RUTHFULLY YOURS

Cologne is a warning sign of what is coming to Europe. The Islamic attitude toward women is a Pakistani or Egyptian problem for now. But it’s becoming a European and American problem due to migration.

What was a distant horror in Pakistan yesterday, is a nearby horror in our cities and towns today and a permanent reality tomorrow.

In 2011 in the area of Gardone Val Trompia (Brescia) two Pakistanis were killed because they had violated Islamic law: they had worn swimsuits on the beach. Condemning them was the imam of Zingonia (Bergamo) Muhammad Zulkifal, a member of a cell of Al Qaeda with its operational base in Olbia. Zulkifal has always claimed “the role of moral guardian of the community and the right to inflict exemplary punishment to enforce divine law.”

The double murder was accidentally discovered by investigators, thanks to an interception in 2012. Two foreigners, never identified, had asked a Lodi photographer to extract images from a mobile phone. Once at work, the man had found the photos sought by the two, depicting a young Pakistani woman with her face swollen, her arms amputated at the elbows and legs to the knees. The limbs were placed close to the body, “according to the technique used by the Taliban” the investigators had highlighted.

The imam was only arrested in April last year and today the trial was reopened in Sassari before the Assize Court. The investigations have uncovered that Zulkifal is part of an organization responsible for the bloody massacre in 2009 in a market in Peshawar (Pakistan) that caused the death of 100 civilians. The terrorist cell to which he belongs, despite being based in Olbia, also has great influence in Pakistan.

This took place in Italy. Not Pakistan, not Afghanistan, Europe. This nightmare is inside the West. And it’s getting worse.

In a September 9, 2011 Zulkifal said: “Taking a photo you could better position the throat of the corpse … you had to take pictures so you can see even the chest. This thing is great …. ” And in the next interception, the imam was referring to movements on the territory of Brescia, the “trunk of a car” and to a “corpse placed in the ground.”

Apparently Najat Abu Bakr forgot that she is a member of the Palestinian parliament and not the Israeli one. She and her colleagues have no right to criticize President Abbas or any senior official in Ramallah. Such criticism is considered an “insult” to top officials and even an act of treason.

And so we have two legislators. One is forced to seek shelter within her own parliament for fear of being arrested by the Palestinian security forces. The other receives all the rights and privileges enjoyed by her fellow Arabs inside Israel — in spite of her immensely provocative behavior.

That is the difference between a law-abiding country and the Palestinian Authority, which has been functioning for many years as a mafia.

Najat Abu Bakr and many Palestinians dream of the day they too will have a Knesset, a true parliament, where leaders are held accountable.

What do Haneen Zoabi and Najat Abu Bakr have in common?

Both women are outspoken members of parliament — Zoabi in Israel and Abu Bakr in the Palestinian territories.

Zoabi, who hails from Nazareth, is a citizen of Israel. Abu Bakr, from the West Bank city of Nablus, is an elected member of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), the parliament that has been effectively paralyzed since 2007, when Hamas expelled the Palestinian Authority (PA) from the Gaza Strip.

The project of a “French Islam” has failed abysmally. A 2,200-page report, “Suburbs of the Republic,” concluded that Muslim immigrants in France were increasingly rejecting French values and identity, and instead immersing themselves in Islam. The report warned that Islamic sharia law was displacing French civil law in many parts of suburban Paris.

The pattern of “importing” imams with no knowledge of the local language and customs is the same all over Europe.

Qatar and Saudi Arabia, where the official form of Islam is Wahhabism, are the main financiers of mosques in Europe. Wahhabism discourages Muslim integration in the West, but actively encourages jihad against non-Muslims. Qatar has financed mosques in France, Italy, Ireland and Spain, among other places, thus spreading Wahhabism across the continent.

Last week Austria ordered the first foreign-funded imam to be expelled when his visa expires. The decision was made under the new provisions of an anti-radicalization law, which Austria passed one year ago under considerable controversy. The main aim of the law is to counter extremism by requiring imams to speak German, and to prohibit foreign funding for mosques, imams and Muslim organizations in Austria. It also stresses that Austrian law must take precedence over Islamic sharia law for Muslims living in the country.

“We want a future in which increasing numbers of imams have grown up in Austria speaking German, and can in that way serve as positive examples for young Muslims,” said Integration Minister Sebastian Kurz, who helped draft the law. Another 65 imams are expected to be deported in the coming weeks, after being informed that their visas will not be renewed. The decision to deport the foreign imam has — predictably — been deemed unconstitutional by Austria’s Constitutional Court, which finds the law discriminatory because it targets only Muslims.

