RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Maundy Thursday a Muslim shopkeeper in Glasgow was brutally murdered. Forty-year-old Asad Shah was allegedly stabbed in the head with a kitchen knife and then stamped upon. Most of the UK press began by going big on this story and referring to it as an act of ‘religious hatred’, comfortably leaving readers with the distinct feeling that – post-Brussels – the Muslim shopkeeper must have been killed by an ‘Islamophobe’. Had that been the case, by now the press would be crawling over every view the killer had ever held and every Facebook connection he had ever made. They would be asking why he had done it and investigating every one of his associates.

But it then appeared that although the Asad Shah murder was being treated by police as ‘religiously motivated’ the suspected killer might in fact have been another Muslim and that, it was speculated, there might also have been a connection with a message on Facebook in which Mr Shah wished a very happy Easter to his ‘beloved Christian nation’ and suggesting people follow in ‘The Real Footstep of Beloved Holy Jesus Christ’.

Mr Shah was an Ahmadiyya (Ahmadi), a member of – against some stiff competition – one of the most persecuted sects within Islam. Persecution against them in Pakistan and elsewhere around the Islamic world is rife. Yet despite that (or perhaps for that very reason) they are probably the most peaceable and indeed admirable sect within Islam. Among other things, Ahmadiyya Muslims formally reject the concept of Jihad that other schools cling to. In Britain whenever there is a vaguely positive news story about Islam it almost invariably involves Ahmadi Muslims. Remember the bus adverts a few years back saying that Islam had ‘love for all, hatred for none’. That was paid for by Ahmadiyya Muslims. Remember the stories of a Muslim group not burning poppies but actually selling them for the Royal British Legion? Ahmadiyyas again.

Faced with a fresh barrage of threatening rhetoric by North Korea, its fourth nuclear test (January 6), and its subsequent successful launch of a ballistic missile capable of reaching the mainland United States, on March 31 President Barack Obama advocated closer security ties among America’s chief allies in the Far East. More significantly, he also urged increased cooperation with China to discourage Pyongyang.

As world leaders gathered for the fourth Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, Obama first met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Park Geun-hye. He then had a meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping at which both leaders urged North Korea (DPRK) to give up its nuclear arsenal. Xi also agreed to fully implement the latest economic sanctions against the regime of Kim Jong-un which were imposed by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on March 2. The wording of that resolution was stronger than initially expected, primarily due to China’s displeasure at Pyongyang’s tendency to take Beijing’s support for granted even when its actions run contrary to China’s strategic interests.

China’s longstanding priorities of “no war, no instability and no nukes” on the Korean Peninsula—in that order of priority—have produced ambiguous policies over the past decade. Two influential power centers in Beijing, the People’s Liberation Army General Staff Department and the International Department of_the_Communist_Party, continue to regard North Korea as an important geopolitical buffer between China and South Korea. They see the stability of the DPRK regime as more important than its compliance with non-proliferation strictures. Following North Korea’s second nuclear test (June 2009) China initially supported a sharply worded UN Security Council resolution, but in October of that year reversed its approach and effectively became North Korea’s protector and enabler, with former prime minister Wen Jiabao saying it was necessary to “put all our efforts without fail to boost peace and stability in Northeast Asia.”

It seems that almost every month since the nuclear agreement with Iran, the “Obama Bomb” deal, was announced last summer there have been new revelations about how the agreement is weaker that Obama administration claimed and side deals that the administration failed to disclose to Congress and the American people.

For example, although President Obama and Secretary Kerry claimed in July 2015 that under the deal Iran would honor UN Security Council resolutions barring Iranian ballistic missiles tests for right years, it turned out that the text of the agreement said nothing about missile tests – this language was included in an annex to a Security Council resolution that endorsed the deal. This means sanctions against Iran lifted by the nuclear deal can’t be reimposed due to Iranian missile tests conducted over the last month and last fall.

There also was a secret side deal allowing Iran to inspect itself for evidence of nuclear weapons-related work.

Last month, we learned the IAEA has dumbed-down its reports on Iran’s nuclear program because it claims the nuclear agreement removed certain mandates that were the basis for some of its previous inspections. However, new IAEA Iran reports have few details on issues the agency is authorized to investigate which may indicate another side deal with Iran which has long opposed detailed IAEA reporting on its nuclear program.

