RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Islamophobia that Erdogan never ceases to claim exists in the Western world may or may not be a real social malady, but non-Muslimphobia in Turkey is increasingly a contagious malady.

“Traitors! We’ll bomb your church!” — The words of Mehmet Ali Eren, suspected al-Qaeda member, as he attacked Protestant Pastor Andrew Craig Brunson in Izmir, Turkey.

Erdogan should explain why he persistently demands more and more tolerance for Muslims living in non-Muslim lands, including the building of mosques in every capital, while his government can deport Pastor Brunson and his wife on the spurious grounds that they pose a security threat to his country. The police explained that they were being expelled on grounds of posing a security threat because they had carried out “missionary activity and received money from sources abroad.”

Over the past several years Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has pressured Greece to construct a mosque in Athens. He has criticized the country which boasts the only European capital without a mosque. He does not hide his passion for mosques worldwide.

In 2015 Erdogan proposed the construction of a mosque in secular, Communist-ruled Cuba. Also in 2015, he went to Moscow for the inauguration of the biggest mosque in the Russian capital.

Earlier this year Erdogan pleasantly announced his presence at the opening of the biggest mosque in Amsterdam. The mosque is called “Hagia Sophia,” named after a Greek Orthodox Christian basilica built in 537 AD in Constantinople, reflecting the typical Muslim extremist obsession with “conquest.” Recently Erdogan has also been eyeing Iraq.

As recently as April, Erdogan attended the opening ceremony of a culture center and mosque in Maryland, United States. The complex, the only one in the United States to feature two minarets, was constructed in the style of 16th century Ottoman architecture, with a central dome, half domes and cupolas, echoing Istanbul’s Suleymaniye Mosque. At the ceremony, Erdogan said: “Unfortunately, we are going through a rough time all around the world. Intolerance towards Muslims is on the rise not only here in the United States but also around the globe.” Intolerance toward Muslims?

LONDON—A fleet of Russian warships, including the country’s sole aircraft carrier, sailed through the English Channel on Friday in a very public display of naval might after European leaders again called on Moscow to stop its attacks on Aleppo, Syria.

The U.K. Ministry of Defense said two Royal navy ships, the frigate HMS Richmond and destroyer HMS Duncan, were escorting the Russian ships as they sailed in international waters down the U.K.’s eastern seaboard. The Russian ships, including the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov and nuclear powered Kirov Class battlecruiser Pyotr Velikiy, are thought to be heading for the Mediterranean Sea.

European Union leaders at a two-day summit in Brussels held off on threatening Russia with sanctions for supporting the Assad regime’s siege of Aleppo following objections from Italy. Instead, EU leaders said all options remained on the table if the bombing continues.

Jens Stoltenberg, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization secretary-general, said Thursday he was concerned about the deployment of a Russian aircraft carrier to the Mediterranean possibly taking part in strikes on Aleppo. Mr. Stoltenberg said the alliance’s navies would monitor the Russian ships as they travel to the Mediterranean.

U.K. Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said Thursday at a defense conference in London that the Russian deployment was, “clearly designed to test the alliance,” adding that the ships would be “marked every step of the way” by British and NATO ships.

Islamic State militants set fire to sulfur stocks outside an industrial plant south of Mosul earlier this week, the U.S. military confirmed Saturday, creating a plume of noxious smoke that has drifted over nearby towns and a U.S. military base, forcing some troops to put on gas masks as a precaution.

Militants set the residue alight at the Mishraq industrial plant as a tactical measure to slow Iraqi military advances in the offensive to recapture Mosul, adding to oil-well fires started weeks ago and still burning in Qayara. The combination is now affecting the nearby U.S. base as shifting winds blow the smoke toward the troops.

“Daesh ignited toxic sulfur residue stored at al-Mishraq (south of Mosul) in an attempt to disrupt the ISF advance,” Col. John Dorrian, spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, said in a statement, using another name for Islamic State. He added that the military is now assessing the risk to U.S. troops because of the multiple fires.

It is unclear whether officers or senior troops ordered soldiers to put on the masks or if the troops chose to do so themselves as a precaution.

Another week, another barrage of headlines illustrating the depth of Europe’s terror threat. The following examples came during a 24 hour window earlier this month: “Schiphol Airport Was Possibly A Target Of Terror Cell That Attacked Paris;” “Police In Brussels Stabbed In Possible Terror Attack;” and “MI5 Missed Chance To Foil Paris And Brussels Attacks.”

It is news to no one that Islamic terrorism is everywhere now, and principally in Northern and Central Europe. But the three news stories, and the Schiphol and MI5 revelations in particular, demonstrate the enormity of the challenges now facing European counterterrorism officials.

