RUTHFULLY YOURS

U.S. officials said China recently sent fighter jets to a disputed South China Sea island at the center of an escalating spat over who is to blame for the “militarization” of the region.

News of China’s latest deployment of fighter jets to Woody Island, part of the Paracel Islands chain, comes amid bilateral tensions over Beijing’s recent placement of air-defense missiles on the same island and while Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was visiting Washington.

U.S. officials cited the latest aircraft deployment as fresh evidence of Beijing’s efforts to militarize the South China Sea to bolster its maritime claims. Chinese officials have defended their activities in the area as defensive and legitimate, and blamed Washington for fueling regional tensions.

The recent fighter-jet deployment “is not a surprise and has been going on for the last few years,” said Capt. Darryn James, a spokesman for U.S. Pacific Command. “But it is still part of a disturbing trend of China’s militarization of the South China Sea.”

The fighters include the advanced J-11, a Chinese variant of the Russian-made Su-27, and the indigenously designed JH-7 fighter-bomber, according to Capt. James. He didn’t elaborate on when and how many aircraft were sent to Woody Island. READ MORE AT SITE

U.S. President Barack Obama has proudly declared that the Iran nuclear deal was the signature achievement of his second term in office, and his key foreign policy accomplishment. What Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act) was for his first term, the Iran nuclear deal was for his second. And much like Obamacare, time has not healed the wounds of the debate over the Iran deal or made the “accomplishment” any more popular.

It should be no surprise that Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction by an overwhelming margin (over 70% believe this) or that the Iran deal has become less popular over time. We are in the midst of a presidential election campaign. Republicans routinely skewer the president on both domestic issues and foreign policy — particularly regarding the chaotic nature of the situations in Libya, Syria and Iraq, and the emergence of the Islamic State group, which has led to the greatest human disaster in the Middle East in decades and Europe’s greatest refugee crisis in 70 years.

Every presidential debate involves several if not all the Republican contenders denouncing the Iran deal as one of the worst ever negotiated, and one that — given its status as an executive agreement rather than a treaty — is subject to immediate termination upon a new president taking office. The Democrats — meaning Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — almost never discuss foreign policy, since the energy in the Democratic race has been supplied by Sanders and his supporters, and their agenda is almost exclusively domestic (other than cutting defense spending). Both Sanders and Clinton supported the Iran deal, as did almost all Democrats in the House of Representatives and the Senate, choosing loyalty to their president over any realistic appraisal of the merits of the agreement (giveaway) negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry and State Department official Wendy Sherman.

The most recent public opinion polling on the Iran deal by the Gallup organization shows 57% opposed and 30% in support. This is by far the widest margin favoring the opposition to the deal since the talks began and since the deal was struck. Barely half of Democrats (51%) support the deal, and only 9% of Republicans do. Independents oppose the deal by almost the identical percentage as the entire national survey, 53% to 30%. Only 14% of Americans have a favorable opinion of Iran.

Again, this should be no surprise — the agreement is routinely condemned in the debates in one party for the nomination — the one which has attracted far more voters and media interest so far. Democratic presidential candidates and the Obama administration itself have been making almost no effort to defend it.

The president and his administration have also been on defense almost since the moment the deal was struck. The supposed “new Iran” which was ready to join the community of nations and become a more moderate, responsible regional power, has been anything but. The president appeared to believe that a stronger, more confident Iran, could achieve a rough balance of power with the Sunni Arab states, and this would enable the United States to further disengage from the area. The president seems to believe that the world is better off and more likely to resolve its disputes when the United States is removed from the picture. Somehow this balance of power arrangement in the region would also be stable and peaceful. It is difficult to choose the right word to characterize such a belief in everything just working out in this part of the world — but it is somewhere between naivete and lunacy.

The seizure of an American ship by the Iranians, and the humiliating picture of our captive sailors with their hands over their heads, was probably the single worst pubic relations disaster for the administration. But anyone following the recent news on Iran would also be aware of their ballistic missile tests and their

Henry Kissinger famously remarked some time ago that Iran must decide whether it wants to be “a nation or a cause.” For decades, U.S. presidents of both parties have been trying to coax Tehran toward the former and away from the latter.

