RUTHFULLY YOURS

BERLIN—German police have arrested a 28-year-old German on suspicion of belonging to the Somalia-based Islamist group al-Shabaab and preparing an act of violence, the country’s federal prosecutor said Tuesday.

Police arrested the man identified as Abshir Ahmed A. on Monday at Frankfurt’s airport when he returned to Germany from Somalia, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

The prosecutor’s office said a preliminary investigation showed that the man in 2012 joined al-Shabaab, an al Qaeda-aligned militant group that has stepped up the pace and the intensity of its attacks in recent months.

The 28-year-old allegedly received training in the use of weapons in Somalia and then was stationed in a defensive position for the militant group in the country, the prosecutor’s office said. CONTINUE AT SITE

Global jihad extended its streak of near-daily attacks on Monday with a trio of bombings in Saudi Arabia. The attack on the Kingdom can hardly be thought of as incidental. Islamic State and other jihadist groups would like nothing more than to destroy the pro-American House of Saud and seize Islam’s holiest cities for themselves.

The attacks claimed fewer victims than recent atrocities in Orlando, Istanbul, Dhaka and Baghdad, though the potential for carnage was great. A bomber at the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina killed four security guards, while another one at the U.S. consulate in Jeddah only managed to blow himself up. A third attack, on a Shiite mosque in the eastern city of Qatif, also killed only the bombers.
No group had claimed responsibility for the attacks as we went to print, though the choice of targets suggests Islamic State; al Qaeda generally frowns on indiscriminate attacks on Muslims, including Shiites. Most alarming is the attack on the Prophet’s Mosque, which is said to be the place where Muhammad is buried. Saudi legitimacy rests on securing Islam’s holy sites, and a successful bombing could call Saudi competence into question and prompt a backlash against its modernizing Deputy Crown Prince, Mohammad bin Salman, who is trying to moderate the role of religion in everyday life. CONTINUE AT SITE

The House Select Committee on Benghazi report confirms what we pretty much already knew. The Obama administration and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton completely politicized this country’s foreign policy in order to ensure the reelection of Obama and to serve the future presidential ambitions of Hillary Clinton. Along the way Obama, Clinton et al. made dangerous decisions, such as establishing the consular outpost in Benghazi, and ignoring the consul’s pleas for more security. They also ignored the many warning signs of incipient attacks, bungled the response to the attack on September 11, 2012, and then obfuscated, spun, and outright lied in the aftermath. The House report adds new details that flesh out the story, but enough had already been leaked to confirm Clinton’s despicable sacrifice of American lives on the altar of her obsessive ambition.

Toxic ambition, sheer incompetence, and the self-serving politics of the individuals involved mean they bear the primary responsibility for this disaster. But Benghazi illustrates as well the climate of bad ideas that make such decisions possible. Bad politicians eventually go away, but malignant ideas and received wisdom are deeply rooted in our institutions, transcending individuals. The Benghazi fiasco illustrates two particularly tenacious ones.

The military intervention in Libya, the origin of the Benghazi tragedy, was another act of Western wishful thinking about “democratizing” and “reforming” the Muslim world. Despite the failure of George W. Bush’s efforts to bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, the so-called “Arab Spring” revolutions encouraged the Wilsonian “freedom and democracy” promoters in 2011 to make Libya yet another poster-child for this doomed project. Moreover, intervention seemingly could be done on the cheap. No troops need be deployed, since jets and missiles could topple the psychotic Muammar Gaddafi––an autocrat straight out of central casting, whose genocidal bluster gave the West a pretext for intervention.

For Hillary and Obama, this was the perfect opportunity to show those neocon militarists what “smart power” was all about, and strike a contrast with the “cowboy” Bush’s “unilateralist” bumbling in Iraq. A UN resolution was secured, and a NATO-led coalition of 19 states assembled for enforcing a no-fly zone. The mission soon escalated into bringing about regime change and the death of Gaddafi.

