RUTHFULLY YOURS

ISIS released a new video on the Fourth of July using child foreign fighters to behead prisoners and threaten the United States, Europe and Russia while recruiting Muslims in these locations to jihad.

The 14-minute video, “They Left Their Beds Empty,” was issued out of ISIS’ Jazirah province, which includes Tal Afar and other areas west of Mosul that are next on the Iraqi army’s liberation list.

An Iraqi commander estimated today that there are just 300 ISIS fighters left holed up in the old city of west Mosul. Iraqi News reported Tuesday that ISIS killed 200 Turkmen, including women and children, in Tal Afar for trying to flee, and murdered the last local leader of the city.

The new video opens with an image of the Paris cityscape with flames video-edited onto a handful of structures including the Eiffel Tower.

In addition to showing a number of stylized battle scenes from ISIS trying to hold on to their caliphate territory, the video includes footage from a number of past ISIS strikes including the December Berlin Christmas market attack, the May Manchester concert attack, and the November 2015 Paris attacks.

The video also shows a copy of the December Europol report “Changes in Modus Operandi of Islamic State (IS) Revisited.” ISIS highlights the “trends in terrorism” section: “Currently the EU is facing a range of terrorist threats and attacks: from networked groups to lone actors; attacks directed by IS and those inspired by IS; the use of explosives and automatic rifles as well as bladed weapons and vehicles; and carefully prepared attacks alongside those that seem to be carried out spontaneously. EU Member States that participate in the anti-IS coalition are regarded by IS as legitimate targets. France remains high on the target list for IS aggression in the EU, but so too do Belgium, Germany, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom.”

One boy identified by his nom de guerre as a Turk threatens America while loading and firing a rocket. Another young teen identified as a Turkman calls out “hey America” before giving a speech and beheading a kneeling prisoner in front of him. The child walks away from the hill carrying the victim’s head.
(ISIS video)

A younger boy about 10 or 11 years old identified as French kicks a handcuffed prisoner into the dirt along a tree-lined path and tries to pull off the victim’s head when he’s unable to cut all the way through. He, too, eventually walks away with the head.

Another beheader identified as Turkish appears to be about 12 or 13 years old, while the last killer is a Russian boy about the same age who cuts off a man’s head in a building hallway. The ISIS video plays a Russian-language nasheed for the final murder, continuing as the boy walks away holding the severed head under the chin.

At the end, the boys line up with the heads of their victims at their feet, while an adult Turkish ISIS member speaks before shooting a prisoner tied to a tree.
(ISIS video)

The video concludes with a call to jihadists in America, Russia and Europe from ISIS spokesman Abul-Hasan Al-Muhajir, suspected to be Texan John Georgelas. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Secular Party is unlikely to be a major player in upcoming elections, representing the monocular obsession of a cranky minority fixated on erasing the influence of religion in public life. Small it may be, but also useful as a reminder of the need to be very careful when making a wish.

Into my hands last week came a press release from the Secular Party of Australia. I hadn’t heard of them before, but that is by the way. The release was prompted by publication of 2016 census data showing a decline in religiosity. Grist for the Secular Party’s mill, indeed it was. For the moment, I want to leave aside the misconceived triumphalism evident in the release. I will come back to it. When I do, the old adage, ‘be careful what you wish for’ underscores my cautionary pointer to the Secular Party.

We are told that the “party intends to build support over the coming years to be ready at the next elections in 2018/19 as a viable alternative to the major parties.” According party president John Perkins, the Secular Party stands for the separation of church from state. He goes on:

Because the Liberal and Labor parties are restricted by their fear of religious voter backlash they are both hamstrung in dealing with straightforward solutions wanted by the majority of ordinary Australians…We can make marriage equality real. We can introduce assisted suicide under conditions which have proved successful in enlightened counties. We can eliminate funding to all religious schools. As champions of human rights, we want women, minorities and the LGBTI community to be free of discrimination and the dictates of archaic superstition.