Most recently, the U.S.-led global nuclear agreement with Iran – with its scores of billions in sanctions relief that President Obama hoped Iran would invest to improve the living standards of its people – was designed to convince Tehran to abandon its revolutionary ways and become a nation in good standing.

But if Tehran’s political crackdown before its upcoming Feb. 26 elections for the Assembly of Experts and Parliament is any indication, the Islamic Republic shows few signs of moderating its ideological impulses. Thus we should expect more of the revolutionary fervor that drives Iran’s efforts to destabilize Sunni regimes, impose its will on their successors and, in that way, advance its hegemonic ambitions.

All of that, in turn, presages no new day in U.S.-Iranian relations, as Obama and his top advisers hoped to create in inking the nuclear deal. Instead, it sets the stage for a still-larger challenge for the next president, with Tehran deploying the financial windfall from that deal to expand its military, advance its weaponry and strengthen its terrorist proxies.

Iran’s ruling class has long played a cat-and-mouse game with the nation’s limited democratic processes – promoting Iran’s democratic trappings to a naive Western audience that seeks its global integration while, behind the scenes, ensuring that no real democracy will unseat the clerics who run things.

“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Pope Francis declared on his flight back to Rome last week.The political implications of his statement have been considered in some detail in recent days, but his assertion also needs to be examined in the light of history.

Had it not been for the walls, strongly built and staunchly defended, Christendom would not have survived the onslaught of Islam in its thousand-year-long period of military expansion. Two prominent examples come from the final two centuries of that period: the sieges of Vienna in 1529 and 1683. The first marked an important early check on Turkish advances, after a century of conquest in the Balkans and Central Europe. The second saved Europe and finally turned the tide. German, Hungarian, Polish, and other defenders of the walls of Vienna were Christian warriors par excellence. During the second siege the city was saved thanks to an alliance between the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Poland, which was brokered at the last minute by Pope Innocent XI. In thanksgiving for the victory at Vienna on September 12, 1683, Pope Innocent fixed that date as the Feast of the Holy Name of Mary.

Over two centuries earlier, in July 1456, some 6,000 Christian soldiers successfully defended the walls of Belgrade from Sultan Mehmed’s army of 50,000. During the siege Pope Callixtus III ordered the bells of all churches to be rung every day at noon, as a call for believers to pray for Belgrade’s defenders; that practice has continued to this day, even though not many people know its origins. An old Franciscan monk and preacher, John of Capistrano, played a key role in the battle and personally led a detachment of troops. For his valor and burning faith Pope Alexander canonized “the soldier priest” in 1690.

Considering what European Union policies have done to Europe, it seems all too apt for its capital to be a hive of Islamic terror and on the road to becoming a majority Muslim city.

Then turn to Brussels, some parts of which host large communities of Moroccan and Turkish immigrants, mostly from religiously conservative regions of those countries. Among respondents in the city, practising Catholics amounted to 12% and non-practising ones to 28%. Some 19% were active Muslims and another 4% were of Muslim identity without practising the faith. The atheist/agnostic camp came to 30%.

Among people who actually practice a religion, Muslims are a majority. And as usual, with Islamic indoctrination and birth rates, the news becomes more troubling in the lower age groups.

Thus among respondents aged 55 and over, practising Catholics amounted to 30% and practising Muslims to less than 1%; but among those aged between 18 and 34, active adherence to Islam (14%) exceeded the practice of Catholicism (12%). Admittedly the sample (600 people in all) is small. But if this trend continues, practitioners of Islam may soon comfortably exceed devout Catholics not just in cosmopolitan Brussels, as is the case already, but across the whole of Belgium’s southern half.

Here’s how demographics sneak up on you. And they have a hell of a bite. Now you can understand why Brussels has become such a terror hub.

The greater Brussels area has long been considered to be a hotbed for radical Islamists. Troubled neighborhoods like Molenbeek and Anderlecht are known as being homes to secluded communities of immigrants in which radicals can easily go underground. So has Belgium become the center of terror in Europe and a security risk for the entire Continent?

