RUTHFULLY YOURS

MANCHESTER, England—Britain’s MI5 security service has launched an internal investigation into how it handled intelligence about Manchester suicide bomber Salman Abedi, who killed 22 people in an attack outside a pop concert last week, a U.K. security official said Monday.

Abedi, a 22-year-old British-born son of Libyan immigrants, had been reported to the authorities for espousing extremist sentiments, saw combat as a teenager in Libya’s civil war and lived in a neighborhood that has produced recruiters and fighters for Islamic State.

Last week, Abedi, dressed in a puffy Hollister winter jacket, bluejeans and a gray baseball cap, walked into a crowd of concertgoers streaming out of a performance by American pop star Ariana Grande and detonated a shrapnel-filled explosive device in the deadliest terror attack in Britain since 2005.

British officials have said Abedi was “known” to security services. He was one of 20,000 suspected extremists MI5 has tracked in the past, but wasn’t among 3,000 under active investigation by the agency at the time of the bombing, the official said.

“He was part of an investigation that was closed, when it was decided it was not necessary or proportionate to continue it,” the official said. “We’re reviewing things in the sense that we’re looking back and want to learn lessons.”

Police on Monday were holding 14 people—including Abedi’s older brother and two cousins—as they tried to piece together what authorities have described as a possible “network” of accomplices that helped him prepare for and carry out the attack.

Abedi’s father and younger brother, Hashem, were in the custody of a Libyan militia in Tripoli.

Authorities worried Abedi had manufactured bomb materials that weren’t used in last week’s attack. But after days of searches and arrests around Manchester, the security services believed they had tracked down all of the hydrogen-peroxide-based explosives linked to Abedi, the official said.

Manchester police on Monday published a photograph of Abedi carrying a blue suitcase and appealed to members of the public for any information about the bag. The police said there was no reason to believe the suitcase or its contents were dangerous, but advised caution.

Friends and acquaintances of Abedi say he had become increasingly religious and expressed interest in extremist groups in recent years.

In 2011, Abedi fought alongside his father as Libyan rebels sought to oust dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Many from Manchester’s Libyan community did the same. Abedi and other teenagers returned from the battlefield hardened, friends and community leaders said.

In the years that followed a number of young people from south Manchester left to fight with Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hezbollah’s strength has multiplied, and conflict is inevitable unless the world acts.There’s Still Time to Avert War in
Lebanon.Mr. Prosor, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.N., is chairman of the Interdisciplinary Center’s International Diplomacy Institute and an executive-in-residence at Liontree.

Donald Trump called out Hezbollah at both stops on his Middle East trip last week. In Saudi Arabia he praised the Gulf Cooperation Council for designating the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite militia a terrorist organization and noted that Riyadh had placed sanctions on a senior Hezbollah figure. In Jerusalem Mr. Trump scored Hezbollah for launching rockets “into Israeli communities where schoolchildren have to be trained to hear the sirens and run to the bomb shelters—with fear, but with speed.”

The president and his national-security team must have taken a good look across Israel’s northern border. Lebanon is at a crossroads. Decisions the president makes now could help prevent a devastating war between Israel and Hezbollah. Such a war would severely damage Lebanon and could drag the U.S. into another complex and costly entanglement in the Middle East. Engagement today can prevent risks to American lives tomorrow.

Hezbollah is sponsored by Iran and has become increasingly brazen in the last decade. It is now more militarily powerful than most North Atlantic Treaty Organization members. It has 150,000 missiles and could launch 1,500 of them a day. From the ground, air or sea, it can strike anywhere in Israel. Lebanon’s president, Michel Aoun, hasn’t distanced the Lebanese army from Iran’s proxy. Rather, he has embraced it. “Hezbollah’s weapons do not contradict the national project,” he said in February, but are “a principal element of Lebanon’s defense.”

Yet when Hezbollah acts, it does so with Iran’s interests in mind—not Lebanon’s. Iran would have no qualms spilling Lebanese blood in a war with Israel. Just look at Syria, where under Iranian direction, the Assad regime has unleashed genocide against the Sunni Arab population using Hezbollah as its storm troops.

War between Israel and Lebanon is avoidable, but only if the world acts now—with American leadership. Hezbollah’s ability to destabilize the region stems from the abject failure of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 and the peacekeeping force tasked with enforcing it, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, or Unifil.

A “trainee pilot” has been arrested as the investigation into the terror network behind Salman Abedi spreads across Britain. The 23-year-old, understood to be Libyan, was arrested at a property in Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex, more than 260 miles from the Manchester Arena where Abedi detonated a suicide bomb a week ago killing 22 people. Neighbours said that they were shocked that the police activity had reached their doorstep. Violet Mainda, the Kenyan-born owner of Violet’s Hairdresser’s beneath the flat, said: “He was a young Libyan guy who was always very jovial and nice.

