RUTHFULLY YOURS

“All the bullying happens in Arabic… The hierarchy of the Arab boys creates a very violent environment. … I have filmed the particularly vile bullying of a Somali boy. You can see the tears in his eyes. They are destroying him; it is very violent. ” — From a dissertation by Jalal El Derbas, Ph.D.

Danish teachers are the least respected and are spoken of in denigrating and humiliating terms.

“I am not saying that all the Arab children did ugly things, but we witnessed on a regular basis… using derogatory Arabic language towards Somalis and girls.” — Lise Egholm, former head of the Rådmandsgade school in Copenhagen.

Whether Danish parliamentarians wish to acknowledge this problem or not, they are up against far wider issues than that of religious incitement in mosques by radical preachers.

After the television documentary, “Sharia in Denmark”, embarrassed Danish authorities by revealing how widespread the preaching of sharia is in mosques in Denmark, the Danish government, in May, concluded a political agreement about “initiatives directed against religious preachers who seek to undermine Danish laws and values and who support parallel legal systems”.

“We are doing everything we can without compromising the constitution and international agreements,” Bertel Haarder, the Minister for Culture and Church, said about the political agreement.

The agreement centers on a number of initiatives, which are supposed to compensate for the detrimental effects of all the years in which sharia was allowed to spread in Denmark while most authorities paid only scant attention to what was happening. Part of the new effort, therefore, will be the mapping of all existing mosques in Denmark.

It will now be obligatory, according to the agreement, for all priests, imams and others who are not part of the Church of Denmark, and who wish to be able to perform weddings — as well as for foreign preachers who apply for residence permits — to learn about Danish family law, freedom and democracy. At the end of the course, all will have to sign a statement that they will accept Danish law, including freedom of speech and religion, gender equality, freedom of sexual orientation, non-discrimination and women’s rights.

The government will examine how to create more transparency in foreign donations to faith communities in Denmark, including controlling and, if necessary, preventing such donations. As part of this work, on May 4 the government presented a law making it a crime to receive funding from a terror organization to establish or run an institution in Denmark, including schools and mosques.

With the prospect of another Labour leadership election now gathering pace, tens of thousands more activists have joined the Labour party. It seems unlikely that they will be “moderates.”

The election of an Islamist-sympathising, terrorist-sympathising, Israel-bashing hardliner at the head of the second largest party in the House of Commons undoubtedly changes the parameters of political discourse in the UK.

However solidly Theresa May’s new Conservative government performs, it will always seem the point — so long as Corbyn is in office — that you are either for Britain or against it, for the Conservative party or against the country.

A fractured and in-fighting opposition also means that there is no meaningful, organised voice challenging the government in Parliament. That principle — the principle on which our system is based — needs to work well even (perhaps especially) if you support the government of the day, because the government of the day needs to be kept alert to error and on top of sensible criticisms if it is going to pass the best legislation it can for the country.

Herbert Stein’s law, “Things that cannot go on, won’t,” is one of the best laws of politics. It works for fiscal issues and it usually works for politics as a whole. The British Labour party, however, is currently working to try to disprove this rule. To do them justice they are having a good stab at doing so, which suggests that the maxim should perhaps be re-written: “Things that cannot go on sometimes do.”

Consider the latest developments in the party’s recent unhappy history. Earlier this month the party’s specially commissioned inquiry into anti-Semitism within the party found the party not guilty of this bigotry for the second time in six months. Yet at the launch of these findings, a grassroots member of Jeremy Corbyn’s wing of the party verbally bullied a female Jewish Labour MP until she left in tears, and Jeremy Corbyn himself appeared to compare the Jewish state with ISIS. Although this episode captured some headlines, it was a mere footnote alongside the other catastrophes in the Labour party.

“Why have jihadist terrorists made France Europe’s bloodiest battlefield? Simple answer: Because France let in the most Muslims.”

So writes Australia’s most-read (and most controversial) columnist, conservative Andrew Boltin the wake of the Nice atrocity. He goes on, inter alia, in the Herald-Sun:

“This link between immigration policies and terrorism largely explains why the French are the greatest victims of Europe’s jihadists.