These people who are firing their weapons and blowing themselves up don’t appear out of nowhere,” respected Belgian sociologist Felice Dassetto wrote on his blog after the Paris attacks. “They were not born yesterday, in the last months or solely in the context of Daesh (editors: the pejorative Arabic term for Islamic State). They are the children and grandchildren of 50 years of radical ideology and jihadists.” And whereas it has taken a half-century to create this jihadi culture, it will take many more (than 50) to convince Muslims that the culture of jihad has led Islam to its current moral and intellectual disaster, “but it is never too late to start.”

Originally posted on Jihad Watch.

“In October 2010, Merkel told a meeting of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party at Potsdam that attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany had ‘utterly failed,’ stating that: ‘The concept that we are now living side by side and are happy about it’ does not work and ‘we feel attached to the Christian concept of mankind, that is what defines us. Anyone who doesn’t accept that is in the wrong place here.’” — from the Wikipedia entry for Angela Merkel

The announcement by Angela Merkel’s government that Germany will take in another 500,000 Muslim “refugees” in 2016, on top of the 1.1. million Germany took in in 2015, should fill any well-informed German, or European, with bewilderment and dread. After all, throwing open the doors of Europe to what is in effect an invasion by Muslims (an invasion that needs no weapons, and that is accomplishing its conquests through demography), represents a complete and astonishing break with the West’s long history of resisting Islamic imperialism, a resistance bolstered by Western Christendom’s historic memory of the subjugation, through violence, of non-Muslims by Muslims from North Africa to India. This expansion of Dar al-Islam – the Domain of Islam — at the expense of non-Muslims was recognized as being a natural and essential part of Islam, to which statesmen as various as John Quincy Adams, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Winston Churchill have all testified. When the great mass of Christians thought about Muslims at all, they never doubted that they had been well-informed by those who had studied Islam or by those who had observed Muslims in their own lands: Islam was an all-encompassing and fanatical faith, deeply hostile to the two monotheisms – Judaism and Christianity – that preceded it.

No Westerner prior to the present age would have employed that soothing and misleading phrase about “the three great Abrahamic faiths” that has gained such foolish currency, serving to conceal a great many differences at the very moment when Muslims are managing to enter the West in large numbers. In the Western world, even if they could not cite sura and ayat by number, non-Muslims in Europe for more than a millennium had a much better understanding of Islam than we do now, and instead of that “three Abrahamic faiths” nostrum, they knew, though perhaps not literally, the Muslim injunction to “take not Christians and Jews as friends, for they are friends only with each other.” This understanding did not depend on Europeans studying the contents of Sura 9 and a hundred other jihad verses in the Qur’an, or many hundreds of anti-Infidel hadiths. The inhabitants of Europe learned about Islam by coming into contact with Muslim raiders up and down their coasts, and with Muslim privateers attacking Christian shipping in the Mediterranean, seizing seamen as well as goods and the ships themselves.

They fled religious hatred, rape and violence in their homelands for the “safe” haven of Germany — only to encounter the same, brutal conditions in their new accommodations: the refugee hostel.

Violence in refugee centers became a national topic in Germany last October, only weeks after Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel invited into Europe one million, mainly Muslim, refugees. But exposure of this disgraceful situation appears to have had little effect, as German newspapers are reporting this month that conditions remain unchanged.

In fact, life in German refugee hostels has now become so unbearable thatreligious minorities, women traveling alone or with children, and homosexuals are fleeing their accommodations. For them, according to one paper, the word “hostel” has become synonymous with ‘”defenselessness”.

The constant harassment and mistreatment at the hands of Muslim male refugees is not only becoming intolerable and dangerous, but, for some, life-threatening.

“Torn bibles and insults, ripped off crosses and even blows to the face, the complaints about violence in the refugee centers do not let up,” the German newspaper, Die Welt, stated recently.

According to Rainer Wendt, chairman of the German Police Union, outbreaks of violence in German refugee centers were occurring before last August. In the first six months of 2015, police were called out 1,288 times to refugee asylums and registered 499 crimes. One problem is definitely the overcrowding, Wendt said, but there are also “knallharte” (very brutal) criminal structures among the refugees.