I am secular. Christ was secular. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. I believe in a separation of church from state; that parliament has the sole role in making laws. Yet I doubt I would find a happy home as a conservative Christian in the Secular Party. Clearly, the Party has a progressive social agenda. Its membership, I would guess, is comprised mainly or wholly of atheists, as distinct from secularists. That’s fine, but why not call themselves something like the Socially Progressive Atheist Party? That way no one would be misled.

I looked at four of their policies: on Economics, Immigration, Education, and the Environment. They are a mixture of barely okay to bad. But that is my view. You’d have to read them. I will give you just a flavour.

On economics, they attribute our history of increasing prosperity to the “humanist phenomenon” of technical progress and commercial innovation, which they want to support. That’s fine as far as it goes but they rule out exploitative capitalism, monopoly power or religion as having played any role. In fact, however, economic progress is built on an exploitative pursuit of monopoly profits. Why else would people put their capital at risk?

Moreover, for capitalism to flourish in the first place a supportive culture is required which protects property rights, which rewards merit, which disdains nepotism and cronyism, which engenders trust, and which values individual worth. That is why capitalism flourished in Christian nations and floundered elsewhere.

Culture is almost everything. Humanism? Give me a break. The Party believes that the key to eliminating world poverty is international cooperation and goodwill which would be helped by promoting secular values. Venezuela and Cuba have secular values. The only way bring nations out of poverty is to encourage them to adopt values throughout their societies which, at their core, are Christian values.

It is no surprise that the Party’s agenda more or less mirrors Tim Flannery’s when it comes to the environment. Global warming is recognised as a “dire threat to global civilisation.” So they advocate an international coal export tax and the use of all forms of low-carbon energy. Mind you, they include nuclear to deal themselves partially into the rational world, as against the Greens. How Australia manages to stay competitive in this brave new energy world is not addressed, so far as I can see.

Mr. Wilczek is Poland’s ambassador to the U.S.

President George H.W. Bush once said: “Poland should be strong and prosperous and independent and play its proper role as a great nation in the heart of Europe.”

Poland has lived up to those words. On Thursday, as an active member of NATO and the European Union, Poland hosts President Trump on his second international trip.

This visit will demonstrate the unbreakable bonds between Poland and the U.S. and address the challenges facing our neighborhood and the broader Euro-Atlantic community.

Polish-American relations are thriving, and for good reason. Poland has been a reliable partner to the U.S. since our democratic transformation. In the Middle East we answered America’s call for action, deploying more than 40,000 Polish military personnel to Afghanistan and Iraq.

With instability just beyond our borders, we welcome the deployment of U.S. and other NATO troops to our region. Thanks to the decisions made at the 2016 Warsaw NATO Summit and bipartisan support in Congress, Poland now hosts thousands of U.S. military personnel, as together we train to be ready to meet any threat.

Poland also continues to be a security provider. We understand that solidarity is our strength. From the 2% of gross domestic product we spend on defense to our contribution of F-16s to the fight against ISIS, Poland continues to approach NATO membership and our alliance with America not as a handout but a commitment that must be honored every day.

As President Trump declared recently, we must all take our defense and security obligations seriously. No one understands this better than Poland. That’s why President Andrzej Duda announced that Poland will further increase its defense spending, to 2.2% of GDP by 2020 and 2.5% by 2030.

President Trump’s visit indicates that the new U.S. administration is taking the challenges of our region and their global ramifications seriously, and is steadfastly committed to strengthening NATO’s collective defense.

America’s renewed interest in our region is also visible in last month’s delivery of American liquefied natural gas to Poland. Central and Eastern Europe have long been dominated by an energy monopoly left over from the Cold War era. We no longer have to be victims of geopolitics. Thanks to the newly constructed LNG import terminals on the Baltic coast and a system of interconnected pipelines, LNG delivered by ship to Świnoujście, Poland, can be transported throughout our region and beyond. These terminals allow us to exert greater energy independence, and we look toward our American partners for continued LNG gas exports.

