’s Wales Summit in 2014. Instead, Merkel’s Ministry of Defense expends a miserly 1.2 percent of GDP, which ranks 16th among the alliance’s 28 member states.

A lot of ink has been spilled decrying President Trump’s failure to verbally commit the United States to the NATO Article V statement that an attack upon one alliance member shall be considered an attack upon all. This is troubling, especially since the only time that Article V has actually been invoked, it was on behalf of the United States, following the 9/11 attacks. This was a lost opportunity for Trump, to be sure. However, it should also be understood that many NATO members do not agree on meaning of Article V itself, which states that if an alliance member is attacked, each member state of the alliance will take “such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” Many members have made it known that in the event of an attack their responses could range from a diplomatic note to a declaration of war. The United States has been one of the few members of the alliance to consistently state that it considers a military response to be its primary option in an Article V scenario.

The basic truth is that NATO leaders simply haven’t found the topic of their own security to be all that important. This is not true of the U.S. population, which still generally supports NATO and its mission. Nevertheless, President Trump’s skepticism of NATO also reflects the doubts of many Americans. While 80 percent of the nation backs NATO, 31 percent of the Republican party, which controls both houses of Congress and the White House, either opposes the alliances or remains ambivalent.

KABUL—A bomb exploded near heavily guarded embassies and military bases in the Afghan capital on Wednesday, killing at least 80 people and wounding more than 300 others, many as they headed to work on foot or in buses, the interior ministry and witnesses said.

The death toll from the blast, which officials described as a suicide attack, was expected to rise as more bodies were discovered in the debris and the critically injured were transferred to hospitals.

The Taliban, Afghanistan’s most powerful insurgency, denied responsibility for the bombing, which occurred as the White House considers a Pentagon recommendation to send an additional 3,000 U.S. troops to the Central Asian country to advise and assist its military.

There was no immediate response to the blast from the local branch of Islamic State, which has gained a foothold in the country since thousands of foreign troops were withdrawn from the country in 2014.

In the past year, the Islamic State affiliate has moved from its redoubt in the east of the country and carried out large attacks in the capital. Along with other Afghan militant groups, it has urged an escalation of attacks during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, now in its fifth day.

Wednesday’s blast rocked the capital, sending a mushroom cloud high above the city.

“I was in the makeup room preparing for my morning show. A huge boom shook the room and everything collapsed. It was terrible,” said Taban Ibraz, a presenter for Afghan television network 1TV, located near the blast.

“The entire studio, newsroom and offices have been destroyed.”

An employee of Roshan, a mobile phone company, said many of his colleagues were killed and wounded in the blast.

“The two floors of office building collapsed completely as a result of the explosion,” he said. “Then office’s generators caught fire as well.”

The explosion struck near the entrance of the so-called Green Zone, which encompasses the U.S. military headquarters and the American embassy here.

The North Koreans now have the range capability to strike the United States with a ballistic missile. “It is a matter of physics and math.” — USAF General John Hyten, Commander of United States Strategic Command, May 9, 2017.

“A major headache for the United States is that much of the financial and technological support for North Korea’s weapons programs comes from China.” — Joseph Bosco, Senior Fellow at the ICAS Institute for Korea-American studies.

North Korea just conducted its seventh missile test launch so far this year. No one should expect this activity to cease, and no one should be surprised by North Korea’s progressively more advanced weapons capabilities, analysts said at a recent Mitchell Institute forum on Capitol Hill, hosted by the author.

“During Kim Jung Un’s five years in power he has done twice, perhaps three times, as many launches of missiles as his father did in 18 years,” said Bruce Klingner, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

The North Korean dictator is not showing any signs of slowing down, and he is determined to push forward the country’s program to enhance the medium and long-range missiles and nuclear warheads that now threaten the United States and its allies.

Klingner estimates that North Korea has 16 to 20 nuclear weapons. “And then, of course, the question or the debate is how far along they are,” he said. “I think it is pretty clear they’ve weaponized and miniaturized the warhead, that right now the Nodong medium-range ballistic missile is already nuclear capable.” This means U.S. allies Japan and South Korea are under a nuclear threat today, he stressed. “It is not theoretical, it is not several years in the future as some analysts or experts will tell you.”

The threats posed by North Korea are wide ranging, Klingner noted. “They’ve got, we estimate, 5,000 tons of chemical warfare agents.” And it has a sophisticated army of cyber warriors. “They are, perhaps, in the top five or top three countries in the world for cyber attack capabilities.”

Missile attacks are, it seems, what worries U.S. policy makers the most. A rising concern are submarine-launched ballistic missiles because of the immediate risk they create for South Korea. “The North Korean subs can come out on the east or west coast and threaten South Korea,” Klingner said.

North Korea successfully tested a Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missile last year, and they “flew it to an unusually high trajectory,” he said. “Had they lowered the trajectory and fired it for effect, the estimates are it could have ranged Guam. So that’s a new threat to a key node for the U.S. defense of the Pacific.”

Keeping U.S. officials up at night is the possibility of an ICBM launch. North Korea has developed several systems. One of its most advanced systems is a space launch vehicle, Klingner said. “But it’s the same technologies you would need to fire off an ICBM warhead.”

As USAF General John Hyten, Commander of United States Strategic Command, said on May 9th at a Strategic Deterrent Coalition nuclear symposium, that the North Koreans now have the range capability to strike the United States with a ballistic missile. “It is a matter of physics and math” he explained.