RUTHFULLY YOURS

Roger Franklin :Holding the Man in Dubai

Given the discriminatory intent of the AFL’s programme to favour Muslim back-office recruits, it is difficult to imagine a more blatant hypocrisy. Not after this weekend’s Rainbow Round, which will see the League promote homosexuality while taking money from desert kingdoms that persecute gays.
The world’s greatest sport, Australian Rules football, has some problems at the moment. The recently re-vamped rules regulating when the ball has been forced out of bounds on purpose prompt much booing and bafflement in the stands. Likewise the high-tackle. Did the nippy rover duck into the knee that knocked him silly, or was flattened by an adversary’s contemptuous disregard for his safety? While these matters are moot, another aspect of the homegrown game is beyond dispute: its executives’ galloping hypocrisy.

Tonight (Friday, August 12) will see the first game of this weekend’s so-called Pride Game, which Chief Executive Gillon McLachlan is presenting as something akin to a manifestation of the AFL’s moral obligation to promote acceptance of the gay lifestyle. Just why a sporting code feels obliged to push alternate forms of human affection remains a mystery, one explained not at all by McLachlan’s conceit that the popularity of his code imposes an obligation “to lead” on this and other social issues. As Tim Blair points out, this agenda also includes preferential scholarships for Muslims, but adherents of no other creed. If you’re a devout Calathumpian who can slot six-pointers from the intersection of the boundary line and fifty, bad luck.

Given the bare-faced and discriminatory intent of that programme, it might be difficult to imagine a more blatant example of hypocrisy. Yet, as is so often the case with the AFL, it strives to exceed even its own worst standards.

Of around 850 Britons believed by authorities to have made their way to Syria and Iraq, more than 50 are women, say police.

LONDON—A British schoolgirl who ran away to Syria to join Islamic State is believed to have died in an airstrike, her family’s lawyer said Thursday.

Seventeen-year-old Kadiza Sultana made headlines last spring when she and two of her friends from an east London high school left their homes to marry fighters for the extremist group in Raqqa, the Syrian city that it controls.

Ms. Sultana’s family were told of her death “weeks ago,” by their own sources, said Tasnime Akunjee, the family’s lawyer.

“Her body was pulled from the rubble of a building hit by a bomb dropped from a Russian plane,” said Mr. Akunjee in a telephone interview.

It hadn’t been possible to verify whether she had died, he added. The family had informed authorities, he said, but they haven’t received any information on Ms. Sultana’s status in response, said Mr. Akunjee.

The U.K. Foreign Office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

World Vision officials have professed to be “shocked” by the arrest in Israel last week of Mohammed El-Halabi, the head of the megacharity’s Gaza operations. Mr. Halabi is accused of repurposing over the course of 10 years up to $7.2 million a year, in cash and materials, to Hamas. That’s approximately 60% of World Vision’s total aid to Gaza. In addition to money allegedly used for deadly weapons and the construction of terror tunnels, the charge sheet includes diverting unemployment payments, “2,500 food packages worth $100 each” and “3,300 packages of cleaning supplies and personal hygiene products worth $80 each . . . to Hamas units.”

According to the Israeli security agency that conducted the investigation into World Vision, Mr. Halabi admitted his role as a Hamas agent during interrogation, though his lawyer has since rejected this account and denied the allegations. World Vision has also denied the charges, claiming that the budget for its Gaza operations was smaller than the amount of the funds allegedly diverted. However, the annual reports of the Jerusalem-West Bank-Gaza (JWG) branch of World Vision fail to specify a separate budget for operations in Gaza alone, making it impossible to independently verify these assertions.

But it is impossible not to see in Gaza the massive construction of terrorist infrastructure everywhere, with humanitarian aid as the primary source of funds and materials. Terror is the territory’s only major industry, and if Hamas wasn’t stealing the aid, where were the sacks of cement, beams, pipes and other materials, as well as the cash to pay for the work, coming from?

