RUTHFULLY YOURS

A suicide bomber who killed 22 people at a Manchester pop concert likely had the help of a terror network, U.K. authorities said, and his brother confessed to a Libyan militia that the two of them belonged to Islamic State.

The allegations came as a portrait emerged of how Salman Abedi, the 22-year-old perpetrator of Britain’s deadliest attack since 2005, grew up straddling middle-class Britain and the tumult of Libya, playing street soccer as a schoolboy before heading off as a teenager to fight alongside his father in their homeland.

Once he returned to Manchester, he nursed a strong sense of anger. Twice, for different reasons, he spoke of wanting revenge. “Whether he got that is between him and God,” his sister, Jomana, said.

The suspected bomber’s brother, Hashem Abedi, is in the custody of Radaa, one of several large militias responsible for security in the Libyan capital of Tripoli. Ahmed Dagdoug, a militia spokesman, said Hashem Abedi confessed that he was in the U.K. during preparations for Monday’s attack and aware of the plans.

Radaa said the younger Abedi was arrested late Tuesday in the city as he picked up a wire transfer of 4,500 Libyan dinar, or about $3,260, sent by his late brother, Salman.

It was impossible to independently confirm Radaa’s claim or to ascertain how such a confession may have been obtained. Libyan militias routinely resort to harsh tactics to extract information from terrorism suspects.

The group’s spokesman, Mr. Dagdoug, said it was also holding Abedi’s father, Ramadan Abedi, to aid in the probe of the attack, which killed 22 people outside a concert by American singer Ariana Grande.

It wasn’t immediately clear if the Libyan group was in contact with British investigators, who on Tuesday in Manchester arrested a man one Western official identified as 23-year-old Ismail Abedi, another brother of the suspect.

British intelligence agencies and police made raids on more properties on Wednesday and are piecing together how Salman Abedi came to use a sophisticated bomb to carry out Monday’s attack.

“I think it’s very clear that this is a network that we are investigating,” said Ian Hopkins, chief constable of the Greater Manchester Police. “There’s extensive investigations going on and activity taking place across Greater Manchester as we speak.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Pictures of dictator Kim Jong Un applauding as another North Korean missile ascends into the sky have become routine. But the Hermit Kingdom’s two most recent launches deserve special attention because they show Pyongyang nearing its goal of deploying a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that could destroy American cities.

On May 14 the North launched a new intermediate-range missile it calls the Hwasong-12. The missile traveled fewer than 500 miles, but that’s because it was fired at a very steep angle to avoid flying over neighboring countries. If launched at the optimum angle, it could have a range of 2,800 miles, which means it threatens the U.S. island of Guam. That’s the farthest of North Korea’s missiles so far, not counting the rockets it used to launch satellites.

The Hwasong appears to use a new high-performance engine tested in March that it developed from scratch instead of adapting a Russian or Chinese design. The missile appears to be a single-stage, liquid-fueled rocket that could become the first stage of a new ICBM. That would allow the North to abandon the derivative designs it previously cobbled together to achieve the thrust for longer ranges. In its current form the Hwasong is also road mobile, making it more difficult to find and destroy. The North Koreans further claim the Hwasong can carry a “large, heavy nuclear warhead.”

On Sunday the North successfully tested another relatively new missile, the Pukguksong-2. While its range is shorter at about 1,000 miles, it is solid-fueled and can be moved using a domestically produced transporter, both of which improve survivability.

Based on a submarine-launched missile that may be a modified Chinese design, the Pukguksong’s first test in February was also successful. That suggests the missile will prove reliable, and North Korean media are reporting that Kim has ordered mass production.

The North also took advantage of the steep trajectory of both missiles to work on one of the last remaining obstacles to ICBM deployment—a re-entry vehicle capable of withstanding the heat and vibration of the fall through the atmosphere. The North Koreans say the Hwasong “verified the homing feature of the warhead under the worst re-entry situation,” and that may be more than a boast. The U.S. and South Korea have confirmed that the test warhead survived and transmitted data.

