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Europe: Choosing Suicide? by Judith Bergman

“We need urgent, wholesale reform of human rights laws in this country to make sure they cannot be twisted to serve the interests of those who would harm our society.” — UK Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, January 2015.

Swedish intelligence deemed him too dangerous to stay in Sweden, so the immigration authorities sought to have him deported to Syria. They did not succeed: the law does not permit his deportation to Syria, as he risks being arrested or executed there. Instead, he was released and is freely walking around in Malmö.

“It would simply never in a million years have occurred to the authors of the original Convention on Human Rights that it would one day end up in some form being used as a justification to stay here by individuals who are a danger to our country and our way of life…” — UK Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, January 2015.

After the Manchester terrorist attack, it was revealed that there are not “just” 3,000 jihadists on the loose in the UK, as the public had previously been informed, but rather a dismaying 23,000 jihadists. According to The Times:

“About 3,000 people from the total group are judged to pose a threat and are under investigation or active monitoring in 500 operations being run by police and intelligence services. The 20,000 others have featured in previous inquiries and are categorised as posing a ‘residual risk”‘.

Why was the public informed of this only now?

Notably, among those who apparently posed only “a residual risk” and were therefore no longer under surveillance, were Salman Abedi, the Manchester bomber, and Khalid Masood, the Westminster killer.

It appears that the understaffed UK police agencies and intelligence services are no match for 23,000 jihadists. Already in June 2013, Dame Stella Rimington, former head of the MI5, estimated that it would take around 50,000 full-time MI5 agents to monitor 2,000 extremists or potential terrorists 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That amounts to more than 10 times the number of people employed by MI5. In October 2015, Andrew Parker, director general of the Security Service, said that the “scale and tempo” of the danger to the UK was at a level he had not seen in his 32-year career.

British politicians appear to have consistently ignored these warnings and allowed the untenable situation in the country to fester until the “new normal” became jihadists murdering children for Allah at pop concerts.

Given the prohibitive costs of monitoring 23,000 jihadists, the only realistic solution to this enormous security issue appears to be deporting jihadists, at least the foreign nationals among the 3,000 monitored, because they pose a threat. British nationals represent a separate problem, as they cannot be deported. Nevertheless, deportation has been an underused tool in the fight against Islamic terrorism: politicians worry too much about international conventions of human rights — meaning the human rights of jihadists and convicted terrorists, rather than the human rights of their own populace.

According to findings by the Henry Jackson Society in 2015 — as, unbelievably, the Home Office said it did not keep figures on the numbers of terror suspects allowed to remain in the UK by the courts — from 2005-2015, 28 convicted or suspected terrorists were allowed to stay in the UK and resist deportation by using the Human Rights Act. According to both the European Convention on Human Rights and the British Human Rights Act, individuals are protected against torture and inhuman or degrading treatment. As these 28 terrorists are all from countries with poor human rights records, they get to stay in the UK by claiming they would face torture if deported to their country of origin.

Peter Smith Monsters of Faith, the Faith of Monsters

I don’t want searches outside public events. I don’t want concrete barriers to prevent mad Muslims mowing down pedestrians. I don’t want to hear another smug sophist prattling about lethal refrigerators. What I want is a logical, reasoned response to an evil, growing menace.

A good big ‘un will always beat a good little ‘un is an adage mostly applied to boxing. And it is mostly true. Correspondingly, family units and small communities are vulnerable to raiding bands of pillagers. Cities are vulnerable to sieges by armed forces. Weaker nations are vulnerable to stronger ones.

This all seems terribly dated, does it not? Vikings sacking British monasteries, Muslim armies at the walls of Constantinople, storm troopers sweeping over the Maginot Line, are all relics of past times?

In fact, the difference between then and now is not the advent of a new moral age. Bad guys are as numerous as ever. If you for a moment doubt that, those in Israel don’t. If you think Israel is a special case think of the heady aspirations of North Korea and Iran, not to mention the “junior varsity” upstarts. And, without wishing to add to Russian fear-mongering, Ukraine and the Baltic states have reason to be anxious.

