RUTHFULLY YOURS

A few days ago, a visiting friend and I walked through Jerusalem’s Mamilla Mall, up some steep stairs and through the Old City’s Jaffa Gate. We both had some gift shopping to do, and we had decided to pick up some pottery and other items in the Christian Quarter’s shops.

Of course, thanks to the present wave of stabbings, we thought twice about our destination. But we went anyway.

One of the first things we noticed was the rather thin array of tourists and the unusually quiet walk along the usually bustling David Street. There were few hucksters, and several shops were shuttered.

We turned left on Christian Quarter Road and went into a couple of shops that we’d been to before; both of the shopkeepers are longtime friends of the woman who was shopping with me. And their stories were rather heartbreaking.

Although neither of them had faced a terrorist’s knife directly, the ripple effect of the stabbings – and particularly those in and around the Old City – had deeply wounded each of them.

Israel’s Ministry of Tourism continues to report only a slightly decreased number of tourists in the country, but that wasn’t what we heard from these two men. And their lack of customers underscored their plight.

“I’ve been using the free time to do some remodeling of my shop,” an elderly Arab Christian merchant told us.

Granted, with so few people around, it was easier for him to tear out shelves and make some long-delayed repairs. “But it’s so expensive and there’s no income to offset the costs,” he lamented.

This man was born and raised in the Jerusalem’s Old City Christian community. He has seen his share of wars and terrorism. And he is infuriated by the present attacks.

His voice rose as he described an incident. “A 50-year-old woman tried to stab a policeman this morning. Fifty years old! How ridiculous is that?”

By then, he was almost shouting, and he furtively glanced out the door of his shop to see if anyone was listening.

“The police shot her dead,” he concluded more quietly. “What else could they do?”

For five months, the State Department has indicated that Iraq’s Yazidi community should be declared a target of ISIS genocide but meanwhile has been less sure about ISIS’s intentions toward Middle East Christians. Tomorrow is Secretary John Kerry’s congressional deadline for officially determining whether Christians, along with the Yazidis and possibly others, face genocide by ISIS. Insisting that department lawyers need a little more time to struggle with the evidence, Kerry promises his decision soon, if not this week.

This shouldn’t be a hard case. Few groups have publicized their brutality toward Christians in real time and in technicolor as ISIS has. Christians, among others, have been declared genocide victims by Pope Francis, the EU Parliament, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, and the U.S. House of Representatives, in a bipartisan, unanimous vote on March 14, in the heat of election season.

All along, the State Department has demonstrated that it is not just being abundantly cautious and slow in ruling that the atrocities against Christians is genocide but that it is simply unwilling to use that designation specifically for Christians. Rather than carefully reviewing the evidence, as it claims, it has ignored it.

For months, State officials claimed they lacked facts about the Christians and then did nothing about it. Rather than follow the precedent of Secretary Colin Powell, who collected evidence for determining genocide in Darfur, Kerry refrained from dispatching fact finders in the case of the Middle Eastern Christians. When some 30 Christian leaders wrote on December 4 to request an opportunity to brief Kerry, he failed to answer. With only a month remaining until its March deadline, State Department officials asked the Knights of Columbus, which had been running TV spots on the Christian genocide, to prepare a written report of the facts. Before it was even completed, those same officials, meeting with Iraqi Chaldean Catholic leaders, told them that a genocide determination for Iraqi Christians was not in the offing. State suggested that terms such as “persecution,” “ethnic cleansing,” or “crimes against humanity” — terms that carry less moral and legal weight — be used instead.

The American public tends to see military action as binary: all in or not in at all. Mostly we’re not in — as befits a country that is not aggressive or acquisitive. But if we’re in it, win it. In this age of transnational enemies and vacuums of governance, however, the Obama administration has created a series of half-in, half-out military and political situations that have brought chaos to the Middle East, confusing our friends and comforting our adversaries. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Somalia, fear of a Vietnam-like quagmire still drives American leadership.

Afghanistan was called “Russia’s Vietnam” for a reason, but Vladimir Putin appears to have learned a different lesson about quagmires. Setting achievable aims — both military and political — and stopping when they have been met as much as practical, is key to being able to leave third countries while maintaining influence.

