RUTHFULLY YOURS

Europeans have delegated to the State the exclusive right to use violence against criminals. But Europeans, especially in France and Germany, are discovering that some kind of “misunderstanding” seems actually to be at work. Their State, the one that has the monopoly on violence, does not want to be at war with its Islamist citizens and residents. Worse, the State gives off the feeling that it is afraid of its Muslim citizens.

“The concept of the rule of law means that the citizen is protected from the arbitrariness of the State. … Currently, the rule of law protects the attackers above all”. — Yves Michaud, French author and philosopher.

If a group of Jewish or Christian terrorists in Algeria, Egypt or Saudi Arabia had committed the same kind of stabbings, car-rammings, throat-slittings and shootings that France and Germany are suffering now, they would have provoked an immediate reaction. Tens of thousands — maybe hundreds of thousands — of enraged Muslims would have rushed into the streets to kill, stab or eviscerate the first group of Jews or Christians they met. Within 24 hours, no church or synagogue would be able to open its doors: all of them would have been burned to cinders.

These words are not to stigmatize anyone; they are meant to explain what terrorists want.According to Gilles Kepel, professor at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and a specialist of Islam, “ISIS calls for stabbing dirty and evil French people… because they want to trigger a civil war.” Muslim terrorists behind the wave of terrorist attacks apparently assume that thousands of French, Germans or Belgians will rush out into the streets, as they would do themselves, to kill, stab or eviscerate Muslims. Muslim sponsors of terrorism may not even be able to imagine that Europeans may not wish to participate in the pleasure of bloodthirsty riots.

The fact is that even if millions of Arabs and Muslims live in Europe today, Europeans are not Arabs and do not act as Arabs do. Westerners in Europe have delegated the “legitimate use of physical force” — commonly, if controversially, known as the “monopoly on violence” — to the State.

Max Weber, in his 1919 essay, “Politics as a Vocation”, claims that the State is any “human community that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” In other words, Weber describes the State as any organization that succeeds in having the exclusive right to use, threaten, or authorize physical force against residents of its territory (“Gewaltmonopol des Staates”).

For French and Germans citizens, the mission of the State is to fight Islamist terrorists — harshly if necessary. But today, instead of the “legitimate violence” of the State, German and French citizens are encountering only denial. The State keeps denying that Islamist crimes are being openly committed in its territory. This denial comes in different forms:

The mass rape of hundreds of German women mostly by Muslim migrants last New Year’s was recently revealed to be far worse than originally acknowledged. Authorities now believe that more than 1,200 women were sexually assaulted – more than twice the original estimate of 500. While more than 2,000 men were allegedly involved, only 120 suspects — about half of them recently arrived migrants — have been identified.

One explanation for why it took half a year for the full extent of the crime to be revealed is the German police’s effort to avoid a public backlash against refugees. But ultimately, Holger Munch, president of the German Federal Crime Police Office, acknowledged to the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung that there is “a connection between the [sexual assaults] and the rapid migration in 2015.”

Denial is not a strategy. Western countries that cherish women’s rights must wake up to the fact that many migrants could challenge those values. Most of the mass migration comes from violence-plagued, Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa, where women are second-class citizens subject to honor killings and various legal restrictions, and where the local culture often condones rape, encourages wife-beating, and treats women as sexual objects (with 72 virgins promised to Muslim men who reach heaven).

Thus, just as the mass migration from the Middle East and North Africa raises the specter of regular Islamist terror on European soil, it also augurs the kind of sexual abuse that those regions have traditionally tolerated. German officials implicitly seemed to acknowledge as much with their laughably impotent campaign to re-educate migrants using signs that explain acceptable behavior towards women.

Seventy-five years ago, the world blew up in just six months.

World War II ostensibly started two years earlier, when Germany invaded Poland. In truth, after the rapid German defeat of Poland in September 1939, the conflict was mostly confined to Western Europe for nearly the next two years. By summer of 1940, only Britain had survived Hitler’s European victories.

The dormant European war only went global on June 22, 1941, when Germany suddenly surprise-attacked the Soviet Union, its former partner.

America and Asia were still not directly involved in the 1941 expansion of the war until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and British Malaya on December 7–8.

Yet the war was even then not truly global until Germany and Italy inexplicably declared war on the United States on December 11.

America was suddenly mired in a two-front war on land, sea, and in the air against the Axis powers — from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara Desert, and from the coast of Florida to China.

These three calamitous events of 1941 marked the real beginning of World War II, in which some 65 million perished, more than 60 percent of them civilians.

Hitler had no need to attack the Soviet Union, a vast country that even Napoleon could not successfully invade and one that was supplying vast amounts of natural resources to his German war machine.

Japan likewise had no reason to bomb the British and Americans in the Pacific. Neither democracy was planning to start a war with the Japanese.