The latest development is a possible new concession the Obama administration reportedly plans to make to Iran to give it access to U.S. financial markets. According to the Associated Press “the Obama administration is leaving the door open to new sanctions relief for Iran, including possibly long-forbidden access to the U.S. financial market,” specifically granting “Iranian businesses the ability to conduct transactions in dollars within the United States or through offshore banks.” Iran also would be permitted to “dollarize” payments.

Obama officials reportedly are considering opening U.S. financial markets to Iran because Tehran has been complaining that it did not receive enough sanctions relief from the nuclear deal. Apparently $150 billion in sanctions relief and a reported $1.7 billion dollar payment by the United States was not enough.

If true, this move would violate assurances provided to Congress by Treasury Secretary Jack Lew last July that the nuclear deal would not allow Iran access to U.S. financial institutions or enter into financial arrangements with U.S. banks.

Just days after the Brussels bombings, a British extremist released a pro-jihad screed filmed on a rainy city street as a passerby strides through the shot without skipping a step.

The material he was filming was promoted and distributed Thursday via ISIS Telegram channels.

London-based bus driver Abu Haleema, an associate of extremist Anjem Choudary, was arrested in spring 2015 by Scotland Yard; he’d warned in a video two months before that “we’re going to see the black flag of sharia in the White House, we’re going to see the black flag of sharia over Windsor castle, we’re going to see the black flag of the khilafah on the Suez Canal.”

He was freed on bail — on the condition that he stop stoking jihad through his active YouTube, Facebook and Twitter accounts.

“Officers from the counter-terrorism command SO15 arrested a 37-year-old man in a west London street on suspicion of encouragement of terrorism contrary to Section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2006,” British law enforcement officials said at the time. “He was taken to a central London Police Station and has since been bailed to a date in mid-June pending further enquiries. The man was detained under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.”

Early this year, Abu Haleema turned his focus to stoking jihad in Australia, with videos attacking more moderate Muslim leaders, including one who issued a fatwa confirming Australian Muslims can join the police and military.

He was featured in a January documentary, The Jihadis Next Door, released by Britain’s Channel 4.

Last week’s Brussels jihadist bombings, and their links to December’s Paris attacks that, similarly, appear to have been coordinated by the Islamic State terror network, spotlighted the challenge posed by Europe’s unassimilated Muslim communities. As I observed in a recent column, the threat posed by radical Islam is not limited to “violent extremists” (the Obama administration’s preferred sanitization of the term “jihadists­­”); it is exacerbated by the support system the jihadists enjoy in Muslim enclaves that share their sharia-supremacist ideology.

The terrorism in Europe prompted no shortage of discussion about American counterterrorism, including the suggestion by Ted Cruz (on whose presidential campaign I am an advisor) of stepped up surveillance of Muslim communities. In the aforementioned column, I explained that Senator Cruz’s proposal was a prudent call for recommitting to the intelligence-based post-9/11 counterterrorism that aimed to prevent terrorist attacks; that would be a departure from the 1990s Clinton approach, which regarded terrorism as a law-enforcement problem – meaning investigators generally did not kick into gear until after mass-casualty attacks had occurred. Cruz has also penned an op-ed fleshing out his thoughts on the subject.

An obvious question arises: Can the proliferation of Islamic enclaves that has occurred in Europe happen in the United States? For now, the situations are not comparable. The U.S. has a vastly larger population than any individual European country; and compared to Europe, we are geographically remote from the Middle East. Muslims make up only about one percent of our population (as opposed to ten percent of France’s), and because we have historically been a melting pot for diverse immigrant populations, we do a better job of assimilating Muslims into our society than the Europeans have.

Still, as I outlined in my 2010 book, The Grand Jihad, a major challenge of radical Islam’s “civilizational jihad” against the West (to borrow the Muslim Brotherhood’s description of its objective in America) is voluntary apartheid. That is the strategy by which Muslims of the fundamentalist bent integrate but quite intentionally resist assimilation. It is very difficult to assimilate a subpopulation that comes to a host country with the specific intention of changing the country rather than becoming part of that country’s culture.

