RUTHFULLY YOURS

As the Russians insist that the Assad government is the only legitimate government, all anti-Assad fighters — ISIS, al Qaeda-related, or U.S.-backed or Turkish-backed “moderates” — are, by definition, terrorists.

Russian — and in particular Syrian — tactics are appalling. Washington would rather not be associated with them, but has a horror of the vacuum that might emerge if Assad is swept aside. Mainly, the U.S. has hung its hat on the International Syria Support Group. The U.S. is muddled, as usual, without a clear goal, clear allies or fixed positions beyond support for a “political process.”

The U.S. is looking less and less relevant, as historic Great Powers do what they have historically done best — fight for their national interests as they define them. President Obama appears to be conceding the lead to Russia and Russian aims.

The shelling of Syrian soldiers by the Turkish military is one more step back into Great Power politics — historic Turkish-Russian enmity played out over Kurds and Syrians. The U.S. appears to believe 21st century wars cannot be won by military force and that battling parties can be induced to set aside their national and religious aims for a negotiated “peace.” Meanwhile, the parties to the conflict are using their armies to pursue victory.

Last week, Turkey attacked Kurdish fighters who were struggling to connect Kurdish territory in northern Iraq with a Kurdish enclave in northern Syria along the Turkish border. The Kurds, backed by Russian air power, want to oust Turkish-backed Syrian rebels from the Azaz region, in order to create contiguous territory from northern Iraq to Syrian Kurdistan, and prevent the Syrian rebels from being resupplied by Turkey. The net effect is to boost Kurdish-Russian cooperation; to provide relief for Assad’s army in the north; to increase Turkey’s hostility toward Russia; and possibly to put Turkey on a collision course with the U.S. — if Ankara believes its position in NATO will protect it from Russian fallout. (It should be noted that although Turkish troops attacked Syrians, they stayed clear of threatening Russia directly.)

The U.S. has urged both Turkey and the Kurds to decrease hostilities, but Turkey dismissed U.S. calls for a ceasefire. Attacks on the Kurds continued as Turkey began to fire on Syrian forces, and Turkey’s President Tayyip Recep Erdogan did not rule out a ground attack inside Syria.

http://acdemocracy.org/

The U.S. bombing of an ISIS training camp in Qasr Talel, Libya, today, killed 43 operatives, including their Tunisian leader, Noureddine Chouchane. This airstrike came shortly after leaks from the defense department that “the Obama administration has turned down a U.S. military plan for an assault on ISIS’s regional hub there,” the port city of Sirte.The U.S. involvement in Libya that begun with Operation Odyssey Dawn‘s airstrikes on Libya in March 2011 assisted Muslim Brotherhood affiliates efforts to oust Muammar Gadhafi.  The help to the anti-Gadhafi opposition resulted in a war-torn country with daily violent clashes. This gave al Qaeda’s adherents the opportunity “to establish well-armed, well-trained and combat-experienced militias,” concluded a report from the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress in August 2012.Libya became a fertile ground for ISIS.Libya’s coastline’s strategic importance as a stepstone to Europe was not wasted on ISIS. In January 2015, ISIS started to ship more than a million Muslim refugees to the Italian island of Lampedusa, just 162 nm from the Libyan coastline. This was followed by repeated calls for ISIS operatives to travel to Libya. Intelligence sources reported that “ISIS earns millions of dollars from taking part in the networks that smuggle migrants to Europe.”It is unknown the ISIS operatives arrived in Europe via Libya as refugees. Indeed, until yesterday, ISIS operatives who travelled to Libya, had the ability to travel to the U.S. from any
country in the  U.S.

https://visaguide.world/us-visa/nonimmigrant/visitor/visa-waiver-program

Recently I found myself in a chance conversation with a former head of the Mossad’s Directorate of Operations. The former master spy, whom I had never met before, knew that I am a journalist.

He was aware of my political views.

Directing his remarks at a friend of mine, he declared that 99 percent of Mossad and Shin Bet officers are leftists. He then added triumphantly that according to a former commander of the air force whose name he cited, 99% of the air force’s pilots are similarly leftists.

Initially, I dismissed his comments as obnoxious chest-beating by a man who felt like irritating a group of right-wingers.

But given the source, it is impossible to simply brush off what he said. And to be clear, far more troubling than the prospect that Israel’s security establishment is uniformly leftist is the notion that there is any intellectual or ideological uniformity of any kind in the ranks of our defense community.

But given our defense community’s record in recent years, there is ample reason to believe that there is more than a grain of salt in the spy chief’s boast.

Consider Israel’s handling of Gaza.

According to a number of senior officers, at the end of Operation Protective Edge in 2014, the IDF’s senior commanders convened in Tel Aviv to determine how to handle the Hamas regime going forward.

During Protective Edge, Israel learned a few things about Hamas and about the strategic balance of power between Israel and Hamas in the region and the world.