Industrial Japan could have gotten most of its oil from the Dutch East Indies, modern Indonesia. Its colonial master, the Netherlands, had been conquered by Germany and was no longer a colonial power.

An aggressive Japan likewise could easily have had all of Indochina and other orphaned European colonies without triggering a war against the world’s two largest navies.

Had Germany not declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor, it is likely that America would have focused on Japan and left Britain alone to fight Germany — just as it had done since 1939.

So why did the three Axis powers commit such blunders that would lose them the new global war in less than four years?

For centuries, France has always proudly borne the title “Eldest Daughter of the Church.” But two days ago, the Roman Catholic Church’s beloved child was barbarically violated and desecrated in a manner probably unseen since Clovis I was baptised in Reims on Christmas Day in 496 C.E.

Striking at France’s religious heart and traditional roots, two Islamic terrorists invaded the sixteenth-century St. Etienne church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, a town of about 30,000 near Rouen in Normandy, Tuesday morning after 9:00 a.m during mass. Eighty-four year-old priest Jacques Hamel was presiding over the ceremony with several nuns in attendance when the two entered the church by a back entrance armed with knives and “fake explosive belts.”

With reported yells of “Allahu Akbar,” present at all such horrifying Islamic undertakings, the two terrorists forced Father Jacques to his knees and proceeded to slit his throat before the terrified onlookers attending morning mass.

One nun, Sister Danielle, reported the “shocking details” of Father Jacque’s murder.

“They forced him to his knees. He wanted to defend himself. And that’s when the tragedy happened,” she said. “They recorded themselves doing it. They did a sort of sermon around the altar in Arabic. It is a horror.”

More shockingly, Sister Danielle said the terrorists told her: “You Christians, you kill us.”

One nun, however, managed to slip away and notify authorities.

“I left when they began to attack Father Jacques,” she said. “I do not even know if they realised that I was leaving.”

The Islamic murderers used two nuns “as human shields” for about an hour inside the church, during which time security forces had surrounded the building. When they exited the holy place, both terrorists were shot and killed. An elderly parishioner was also critically injured, but the circumstances concerning this person’s wounding are unclear. Three other hostages were reported unharmed.

The Islamic State (IS) was quick to claim responsibility for the attack, calling the two murderers its “soldiers.”

Islamic supremacy is arriving in medical settings using stealth means, or what is often referred to as creeping sharia. Common themes include Muslim health care workers refusing to uphold infection control protocols, Muslim medical students refusing to study topics they deem forbidden according to Islamic law, Muslim visitors in hospitals ignoring hygiene guidelines to protect patients, and hospitals bending over backwards (or is it forwards?) to accommodate Muslim demands above and beyond anything done for members of any other religious or demographic group. Also covered are outright acts of violence perpetrated by Muslim men who attack hospital personnel.

Islamic supremacy + dhimmitude = the end of civilized societies. Before I begin the (by no means exhaustive) list of how this equation is playing out in health care settings throughout the West, I’d like to share a personal story.

Shortly after the 9/11 Islamic terror attacks I had occasion to speak with a Muslim doctor who lived down the street from me. At that point in time I was completely ignorant about Islam and was, in fact, still a leftist (though wouldn’t be for much longer).

The doctor, a meticulously groomed, soft-spoken, modern-appearing man made it clear that, among other things, he believed that Muslim females become “mature” when they turned nine and therefore can be married at that age. I ignored the alarm bell that went off in my head when he made that statement. Of course I’ve long since realized that this highly educated doctor who worked at a prestigious hospital had sanctioned, at the very least, child rape (in keeping with the teachings of his prophet, the king of all pedophiles, Mohammed).

And therein lies the rub with Muslim doctors, as with all Muslims. If they are good Muslims and follow the teachings of the Quran, their values will necessarily be in direct conflict with our own.

So with that in mind, let me begin our tour through Islamic supremacy in medial settings right here in the United States.

An Islamic medical association operating in this country was identified by the Muslim Brotherhood as one among several “organizations of our friends” — friends that could help the MB advance their goal of destroying America from within. Part of the association’s oath includes: “We serve no other God besides [Allah] and regard idolatry as an abominable injustice.”

Oh Puleez! Scathing? Hardly…he gratified their goals by discussing ” Jerusalem and Palestine” and spoke of their “cultural and media occupation.” Spare me the pieties of these faux friends…..rsk
Eshki posited that PIJ and Hamas leaders have a flawed understanding of normalization.Former Saudi Arabian General Anwar Eshki, who visited Israel and the Palestinian Territories ( real name is Judea and Samaria, Israel…rsk)last week, issued a scathing critique of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Hamas for claiming his visit amounted to normalization.