Intelligence and law enforcement continue to fumble in handling the threat, often through no real fault of their own. The perpetrators are slippery and elusive. Sometimes they travel under false names. Some slip in as refugees, using false passports and false histories. Others are returnees from Syria whose activities and encrypted Telegram communications slide beneath the radar, even as they are being watched. And overtaxed law enforcement agencies have made any number of mistakes, overlooking suspicious behavior or releasing suspects without adequate investigation – in part a consequence of political pressures and the fear of being accused of “Islamophobia” by politicians and the press.

As it turned out, the suspect in the Brussels knife attack was a former Belgian military officer already known to the police for his connections to fighters in Syria. To date, officials have not determined whether he has been to Syria or ISIS territory in Iraq.

But the contact with ISIS and other terror groups in the self-declared caliphate is a common link, not only among the known perpetrators of last November’s Paris attacks and the March attacks in Brussels, but among their alleged colleagues planning to attack Schiphol airport. Those two men, identified as the Tunisian Sofien Ayari and Syrian-Swedish Ossama Krayem, traveled by bus from Brussels to Amsterdam on Nov. 13, the day of the Paris massacre. Both used false IDs. They returned, still undetected, the following day.

Four months later, police raided a safe house used by the terror cell in Schaarbeek, a Brussels neighborhood, and retrieved a laptop computer containing files labeled “13 November.” Included in those files were documents referring not only to “Stade de France” and “Bataclan” – both targets in the Paris killings – but also to a “Schiphol group.”

The same week that Mr Yousaf was extolling the idea that Britain is a proto-Nazi state and Pakistan a potential safe-haven, the Pakistani authorities saw the latest round of the interminable and unforgivable saga of Asia Bibi. This is the woman who has been on death-row in Pakistan for no crime other than the crime of being a Christian. Bibi has been awaiting execution for five years, purely because a neighbour claimed that Bibi had insulted Mohammed during an argument.

They attack the Conservative government of the UK for Nazism while not merely praising, but lauding as a safe haven, a state which actually persecutes and murders people because of their religion.

Which means that he is doing what many other people today are doing, which is knowingly to cover for a racist despotism, so long as it is despotism with an Islamic face.

Is Britain becoming a Nazi state? It would seem unlikely, but to listen to some of the critics of the Conservative government in recent days it would appear that we are only moments away from become a racist despotism.

Last week the convener of the Scottish Parliament’s Equalities and Human Rights Committee, one Christina McKelvie, pronounced that the Conservative party is displaying “some of the most right-wing reactionary politics that I’ve heard in my lifetime” and claimed that the Conservative party’s recent conference showed what will happen in Britain “if we become bystanders and do not speak out against discrimination.” She said that some recent Conservative proposals were “reminiscent of the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.”

Higher up the Scottish Nationalist Party food-chain, one of their MPs, Mhairi Black last week also compared the recent Conservative party conference to the Nazi party. She wrote without irony that she was vexed by its alleged “nationalism’, all the more “when that “nationalism” is used as a motivation or an excuse for racist, bigoted and small minded policy.” The policies of the Conservative party, she claimed, were increasingly “reminiscent of early 1930s Nazi Germany.” As though to demonstrate how sparse her knowledge of that period is, she concluded her piece by citing — as though no one could possibly have come across the quotation before — Pastor Martin Niemoller. “First they came for the Jews.”

Having sparked some criticism, other nationalists soon came to the aid of Ms Black. Notable among them was Humza Yousaf, one of the ministers of the SNP and himself a member of the Scottish Parliament. While many people on social media criticised Ms Black’s absurd rhetoric, he chose to back her up. “Those criticising, I have friends/family who have applied for dual nationality with Pakistan. Feel UK will be unbearable for Muslims in future.” This gained headlines of its own. But nobody pointed out the twin outrages of this grotesque nonsense.

PARIS—A predawn attack on a French policeman’s home, the killing of a priest during Mass and a car bomb planted near Notre Dame Cathedral in recent months were plots that appeared isolated until investigators discovered a common thread.

Their authors had all allegedly been in contact with a man whom authorities identify as 29-year-old Rachid Kassim.

From somewhere in Islamic State-held territory in Iraq or Syria, authorities say, the French national had used the encrypted Telegram chat app and other social-media tools to contact people back home—mainly French teenagers who are believed to have little or no previous connection to the terror group or each other—and instruct them on how to mount attacks.