The apparent beginning of a Russian pullout of some forces from Syria should not be mistaken for the end of the Syrian civil war — or for a moral foreign policy. What it suggests, rather, is that Russia has achieved its military goals there and is now content to let both the political and military processes proceed with less direct Russian intervention.

Russia’s primary goals in Syria were:

To secure its hold on the bases at Latakia and Tartus, which requires a friendly government in Damascus, and
To damage Sunni jihadist rebels, whether ISIS, al Qaeda, or simply anti-Assad.

A secondary goal was to allow the Russians to test and show off new generation military equipment and tactics, including sustained bombing and the MiG-31M aircraft. Another was to provide diplomatic achievements including opening conversations — and discussing arms sales — with American allies/clients Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan, and deepening the information exchange with Israel.

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama will take a bulging schedule with him on his history-making trip to Cuba, planning to meet President Raúl Castro, tour Old Havana, meet with dissidents and deliver a speech on U.S.-Cuba relations, senior officials said, all steps designed to showcase his policy of engagement.

Mr. Obama is scheduled to arrive in Cuba on Sunday evening, accompanied by his daughters, Sasha and Malia, first lady Michelle Obama and her mother, Marian Robinson, the officials told reporters Wednesday.

He will meet with staff members of the U.S. embassy and visit the sites of Old Havana, including the cathedral, where he will be greeted by Cardinal Jaime Ortega who, along with Pope Francis, helped facilitate the president’s secret talks with the Cuban government about restoring relations.

Mr. Obama won’t see Mr. Castro until the second day of his trip. The two leaders will meet at the Palace of the Revolution after Mr. Obama and the first lady lay a wreath at the Jose Martí Memorial to honor the 19th century Cuban national hero. Mr. Castro will also host Mr. Obama for a state dinner Monday evening.

Mr. Obama’s schedule includes an event with entrepreneurs, and before moving on to Argentina, he will deliver a speech at the opulent Gran Teatro. He’ll also meet with Cuban dissidents and attend a baseball game at Estadio Latinoamericano.

The trip is part of the Obama administration’s bid to make the policy shift permanent, Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to Mr. Obama who helped negotiate the Cuba opening, said. The U.S. will discuss cooperation in agriculture, health care and educational exchange and will urge economic progress and contacts between the two countries. CONTINUE AT SITE

BERLIN—German authorities banned a far-right extremist group called Weisse Wölfe Terrorcrew and conducted raids in 10 states, moves the government said were aimed at people who want to create fear and panic among migrants.

The interior ministry said it searched and seized evidence against 16 leading members of the group, whose name translates to the White Wolves Terror Crew. The group, which has at least 50 members across Germany, includes neo-Nazis and former members of the skinhead scene, according to officials.

“Right-wing extremist groups such as WWT have no place in Germany,” Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said. “WWT is acting openly and aggressively against our state and our society, against migrants and anybody who doesn’t follow its line.”

Mr. de Maizière said the group had sought violent confrontations with political opponents, migrants and police. Two members were arrested last year, accused of planning attacks on refugee shelters, but it wasn’t clear if they had been carried out. The government didn’t provide full names for any of the group’s members.
The move against the fringe group highlights the German government’s efforts to deal with rising xenophobic sentiment since the arrival of roughly one million migrants in 2015. Before last year’s migrant influx, support for far-right groups had been declining for years. CONTINUE AT SITE

According to the Obama administration, the Islamic State is committing genocide against certain religious minority groups — excluding Christian minorities. But ISIS is on record saying that its eradication of Christians is due to their religious identity.

The Obama administration’s rejection of the word “genocide” fits a familiar pattern.

When asked about the plight of Christians under ISIS, Colonel Steve Warren said “We’ve seen no specific evidence of a specific targeting toward Christians.”

Although Christians number 10% of Syria’s population, only 2% of refugees accepted into the U.S. from there are Christian. (The majority — almost 98% — are Sunni Muslims, the same sect to which ISIS belongs and thus are not persecuted.)