For a while, this was a perfect, low-cost, quick little war that would illustrate the various shibboleths of moralizing internationalism: international diplomatic approval for the use of force, multilateral coalition building, a reliance on air power that minimized casualties among participating militaries, and a smaller role for the US, which would be “leading from behind,” as an Obama advisor said. This last idea reflected Obama’s belief that the US needed to diminish its role in world affairs and avoid the arrogant overreach that stained its history abroad, most recently in Iraq. This notion of America’s global sins is another bad idea reflecting ideology, not historical fact.

For Secretary of State Clinton, the Libya intervention would be the showcase of her tenure at State and proof of her superior foreign policy skills and presidential potential. Of course, we all know that the toppling of Gaddafi has been a disastrous mistake. Gaddafi was a brutal creep, but he kept in check the jihadists from Libya eager to kill Americans in Iraq and foment terror throughout the region. His departure created a vacuum that has been filled with legions of jihadist outfits across North Africa, including ISIS franchises. They are armed in part with weapons plundered from Gaddafi’s arsenals such as surface-to-air missiles, assault rifles, machine guns, mines, grenades, antitank missiles, and rocket-propelled grenades. Yet eager to protect her defining foreign policy achievement, Hillary kept open the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi even as other nations pulled out their personnel because of the increasing danger caused by the new Libyan government’s inability to control and secure its territory.

We have reached the point where moral equivalence has become a moral atrocity.

The smart set in the West has insisted for over a generation that Israel and the Palestinians are morally equal. There are extremists, on both sides, they say. Both sides are responsible for the absence of peace.

The first serious outcry against this lie came immediately after the Palestinians began their terrorist war against Israel in September 2000. That war, incited, directed, funded, commanded and celebrated by Yassir Arafat and his henchmen, including his successor Mahmoud Abbas, began two months after Arafat overturned the table at Camp David in response to then prime minister Ehud Barak’s offer to withdraw from 95 percent of Judea and Samaria, all of Gaza and half of Jerusalem to enable the establishment of an independent state of Palestine in the areas.

The areas in question, Barak said, would be handed over to the PLO Jew free. The hundreds of thousands of Jews living in the areas set to become Palestine, would be forcefully evicted from their homes to ensure that the delicate, sensitive Palestinians, wouldn’t be troubled by the Jews with their “dirty feet,” in the words of Abbas.

That, of course, wasn’t enough for Arafat. And it was insufficient not because Barak failed to give him what he demanded. It was insufficient because his demands were insatiable. Arafat was never interested in peace.

As his deputy Faisal Husseini said at the time, the peace process was a “Trojan Horse.”

Its purpose was to get the PLO bases of operation inside of Israeli territory in order to expand its ability to destroy the Jewish state. This is the reason that despite the fact that the international community has given them more financial assistance than any other people in the history of humanity, the Palestinians have not built a society. They have received tens of billions of dollars in development aid and failed to develop an operating economy.

This failure isn’t due to incompetence or corruption.

It is simply that the Palestinians don’t want those things. They chose not to develop independent institutions.

ISIS is celebrating the Muslim holy month of Ramadan with multiple massacres. ISIS’s followers are heeding the message released by ISIS’s spokesman, Abu Muhammed al-Adnani, before Ramadan began. Jihadists must attack to “gain the great reward for martyrdom in Ramadan,” he declared. ISIS looks to the example of Prophet Muhammad himself who defeated his enemies in Mecca in the Battle of Badr, which took place during Ramadan.

In the last week alone, ISIS followers have struck in several cities – Istanbul, resulting in at least 44 deaths, the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka that left 22 dead, and most recently Baghdad, where a suicide bombing on a busy shopping street killed at least 200 people including dozens of children. On the penultimate day of Ramadan, ISIS even struck inside Saudi Arabia. It has reportedly taken credit for a suicide attack in Medina, Islam’s second holiest city.