It also explains why we are fools not to change our own immigration policies to protect ourselves.

No European Union country has a higher proportion of Muslims than France — up to 10 per cent of its population, or six million people, though statistics are vague, and vary.

Yes, numbers don’t tell the whole story, but they do count….

France has the most Muslims, and that is why four people were killed, three of them children, in an Islamist attack on a Jewish day school in Toulouse four years ago.

There on the ABC, right on schedule after the Nice massacre, was an argument for moral equivalence being presented by no less than a full-blown academic from the University of Sydney. It takes that sort of mind to grasp that the US is no different from its Islamist adversaries.

I have a strong suspicion that some of the most pointless people in this country have PhDs in the Social Sciences. Of course, I don’t really mean to say that these people are unintelligent; obviously they know a good deal about Derrida, Foucault, Butler, and the rest of the gang. It’s their moral relativism that irks me, as well as the cultivated grudges against their own societies and culture. I’m thinking of the insistence that Australia was ‘invaded’, for example, or the tendency to self-blame after each attack by our Islamist enemies. In a way, one has to admire their industriousness: every day they manage to find brand new ways of hating themselves.

When it comes, then, to questions about the upkeep of Western civilisation, the university lecturer is not the person one first thinks to consult. Once upon a time, I have heard, his thoughts and recommendations were confined to the mercifully recondite and unreadable journals of the academic Left. No longer, though. This means I have to update my earlier suspicion: if I am right (and let’s face it, I am), all these useless people will appear, at some stage of their careers, on the ABC.

For a measure of proof, I invite the reader to consider last Friday’s episode of ABC’s The Drum, which featured Peter Chen (above), a senior lecturer in politics at University of Sydney. The topic was the ongoing assault on French civil society, but Chen seemed to wonder if this was a conversation worth having at all. He argued that what happened in Nice was awful, of course, but it was hardly new: the conversion of trucks into weapons of suicide terror happens every day in other parts of the world. For Chen, shock was an invalid emotional response. It proved that Westerners only care about their own. He sneered: “Why are we shocked about this? Because it occurred in France.”

Really? This type of teaching jihad and hatred to kiddies has been going on for decades among the Palarabs….rsk

President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran has a sunset clause, with almost every restriction on the mullahs’ nuclear program expiring in 15 years. So it’s worth paying attention to what the next generation of Iranians are being taught about their country’s mission in the world.

Our best look so far comes thanks to a new report from Impact-se, a Jerusalem-based institute that monitors the content of textbooks across the Middle East. A ninth-grade social-education textbook reads: “All are submissive and obedient to the Guardian-Jurist,” that is, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Regime leaders are presented as infallible, divinely inspired and beyond criticism.

A third-grade religion textbook’s section on cleanliness includes an illustration of Iranian children chasing away a filthy, mucuslike blob with a Star of David on its back. A fifth-grade text for the 2016-17 academic year shows Palestinian children attacking Israeli soldiers with rocks and slingshots. It’s accompanied by regime founder Ayatollah Khomeini’s portrait and his injunction that “Israel must be wiped out.” America is portrayed as an aggressive hegemon.

As for the types of weapons Iran may use, a 12th-grade religion textbook instructs that “Islamic learning is such that religious experts can extract from it new laws concerning . . . procurement and use of new weapons, in accordance with the new needs of society.”

Part of Mr. Obama’s bet in signing the nuclear deal is that Iranian youth will be more moderate than the religious fundamentalists who now rule the country. This curriculum suggests that’s not a bet he’s likely to win. CONTINUE AT SITE

BRUSSELS—European arrests in terrorism cases were up sharply last year, as law enforcement moved to address a shift by jihadist groups to carry out mass casualty attacks on the continent, according to a new report.

The threat of terrorism in Europe remains on an upward trajectory, as jihadist terrorists have shifted to a strategy that seeks to inflict high numbers of deaths, a report by Europol, the European Union police agency, said.

“The attacks in Paris in January and November 2015 represented a clear shift in the intent and capability of jihadist terrorists to inflict mass casualties on urban populations,” the report said.

