RUTHFULLY YOURS

SEOUL—North Korea fired a submarine-launched missile that traveled much further than previous similar tests, a fresh sign of progress in Pyongyang’s program to develop nuclear-tipped missiles that are difficult to detect before launch.

The missile was launched from near the port of Sinpo on North Korea’s eastern coast at around 5:30 a.m. Seoul time on Wednesday. It traveled about 300 miles (482 kilometers), according to the U.S. military, before falling into the sea.

North Korea began testing submarine-launched missiles in late 2014 but flight distances have been limited to a few miles at most. The previous most recent missile launched from a submarine in July of this year failed in the early stage of flight, according to South Korea’s defense ministry.

The latest launch showed “progress” compared with previous tests, according to a statement from South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The apparent successful launch of a missile from a submarine comes after North Korea also held its first successful launch of a missile from a land-based mobile carrier in June.

Both missile types represent a new threat because they are harder to identify and destroy before launch. They also have the potential to give North Korea a “second-strike” capability to retaliate to an initial major attack on its military bases.

South Korea and the U.S. quickly condemned the latest test, one of a string of ballistic missile launches by North Korea this year in violation of a United Nations’ ban. CONTINUE AT SITE

Religious programming is popular throughout the Middle East. Television viewers call in or send questions via email or social media to ask scholars of Islamic law about all manner of things. Most questions relate to their personal lives, from the mundane—can Muslims listen to pop music?—to such issues as inheritance, alimony and contraception.

Every once in a while, however, a viewer raises an issue of political consequence. Such was the case with a 2015 episode of the Al Jazeera talk-show “Al-Sharia wa Al-Hayat” (Shariah and Life), which has recently become the subject of intense debate. The following question was asked: “Is it permissible—in the Syrian context—for an individual to blow himself up to target a group that owes allegiance to the Syrian regime, even if this causes casualties among civilians?”

This was the response:

“Generally, individuals should fight and die in combat. . . . However, if the need arises, individuals should only blow themselves up if a group (jamaa) decides that it is necessary for those individuals to blow themselves up. . . . These are matters that are not to be left to individuals. . . . Individuals should surrender themselves to the jamaa, and it is the jamaa that determines how to utilize individuals according to its needs.”

The speaker was Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the intellectual force behind the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamic groups. He has written more than a hundred tomes on theological and jurisprudential issues that have attracted many adherents and numerous detractors. In addition to his scholarship, he has devoted a lifetime to religious political activism. Through his many writings, sermons, speeches and religious edicts, al-Qaradawi has become recognized as a progenitor of radicalism in the Middle East and beyond.

His answer regarding suicide bombings is typical of his extremism. By failing to reject the premise of the question, al-Qaradawi accepted suicide bombings as a legitimate weapon of warfare. This openly contradicts the prohibition in Islamic law on committing suicide.

Al-Qaradawi also fails to uphold the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, a cardinal principle of modern international humanitarian law and Islamic laws of war. The Holy Quran and various Prophetic sayings, otherwise known as the Hadith, establish an unquestionable prohibition on targeting noncombatants.

More alarmingly, al-Qaradawi entrusts the so-called jamaa—a term that can mean “the group” or “the community” and was left undefined—with the authority to order young women and men to become suicide bombers. He finds no religious compulsion or moral imperative to condemn the heinous practice of transforming human beings into indiscriminate instruments of death. He fails to denounce the evil of exploiting young women and men to advance the cause of terror. CONTINUE AT SITE

The world is spinning on its axis very quickly. Conditions that seem to define world affairs yesterday are hopelessly out of date today. There was a time only a couple of years ago when President Obama called Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan his closest friend on the world stage. Erdogan was perceived as a loyal member of NATO and an enemy of Russian’s imperial ambitions in the Middle East. Moreover, Erdogan was devoted to the ouster of Syrian president Bashar Assad, a stance that put him in direct opposition to the Russian strategy. In fact, tensions reached the point of actual conflict when a Russian fighter jet was shot down by Turkish forces near the Syrian border.

However, the ice cold relationship between the two states has begun to thaw after the attempted coup against Erdogan. During this recent period of “good feelings” Erdogan told Russian media outlets that Putin is the ”most significant” factor in resolving the Syria conflict, a statement that blatantly ignored the role of the United States.

Obviously the Turkish relationship to the U.S. has undergone change since the Obama administration has refused to extradite Fethullah Gulen, the Turkish preacher residing in Pennsylvania, who Erdogan believes was the moving force behind the attempted coup.

Erdogan has come to the obvious conclusion that reliance on the U.S. as an ally is foolhardy. Far better to deal with the malevolent Russians than the unreliable Americans. Second, Turkey’s role in NATO is now ambiguous; State Department spokesmen have openly questioned having Erdogan as an ally in the alliance. On this matter, Erdogan appears to agree.