On the ground Israel learned that Hamas bases its offensive capabilities on civilian infrastructure.

Hamas placed its missiles, its communications centers and its operational commands inside civilian buildings including private homes, hospitals, clinics, schools, mosques and UN offices.

As far as the strategic balance and resources of both sides, during the war Hamas enjoyed the de facto backing of the Obama administration.

Throughout the war, the administration pressured Israel to accept Hamas’s cease-fire terms as dictated by its state sponsors Qatar and Turkey.

On the other hand, Israel was able to avoid bowing to the US’s pro-Hamas demands because throughout the conflict we enjoyed the open support of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

In other words, during the war, Israel discovered that Hamas’s military strategy was based entirely on an implicit alliance with the West, which attacked Israel for targeting Hamas’s military infrastructure, which, again, was all based in civilian structures.

I am in bewilderment of those who have made a fifty year career, costing billions of dollars, in pursuit of an elusive Two-State Solution.

Personal disclosure. I was a member of this cult until the harsh reality of truth hit my hometown of Netanya in the form of post-Oslo Accord, Arafat-inspired, Palestinian terrorism.

I was fortunate. I was hit with a psychological smack in the head. I got off easily. Too many of our citizens were killed or badly injured by the incessant suicide bombings, car bombs and shootings that only stopped by Operation Defensive Shield which targeted the terrorist cells under Palestinian control.

It is shocking how persistent people are to pursue this Two-State Solution as if it is the only oasis in a barren, arid, desert. But this fifty year trek toward a shimmering distant mirage draws sloggers toward an unreachable goal. Had they looked left or right they may have discovered alternative routes to peace, rather than doggedly plod toward a fantasy.

Way back in January 1988, a New York Times article stated that “Gaza could be the Singapore of the Middle East.” So it could if Gazan Arabs weren’t so passionately and religiously bound to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The twisted tribal code of Arab honor leaves them with a sense of shame and inferiority when Israeli cooperation and assistance is offered to them. Rather than benefit and prosper they grudgingly accept largesse while plotting to chop off the hand extended to them in peace. The resentment can be seen in the ‘anti-normalization’ campaigning of BDS activists encouraged by a large segment of the Palestinian leadership.

Truth be told, the signs were there for all to see decades ago. Resear

Back in the days when Garrison Keillor was still funny, he told stories about the pioneering settlers who founded Lake Woebegon, Minnesota in the 19th century. In the story, Norwegian immigrants settled in the coldest part of Minnesota because it reminded them of home – and then, when winter came, they remembered why they had left there in the first place. German Catholics wandered into Lake Woebegon by mistake, “but they refused to admit it.”

So they stayed.

Today, Angela Merkel’s Germany is making another suicidal gesture by opening the borders to tens of thousands of predatory, war-indoctrinated jihadis – young men of military age, who have been taught to despise, hate, and beat up anybody outside their own Muslim sect. They are indoctrinated in war theology – the last major war theology on Earth. Merkel and the EU have drifted into this suicidal fiasco by mistake – but they still refuse to admit it.

It’s the German Catholics and Lake Woebegon again. Sweden and Germany (especially Prussia) have a long folk reputation for getting completely stuck in whatever the current absolutist ideology happens to be. This kind of fanatical belief led to centuries of bloody warfare between German-speaking Lutherans and Catholics. Then it was Prussian imperialism with Frederick the Great and later Bismarck, who turned the independent provinces of Germany into one unified and self-glorifying Reich. Prussian egomania turned into Karl Marx’s “philosophy” and Richard Wagner’s ideology in 1848; Marx preached revolutionary terror, and Wagner led directly to Hitler. But the absolutist pathology over there was still the same. Only the slogans changed.

Today Angela Merkel and the EU preach peace, peace, but they stupidly let in 50 million easily indoctrinated Muslims – so there will be no peace. Isaiah (48:22) was right again. The Swedes, Germans, and French still yearn for that Napoleonic absolutism, and the EU is always frantically denying that it plans to become another Roman Empire.

De-gendering society inspires shrieking enthusiasm in womyn’s studies classrooms, where academic notions of equality make minimal contact with the real world. In a foxhole things are different, which explains why the feminist push to “reform” the armed forces is so very worrying
In an epochal change in late 2011, Labor’s Defence Minister Stephen Smith announced that virtually all remaining military restrictions on women in combat would be lifted before 2016. Women in the Australian Defence Force (ADF) are now available to kill or be killed at the bleeding edge

This followed the ADF’s own announcement in April, 2011, to the same effect. Those signing off on it were General David Hurley, Chief of the Defence Force; Navy chief Vice-Admiral Ray Griggs; Army chief Lt-Gen David Morrison (current Australian of the Year); Air Force chief Air Marshall Geoff Brown; and Major-General Gerard Fogarty, Head, People Capability. Hurley began it:

After thirty-five years in the Infantry, I know the rigours of life as an infantryman. My decision to support the opening of combat positions in the Australian Defence Force (ADF) to women comes from experience and knowledge … A robust and agile ADF relies on every member having the opportunity to contribute fully and equally to Defence operations and capability.