Investigators across Europe are alarmed by the rise of militants such as Mr. Kassim, who they suspect have developed a way to “remote control” attacks from far away. That is blurring the lines between assaults carried out by militants trained in Islamic State territory and those by so-called lone wolves who authorities assumed were acting without the direction or support of terror groups.

“What worries us is a new type of attacker who only appears to be acting alone,” said Hans-Georg Maassen, head of Germany’s domestic intelligence. “Such assailants are being steered virtually from abroad via instant messaging.”

Followers of Mr. Kassim’s private channel on Telegram received instructions in mid-August on how to buy cooking-gas canisters for a car bomb, according to a copy of the channel’s content provided to The Wall Street Journal by a person with access to it. The content was confirmed by French authorities.

CELLE, Germany—The trial of a teenage girl accused of stabbing a policeman, in what officials allege was the first attack ordered by Islamic State on German soil, began on Thursday behind closed doors.

The case casts light on the growing phenomenon of radicalization among teens and the new challenge it presents for authorities, given the extensive legal protections juveniles enjoy in most Western countries.

This special status was on evidence on Thursday when the court in this small northern German town ordered reporters and the public out of the courtroom. The minor’s right to a closed-door trial, the judges argued, trumped even the “great public interest given the growing threat of Islamist terrorism.”

The 16-year-old, identified only as Safia S., is charged with attempted murder, aggravated assault and support of a foreign terrorist organization. Federal prosecutors say Islamic State operatives ordered her to commit an “act of martyrdom” and helped plan her knife attack on a policeman in Hannover in late February.

“We believe she was motivated and steered in her act by supporters of IS,” said Simon Henrichs, senior federal prosecutor, after the first day of the trial.

The defendant’s lawyer, Mutlu Günal, denied a terrorist motive, however. “That the attack happened is a fact and she apologized for it,” Mr. Günal said. “But there is no terrorist background.”

The accused faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

The case marks the first terror plot linked directly to the terror militia in Germany, a country that has seen a spate of attacks by Islamist extremist in recent months. Several of these followed a pattern observed around Europe of Islamic State operatives in the Middle East steering supporters remotely.

Reminiscent of the Third Reich, Jew hatred and agitating against Jews are in full bloom in Germany. And it is not guilt over Nazism that has Germany protecting parasitic Muslim refugees, most of whom are anti-Semitic.

In their recent documentary, Germans and Jews, filmmakers Tal Recanati and Junina Quint, portray Germany as having reached a nuanced reconciliation with its Nazi past by breaking the silence about it and facing it head-on. Yet, several recent surveys of German attitudes toward Jews and the Jewish homeland reveal the persistence of strong, anti-Semitic attitudes that belie the filmmakers’ conclusions.

Indeed, Germany may actually be stoking anti-Semitism with its official policy of acceptance and open-mindedness toward Muslim immigrants, even to the point of allowing them expression of hatred toward Jews. One of Germany’s major trade partners is Iran, hostile to Israel since the first Gulf War, and Germany continues to blame Israeli settlements for Middle East unrest. Thus, Germany’s policy of acceptance and tolerance toward Muslims may actually mask an underlying anti-Semitism that stubbornly remains despite the passage of time.

The Surveys and Anti-Semitism Revealed

In 2011, a survey by the Freidrich Ebert Foundation, Intolerance, Prejudice and Discrimination, found that 49% of German respondents agreed with the statement that Jews were trying to take advantage of their people’s suffering during the Holocaust. Another 20% of Germans agreed that Jews have too much influence in their country, 30% agreed, “Jews don’t care about anything or anyone but their own kind.”

A 2015 study by the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence from the University of Bielefeld found that 49% of Germans don’t want to hear anything about the Holocaust, 55% are angry that Germans are still accused of crimes against Jews, 28% responded that they can understand why people don’t like Jews considering Israel’s policies, and 27% say that Israeli policy toward Arab-Palestinians is not different from what the Nazis did to the Jews during the Third Reich.

The deep resentment and demonization of Jews revealed in surveys are not indicative of a guilt-wracked…people anxious to rise above the atrocities of the Nazi generation. Clearly, large percentages of Germans still harbor harsh, anti-Jewish sentiments.
In 2012, an Anti-Defamation League survey of Attitudes Toward Jews in 10 European Countries discovered the following about German respondents: 24% felt that Jews have too much power in international financial markets, 43% agreed that Jews talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust, 14% believe that Jews are responsible for the death of Christ, and 77% believed the government was doing enough to ensure the safety and security of its Jewish citizens.