“He said he was training to be a pilot at Shoreham Airfield and he had just completed doing that. I am really, really shocked by this. I can’t believe he had been arrested.

“He had a few friends and a girlfriend and always seemed very nice. I don’t know if he worked, I think he just studied to be a pilot. He said he was studying to become a pilot at Shoreham.”Armed officers also swooped on sites across Manchester in a flurry of raids and arrests over the weekend as they worked to stamp out any lingering threat from co-conspirators to Monday’s massacre.

The Sussex arrest early on Monday morning brings the number of people in custody in relation to the the attack to 14.

With the intense series of police operations showing no signs of abating:

A 25-year-old man was held on suspicion of terror offences in the Old Trafford district.
Thousands of runners turned out defiantly for the Great Manchester Run, pounding the streets of the city amid a heightened security operation.
The NHS said 54 people injured in the attack were still being treated in eight hospitals with 19 receiving critical care.
Home Secretary Amber Rudd revealed temporary exclusion orders, banning suspected jihadis from returning to the UK, had been used for the first time.
CCTV stills of Abedi, bespectacled and casually clothed, were released by police in a plea for information about his movements between May 18 and the attack.
A vigil, attended by hundreds, was held for 29-year-old victim Martyn Hett in Stockport.

Sharia law, the president at the time of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils ludicrously argued, far from discriminating against women, “guarantees women’s rights that are not recognised in mainstream Australian courts”.

The Australian Federal Police investigated 69 incidents of forced or under-age marriage in the 2015-16 financial year, up from 33 the previous year. While there are no official numbers, it is estimated that there are 83,000 women and girls in Australia who may have been subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM).

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, which has spent the past four years probing numerous religious organizations, has made no inquiries into Islam. The commission has held 6,500 one-on-one private interview sessions with survivors or witnesses making allegations of child sexual abuse within institutions, but only three sessions in relation to Islamic institutions.

What legacy did Australia’s former Grand Mufti, Sheikh Taj Din al-Hilali — named “Muslim Man of the Year” in 2005 and the country’s most senior, longest-serving (1988-2007) Muslim cleric — leave behind?

In 1988, when Hilali was imam of the largest mosque in Australia, he gave a speech at Sydney University in which he described Jews as the cause of all wars and the existential enemy of humanity.

In July 2006, he called the Holocaust a “Zionist lie” and referred to Israel as a “cancer”.

In October 2006 — insinuating that the long prison sentences handed to Sydney’s Lebanese gang-rapists for attacking young teenage girls in the year 2000, were unfair — he compared Australian women who do not wear the Islamic veil to meat left uncovered in the streets and then eaten by cats. During his long career, Hilali also praised suicide bombers as heroes and called the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States “God′s work against oppressors” and “the work of 100 percent American gangs”.

At the time, Hilali’s principal adviser and spokesperson, Keysar Trad, wrote, “The criminal dregs of white society colonised this country and… the descendants of these criminal dregs tell us that they are better than us.” Trad subsequently served as president of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils — the national umbrella organization, which represents Australian Muslims at national and international level — from July 2016 until May 2017.

According to Australian senator Cory Bernardi:

“In 2009, the New South Wales Supreme Court found that Mr. Trad ‘incites people to commit acts of violence’, ‘incites people to have racist attitudes’ and is a ‘dangerous and disgraceful individual’… When talking about the gang rape of young women in Sydney by a group of Lebanese men… Mr. Trad … described these types of perpetrators as ‘stupid young boys’… Mr. Trad did not condemn Sheikh Hilali’s disgraceful comments about women being ‘uncovered meat’ in a speech about rape. Instead Mr. Trad chose to defend that speech and the sheikh’s comments”.

Less than 24 hours after the Abbas-Trump meeting in Bethlehem, in which Abbas promised Trump and his representative, Jason Greenblatt, to cease all forms of incitement against Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA) government in Ramallah resumed its vicious rhetorical attacks on Israel.

The Palestinian denial of Jewish ties and history to the land also continues full blast, despite Abbas’s pledge to Trump that Palestinians are not in conflict with Jews or Judaism.

Hard on the heels of Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’s assurances to US President Donald Trump that he is raising Palestinians on a “culture of peace,” he continues to glorify terrorists who have Jewish blood on their hands.

Abbas, who met with Trump in Bethlehem on May 23, told reporters that he was committed to working with the new US administration to achieve a “historic peace deal with Israel.” Abbas also announced his readiness to become a “partner in the war on terrorism in our region and the world.” He claimed that he and his Palestinian Authority have been promoting “tolerance and coexistence, and spreading a culture of peace and renouncing violence.”