Speaking to the Egyptian news site, al-Youm al-Sabaa, Eshki, who currently serves as chairman of the Middle East Center for Strategic and Legal Studies in Saudi Arabia, said that he did not visit Israel as Israeli newspapers reported, but rather “Jerusalem and Palestine”, and added that PIJ and Hamas leaders were wrong to suggest otherwise. “[My visit] infuriated some leaders of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas because they based their decisions on what Israeli newspapers published, which proves that they are living under a cultural and media occupation,” he said.

Eshki posited that PIJ and Hamas leaders have a flawed understanding of normalization. He said that normalization is the establishment of normal relations between two peoples and two countries and that the dialogue meetings he held with various Israelis and Palestinians do not reflect that.

He also accused Hamas and PIJ leaders of hypocrisy, saying they have shook hands with and hugged Israelis at international conferences and asked him and his center to develop plans to improve their relations with Israel. Moreover, Eshki argued that many of PIJ’s and Hamas’s allies are partaking in “real normalization”. He said the relationship between Turkey and Israel and the comments of an Iranian minister that Saudi Arabia, not Israel, is the real enemy, embody the true concept of normalization.

On July 18, a young man stormed through a train outside of Wurzburg, Germany. Crying “Allahu Akbar,” (God is greatest) he brandished an axe high into the air, then slashed at the men and women seated around him. Within minutes, the car, as one person described it, ” looked like a slaughterhouse.”

Then he fled.

By the time the day had ended, five people had been seriously wounded: four on the train, and a woman who had the misfortune of walking her dog at the moment he passed by. She remains in critical condition.

A day later, the Islamic State took credit for the attack, calling the killer, a 17-year-old refugee who was ultimately shot and killed by German police, a “soldier for ISIS.” It was the first full-scale Islamic terrorist attack in Germany.

But it was not the first Islamic terrorist attack on a train. Far from it: starting with the 2004 commuter train bombings in Madrid and the July 7, 2005 bombings of the London Underground, trains and metros have been a common target for extremist groups. Some efforts, like the bombing of the Brussels metro station this past April, succeeded; many more have failed. But the attempts, successful or not, betray a gaping hole in international security, and one that may not be easy to repair.

In fact, a 2007 report from the Council on Foreign Relations noted that “security professionals see trains as some of the likeliest targets.” Consequently, when it comes to the possibility of a major attack on U.S. or European railway or metro systems, former Homeland Security officer Sean Burke told Boston’s WCVB news, “We have to expect it. That’s the bottom line.”

Such an attack, if large enough, could be devastating. While air traffic remains substantial, five times as many people ride trains as fly in the United States, and in Europe, the rapid, efficient and low-cost trains often offer the best transportation options between countries, especially in an era of long airport security lines and early check-ins. Moreover, freight shipments, including highly toxic industrial chemicals, travel the same routes as passenger trains, frequently passing through densely populated areas. Because of this situation, the Council on Foreign Relations reported in 2007 that former White House Deputy Homeland Security Adviser Richard Falkenrath considered such trains “the single greatest danger of a potential terrorist attack in our country today.'”

Yet security on both continents is weak, and in Europe, often at the bare minimum; one will rarely find a policeman or other security personnel at a train station in the Netherlands, for instance. Even on international trains, like the high-speed Thalys between the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, customs and immigration officials are few and far between. Rarely is anyone asked for ID (let alone a passport), and there are, as in the U.S., no security screenings even at major rail stations like Paris’ Gare du Nord and Berlin Hauptbanhof.

Which may in part explain why the real identity of the axe-wielder in Bavaria is still uncertain: at a July 20 press conference in Berlin, officials admitted that his name is still uncertain since he, like many other asylum seekers, entered the country without a passport or other identifying papers. Indeed, Time reports that, “Authorities have discovered that he could be from Afghanistan or Pakistan, and that the information he provided to officials in Germany could be partly or entirely false.”

The solar-powered plane that recently concluded its much delayed and long overdue round-the-world flight was predictably touted as further ‘proof’ that green energy has come of age. The real-world appraisal is dour: a PR stunt to obscure the fact that ‘alternative technologies’ are going nowhere.
Just the other day, we were told history was made when the aircraft Solar Impulse 2 landed in Abu Dhabi after what was described as the first round-the-world flight by a solar powered plane. The epic journey commenced in March, 2015, and since that time the plane had spent a total of 23 days in the air. This was an achievement for which the aviation world waited a long time, quite literally, to applaud — both in the short and much longer-term.

On December 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright conducted what is generally credited as the first sustained powered flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft, covering 39 metres. By 1905, the Wrights were able to cover 24 miles in 39 minutes 23 seconds. By 1916 the aeroplane had been matched the synchronised machine gun and become a potent instrument of war. A bare 65 years after the short hop at kitty Hawk, NASA put a man on the moon. The rapid progress was fuelled primarily by human imagination, wonderful new commercial opportunities and, of course, by two world wars. It was an extraordinarily rapid pace of development.