Instead, World Vision leaders such as Tim Costello of the charity’s Australian branch, which provided a significant portion of World Vision JWG’s 2014 budget of more than $20 million, took refuge in distant accounting firms. “We have PricewaterhouseCoopers that audit us each year,” Mr. Costello said. CONTINUE AT SITE

With an indictment unsealed last week, Israeli investigators have sounded an alarm over the illicit use of global aid money to fund Palestinian terrorism. Prosecutors in the city of Beersheba allege that Mohammed El-Halabi, Gaza Strip director of the California-based charity World Vision, transferred tens of millions of dollars to Hamas to buy weapons and build underground attack tunnels. Although World Vision denies fault, the governments of Australia and Germany have halted donations pending investigations.

This revelation should spur a broader reassessment of American aid to the Palestinian government. For two decades the Palestinian government has used U.S. and other foreign taxpayers’ money to pay generous rewards to the families of terrorists. The deadlier the crime, the larger the prize, up to about $3,100 a month, or several times the average salary of a worker in Palestine’s non-terrorist economy.

Recall that 13-year-old Hallel Yaffa Ariel was murdered in her bed by a knife-wielding Palestinian in June. She was a dual Israeli-American citizen, making her the 11th American killed by Palestinians since 2014. Other victims include 18-year-old Ezra Schwartz, a student from Sharon, Mass., and 28-year-old Taylor Force, a West Point graduate and two-tour U.S. Army veteran from Lubbock, Texas. The families of the killers now receive regular payments from Palestinian leaders—funded partly by U.S. taxpayers.

No U.S. official can plead ignorance. Palestinian law has sanctioned these payments since at least 2004, specifying how much money is earned depending on the circumstances of the attacker and the body count. A Palestinian from Israel with a wife and children who kills many people and dies in the act, or is captured and sentenced to more than 30 years in prison, earns the most. Single, childless attackers from the West Bank or Gaza earn less. The incentives are clear.

Palestinian leaders once tried to obscure their payments by characterizing them as “assistance” rather than “salaries.” They also shifted nominal responsibility from the Palestinian Authority (PA), which takes donations from foreign governments, to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which doesn’t. But this was a sham, as both bodies are run by Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party.

In 2014 Israel estimated the terror payments at $75 million, or a sum equal to 16% of all aid sent to Palestine from overseas. This year the figure is nearly $140 million, says Yigal Carmon of the Middle East Media Research Institute.

How do U.S. aid transfers square with laws against funding terrorism? Willful blindness helps. “I think that they plan to phase it out,” State Department official Anne Patterson said in 2014 after the meaningless PA-to-PLO two-step. This year’s State Department report on terrorism praised Palestinian leaders for “many improvements,” including making “terrorism financing a criminal offense.” It said nothing about official payments to terrorists. CONTINUE AT SITE

Vladimir Putin is a master at pressing his geopolitical advantage when he senses complacency in the West. That’s the meaning of his latest tantrum over Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula Moscow invaded and illegally annexed in 2014.

The Russian strongman on Wednesday accused Kiev of sending special forces to Crimea to destabilize the occupied Ukrainian territory ahead of Russian parliamentary elections next month. His spy agency, the FSB, said one of its men and a Russian regular had been killed in clashes with the Ukrainians over the weekend. The Kremlin also claims to have arrested several Ukrainian would-be infiltrators, including an intelligence officer.

The Russian leader then used the episode as an excuse to pull out of peace talks aimed at de-escalating the Russia-instigated conflict in eastern Ukraine. A fresh round had been proposed for the sidelines of next month’s G-20 meeting in China, but on Wednesday Mr. Putin declared such diplomacy “meaningless.”

Kiev denies the allegations, which bear the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, not least because there is no plausible evidence. A senior Western diplomat says Mr. Putin’s accusations represent an attempt at “sabotaging the diplomacy around Minsk,” the 2015 cease-fire accord that ended the worst of the fighting in eastern Ukraine.