Abbas’s sweet talk, however, did not last long. Just hours after Trump left the region, Abbas and his PA returned to their anti-Israel incitement. This stands in blinding contrast to what Abbas told Trump and his Middle East envoy, Jason Greenblatt, with whom Abbas met 48 hours after his get-together with Trump in Bethlehem.

At a meeting of Fatah leaders in Ramallah on May 25, Abbas described Palestinian prisoners held by Israel as “heroes.”

Just last month, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told the United Nations Security Council that the era of letting North Korea call the shots was over. Commenting on a record in which North Korea has carried out five nuclear tests since 2006, two of them just last year, Tillerson said: “For too long the international community has been reactive in addressing North Korea.” He added, “Those days must come to an end. Failing to act now on the most pressing security issue in the world may bring catastrophic consequences.”

Yet here we are, with Reuters reporting, based on a news conference held Friday in Beijing by senior State Department official Susan Thornton, that the U.S. is “looking at discussing with China a new Security Council resolution on pre-negotiated measures to reduce delays in any response to further nuclear tests or other provocations from the North.”

In other words, the U.S. is waiting to react to North Korea’s next nuclear test, which North Korean officials have already threatened to carry out, and for which preparations have been visibly underway.

With the variation that the diplomatic response (providing China agrees) would be “pre-negotiated,” this sounds disturbingly similar to the ritual that President Obama’s administration dolled up under the fatuous label of “strategic patience.” The result, on Obama’s watch, was that North Korea carried out four of its five nuclear tests to date, and accelerated its missile program to include over the past three years — as The Wall Street Journal reported recently — the launches of “more major missiles than in the three previous decades combined.”

The Obama ritual went like this: North Korea would carry out a forbidden nuclear test (in 2009, 2013, and two in 2016). The U.S. would turn to the UN Security Council, which after a period of closed-door wrangling would respond by approving yet another sanctions resolution, which would then be advertised by the U.S. as tough… tougher… toughest. Whatever.

Recall America’s former ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, declaring after the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 2270 in March 2016 (in response to North Korea’s fourth nuclear test) that “this resolution is so comprehensive, there are many provisions that leave no gap, no window.” That resolution was followed last September by North Korea’s fifth nuclear test, to which the UN responded by adding to the gapless, windowless sanctions resolution #2270 the even more gapless and windowless resolution #2321.

One might reasonably ask: Why reserve all those ever tougher sanctions for North Korea’s next nuclear test, or the one after that? If gapless, windowless sanctions have yet more holes that need plugging, why not do it all now?

If I might hazard a guess, the obstacle is not solely that veto-wielding permanent Security Council members China and Russia have no serious interest in trying to throttle North Korea’s Kim regime. Even when they vote for those ever tougher UN sanctions, they have been, to put it generously, highly casual about enforcing them. On the evidence, China — despite its public expressions of disapproval and disappointment over each North Korean nuclear test — has nonetheless, for decades now, allowed North Korea to proceed. It is past time to ask quite seriously whether Beijing (never mind its public posturing) reached a quiet decision quite some years ago that China can live comfortably enough with a nuclear-armed North Korea that dedicates itself to bedeviling such leading democracies as South Korea, America and Japan.

The savagery of Erdogan’s Turkish enforcers in Washington, whom many observers viewed as thugs, reflects a new dimension in carrying his message to any potential leader who may host him in the future: We treat peaceful dissent abroad as we treat it in Turkey.

Turkey probably was protesting the United States for not giving President Erdogan’s men a license to kill.

According to the official narrative, U.S. President Donald Trump was hosting in Washington the leader of a long-friendly country and historic ally. In typical diplomatic niceties, Trump mentioned Turkey’s role as a pillar in the Cold War against Soviet expansion, and Turkey’s legendary courage in fighting alongside American soldiers in the Korean War in the 1950s. Trump also said, speaking of the present, that he looks forward to “working together with President Erdogan on achieving peace and security in the Middle East, on confronting the shared threats, and on working toward a future of dignity and safety for all of our people.” Facts on the ground, however, are frequently less pleasant than Kodak-moment niceties.

The fundamental incompatibility between Trump and Erdogan was too apparent from the beginning of what looks like a largely transactional, pragmatic but problematic relationship. Erdogan’s political ideology is deep-rooted in an often-aggressive blend of Sunni Islamist supremacy and neo-Ottoman, Turkish nationalism. Erdogan, disregarding Saudi Arabia and other possible contenders for the title, claims to be the protector of Sunni Muslims across the Middle East, and does not hide his ideological kinship with groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, of which Trump is not a great admirer. In contrast, Trump hit out at Muslims during his campaign and proposed both a “Muslim travel ban” and a “Muslim registry”. It was only too predictable: in response, Erdogan, in June 2016, called for Trump’s name to be stripped from the Trump Towers in Istanbul.

