RUTHFULLY YOURS

PARIS—Police detained four people in southern France on Friday on suspicion of planning an attack using the same explosive employed by suicide bombers in Islamic State assaults in Paris and Brussels.

Three men—aged 20, 26 and 33—and a 16-year-old girl were taken into police custody in and around the city of Montpellier, according to people familiar with the investigation. At the home of one of the men, police found a liter each of acetone, hydrogen peroxide and sulfuric acid, chemicals used to make the explosive material TATP.

Three of the detainees were suspected of direct involvement in an “imminent attack on French soil,” French Interior Minister Bruno Le Roux said.

In November 2015, Islamic State gunmen, all but one wearing suicide vests containing TATP, killed 130 people in attacks across the French capital. Months later, another group of Islamic State militants using TATP bombed the airport in Brussels and a nearby metro station, leaving 32 people dead.

Friday’s arrests in southern France cap a week of police action across Europe against suspected Islamist radicals.

Two men, one Algerian and the other Nigerian, were taken into custody in Germany on suspicion of planning an imminent attack. Belgian police targeting returnees from Syria detained 11 people in the capital Brussels on Wednesday and released them a day later following questioning.

In the U.K., police on Thursday arrested a 44-year-old man from the southern county of Hertfordshire on suspicion of terror offenses. The man was taken into custody at Gatwick Airport after returning from Iraq, police said, giving no further details.

France has been on high alert after a spate of terrorist attacks in the past 18 months that have left more than 200 people dead.

With presidential elections scheduled for April 23, the country’s Socialist government is under pressure to show it is doing all it can to prevent new attacks. Conservative candidate François Fillon and far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who is leading in the polls, have criticized the government for what they say is its complacency over the threat of terrorism.

French security forces have been granted sweeping powers to hunt and apprehend potential terrorists, and since the beginning of 2016 more than 400 people with suspected links to terrorist groups have been detained.

It was unclear whether the people detained Friday have any links to the militant networks that have carried out attacks in Europe in recent years.

Even as Islamic State loses territory in Syria and Iraq, the militant group has claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks across Europe, which has enabled it to keep the public on edge without being forced to train and equip teams to pull off highly sophisticated operations.

Last week, a man believed to be visiting from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates attacked soldiers near Paris’s Louvre museum while shouting “Allahu akbar.” CONTINUE AT SITE

TEHRAN—Iran’s annual celebration of its 1979 Islamic Revolution found a new villain on Friday in President Donald Trump, as the country marked the anniversary amid renewed friction between the two countries.

Anti-Americanism has long been a domestic political force in Iran, routinely invoked by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Such sentiments were stoked by Mr. Trump’s recent moves to impose new sanctions in response to an Iranian missile test and bar Iranians from entering the U.S.—and by Mr. Khamenei’s response denouncing the U.S. president.

The annual march in Tehran on Friday featured the ritual burning of American flags, augmented this year with shows of hostility such as an effigy of the American president hanging by a noose and a poster of Mr. Trump with rifle sights on his face.

An Iranian woman holds an anti-Trump poster during an annual event in Tehran on Friday marking the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

An Iranian woman holds an anti-Trump poster during an annual event in Tehran on Friday marking the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Photo: abedin taherkenareh/European Pressphoto Agency

Such displays were also routine during the Obama administration, even as President Barack Obama sought to ease tensions and helped bring about the 2015 deal that lifted sanctions on Iran in exchange for the country’s shelving of its nuclear ambitions.

“Iranian people are like this,” said Ali Farhadi, a retired member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite military force. “When they get threatened, they get motivated and are enticed to come out and show resistance.” CONTINUE AT SITE

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) presented themselves in the manner of debt collectors: standing beside a big bruiser stressing how sorry they were to have to demand this payment, but that they were only just holding back their big, angry friend.

Unfortunately for them, during the last Labour government in Britain the MCB’s behaviour and beliefs were exposed by the more progressive Muslim voices who were by then coming along, and also by a wider society which had become wise to the tricks of these self-appointed “community leaders.”

The Daily Mail issued an apology, allowing supporters of the radical National Union of Students president to pretend that she was the victim of a smear campaign by self-confessedly inaccurate media reports rather than a nasty anti-Semite whose back was being covered by a full-time pedant with dodgy facts.

Miqdaad Versi is happy to apply rigorous standards to others, but holds exceedingly lax standards himself so long as he can carry on his own campaigning work against the UK government’s counter-terrorism and counter-extremism programmes.

Sadly for Versi, the British public’s security concerns are not caused by very slightly inaccurate media reports but rather by the deadly accurate bomb blasts and shooting attacks around the world which nobody needs to make up and nobody can fully cover over.

When considering the roles that various people worldwide play in advancing various causes, a lot of attention is paid to the people who blow themselves up. A fair amount of time is spent on the victims of such people. But relatively little time is spent focusing on the people whose role is clearly to tire everyone to death.

In this regard, it is worth introducing to a wider audience the existence of a man called Miqdaad Versi. This man works for the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), an organisation which enjoyed a certain amount of access to the British government after the Satanic Verses affair, 9/11, 7/7 and other atrocities. During those years, they presented themselves in the manner of debt collectors: standing beside a big bruiser stressing how sorry they were to have to demand this payment, but that they were only just holding back their big, angry friend.

Unfortunately for them, during the last Labour government in Britain, the MCB’s behaviour and beliefs were exposed by the more progressive Muslim voices who were by then coming along, and also by a wider society which had become wise to the tricks of these self-appointed “community leaders.” The Labour government took a strong exception to the MCB’s then-Deputy Secretary General, Daud Abdullah, signing the ‘Istanbul Declaration’. As Home Office Minister Hazel Blears said at the time, it “supports violence against foreign forces — which could include British naval personnel… and advocating attacks on Jewish communities all around the world.”

Finland’s security and intelligence police Supo says it’s seeing a rise in radical Islamic Finnish-language propaganda. Supo highlighted one blog in particular, which has been operating since last August.

Finnish security police have identified a Finnish-language blog disseminating propaganda by the extremist Islamic State organisation. The blog has been used to share content such as speeches by IS leaders as well as texts from the group’s online paper, translated into Finnish.

According to Supo, the blog has been in existence since last August and officials described the translations as reasonably clear Finnish, although peppered with some foreign words.

“The blood of kaffirs is halaal [acceptable] to you so let it flow,” one section of texts urges.

Supo added that the writings say that sowing fear in the hearts of infidels is the duty of Muslims.

The existence of the blog was first reported by the independent online foreign and security policy paper, The Ulkopolitist.

The blog calls on adherents of extreme Islam to select a variety of soft targets for attacks, such as businessmen on the way to work, young people playing in parks and florists.

In another article translated from IS’s online paper, the writer calls on readers to take their families and flee to Muslim states for protection. If that is not possible, the writer continues, Muslims should publicly declare an oath of allegiance to the caliphate.

The blog also urges followers to use the Telegram messaging service, which offers end-to-end encryption as a security feature, to receive IS updates.
Supo following propaganda phenomenon

Supo special researcher Pekka Hiltunen said that the intelligence agency is familiar with the blog. However he added that Supo will not comment on the legality of individual blog posts.

The agency also declined taking a public position on who may be behind the blog or the location from which it is updated.

According to Hiltunen Supo has observed a growing trend to provide radical Islamic content in Finnish and to target Finland with such propaganda. He said that two factors must be considered when looking at the calls to commit murder.

“First, if we look at it from a law enforcement perspective, then if generally speaking there is reason to suspect a crime, then a preliminary investigation will be launched,” Hiltunen noted.

He noted that if the case is viewed as part of a wider phenomenon of propaganda distribution, then the writings represent a broader trend aiming to drive Islamic State’s agenda, he noted.

“It is also trying to instigate strikes anywhere outside the conflict area, in countries where readers may be,” he added.

The Supo researcher said however that the intelligence police have long known about IS’s propaganda incursions. He pointed to a 2015 Supo threat assessment which also mentioned strikes committed by so-called lone wolves.

“Several of those incidents by individual actors either have propaganda as the background or some similar inspiration. So as a trend, this has been in the threat assessments for a long time,” he noted.

At the end of last year an IS call to action shocked the Lapland tourism sector, as the propaganda images showed Santa, a snowy winter landscape, reindeer as well as a burning sign showing the year 2017.

http://thefederalist.com/2017/02/07/wrong-compare-terrorist-attacks-generic-gun-violence/

On Friday, an Egyptian man armed with two machetes attacked a group of security guards patrolling the Louvre Museum in Paris. The man, who yelled “allahu akbar” during the attack, was shot and taken to the hospital. Thankfully, no one was killed. The attack still terrified Parisians and many across the West. Why? Because of the attacker’s intent and our own vulnerability in our day to day lives.

Since President Trump signed his executive order on immigration two weeks ago, social media has been flooded with memes and graphs showing how few people have died at the hands of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries who’ve committed acts of terrorism. The Left uses this narrative to argue that we don’t need to worry about Middle Eastern terrorism or refugees coming into the country.But this misunderstands, on a deep level, the psychology of terrorism and the importance of intention.
Terrorism Aims to Destabilize Society

Statistics about terrorism are often accompanied by the number of gun deaths that occur every year. This is a typical tactic of the Left. Whenever Islamist terrorism comes up, they change the conversation to guns and gun control.

There’s no doubt that gun violence in America is out of control. But comparing terrorism to gun violence misses the importance of intention, and how strongly it affects peoples’ sense of security. This is at the root of why terrorism frightens people so much.

One of Europe’s last great political certainties is evaporating as it becomes clearer that Angela Merkel could lose the autumn election in Germany. For the first time since 2010 her party fell to a close second place in a poll released this week, and not a moment too soon.

We say that not out of enthusiasm for the opponent who’s upstaging Mrs. Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) got a boost when it selected former European Parliament President Martin Schulz as its leader. Mr. Schulz is an orthodox tax-and-spend, pro-European Union social democrat, but he has the advantage of not being tarred by the previous leadership’s 2013 decision to form a grand coalition with Mrs. Merkel.

Mrs. Merkel needs some serious political competition. Absent a vibrant center-left, Mrs. Merkel positioned herself as a pragmatic centrist of the European status quo. Most controversially, the lack of a challenger for centrist votes led Mrs. Merkel to assume she could count on that part of the electorate to support her open-door migration policy despite opposition from her right within the CDU. This fueled the popularity of the far-right, euroskeptic Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

Now voters inclined to vote for a social democrat appear to be returning home to Mr. Schulz because he really is one. Polls show the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, together virtually tied with the SPD at around 30% support. This is forcing Mrs. Merkel back toward the right. Witness the tougher new policy to deport some migrants—and to step up security surveillance while migrants are in Germany—she unveiled Thursday. This is a sign she’s no longer taking for granted the support of the CDU faithful.

It’s significant that Mrs. Merkel is being harried not by a euroskeptic but by another “good European.” Perhaps the message is that voters have turned to fringe parties such as AfD not out of dislike for the EU but out of frustration with mainstream parties that don’t compete against each other vigorously enough.

In which case, here’s hoping Mrs. Merkel continues her rightward drift. Maybe she can even embrace economic-reform ideas such as the tax cuts for which some members of her party are agitating, while Mr. Schulz pushes his proposals for more government spending. The result would be a genuine mainstream choice for German voters—something too many of their European peers have been denied in recent elections.