The difference between then and now is purely logistical. Enemies have to cross borders and sometimes open seas. Standing against them are the good guys; disciplined defence forces armed with advanced weaponry, allied across enlightened Western countries. They are ‘the thin red line’ between us and pillage, rape, massacre and enslavement. We can sleep peacefully in our beds.

Hold on, enemies within don’t have to breach borders or engage the thin red line. They are an entirely different kettle of fish. What do you do if the bad guys are on the inside?

The advice that British police give citizens is to “run and hide” from terrorists. Good advice when you’re not armed and armed police at the very (amazing) best will take eight minutes to turn up and kill the assassins, as in the London attack on June 3. Be aware, they should add as part of their advice, “knife, gun, bomb and truck wielding assassins might take only seconds to kill you.”

Why we are concerned but not quaking? Yes, as I said, we have the police and army if needed, but also we have each other. We can rely upon each other. Not to defend us but to be like us. Hardly anyone in our street is a criminal or assassin. Moreover, to the extent criminals and assassins are among us they are not glued together as a cohesive force. Suppose they were? Suppose that the 23,000 known Islamic extremists in the UK and their support networks, their fellow travellers, and fair-weather brothers and sisters, were glued together by a common ideology and purpose?

Be afraid. They are glued together by an extremely widespread perverted and extremist view of their ‘noble faith’. Mind you, how tens upon tens of thousands of Islamic scholars and hundreds of millions of ordinary Muslim folk could get it all so wrong I must leave to your vivid imagination. It is beyond sense that this for example – “fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness” (9:123) – could be a given any kind of threatening interpretation. And those dastardly conservatives dispute the validity of Islamophobia. Really!

Philip Hopkins A Looming Disaster in Energy Security

Renewables will provide, optimistically, 10 to 20 per cent of global energy by 2035. There is no prospect of seriously reducing fossil fuel emissions without an accompanying fall in global standards of living directly implied by large reductions in per capita energy use

The constant headlines say it all: Australia’s energy system is in crisis. “High power costs floor business” says a lead story in the Australian Financial Review: “Shell-shocked businesses are re-assessing investments and jobs slugged by huge increases in electricity bills.” The Energy Users Association of Australia, which represents the country’s largest power users, believes major industries are on the verge of collapse because of the price of power. BlueScope Steel has warned that climate policies could produce an “energy catastrophe”. A country blessed with massive coal and gas reserves, economic resources that traditionally drive economic growth, has suffered a power blackout in South Australia and is suffering from extremely high power prices.

Let’s start with a brief overview of Australia’s energy system. Australia gets 73 per cent of its power from coal, 11 per cent from natural gas, and about 15 per cent from renewables (hydro 7 per cent, wind 4 per cent, rooftop solar 2 per cent and bio-energy 2 per cent). When the Hazelwood power station closed in March, Victoria lost 15 to 20 per cent of its base-load power, and the nation’s power capacity fell by 5 per cent. In Australia, coal is by far the cheapest way to produce energy and we’ve got plenty of it—hundreds of years’ worth in New South Wales and Queensland. Victoria has 200 billion tonnes of brown coal, enough for another 500 years. And it’s easily accessible—we’ve used less than 2 per cent of brown coal reserves since mining began in the early 1920s.

With coal comes greenhouse emissions, blamed by many scientists for “global warming”. Burning coal produces carbon dioxide, particularly Latrobe Valley brown coal, which is two-thirds water and has to be heated and dried before it can be burned. Gas, also a fossil fuel, produces fewer greenhouse emissions than coal, while renewables, hydro and nuclear produce none. So how does Australia go about trying to cut its greenhouse emissions? With no carbon price, the Renewable Energy Target (RET) rules. The current renewable targets are: the federal Coalition wants 23.5 per cent by 2023, with a 28 per cent target by 2030 under the Paris climate agreement; the federal Labor Party has a target of 50 per cent by 2020; South Australian Labor has a target of 50 per cent by 2025 (it’s now at 40 per cent); Queensland is similar; while the Andrews government in Victoria has a target of 25 per cent by 2020, 40 per cent by 2025. Logically, any curtailing of coal for other more expensive energy uses is going to flow through to higher electricity prices, although there are other factors at work, such as rising network charges.

