RUTHFULLY YOURS

BRUSSELS—Belgian police on Friday arrested Mohamed Abrini, one of Europe’s most-wanted terrorist suspects, and prosecutors said they were working to determine whether he was the third attacker at the Brussels airport in March.

According to two officials, Belgian authorities suspect Mr. Abrini was the sole surviving attacker who escaped from the national airport during the March 22 attacks, wearing a dark hat and a light-colored jacket. Thirty-two people were killed that day by suicide bombers at the airport and the Maelbeek subway station in central Brussels.

In all, five people were arrested on Friday, including a man Belgian officials detained in connection with the subway station attack, confirming for the first time that investigators believe a second person was involved at that site.

“The investigators are verifying whether Abrini can be positively identified as being the third person present during the attacks in Brussels National Airport, the so-called man with the hat,” said Eric Van Der Sypt, the spokesman for the prosecutors.

Prosecutors spoke with caution Friday night, a likely reflection of the fact that a man previously arrested on suspicion of being the third attacker, Faycal Cheffou, was later released after it was established he wasn’t at the airport on March 22.

The Belgian government’s security council met Friday evening to discuss the arrests and progress in the case. Belgium’s terror level was kept at one notch below its highest level.

If Belgian authorities can confirm that Mr. Abrini is the “man in the hat”—the focus of an intense search since then—and confirm the capture of the second alleged Maelbeek attacker, they will have resolved key remaining questions about the attacks. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Cologne attacks were a series of mass sexual assaults on women by Muslim colonists and settlers operating in that city as well as other German and European cities on New Year’s Eve. Now we’re learning more about the initial coverup which dealt a severe blow to Merkel’s open borders refugee policy.

Police investigating the mass sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve claim they were ordered to remove the word “rape” from their initial report.

Local officers had produced an internal “important event” memo entitled “rape, sexual harassment, thefts, committed by a large group of foreign people” – the first indication of the scale of the incident which would go on to make headlines around the world.

According to Cologne newspaper Express, officers received a phone call from the state police control centre ordering them to take down the report “or otherwise delete the phrase ‘Vergewaltigung’” – “rape”.

A senior Cologne police officer told Express he was informed of the order by a colleague who took the call, and that state police understood it to be “the wish of the state interior ministry”.

Police ultimately refused the request, leaving the word “rape” in their report, and the news would eventually reach the wider world.

Which is how the truth got out.

The Christian communities of Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon are well on the way to joining their Jewish cousins. The Jewish communities of these states predated Islam by a millennium, and were vibrant until the 20th century. But the Arab world’s war on the Jewish state, and more generally on Jews, wiped out the Jewish populations several decades ago.

And now the Christian communities, which like the Jews, predate Islam, are being targeted for eradication.

The ongoing genocide of Middle Eastern Christians at the hands of Sunni jihadists is a moral outrage. Does it also affect Israeli national interests? What do we learn from the indifference of Western governments – led by the Obama administration – to their annihilation? True, after years of deliberately playing down the issue and denying the problem, the Obama administration is finally admitting it exists.

Embarrassed by the US House of Representatives’ unanimous adoption of a resolution last month recognizing that Middle Eastern Christians are being targeted for genocide, the State Department finally acknowledged the obvious on March 25, when Secretary of State John Kerry stated that Islamic State is conducting a “genocide of Christians, Yazidis and Shi’ites.”

Kerry’s belated move, which State Department lawyers were quick to insist has no operational significance, raises two questions.

First, what took the Obama administration so long? Persecution of Christians in Iraq began immediately after the US-led coalition brought down Saddam Hussein in 2003. With the rise of Islamic State in 2012, the process of destroying the Christian community went into high gear. And now these ancient communities are on the brink of extinction.

In Iraq, Christians comprised 8 percent of the population in 2003. Today less than 1% of Iraqis are Christians. In Syria, the Christian community has lost between half and two-thirds of its members in the past five years.

One of the appalling aspects of ISIS’s deliberate, open targeting of Christians for destruction is how little resistance it has received from local Sunni populations. As Raymond Ibrahim from the David Horowitz Freedom Center has scrupulously documented, the local Sunnis have not stood up for their Christian neighbors, who have lived side-by-side with them for hundreds of years. Rather, in areas that have been conquered by ISIS, the local Sunnis have collaborated with their genocidal masters in raping and murdering Christian neighbors, plundering their property, destroying their churches, and driving them from their ancestral homes.