In 1925, John Logie Baird demonstrated his first prototype of a modern television set. His breakthrough, of course, relied on earlier technologies, the most important of which was the cathode ray tube first demonstrated in 1907. In 1928, the world’s first television station WGY commenced operation in Schenectady in upstate New York.

In 1932 the BBC commenced regular programming. TV broadcasts in London were on the air an average of four hours daily from 1936 to 1939. There were 12,000 to 15,000 receivers. Some sets in restaurants or bars might have 100 viewers for sport events. Broadcasts were suspended during the war and resumed in 1946. By the 1960s TV had become a ubiquitous part of modern life and by now its quality has improved exponentially.

A third example of technological advancement and commerce began in 1946, when ENIAC, the world’s first electronic general purpose computer was unveiled. It weighed 27 tons, occupied 167 square metres of space, used 150kw of electricity. Its construction cost almost US$7 million in today’s money, not least for its five million hand-soldered joints! It could multiply two 10 digit numbers in .0028 seconds. ENIAC was, of course, based on vacuum tubes and crystal diodes, which imposed a serious physical limitation on future progress. This impediment was overcome in 1955 with the development of the first fully transistorized computer, the Harwell Cadet, at the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment. The development if the integrated circuit in 1958 then opened the way to the rapid development of the microcomputer. The world went from ENIAC to Apple Mac in just 38 years! And the pace of technological advance in computing since then has been astronomical.

See where I’m going with this? Now consider other technologies, ones we are constantly told are on the very edge of becoming commercially viable.

A former Guantanamo Bay detainee who unexpectedly disappeared from Uruguay last month showed up in Venezuela on Tuesday, saying he wanted help traveling to Turkey, Uruguay’s Foreign Ministry said.

Abu Wa’el Dhiab, who was transferred by the Obama administration to Montevideo, Uruguay, in 2014, appeared at Uruguay’s consulate in Caracas and asked for assistance to fly to Turkey or some other country to be reunited with his family.

“He made it clear he has no interest in returning to Uruguay, but that he needs our country’s help,” the ministry said late Wednesday, adding that Venezuelan authorities were aware of the situation.

A spokesman for the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry in Caracas had said earlier that the office had no information about the former detainee’s arrival.

Uruguay’s foreign ministry said it wouldn’t fund Mr. Dhiab’s travel plans but that he could return to Montevideo, where his legal status as a refugee would still be valid.

Mr. Dhiab’s abrupt disappearance from Uruguay sparked weeks of speculation and concern about his intentions, leading several South American nations to try to determine his whereabouts. Brazil was especially interested as security is being heightened ahead of the Summer Olympic Games set to begin next week.

Once accused of being an al Qaeda militant, Mr. Dhiab is one of six former Guantanamo prisoners who were resettled in Uruguay as part a White House effort to close down the Cuba-based prison. The other five men remain in Uruguay.

Uruguayan officials have allowed the former detainees to move about freely.

Mr. Dhiab’s travel plans may raise additional concern, given Turkey’s porous border with Syria and its use as an entry point for volunteers looking to join Islamic State. CONTINUE AT SITE

Turkish prosecutors are investigating people who allege on social media that the coup attempt was in fact a hoax.

In a massive purge, the government sacked more than 60,000 civil servants from the military, judiciary, police, schools and academia, including 1,577 faculty deans who were suspended. More than 10,000 people have been arrested and there are serious allegations of torture.

Witnesses told Amnesty International that captured military officers were raped by police, hundreds of soldiers were beaten, some detainees were denied food and water and access to lawyers for days. Turkish authorities also arrested 62 children and accused them of treason.

The good news is that the coup attempt failed and Turkey is not a third world dictatorship run by an unpredictable military general who loves to crush dissent. The bad news is that Turkey is run by an unpredictable, elected president who loves to crush dissent.

In 1853, John Russell quoted Tsar Nicholas I of Russia as saying that the Ottoman Empire was “a sick man — a very sick man,” in reference to the ailing empire’s fall into a state of decrepitude. Some 163 years after that, the modern Turkish state follows in the Ottoman steps.

Turkey, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rule, was staggering between a hybrid democracy and bitter authoritarianism. After the failed putsch of July 15, it is being dragged into worse darkness. The silly attempt gives Erdogan what he wanted: a pretext to go after every dissident Turk. A witch-hunt is badly shattering the democratic foundations of the country.

Taking advantage of the putsch attempt, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency that will run for a period of three months, with an option to extend it for another quarter of a year. Erdogan, declaring the state of emergency, promised to “clean out the cancer viruses like metastasis” in the body called Turkey. With the move for a state of emergency, Turkey also suspended the European Convention on Human Rights, citing Article 15 of the Convention, which stipulates: