RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the words of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, the tunnels are being dug not only to “defend the Gaza Strip, but to serve as a launching pad to reach all of Palestine.” As one can see from any map of Palestine, “all of Palestine” does not mean living in peace alongside Israel; it means supplanting Israel.

To its credit, Hamas has been refreshingly transparent about its ambition, the elimination of Israel. Hamas wants the Palestinians to continue living in misery and bitterness. It is fertile soil for jihad recruitment.

A Palestinian Authority-Hamas unity government would mean tunnels not only along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel, but also from the West Bank into Israel.

Forever looming, of course, is the illusion that Abbas will be able to persuade Hamas to abandon its aim to destroy Israel.

The myth that Hamas uses tunnels to smuggle food and other necessities to the “besieged” Gaza Strip has been buried under the rubble of the tunnel that collapsed last week east of Gaza City.

The incident, in which seven members of Hamas’s armed wing, Ezaddin Al-Qassam, were killed when the tunnel they were working in collapsed, provides further proof that the Islamist movement has stayed true to its charter, which calls for the total destruction of Israel.

Islamic State terrorists beheaded a 14-year-old boy in front of his parents, according to ARA News. The murder took place on January 30 in Jarablus – a city in northern Syria. The report said that the boy had missed Friday prayers at the mosque.

At the worship space in central Jarablus, extremist preachers who call for an Islamic Caliphate regularly call down death sentences for alleged sinners.

Human rights campaigner Nasser Taljbini reported that the Islamic sharia court had ordered the execution of sentence to take place in public. “Dozens of people attended the brutal execution, including the victim’s parents who were forced to witness the beheading of their own son,” Taljbini said.

ISIS forces boys and adolescents to fight alongside adult terrorists and sometimes forces them to participate in beheadings of captives.

Earlier this week ISIS reportedly arrested dozens of women in Jarablus for violating the Sharia dress code. According to their interpretation of Islam, women must be fully covered from head to foot. Infractions are dealt with harshly.

Our government is playing games with itself. And losing.

On Wednesday Chaim Levinson reported in Haaretz that for the first time in nearly two years, last week the Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria approved new building plans for a small number of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.

Levinson also reported that last month Jerusalem’s municipal planning and building commission gave final approval to plans to build nearly 900 housing units in the southern neighborhood of Gilo. Initial approval was granted back in 2012.

But in the intervening three years, the commission refused to allow them to go forward.

From the report, we learn that the government’s critics in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria who claimed that it was barring Jewish building were right all along. Despite the government’s denials, the fact is that for at least the last year and a half, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers maintained an undeclared freeze on construction for Israeli Jews in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.

During this period, Jews have only been permitted to build in these areas either on the basis of plans that had received final approval before the unofficial freeze took effect, or in cases where refusal to approve building would have involved admitting that a freeze was in effect. So, for instance, in areas where the rights of Jews to their property in Judea and Samaria have been challenged before the Supreme Court by EU-financed Israeli NGOs like Yesh Din, the government has defended those rights and so given permission for Jews to exercise their property rights.

The government opted to enact this unofficial building freeze, and so trample the civil rights of hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens, in the hopes of convincing the Obama administration to protect Israel from Palestinian efforts to pass anti-Israel resolutions at the UN Security Council.

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.