RUTHFULLY YOURS

250,000 Christians lived in Aleppo before the Sunni-Shiite Islamic civil war began. Today their numbers have fallen to 40,000.

There were no worldwide protests over this ethnic cleansing of Christians from Aleppo as there are over the fall of the Sunni Islamic state whose Jihadis are euphemistically described as rebels. There were no photos of crying Christian children blanketing every media outlet. But today you can hardly open a newspaper without seeing a teary Sunni Muslim kid allegedly being evacuated from Aleppo.

Given a chance, the weeping Sunni Muslims did to their Christian neighbors in Aleppo what they had done to them back during the Aleppo Massacre a hundred years ago when they were upset that the decline of Islamic Sharia power led to Christians gaining some civil rights. The Jewish population of Aleppo, which had once made up 5% of the city, had already been wiped out in the 1947 Muslim riots.

The last Jewish family was evacuated from Aleppo to escape the Sunni Jihadis two years ago.

The destruction of the Jewish and Christian communities of Aleppo happened without a fraction of the hysterical tumult over the defeat of the Sunni Jihadis and their fellow Muslim religious dependents.

“Aleppo will join the ranks of those events in world history that define modern evil, that stain our conscience decades later,” Samantha Power declared at the United Nations.

Why doesn’t the ethnic cleansing of 210,000 Christians stain Power’s conscience? Or the church bombings by Islamists in Egypt, the stabbings of Jewish women in Israel and the Boko Haram genocide of Christians in Nigeria? True modern evil is the righteous conviction of liberals that only Muslim lives matter and that their Christian, Jewish and other non-Muslim victims somehow have it coming.

The fall of the Sunni theocracy is denounced as an outrage that will stain the conscience of the world. Journalists have taken a break from their ski vacations to lecture us on how we should have done something. That “something” being the thing they didn’t want us to do in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein had butchered hundreds of thousands, but that is somehow now a moral imperative in Syria.

Why do the Sunni Muslims of Aleppo matter while the ethnically cleansed Christians of Aleppo don’t? And why was removing Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, a crime that liberals still howl about while removing Assad, an Alawite Shiite, is a moral imperative? Because the “righteousness” axis of our foreign policy is controlled by the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, the Sunni Saudis and the rest of their Sunni Gulfie ilk.

The Muslim Brotherhood set our agenda for the Arab Spring. It’s why our government and our human rights organization backed the popular overthrow of Mubarak, but fought the popular overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Morsi. Kenneth Roth, the head of Human Rights Watch, an organization which despite its name has solicited money from the Saudis, the sugar daddies of the Sunni Jihad, sneers at Copts for supporting the “persecution” of the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s not just Orwellian. It’s evil.

With all this talk of Russians allegedly interfering in U.S. elections, it is worth recalling that it wasn’t too long ago that the previous Democrat in the White House betrayed America by working hand in hand with our Communist enemies in mainland China.

As president, Bill Clinton essentially wiped out any strategic advantage the U.S. had by selling advanced U.S. missile technology to our enemy, the People’s Republic of China.

That “administration’s voluntary release of all the secrets of America’s nuclear tests, combined with the systematic theft of the secrets that were left as a result of its lax security controls, effectively wiped out America’s technological edge,” David Horowitz writes in the recently published, The Black Book of the American Left Volume 7: The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama.

Unlike the administrations that preceded it, the Clinton administration accepted millions of dollars from the military and intelligence services of at least one hostile foreign power. All of this was done in exchange for illegal campaign contributions from a massive totalitarian country determined to eclipse the U.S. as a world superpower.

President Clinton also lifted security controls, allowing thieves to access other vital military technologies, while disarming his own side and opposing needed defenses.

“One of the key technological breaks China received, without having to spy to get it, was the deliverance of supercomputers once banned from export for security reasons,” writes Horowitz.

“Supercomputers underpin the technology of nuclear and missile warfare, and not only for firing and controlling the missiles. A supercomputer can simulate a nuclear test and is thus crucial to the development of nuclear warheads. But, according to a Washington Post editorial: ‘In the first three quarters of 1998 nine times as many [supercomputers] were exported [to China] as during the previous seven years.’”

“This transfer,” he writes, “was authorized three years after the spy thefts were detected. What rationale—besides stupidity, greed, or some other equally indefensible motive—could justify this? What responsible president or administration official, at any relevant level in any government, would allow the massive transfer of national-security assets like these to a dictatorship they knew had stolen their country’s most highly guarded military secrets?”