Not only has the European Union consistently blocked Turkey’s membership, it has also challenged Turkey over the issue of migrants. Arguably the most significant bone of contention is the drum beat of Western criticism over the state of Turkish democracy or lack thereof. Erdogan is now engaged in ideological cleansing, a function of the failed coup. He remains adamantly persuaded that criticism from the U.S. and European capitals is a form of intervention and a challenge to Turkish sovereignty.

Raising American Muslim Kids in the Age of Trump was a meditative essay penned by Wajahat Ali in the New York Times. During these years of Obama and Hillary, he has been comfortable knowing that no one would question his allegiance to Islamic law (sharia) over the American Constitution. Despite Islam’s record of subversion and violence, he and his coreligionists need not have been overly concerned if their children were caught rioting in the name of Allah, damaging or looting property, or burning tires or American and Israeli flags, For nearly eight years, this has been a Land of the Freedom to Run Amok and cause damage; to join boycotts against a country, Israel, that is falsely accused of the decadence and immorality widespread in Islamic countries; to march and rally against an emasculated police force; to brazenly masquerade an ideology of conquest as a religion of peace, and to be believed!

As Mr. Ali ruminates about his toddler son and new baby daughter, he shares his concerns if Donald J Trump were to become president, and the extreme vetting that could restrict others’ entry to America, regardless of possible aggression. He fears that his friend’s son might be deported and he muses that his daughter could be sent to a “concentration camp” by the only presidential candidate who expresses his intense loyalty to our laws! Has Ali not studied the Constitution and Bill of Rights? Has he not heard Trump iterate that he wants America restored and that his favors cannot be bought? Ali fears a president who upholds the Constitution, but would be comfortable with a Clinton-Kaine administration that will continue to promote the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran, endanger our homeland security with additional hordes of unvetted immigrants, betray Israel, and grant positions of power in exchange for payments, resulting in the stealthy imposition of sharia into government.

With pensive reminiscence, he speaks of the beauty of celebrating Eid-al Fitr, an elaborate dining festival that ends the Islamic month of Ramadan, and suggests that he could be denied his celebrations and food preparations under new leadership. This is pure fantasy and fear-mongering, as no other religious group has ever been thus denied – unless, of course, he misses the cattle preparation of his forebears, the men who walk in the streets with their cattle purchases, and intentionally stab and torture the docile animals with picks and knives until they bleed out and bleat their last breath. Does he fear being questioned about his loyalty to the Constitution? Does he fear the prospect of living in a country that does not countenance the torture and abuse found in the Koran?

With the United States in the throes of a presidential election, an August 10 terrorist plot in Strathroy, Ontario, Canada did not grab much news coverage. Even so, the incident proved enlightening on a number of fronts, including the motivation of the terrorist.

Aaron Driver, 24, was a Muslim convert and ISIS supporter who posted a video in which he said: “O Canada, you received many warnings… You were told many times what would happen.” The masked Driver also said “You saw bodies of the filthy French lying in the streets. You still have much to pay for.” The Canadian Muslim convert also said “For this we thirst for your blood,” and “You will pay for everything you brought against us.”

Driver’s video warned that he planned to detonate a bomb in an urban center. On August 10, he hired a taxi and headed to a shopping mall in London, Ontario. Acting on a tip from the American Federal Bureau of Investigation, Canadian police intercepted Driver, who detonated an explosive device before police shot him dead. His more powerful bomb never exploded, and the Muslim convert was already well known to Canadian authorities.

Known online as Harun Abdurahman, Driver made contact with jihadists in Britain and posted messages praising the October, 2014 attack on Canada’s Parliament Hill by Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, another Canadian Muslim convert. In June 2015, Canadian authorities arrested Driver but did not bring charges.

Instead, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) placed Driver under a court-ordered “peace bond,” which demands that a person “keep the peace and be of good behavior” and attaches additional restrictions. Driver’s peace bond limited his activities, forbade him from using the Internet and communicating with the Islamic State. The Muslim convert and ISIS supporter continued to plot terrorism and duly manufactured a bomb.

On August 20, a suicide bomber detonated his explosive vest at a wedding ceremony attended by supporters of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, or HDP. The blast occurred in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep near the restive Syrian border and claimed the lives of at least 54. The death toll will likely rise given that many of those wounded in the bombing were in critical condition. Nearly half of those killed were under the age of 14. The bomber is believed to be a boy between the ages of 12 and 14. Turkish officials initially blamed their traditional nemesis, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK but now believe that the bomber was affiliated with ISIS.

Turkey, led by its increasingly unbalanced and unhinged president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is a nation teetering on the brink. The country has been wracked by a pandemic of bombings and shootings principally carried out by the PKK, which generally targets the military and security forces, and ISIS, which deliberately seeks out soft targets and aims to maximize civilian carnage. The wedding bombing is typical of its modus operandi.

