RUTHFULLY YOURS

Many of what pass these days for mature adults believe the views of sixteen-year-olds are worth taking into account, and why wouldn’t they? Their own views are baseless invocations of ideas blowing in the wind, therefore no more valid than those of callow youths.
Ever have annoying experiences? Well, of course we all do. I have more these days because I get annoyed by MSM commentators, even by the dwindling number of conservatives. No-one can tell me that the quality of commentary has improved in the past thirty to forty years. I don’t know why precisely. Perhaps it is the fault of post-modern education which, so I understand, encourages barely-formed minds to have views instead of concentrating on absorbing building blocks for rational thinking.

I am glad to say that when I was sixteen I had no views at all. My recollection is that having views was not encouraged. Every mature adult knew that the views of a sixteen-year-old were worthless. Now views have supplanted building blocks. They are, if you like, anchorless views. Accordingly, the new breed of mature adults thinks that the views of sixteen-year-olds are worth taking into account. Why wouldn’t they? Their own views are baseless invocations of ideas blowing in the wind and therefore no more valid than those of callow youths.

The manifestation of this trend towards generalised imbecility is what I call foggy thinking. I was in quite a few ‘pea-soupers’ when growing up in England. You simply couldn’t see a metre in front or behind you. I can only assume that pea soup has crept into commentators’ cranial cavities.

The number of deaths from guns dwarfs deaths from terrorist attacks in the US we are regularly told by left-wing commentators. Juan Williams on Fox News is the latest I have heard spouting this guff during a discussion of the Islamic massacre in Berlin. Quite honestly, what are we supposed to take from this kind of comment?

Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple) spoofed it brilliantly in Quadrant a little time ago. I recall he suggested that Britain in WWII might have been better served concentrating on reducing heart attacks than on countering the blitz, which took far fewer lives.

A related topic that generally has me weeping in frustration is the thought, often propagated by conservative commentators, that it is extremely difficult to identify the few among Muslim migrants who might do us physical harm. The implication is that if ‘extreme vetting’ worked it would be fine to allow Western societies to be inundated by ‘peace-loving’ Muslims. No, it wouldn’t, dummies!

The Devil is a novice. His biggest trick is to convince us that he doesn’t exist. In the face of survey after survey showing religious and social intolerance among Muslim communities most everywhere and in the face of supposedly democratic Muslim countries like Indonesia and Pakistan wanting to punish and execute their citizens for insulting Islam, apparently the vast majority of Muslims are fine and dandy. And this narrative gains strength after each horrific Islamic terrorist massacre. What a trick!

Here we have subscribers to a supremacist, intolerant and violent creed being given a pass because only a relative few (tens of thousands, or is it more?) of their number out of 1.6 billion are monstrous literalists. Well, these monsters could not and do not emerge from a vacuum. They are a product of their creed; a vile excretion from the mass of subscribers.

CANBERRA, Australia—Authorities said they disrupted a terrorist plot inspired by Islamic State to explode improvised bombs in central Melbourne on or around Christmas Day, with a railway station and a cathedral among the suspected targets.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said seven people were arrested, of whom five were expected to be charged over the plot. The plan allegedly involved the use of several improvised explosive devices, and a senior police chief said the accused plotters may have planned to use other weapons as well, including knives and a firearm.

Authorities alleged the suspects had scouted popular sites in Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city and home to some 4 million people, as possible targets. The locations included the centrally located Flinders Street train station, St. Paul’s Cathedral and Federation Square, a popular riverside gathering place.

Mr. Turnbull called it “one of the most substantial terrorist plots” of recent years.

After a truck earlier this week plowed into a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12 people and injuring about 50 others, the Australian government ordered intensified security arrangements ahead of the Christmas and New Year celebrations, with state and national police on guard against a similar attack. Sydney holds large New Year fireworks celebrations each year, usually attracting more than a million people.

In the predawn hours of Friday, counterterrorism police raided several Melbourne buildings and arrested six men and one woman. Five of the men, all in their 20s, were expected to face charges including “acts in preparation of a terrorist event.”

Three appeared in a Melbourne court Friday, aged between 21 and 26, while two others were expected to face a judge on Saturday.

Australia’s five-tier terrorism threat alert system has been set at “probable,” the third-highest level, since September 2014. In December of that year, a lone gunman, later identified as Iranian immigrant Man Haron Monis, took over a central Sydney cafe and held numerous people hostage for 16 hours before police killed the gunman to end the siege. Two hostages—the cafe’s manager and a female customer—also died.

Since then there have been four attacks and 12 others disrupted. In September this year, police charged a 22-year-old man with committing a terrorist act and attempted murder after he allegedly stabbed another man multiple times in Sydney. In total, 57 people have been charged with terrorism-related offenses, Mr. Turnbull said. CONTINUE AT SITE

PARIS—The prime suspect in the Berlin truck attack arrived in Europe five years ago, at the leading edge of a wave of nearly uncontrolled immigration. That influx, culminating in the 2015 mass arrival of refugees, has exposed the region to security threats that will linger far into the future.