Islamic State (Isis) terrorists have called on jihadists to attack the Miss Universe competition being held in the Philippines in January 2017. The call for the terrorist attacks was made through their online networks and directed “everyone who can” to launch an attack on the global beauty pageant.

According to SITE Intel Group, which reports on jihadist threats online, a Filipino jihadi telegram channel posted a video on how to make suicide belts. It suggested followers “create [the] bomb for Miss Universe”.

The call for jihadists addressed “brothers who love martyrdom”. The annual beauty pageant is due to be held in the Philippines capital Manila in January 2017.

A statement from SITE Intel Group said: “A pro-Islamic State telegram channel posted an explosive belt manufacturing video and a timed hand grenade manual, and suggested to ‘create bomb for Miss Universe’, referring to the beauty pageant to be held in the Philippines in January 2017.”

Although the online threats could not be verified, Isis has been expanding its presence in the Philippines and attempting to recruit more jihadist fighters from the country. In June 2016, the terrorist group released its first recruitment video for the Philippines and its neighbouring countries.

A Canadian man known as an ISIS supporter and who was released in February on a peace bond has been killed in an overnight police raid in his hometown of Strathroy, Ontario. Authorities said that Aaron Driver, aka Harun Abdurahman, had planned a suicide attack on a major Canadian city. An alert sent to Canadian law enforcement authorities yesterday indicated that an attack was imminent.

This is the most recent example of what I have termed “known wolf” terrorism, where a suspect was already known to law enforcement.

And reports of at least one raid early this morning may indicate that Driver was not acting alone.

CBC reports:

CBC News has confirmed that Aaron Driver, a suspect being sought in connection with a terror threat, has been killed in a confrontation with police in Strathroy, Ont.

A family member confirmed the death of the 24-year-old.

CBC News has learned that Driver’s family was told by the RCMP that police shot Driver after he detonated an explosive device that injured himself and another person. The family was also told Driver had another device that he was going to detonate, which is why police shot him.

A senior police official told Canadian Press Wednesday the suspect allegedly planned to use a bomb to carry out a suicide bombing mission in a public area but was killed in a police operation.

The RCMP were conducting an operation in a residential southwestern Ontario neighbourhood of Strathroy on Wednesday evening after it said credible information of a potential terrorist act was received earlier in the day.

So despite being released by Canadian authorities on a “peace bond” in February, Driver was apparently able to build or receive multiple explosive devices under the noses of law enforcement.

Driver was well known to authorities and had been the subject of numerous media reports over the past two years going back to his support for the October 2014 Parliament Hill shooting that killed one military honor guard and ended in a shootout inside Canada’s Parliament building.

But despite his open support for ISIS, he assured authorities and the media he was no threat.

Europe is giving signals, albeit slowly, that it may be waking up from the “Turkey-the-bridge” dream. Germany’s Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmaier said that his country’s relations with Turkey have grown so bad the two countries have virtually “no basis” for talks.

“Italy should be attending to the mafia, not my son,” said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Typically, he does not understand the existence of independent judiciary in a European country. He thinks, as in an Arab sheikdom, prosecutors are liable to drop charges on orders from the prime minister.

“We know that the democratic standards are clearly not sufficient to justify [Turkey’s] accession [to the European Union].” — Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern.

Nations do not have the luxury, as people often do, of choosing their neighbors. Turkey, under the 14-year rule of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist governments, and neighboring both Europe and the Middle East, was once praised as a “bridge” between Western and Islamic civilizations. Its accession into the European Union (EU) was encouraged by most EU and American leaders. Nearly three decades after its official bid to join the European club, Turkey is not yet European but has become one of Europe’s problems.

Europe’s “Turkish problem” is not only about the fact that in a fortnight a bomb attack wrecked a terminal of the country’s biggest airport and a coup attempt killed nearly 250 people; nor is it about who rules the country. It is about the undeniable democratic deficit both in governance and popular culture.

In only the past couple of weeks, Turkey was in the headlines with jaw-dropping news. In Istanbul, a secretary at a daily newspaper was attacked by a group of people who accused her of “wearing revealing clothes and supporting the July 15 failed coup.” She was six months pregnant.

Also in Istanbul, a Syrian gay refugee was murdered: he had been beheaded and mutilated. One social worker helping LGBT groups said: “Police are doing nothing because he is Syrian and because he is gay.”

Turkey is dangerous not only for gays and refugees. A French tourist was left bloodied and beaten by Turkish nationalists after he refused to hold a Turkish flag. Grisly footage shows the gang, encouraged by Erdogan to patrol the streets on “democracy watch,” telling the man “You will be punched if you don’t hold the flag.” The tourist is alone and does not appear to speak Turkish.

100% of the money will be spent in the U.S., while Israel is presently able to spend 25% in Israel. This is a subsidy for U.S. defense industries and constrains Israel’s defense choices by forcing the IDF to exclude weapons from Europe and elsewhere.

Without the ability to spend some money in Israel, it will be harder for smaller defense and high-tech industries to keep up.

Israel will be prohibited from asking Congress for additional funds for ten years, effectively removing a bipartisan center of support for Israel’s security from the equation and reducing Israel’s flexibility in addressing rapidly emerging threats.

This could be particularly problematic: an administration that opposes missile defense in principle — as does the Obama administration — could effectively stifle Israel, which protects its people with a layered missile defense system.

A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) is an agreement between two parties — in this case, the governments of Israel and the United States. It is less than a treaty, more than a handshake. The first MOU was signed in 1981, recognizing “the common bonds of friendship between the United States and Israel and builds on the mutual security relationship that exists between the two nations.” The current MOU, signed in 2007, represented a 10-year commitment. The Obama Administration and the government of Israel have been negotiating a new 10-year agreement that will come into effect in 2017.

The media have a way of wrapping up big stories like the slaughter of a priest in a Normandy church as if there is nothing important left to say or to learn ten days after the incident. The item sinks to the lower depths, small details pop up like junk in the surf. The mayor of Montluçon will not deliver an inhumation permit for Abdelamlik Petitjean; he wasn’t born there, the law doesn’t allow him to be buried there. Or is it “require”? Is the mayor taking advantage of an option? In any case, neither Kermiche nor Petitjean is welcome in our cemeteries. Some Danish Muslims offered to perform the rites for Kermiche.

This media practice of tying the knots and putting a story on the shelf gives the impression that the general population concurs. Not so. As for me, I can’t stop writing about it. My readers have a choice; if you’re no longer interested, you can skip it. I can’t.

The mayor of St. Dié des Vosges has publicly announced that he will not allow Abdelmalik Petitjean to be buried in his commune, even though he was born there. He thinks the terrorist should be buried in an unmarked grave in a secret location. This is one more indication of the climate of opinion today in France.

I receive countless messages from friends in other lands, informing me by attached articles that the Hollande government has flatly announced that there will be more attacks and nothing can be done about it. And the population is duly resigned. Others inform me that Europeans have simply not caught on to this Islamic game. They’ll be suckered until they are conquered. Still others are preparing to celebrate the victory of Marine Le Pen, the only politician in the whole of France who knows the score and can do what has to be done.

Polls are showing that security has jumped to first place in the concerns of French voters, ahead of jobs, the economy, and purchasing power.

What else is new?

Several of Adel Kermiche’s ex-cellmates have spoken up. The young man was a flaming radical. Nothing subtle about him. Unfortunately, former Justice Minister Christiane Taubira—famous for her corn rows, gay marriage bill, and talent for quoting great writers in her impassioned speeches—dismantled the prison intel network set up under the Sarkozy administration. Specialized anti-terrorism judges have complained that they were getting zero information from the penitentiaries. Socialist Youth movement president Bernard Lucas, however, stands with Taubira and the dissident fringe of the Left opposed to their party’s dérive sécuritaire, a sort of hardening of the national security arteries.