According to the Obama administration, the Islamic State is committing genocide against certain religious minority groups — excluding Christian minorities. During a February 29 press briefing, White House spokesman Josh Earnest was asked: “Is the Islamic State carrying out a campaign of genocide against Syria’s Christians?” He replied:

Well, we have long expressed our concerns with the tendency of — well, not a tendency — a tactic employed by ISIL to slaughter religious minorities in Iraq and in Syria. You’ll recall at the very beginning of the military campaign against ISIL that some of the first actions that were ordered by President Obama, by the United States military, were to protect Yazidi religious minorities that were essentially cornered on Mt. Sinjar by ISIL fighters. We took those strikes to clear a path so that those religious minorities could be rescued.

Due to the obvious equivocation — it is unclear how Obama’s efforts “to protect Yazidi religious minorities” answers a question about persecuted Christians — the question was repeated: “But you’re not prepared to use the word ‘genocide’ yet in the situation [regarding Christians]?”

Earnest’s response:

My understanding is the use of that word involves a very specific legal determination that has at this point not been reached.

Eminently predictably, Angela Merkel just got the first taste of her well-deserved comeuppance at the polls over the weekend. There will be more to come:

The ripple effects of the German voter rebellion against Merkel’s open-door immigration policy will rapidly be felt across the continent. It will not matter much that the Chancellor has tried to modify it after the fact, reaching out to Turkey and seeking ways to slow down the migration inflow, with NATO and the EU looking for joint solutions to strengthen the borders. If anything, the public rejection of Merkel’s policy has reinforced the sense that her leadership has failed to grasp fully the complexity of the nearly thirty-year-old European Union—especially the enduring strength of the national identity politics of its newer members and the ultimate insularity of state interests in the United Kingdom, France, and Spain. Today, regardless of how Germany ultimately adjusts its immigration policy, the amount of damage done to the EU’s cohesion by Merkel’s initial open door policy will endure. It has already reinforced an increasingly nationalized approach to managing immigration by individual member states, while feeding the European public opinion’s growing anti-Brussels sentiment.

The anti-Merkel vote in Germany also casts in a different light the early decision by Viktor Orban of Hungary to build a fence across his country’s border, and, more recently, the refusal by France to take in more migrants, the ongoing resistance in Poland to the mandatory resettlement quota system advocated by the EU Commission, and the Macedonian government’s decision to close the country’s border completely. Likewise, the creeping de facto reintroduction of national border controls across the Schengen Zone is but the latest reaffirmation of what was once derided in Berlin, Vienna, and Brussels as the “Orbanization of Europe.” This was, in hindsight, at least on the border question, a prudent if clumsily executed effort to manage the flow so as to stay attuned to the public mood in the European Union and to preserve individual states’ absorption capacity. Whatever one thinks of Orban’s questionable economic and foreign policy priorities, he correctly anticipated the public’s resistance to the current wave of MENA migrants.

But today, these novelists hold a deep, uninformed, irrational hatred… Instead of backing the only country that gives full rights to all its citizens, they are instrumental in attacking not only Israel but the Jewish people.

What is notable is that every single time, these most illustrious writers “forget” to say why Israel built those fences, checkpoints and roadblocks in the first place.

Mr. Saramago chose not to see and talk about the Israeli restaurants, shopping malls and hotels turned into carpets of human bodies while he was visiting Ramallah. The wholesale slaughter of Jews was the only reason Israel had to send tanks and soldiers back into the Palestinian cities after the Oslo Accords. Saramago did not mention the context; he preferred to give credence to a distorted, demonizing vision.

What is the only country about which can be said:

Its very existence is disputed? (Clue: Not Zimbabwe, not Tuvalu, not even overrun Tibet.)
Its boundaries, bought with blood in wars initiated by others, is challenged by all nations, who now seem determined to destroy it through boycotts, unjust defamation and purported “laws” that are applied to no other nation?
It fully respects the rights of women and every kind of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities, notwithstanding that it is condemned at the United Nations for being “the worst violator of women’s rights.” Worse than Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan?
It provides its own enemy with water, electricity, food and medical treatment; its Defense Forces, to avoid enemy civilian casualties, warn the enemy to evacuate buildings before attacking them, and — instead of simply carpet bombing the enemy as all other nations do, including most democracies –sends its own soldiers poissibly to die on land missions?

