RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

What does it say about Messrs. Obama, Trudeau & Co. that their farewells to Fidel could have been voiced by communist toadies?

The retrospectives on Fidel Castro continue, even as the entombment of the Cuban dictator has passed. New photographic essays, retrospectives and interviews appear on our computer screens. So symbolic has this figure proved that I expect to see apologias and indictments into the New Year, if only because the former necessitate the latter.

Ponder the inability in some quarters to name unpleasant facts. President Obama never quite could bring himself to say “radical Islam” or to tell us what the “extremists” of which he spoke instead were extreme about. Here, he went a step further, silent on the ideology that animated Castro as well as the crimes to which they gave rise.

Indeed, the language deployed by some world leaders has been no more honest or creditable than that heaped upon Castro by veteran KGB stooges and communist fellow-travelers. Note the common resort to the purposely evasive, syrupy valedictory language normally reserved for the passing of a pioneering CEO or a charismatic motivational speaker — “powerful emotions” for someone who “altered the course of individual lives” (President Obama), “deep sorrow” for “a larger than life figure” (Canada’s Justin Trudeau), a “beacon of light,” an “absolute giant of the 20th century” (Marxist former London mayor Ken Livingstone), “a really great man” who “controlled things very firmly” (KGB agent of influence historian Richard Gott).

Note, too, the substitution of real or imagined successes to the exclusion of the dread, deadly deeds dispositive of the lives hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Nothing here of the show trials, the mass executions, the forced labor camps or the decades-long confinement of dissidents to windowless cells. Nothing of the 5,300 people killed resisting Castro’s forces; the one-fifth of Cubans who voted with their feet to escape totalitarian oppression; the lives of the still less fortunate 78,000 Cubans, lost in shark-infested waters fleeing in horror the only home they had known; the 14,000 Cubans killed in Castro’s wars abroad; the 6,800 politically motivated assassinations; the gulag of labor camps, known by their Spanish acronym UMAPs, holding tens of thousands for infractions as arbitrary as being gay, a Jehovah’s Witness or a Seven Day Adventist.

Indeed, the destruction of the lives of opponents was raised to a new virtue and the very concept of law explicitly subordinated to the enforcement of control through brute force. As Castro’s executioner, Che Guevara, put it, “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution. And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.” These were not the aberrant words of a maverick henchman. Castro himself put it no less forcefully: “revolutionary justice is not based on legal precepts, but on moral conviction.”

ISIS has found another radical-Islamic Brit willing to butcher innocent hostages:

Mohammed Reza Haque, 36, is depicted in the video using a serrated hunting knife to cut off a prisoner’s head in the middle of a barren desert.

The vile killer was likened to extremist Mohamed Emwazi – dubbed ‘Jihadi John’ – who beheaded five western hostages on video, after murdering his victim in an almost-identical fashion.

Emwazi was known as “Jihadi John,” ISIS’ most infamous executioner. Before he was finally taken out by an American drone, Emwazi slaughtered at least five prisoners: David Haines and Alan Henning from Britain, and Americans James Foley, Peter Kassig and Steven Sotloff. Although it was a great day for humankind when Emwazi was finally killed, he’s now been succeeded by another radical Muslim from Britain: Mohammed Reza Haque.

Haque was radicalized many years ago. From 2011 onwards, Haque was a bodyguard of Anjem Choudary, perhaps Britain’s most infamous radical-Islamic preacher. Choudary was imprisoned in September for inciting support for ISIS.

On Remembrance Sunday in Britain back in 2011, Haque could be seen burning poppies near the Royal Albert Hall in London. When the crowd observed a two-minute silence for British soldiers fallen in war, Haque and his radical friends chanted, “Burn British soldiers; burn in hell.”

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In other words, the British authorities knew Haque was a radical Muslim and terrorist sympathizer. Yet, they did nothing. He was just charged with a “public offense.” Amazingly, the politically correct judge decided that there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him. His boss and main mentor, Choudary, was found guilty but was also let off the hook with a 50-pound fine.