RUTHFULLY YOURS

After raiding refugee shelters in three towns in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein this week, German authorities detained three suspected Islamic State (ISIS) members linked to the same group that carried out the November 2015 Paris attacks.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere confirmed that three Syrian nationals were arrested on Tuesday, and that one was found to have joined ISIS a year ago.

The young men were said to have entered Germany in November with the intention of “carrying out a previously determined order [from ISIS] or to await further instructions.”

They are thought to have traveled through Turkey and Greece, using fake passports issued by ISIS along with U.S. cash and mobile phones loaded with a communications app.

De Maiziere linked the individuals to the Paris attacks.

“There is every reason to believe that the same trafficking group used by the Paris attackers also brought the three men who were arrested to Germany,” he said [1], adding that their forged passports had also come from the “same workshop.”

More than 200 officers from the German Federal Police and agents from the GSG9 special operations unit took part in the coordinated raids.

Germany has remained on edge following several violent attacks [2] in July, including a suicide bombing attempt near a music festival, and an ax-and-knife attack on a commuter train, both later linked to ISIS.

German police have ramped up security efforts since the attacks. In raids on refugee facilities in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia last month, two men were arrested on suspicion of connection to jihadist movements. One is suspected of planning an attack at a soccer game.

After those arrests, Rainer Wendt, a police officer and head of the German Police Trade Union, called for increased monitoring of asylum seekers.

“What happened here in North Rhine-Westphalia showed that it’s right to observe these people and, at the right time, to take them into custody,” he said.

Last weekend De Maiziere warned in an interview [3] with the Bild daily that there were 520 “potential” Islamist attackers in the country, as well as a further 360 “relevant persons” under surveillance, closely affiliated with potential attackers.

Jibril Rajoub, chairman of the Palestinian Football Association and a top official of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, made the offensive remarks during a recent interview with an Egyptian television station.

Many Palestinian Christians said that Rajoub’s derogatory remarks would further heighten tensions between them and Muslims. They pointed out that the top PA official was excluding them from being an integral part of the Palestinian people.

Christians see Rajoub’s derogatory remarks as part of the widespread persecution of Christians in Arab and Islamic countries, which has claimed the lives of thousands of Christians over the past few years and prompted many of them to flee to the US, Canada, Australia and Europe.

In an open letter to Rajoub, who previously commanded the PA’s notorious Preventive Security Force, and served 17 years in Israeli prison for terror-related charges, Bethlehem Pastor Danny Awad wrote: “We have been here for more than 2000 years… We are not strangers or guests or aliens who speak a foreign tongue.”

Rajoub’s disparagement of Palestinian Christians is indeed likely to encourage Christians to leave the Western-funded PA areas. Such comments are particularly unwelcome at a time when Christians in Syria, Iraq and Egypt face a campaign of terrorism and intimidation by Muslim extremists.

A senior Palestinian official has enraged Palestinian Christians by referring to them as the “Merry Christmas Group” and accusing them of supporting the Islamist movement, Hamas. Jibril Rajoub, chairman of the Palestinian Football Association and a top Fatah official who previously served as commander of the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) notorious Preventive Security Force in the West Bank, made the offensive remarks during a recent interview with an Egyptian television station.

Referring to the Palestinian local elections, which were supposed to be held on October 8 but were suspended due to the continued power struggle between Fatah and Hamas, Rajoub said in the interview:

“Even some of our brothers, the ‘Merry Christmas Group,’ voted for Hamas [in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary election]. Today, no one will vote for Hamas. What has Hamas given them? Hamas has brought nothing but destruction.”

Hmmm……not word here about the rapes, attacks the “refugees” have perpetrated in Germany…..rsk

BERLIN—Violent clashes erupted between young migrants and far-right sympathizers late Wednesday in the German town of Bautzen, the latest in a string of brawls amid rising anti-refugee sentiment.

Police in Bautzen said some 100 officers were forced to intervene after fighting broke out between a group of asylum seekers and about 80 demonstrators described as mainly from the “right-wing political spectrum.” The demonstrators were gathered at the town’s central square, propagating slogans such as “Bautzen to the Germans,” police said.
Between 15 to 20 asylum seekers living in a shelter in town threw stones at the neo-Nazis, who then attacked the migrants, police said. The confrontation escalated into street fights between the groups, Bautzen police chief Uwe Kilz said in a press conference.
When police intervened, the young asylum seekers who had come to Germany without their parents, threw bottles at officers, who used pepper spray and police batons to defend themselves, he added.

