RUTHFULLY YOURS

Across the African continent, black children and teenagers are being kidnapped and raped in routine recruitment tactics for various Islamic terrorist groups. In Nigeria, Boko Haram has taken children as young as 5, forcing them to use weapons, to witness beheadings and to agree to kill even their parents if necessary. It’s estimated that Boko Haram has taken 10,000 boys as well as many hundreds of girls, subjecting them to starvation, torture, drugs, rape and pregnancy, jihadist videos and becoming suicide bombers themselves. In Yemen, Somali and Mali, Al Qaeda has done the same. Yet Black Lives Matter, the militant organization headed by people who call themselves African/American has said little to nothing about this continuing enslavement and murder of its own kin.

Instead, Black Lives Matter has focused on Israel , which it accuses of genocide of brown people – not black. It calls for ending U.S. military aid to Israel which is described as an “apartheid state.” It stands in solidarity with BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) and with Muslim people despite the daily deadly violence perpetrated by Muslims specifically against African blacks. No mention of ISIS or any other terrorist group which enslaves young blacks by the most barbaric tactics. Why bother to use African as part of your ethnic identification if you are determined to ignore the fate of your own people? How do other Black activists and leaders reconcile their own failure to rally against these horrific abuses at the UN, in front of the White House , in Union Square and the various other public forums they have used as venues for their protests. And how shameful that the very same organization that is seeking reparations for slavery two centuries ago has blinded itself to current mass slavery and its ravages.

Jews in the United States have a long history of standing in the forefront of civil rights activism and blacks perversely , have a long history of anti-semitic railing against the very people who have contributed so much to their liberation. Their embrace of Islam in the face of Islamic brutality in Africa is a sober reminder of how politics make strange bedfellows and how important causes can be dangerously subverted by the notion of inter-sectionality. The plight of young African blacks has nothing in common with Islamic Palestinians who are neither enslaved, tortured , kidnapped, starved or raped. What they do both share is being oppressed by Muslims; the former by radical terrorists and the latter by their own leadership which refuses to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state, preferring to keep Palestinians in the faux state of “refugee” status indefinitely rather than make that concession to reality. Black Lives Matter loses both credibility and rationality by espousing the Palestinian cause instead of showing solidarity with the African/ black victims of radical Islam.

Mr Shah’s murderer was a Sunni Muslim, Tanveer Ahmed, who had travelled to Glasgow to kill Mr Shah because he believed Mr Shah had “disrespected the Prophet Mohammed.” At this point the comfortable narratives of modern Britain began to fray.

If Mr Shah’s murderer had been a non-Muslim, there would be a concerted effort by the entirety of the media and political class to find out what inspirations and associations the murderer had. Specifically, they would want to know if there was anybody — especially any figure of authority — who had ever called for the murder of Muslim shopkeepers. Yet when a British Muslim kills another British Muslim for alleged “apostasy” and local religious authorities are found to have praised or mourned the killers of people accused of “apostasy,” the same people cannot bother to stir themselves.

Earlier this year there was a murder that shocked Britain. Just before Easter, a 40-year old shopkeeper in Glasgow, Asad Shah, was repeatedly stabbed in his shop; he died in the road outside. The news immediately went out that this was a religiously-motivated attack. But the type of religiously motivated attack it was came as a surprise to most of Britain.

The early Cold War wisdom that “we must stop politics at the water’s edge” has never been entirely true. In endeavors as human as politics, no such altruistic aspiration ever will be. But Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s adage does reflect a principle critical to effective national security: The United States is imperiled when partisan politics distorts our understanding of the world and the threats it presents.

We’ve been imperiled for a long time now. The most salient reason for that has been the bipartisan, politically correct refusal to acknowledge and confront the Islamic roots of the threat to the West. It has prevented us from grasping not only why jihadists attack us but also that jihadists are merely the militant front line of the broader civilizational challenge posed by sharia supremacism.

Inevitably, when there is a profound threat and an overarching strategic failure to apprehend it, disasters abound; and rather than becoming occasions for reassessment of the flawed bipartisan strategy, those disasters become grist for partisan attacks. From 2004 through 2008, the specious claim was that President Bush’s ouster of Saddam Hussein created terrorism in Iraq. Now it is that President Obama is the “founder of ISIS,” as Donald Trump put it this week.

The point here is not to bash Trump. He is hardly the first to posit some variation of the storyline that Obama’s premature withdrawal of American forces from Iraq led to the “vacuum” in which, we are to believe, the Islamic State spontaneously generated. Indeed, this narrative is repeated on Fox News every ten minutes or so.