So is there a large enough, determined radical Islamic faction in the U.S. to trigger the development of sharia-supremacist enclaves – many of which, in Europe, have become “no go zones” hostile to the police and other government authorities?

Back in 2012, France’s President Hollande made good on a campaign promise and imposed a 75% tax on millionaires. There were some high-profile rich Frenchmen who exited the country, including Bernard Arnault, the chief executive of luxury group LVMH, who applied for Belgian nationality, and the actor Gérard Depardieu, who also moved across the border to Belgium before obtaining Russian citizenship.

Predictably, the tax took in far less than advertised before it was dropped. But there was no mass exodus of rich people from the country. You don’t get to be rich by paying taxes; you get rich by shielding your money from the tax man.

But exiting because of terrorism is another matter. And last year, 10,000 rich people left France for greener pastures – an astonishing 3% of all the millionaires in the country.

IBT:

The report was compiled by New World Wealth, an agency that gives information on the global wealth sector. The report was based on data collected from investor visa programme statistics of each country; annual interviews with around 800 global high net worth individuals and with intermediaries like migration experts, second citizenship platforms, wealth managers and property agents; data from property registers and property sales statistics in each country; and by tracking millionaire movements in the media.

According to the report, Millionaire migration in 2015, France topped the list of countries with maximum millionaire outflows as it lost 10,000 millionaires, or 3% of its millionaire population. Among the cities that saw maximum millionaire outflow, Paris, was at the top – losing about 6% of its millionaire population or 7,000 millionaires in 2015 to the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and Israel.

As someone specializing in Islamic jihadism, one would expect I’d have much to say immediately after jihadi attacks of the sort that recently occurred in Brussels (35 killed), or San Bernardino (14 killed), or Paris (130). Ironically, I don’t: such attacks are ultimately symptoms of what I do deem worthy of discussion, namely, root causes. (What can one add when a symptom of the root cause he has long warned against occurs other than “told you so”?)

So what is the root cause of jihadi attacks? Many think that the ultimate source of the ongoing terrorization of the West is Islam. Yet this notion has one problem: the Muslim world is immensely weak and intrinsically incapable of being a threat. That every Islamic assault on the West is a terrorist attack — and terrorism, as is known, is the weapon of the weak — speaks for itself.

This was not always the case. For approximately one thousand years, the Islamic world was the scourge of the West. Today’s history books may refer to those who terrorized Christian Europe as Arabs, Saracens, Moors, Ottomans, Turks, Mongols, or Tatars — but all were operating under the same banner of jihad that the Islamic State is operating under.

No — today, the ultimate enemy is within. The root cause behind nonstop Muslim terrorization of the West is found in those who stifle or whitewash all talk and examination of Muslim doctrine and history; who welcome hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants while knowing that some are jihadi operatives and many are simply “radical”; who work to overthrow secular Arab dictators in the name of “democracy” and “freedom,” only to uncork the jihad suppressed by the autocrats (the Islamic State’s territory consists of lands that were “liberated” in Iraq, Libya, and Syria by the U.S. and its allies).

So are Western leaders and politicians the root cause behind Islamic terrorization of the West?

Close — but still not there yet.

Far from being limited to a number of elitist leaders and institutions, the Western empowerment of the jihad is the natural outcome of postmodern thinking — the real reason an innately weak Islam can be a source of repeated woes for a militarily and economically superior West.

The Left has been at it for half a century now, colonising our educational institutions and filling the minds of infantalised students with a mush of doctrine dressed up as history. The UNSW commissars’ guide to “appropriate” terminology is the latest example, and one of the sickest.
No civilization ever survived by making itself stupid. And yet this is what our education system is attempting to do. There are innumerable examples of this deliberate dumbing down, but the recent revelations about the sinister instructions contained in the University of New South Wales teaching guide are an excellent illustration. These edicts institutionalize some of the worst aspects of the History Wars, enshrining an ignorant and negative interpretation of Australian society and its history while prohibiting any questioning or criticism of this arbitrarily imposed view.