Europol estimated that terrorist attacks in Europe resulted in 151 fatalities in 2015, all but three in France. In 2014, Europol reported only four people were killed in terror attacks.

According to the report, 1,077 people were arrested for terrorism-related offenses in 2015, up from 774 in 2014. The bulk of the arrests were in France, followed by Spain and the U.K.

Jihadist terror attacks in Europe in 2015 were plotted by people who had returned from fighting in Syria, used local recruits to carry out the attacks and likely received direction from Islamic State leaders, according to the Europol report. CONTINUE AT SITE

ISIS is merely one of the many Islamic terrorist organizations which have declared war on Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and every faith and non-faith in the world that is non-Muslim.

ISIS is simply the flavor of the week. It exists in infamy along with Al-Shabab, Boko Haram, Hamas, Hezb’allah, the PLO, Al Qaida, ad nauseum. But behind them all lies Islam itself to which they all swear allegiance and which is the driving force behind the horrors we see perpetrated around the world today.

It has been thus since Islam’s founding in the 7th century. Barbaric Sharia law and jihad reside in the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of Muslims across the world. For them, it is authentic and fundamental Islam. But the global elites and “progressives” led by Obama still refuse to name it as the enemy.

We must understand that increasing numbers of Muslims now reside in our own communities whose loyalty to the state is not only suspect but demonstrably closer to the ummah (the Islamic worldwide community) than to our own Constitution.

Indeed, as Newt Gingrich said in the aftermath of the Muslim terrorist attack in Nice, France: “We should, frankly, test every person here who is of a Muslim background, and if they believe in Sharia, they should be deported. Sharia is incompatible with Western civilization.”

We must face the real issue, which is the one spelled out for us in Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” by contrasting aggressive, expansionist, supremacist Islam with the Judeo-Christian civilization of the West as well as by the beliefs practiced throughout the rest of the non-Muslim world.

So it is not about ISIS or Hamas or Boko Haram but about the fundamental ideology and Sharia driven Islamic jihad in all of its malevolent forms.

Remember Winston Churchill himself described Islam as an ideology wrapped in a religion. This ideology manifests itself not only in unspeakable violence perpetrated daily by its followers, whether it be in France, Britain, America, Israel, India, Holland, Sweden, Germany, Russia, the Philippines – practically everywhere – but also in what can be called the stealth jihad.

Using both carrots and sticks, Israel has so far managed to prevent attacks against the Golan, but the danger is growing as jihadist movements increase their presence in southwestern Syria amid setbacks on other fronts.

Israeli military forces in the Golan Heights have been in a state of permanent alert for some time, with one officer recently telling the author that the situation on the other side of the ceasefire line has become “incomprehensible and threatening.” Ever since large contingents of the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) withdrew from the demilitarized zone separating the Israeli and Syrian portions of the Golan, various radical groups have taken over much of the area, including the Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra (JN). And while Druze villages in the area remain under the Assad regime’s control, Hezbollah has repeatedly tried to establish its own foothold there. These developments have exacerbated concerns about a potential jihadist or Hezbollah attack on the western side of the Golan, since destroying Israel remains the mobilizing utopia of all of these movements.
ASSAD HAS LOST MOST OF THE GOLAN

On the Syrian side of the Golan ceasefire line, all of the regime’s armored divisions have gradually been withdrawn in order to fight rebels in the Damascus, Aleppo, and Homs areas. Bashar al-Assad has not been troubled about making such redeployments because he knows that Israel will not invade. Yet his army has also lost a large swath of territory along the Jordanian border between the Golan and Jabal al-Druze, leaving only one regime contingent that holds half of Deraa city and the road to Damascus.

Click on map to view high-resolution version.
According to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), about 150 independent rebel groups are now present in southern Syria. Some of these groups have united under the “Southern Front” umbrella, reportedly with substantial support from a U.S.-backed military operations center in Jordan (MOC Amman). Yet this alliance is only temporary and intended for specific, limited purposes. Thus while JN has no more than 1,500 fighters in the area, and IS less than a thousand, they are enough to play a substantial role inside a very fragmented southern rebellion.