Back in the 1990s, as longtime Clinton bagman Terry McAuliffe, now governor of Virginia, set records raising money for the Clintons. In that era congressional investigators unearthed an elaborate Communist Chinese money-laundering scheme.

China’s seizure of an American underwater drone in international waters in the South China Sea has grabbed the headlines — for good reason. It’s not often that China commits an aggressive, provocative act like this, in full view of the U.S. naval vessel that launched the drone (although China has seized U.S military gear before, as in 2001 when a Navy surveillance aircraft was forced down on Hainan Island after it collided with a chicken-playing Chinese warplane).

But China’s thievery, and our humiliation in doing nothing about it except uttering feeble protests and politely waiting for them to return the drone, is only part of a much larger strategy China has been unveiling over the past seven years. In effect, China is annexing the entire South China Sea and eliminating any claim by other countries — including the United States to navigate its waters or fly through its airspace without China’s permission. It’s essentially an Anschluss of the South China Sea, analogous to Hitler’s takeover of Austria in 1938.

The centerpiece of this effort was also revealed last week, even though it was overshadowed by the drone story. Satellite pictures show that China has built a series of air strips and hardened structures for military aircraft on three islands in the contested Spratly Islands where just three years ago there were no islands at all: Fiery Cross Reef, Mischief Reef, and Subi Reef. China’s on-going dredging operations to build its Great Wall of Sand on those sites have now created enough space for full military installations. Also, on four other nearby artificial island, China is putting antiaircraft batteries and close-in-weapons systems that can target and shoot down cruise missiles.

Those weapons can serve as the future centerpiece of a Chinese network of mobile surface-to-air missile systems installed in the Spratlys. In sum, China will probably be able to keep anyone China doesn’t like — particularly the United States — out of South China Sea airspace.

None of this comes as a surprise to those of us who have been sounding the alarm bells about China’s increasingly aggressive moves in the South China Sea. Nor is the Obama administration’s feeble and completely inadequate response to these moves a surprise. It’s an administration whose specialty has been letting the United States be humiliated, whether it’s by Iran, in the Hormuz Straits, where it grabbed our sailors and made a display of their surrender; or by Russia, in Crimea and Syria; or by China, in the South China Sea. After eight years, the whole world knows that Obama lacks the will to halt those powers that are bent on twisting the rules of the global order to their advantage.

In September, I warned that as Obama’s time in office winds down, Russia, China, and Iran will look for opportunities to seize what they can get before a new president takes office on January 20 — one who will take a very different approach to being bullied and humiliated.

For Western Europe, 2016 began with an apocalyptic frenzy, a nightmarish vision of its possible future – namely, an avalanche of brutal sexual assaults, over a thousand of them, committed on New Year’s Eve by savage Muslim gangs in the streets and squares of Cologne and several other major German cities.

The horrific events of New Year’s Eve didn’t happen out of the blue, of course. For over a generation, thanks to irresponsible immigration policies that had never been submitted for approval to any electorate, as well as to straightforward demographic realities, Western Europe had been steadily Islamized. At first in a few large cities and eventually even in small, remote towns, the presence of Islam became more and more visible. Over time, government officials who had made these developments possible, and who had cut back their own citizens’ welfare-state entitlements in order to feed, clothe, and house newly arrived Muslims, were rewarded not with the gratitude and assimilation they had expected but with the exact opposite. Steadily, Muslim communities developed into crime-ridden, sharia-governed enclaves, increasingly explicit in their hostility to infidels, increasingly aggressive in their rejection of the values of their host cultures, and increasingly insistent on their legal independence from secular authorities. Forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and honor killing became European problems. Hijab proliferated, then (in some places at least) niqab. And authorities reacted to all of it with a feckless passivity.

Along with the quotidian reality of stealth jihad came jihad of the more headline-grabbing sort: terrorism. Only months after 9/11, the Netherlands experienced the coldblooded murder of politician Pim Fortuyn, a vocal critic of Muslim immigration and leading prime ministerial candidate; in 2004, journalist Theo van Gogh, who had just released a documentary about Islam’s treatment of women, was butchered in broad daylight on an Amsterdam street. In 2006, Muslims around the world rioted, committed major acts of vandalism, and massacred dozens in response to a Danish newspaper’s publication of cartoons of their prophet. Bombs took 191 lives in and around Madrid’s Atocha railway station in 2004 and 52 lives in London in 2005; last year saw the assassination of 12 people at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Each time, mainstream media and public officials made haste to insist that the atrocities had nothing to do with Islam, to reaffirm their dedication to the policies that made this bloodshed possible, and to shower Europe’s Muslims with inane, unmerited praise. Europeans didn’t have to be familiar with Islamic theology to understand that, like it or not, they were at war. And they didn’t need to know the term dhimmi to recognize that their elites were kowtowing to would-be conquerors.