The sheer malevolent savagery of Islam on display:

A burka-clad babysitter has been arrested in Moscow after she walked through the streets carrying the severed head of a four-year-old girl, Daily Mail reports. Eyewitnesses say the woman shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ as she appeared near Oktyabrskoye Pole metro station in the northwest of the Russian capital and threatened to blow herself up.

Earlier today there were reports that officers had found the headless body of a child aged about four at a block of flats in the city after they were called to a fire. The victim was a girl identified as Nastya M – and the child’s 39-year-old nanny Gyulchehra Bobokulova, from Uzbekistan, has been arrested. The woman was seen pulling the severed head out of a bag and walking around near the entrance to the metro station as police moved in.

Naturally, the police are stumped as to a possible motive. From the Daily Mail:

According to local media, she shouted: ‘I hate democracy. I am a terrorist. I want you dead. You have become so hardened, you have eliminated so many of us. Look I am a suicide bomber, I will die, doomsday will come in a second.’

I trust that anyone that even glances at the fruits of Obama’s 16-month engagement with the Castro-Family-Crime-Syndicate (euphemized as “Cuba” by the media and the Obama administration) marvels.

Because never in the course of U.S. diplomacy has so much been surrendered by so many to so few for so little.

Not a penny of the $7 billion Castro stole at gunpoint from Americans (while torturing and murdering a few Americans who resisted) has been compensated—or even acknowledged. Some of the FBI’s most wanted terrorists still live like celebrities in Cuba. All this after Castro promptly got his murdering (of Americans) terrorists back as a bonus to an economic lifeline from Obama—in the nick of time and much of it at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer.

Oh, and by the way: repression in Cuba–involving everything from thousands, upon thousands of arbitrary arrests by KGB-trained secret police to machete attacks by regime-paid mobs against peaceful women dissidents—has cranked up to a recent record, which is really saying something.

In fact, since Obama began his “opening” to Cuba (which actually commenced the minute he took office in 2009) 6 peaceful Cuban dissident have “mysteriously died” (i.e. been murdered by the KGB-founded and mentored regime.) As usual, the world took no notice of these blatant murders.

This is the same “world,” by the way, that wailed in horror and indignation every time Nelson Mandela complained of a lumpy mattress in his country club prison cell in Apartheid South Africa. Sounds “insensitive,” I know. So have a look at his cell. By Cuban standards, Nelson Mandela’s cell looked like a suite at Motel 6. Naturally President Obama is prominent among those who honor Mandela and demonize his jailers.

While the West debates the humanitarian problem of Syrian refugees flooding across its borders, the discussions repeatedly turn to the dangers they might pose: what if there are terrorists among them? How can we be sure? How can we save those in need of saving and still be safe ourselves?

Yet for many of these refugees, married off against their will, the terror has already begun. They are 11 and 13 and 14 years old. Some of them are pregnant. Some are already mothers at 14. Their husbands are 25 or 38 or 40. And there is no escape.

“Child marriage existed in Syria before the start of the conflict,” reports Girls Not Brides, a global partnership aimed at ending child marriage worldwide, “but the onset of war and the mass displacement of millions of refugees has led to a dramatic rise in the number of girls married as children.”

Indeed, since the start of the refugee crisis, UNICEF reports, as many as “one-third of registered marriages among Syrian refugees in Jordan between January and March 2014 involved girls under 18,” with some as young as 11.

In many cases, these marriages are set up by well-meaning parents who believe their daughters would be safer in the asylum centers if married and so, less likely to be approached sexually by strange men. In other instances, the daughters are sold off by parents who can no longer afford to keep them, or given in marriage to men already planning to leave Syria in the hopes that, once the couple arrives in the West, the parents can then legally join them.

But girls married in their early teens and younger face dark futures, according to Girls Not Brides. They are more likely to live in poverty, often are physically and emotionally abused, are at higher risk for sexually transmitted diseases, and are vulnerable to complications during childbirth – some of them fatal.

The plight of refugee child brides, which some authorities now call a crisis, first came to light in October last year, when 14-year old Fatema Alkasem vanished from a refugee center in the Netherlands along with her husband. She was nine months pregnant at the time.

Soccer is not a sport I follow, but international corruption is an activity to which I’ve devoted a fair amount of attention over the years. When a massive corruption scandal erupted last year within FIFA — the governing body of world soccer — I gave it a passing glance, musing that the FIFA corruption described by U.S. prosecutors as “rampant, systemic, and deep-rooted” bore some distinct similarities to problems I have covered at the United Nations.

This week I did a double take, when FIFA and one of the UN’s iconic has-beens briefly converged. On Thursday, the Associated Press reported that one of the candidates running for the presidency of FIFA, Prince Ali Al Hussein of Jordan, was proposing — should he win — to have an independent panel monitor the FIFA reform process. And of all the eminences, in all the wide world, to whom did Prince Ali extend an invitation to head this reform-promoting panel?