“I’m angry and shocked,” the Mayor of Bautzen Alexander Ahrens said in a statement. “I strongly condemn this violence and I say that very clearly, regardless of where it came from.”

Bautzen and other towns in eastern Germany have been the scene of tension between asylum seekers and local far-right extremists in recent months, highlighting the growing unrest in Germany, particularly in the East, over Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policies.

In February, locals cheered when a fire broke out in a building in Bautzen that was set to be turned into an asylum-seeker shelter, sending shock waves through the country. When German President Joachim Gauck visited the town a few weeks later, he was heckled as a “traitor of the people” in the street.

Violence against asylum seekers has been surging since the migrants numbers peaked last year, particularly in the former communist states, according to police statistics. CONTINUE AT SITE

BERLIN—As the flow of asylum seekers entering Germany started to break historic records last fall, Continental AG rushed to tap some of the newcomers for its workforce.
But one year after the tire maker began advertising an internship program designed for 50 migrant workers, only 30 of the positions have been filled as it struggles to find suitable candidates or vet their qualifications.

Continental isn’t alone. Answering calls from Berlin to help in the country’s massive integration effort, German companies big and small have scouted refugee shelters and job centers for potential employees. Yet because of administrative bottlenecks and a mismatch in needed skills, the number of migrants in jobs with benefits was only about 25,000 higher in June than a year earlier, despite more than 736,000 arrivals in that time.

Frustrated with the slow pace of hiring, Chancellor Angela Merkel invited senior executives from the 121 companies behind a jobs-for-refugees initiative called “Us Together” to discuss their progress and difficulties on Wednesday.

More than 80 business leaders attended the three-hour meeting. Among those questioned by Ms. Merkel were top executives at Deutsche Bank AG and Lufthansa AG . “It is our common target to integrate more and more refugees into the labor market,” she said beforehand. “If we succeed, it will be a benefit for all.”

Afterward, an “Us Together” spokeswoman said there was “an open exchange” about existing projects.

Failure to integrate the recent arrivals into Germany’s economy, the largest in Europe, could seal Ms. Merkel’s political fate. The chancellor’s popularity has waned, and her party lost badly in recent regional elections as more Germans doubt the wisdom of opening the country’s doors, which has brought well over a million migrants into the country in the past 18 months. Ms. Merkel has until the general election next year to change their minds.CONTINUE AT SITE

“In an implicit criticism of Boko Haram’s strategy until now, Mr. Barnawi told al-Naba that the jihadists should focus on combating Nigeria’s Christians—a target largely ignored by Mr. Shekau in recent years. The new approach should be “booby-trapping and blowing up every church that we are able to reach, and killing all those we find from the citizens of the cross,” Mr. Barnawi announced.”

Some people can be too extreme even for Islamic State.

The self-proclaimed caliphate’s biggest and deadliest franchise outside the Middle East, the “West Africa Province” also known as Boko Haram, fractured in recent weeks over Islamic State’s decision to replace its notorious leader, Abubakar Shekau.

Mr. Shekau hasn’t recognized the August appointment of a rival Boko Haram commander, Abu Musab al-Barnawi, as the group’s new “governor.” The two factions have repeatedly clashed since then and their followers have accused each other of abandoning the true faith.

This split, while weakening Boko Haram in the immediate term, could have dramatic consequences for how jihadists continue their struggle in Nigeria and in neighboring countries. Boko Haram’s areas of influence were cut down by the recent offensives of regional militaries, which were aided by U.S., British and French advisers. But the group still controls large chunks of northeastern Nigeria and operates in parts of Niger, Cameroon and Chad.

Mr. Shekau took over Boko Haram after its founder, Mohammed Yusuf, was killed in Nigerian police custody in 2009. He unleashed a strategy of unbridled terror, treating Muslim villages that didn’t join his organization as legitimate targets. Over the past year, he sent scores of children on suicide missions to blow up markets and mosques—with local Muslim civilians making up the vast majority of the casualties.

“You can’t really be more barbaric and more savage than Shekau. He’s the pinnacle of barbarism,” said Issoufou Yahaya, a political analyst and head of the history department at the Niamey University in Niger.

Dispatching child suicide bombers to Sunni mosques was apparently too much even for Islamic State’s leadership in Syria and Iraq. In August, the organization’s newspaper al-Naba published an interview with Mr. Barnawi that made no mention of Mr. Shekau. Instead it referred to Mr. Barnawi, who is rumored to be a son of the Nigerian group’s founder, Mr. Yusuf, as the new “governor” of the West Africa Province.

A surprised Mr. Shekau responded by accusing his rival of apostasy and by complaining that Islamic State chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been tricked.