The path of the suspect—a 24-year-old Tunisian named Anis Amri who served jail time in Italy, then was detained briefly and released in Germany—has laid bare multiple failings in Europe’s security apparatus, including poor cooperation between national governments, porous borders and lack of biometric data to identify people who use false identities.

Compounding those problems, the rise of Islamic State and Germany’s decision to throw open the door to refugees last year has left security services overwhelmed as they try to track jihadist The attacks in Paris in 2015 and Brussels in March confirmed fears that Islamist groups had exploited refugee flows to smuggle operatives into the heart of Europe. Investigators have determined most of the assailants in those cases traveled from Syria through the Balkans and then Central Europe along with a river of refugees in the summer and fall of 2015.

Around the same time, Mr. Amri was released after four years in an Italian prison for starting a fire at a refugee shelter. The authorities ordered him to return to Tunisia. Instead, he headed to Germany, where he roamed freely using a series of false identities and sought asylum.

His path to Berlin is prompting calls for Europe to fix the longstanding security flaws of the Schengen Zone, which allows border-free travel throughout much of the region.

“We are very late, and we’re in the process of catching up,” said Georges Fenech, chairman of the French parliamentary committee that investigated the Paris attacks. “Because today, these terrorists move freely in the Schengen area. From the moment they enter with the migrants, they pass borders without much difficulty.”

Overtaxed security agencies dropped 24-hour surveillance of Mr. Amri this year when they failed to find enough evidence to make him a high-priority target. Mr. Amri had been under scrutiny after authorities discovered links between him and a radical cleric.

Police detained him in July when they discovered his request for asylum was denied and he was to be deported. But they released him a day later, because of Germany’s strict legal limits on the detention of migrants and Tunisia’s unwillingness at the time to take him back. CONTINUE AT SITE

German investigators have named a Tunisian refugee, Anis Amri, as the jihadist whom they suspect carried out Tuesday’s mass-murder attack. Amri is believed to be the man who drove a truck through a Christmas festival in Berlin, killing twelve and wounding four-dozen others in an atrocity reminiscent of the attack in July, when 86 people were killed at a Bastille Day celebration in Nice.

Notwithstanding that they arrested and held the wrong man for several hours, it turns out that German authorities have been well aware that Amri posed a danger. He is yet another of what my friend, the terrorism analyst Patrick Poole, has dubbed “known wolves” — Islamic terrorists who were already spotlighted by counterterrorism investigators as likely to strike.

Amri, who is variously reported to be 23 or 24, arrived in Germany in July 2015 as an asylum-seeker. He was able to remain because of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s suicidal open-door policy for refugees from the Muslim Middle East and North Africa. Prosecutors in Berlin attempted to deport Amri back in June, after learning three months earlier that he was planning “a serious act of violent subversion.” He is reportedly a follower of Abu Walaa, an Iraqi sharia-supremacist firebrand who was recently arrested on suspicion of being a top ISIS leader and recruiter in Germany.

His terrorist activities aside, Amri has also been involved in narcotics trafficking, theft, and the torching of a school. That last felony occurred in Italy, where the “refugee” was sentenced to five years in prison before being welcomed into Deutschland. All that baggage, and still the Germans allowed him to remain. Reportedly, officials felt they could not deport him because he did not have a passport and the Tunisian government would not acknowledge him (despite the fact that the Tunisian government had convicted him in absentia of a violent robbery). That might explain a brief delay in repatriating him; it does not explain a legal system that permits a suspect with a lengthy, violent criminal record to remain at liberty while he is suspected of plotting mass-murder attacks.

Yesterday’s atrocity highlights an aspect of the refugee crisis to which I have been trying to draw attention for over a year: The main threat posed by the West’s mass-acceptance of immigrant populations from sharia cultures is not that some percentage of the migrants will be trained terrorists. It is that a much larger percentage of these populations is stubbornly resistant to assimilation. They are thus fortifying sharia enclaves throughout Europe. That is what fuels the jihad. It would be foolish to think it couldn’t happen here, too.

To be sure, the infiltration of trained terrorists is a huge problem; even a small percentage would compute to thousands of jihadists within the swarms of migrants. Alas, that is a secondary concern. The bigger threat is the enclaves.

These are not merely parallel societies in which the law and mores of the host countries are supplanted by Islamic law and Islamist mores. Even residents who are not jihadists tend to be jihadist sympathizers — or, at least, to be intimidated into keeping any objections to themselves. That turns these neighborhoods into safe havens for jihadist recruitment, training, fund-raising, and harboring. They enable the jihadists to plan attacks against the host country and then elude the authorities after the attacks.

“They go low, we go high.” “Love trumps hate.” The left, as we learned from the recent presidential campaign, is all about love. And hope. And, naturally, fighting hate.