The leader of Britain’s Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn must “think very carefully” about antisemitism within his party, British Prime Minister Theresa May declared on Wednesday.https://www.algemeiner.com/2016/10/19/british-prime-minister-may-calls-out-labour-leader-corbyn-we-must-have-zero-tolerance-for-antisemitism/

May — the head of Britian’s governing Conservative Party who succeeded David Cameron at 10 Downing Street in July — made the statement during a Prime Minister’s Questions session, just days after the publication of a House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee report which found Labour had shown “demonstrable incompetence” in dealing with antisemitism within its ranks.

In response to a question posed by Conservative MP Oliver Dowden, May said: “I absolutely agree with my honorable friend that this house should send a very clear message that we will not tolerate antisemitism. I have been concerned about the rise in the number of incidents of antisemitism in this country.

“We should very clearly ensure that those incidents of antisemitism are properly investigated and dealt with, and that we give the clear message that we will not tolerate it. But that does have to be done by every single political party in this chamber, and I say to the leader of the opposition that given the report of the Home Affairs Committee about antisemitism and the approach to antisemitism in the Labour Party, he needs to think very carefully about the environment that has been created in the Labour Party in relation to antisemitism.”

Recently, as reported by The Algemeiner, Jewish Labour MP Ruth Smeeth was assigned police protection, following an antisemitic death threat made against her on a social-media platform.

At the time, Smeeth told the UK’s Sun newspaper she held Corbyn “personally responsible” for the threats she had received. Earlier this summer, as reported in The Algemeiner, Smeeth said she was “verbally attacked” by an activist linked to the left-wing organization Momentum — which supports Corbyn — during the conference revealing the results of Labour’s own controversial investigation into antisemitism allegations within the party.

As reported by The Algemeiner, antisemitic incidents in the UK jumped in the first half of 2016, with the Jewish community being targeted on an average of three times per day.

In August, the head of a UK charity and antisemitism watchdog group told The Algemeiner that British Jews were “being denied justice” by their country’s main criminal prosecution agency, as it failed to crack down on antisemitic crimes.

More than 1.5 million Germans, many of them highly educated, left Germany during the past decade. — Die Welt.

Germany is facing a spike in migrant crime, including an epidemic of rapes and sexual assaults. Mass migration is also accelerating the Islamization of Germany. Many Germans appear to be losing hope about the future direction of their country.

“We refugees… do not want to live in the same country with you. You can, and I think you should, leave Germany. And please take Saxony and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) with you…. Why do you not go to another country? We are sick of you!” — Aras Bacho an 18-year-old Syrian migrant, in Der Freitag, October 2016.

A real estate agent in a town near Lake Balaton, a popular tourist destination in western Hungary, said that 80% of the Germans relocating there cite the migration crisis as the main reason for their desire to leave Germany.

“I believe that Islam does not belong to Germany. I regard it as a foreign entity which has brought the West more problems than benefits. In my opinion, many followers of this religion are rude, demanding and despise Germany.” — A German citizen who emigrated from Germany, in an “Open Letter to the German Government.”

“I believe that immigration is producing major and irreversible changes in German society. I am angry that this is happening without the direct approval of German citizens. … I believe that it is a shame that in Germany Jews must again be afraid to be Jews.” — A German citizen who emigrated from Germany, in an “Open Letter to the German Government.”

“My husband sometimes says he has the feeling that we are now the largest minority with no lobby. For each group there is an institution, a location, a public interest, but for us, a heterosexual married couple with two children, not unemployed, neither handicapped nor Islamic, for people like us there is no longer any interest.” — “Anna,” in a letter to the Mayor of Munich about her decision to move her family out of the city because migrants were making her life there impossible.

A growing number of Germans are abandoning neighborhoods in which they have lived all their lives, and others are leaving Germany for good, as mass immigration transforms parts of the country beyond recognition.

Data from the German statistics agency, Destatis, shows that 138,000 Germans left Germany in 2015. More are expected to emigrate in 2016. In a story on brain drain titled, “German talent is leaving the country in droves,” Die Welt reported that more than 1.5 million Germans, many of them highly educated, left Germany during the past decade.

The statistics do not give a reason why Germans are emigrating, but anecdotal evidence indicates that many are waking up to the true cost — financial, social and cultural — of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow more than one million mostly Muslim migrants to enter the country in 2015. At least 300,000 more migrants are expected to arrive in Germany in 2016, according to Frank-Jürgen Weise, the head of the country’s migration office, BAMF.

Mass migration has — among many other problems — contributed to a growing sense of insecurity in Germany, which is facing a spike in migrant crime, including an epidemic of rapes and sexual assaults. Mass migration is also accelerating the Islamization of Germany. Many Germans appear to be losing hope about the future direction of their country.