At dawn on February 16, 2016, Belgian authorities launched nine counter-terrorism raids throughout the City of Brussels. In the months following the Paris attacks and more revelations of the growing jihadist problem in Brussels, authorities unleashed a measure to crack down on Islamic State (IS) recruitment cells.

The police raids included suburban areas of Brussels including Kuechenberg, Schaerbeek, Etterbeck, and Molenbeek, which was where many of November’s Paris attacks resided. Molenbeek has the home of individuals linked to terrorism since the 1990s. One of the 2004 Madrid train bombers had ties to the area, as did the Jewish museum shooter Mehdi Nemmouche, and Paris hostage taker Amedy Coulibaly.

Prosecutors said the raids were not related to the Paris attacks, but rather to locate and dismantle recruitment centers. Information collected by authorities showed many of those arrested had gone to Syria to join IS.

Belgian police are still holding nine people in question over the November Paris attacks as more evidence points to the plot being completely hatched in Belgium.

Earlier this month authorities discovered three safe houses that were used for suspects of the Paris attacks. One in Brussels, another in Charleroi, an hour south of the capital, and Auvelais a village near the French border.

If only President Obama were as tough on America’s enemies as he’s been on his own domestic rivals. Recall his statement, during the 2008 presidential campaign, on how to deal with Republicans: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” Unfortunately, no such creed seems to apply in Obama’s dealings with North Korea (or, for that matter, with Iran, or Russia, or Cuba…). Instead, while Pyongyang prepares a nuclear test, Obama brings neither a gun nor a knife to the showdown. Rather, in apparent hope of yet another “historic” bargain to cap the rotten nuclear deal with Iran and the feckless embrace of Cuba’s Castro regime, he extends his hand to Pyongyang.

So we learn from a Feb. 21 Wall Street Journal scoop, headlined: “U.S. Agreed to North Korea Peace Talks Before Latest Nuclear Test.” The Journal article, by Alastair Gale and Carol E. Lee, broke the news that “days before North Korea’s latest nuclear-bomb test, the Obama administration secretly agreed to talks to try to formally end the Korean War, dropping a longstanding condition that Pyongyang first take steps to curtail its nuclear arsenal.”

In other words, while North Korea was readying its fourth nuclear test, the Obama administration was quietly offering concessions to North Korea’s tyrant Kim Jong Un. Make no mistake, for America to talk with North Korea at all is, in itself, a concession — dignifying the world’s most horrific rogue regime, while setting the stage for yet another round of North Korean cheating and nuclear extortion. For the American superpower, erstwhile leader of the Free World, to furtively offer sweeteners — and this one was a whopper — in hope of opening official talks with Kim is even worse. Concessions that the State Department may regard as carrots are viewed by North Korea as capitulation.

In settlement talks with the German auto maker Volkswagen over their cheating on emissions tests by including a gadget that could fool the government, the EPA is trying to force the company to subsidize the American electric car industry to “atone” for its sins.

Washington Times:

According to the report Sunday, the EPA wants VW, the world’s largest automaker by some measures, to produce electric cars at its U.S. manufacturing plant in Chattanooga, Tenn. It also is using settlement talks with the German giant, to get help in building a network of charging stations throughout the U.S. — the main practical problem with electric cars, given their short range.

The German report did not specify its sources, according to multiple accounts in the English-language press.

“Talks with the EPA are ongoing and we are not commenting on the contents and state of the negotiations,” a spokesman for Volkswagen said. EPA refused to comment to Welt am Sonntag.

Whether the report is accurate or not isn’t the point. The point is, it’s entirely believable. Perhaps more than any other agency in government besides the IRS, the EPA loves to throw its weight around, threatening and bullying companies large and small. How many individual lives have been ruined by this agency’s arrogance and disregard for procedures and the law?

No doubt, what Volkswagen did is despicable. It sought an unfair competitive advantage over its rivals by thumbing its nose at the law. Punishment should be severe, and the company should be forced to make changes to the engines in every auto and truck that is in violation of emissions standards.

But the EPA has no business forcing the company to subsidize the American electric car industry, which can’t sell the American people on its underpowered, overpriced lemons.