RUTHFULLY YOURS

Iran’s capture of 10 American sailors earlier this month is proving to be the gift that keeps on giving — for Iran.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei awarded Iran’s highest military honor — the Fath (Victory) medal — to five Iranian commanders who captured the Americans off Farsi Island.

The ceremony shows that Iran continues to rub America’s nose in the humiliation.

Fox News:

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei awarded the Order of Fat’h medal to the head of the navy of the Revolutionary Guards and four commanders who seized the two U.S. Navy vessels, according to Reuters. Iran’s state media reported the news on Sunday.

In a tweet sent from his account Sunday, Khamenei misidentified those who were “captured” as being members of the Marines.

On Jan. 12, Iran captured 10 sailors whose boats “misnavigated” into Iranian waters, according to Defense Secretary Ash Carter. Though the sailors were released the following day, Iran released video of the sailors being captured, detained and apologizing for the incursion.

In one of the more enduring images from the video of the capture, the sailors are shown kneeling on the decks of the boats, with their hands on their heads, all while being watched by armed Iranian troops. Though U.S. officials initially sought to downplay the encounter, Carter recently said the images made him “very, very angry.”

N24 television has reported that up to 50% of “asylum seekers” have gone into hiding and their whereabouts are unknown. They presumably include economic migrants and others who are trying to avoid deportation if or when their asylum applications are rejected.

Tens of thousands of migrants destroyed their passports and other identity documents before arriving in Germany. It may take years for German authorities to determine the true identities of these people and their countries of origin.

Even if Germany sends these individuals back to the countries where they first entered the EU (usually Greece, Hungary or Italy), with a borderless Europe, migrants can easily make their way back to Germany.

German authorities are downplaying migrant lawlessness, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiment.

Migrants are still coming to Germany at the rate of about 2,000 per day.

“Eight to ten million migrants are still on the way.” – Development Minister Gerd Müller.

In other news from the receding tide of war, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has given medals to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who recently captured and humiliated American sailors.

Iran state media reported Sunday that the Supreme Leader had awarded the Fath, or Victory, medal to the head of the Revolutionary Guards navy and four commanders who were involved in seizing two U.S. Navy boats in January. The two patrol boats were seized after they somehow entered Iran’s territorial waters. The Pentagon hasn’t publicly explained what happened, but the Revolutionary Guards have said they believe the boats entered their waters by mistake.

The Guards released the boats and crew, but not before deliberately embarrassing the sailors, the Navy, and the U.S. by broadcasting photos of the Americans in captivity, including the one nearby of the U.S. sailors on their knees with their hands behind their heads under armed Iranian guard.

Secretary of State John Kerry initially hailed the return of the sailors as a sign of the great new era of U.S.-Iran cooperation in the wake of the nuclear accord. “I think we can all imagine how a similar situation might have played out three or four years ago, and the fact that today this kind of issue can be resolved peacefully and efficiently is a testament to the critical role diplomacy plays in keeping our country safe, secure, and strong,” Mr. Kerry said.

Suspected Boko Haram members stormed a refugee encampment in northeast Nigeria, killing at least 60 people, many of them children burned to death in makeshift homes.

The attack spotlighted the Islamist insurgency’s brutal punishment of those fleeing its violence.

The assault began on Saturday night in the small town of Dalori, which houses a camp for Nigerians and other West Africans made homeless by the group’s violence, said a military spokesman, Col. Mustapha Anka. Several suicide bombers ran toward the camp’s gates while gunmen on motorcycles traversed the area firing assault rifles, he said.

The terrorists dressed in military fatigues, as Boko Haram fighters often do, said a survivor, Maina Bukar. Several of them set fire to mud-brick homes with families trapped inside. “I had to run and hide,” he said.

Many of the dead were children, Mr. Bukar said, adding that he helped recover 60 bodies. His account matches that of another survivor, cited by the Associated Press, who described hiding in a tree as Boko Haram militants firebombed homes below him. Three suicide bombers, all women, then ran into a group of people fleeing to a nearby village, the AP reported.

TEL AVIV—Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday criticized a French proposal to recognize Palestine as a sovereign state, calling it an incentive for the Palestinians not to compromise in negotiations to resolve their long-running conflict.

France said Friday it would recognize the State of Palestine if one last attempt to bring the two sides together through an international conference failed. Mr. Netanyahu told a weekly cabinet meeting Sunday the proposal meant France effectively supported the Palestinian leadership.

“This will be an incentive for the Palestinians to come and not compromise,” he said.

He reiterated that Israel was prepared to enter direct negotiations with the Palestinians but without preconditions or terms dictated by the international community.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said France would try to convene an international event with the Israelis, the Palestinians and Arab states to start negotiations on a peace agreement.
Palestinian officials welcomed the proposal by France and called on other countries to pressure Israel to cease building of settlements on the land it captured after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and on which Palestinians want to build a future state.

Regarding the Syrian peace talks that began over the weekend in Geneva, allow us to raise two questions: What peace—and what talks?