The point is to try to understand what we are actually dealing with, how we got to this place, and what the security implications are. There is no denying that American missteps have exacerbated a dangerous threat environment in the Middle East to some degree. It is spurious, though, to suggest that any of these errors, or all of them collectively, caused the catastrophe that has unfolded.

The problem for the United States in this region is Islam — specifically, the revolutionary sharia-supremacist version to which the major players adhere. There is no vacuum. There never has been a vacuum. What we have is a bubbling cauldron of aggressive political Islam with its always attendant jihadist legions.

Germans with dual nationality will lose their German citizenship if they fight for militant Islamist groups abroad under new anti-terror proposals.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere also announced plans to speed up the deportation of foreign criminals.

He announced extra personnel, equipment and surveillance powers for the police.

But he rejected banning the public wearing of the burka (the Islamic full veil). And he resisted pressure to ease medical confidentiality.

Some of his conservative Christian Democrat (CDU) colleagues have urged a burka ban but Mr de Maiziere said it would be “problematic” and “you cannot ban everything that you reject”.

Mr de Maiziere was responding to recent attacks linked to militant Islamists. Two terror attacks by Islamist migrants shocked Germany last month – in Wuerzburg and Ansbach.
Citizenship debate

“I propose that German citizens who are fighting with terror militias in other countries, and take part in combat operations there, if they have a second nationality – and only then – they would lose German citizenship,” he told a news conference.

There was a move in France recently to deprive jihadists of their French citizenship, but it did not get through parliament.

German media report that the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) – the CDU’s coalition partners – strongly oppose any general ban on dual citizenship. The Greens are also against the idea.

For months experts and the media insisted that it was inconceivable and impossible for Muslim terrorists to enter Europe or America by pretending to be Syrian refugees. Now it’s just a fact of life. That’s the way it usually is with the left. The disastrous outcomes of their policies are denied and then they’re just a reality that we’re expected to cope with.

German intelligence services have evidence that “hit squads” from the Islamic State terror group have infiltrated the country disguised as refugees, the deputy head of Bavaria’s spy agency told the BBC Thursday.

“We have to accept that we have hit squads and sleeper cells in Germany,” Manfred Hauser, the vice president of the Bavaria region’s intelligence gathering agency, BayLfV, told the Today program.

“We have substantial reports that among the refugees there are hit squads. There are hundreds of these reports, some from refugees themselves. We are still following up on these, and we haven’t investigated all of them fully,” said Hauser.

Why do we have to accept them? Because we keep accepting Muslim migrants who claim to be refugees. We have to keep eating the whole bowl of candy wondering which of the pieces is poisoned.

In the wake of the recent rise in Islamic terror attacks, German conservative officials are calling to ban the burqa, a traditional Muslim grabs that covers a woman’s entire body, usually donned by the most extreme devotees of the religion.

A handful of state interior ministers from the Christian Social Union and Christian Democratic Party (Chancellor Angela Merkel’s own party) drafted a proposal this week aimed at controlling the spread of radical Islam, cutting off the financing of terrorism-promoting mosques and banning Islamic dress that signals extremist affiliations.

“Freedom of religion is a central, fundamental right. However, religious extremism and the abuse of religious symbols have no place in Germany,” the proposal said, adding:

Freedom of expression is for us non-negotiable. The brutalization of our language and in particular hateful messages posted on social media will not be tolerated. We need to return to our civic virtues. Respect, courtesy and mutual consideration of one another are the foundations for a peaceful coexistence,” the proposal states.

Pointing to the fact that terror attacks in Germany have been mostly committed by Muslims with dual citizenship, the proposal called on Germans to decide where they stand.

“Dual citizenship is a huge obstacle for integration,” the proposal stated bluntly. “We object to this split loyalty. Whoever wants to engage themselves with the politics of foreign governments, we would advise to leave Germany. We call for people to make a conscious choice for the values of our free, democratic constitutional order.”

Moreover, the proposal addressed the politically-contentious issue of “uncontrolled immigration,” suggesting that it is a primary driver of violence in the country.

“Uncontrolled immigration and with that the link to people smuggling create unease within the population and simplify the process of sneaking into Europe for criminals and violent Islamist criminals,” the proposal asserted.

Leftist politicians have pushed back, arguing that the conservatives are straddling between between hate and xenophobia.

“Members of the Die Linke (Left Party) have already voiced criticism of the draft proposals. Bundestag Left Party member Frank Tempel told broadcaster Deutschlandfunk that a burqa ban proposal has nothing to do with fighting terrorism,” reports The Local.

Almost all the perpetrators of sexual assaults who attacked in groups and who have been apprehended, are citizens of Afghanistan, Eritrea and Somalia — three of the four largest immigrant groups in Sweden who fall into the category of “unaccompanied refugee children.”