Erdogan’s Washington, DC visit, apart from Trump and Erdogan agreeing to disagree on more essential issues, will be remembered as a Turkish excess, with scenes of the bloodied faces of peaceful protestors beaten up by Erdogan’s bodyguards in front of the Turkish ambassador’s residence. Although these unpleasant incidents caused an uproar in America, such brutality should have come as no surprise.

Slightly over a year ago, Erdogan and his team were in America on another visit, with the Turkish president scheduled to speak at the Brookings Institution. His security guards harassed and physically assaulted journalists trying to cover the event; they also forcibly attempted to remove several journalists, although they were on the guest list. According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the Brookings staff prevented them from ejecting the reporters. One Turkish journalist was removed from the building while checking in. But that was not the entire show. An American reporter attempting to film the harassment was kicked in the chest. The National Press Club was outraged. “We have increasingly seen disrespect for basic human rights and press freedom in Turkey,” said the president of the Club, Thomas Burr. “Erdogan doesn’t get to export such abuse”.

Europe still has not realized that the terror which struck its metropolis was a war, and not the mistake of a few disturbed people who misunderstood the Islamic religion.

We are apparently not ready to abandon our masochistic rules of engagement, which privilege the enemy’s people over our own.

It appears that for Europe, Islamic terrorism is not real, but only a momentary disruption of its routine. We fight against global warming, malaria and hunger in Africa. But are we not ready to fight for our civilization? Have we already given up?

This long and sad list is the human harvest of Islamic terrorism on Europe’s soil:

Madrid: 191. London: 58. Amsterdam: 1. Paris: 148. Brussels: 36. Copenhagen: 2. Nice: 86. Stockholm: 4. Berlin: 12. Manchester: 22. And it does not take into account the hundreds of Europeans butchered abroad, in Bali, in Sousse, in Dakka, in Jerusalem, in Sharm el Sheikh, in Istanbul.

But after 567 victims of terror, Europe still does not understand. Just the first half of 2017 has seen terror attacks attempted in Europe every nine days on average. Yet, despite this Islamist offensive, Europe is fighting back with teddy bears, candles, flowers, vigils, Twitter hashtags and cartoons.

Candles and flowers left behind following an evening vigil on May 23, 2017 in Manchester, England, held after a suicide bombing by an Islamic terrorist who murdered 22 concert-goers the night before. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

After 9/11 and 2,996 victims, the U.S. under George W. Bush rose to the fight. The United States and a few brave European allies, such as the UK, Italy and Spain, proved themselves “the stronger horse”. Islamic warriors were thrown on the defensive; Jihadist recruits dropped off and dozens of terror plots were disrupted. But that response did not last. Europe quickly retreated into its own homefront, while the Islamists carried the war onto Europe’s soil: Madrid, London, Theo van Gogh…

Since then, the situation has only become worse: a simple calculation shows that we went from one attack every two years to one attack every nine days. Take just the last six months: Berlin, London, Stockholm, Paris and now Manchester.

Abedi was part of an Arabic-speaking “clique” during his time at the school, The Times reports.

He is believed to have been part of a group of teens that became upset when one of their teachers brought up the topic of suicide attacks.

The teacher “asked what they thought of someone who would strap on a bomb and blow people up”, according to a source quoted by the paper.

The source said the boys then went to their RE teacher and lodged a complaint, telling them it was “Islamophobic”.

The source added: “[Abedi] was a silly boy, not very serious. He was not smart enough to be a mastermind of anything like that.”

A spokesperson for Burnage Academy said yesterday: “We feel the pain that Manchester feels. We stand shoulder to shoulder with our fellow Mancunians against terrorism in all forms.”

Pals of the evil killer yesterday revealed his wild youth of booze and drug-taking – and how he was nicknamed “Dumbo” because of his big ears.

Pictures show him grinning in a bar with three student friends and on a beach in Libya, before he is thought to have been indoctrinated.

Pals described the brainy Manchester United fan as “very jolly”.

But over the past two years he is said to have changed completely after a number of trips to Libya to visit his family.

His parents are even said to have confiscated his passport amid fears he was being radicalised.

This week it was claimed Abedi called his family in Tripoli 15 ­minutes before the attack.

His mother Samia Tabbal, 50, and father Ramadan, 51, a security officer, were born in the Libyan capital.

They emigrated to London before moving to Manchester.

Manchester-born Abedi is believed to have regularly travelled to see his family, who moved back to Tripoli following the fall of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

One friend said: “He became silent and withdrawn after a trip a ­couple of years ago. Before then he was a happy-go-lucky kid and always did well in school.

“We used to party together. He loved being around his friends and wasn’t a strict Muslim at all.

“He even used to drink alcohol and loved smoking weed, he never mentioned religion.