The North still has to overcome obstacles to targeting the U.S., not least designing an ICBM re-entry vehicle. While the Kim regime is believed to have partially miniaturized an atomic weapon, it hasn’t tested a hydrogen bomb. But that is little comfort. On Tuesday when Senators asked Lt. Gen. Vince Stewart, director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, how long North Korea needs before it can deploy an ICBM, he answered that it “is on a pathway where this capability is inevitable.”

This month’s tests mean advances in Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs are coming much faster than analysts thought possible. If the U.S. and its allies don’t take steps to stop it now, the world will soon wake up to a nuclear North Korea far more dangerous and disruptive than the one we have today.

The United Nations Human Rights Council is preparing a blacklist of American and other companies doing business with Israel—and U.S. taxpayers are paying a quarter of the bill.

The council’s move embraces the “boycott, divestment and sanctions” campaign, which seeks to accomplish through economic strangulation what Israel’s enemies have been unable to achieve through war and terror. How did the U.S. get on the wrong side of this battle?

When the Human Rights Council was created in 2006 as a “reform” of the original U.N. Human Rights Commission, the Bush administration voted against, because no membership conditions required actually respecting human rights.

But Barack Obama jumped on board and, playing Gulliver at the U.N., allowed the American giant to be tied up by foes contributing a fraction of our moral and financial weight. In 2016 Americans sent the U.N. almost $10 billion.

On Thursday a U.S. Senate subcommittee will meet to “assess” the Human Rights Council. Reconsidering U.S. membership and walking away—now—is the right choice. Successive White Houses have tried and failed to correct the entrenched anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bias of the council (and commission) for decades Simply put, the Lilliputians have more votes.

The council has condemned Israel more than any of the other 192 U.N. states, notwithstanding 500,000 dead in Syria, starvation and mass torture in North Korea, and systematic, deadly oppression in Iran. Saudi Arabia and China have used their seats on the council to avoid condemnation altogether.

Terror in Brussels – ISIS claims responsibility for “martyrdom” bombers; Belgium’s Jewish schools locked down http://www.jewishledger.com/2016/03/terror-brussels-isis-claims-responsibility-martyrdom-bombers-belgiums-jewish-schools-locked/

(JTA) As the Ledger went to press on Tuesday, news began pouring in regarding three suicide bombers who blew themselves up in Brussels early in the day, killing at least 34 people and injuring as many as 130. It was the worst terror attack to hit Europe since the Islamic State-organized terror attacks in Paris last November.

The Islamic State – commonly referred to as ISIS — claimed responsibility for the attacks, according to Amaq, a news agency affiliated with the terror group.

“Islamic State fighters carried out a series of bombings with explosive belts and devices on Tuesday, targeting an airport and a central metro station,” the Amaq agency said.

“Islamic State fighters opened fire inside Zaventem Airport, before several of them detonated their explosive belts, as a martyrdom bomber detonated his explosive belt in the Maalbeek metro station.”

Jewish schools and other institutions in Antwerp and Brussels went into lockdown following the attacks, as police advised civilians to remain indoors. Public transportation and flights to and from Zaventem were suspended.

Among the wounded was an Israeli citizen who resides in Antwerp and was in Brussels for a wedding, according to Rabbi Pinchas Kornfeld, a community leader from Antwerp. He sustained injuries to his legs but is not in life-threatening condition, Kornfeld said.

Another Jewish person was moderately wounded, according to Samuel Markowitz, a paramedic for Hatzoloh, a local Jewish emergency services organization. Several dozen Jews were among the hundreds of passengers who were evacuated to a safe area near the airport, he added in an interview with the Joods Actueel Jewish monthly.

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Shortly after the attacks, the Antwerp World Diamond Center canceled a Purim party it planned for tomorrow “out of respect for the victims and their families,” the center’s CEO, Ari Epstein, told Joods Actueel. Another Purim party by the European Jewish Association was canceled in Brussels, the group’s director, Rabbi Menachem Margolin, said.

The airport attack occurred at 8 a.m. near the American Airlines desk, according to the online edition of Joods Actueel. Kornfeld said many Jewish passengers were traveling between Antwerp, which has a large haredi Orthodox community, and New York.

“It was the right time and place to produce many Jewish casualties,” he said.