The regime of Bashar Assad is intensifying its longstanding “starve or kneel” policy against besieged enclaves containing an estimated half a million people. The regime has also scored recent battlefield victories against moderate opposition forces, aided by a combination of Russian air power, Hezbollah ground fighters and Iran’s elite Quds Force.

Meantime, the Institute for the Study of War reports that Islamic State (ISIS) has responded to its recent losses in Iraq by launching a fresh offensive in eastern Syria to consolidate control of the Euphrates River valley, while the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front is gaining strength in Aleppo, once Syria’s commercial capital. Neither ISIS nor Nusra are at the talks, and they will continue to fight regardless of what comes out of Geneva.

Also not represented are Kurdish forces, which have been the most effective ground fighters against ISIS but were excluded due to Turkish sensitivities.

Instead, the opposition is represented by an umbrella group backed by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia called the High Negotiations Committee, which is demanding that the regime lift its starvation sieges and end air strikes as a precondition to “proximity negotiations”—so named because the two sides won’t agree to sit in the same room. But the opposition’s diplomatic leverage has fallen with its battlefield fortunes, so any deal it might strike in Geneva would have little effect inside Syria.

Sweden is one of the most welcoming countries in Europe, taking in more refugees per capita than anyone else.

But residents of at least one small town outside Gothenburg, Sweden’s second largest city, are beginning to regret that open arms policy.

Mölndal is a quiet suburb of 63,000. But in the last year, more than 4,000 refugees – most of them unaccompanied minors from the Middle East and Africa – have set off a crime wave that culminated in the murder of a social worker in a refugee center that has shocked Europe.

Daily Mail:

The murder of social worker Alexandra Mezher at a home for unaccompanied refugees this week has shone the spotlight on the country’s controversial open-door immigration policy.

The 22-year-old’s mother Chimene, who arrived in Sweden as a refugee, claims the country is no longer safe.

Heartbroken Mrs Mezher said: ‘We left Lebanon to escape the civil war, the violence and the danger. We came to Sweden where it was safe, to start a family. But it is not safe anymore.’

Her husband Bourous, 45, moved to Sweden from Beirut in 1989 and built up a pizza business. Mrs Mezher, who has three sons, said: ‘She was not just my daughter, she was my angel. She was a just and fair human being. There were so many who loved her. She was my daughter, my friend.’

She blamed Swedish politicians for a dramatic rise in immigration in Molndal – particularly of unaccompanied children.

Escaped eyewitnesses have reported that ISIS places Iraqi and Syrian Christians in cages or coffins and sets them on fire.

ISIS persecution of Christians “fits the definition of ethnic cleansing.” — Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial.

When a 1,400-year-old Iraqi Christian monastery was destroyed by the Islamic State (ISIS) most of the world condemned the demolition — except for spokesman for the U.S. military’s Operation Inherent Resolve, Col. Steve Warren.

“Thousands [of Iraqi Christians] have been killed, hundreds of thousands have been forced to flee,” said CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in an interview with Col. Warren the other week. “There is legitimate fear — you’re there in Baghdad — that the long history of Christians living peacefully, productively in Iraq, is coming to an end. How worried should we be about the Christian community in Iraq?”

Col. Warren’s response: “Wolf, ISIL doesn’t care if you’re a Christian … We’ve seen no specific evidence of a specific targeting towards Christians.”

Except that roughly two-thirds of Iraq’s 1.5 million Christian citizens have been killed or forced to flee the country by ISIS and its jihadi predecessors over the past decade. This has nothing to do with their religious identity?

FRANKFURT—Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel Saturday said she expects many refugees to leave Europe’s largest economy once the war in Syria is over, addressing public concerns the country won’t be able to cope with the continued influx of immigrants.

“We expect that once peace is restored in Syria” and once terror organization ISIS is curtailed, many refugees will return back home, Ms. Merkel told members of her conservative Christian Democratic Party at a gathering broadcast on German television channel ARD.

The recent changes of asylum laws will noticeably reduce the number of immigrants.

Last year, 1.1 million migrants—mainly Arabs, Afghans and Africans—came to Germany to escape war and hardship, many of them risking their lives to make the dangerous journey. Authorities have scrambled to accommodate the influx and Ms. Merkel is facing growing public discontent, especially after the alleged role of foreign-born men in the mass assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve.

Europe is bottling up migrants at the foot of the Balkans as its other plans for stemming the migration crisis flounder.

European Union member states have sent border guards, police vehicles and fingerprinting machines to Macedonia, a nonmember of the bloc. The goal: to squeeze the river of people still streaming north from Greece toward Germany into a trickle, turning away all but those from warn-torn countries such as Syria and Iraq.

The mounting restrictions are buying German Chancellor Angela Merkel time as she asks voters for patience and lobbies fellow EU leaders to implement what she promises will be a comprehensive solution to the migration crisis.

Ms. Merkel wants Turkey to dismantle smuggling networks that bring migrants across the Aegean Sea to Greece, and she wants Greece to set up large registration camps that would allow recognized refugees to be distributed across the EU.

But with the chancellor’s approach making little headway, many European policy makers say they have only until March to reduce the numbers from the Middle East, South Asia and Africa who are arriving in the Continent’s core, mainly Germany.