These elites inhabited a bubble of privilege, protected from the consequences of their own policies. Most Western Europeans did not. In the space of a few years, they’d seen their neighborhoods dramatically transformed. Their once-safe streets were dangerous. Their children were harassed at school. Jews, especially, were terrorized. There was no sign of a reversal in this rapid process of civilizational decline and destruction. And if they tried to discuss the issue honestly, they risked being labeled bigots, losing their jobs, and even being put on trial. Here and there, voters found, and supported, politicians who articulated their concerns. But the political establishment erected cordons sanitaires around them, denying them power and, when possible, dragging them, too, into court. Instead of heeding the voice of the people, officials doubled down.

The Iranian government, with these two cases (Kabis and Noor 1), seems to hold in its hands a bomb that can blow up the Greek economic and political system. If Greek authorities seriously investigate these cases, they will trigger a domino-effect of disclosures that could well destabilize Greece’s government.

Iran can blackmail and manipulate its political influence inside Greece, or Iran can use its ability to destabilize a member of NATO and Eurozone, Greece, to strengthen its international position.

As Sunnis and Shiites are fighting for regional hegemony in the Middle East — Syria, Yemen — Greece, as geographical gate for Europe and the Balkans, is a trophy country for the Iranian regime. In recent years, the Iranians have been exploiting the corrupt establishment’s thirst for money. Through drug dealing and oil smuggling, Iran seems to be trying to buy political influence and access to the Greek media. Well-informed diplomatic sources say that the Iranian Embassy in Athens is extremely active in Greece’s political and economic life behind the scenes.

Until now, the Greek political and economic regime, after the junta in 1974, had always been extremely friendly to Sunni political Islam. During the Iran-Iraq war, the Greek regime sided with Iraq. Andreas Papandreou, former Prime Minister of Greece, was a close friend and supporter of the PLO and its chairman, Yasser Arafat. Greek businessmen and media owners always had close economic relationships with the Gulf States’ petrodollar business, and lobbying by Greek ship-owners, who carry Arab oil to international markets, always favored Sunni Arabs.

The influence of Sunni Islam in Greece is also large in the political and economic systems — many times stronger than in other countries of the European Union, with the Greek media always on the side of the Palestinians, Hezbollah and in recent years, many did not hide their sympathy for Hamas.

Dimitris Kabis, a professor at the University of Piraeus and recently a ship-owner — as president of Empire Shipping Limited — seems to be the protagonist in a network of oil-smuggling, arms-dealing and lobbying in Greece for the Iranian regime.

In March 2013, the US froze Kabis’s accounts, after accusing him of violating the US and EU sanctions on Iran, by bringing oil from Iran to China.

Dimitris Kabis was accused by the US that, with $500 million from Iran, he bought eight tankers for the National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC). Each of the eight tankers carried oil worth $200 million — per shipment — to China, in violation of the sanctions imposed on Tehran. In 2014, the NITC reportedly returned five of the eight tankers, but he illegally sold the remaining three in India and Bangladesh and received $100 million, which he apparently embezzled from the Iranian government.

Kabis, with the Iranian funds and a network of 20 Greek businessmen, for years supplied Iran with pharmaceuticals, weapons, high-technology products, money-laundering services and everything else Tehran needed. Among the Greek businessmen, at least one was confirmed as a TV station owner who has close relationships with Kabis.

Kabis seems to have violated an agreement signed by him and the NITC, and in July was arrested in Tehran and sent to prison. Although Tehran’s “special” court acquitted him, the Iranian seized took his passport. Kabis now resides in the Greek Embassy in Tehran, but does not have the necessary documents to return to Greece. That is why he sent a letter to the Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs to help him come back.

BERLIN—German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tuesday that the deadly truck crash at a Berlin Christmas market was believed to have been a terrorist attack.

She said Monday’s attack, in which a black semitrailer plunged into crowd of holiday revelers at the market in front of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church killing 12 people and injuring 48 others, may have been perpetrated by a migrant who had sought asylum in Germany.

“I know it would be especially hard to bear for all of us if it should be confirmed that the person who committed this act sought protection and asylum in Germany,” Ms. Merkel told a news conference at the Chancellery in Berlin.

“This would be especially despicable toward the many, many Germans who are daily engaged in helping refugees, and toward the many, many people who truly need this protection and strive to integrate themselves into our country.”

Ms. Merkel urged Germans not to give in to fear. “We do not want to live paralyzed by fear of evil,” she said.