The need to reassert our region’s influence is the underpinning of the Three Seas Initiative, a forum that includes 12 countries from our neighborhood. President Duda and his Croatian counterpart, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, have invited Mr. Trump to meet with leaders from the Adriatic, Baltic and Black Sea region.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policy was not a masterpiece of humanitarian politics; it was dictated by the fear of television images spread all over the world.

Even the suffering of our enemies disturbs us, in the humanitarian culture of the West. We are therefore increasingly amenable to policies of appeasement, censorship and retreat in order not to have to face the possibility of such horribleness and actually having to fight it. That is why radical Islam has been able to horrify the West into submission. We have paralyzed ourselves. We censor the cartoons, the graphic photos of the terrorists’ victims and even the faces and names of the jihadists. The Islamic terrorists, on the other hand, are not publicity-seekers; they are soldiers ready to kill and die in the name of what they care about.

Images, as in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, are published only if they amplify the West’s sense of guilt and turn the “war on terror” into something more even more dangerous than the jihad causing the war. The result is to erase our enemy from our imagination. This is how the “war on terror” has become synonymous with lawlessness throughout the West.

September 2015. Thousands of Syrian migrants crossing the Balkan route were heading toward Germany. Chancellor Angela Merkel was on the phone with Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, talking about a number of measures to protect the borders, where thousands of policemen were secretly located along with buses and helicopters. De Maizière turned for advice to Dieter Romann, then head of the police. “Can we live with the images that will come out?” de Mazière asked. “What happens if 500 refugees with children in their arms run toward the border guards?”

De Maiziére was told that the appropriate use of the measures to be taken would have be decided by the police on the field. When de Maizière relayed Romann’s response to the Chancellor, Merkel reversed her original commitment. And the borders were opened for 180 days.

“For historical reasons, the Chancellor feared images of armed German police confronting civilians on our borders,” writes Robin Alexander, Die Welt’s leading journalist, who revealed these details in a new book, Die Getriebenen (“The Driven Ones”). Alexander reveals the real reason that pushed Merkel to open the door to a million and a half migrants in a few weeks: “In the end, Merkel refused to take responsibility, governing through the polls.” This is how the famous Merkel’s motto “Wir schaffen das” was born: “We can do it.”

According to Die Zeit:

“Merkel and her people are convinced that the marchers could only be stopped with the help of violence: with water cannons, truncheons and pepper spray. It would be chaotic and the images would be horrific. Merkel is extremely wary of such images and of their political impact, and she is convinced that Germany wouldn’t tolerate them. Merkel once said that Germany wouldn’t be able to stand the images from the dismal conditions in the refugee camp at Calais for more than three days. But how much more devastating would images be of refugees being beaten as they try to get to Austria or Germany?”

Merkel’s refugee policy was not a masterpiece of humanitarian politics; it was dictated by the fear of television images spread all over the world. In so many key moments, it is the photograph that dictates our behavior: the image that dishonors us, that makes us cringe in horror.

I agree with this column but don’t spare George Bush the minor and Condoleeza Rice whose policies and predictions “pragmatice silence” with respect to North Korea were terrible, and now she attempts to shift the blame for the present situation to Donald Trump….rsk

Less than six months into Donald Trump’s presidency America has awakened to the nightmare of a North Korea armed with intercontinental ballistic missiles that the Trump administration says are capable of reaching Alaska.

U.S., South Korean, and Japanese officials say the North Korean Hwasong-14 ICBM flew approximately 580 miles in 40 minutes and achieved an altitude of 1,500 miles, besting previously reported North Korean test results. North Korea’s successful but unexpected test is a sobering reminder of how urgently the United States needs to ramp up its antiballistic missile program after years of reckless military downsizing by the Obama administration.

The North Korean launch was “the big story we have all been waiting for,” Professor Bruce Bechtol of Angelo State University in Texas told Fox News on Tuesday. “All of the paradigms have changed. It is now time to see what action the USA will take.”