Moreover, MOC Amman seems to have frozen its offensive plans against Deraa and Damascus in recent months, partly because of the Russian intervention in Syria that began last fall, and also because Jordan is straining under the weight of refugees and does not want to encourage heavy fighting that spurs more Syrians to flee across the border. For its part, Russia has not conducted airstrikes in the Golan apart from a brief spate of bombing, respecting President Vladimir Putin’s understanding with Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

Jihadist groups have been quick to exploit this stalemate, whether by extracting allegiance through force or playing on the sense of betrayal that some local factions feel toward their Western and Arab allies. JN has strengthened its presence in the south and become the dominant player there, just like it did in Idlib province. Its only real competition comes from IS, which exerts local influence through its affiliate, the Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade (Liwa Shuhada Yarmouk, or LSY). This is the group that most concerns IDF officials, some of whom believe that LSY could attack Israel with unconventional means such as chemical weapons or suicide attacks.
ISLAMIC STATE AND AL-QAEDA ON ISRAEL’S BORDER

LSY was founded in summer 2012 by a local chief of the Yarmouk Valley, Mohammed al-Baridi. Since his death in November 2015, the group has been led by Abu Obeida Qahtan, a Palestinian Syrian from Damascus and a veteran of conflicts in Chechnya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where he was close to Osama bin Laden. The group became famous in March 2013 when it kidnapped a group of UNDOF soldiers, later releasing them after extracting ransom from Qatar. Despite this incident, LSY continued to receive military support from MOC Amman until summer 2014, when it became clear that the group had pledged allegiance to IS, according to the Emirati daily the National.

This May, LSY joined together with the Muthanna Islamic Movement and Jaish al-Jihad to create the Army of Khaled ibn al-Walid. From a defined territory protected by the Yarmouk Valley and the Golan ceasefire line, this umbrella group has launched attacks against other rebel factions in the direction of Deraa and Quneitra, including suicide bombings. On July 2, for example, a suicide attack in Inkhil killed 7 Southern Front commanders.

Meanwhile, JN controls the southern areas between IS and the Syrian army, including the ruins of Quneitra city. JN forces in the south first made their presence known in early 2012, launching attacks against Jabal al-Druze. Since then, the group has increased its grip on the rebellion as a whole, cooperating with Ahrar al-Sham to unite various factions on the model of the Jaish al-Fatah (Army of Conquest) coalition in the northwest. But JN was unable to replicate its Idlib successes in the south because MOC Amman actively tried to keep the group away from the Southern Front coalition.

Since last fall, MOC Amman’s priority has been the campaign against IS. Yet fighters supported by the MOC have not been very efficient in that regard, partly because they would prefer to battle the Assad regime, but also, ironically, because their MOC-supplied livelihood depends on a perpetual anti-IS campaign. Thus JN is the only southern player with a genuine interest in eliminating IS, its direct ideological and military competitor.

More puzzling than the elusive pages from the Congressional 9/11 inquiry is why Obama released them, and specifically, why now.

The president apparently believes it will burnish his legacy, embarrass his enemies and make permanent his diplomatic “accomplishments” with Iran. Reminding Americans of Saudi Arabia’s Al-Qaeda connections, shortly after the one-year mark of the Iran nuclear deal and before the 15-year mark of 9/11, might also continue to desensitize us to the dangers posed by Iran.

Americans suddenly flush with a renewed indignation against the Saudis might not run into the arms of the Iranian mullahs, but some might get distracted from their equally-deserved indignation about Iran’s ongoing missile tests, the steady progress Iranian scientists are making at the nuclear plant in Parchin, and their anger at having been lied to again and again.

After keeping them secret for 14 years, the White House has finally released the 28 pages that were removed from the 2002 Congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks and withheld from the final 9/11 Commission Report. More puzzling than the elusive pages is why Obama released them, and specifically, why now.

The administration claims that the 28 pages clear the Saudis because they provide no conclusive evidence of their involvement in 9/11. The media echo chamber followed the administration’s lead: Time, Al Arabiya, NBC, the Associated Press and many others reported that the pages contained “no smoking guns.” But there are smoking guns. Those smoking guns expose the Saudi government as a sponsor of terrorism, and, by proxy, improve Iran’s standing in the Middle East.