A few days later, it turned out that many of the perpetrators who sexually assaulted women at the “Putte i parken” music festival in Karlstad wore the “Don’t grope” bracelet.

Many people were therefore aghast to learn that the organizers of the Trästocksfestivalen music festival in Skellefteå had decided to arrange free bus rides to the festival for the local “unaccompanied refugee children.” They claimed they were “proud to be the first music festival in Sweden that encourages a significant increase of newly arrived migrants in the audience.” By the time the Trästocksfestivalen ended, the police counted twelve reported sexual assaults.

Apparently, Swedish girls and women should learn to live with being groped and raped — or leave the public space altogether. The latter seems quite in line with what Islamic sharia law prescribes.

In the wake of the New Year’s Eve attacks in Cologne, Germany, news broke in Sweden that a large number of sexual assaults against girls and women had occurred at the music festival “We Are Sthlm” [short for Stockholm] in both 2014 and 2015, but had been covered up by both the police and the media. The National Police Commissioner, Dan Eliasson, immediately launched an investigation to find out the scope of the problem.

The results were presented in May, in a report, “The current situation regarding sexual assault and proposals for action” — and the conclusions are frightening. Almost all the perpetrators who attacked in groups and who have been apprehended, are citizens of Afghanistan, Eritrea and Somalia — three of the four largest immigrant groups in Sweden who fall into the category of “unaccompanied refugee children.”

This is about distance, and detachment, and a kind of historic decoupling between the top and the bottom in the West that did not, in more moderate recent times, exist.

Recently I spoke with an acquaintance of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and the conversation quickly turned, as conversations about Ms. Merkel now always do, to her decisions on immigration. Last summer when Europe was engulfed with increasing waves of migrants and refugees from Muslim countries, Ms. Merkel, moving unilaterally, announced that Germany would take in an astounding 800,000. Naturally this was taken as an invitation, and more than a million came. The result has been widespread public furor over crime, cultural dissimilation and fears of terrorism. From such a sturdy, grounded character as Ms. Merkel the decision was puzzling—uncharacteristically romantic about people, how they live their lives, and history itself, which is more charnel house than settlement house.

Ms. Merkel’s acquaintance sighed and agreed. It’s one thing to be overwhelmed by an unexpected force, quite another to invite your invaders in! But, the acquaintance said, he believed the chancellor was operating in pursuit of ideals. As the daughter of a Lutheran minister, someone who grew up in East Germany, Ms. Merkel would have natural sympathy for those who feel marginalized and displaced. Moreover she is attempting to provide a kind of counter-statement, in the 21st century, to Germany’s great sin of the 20th. The historical stain of Nazism, the murder and abuse of the minority, will be followed by the moral triumph of open arms toward the dispossessed. That’s what’s driving it, said the acquaintance.

It was as good an explanation as I’d heard. But there was a fundamental problem with the decision that you can see rippling now throughout the West. Ms. Merkel had put the entire burden of a huge cultural change not on herself and those like her but on regular people who live closer to the edge, who do not have the resources to meet the burden, who have no particular protection or money or connections. Ms. Merkel, her cabinet and government, the media and cultural apparatus that lauded her decision were not in the least affected by it and likely never would be.

Nothing in their lives will get worse. The challenge of integrating different cultures, negotiating daily tensions, dealing with crime and extremism and fearfulness on the street—that was put on those with comparatively little, whom I’ve called the unprotected. They were left to struggle, not gradually and over the years but suddenly and in an air of ongoing crisis that shows no signs of ending—because nobody cares about them enough to stop it.

The powerful show no particular sign of worrying about any of this. When the working and middle class pushed back in shocked indignation, the people on top called them “xenophobic,” “narrow-minded,” “racist.” The detached, who made the decisions and bore none of the costs, got to be called “humanist,” “compassionate,” and “hero of human rights.”

And so the great separating incident at Cologne last New Year’s, and the hundreds of sexual assaults by mostly young migrant men who were brought up in societies where women are veiled—who think they should be veiled—and who chose to see women in short skirts and high heels as asking for it.

Cologne of course was followed by other crimes. CONTINUE AT SITE

The militant group has forced thousands to become child jihadists. As many escape, Nigeria wonders what to do with them.

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria—In a forest of thorn trees somewhere far outside this city, the Boko Haram insurgency ran a boot camp for about 100 boys. Children as young as 5 years old learned to handle assault rifles and march through the woods in flip-flops. Their teacher was only 15.

“I was terrified if I didn’t do it, they would kill me,” said Idriss, the teenage instructor, in an interview. He said he was kidnapped by the militants in 2014 but has since escaped.