Although precise data is hard to come by, it is clear that thousands of Christians have been slaughtered. Thousands of Christian women and girls have been sold as sex slaves in ISIS slave markets, subjected to continuous, violent rape and beatings. Nuns and priests have been enslaved, crucified, mutilated, kidnapped and held for ransom, as have lay members of Christian communities. Christians have been burned alive.

In a ceremony to mark Iran’s National Day of Nuclear Technology, the Islamic Republic on Thursday announced the unveiling of twelve new, self-developed nuclear products in several different fields, ranging from fuel and laser technology to power plants and reactors.

Among the products unveiled at the ceremony, which was attended by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, were new centrifuge systems and fuel rod complexes for testing reactors, according to the Iranian Fars news.

The report quoted a spokesman for the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization referring to “new nuclear achievements” in “fuel, laser, power plants and health fields.”

During Thursday’s event, Rouhani also announced the establishment of the Pasman Gor nuclear site in Anarak region, as well as the publication of three books related to nuclear technology and the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.

On Wednesday, Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan said the country intends to produce the powerful explosive Octogen for use in the warheads of its missiles to improve their “destructive and penetration power.”

Octogen is used as an explosive in penetrating missile warheads and as a solid rocket fuel — but is also employed as part of the detonator in an atomic bomb.

In 1972, Ishmael Muslim Ali LaBeet and four other killers walked into the Fountain Valley golf club in the Virgin Islands. They rounded up four Florida tourists and four employees, forced them to kneel on the ground, and opened fire.

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That was how the Fountain Valley Massacre began.

Afterward LaBeet and his fellow murderers were swarmed by civil rights attorneys eager to claim that their clients had been tortured into confessing. But the claims of torture were undermined by LaBeet.

At his trial, Ishmael LaBeet yelled, “I killed them all. I don’t give a f__. I killed them all.”

The killers were found guilty and sentenced. But LaBeet hijacked an airplane to Cuba. Today he is still there, north of Guantanamo, calling himself a Communist.

LaBeet is one of many terrorists who have killed Americans and who are being harbored by the Castro regime. The pain of the victims of these left-wing terrorists under the protection of the Castro crime family have not been mentioned in the rush to celebrate the “opening” of Cuba.

They are Castro’s American victims even though they have never set foot in the Cuban dictatorship

Even though Obama illegally and falsely delisted Cuba as a state sponsor of terror, the Communist dictatorship still remains a haven and a hub for terrorists from around the world.

Cuba is best known for its ties to the Marxist narcoterrorists of FARC who have kidnapped and murdered Americans. But the Iran-backed Islamic terrorists of Hezbollah, who carried out the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, have a home in Cuba. As do members of the left’s former terrorist networks in America.

Six years ago Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali were on opposite sides of a debate in New York titled “Islam is a religion of peace.” I was on Ayaan’s side in arguing “not so much” and the audience ended up by triumphantly agreeing with us. Not least among the debate’s memorable aspects was that it was conducted so freely. For once we dived straight into all the tricky stuff — Muhammad’s personal life, the Koran, and so on. Three years later Ayaan and Maajid discussed the same matter on another stage in America and found some common cause. Six years later they were sitting here in London for a one-on-one discussion as colleagues in the same fight against the fanatics.

The audience included Islamic clerics, making the evening’s final appeal from Ayaan all the more pertinent. We don’t study Nazism without studying the teachings, writings and beliefs of Hitler, she pointed out. We don’t teach our children about Communism without reference to the writings of Karl Marx. Likewise, she stressed, you cannot understand Islam or Islamism without looking at the teachings, behaviour and writings of Muhammad. Including the bad bits. Admittedly the venue was once again very well guarded, but nobody stood up and started screaming. Here was an actual discussion. There are problems in the tradition and rather than skirt around them or pretend they are not there, it is better for everyone — Muslims and non-Muslims — to face up to them.

Afterwards I found myself reflecting on how people’s minds change. It never does happen just there and then, with someone saying, “Yes — I see, I was quite wrong and you’ve changed my mind.” But over time the bits of your own argument that have become unsupportable simply crumble away, usually without you even acknowledging it. But one thing of which I am quite certain is that in order to stand any chance of change or progress on the subject of Islam, the facts and opinions have to be confronted frankly. Our decent desire to be polite, combined with our indecent concessions to fear, make the possibility of reform less likely. But for one night at least one saw the fruits of progress in action.