The Baghdad attack, which occurred in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood, was the deadliest single bombing attack in the Iraqi capital in years. In taking credit for the massacre, ISIS warned in its statement that “the raids of the mujahedeen [holy warriors] against the Rafidha [Shiites] apostates will not stop.” The attack laid bare the folly of President Obama’s decision against military advice to pull out all U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011. It also revealed gaping holes in the Iraqi government’s security measures for the capital. Baghdad residents were so disgusted that they jeered and threw objects at Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi‘s convoy when he visited the devastated area to inspect the damage.

The Ramadan spree of jihadist killings began early in the Muslim holy month when on June 8th ISIS-affiliated Palestinian terrorists struck Tel Aviv, killing four people. They “belonged to the largest Palestinian cell linked to ISIS to be uncovered so far by Israeli security services,” according to DEBKAfile. The plan, DEBKAfile reported, was to have originally included “a mass-murder shooting attack on a crowded train.”

Four days after the Tel Aviv attack, the Orlando massacre was carried out by an individual who had regularly attended a radical Islamic mosque and pledged his allegiance to ISIS during the shooting. Two illegal immigrants from Tunisia, who were ISIS followers, stabbed a 26-year-old transgender man in Brussels the day before the Orlando attack. A man claiming allegiance to ISIS stabbed a police official and his companion to death in France a day after the Orlando attack.

Thirteen-year-old Hillel Ariel, a U.S. citizen, was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist last week while sleeping in her bed in her home near Hebron.

The day after her murder the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the group representing all 57 Muslim-majority nations, tried to insert justifications for Palestinian terror during a United Nations review of its counter-terrorism strategy.

Stephanie Granot of The Jewish Press reports:

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), attempted to introduce language condoning terrorism under certain conditions into a draft of a UN Counter-Terrorism Resolution. The official document is expected to be finalized on Tuesday when the General Assembly concludes a bi-annual Review of its UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy.

The OIC, an organization of 57 member-states that considers itself “the collective voice of the Muslim world”, has Permanent Delegations to the United Nations as well as to the European Union. Several days prior to the start of the Review, OIC Representative Abdallah Y. Al-Mouallimi (Saudi Arabia) sought to insert the following clause to the draft of the resolution: “Terrorism in the name of self-determination and national liberation does not constitute terrorism.”

Shortly after Rep. Al-Mouallimi addressed the General Assembly, Israel’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador David Roet delivered an impassioned and powerful speech…

Subsequent to Ambassador Roet’s speech, some significant diplomatic maneuvering by the Israel’s Mission to the UN, and a steadfast refusal on Israel’s part to allow member-states to compromise draft language for the sake of a unanimous consensus, the clause was ultimately not included in the final draft of the review, entitled “The United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy Review”.

As the article notes, the OIC, which is the second largest inter-governmental body in the world behind the United Nations, has a permanent delegation at the UN.

In May, just a month before the Orlando terror attack that killed 49, the OIC blocked LGBT groups from attending a UN conference on AIDS held days before the attack.

The defense of Palestinian terrorism is a recurring topic of the OIC.

In April 2002, in response to the 9/11 terror attacks, the OIC adopted a declaration on international terrorism. But during the debate the OIC could not agree on a definition of terrorism, but did reject “any attempt to associate Islamic states or Palestinian and Lebanese resistance with terrorism.”

The OIC’s Islamic Fiqh Council published a January 2003 resolution explicitly endorsing Palestinian terror attacks, saying suicide attacks are a legitimate form of jihad:

3- The Islamic Fiqh Council asserts that jihad and martyr operations done to defend the Islamic creed, dignity, freedom and the sovereignty of states is not considered terrorism but a basic form of necessary defense for legitimate rights. Thus the oppressed peoples who are subjected to occupation have the right to seek their freedom via all means possible.

4- The Islamic Fiqh Council stresses that martyr operations are a form of jihad, and carrying out those operations is a legitimate right that has nothing to do with terrorism or suicide. Those operations become obligatory when they become the only way to stop the aggression of the enemy, defeat it, and grievously damage its power.

5- It is not allowed to use terms such as “jihad”, “terrorism”, and “violence”, which have become frequently used by today’s mass media as scientific terms, to mean other connotations beyond their basic well known meanings.