According to David Dixon, the Dean of the Law School at UNSW, the guidelines are contained in students’ reading material and are common across tertiary institutions. He claims

The reason that we do this is to help our students, because of a number of incidents in the past where non-Aboriginal students have quite unintentionally said things in class discussion which have caused offence to their Aboriginal peers.

So providing something which is just a way in which people can look at and find out what is the best way to say things, which will not cause offence to people, is I think a really responsible educational approach. And that’s what we’re trying to do.

The notion that this is simply about avoiding offence is disingenuous. The guidelines are based on a radical and racist interpretation of Australian history that demonizes the everything about European settlement and the civilization it brought with it. They all but criminalize a vast range of previously innocuous terms and concepts that are now deemed offensive, and they are used to stifle free and open discussion. Students know they can be severely censured by their universities for inadvertent speech. And above all else, they are very aware of the draconian Section 18C of the RDA and the way in which it can be used by Indigenous students to target and intimidate others, on even the flimsiest pretext.

Aaron David Miller is a vice president at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars and most recently the author of “The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President.” He is on Twitter: @AaronDMiller2.

If elections were held today in Israel, the newspaper Haaretz reported recently, a single list of center-right candidates would edge out Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition and usher in a more centrist one without his Likud Party that could govern with a comfortable majority. A more telling sign that Israelis are tiring of Mr. Netanyahu came in another new Haaretz poll, which found that 51% of Israelis believe that Mr. Netanyahu should “leave political life” rather than run again in the next scheduled election.

Despite this, the chances of Mr. Netanyahu leaving and major change coming in Israeli politics before scheduled elections in 2019 are not great. Here are four reasons why:

Mr. Netanyahu’s political longevity. Should he survive until 2018, Benjamin Netanyahu will be the longest-governing prime minister in Israel’s history, surpassing David Ben-Gurion. Critics of Mr. Netanyahu say that, rather like “Seinfeld,” his tenure has been a show about nothing. Yet he survives. His political wiles have established the perception that he is indeed prime minister material, with tested security credentials. And there is no single Israeli leader on the scene with the stature to challenge him.

The bad neighborhood. As the Middle East melts down, the value of a leader’s security credentials goes up. You might argue that Israelis would be looking for a leader with vision and principle to at least extract them from their conflict with the Palestinians, but there’s little faith these days in the peace process or in Mahmoud Abbas or the Palestinian Authority. Mr. Abbas is perceived as either acquiescing in the current wave of terror, unable to stop it, or using it as leverage. A compelling argument could be made that Mr. Netanyahu has been remarkably averse to risk and that he has not provided an answer to the wave of Palestinian stabbing and shooting attacks on Israelis since September or orchestrated a determinative defeat of Hamas in Gaza. Still, he has not blundered into quagmires or unnecessary or unwinnable wars either. CONTINUE AT SITE

WASHINGTON—The Obama administration is preparing to give Iran limited access to U.S. dollars as part of looser sanctions on Tehran, according to congressional staff members and a former American official briefed on the plans.

The proposed move comes amid rising Iranian criticism that the landmark nuclear agreement reached last year between global powers and Tehran hasn’t provided the country with sufficient economic benefits.

Executives at European and Asian banks have said in recent interviews that they remain reluctant to conduct any financial transactions with Iran due to fears they might run afoul of the U.S. Treasury and its regulations that ban dollar dealings with Iranian firms. Most major international trade, particularly in oil and gas, is conducted in U.S. dollars.

The Treasury is considering how to issue licenses to offshore dollar clearing houses for specific Iranian financial institutions, an approach that wouldn’t require the involvement of American banks, according to the congressional officials. The clearing houses, likely involving select foreign banks, would conduct the dollar transactions instead, shielding the U.S. financial system from any direct contact with Iran, these officials said.

“They are looking at a couple mechanisms to allow for this dollar trade, stopping short of normalizing banking transactions,” said a congressional banking official briefed by the administration on its plans, which haven’t been finalized.

Treasury action on Iran’s access to the dollar wouldn’t require congressional approval.

American law still prohibits U.S. and foreign banks from dealing in dollars with Iran, despite the July nuclear agreement. The Treasury Department designates Iran’s entire financial system as a “primary money laundering concern” due to Tehran’s nuclear and missile programs and support for international terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. CONTINUE AT SITE