Gas is more expensive than coal. It takes more capital to bring a gas well into operation than to open a coal mine. Gas power stations, though, are cheaper than coal stations to build. Renewables are inherently more expensive and cost at least three times as much as coal. This is mainly due to the materials they use, and the construction cost. The capital expense is borne mostly by the government; huge subsidies allow wind and solar to be considered economic, but is this so in reality? Money spent in capital construction must be recovered in energy, but renewables don’t produce much energy. The income they generate does not cover the capital cost. Renewables do have running costs; they have some operators. More importantly, they also have maintenance; for example, solar can’t afford to have solar panels covered in dust—it reduces their effectiveness. Figures showing the effectiveness of solar panels are determined in the laboratory; the real world is different. There is also the extra cost of building wind and solar connectors to the main grid. In addition there is the impact on the grid itself. With a mix of solar and thermal generators producing electricity, you challenge the stability of the system.

The intermittency of renewables creates pressure in the system. It has two damaging effects. First, the base-load plant has to shut down, but the plant is not built to shut down and come up to speed again. Normally it stays on line between major overhauls. Second, if you start bouncing the network around, you start to get failures of equipment on the network. In Victoria, there are gas turbines that can be brought on line and taken off quickly. These are mainly used for peak power, but with the Hazelwood closure, and the Andrews government planning to dramatically expand renewable power, some gas would effectively form base-load power, pushing up base power prices. Victoria may even end up importing black-coal power from New South Wales! Ironically, that’s why Victoria set up the State Electricity Commission in the first place—to mine brown coal instead of importing black coal from New South Wales.

The brute fact is that wind and solar are more expensive. The panel headed by the industrialist Dick Warburton estimated in its 2013 report that there existed a cross-subsidy for renewables of $9.4 billion between 2001 and 2013, with a further $22 billion required for the remainder of the scheme until 2030. That’s an average subsidy of about $3 billion a year. The report was ignored because Warburton was said to be a “climate change denier”, but the study concentrated purely on the economics of renewables. A recent report by BAEconomics came up with a similar figure, revealing that the government renewables subsidies were $3 billion in 2015-16. On one estimate, this equated to 6 to 9 per cent for the average household and up to 20 per cent for the industrial customer. These subsidies are not transparent, the report said. Almost three quarters come from government mandates paid for by customers and collected by third parties. Higher prices are passed on by retailers and paid for by consumers. These subsidies do not appear in government accounts, and are thus approximate in the report. The report’s other features include:

Why Trump Wins Will Robert Mueller investigate intelligence agencies for playing in domestic politics? By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Ex-FBI chief James Comey played well in Thursday’s hearing to the audience he cares about, the media and bicoastal elites. Donald Trump may well have scored a win among the audience he cares about, Trump’s America.

Much was made of Mr. Comey saying he didn’t trust Mr. Trump not to “lie” about what transpired in their private meetings. Yet despite our president’s dubious relation with veracity, President Trump was shown to be the source of important truths. Mr. Comey had indeed told him he was not under personal investigation in the Russia “collusion” matter. As Sen. Marco Rubio, not a big Trump fan, noted, this fact was remarkable for also being widely known among Senate colleagues and yet was the one fact that never leaked to the media.

Mr. Comey made much of conflicting statements about why he was fired. But it was Mr. Trump who, belying his own White House flackery, stated candidly it was because of the “Russia thing.” Even a non-Trump fan listening to the hearing could readily gather that Mr. Trump had reason to be frustrated that his administration was being paralyzed by insinuations of collusion for which there is zero evidence.

As a rule, when there is no evidence of a particular act, the FBI does not investigate. The FBI is investigating now only because Democrats and Trump opponents so filled the airwaves with unsubstantiated speculation.

Now here’s a secret: Most Democrats understand the hunt will come a cropper. If a Trump associate brushed shoulders with a Russian-looking individual on the way to the men’s room, it has leaked. The U.S. government sucks up and archives vast gobs of communication data.