***There wasn’t so much progress the week before when I took part in an Intelligence Squared debate on taking action against IS alongside General John Allen and against Ken Livingstone and Rula Jebreal. Aside from talking over her opponents incessantly, the strangest thing about Ms Jebreal was that she began her case by complaining about having to listen to “two white men” on our side. She seemed to have fewer problems with the other person on her own side, who was not just white and a man, but also — crime of all crimes today — old. I hope that in my lifetime the use of someone’s skin pigmentation will become unacceptable as a means of attack. But for now it appears to remain fine so long as it is in one direction. It leads me to wonder if there are things I would not say against an opponent. I think so. For instance Ms Jebreal is married to an American multi-millionaire, a fact some people might suggest undermines her strident pose as a poor suffering Palestinian. But — as when debating left-wing heirs and heiresses far richer than I shall ever be — I always think this too personal a point to make.

A defense official confirmed today that high-level discussions are under way to decide whether U.S. forces will be pulled out of the Sinai peninsula because of the danger posed by ISIS.

About 700 troops are currently part of the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) mission in the region established by the 1979 peace deal.

Joint Staff Vice Director for Operations Rear Adm. Andrew Lewis told reporters at the Pentagon today that reports stating two outposts outside the northern camp in the Sinai had been closed were incorrect.

“Operationally, we have people there that are committed to the mission. And my focus is making sure that they have the force protection measures in place and we have increased the force protection measures in MFO Sinai, to ensure their maximum safety,” Lewis said.

The admiral said there are no plans in place, but “those discussions are happening…whether to pull them out or not” within the U.S. government and the governments of Israel and Egypt. “And on those discussions are happening at the very highest levels,” he added.

ISIS claimed responsibility for taking down a Russian airliner over the desert on Halloween, and later published in Dabiq magazine photos of what ISIS says was the bomb — constructed out of a soda can.

Boko Haram reinforced their year-ago pledge of allegiance to ISIS, urging self-proclaimed caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to have “steadfastness, steadfastness, and patience, patience” to achieve victory.

The video opens with pickups driving through the brush carrying masked jihadists wielding an ISIS flag. Front license plates were also replaced with ISIS flags.

A few more camera angles are used of the jihadists than the usual single, straight-on shot frequently seen in Boko Haram statements. The terrorist in the center juggles a couple pieces of paper as he reads the statement.

“The enemies of Allah the Almighty hold conferences and meetings to come up with a solution for the hole into which they fell, thinking that they can rescue their proxies and allies from the assault of the soldiers of the Caliphate,” the speaker says.

“They gave statements and threatened on television screen that they will defeat the monotheists who proved, by the grace of Allah the Almighty, the extent of their firmness and the harm they inflicted upon their enemies and the losses in terms of lives, wealth, and weapons, whether in Nigeria, the Niger border, Cameroon, or Chad,” he continued.

“Those people were shocked by what they saw, and they were surprised by the steadfastness of the monotheists in front of their Crusader campaigns, despite their alliance and cooperation with their henchmen from among the apostates and the Rafidhi [Shi’ite] militias. The monotheists have realized that victory is from Allah.”

“The march,” they vowed, will continue until jihadists “purify the land from the filth and defilement of the polytheists.”

“As usual, the disbelievers and apostates have for ages, when they feel hopeless to stop the spread of the truth, rush to scheme and sow rumors and lies against the mujahideen,” the speaker lamented.

The curtain was just closing on president Obama’s benefit performance on behalf of the billionaire Castro family in Havana last month when another curtain opened on an adjacent stage.

Accompanied by a chorus of idiotic media hype The Rolling Stones arrived in Havana three days after Obama departed the island amidst a similar chorus of idiocies. Despite the insufferable media blather both sets of performers were helping further enrich the Castro family for one reason: their “legacies.”

You see, amigos: Cuba’s entire economic infrastructure is owned almost lock stock and barrel—not only by the Stalinist regime’s military and secret police sectors (the only people in Cuba with guns, in case you’d forgotten)—but more specifically by the Castro family itself. In Congressional testimony a few years ago, Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Simmons, a recently retired Defense Intelligence Agency Cuba specialist, explained the issue in detail. He showed how through a corporation named GAESA, Raul Castro’s military owns virtually every corporation involved in Cuba’s tourism industry, among the Stalinist regime’s top money-makers lately.