Yep. Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Who, according to his spokesman, “would be available” to take up this task.

As it turned out, Prince Ali lost his bid for the FIFA presidency to Swiss-Italian Gianni Infantino. Whether that knocks Kofi Annan out of the running for Lord High Chancellor of FIFA reform, I don’t know. I have not seen any further reports on where Annan now stands in that lineup. But I am still marveling that at this stage of the game anyone, anywhere, would turn to Annan for help in cleaning up corruption at a global institution. It’s like asking the planners of Obamacare to design your web site.

What’s most remarkable, though, is not how little the would-be reformers of soccer seem to understand about Annan, but how little Annan seems to understand about himself. If almost no one else remembers his own history, surely he does. Exactly what, in his record, would suggest that he is equipped to reform anything? Over a long career, he has scored a great many credentials, including 10 years as the chief administrator of the UN, and self-described “chief diplomat of the world.” But the performance, and judgment — or lack of — that accompanied these credentials could best serve FIFA as a case study in behavior to avoid.

The tone was plaintive, almost bewildered. “We work tirelessly for the good of British society on several fronts,” Anas Altikriti protested before calling a press conference to refute the government’s charge that he and other like-minded Muslim leaders are doing the opposite.

A classified government review by two of Britain’s leading civil servants, expert in the Arab world and Islamist ideology, has concluded that organisations like the one Altikriti heads are, in effect, fronts for the Muslim Brotherhood — a charge they categorically deny.

The Ikhwan al-Muslimeen, as it is known in Arabic, was established in 1928 in Egypt and its goal was — and remains — the step-by-step Islamisation of Muslim communities with the ultimate aim of creating a global Caliphate ruled by holy law. “Allah is our objective” is the Brotherhood’s motto, “The Prophet is our leader. The Koran is our constitution. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

With Altikriti on the platform was Omer El-Hamdoon, president of the Muslim Association of Britain, and Mohammed Kozbar, chairman of the Finsbury Park Mosque, North London, where the press conference was held. “We are not enemies of the state,” said the gently-spoken Hamdoon. All three say they “totally reject the allegation” that they are “in any way linked to the Muslim Brotherhood”.

Altikriti, in particular, has emphasised that he has “absolutely no links” and on its face his denial would seem to be consistent with the values of “tolerance” and “positive co-existence” which he says he is devoted to promoting. It’s certainly a vision a world away from the Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, who sought the moral purification of Muslims, because he regarded them as having been infected by Western decadence. That and his belief that Jews were a major source of the infection help explain why he was an admirer of Hitler and why he translated Mein Kampf into Arabic, calling it My Jihad.

Amidst rumors that Iran is withdrawing its forces from Syria, Debka File reported that “Under cover of the Syrian ceasefire that went into effect Saturday, Feb. 27, and the Russian air umbrella, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps finally managed to secretly install hundreds of armed Palestinian terrorists on the Syrian-Israeli border face-to-face with the IDF’s Golan positions.” Once again, events on the ground contradict Secretary John Kerry’s claim that Iran involvement in Syria is diminishing. “The IRGC has actually pulled its troops back from Syria. Ayatollah Khamenei pulled a significant number of troops out. Their presence is actually reduced in Syria,” Kerry told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations last week.

Apparently, Kerry missed or ignored the statement made Mohammad Pakpour, the commander of the IRGC ground forces earlier this month, confirming that units from its Saberin special forces brigade had been deployed in Syria and Iraq.

Al-Sabirin, is a new terrorist organization that the IRGC and Hizballah “are building in the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.” Debka describes how their agents clandestinely recruited new terrorists from among young Palestinians who fled the Yarmouk refugee camp outside Damascus and sought refuge in Lebanon. Hizballah organized their return to Syria through south Lebanon – but not before training and arming them for penetration deep inside Israel to carry out mass-casualty assaults on IDF positions, highways and civilians.”

The recruitment of Palestinians to fight along the IRGC and Hizballah forces together with the announcement that Teheran will reward of “$7000 to the family of every Palestinian shaheed killed in the Jerusalem intifada, and $30,000 to every family whose house had been razed by Israel, helps to increase Iran’s influence among Palestinians everywhere.

According to ITIC Spotlight on Iran, on February 23, Qasem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC’s Qods Force, met with the families of IRGC fighters who had been killed in Syria. He talked about his presence in Lebanon with senior Hezbollah officials during Second Lebanon War (2006). He said he had returned to Tehran after the first week of the war and met with Ali Larijani, at the time the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (today chairman of the Majlis, the Iranian parliament), and that they had gone together to the city of Mashad and met with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. During the meeting, said Soleimani, they received instructions from Khamenei that changed the outcome of the war. He did not reveal what the instructions were (ISNA, February 23, 2016).”