Thus the name of the British organization Hope Not Hate. I’ve written about it before. It describes itself as an anti-fascist monitoring group, and the mainstream media, with few exceptions, routinely echo this self-description. In fact, however, HnH, founded in 2004, is far from what it pretends to be. Think of it as Britain’s answer to the Southern Poverty Law Center: a vicious smear machine masquerading as a virtuous anti-hate group.

It was Hope Not Hate that successfully campaigned to have Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller banned from the U.K. because of their criticism of Islam. It was Hope Not Hate that slandered me and several dozen other critics of Islam in an outrageously mendacious “Counter-Jihad Report” that actually juxtaposed photos of David Horowitz and Geert Wilders with one of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik (complete with gun). It was Hope Not Hate that spent the run-up to the Brexit vote demonizing UKIP, the anti-EU party, which it routinely treated as racist, xenophobic, and neo-Nazi scum.

HnH’s modus operandi is always consistent: instead of engaging the arguments of its ideological opponents in a fair, factual way, it maligns us, misrepresents us, and does its damnedest to destroy our reputations. The ultimate goal, plainly, is to try to make us shut up and go away.

Now they’re at it again. Their latest target: none other than former UKIP head and Brexit hero Nigel Farage. After the December 19 attack in Berlin, Farage tweeted that such events “will be the Merkel legacy.” Merkel, he wrote, had “blood on her hands.” Farage was hardly alone in this opinion: perhaps the most common Facebook meme during the hours after the attack was a picture of Merkel with, yes, blood on her hands.

But at least one prominent Brit considered Farage’s remarks wildly inappropriate. On his own Twitter account, Brendan Cox warned Farage that “blaming politicians for the actions of extremists” would lead him down a “slippery slope.”

Who is Brendan Cox? He’s a professional left-wing activist who once served as an adviser to Gordon Brown. He’s held well-paid positions at groups with names like Crisis Action and was chief strategist at Save the Children, from which he resigned in 2015 after accusations of “inappropriate behavior.” But he’s best known as the widower of Labour MP Jo Cox, a vocal Remain advocate who was murdered last June by a right-wing fanatic. Following her death, her family encouraged contributions in her memory to three groups that had been “close to her heart.” One of them was Hope Not Hate.

I take the title of this column from a 1994 British film, “The Madness of King George,” which dramatizes the enveloping insanity of George III, the monarch who lost America and was losing his mind. George kept committing actions that were “embarrassing” to the nation, but most of all, to the dignity of his station. Doctors were at a loss to diagnosis and possibly correct the king’s bizarre behavior and eccentricities. Given the primitive state of mental and physical science of the time, they were reduced to examining his stool for clues to a remedy. The only doctor to make a semblance of progress was one who insisted that all regal niceties be dropped and the King be put through a régimen of what only could be called, in certain military circles, “square bashing.” George would be put in a straight jacket every time he “misbehaved.”

But George III’s madness was a low-level one compared to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy of madness. She cannot help but be aware of the insanity and the suicidal consequences of her policies, but she chooses them. George’s madness could not be corrected with rational persuasion or introspection. He was not capable of conscious irrationality. His mind careened in its own world of causo-connections.

As does Merkel’s.

Merkel’s madness, seeks to reduce her nation to being a deferential caliphate of Islam against the will of the non-Islamic population, which is expected to meld peacefully without complaint with the savages, rapists, thieves and welfare parasites. It is based on the madness of her brand of collectivism, Marxism.

Marxism itself is a system of madness that defies or denigrates human volition and goes against any measure of rationality. If you were born in a certain “class,” preferably a poor one, then you were destined to become a communist, or at least a socialist, and resent anyone better off economically than you. Dialectical Materialism brands you from the beginning and you have no choice about what you are and what you condition is. Your economic condition or circumstances indelibly “condition” how you think and behave.

Wikipedia has this description of Marxism:

Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that analyzes class relations and societal conflict using a materialist interpretation of historical development and a dialectical view of social transformation. It originates from the mid-to-late 19th century works of German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Marxist methodology originally used a method of economic and sociopolitical inquiry known as historical materialism to analyze and critique the development of capitalism and the role of class struggle in systemic economic change.

To Merkel’s mind, immigrants who rape, murder, or turn into bloody jihadis are just that way, through no fault of their own, it’s their cultural heritage, and they must not be judged according to Western measures of civil conduct, they were just born that way, and extraordinary efforts must be made to persuade them to be nice, and not commit crimes. They are blameless because that was how they were born.

The Grand Mufti reviewing Muslim troops in Bosnia

On the other hand, native Germans must make an effort to accommodate migrants and Muslims, and form a societal union with them until all conflict between Western and Muslim culture ceases. Unfortunately, the only “dialect” Muslims practice and understand is force. “Peace” in Islamic “dialectics” means your submission, or your death.