Yet the earnestly desired evidence of collusion has not materialized, so Democrats have turned instead to charging “obstruction of justice,” with many already baying for impeachment.

Here’s another secret: Such “process” crimes don’t impress voters when there is no underlying crime. If Mr. Trump leaned on his intelligence officials to remove the Russian cloud, this was ill-advised on the part of a president whose specialty is the ill-advised. But his behavior will also increasingly appear in a new light if it turns out Washington’s tail-chasing has been partly driven by Russian fabrications.

The Washington Post and CNN reported late last month that the single most shattering series of events for the Hillary Clinton campaign—the events that began with FBI chief Comey’s intervention in the race—was partly influenced by planted Russian fake intelligence.

Likewise the dossier of repulsive Trump allegations, assembled by a retired British spy supposedly tapping his Russian intelligence sources, also appears to have been a Russian plant and yet may have played a role in justifying the Obama administration’s decision to launch an intelligence investigation of the Trump campaign.

Think about it: To the extent the fruitless hunt for collusion has been promoted by planted Russian intelligence, Russian fiddling is playing a bigger role in shaping our politics today than it did during the campaign.

By the way, we’re not alleging supercompetence on Russia’s part. Planting fake information is routine intelligence work. The World War II battle of Midway was won partly with fake information about water filtration on Midway Island. CONTINUE AT SITE

QATAR, TRUMP AND DOUBLE GAMES : CAROLINE GLICK

US President Donald Trump has been attacked by his ubiquitous critics for his apparent about-face on the crisis surrounding Qatar.

In a Twitter post on Tuesday, Trump sided firmly with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and the other Sunni states that cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and instituted an air and land blockade of the sheikhdom on Monday.

On Wednesday, Trump said that he hopes to mediate the dispute, more or less parroting the lines adopted by the State Department and the Pentagon which his Twitter posts disputed the day before.

To understand the apparent turnaround and why it is both understandable and probably not an about-face, it is important to understand the forces at play and the stakes involved in the Sunni Arab world’s showdown with Doha.

Arguably, Qatar’s role in undermining the stability of the Islamic world has been second only to Iran’s.

Beginning in the 1995, after the Pars gas field was discovered and quickly rendered Qatar the wealthiest state in the world, the Qatari regime set about undermining the Sunni regimes of the Arab world by among other things, waging a propaganda war against them and against their US ally and by massively funding terrorism.

The Qatari regime established Al Jazeera in 1996.

Despite its frequent denials, the regime has kept tight control on Al Jazeera’s messaging. That messaging has been unchanging since the network’s founding. The pan-Arab satellite station which reaches hundreds of millions of households in the region and worldwide, opposes the US’s allies in the Sunni Arab world. It supports the Muslim Brotherhood and every terrorist group spawned by it. It supports Iran and Hezbollah.

Al Jazeera is viciously anti-Israel and anti-Jewish.

It serves as a propaganda arm not only of al-Qaida and Hezbollah but of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and any other group that attacks the US, Israel, Europe and other Western targets.

Al Jazeera’s reporters have accompanied Hamas and Taliban forces in their wars against Israel and the US. After Israel released Hezbollah arch-terrorist Samir Kuntar from prison in exchange for the bodies of two IDF reservists, Al Jazeera’s Beirut bureau hosted an on-air party in his honor.

Communism Victims Remember Powerful testimony of personal experiences with communism’s horrors. Andrew Harrod

“Do not listen to what the Communists promise, just watch their actions…Search the truth by talking to victims of Communism,” recently warned Truc Brown, a refugee from Vietnamese Communism. Available for public appearances in the Anticommunism Action Team’s (ACAT) Speakers Bureau, she and other individuals now provide powerful testimony of their personal experiences with Communism’s horrors from around the world.

Brown addressed the April 30 Washington, DC-area conference “Down the Memory Hole of Socialism,” cosponsored by the Alexandria Tea Party and the Botev Academy. She joined other ACAT speakers such as Boyko Antonov and Lilia Slavova from Bulgaria, Anna Urman (Belarus/Lithuania), and Klara Sever. Sever, who is Jewish, hid from Nazi genocide in her occupied Czechoslovakian homeland during World War II thanks to heroic neighbors, but then had to endure Czechoslovakia’s postwar Communist tyranny. Like Brown, Sever warned that Communism “is a very poor copy of utopia, which has nothing to do with real life, but it is a very good tool because utopia is based on promises, and promises, as we well know, are very cheap.”