Recess was canceled at dozens of Jewish schools in Antwerp and children were instructed to stay inside the buildings, Kornfeld said. Community leaders are discussing the possibility of canceling school tomorrow and Purim street festivities planned for Thursday. Shortly thereafter, similar instructions went out from the Belgian government’s crisis center to all of the country’s schools.

University students were instructed to refrain from coming to campus.

“This is yet another shocking, appalling, and deadly attack on innocent Europeans by terrorists. These attacks on an airport, train system, and outside European Union institutions are shots at the heart of Europe. Our prayers and thoughts are with the Belgian people at these difficult times,” said Dr. Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, adding, ”we can no longer ignore the fact that radical Islamists are at war with Europe and all Europeans and we call on our governments and law enforcement agencies to act accordingly.”

Witnesses told Joods Actueel that at the airport, they heard shouts in Arabic, gunshots and a massive explosion.

Prague — The West that birthed globalization is now in an open revolt over its own offspring, from here in Eastern Europe to southern Ohio.

About half of the population in Europe and the United States seems to want to go back to the world that existed before the 1980s, when local communities had more control of their own destinies and traditions.

The Czech Republic, to take one example, joined the European Union in 2004. But it has not yet adopted the euro and cannot decide whether the EU is wisely preventing wars of the past from being repeated or is recklessly strangling freedom in the manner of the old Soviet Union — or both.

In places devastated by globalization — such as southern Michigan or Roubaix, France – underemployed youth in their mid 20s often live at home in prolonged adolescence without much hope of enjoying the pre-globalized lifestyles of their parents.

Eastern Europeans are now discovering those globalized trade-offs that are so common in Western Europe, as they watch rates of marriage, home ownership, and child-rearing decline.

One half of the West — the half that lives mostly on the seacoasts of America and Western Europe — loves globalization. The highly educated and cosmopolitan “citizens of the world” have done well through international finance, insurance, investments, technology, education, and trade, as the old Western markets of 1 billion people became world markets of 6 billion consumers.

These coastal Westerners often feel more of an affinity with foreigners like themselves than with fellow countrymen who live 100 miles inland. And they are not shy in lecturing their poorer brethren to shape up and get with their globalized program.

Late-20th-century globalization — a synonym for Westernization — brought a lot of good to both poorer Western countries and the non-Western world. Czech farmers now have equipment comparable to what’s used in Iowa. Even those who live in the Amazon basin now have access to antibiotics and eyeglasses. South Koreans have built and enjoyed cars and television sets as if they invented them.

But all that said, we have never really resolved the contradictions of globalization.

Does it really bring people together into a shared world order, or does it simply offer a high-tech and often explosive veneer to non-Western cultures that are antithetical to the very West that they so borrow from and copy?

An Islamic State terrorist does not hate the United States any less because he now wears hoodies and sneakers and can text his girlfriend. More likely, Western fashion and high-tech toys only empower radical Islamic hatred of Western values.

Iran is desperate for nuclear technology originally spawned from the ‘Great Satan’ in order to better destroy the Great Satan.

So it was not a “response” to Trump’s visit to Israel, nor a sudden”lone wolf” attack, not by an “evil loser” but by a barbarian Jihadi who is part of a group that planned the attack….Wake up! rsk

Authorities tell ABC News that they found a kind of bomb-making workshop in Salman Abedi’s home and he had apparently stockpiled enough chemicals to make additional bombs.

The hunt is intensifying for what British authorities suspect is a possible “network” behind the deadly suicide blast outside an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena on Monday, officials say.

The search stretched from the U.K. to Libya, where officials made multiple arrests in a country seen by American officials as a burgeoning new base of operations for ISIS, which has claimed Salman Abedi was a “soldier of the Caliphate.”

Counterterrorism officials fear whoever built the bomb that killed 22 people and injured more than 50 others may have built other improvised-explosive devices which could be used in further attacks.

“I think it’s very clear that this is a network that we are investigating,” Ian Hopkins, chief constable of the Greater Manchester Police, said in a press briefing.

According to a terrorism expert who has been briefed on the investigation, the bomb featured a sophisticated design similar to the bombs used in the attacks in Brussels in 2016.