The missile was apparently launched from a mobile launcher, which “nearly destroys our warning time and also means that the North Koreans have a real shot at launching this system at us without us being able to destroy it on the ground.”

North Korea also carried out a successful ballistic missile test on May 14, and the U.S. Missile Defense Agency conducted its first successful interception of an ICBM on May 30. A long-range ground-based interceptor missile launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California hit and destroyed the ICBM launched from the U.S. Army’s Reagan Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

This idea of missile defense, oft-compared to trying to shoot a bullet with another bullet, grew out of President Reagan’s Strategic Defensive Initiative (SDI), derided by left-wingers at the time and for years after as “Star Wars.” Unsurprisingly, Barack Obama used to scoff at the idea that a missile could take out another missile.

Meanwhile, Monday evening after news of the successful Hwasong-14 ICBM test broke, President Trump took to Twitter.

The first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem.

That should be what advisers to the Swedish prime minister should be whispering in his ear constantly, in case he fails to respond to comments made by his spy chief yesterday.

The National (UAE) reports:

Sweden is home to at least 2,000 ISIL sympathisers who are believed to have been radicalised over the internet, the country’s spy chief revealed on Monday.

Anders Thornberg, who heads the domestic intelligence agency Säpo, said the number of ISIL loyalists had increased from a suspected 200 in 2010; a 10-fold leap.

“We have never seen anything like it before,” Mr Thornberg told the Swedish news agency TT. “We would say that it has gone from hundreds to thousands now.

“This is the ‘new normal’ … It is an historic challenge that extremist circles are growing,” he said.

He also reported that Swedish security police are receiving 6,000 intelligence tips on Islamist extremist activity every month.

Last month I reported here at PJ Media that jihadist arrests in the EU had doubled last year from 2015:And since 2007, terrorism in OECD countries has skyrocketed a whopping 900 percent:The scope of the Islamist terror problem in Europe — as the Swedish spy chief now admits — is without precedent.Another remarkable element to this story is that just a few months ago President Trump observed that Sweden has having such issues. The Swedish prime minister responded with mocking:

Reportedly, more than 150 former ISIS fighters have returned to Sweden. And what is the Swedish government’s response? Finding them jobs: CONTINUE AT SITE

The largest music festival in Sweden will not go on next year because, for the second year in a row, more than a dozen sexual assaults of young girls marred the event.

Last year, more than 40 young girls reported being sexually assaulted. Men described as being of “foreign origin” were responsible.

Despite increased security this year, the assaults continued.

Breitbart:

Festival safety manager Ulf Bowein was asked why the sex attacks were continuing to happen despite the increase in the number of personnel and tighter security precautions. He said: “That’s a good question—ask those who commit the infractions instead.”

“Unfortunately, it’s like anywhere in the community. We have a number of individuals who commit the crime,” he added.

Bowein noted the number of attacks had gone down in number since last year. Reports claimed that men, largely described as being of “foreign origin”, had sexually molested up to 40 girls at the festival.

The news prompted British band Mumford and Sons, who headlined the event, to announce a boycott for future performances until the situation was brought under control. The band did not feature at all in this year’s event.

Sex attacks became common at Swedish festivals last year, so much so that officials estimate the number of sex attacks at outdoor music festivals increased by 1,000 per cent in 2016.

The targets of the sex attacks are generally young girls, many of them underage. 17-year-old Alexandra Larsson was one of the victims and she described what happened to her: “First, someone touched me on the butt a few times. I turned around and inquired who had done it, but got no answer.”

“This was repeated several times. Finally, someone touched me on the genitals. Then I got angry and turned around and shouted, ‘Whoever it was, you are an idiot!’”

Festivals are not the only locations for sex assaults as various reports have shown that girls in Sweden have been attacked in railway stations, and even in public schools.

It should be noted that authorities have not identified the perpetrators of the assaults this year. Less than a month ago, two “African migrants” were arrested for sexually assaulting numerous women at a railway station.