Last week, the PKK carried out a string of bombings in eastern and southeastern Turkey killing at least 14 and injuring more than 200. The attacks were directed at Turkish military and police forces but civilians were counted among the dead and injured. Under Erdogan’s direction, Turkey is currently waging a vicious counter-insurgency campaign against the guerillas who are seeking greater autonomy. Human rights groups have accused both sides of human rights abuses.

In June, ISIS terrorists attacked Istanbul’s Ataturk airport with bombs and AK-47 assault rifles killing at least 36. ISIS terrorists were responsible for at least two other bombings in Turkey this year that claimed the lives of several foreign nationals including Germans, Israelis and a Peruvian.

On July 15, elements of the Turkish military staged a failed coup in which nearly 300 were killed and some 2,200 were wounded. The coup plotters were frustrated with Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian style and Islamist bent. Erdogan then used the coup attempt to lash out at his enemies (real and imagined) and crush internal dissent. He blamed the coup on followers of the US-based cleric, Fethullah Gulen. Gulen and Erdogan had once been close allies but the two had a falling out and are now bitter rivals.

The first thing that we see is the megalomaniacal nature of Soros’s philanthropic project. No corner of the globe is unaffected by his efforts. No policy area is left untouched.

Major media outlets in the US have ignored the leak of thousands of emails from billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundation by the activist hacker group DCLeaks. The OSF is the vehicle through which Soros has funneled billions of dollars over the past two decades to non-profit organizations in the US and throughout the world.

According to the documents, Soros has given more than $30 million to groups working for Hillary Clinton’s election in November, making him her largest single donor. So it is likely the case that the media’s support for Clinton has played some role in the mainstream media’s bid to bury the story.

It is also likely however, that at least some news editors failed to understand why the leaked documents were worth covering. Most of the information was already public knowledge. Soros’s massive funding of far-left groups in the US and throughout the world has been documented for more than a decade.

But failing to see the significance of the wider story because many of the details were already known is a case of missing the forest for the trees. The DCLeaks document dump is a major story because it exposes the forest of Soros’s funding networks.

The first thing that we see is the megalomaniacal nature of Soros’s philanthropic project. No corner of the globe is unaffected by his efforts. No policy area is left untouched.

On the surface, the vast number of groups and people he supports seem unrelated. After all, what does climate change have to do with illegal African immigration to Israel? What does Occupy Wall Street have to do with Greek immigration policies? But the fact is that Soros-backed projects share basic common attributes.

They all work to weaken the ability of national and local authorities in Western democracies to uphold the laws and values of their nations and communities.

They all work to hinder free markets, whether those markets are financial, ideological, political or scientific. They do so in the name of democracy, human rights, economic, racial and sexual justice and other lofty terms.

In each horrifying operation executed by ISIS, the radical terrorist group uses every possible way to convey its Islamic identity. They make sure the world sees and hears what they believe and seek, emphasizing plainly their religious motivation.

However, in each of these instances, we immediately, and almost automatically, hear some Western “scholars” insist that everything about ISIS is un-Islamic: ISIS reflects “societal ills, not Islamic doctrine,” as it “hijacks religion in order to legitimate, mobilize and recruit.” We also hear that ISIS’s version of Islam “is not in accordance with the Quran, the traditions of the Prophet or even with Islamic Law,” and that “No religion, including Islam, preaches indiscriminate violence against innocents.”

This is puzzling. But, no, it should not be.

When some Western scholars deny that ISIS is “in any way” driven by rigorous Islamic ideology, this could hardly be attested, especially if you consider the insistence of prestigious Islamic institutes, like Egypt’s al-Azhar, on identifying the members of ISIS as true Muslims who are committing wrong deeds. For al-Azhar, ISIS’s members cannot be identified as unbelievers as long as they do not reject Allah’s strict monotheism and the apostleship of Muhammad.

Contrary to arguments set forth by these Western scholars, ISIS reflects a specific interpretation of Islam that is both legitimate and consistent with Muslim sacred texts and classical exegesis. Claiming that ISIS’s members are lunatics driven by lust or social evil is hardly plausible, and at best fanciful. Its members can establish rigorous convincing arguments based on the Quran and Islamic tradition to justify each action they take, as they affirm: “This is a fight against Muslims and Islam.” They rely on what Muslims consider divinely inspired and authoritative texts. Ideology establishes convictions and drives behavior.

While there are, of course, various political, sociological, and economic dimensions of the ISIS identity that make its radical image appealing, the religious appeal is exceptionally powerful and unmatched.