The expert confirmed that Abedi traveled to Manchester Arena by train, likely carrying the bomb in a backpack. The device, a metal container stuffed with bolts and nails, was apparently hooked to a powerful battery and featured a remote, cell-phone detonator with built-in redundancies to ensure a blast even if a first attempt failed.

The design was sophisticated enough to bolster the theory that Abedi didn’t act alone, suggesting, according to the expert, “there’s a bomb maker on the loose.”

“It’s really suggesting that he probably did not act alone, that he probably had some help, that he certainly had some advice on how to create the bomb,” said Matt Olsen, former director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center and an ABC News contributor.

After the terror, the platitudes. And the hashtags. And the candlelit vigils. And they always have the same message: ‘Be unified. Feel love. Don’t give in to hate.’ The banalities roll off the national tongue. Vapidity abounds. A shallow fetishisation of ‘togetherness’ takes the place of any articulation of what we should be together for – and against. And so it has been after the barbarism in Manchester. In response to the deaths of more than 20 people at an Ariana Grande gig, in response to the massacre of children enjoying pop music, people effectively say: ‘All you need is love.’ The disparity between these horrors and our response to them, between what happened and what we say, is vast. This has to change.

It is becoming clear that the top-down promotion of a hollow ‘togetherness’ in response to terrorism is about cultivating passivity. It is about suppressing strong public feeling. It’s about reducing us to a line of mourners whose only job is to weep for our fellow citizens, not ask why they died, or rage against their dying. The great fear of both officialdom and the media class in the wake of terror attacks is that the volatile masses will turn wild and hateful. This is why every attack is followed by warnings of an ‘Islamophobic backlash’ and heightened policing of speech on Twitter and gatherings in public: because what they fundamentally fear is public passion, our passion. They want us passive, empathetic, upset, not angry, active, questioning. They prefer us as a lonely crowd of dutiful, disconnected mourners rather than a real collective of citizens demanding to know why our fellow citizens died and how we might prevent others from dying. We should stop playing the role they’ve allotted us.

As part of the post-terror narrative, our emotions are closely policed. Some emotions are celebrated, others demonised. Empathy – good. Grief – good. Sharing your sadness online – great. But hatred? Anger? Fury? These are bad. They are inferior forms of feeling, apparently, and must be discouraged. Because if we green-light anger about terrorism, then people will launch pogroms against Muslims, they say, or even attack Sikhs or the local Hindu-owned cornershop, because that’s how stupid and hateful we apparently are. But there is a strong justification for hate right now. Certainly for anger. For rage, in fact. Twenty-two of our fellow citizens were killed at a pop concert. I hate that, I hate the person who did it, I hate those who will apologise for it, and I hate the ideology that underpins such barbarism. I want to destroy that ideology. I don’t feel sad, I feel apoplectic. Others will feel likewise, but if they express this verboten post-terror emotion they risk being branded as architects of hate, contributors to future terrorist acts, racist, and so on. Their fury is shushed. ‘Just weep. That’s your role.’

The post-terror cultivation of passivity speaks to a profound crisis of – and fear of – the active citizen. It diminishes us as citizens to reduce us to hashtaggers and candle-holders in the wake of serious, disorientating acts of violence against our society. It decommissions the hard thinking and deep feeling citizens ought to pursue after terror attacks. Indeed, in some ways this official post-terror narrative is the unwitting cousin of the terror attack itself. Where terrorism pursues a war of attrition against our social fabric, seeking to rip away bit by bit our confidence and openness and sense of ourselves as free citizens, officialdom and the media diminish our individuality and our social role, through instructing us on what we may feel and think and say about national atrocities and discouraging us from taking responsibility for confronting these atrocities and the ideological and violent rot behind them. The terrorist seeks to weaken our resolve, the powers-that-be want to sedate our emotions, retire our anger, reduce us to wet-eyed performers in their post-terror play. It’s a dual assault on the individual and society.That the post-terror narrative is fundamentally about taming our passion and politics is clear from its sidelining of all issues of substance. We are actively warned against asking difficult questions about 21st-century society and why it has this violence in it, this nihilism in it. Question the wisdom of multiculturalism, of refusing to elevate one culture over another and instead encouraging people to live in their own cultural bubbles, and you’re racist. Wonder if the obsession with combatting ‘Islamophobia’ might have given rise to a situation where some Muslims, especially younger ones, cannot handle ridicule of their religion, and… well, you’re ‘Islamophobic’. As for immigration: this is the great unmentionable; you’re a fascist even for thinking about it. The post-terror narrative that barks ‘You must empathise!’ also says, implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, ‘You mustn’t think! You mustn’t ask those questions or say that thing.’ And so in their response to terrorism, they erect an intellectual forcefield around some of the problems that might, just might, be contributing to that terrorism. CONTINUE AT SITE