We all share the responsibility to work towards a fair, just and inclusive ADF. After all, gender equality is the whole community’s responsibility.

The statement was emphatic that standards would not be lowered for women’s entry. It was accompanied by a “Risk Management Plan” of high formality but little substance (maybe the nitty-gritty details are for military-eyes only). Meanwhile, Defence got a new employee, a “permanent full-time cultural change manager to assist with implementing cultural change within Army.”

France today is one of the main enemies of Israel — maybe its main enemy — in the Western world. France’s disregard of the threats faced by Israel is more than simple willful blindness. It is complicity.

At a time when Mahmoud Abbas constantly encourages terror and hatred against Israel, and when murders of Israeli Jews by Palestinian Arabs occur on a daily basis, France’s anti-Israel relentlessness can only be seen as the latest extension of France’s centuries-old anti-Semitism.

France’s “Arab policy” has gone hand-in-hand with a massive wave of Muslim immigration. France has quickly become the main Muslim country in Europe. More than six million Muslims live in France, and make up approximately 10% of the population. The Muslim vote is now an important factor in French politicians’ decisions; the risk of Muslim riots is taken into account.

On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, Hassan Rouhani, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran — a regime that denies the fact that the Holocaust occurred and does not hide its intention to commit another holocaust — arrived in Paris for an official visit.

Two days earlier, Rouhani had been in Rome, where the Italian authorities, in a gesture of submission, covered up the nude statues of Rome’s Capitoline Museum.

Rouhani thanked Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi for his “hospitality”. He did not thank President François Hollande for having hosted him on January 27.

According to the court decision, pointing out the totalitarian and cruel aspects of Islam itself is now a criminal offense, considered “insulting and demeaning” to Muslims in Denmark and therefore constituting “racism.” In effect, this means that the court is conflating what might possibly constitute blasphemy with racism.

Conversely, when a Danish imam called Jews “the offspring of apes and pigs,” he was officially reported to the police for breaching § 266b, but no legal charges were ever filed against him.

In Denmark, apparently, it is a crime to criticize Islam and “Islamists,” but calling Jews the “offspring of apes and pigs” and inciting their murder in a packed mosque (and calling non-Muslims in general “animals”) can be done with impunity.

Last week, a Danish district court ruled that what a Danish citizen had written on Facebook in November 2013 violated the Danish criminal code.

In response to a debate about the local activities of a radical Islamic organization, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, which works for the re-establishment of the Islamic caliphate, he wrote: “The ideology of Islam is as loathsome, disgusting, oppressive and as misanthropic as Nazism. The massive immigration of Islamists into Denmark is the most devastating thing to happen to Danish society in recent history.”

According to § 266b of Denmark’s criminal code, it is prohibited and punishable by fine or prison publicly to threaten, insult or demean a group of persons because of their race, skin color, national or ethnic origin, faith or sexual orientation.

As the ostensible cease-fire deal agreed upon during a security conference in Munich last week was supposed to take effect in Syria a few days from now, some 50 civilians were killed Monday in Russian airstrikes on two medical facilities.

This kind of deadly paradox is par for the course in the Middle East, particularly when none of the parties involved actually signed any agreement about what European brokers called a “cessation of hostilities.”

Russia, for example, which has been fighting ferociously to rescue the regime of Syrian dictator President Bashar Assad, announced that such a “cessation” would not apply to its bombing of opposition targets.

Assad echoed this in a televised address on Monday, saying that a cease-fire would not include a halt to the use of weapons by the warring parties. No, he explained, the real aim of a “cessation of hostilities” would be to prevent his enemies “from strengthening their positions. Movement of weapons, equipment or terrorists, or fortification of positions, will not be allowed.”

Sebastian Junger’s memorable book, we learned that weather systems, which usually work to cancel each other out, can in that once-in-a-century circumstance combine to create a perfect and awesomely destructive storm.

The same can be true of political and historical forces that we are compelled to conclude have combined to create the perfect refugee storm now rapidly destroying the European Union.

The immediate cause is, of course, the so-called civil war in Syria. It’s not a civil war because Russian and Iranian forces have long since replaced the Assad regime’s forces as one side’s primary belligerent against the Saudi-led effort to overthrow Assad. The risible new “truce” so expertly negotiated by John Kerry does not include Russian air forces in it, so the most devastating part of the fight will continue uninterrupted.

Vladimir Putin couldn’t have foreseen the exodus of people from Syria, but his forces are continuing the pressure that caused it. The fighting around the city of Aleppo alone has produced as many as three hundred thousand refugees, most of whom are gathered on the Syrian-Turkish border. Putin sees the opportunity to destabilize Western Europe by pushing more refugees into its borders. It’s a very useful (to him) byproduct of his military intervention in Syria.