The AOH is an ephemeral (every Oct-Nov) thinning of stratospheric ozone at an altitude of 20-25 km, roughly covering the Antarctic continent; unanticipated, it was discovered serendipitously in 1985 but is now tracked with satellite-borne ozone meters. Its discovery created much panic about an epidemic of skin cancers that led directly to passage of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an international treaty stopping the manufacture and release into the atmosphere of ozone-depleting chemicals, including CFCs used in refrigeration and bromine-containing fire suppressants.

Recently, there have been many voices, suggesting that the AOH is shrinking, presumably as a result of the Protocol. I am somewhat skeptical of the evidence, but also for theoretical reasons. I am inclined to blame wishful thinking –- a desire to justify post facto the 1987 Montreal Protocol and the economic losses it has produced around the world since then. By implication also, this tends to support the concept of a (largely unrelated) global climate treaty that would severely reduce the release of the greenhouse gas CO2.

For evidence, I refer to a well-written semi-popular story in Eos of 15 August 2016, which relies mainly on a paper in Science magazine [of 30 June, 2016] by MIT chemist Susan Solomon et al. The credibility of the paper derives from the fact that its lead author had identified the correct mechanism for creating the AOH at a time when there was much dispute about its cause; it turned out to be ‘heterogeneous’ reactions of chlorine compounds on the surfaces of polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs), made up of ice particles created from stratospheric moisture by the extremely cold local temperatures. [Heterogeneous reactions involve both gas molecules and solid particles, while ‘homogeneous’ reactions involve only gas molecules.]

These reactions eventually release free chlorine atoms (able to destroy ozone catalytically) from the existing stratospheric chlorine reservoir, gaseous HCl –hydrogen chloride. The relevant chemical reactions commence when solar radiation reaches the Antarctic stratosphere in the beginning of Spring, i.e., in October, after a winter darkness lasting up to six months.

But the same Eos story also quotes NASA atmospheric scientist Susan Strahan, who points to the difficulty of identifying a trend in the presence of “noise,” the year-to-year variation in geographic extent of the AOH. Worse still, the AOH can also be characterized by other varying parameters, like depth of depletion and by its duration. Nevertheless, Solomon extrapolates the somewhat uncertain geographic trend and boldly estimates that the AOH will seal up and disappear by mid-century.

In the American Geophysical Union journal Earth Future, atmospheric chemist Guy Brasseur and colleagues suggest a faster way to “heal” the AOH – by actively releasing ice particles in the stratosphere to deplete HCl, the main reservoir of stratospheric chlorine. But they do not consider the continued existence of natural sources of chlorine compounds: frequent volcanic injections and possibly also oceanic salt spray carried into the stratosphere by convection. Worse still, they ignore the risks of their proposed geo-engineering scheme – the strong greenhouse effects of their ice particles, which would absorb and then re-emit (albeit at a much lower temperature) most of the outgoing long-wave radiation from earth into space, covering even the normally open atmospheric infrared “window” region (of 8 – 12 microns).

In the fall of 1940 the governments of Japan, Italy and Germany—bitter enemies in World War I—signed the Tripartite Pact, pledging mutual support to “establish and maintain a new order of things” in Europe and Asia. Within five years, 70 million people would be killed in the effort to build, and then destroy, that new order.

The Pact was the culminating act in a series of nonaggression, friendship and neutrality treaties signed by the dictatorships of the day, sometimes to deceive anxious democracies but more often to divvy up the anticipated spoils of conquest. So it’s worth noting our new era of cooperation between dictatorships—and to think about where it could lead.

The era began in July 2015, when Iran’s Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani paid a visit to Moscow to propose a plan to save Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria from collapse. Iran and Russia are not natural allies, even if they have a common client in Damascus. Iranians have bitter memories of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the Kremlin has never been fond of Islamists, even of the Shiite variety.

But what tipped the scales in favor of a joint operation was a shared desire to humiliate the U.S. and kick it out of the Middle East. “America’s long-term scheme for the region is detrimental to all nations and countries, particularly Iran and Russia, and it should be thwarted through vigilance and closer interaction,” Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei told Vladimir Putin during the Russian’s visit to Tehran last November.

Since then, Tehran has agreed to purchase $8 billion in top-shelf Russian weapons and is seeking Moscow’s help to build another 10 nuclear reactors—useful reminders of how the mullahs are spending their sanctions-relief windfall. The two countries have also conducted joint naval exercises in the Caspian Sea. Just last week Russia used Iranian air bases (a little too publicly for Tehran’s taste) to conduct bombing raids on Syria.

All this is happening as the nuclear deal was supposed to be nudging Iran in a more pro-American direction. It’s also happening as Moscow and Ankara are moving toward rapprochement and even a possible alliance, less than a year after the Turks shot down a Russian jet. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim allowed last week that Mr. Assad will remain in power for the foreseeable future, and Russian media outlets are touting the possibility that Russian jets might use the air base at Incirlik to bomb targets in Syria. That all but presumes U.S. withdrawal. CONTINUE AT SITE