The true culprit in Iran’s economic failure is Iran itself, whose internal barriers make a flourishing economy a pipe-dream. These include: the absence of free-market competition, due mainly to the monopoly of conglomerates affiliated with Ayatollah Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards over a huge sector of the country’s economy, which affects at least half of its GDP; the precariousness of the rule of law; the deterioration of human rights; and the exorbitant cost of military intervention in Syria, Yemen and Iraq, as well as the bankrolling of the Lebanon-based Shiite terrorist organization Hezbollah and other regional proxies.

The clear victory on May 19 of incumbent Iranian President Hassan Rouhani over his key rival, Ebrahim Raisi — the candidate supported by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – indicated that voters were concerned above all with the economy. Raisi, an extremist and isolationist like Khamenei, was the candidate who represented hardline power politics and Middle East hegemony.

It was during Rouhani’s first term in office that the nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was signed between Iran and six world powers. This not only led to the lifting of crippling international sanctions from the regime in Tehran, but seemed to signal an effort to renew diplomatic and commercial ties the West.

Iran initially benefited greatly from the JCPOA. From the document’s signing in July 2015 and up until early 2017, dozens of delegations from Western countries visited Iran, and hundreds of economic memoranda of understanding were reached.

Excitement could be felt within and beyond Iran’s borders. Despite his decades as a prominent member of the mullah-led regime’s security apparatus, President Rouhani was and largely still is viewed in the West as a moderate. In addition, the appetite of Iran’s 80 million-strong consumer market for Western goods was high, as was the need for Western investment and technology to rebuild Iran’s outdated infrastructure. Meanwhile, Western companies were eager to enter the potentially lucrative market, imagining post-JCPOA Iran to be like the mythical Spanish city of gold, El Dorado.

LONDON—Rifle-toting soldiers in camouflage took up positions around Buckingham Palace and patrolled Westminster on Wednesday, as Britain joined European neighbors in deploying military force against terrorism at home.

The U.K. government sent troops to the streets a day after raising the country’s terror-threat alert to its highest level while investigating the bombing of a concert in Manchester, England. The Monday night attack, which killed at least 22, added to the catalog of recent terror that has bloodied some of Europe’s biggest cities, including London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels and Nice, France.

Britain joins France and Belgium, which have also had high-profile military personnel deployments to bolster domestic police and security forces in the wake of attacks. For tourists, soldiers in military fatigues clustered at airports, train stations and museum entrances have been jarring and grim reminders of the heightened state of alert the continent has adopted.

For many Europeans, it has also become a part of life. Troop deployments in France and Brussels were initially seen as temporary measures. In both countries, soldiers are still patrolling alongside police more than a year after rolling out.

“It is easy to get soldiers on the streets,” said Ben Barry, senior fellow for land warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “It is much more difficult to get them off.”

France, which has suffered the brunt of recent attacks, has adopted a particularly visible domestic war-footing. Military troops carrying assault rifles patrol the boulevards of Paris. Security officials conduct bag checks in front of grocery stores and cinemas.

Security officers have set up cordons around tourist sites like the Louvre museum. The vast space under the Eiffel Tower, long a gathering place for tourists and locals alike, is now accessible only after passing through metal detectors. Temporary barriers erected around the structure are being replaced with a permanent, eight-foot-tall glass wall that will be finished by autumn.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday proposed extending France’s state of emergency—in place since November 2015—for another five months. The emergency status allows warrantless searches and house arrest.

France has dispatched 7,500 troops across the country to augment police and other security forces. About half are in Paris. The home-front deployment involves about the same number of troops currently involved in France’s various overseas commitments, including in places such as Iraq and Mali. CONTINUE AT SITE