While the world focused on Boko Haram’s mass kidnappings of women and girls, the Islamist group was stealing an even greater number of boys. Over the past three years, Boko Haram has kidnapped more than 10,000 boys and trained them in boot camps in abandoned villages and forest hide-outs, according to government officials in Nigeria and neighboring Cameroon, and to Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group.

Abubakar was abducted by Boko Haram and forced to participate in the violent terrorist group’s campaign in northeast Nigeria. He managed to escape a year later. Video: Gabe Johnson/Mackenzie Knowles-Coursin/WSJ

Child soldiering was a big problem in various collapsing states in the 1990s, including some in Africa. What is happening here in northeastern Nigeria is part of a disturbing rise in child jihadism. Young boys and at times girls are being indoctrinated into violent fundamentalism and used as fighters, suicide bombers and spies.

Something similar is happening in other countries battling Islamist insurrections. Commanders of al Qaeda’s branches in Yemen, Somalia and Mali have deployed youngsters. Islamic State has used children in combat, suicide bombings and in execution videos in Iraq and Syria.

Interviews with 16 young Nigerians who escaped from Boko Haram captivity and with other witnesses, soldiers, researchers, officials and diplomats in Nigeria and Cameroon provide a picture of the harrowing life endured by the children who wage jihad. The Wall Street Journal isn’t publishing their surnames.

Witnesses said the boys were trained and sent into battle, at times unarmed and often numbed with opiates. Many of the boys were beaten and some died of starvation or thirst, these people said. Their individual accounts couldn’t be independently verified but are consistent with information gathered by researchers and military officials, both in terms of timing and specific details.

“They told us, ‘It’s all right for you to kill and slaughter even your parents,’ ” recalled Samiyu, a former captive who said he witnessed a beheading on the first day of his 11 months with Boko Haram. He said other boys helped hold down the victim. “They said, ‘This is what you have to do to get to heaven.’ ”

People displaced by fighting between Nigerian troops and Boko Haram militants have settled in a camp on the outskirts of Maiduguri, Nigeria.

Witnesses recounted Boko Haram using fleets of passenger vans to move child fighters through the forests of northeastern Nigeria. Some have described camps of more than 1,000 boys and adolescents training to fight, with very few adults present.

“If you go there, you can see 12-year-olds talking about burning down a village,” said Fatima, a 20-year-old former hostage. “They have converted.”

As more such boys escape from the group and others are captured by government forces, West African officials are debating whether the boys can be returned to their families—and how.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Nigerian peacekeepers helped end the civil war in Liberia, and thousands of young boys were disarmed and returned to society. Some of those peacekeepers are now ranking officers. They must confront a new generation of child combatants raised on an ideology more apocalyptic than anything offered by the warlords of 1990s Liberia.

Boko Haram recruited children from the earliest days of its insurgency. First it tapped them as spies and couriers before shifting toward front-line mobilization, according to Nigeria’s military and Human Rights Watch. CONTINUE AT SITE

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was not able to attend last week’s Arab League summit in Mauritania, because he was in mourning for his brother, Omar, who died in Qatar a few days before the event. He therefore traveled to Doha for the funeral and sent PA Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki to Nouakchott in his stead.

Though Abbas has made it clear in word and deed that he will never make peace with the Jewish state, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu phoned him to extend condolences over the loss of his brother. This gesture was not merely a display of good manners. Like many relatives of Palestinian bigwigs bent on Israel’s annihilation, Omar Abbas had been undergoing regular cancer treatments at Tel Aviv’s Assuta Medical Center.

In Mauritania, Malki conveyed his bereaved boss’s message to the Muslim-Arab honchos who had gathered to discuss Middle East “issues.” The PA, he said, was planning to file a lawsuit against Britain for the Balfour Declaration, which has its 100th anniversary in 2017. Abbas, Malki explained, wanted to enlist the support and assistance of his brethren in this endeavor.

It is not clear whether any of them guffawed into their robes at the absurdity of the proposed move — or whether they were impressed at the way in which Abbas manages to outdo himself in audacity. But one thing we do know is that this year they devoted a bit less time and lip service to the plight of the Palestinians. It has always been the case that the only use they have for Abbas is tactical; as long as they echo his yammering about Israel’s being the root cause of instability in the region, they can go about plotting against and killing one another without Western focus. But things are really on a downswing for them right now, so their heart and rhetoric are not really in it for Abbas and what they know to be his — and their — phony cause.

Back on the ranch in Ramallah, Abbas has kept busy engaging in laughable behavior, without batting an eyelash or working up a blush.