In a personal essay, Server recalls how she spent “half of my adult life standing in line” for all manner of basic necessities and consumer goods while living in her native Bratislava. Accordingly, she always carried a shopping bag for use whenever she chanced upon scarce commodities in any store, such as when she stopped to buy onions and potatoes while rushing to a theater performance with her husband. “We made it to the theater in the nick of time,” she recalled, the “lady behind the counter, without batting an eye, hanged the bag next to my nice coat.”

Sever’s essay elaborates upon her online biography’s description of being “blacklisted” in the 1950s due to her “enemy of the state” husband. Given that her father was an initial supporter of Communism, she had encountered no difficulty in studying at a university, but there her marriage to a man from a bourgeois background changed everything. Authorities answered her application for further study “with a proviso that I need to go to work as a manual worker for 5 years. I did and was moved into a working class cadre.” “Your position depended on your family background,” she recalled; “if you came from a working class, the doors were opened to you to all positions without qualifications.”

As at the 2013 Survivors of Communism Summit of the Alexandria, Virginia, Tea Party, Sever has often discussed life under totalitarian surveillance. “One could never be too cautious. You trusted only very few friends, that meant your little circle was small and sometimes getting smaller and smaller, depending upon who was disappearing.” People meeting in the street would often first ask about a recent soccer game in order to be able to pretend to any inquisitive police who might appear that the street conservation had nothing to do with sensitive topics like politics.

Drawing upon his extensive writings, Jaroslaw Martyniuk has joined Sever at both conferences in 2013 and 2017 to analyze Communism on the basis of his experience as the son of a family that fled Ukraine in World War II’s aftermath. He often focuses on the Holodomor, the Soviet Union’s genocidal forced famine of the Ukraine in the 1930s, and thereby emphasizes the importance of a citizenry’s right to bear arms that is often disputed in the United States. While World War I and Russia’s subsequent Civil War had littered Ukraine with weapons, Soviet authorities confiscated them in 1925. As a result 25,000 Soviet authorities could later subdue 25 million Ukrainians even as 25,000 died a day at the Holodomor’s height in 1933, a “magic 25/25/25” formula.

Hoodwinking the Kuffar by Denis MacEoin

The implication is that Muslims too love Jesus — an approach that is bound to attract Christian passers-by (including priests and nuns) if only out of curiosity. But the Jesus of the Qur’an is not the Jesus of the New Testament. For Muslims, he is not the Son of God, not one third of the Trinity, did not die on the cross, was not resurrected after death, and is not God incarnate. He is simply one of a long line of prophets, important — yet inferior to Muhammad.

“We call them stinking kafir [non-Muslims], dirty. But, of course, akhi [brother], if that’s going to run them away from al-Islam, we don’t say that to them in front of their face.” — Abu Usamah, an imam at the Green Lane Mosque in Birmingham.

No one loves the kuffaar. No one loves the kuffaar! [unbelievers] … Whether these kuffaar are from the UK, or from the US … We love the people of Islam and we hate the people of the kufr. We hate the kuffaar. Whoever changes his religion from al-Islam to anything else kill him in the Islamic state. — Abu Usamah al-Thahabi, Channel 4 documentary, 2007.

When long-standing Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas met US President Donald Trump on May 7, he came out with what we British call a whopper, a huge lie. Here is what Abbas said with a straight face:

“Mr. President, I affirm to you that we are raising our youth, our children, our grandchildren on a culture of peace. And we are endeavoring to bring about security, freedom and peace for our children to live like the other children in the world, along with the Israeli children, in peace, freedom and security.”