In between its unashamed defense of terrorism, the OIC has taken up the cause of suppressing freedom of speech in the name of combating “Islamophobia.” CONTINUE AT SITE

A new poll in the Netherlands shows that Geert Wilders would, if an election were held today, lead his Party for Freedom (PVV) to 36 seats, or 50% more than the seats that would be obtained by the nearest rival party.

The Brexit results appear to have significantly boosted the popularity of the PVV. The same poll conducted a year ago had the PVV projected to receive 20 seats, almost half the level of current support.

Euroskepticism appears widespread in the Netherlands. When asked their opinion about the statement that “[t]he EU has made a significant contribution to economic growth in the Netherlands,” just 14% of PVV supporters and 50% of the overall public agree.

Similarly, only 14% of PVV voters and 51% of the public agreed that the “EU has helped to ensure that there are fewer wars in Europe.”

Only 2% of the PVV base and 14% of the Dutch public want the EU to become one country. An overwhelming percentage (83%) of PVV voters and 46% of all Netherland residents believe that the EU will fall apart within a decade.

Almost all PVV supporters (91%) and half (49%) of the public want to eliminate the Schengen Agreement, which involved the abolishment of internal border checks between EU members.

Support for a full withdrawal from the EU is high among PVV voters (86%) and at nearly 40% among the general public. Similar levels of support are seen for removing the Netherlands from the Euro.

Just 20% of the public (down from 50% in 2011), and effectively no PVV supporters, want to see any more powers transferred to Brussels.

About half the public worries about the outbreak of another world war, and a similar proportion sees a likelihood of revolutions across Europe during the coming years. Both percentages are substantial increases compared to how the Dutch public felt five years ago.

Donald Trump says NATO is obsolete, too expensive and lacks the right makeup to deal with terrorism. He may be right, but if he wants to abandon NATO he may not get the chance because the European Union may beat him to it. It’s part of the fallout from the U.K. vote to leave the EU in the “Brexit” referendum.

The EU may cast NATO aside — not because the threat NATO faced is ended — but because the European Union’s members think it’s more important to punish Britain for Brexit than defend themselves against Russia, Iran and China.

Five days after the June 23 Brexit vote, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, released a new defense strategy plan that envisions replacing NATO with an all-EU defense structure. She’s aiming for a strategic independence that cannot exist inside NATO.

Ms. Mogherini’s “global strategy” proposal is part of the grandiose plan envisioned in Article 42 of the EU’s 2009 Lisbon Treaty. That article mandates a common security and defense policy for the EU and implies the need for a separate EU armed force outside NATO.

Ms. Mogherini, according to a Financial Times report, suggests “streamlining our institutional structure” in common security and defense policy which the FT characterizes as “a nod to calls for a joint EU military and planning headquarters.” In short, NATO without the United States and the U.K.

“Former German President Christian Wulff said: ‘Islam belongs to Germany.’ That is true. This is also my opinion.” — Chancellor Angela Merkel, January 12, 2015.

“Angela Merkel’s statement obscures the real problem: A growing proportion of Muslim citizens in Europe does not share the Western system of values, does not want to culturally integrate and seals itself off in parallel societies.” — Thilo Sarrazin, renowned former central banker and a member of the Social Democrats, January 20, 2015.

“Islam is not a religion like Catholicism or Protestantism. Intellectually, Islam is always linked to the overthrow of the state. Therefore, the Islamization of Germany poses a threat.” — Alexander Gauland, AfD party leader for Brandenburg, April 17, 2016.

“An Islam that does not respect our legal system and even fights against it and claims to be the only valid religion is incompatible with our legal system and culture. Many Muslims live according to our laws and are integrated and are accepted as valued members of our society. However, the AfD wants to prevent the emergence of Islamic parallel societies with Sharia judges.” — AfD Manifesto.

“Anyone who believes Islam belongs to Germany should not hesitate to go one step further and declare: Sharia law belongs to Germany. Without Sharia law, there is no authentic Islam.” — Henryk Broder, German journalist, May 16, 2016.