Nigeria’s military, which has repeatedly announced Mr. Shekau’s death in the past, claimed to have seriously injured him in a late August airstrike. There has been no independent confirmation of that claim. CONTINUE AT SITE

Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri made a new video that appeared on September 9. It offers little that is new: 9/11 is again praised and portrayed as a product of Muslim grievances and payback for Western crimes; he vows a “thousand more” 9/11s; and warns against apostates being more dangerous than original infidels.

Only one angle stands out—again, not because it is new, but because it sheds light on a growing phenomenon: black violence against police in general, in the context of Black Lives Matter in particular. In last week’s video, Zawahiri called on American blacks to convert to Islam, asserting that they will never receive justice and will always live in “humiliation” until they convert to Islam and rebel against the “white majority.” He even showed footage of the Nation of Islam’s Malcolm X preaching.

While many conclude that al-Qaeda is opportunistically trying to exploit groups like BLT, the reality may be that BLT has from the start long been influenced by al-Qaeda’s rhetoric and propaganda (which, as usual, is quietly disseminated on the ground, not by al-Qaeda, but by its many Muslim sympathizers in America). For Zawahiri has in fact for years been calling on American blacks to turn against whites and quoting Malcolm X.

Nearly a decade ago, Zawahiri issued a similar message:

That’s why I want blacks in America, people of color, American Indians, Hispanics, and all the weak and oppressed in North and South America, in Africa and Asia, and all over the world, to know that when we wage jihad in Allah’s path, we aren’t waging jihad to lift oppression from Muslims only; we are waging jihad to lift oppression from all mankind, because Allah has ordered us never to accept oppression, whatever it may be…This is why I want every oppressed one on the face of the earth to know that our victory over America and the Crusading West — with Allah’s permission — is a victory for them, because they shall be freed from the most powerful tyrannical force in the history of mankind.

American blacks, however, were Zawahiri’s primary targets. He again praised and quoted from Malcolm X: “Anytime you beg another man to set you free, you will never be free. Freedom is something you have to do for yourself. The price of freedom is death.”

Jeremy Corbyn — who could possibly become British prime minister at the next election – felt obliged to write something about the anniversary of 9/11 on Sunday. What he said is outrageous. At least it’s outrageous on a certain reading. The problem is, I don’t know how else to take it. Indeed many people have taken it in exactly the same way I’ve taken it.

Here’s Corbyn’s short tweet:

“My thoughts are with those whose lives were shattered on 9/11/2001 — and in the wars and terror unleashed across the globe in its aftermath.”

It’s crystal clear that Corbyn felt a strong need to politicise these commemorations. And he did so in a particular way.

Let’s be clear about that interpretation.

i) Corbyn states that his “thoughts are with those whose lives were shattered on 9/11/2001”.

ii) He then says: “and in the wars and terror unleashed across the globe in its aftermath”.

What connects the first clause with the second? They must have some kind of connection otherwise the whole sentence would be a non sequitur.

Why would a terrorist attack which was “the victims’ blow to the motherland” (as Chomsky once put it) — and after which tens of thousands of Muslims celebrated on the streets — have “unleashed war and terror across the globe”? After all, this was a successful act of terror for al-Qaeda and tens of millions of other Muslims.

That must mean that what followed 9/11 — not 9/11 itself! — “unleashed terror and war across the globe”. What followed 9/11? The intervention in Afghanistan in October 2001 and the Iraq War in 2003. Thus in a tweet seemingly to commemorate the victims of 9/11, Corbyn couldn’t stop himself from pointing the finger at Blair and Bush (plus another 23 states!) and indeed at all “Western capitalist powers”.

When the inquiry’s report was published on June 30, it turned out to be what most Jews and pro-Israel activists had suspected it would be from the beginning: a whitewash. It opens with the words: “The Labour Party is not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or other forms of racism”. But nobody had ever suggested that it was.
The report is vague and waffly, 28 pages saying almost nothing about the subject under question, anti-Semitism, which is throughout subsumed under general issues of racism.
The working definitions of anti-Semitism for the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia and the US State Department, along with others, agree that exaggerated, mendacious, or malicious criticism of the Jewish state, or the setting of double standards for Israel that are used for no other nation, is anti-Semitic. It is precisely accusations of this kind that make up the bulk of the Labour Party’s anti-Semitic comments, including statements still being made by some party members, including Jeremy Corbyn himself.