Author Paul Sperry writes that the 28 pages “show the hijackers got help from Saudi diplomats and spies.” And while the evidence might not meet the threshold that the current Department of Justice requires for an indictment, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) described it as

“a chilling description of Saudi ties to terrorists, Saudi payments to terrorists, and Saudi obstruction of U.S. antiterrorism investigations” and found “more than enough evidence to raise serious concerns.”

Obama had to know, despite his administration’s tepid affirmation of Saudi innocence, that the information in the 28 pages would inspire a wave of negativity towards Saudi Arabia from the American public. He also knows that anything that hurts Saudi Arabia’s reputation helps Iran. What weakens Saudi Arabia tips the scales in Iran’s favor, as the two nations compete for dominance in the region.

Every calendar quarter the United Nations Security Council holds an extensive debate on the Israeli-Palestinian “situation.” The Israeli and Palestinian UN representatives make speeches following the Secretary General’s report on the current status, which are normally predictable restatements of their respective positions. This time, however, Israel’s ambassador Danny Danon, addressing the Security Council at its July 12th meeting, presented new graphic evidence of Hezbollah’s alarming arsenal of rockets and missiles located in civilian areas of southern Lebanon.

Ten years ago, when Security Council Resolution 1701 was adopted, ending the war that had broken out between Israel and Hezbollah, the terrorist group was estimated to have had about 7000 rockets. The resolution called for Hezbollah and other armed groups not officially a part of the Lebanese government’s armed forces to relinquish their weapons. Instead, precisely the opposite has happened. Hezbollah never stopped its arms build-up, which has been funded and supplied principally from the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, Iran.

Hezbollah now has approximately 120,000 rockets and missiles aimed at Israeli civilian population centers. By way of comparison, Ambassador Danon said that “more missiles are hidden underground in 10,000 square kilometers [of Lebanon] than the above-ground 4 million square kilometers” of the European North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries.

Referring to aerial satellite imagery, based on the latest Israeli intelligence, Ambassador Danon demonstrated to the members of the Security Council the location of rocket launchers and arms depots that Hezbollah had placed in civilian areas. “The village of Shaqra has been turned into a Hezbollah stronghold with one out of three buildings used for terror activities, including rocket launchers and arms depots,” Ambassador Danon said. “Hezbollah has placed these positions next to schools and other public institutions putting innocent civilians in great danger.”

Hezbollah, aided and abetted by Iran, was “committing double war crimes,” the Israeli ambassador charged. “They are attacking civilians, and using Lebanese civilians as human shields,” he said. “We demand the removal of Hezbollah terrorists from southern Lebanon.”

Not surprisingly, Ambassador Danon’s presentation of irrefutable evidence of Hezbollah’s clear and present danger to Israeli and Lebanese civilians, and his demand for Security Council action, fell on deaf ears. In her own statement that followed Ambassador Danon’s remarks, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power said not a word about what was just presented regarding Hezbollah. Instead, she stuck to her canned talking points that continue to draw a moral equivalence between acts of Palestinian terrorism and Israeli self-defense. “In recent months, there’s been a steady stream of violence on both sides of the conflict,” she said. Then Ambassador Power proceeded to criticize the building of Israeli settlements, as if again to draw a moral equivalence between housing construction and terrorism. She assailed what she called Israel’s “systematic process of land seizures, settlement expansions, and legalizations of outposts that is fundamentally undermining the prospects for a two-state solution.” All that Ambassador Power said about Lebanon was to decry the political stalemate in electing a new president and to state that “the United States is helping the Lebanese armed forces build the capabilities necessary to counter violent extremism and protect the Lebanese people.” If the Obama administration were truly interested in countering “violent extremism” in Lebanon and protecting the Lebanese people, it would start by doing everything possible to eliminate the violent extremist threat posed by Hezbollah’s massive rearmament. That, in turn, would require the Obama administration to reverse its appeasement course towards Iran and tighten, not loosen, the financial screws on the regime.