Yet this is the only country that even famous writers, intellectuals and Nobel laureates target, demonize and criminalize.

Some of these police officers have openly refused to to protect synagogues or to observe a minute of silence to commemorate the deaths of victims of terrorist attacks.
That police officers are armed and have access to police databases only intensifies anxiety.
In July 2015, four men, one of whom is a Navy veteran, were called in for questioning. They had planned to penetrate a Navy base in the south of France, seize a high-ranking officer, decapitate him, and then spread photos of the decapitation on social media networks. The Navy veteran was one of the leaders.

According to a confidential memo, dated January 2015, from the anti-terrorist unit of the interior ministry, France was already host to 8,250 radical Islamists (a 50% increase in one year).

Some of these Islamists have gone to Syria to join the Islamic State (IS); others have infiltrated all levels of society, starting with the police and the armed forces.

A confidential memo from the Department of Public Security, published by Le Parisien, not only details 17 cases of police officers radicalized between 2012 and 2015, but that this increase had accelerated during 2014. Particularly noted were the police officers who listen to and broadcast Muslim chants while on patrol.

Some of these police officers have openly refused to to protect synagogues or to observe a minute of silence to commemorate the deaths of victims of terrorist attacks.

In addition, the police were alerted to a policewoman who incited terrorism on Facebook, and called her police uniform a “filthy rag of the Republic” while wiping her hands on it. When she came out of the restroom she was wearing a hijab. In January 2015, immediately after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher market in Vincennes which had left 17 people dead, she wrote on her Facebook page: “Masked attack led by Zionist cowards… They need to be killed.”

That police officers are armed and have access to police databases only intensifies anxiety.

Although Police headquarters in Paris confirm that this situation is rare, they have decided to review on a weekly basis any behavior that overstep the principle of separation of church and state, such as that of Muslim officers who appear to be leaning toward radicalization. Patrice Latron, who manages the office of the Paris police prefect, told Le Parisien that these circumstances are “very marginal.”

Americans have long associated the fight against Islamist terrorism with the Middle East, as Sunday’s attack in the Turkish capital of Ankara reminds us. But that geographical horizon is also increasingly out of date. Witness the expanding grip of jihadists in Africa—and the Obama Administration’s belated but increasingly urgent attempts to fight it.

This is apparent from the March 5 air strike, by manned and unmanned U.S. planes, on an al Shabaab training camp in Somalia that killed an estimated 150 terrorists. Four days later U.S. Special Forces assisted the Somali military in taking down another Shabaab camp. In both cases Pentagon officials cited intelligence suggesting an imminent threat of attacks by the al Qaeda-allied group, whose name means “the youth.”

Ostensibly, U.S. Special Forces are in Somalia to train and assist the African Union Mission in Somalia, or Amisom, which helps Somalia’s federal government. Shabaab is a menace to all of East Africa, with outrages including the 2013 attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi and last year’s rampage at Kenya’s Garissa College that massacred 148 Christian students.

But Shabaab is also a menace to the West. A Shabaab member tried to kill Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard in 2010 with an ax in revenge for drawing the prophet Mohammed. Shirwa Ahmed of Minneapolis became the first known American suicide bomber when he drove a truck bomb into a Somali government compound, killing 20. An estimated 40 U.S. citizens have traveled to Somalia to join Shabaab, which has called for attacks on U.S. shopping malls. If Islamic State can radicalize the San Bernardino killers from afar, Shabaab can do the same.

Al Shabaab militants parade new recruits after arriving in Mogadishufrom their training camp south of the capital on October 21, 2010. Photo: feisal omar/Reuters

The Obama Administration has sent 300 troops to Cameroon to fight the Islamist terrorists of Boko Haram in neighboring Nigeria, and it’s an open secret that the U.S. operates a drone base in Garoua in northern Cameroon. A U.S. air strike last month near the Libyan city of Sabratha killed an Islamic State leader and 48 terrorist comrades, and the Pentagon is reported to be drawing up plans for a broader air campaign against Islamic State in Libya. CONTINUE AT SITE