Britain’s Labour Party, out of power since 2010, more or less cut its own throat when its members (plus fresh recruits who, instead of taking out membership, paid £3 to vote in the leadership election in 2015) chose Jeremy Corbyn, a formerly marginalized far left socialist, as the new head of the party. Ordinary Labour voters were horrified, knowing from day one that Corbyn could never lead the party to government and was not either remotely Prime Ministerial material. But vast numbers of young extreme left-wingers, flushed with victory and dedicated to an idealistic coming revolution and led by a new Corbyn-worshipping movement called Momentum, were determined to take traditional working- and middle-class voters in a direction that had little or no appeal to them at all.

From the outset, Labour was split almost down the centre. That divide proved dangerous for the political system in Britain, where government has been unevenly but broadly shared between the Tory and Labour parties in what was effectively a two-party arrangement. With the almost total collapse of the centrist Liberal Democrats, who had just been in an ill-judged coalition with the Tories in government from 2010 to 2014, Britain faced the possibility that the two-party system would founder after many decades, should Labour split and leave the country with three unbalanced parties and the real threat of a one-party state emerging, so long as neither Labour group remained unelectable.

That something has gone wrong within the Labour party is clear. After the referendum vote to leave the European Union, Corbyn came under severe pressure to resign as leader, and a battle ensued with loyal Corbynites both in and outside Momentum backing him to the hilt, but with the parliamentary Labour Party, made up of members of parliament, urging him to bow to the inevitable and go.

“[Britain wants] to be like Switzerland but they don’t know that Switzerland has to pay an enormous amount to the EU… They will have to accept the free movement of people and pay high fees and accept some laws which they would have no influence on.” — Daniel Pedroletti, president of the Swiss community group New Helvetic Society London.
Norway is the only country that has adopted all EU directives before their deadline. Norway, which is supposedly not a member of the EU, thus implements EU rules and regulations more obediently than do the founding members France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
Most of Norway’s laws are currently written by bureaucrats in Brussels, not by elected parliamentarians in Norway.
The citizens of Norway rejected membership in the EU, twice. Opinion polls today show that a very large majority of Norwegians are against membership in the EU. Despite this, the nation’s politicians have made the country more or less a member of the EU, only without any influence or voting rights — in opposition to the popular will, and possibly also in violation of the country’s Constitution.
The British should study the case of Norway closely. But mainly as a negative example of what to avoid.

On June 23, 2016, 51.9% of the voters in the United Kingdom voted for leaving the European Union (EU). The turnout was high, and the British referendum gained great international attention. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front, praised the result, calling Brexit “the most important moment since the fall of the Berlin Wall.” Le Pen said that if she wins France’s 2017 presidential election she would call a referendum on leaving the EU.

Nigel Farage stepped down as leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) shortly after winning the historic vote. Many death threats against him and his family from supporters of the EU reportedly affected his decision.

The complicated divorce process between the UK and the EU could take years of negotiations. Some people have looked to Switzerland and Norway, two of the wealthiest countries in Europe, as possible models to follow, yet both maintain a close cooperation with the EU. There are also concerns in Switzerland and Norway about how Brexit will impact their own relationship with the EU.

Days after Rodrigo Duterte called Barack Obama a “son of a whore,” the Philippine President announced he would expel U.S. counterterror forces from the southern Philippines, cease joint South China Sea patrols with the U.S. Navy and begin buying arms from Russia and China—a trifecta of policy shifts that will harm regional security.

“I do not like the Americans. It’s simply a matter of principle for me,” Mr. Duterte said Monday. His record backs him up.

Before winning election in May, Mr. Duterte was the longtime mayor of Davao in the restive southern province of Mindanao, where he railed against the presence of U.S. forces who were invited by previous national governments to fight al Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf terrorists. As mayor he kept U.S. drones out of Davao, refused to become Philippine Defense Minister for fear of working with Washington, and expressed “hatred” for the U.S. over a 2002 explosion in a Davao hotel for which he blames the FBI.

U.S. operations in Mindanao over the past two decades—counterterror raids, training of local forces, economic development—helped calm an insurgency that was killing Filipinos and foreigners by the hundreds, corrupting Philippine armed forces and bedeviling national leaders in Manila. But Mr. Duterte prefers to see the U.S. as an ex-colonial overlord trying to reimpose its will.

Many Filipinos assumed Mr. Duterte’s views would moderate once he became President. His predecessor, Benigno Aquino, initially courted China but then dramatically deepened security ties with the U.S. after Beijing escalated its assault on Philippine rights in the South China Sea. But three months into his tenure, and despite the landmark international-tribunal verdict against China’s maritime behavior in July, the new leader is increasingly spurning Washington for Beijing.