We expect politicians to lie out of all sides of their mouths, to use doublespeak in order to seduce citizens to vote for them. Whether they be government officials or opposition hopefuls, a certain amount of economy with the truth is par for the course. Political analysts and well-informed journalists know this, of course, and work hard to untangle these webs. Facts matter. Sources make a difference. And in democratic countries that value free speech and the freedom of the press, politicians are held to account. Not many falsehoods get off Scot-free, and serial liars are regularly brought to book.

Politicians and their spokespeople know this, however, and do their best to keep their lies within reasonable bounds, even when making promises they have no real desire to fulfil. Abbas’s lies, however, are so gargantuan as to be in a league of their own. There, the exact opposite is true, and thousands of videos, texts, and recorded radio broadcasts show that the PA, the PLO, Fatah and Abbas himself have, over the years done their utmost to teach Palestinian children to hate and prepare themselves for violence against Jews.

There is a reason for this subterfuge. Muslims in general, especially those promoting extreme ideas, are growing more and more conscious of how they appear in the forum of public opinion. Even the terrorist group Hamas has issued a new Charter from which they have removed the explicit anti-Semitic passages of its 1988 version, in order to make it look better in Western eyes. In fact, Hamas has not changed its ways, and is still planning to use violence to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Islamic Palestinian state.

Aussie Conservative Andrew Bolt Fights Off Antifa Ambush By Debra Heine see video

An incredible video has emerged online of Australian conservative commentator Andrew Bolt being attacked by Antifa goons in Melbourne, Australia, and fighting back hard.

The masked thugs attacked Bolt with a “glitter-bomb” (consisting of glitter, dye, and shaving cream) outside a Melbourne cafe on Tuesday, after a woman asked him for a selfie.

The video shows Bolt immediately responding with a haymaker, being pushed into a pole and falling over chairs and tables outside the restaurant. But he recovered quickly and charged his assailants, kicking and punching one of them in the face and groin before they scurried away.

Bolt explained his reason for punching back:

We must intimidate and humiliate the enemies of free speech, and not let them intimidate and humiliate us.

The video was taken by a photographer at the scene “who claims he wasn’t part of the ambush.” But Bolt says he “has trouble believing him”:

How come he was so well placed?

Why did he run away when the attackers did?

Why didn’t he offer help or tell me he had the vision?

He said on Thursday morning that he would pursue a monetary settlement from his attackers, as well as a donation to a charity of his choice, if and when police nab them.

Via the Australian:

“I’m not a brawler,” he said. “I had one bruised knuckle and I don’t care a stuff about it. I had a suit ruined and I want every cent of that paid back. And I want a hefty donation to a charity of my choice.”

Melbourne Antifa, a loose collection of left-wing activists united behind “anti-fascist action”, appeared to claim a role in the incident, posting on Facebook that “some of our family in solidarity were attacked by Andrew Bolt while they were protesting today”.

The group argued Bolt should be imprisoned for his “violent, horrendous language”.

Bolt told Fairfax Media the attack was the latest in a long line of threats to the safety of himself, his family and other conservatives in his home city.

“I am sick of people trying to intimidate me, trying to threaten me,” he said. “I’m sick of the threats on my life and my reputation. I’m sick of being sued and bullied and I’m not going to take it. I’m just not going to take it.

“We should be free to have a debate and to walk down the street without fear of being attacked.

“The right to free speech has to be better protected — everywhere but particularly in Melbourne. It is ridiculous how dangerous it is for conservatives in this town to speak out.

“If you don’t like what I say just prove me wrong. Don’t threaten me, don’t threaten my house, don’t threaten my family, don’t abuse me — just argue with me.

“It must be a question of the principle and not the side.”

The Spanish Left Yearns for Deconquista Muslims demand to worship in a cathedral that hasn’t been Islamic since 1236. By Charlotte Allen

“The Great Mosque of Cordoba.” That’s what Unesco—the cultural arm of the United Nations—calls the 24,000-square-foot 10th-century structure visited by 1.5 million tourists a year. It was declared a World Heritage site in 1984, and rightfully so: The building’s interior is a stunning example of Moorish architecture.