Her economic policies reek of ratbaggery, so let us hope she doesn’t use her Senate clout to revive protectionism and tariffs. On multiculturalism and de-funding Big Climate’s fools and charlatans, however, she is with the angels. No wonder the ABC is already spitting insults.
Pauline Hanson is now a powerful force in a divided Senate. She may head a team there of two, three (with a NSW seat) or even four senators, on a platform including a Royal Commission into the corruption of global warming science. “This whole climate change is not based on empirical evidence and we are being hoodwinked,” she says. “Climate change is not due to humans.”

The Hanson policies will now, unavoidably, be brought into the mainstream political conversation. Hitherto, the media has chosen to treat her and her policies as “racism and bigotry” (they aren’t), “divisive” (code for “intolerable for us Leftists”) and as a butt for sex gibes.

The ABC has just now displayed a caricature of her as “Pauline Pantsdown”. The ABC’s only pretext for this crudity is “Simon Hunt’s Pauline Pantsdown character (right) was popular in the 1990s.”

Somehow I can’t imagine our ABC running an equivalent caricature of Labor’s Penny Wong as “Penny Pantsdown”, ditto Julia Gillard.

Expect new ABC managing director, Michelle Guthrie, to crack down hard on her myrmidons responsible for this sexist crudity against Hanson. Expect feminist Anne Summers to fly to Hanson’s defence any minute now. Expect ex-General David Morrison, Australian of the Year, to issue a new missive deploring ABC sexism – as he says, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. Oh, and expect pigs to fly. The ABC illustration, published apropos of nothing at all, is below.

Actually, worse things have been done to Hanson by way of misogynist abuse. On March 15, 2009, while she was in her final week’s campaign as an independent for the Queensland State election, News Corp’s Sunday Telegraph and four other Murdoch tabloids published nude photographs purporting to be of Pauline Hanson in 1975. The papers paid a paparazzo $15,000 for them. Hanson’s election bid was defeated amid taunts and mockery, but the pictures of “Hanson” were manifestly fakes. In May Sunday Telegraph editor Neil Breen published a signed three-paragraph apology to her saying, “We have learnt a valuable lesson”. She obtained an out of court settlement.

Hanson is no longer easy prey. She is very likely to have as her running mate in the Senate the prominent climate sceptic Malcolm Roberts. He has been project leader for a sceptic think-tank, the Galileo Movement, founded by Case Smit and John Smeed.[i]

Roberts is an engineering honors graduate and MBA from Chicago Graduate School of Business. He is a one-time underground-coal miner and project executive, and his primary motive for joining Hanson is the fight against global warmists. The Galileo website says Roberts had been “statutorily responsible for thousands of people’s lives based on his knowledge and real-world experience of atmospheric gases, including carbon dioxide.”

Roberts explains his move to the Hanson party: “She is not as the media and political opponents have portrayed. Pauline is intelligent, quick, honest, courageous and persistent. We are passionate about bringing back our country.”

Anything is possible among Senate minor candidates and Fred Nile’s Christian Democrats includes up-front warming sceptics[ii] and a sceptical/agnostic view of the warming panic. This includes a halt to warmist propaganda in school.

What a conundrum for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his side-kick, Greg Hunt, who brought their faux carbon tax into operation last week, under the emissions trading label. Turnbull said last month that Hanson “is not a welcome presence on the Australian political scene.” She responded reasonably that this was the electors’ call, not Turnbull’s.

What a conundrum for Tony Abbott, who organized the funding for the legal persecution of Hanson, claiming she had committed electoral irregularities. Hanson in 2003 was sentenced to three years gaol for fraud and served eleven weeks in maximum security, including some time in solitary confinement. In November, 2003, the Court of Appeal quashed her conviction but she was still left $500,000 out of pocket.

What a conundrum for The Greens, with their agenda to suicidally switch Australian energy to those expensive unreliables, wind and solar. Hanson outpolled the Greens in the Senate on Queensland first preferences, 9.15 per cent to 7.57 per cent.