Authorities on Tuesday questioned the sole suspect in a truck assault. The suspect in the truck attack is from Pakistan, a person familiar with the investigation said. The man was born in the 1990s, the person said, noting it wasn’t yet clear whether the man entered Germany as a refugee as some German media reported.
What We Know

Truck Rams Berlin Christmas Market

The black semitrailer with Polish license plates drove onto the sidewalk at the market at about 8 p.m. on Monday, barreling more than 200 feet, the police said, citing witness reports. They driver fled, the said.

Soon after, police apprehended the suspected driver about a mile away, at the Victory Column in Berlin’s sprawling Tiergarten park.

Islamic State took responsibility for the December 19 Berlin truck-ramming attack that killed 12 people, similar to the July 14 attack in the French city of Nice, and countless car-rammings in Israel. Now Europeans feel what Israelis live with every day.

This month, the police union in the German state of Thuringia issued an open letter to the state’s Interior Minister, describing the crumbling law-and-order situation amid the rising migrant crime: “[You] are abandoning us completely helpless to a superior force… But what changes? Nothing. One instead gets a sense of uninterest.”

Meanwhile, representatives of Arab community were reported telling the police in Ruhr, “The police will not win a war with us because we are too many.”

Chancellor Merkel, Germany’s ruling elites and the media can continue putting a happy face on uncontrolled mass-migration from Arab and Muslim lands, or suppress news reporting on rising migrant crime, but they cannot wish away the country’s deteriorating law and order situation.

It should be evident to even a casual observer that her government still does not care about the victims of its own failed “refugee” policy.

Monday’s terrorist attack on a Berlin Christmas market killed at least 12 people and injured 50 others. Islamic State took responsibility for the truck-ramming attack, as recommend by the al-Qaeda magazine, Inspire, and similar to the July 14 attack in the French city of Nice, and countless car-rammings in Israel. Now Europeans feel what Israelis live with every day.

Police confer at the site of the December 19 car-ramming attack at a Christmas market in Berlin. (Image source: RT video screenshot)

Earlier this year, Germany was hit by a series of ISIS-inspired attacks and failed terror plots. Despite that almost all the perpetrators were recent Syrian or Afghan migrants, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in the middle of a re-election bid, has stuck to her claim that there is “no connection” between terror attacks in the country and uncontrolled mass migration from Arab and Muslim lands.

Ahead of an election year, Merkel and her coalition partners also want to avoid another mass sexual attack — in Cologne.

Turkey’s Kurdish problem is not a military one. On the contrary, the military aspect of the problem is the consequence, not the root cause. Turkey’s Kurds have been demanding a homeland since the 19th century — long before the modern Turkish state was born in 1923.

It is time that Ankara rethinks its diagnosis about the Kurdish dispute. The Turks can start by asking themselves why their Kurdish compatriots choose to live in mountainous hideouts, fight, kill or be killed.

In this year’s Rule of Law Index, released by the World Justice Project, Turkey ranked 99th out of 113 countries, scoring worse than Nigeria and Myanmar.

Turkey can sometimes look like a bad joke. Turkey sits in the lowest ranks of any credible index measuring press freedoms and the rule of law.

Reporters Without Borders, for instance, in its 2016 report, put Turkey into the 151st place out of a list of 180 countries — ranked below Pakistan, Russia and Tajikistan.

In this year’s Rule of Law Index, released by the World Justice Project, Turkey ranked 99th out of 113 countries, scoring worse than Nigeria and Myanmar.

Turkey’s leaders, nevertheless, recently condemned the state of press freedoms in Europe and the United States. An official statement claimed that press freedoms had a problematic and restrictive state in “Western democracies such as, France, Germany, England, Sweden, Spain, Netherlands and the USA.”

But not all Turkish news is equally amusing. On Dec. 10, a twin bomb in Istanbul killed 44 people and injured more than 150. The perpetrators were an urban branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been fighting for a Kurdish homeland since 1984. The conflict has already taken nearly 40,000 lives.

The aftermath of one of the two December 10 bombs in Istanbul. The attacks killed 44 people and injured more than 150. (Image source: CCTV America video screenshot)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself announced the more recent bloody picture. Calling for a “national mobilization against all terrorist organizations,” Erdogan said that 1,178 people have been killed since July 2015 in Turkey’s fight with the PKK. Bomb attacks by the Islamic State (ISIS) claimed another 330 lives. Those numbers exclude 248 people who died during the bloody coup attempt of July 15, as well as 9,500 apparent PKK members who were killed by Turkish security forces. Turkey also claims that it killed 1,800 ISIS members since July 2015.