Yet this “mosque” is actually the cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Córdoba. In 1236, King Ferdinand III of Castile captured Córdoba from the Almohad Caliphate. He then had the building consecrated for Christian use. Or reconsecrated, rather, since underneath the mosque lay the demolished remains of a sixth-century church built by Spain’s Visigothic rulers before the Muslim invasion in 711. Today, Mass and confession are celebrated inside. The cathedral has been a Christian house of worship for centuries longer than it was an Islamic one.

The discordance greeting tourists is the result of more than 200 years of antagonism toward the Catholic Church by left-leaning Spanish intellectuals. They have used the cathedral’s unique architecture essentially to de-Christianize it in the name of restoring its historical Islamic roots. This secularist campaign began in the early 19th century but has gained new force in the past 20 years. Recent Islamic immigration to Spain has given the anticlerical leftists new allies—Muslims demanding to worship in their “Great Mosque.”

But that would require taking the building out of the Catholic Church’s hands. In 2013 an organization called the Platform for the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba gathered more than 350,000 signatures on a petition calling for a public takeover. A year later, the Socialist-led coalition government of Spain’s Andalusia region, which includes Córdoba, accused the diocese of “hiding” the building’s history. In March the city council issued a report arguing that the diocese does not legally own the cathedral. “Religious consecration is not the way to acquire property,” it said. The site’s true owners “are each and every citizen of the world from whatever epoch and regardless of people, nation, culture or race.”

The diocese worries that the leftists may be about to get their way. To shore up support among American Catholics, the bishop of Córdoba, Demetrio Fernández González, spoke Wednesday at a meeting sponsored by the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom. Outright expropriation by the local government “would be impossible,” Bishop Fernández told me before his speech. But, as a European Union report on the mosque controversy pointed out, Andalusian law would permit expropriation if a court determined the diocese had failed properly to maintain and conserve the property. The bishop added that he already has obtained the pope’s support should a legal battle arise over ownership. CONTINUE AT SITE

North Korea Dreams of Turning Out the Lights Pyongyang doesn’t need a perfect missile. Detonating a nuke above Seoul—or L.A.—would sow chaos. Henry Cooper

Mr. Cooper was the U.S. ambassador to the Defense and Space Talks during the Reagan administration and director of the Strategic Defense Initiative during the George H.W. Bush administration.

Conventional wisdom holds that it will be years before North Korea can credibly threaten the United States with a nuclear attack. Kim Jong Un’s scientists are still testing only low-yield nuclear weapons, the thinking goes, and have yet to place them on ballistic missiles capable of reaching America’s West Coast.

While its technological shortcomings have been well documented, North Korea’s desire to provoke a nuclear conflict with the U.S. should not be minimized or ignored. Pyongyang is surely close to getting it right.

For South Korea the danger is more immediate. According to physicist David Albright, the founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, the North Koreans have between 13 and 30 nuclear weapons and can build as many as five more every year. If Mr. Kim were to detonate one of these bombs in the atmosphere 40 miles above Seoul, it could inflict catastrophic damage on South Korea’s electric power grid, leading to a prolonged blackout that could have deadly consequences.

The United States has 28,500 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in South Korea stationed below the 38th parallel—and more at sea nearby. An electromagnetic pulse attack on South Korea could play havoc with America’s ability to mount an effective response to North Korean aggression. One hopes the troops manning the two already-deployed batteries of the Thaad ballistic-missile defense system are prepared for such a scenario (in a concession to China, the newly elected South Korean government suspended this week the deployment of four additional launchers).

In 2001 Congress established a commission to study the danger of an electromagnetic pulse generated by the detonation of a high-altitude nuclear weapon. It concluded that while there would be no blast effects on the ground, critical electricity-dependent infrastructure could be rendered inoperable. The commission’s chairman, William R. Graham, has noted that several Russian generals told the commissioners in 2004 that the designs for a “super EMP nuclear weapon” had been transferred to North Korea.

Pyongyang, the Russian generals reported, was probably only a few years away from developing super EMP capability. According to Peter Vincent Pry, staff director of the congressional EMP commission, a recent North Korean medium-range missile test that was widely reported to have exploded midflight could in fact have been deliberately detonated at an altitude of 40 miles. CONTINUE AT SITE