RUTHFULLY YOURS

—The trial of four men from west London who were allegedly poised to carry out an Islamic State-inspired gun attack in the U.K. capital opened on Monday.

Prosecutors say British Muslims Tarik Hassane, 22, Suhaib Majeed, 21, Nyall Hamlett, 25, and Nathan Cuffy, 26, were planning to murder a police officer or soldier with a silencer-equipped pistol, but the plan was foiled when authorities arrested them in 2014.

The case underscores the growing number of Islamic extremist plots in Europe targeted at police or military personnel.

Potential targets may have included the Shepherd’s Bush police station in West London and the nearby Parachute Regiment barracks, prosecutors alleged, after a forensic examination of Mr. Hassane’s electronic device found he had used Google Street View to case their locations.

“If the plot had been allowed to run its course, it would have resulted in a terrorist murder or murders on the streets of London, according to the warped ideology of the defendants, in the cause, and for the sake, of Allah,” lead prosecutor Brian Altman said

Islamic State fighters launched a naval assault in northern Libya last week, dispatching three boats that fired on an oil terminal at Zueitina. Local guards repelled that attack, but it was a reminder of Islamic State’s growing capabilities and reach beyond its heartland in Syria and Iraq. Too bad Western capitals seem unprepared to stop it.

The Zueitina episode was the latest in a string of Islamic State attacks in Libya since the new year. On Jan. 8 an Islamic State truck bomb hit a police academy in Zliten, western Libya, killing 65 people. The same week Islamic State arson attacks ignited two other Libyan oil terminals. Islamic State draws much of its revenue by marketing oil from captured fields in Iraq and Syria.

Following the Zletin truck bombing, the European Union—300 miles across the Mediterranean—offered $108 million in security assistance to Libya. The aid is supposed to take the form of technical and logistical support to the newly formed Libyan unity government, currently based in neighboring Tunisia.

In Syria, Bashar Assad is trying to bring his enemies to heel by blocking humanitarian convoys to desperate civilians living in besieged towns. The policy is called “starve or kneel,” and it is openly supported by Hezbollah and tacitly by Iran, which has deployed its elite Quds Force to aid Mr. Assad’s war effort.

So what better time for right-thinking liberals to ask: “Is Iran really so evil?”

That’s the title of a revealing essay in Politico by Stephen Kinzer, a former New York Times reporter now at Brown University. “The demonization of Iran is arguably the most bizarre and self-defeating of all U.S. foreign policies,” Mr. Kinzer begins. “Americans view Iran not simply as a country with interests that sometimes conflict with ours but as a relentless font of evil.”

Mr. Kinzer’s essay was published Sunday, as sanctions were lifted on Tehran and four of America’s hostages came home after lengthy imprisonments. The Obama administration publicly insists that the nuclear deal does not mean the U.S. should take a benign view of Iran, but the more enthusiastic backers of the agreement think otherwise. “Our perception of Iran as a threat to vital American interests is increasingly disconnected from reality,” Mr. Kinzer writes. “Events of the past week may slowly begin to erode the impulse that leads Americans to believe patriotism requires us to hate Iran.”

I share Daniel Johnson’s concern about Europe’s future—although not always for the reasons he cites. In general, I believe he conflates Europe’s domestic pathologies with the effects on Europe of global events, not all of which are of Europe’s making and not all of which are as grave as he stipulates. He writes, for instance, that the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris mark a culmination so far in “a concerted campaign directed mainly at Europeans.” Those attacks are certainly the ones Europeans noticed, because they were the victims, but they are largely irrelevant to the main “campaign”: a vicious Islamic civil war and a superpower conflict by proxy. In that war’s real theaters, the death toll dwarfs, to say the least, anything directed mainly at Europeans.

As for the other reasons why Europe’s future could well be bleak, I would list several. The United States is now the Sick Man of the Globe, and when a hegemonic power falls into desuetude, disorder is inevitable. The Eurozone crisis and Europe’s moribund economies have exacted a steep price in public trust of Europe’s institutions. The world has not naturally adopted liberal democracy as a form of government (as many had hoped at the end of the cold war), and the rise of illiberal democracies, particularly in Russia and Turkey, is a great danger—both directly in that Russian forces now openly threaten European countries and indirectly in that the authoritarian contagion has spread to Europe’s own southern and eastern flanks.

This is hardly to deny that the catastrophic breakdown of states and social order in much of the Islamic world—leaving a quarter-million dead in Syria alone — is a threat to Europe. But 800,000 asylum-seekers provoking a clash of civilizations on Europe’s soil, plunging it into chaos on the scale of the Middle East? Not so fast.

Muslim governmental officials — not “ISIS” — in nations such as Brunei, Somalia, and Tajikistan continue openly and formally to express their hostility for Christmas and Christianity. And extremist Muslims — not “ISIS” — continue to terrorize and slaughter Christians on Christmas in nations as diverse as Bangladesh, Belgium, the Congo, Germany, Indonesia, Iran, Nigeria, Philippines, Syria, the West Bank, and even the United States.

On Christmas Day in the West Bank, two Muslims were arrested for setting a Christmas tree on fire in a Christian-majority village near Jenin. On the same day in Bethlehem, Muslim rioters greeted the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem with a hail of stones. Authorities subsequently arrested 16 “Salafi radicals” who were planning to carry out terror attacks against tourists celebrating Christmas.

If this was Christmas in Bethlehem — Christ’s birthplace and scene of the Nativity — Christmas in other parts of the world experienced similar abuse.

In the United States, a 46-year-old Christian mother of three was among the 14 people killed in the San Bernardino terrorist attack targeting a Christmas party. Ironically, Bennetta Bet-Badal had fled Iran for the U.S. when she was 18 to escape the persecution of Christians after the 1979 Islamic revolution. After graduating from college with a degree in chemistry and marrying and raising three children, the jihad caught up with her. She was attending a Christmas luncheon and bringing gifts to her co-workers when Muslim terrorists burst in and massacred them.

Belgium resembled Bethlehem: A video appeared showing a number of youths lighting a firebomb under a Christmas tree in Brussels. Seconds later, there is an explosion, and the tree is engulfed in flames. Young men shouting “Allahu Akbar,” [“Allah is Greater”] run away. The person who originally uploaded the video, Mohamed Amine, has since taken his Facebook page down.

Dying Germany has only one item on its bucket list, and that is redemption. The Germans cannot seek redemption from the crimes of their grandparents because they do not understand what motivated them to do such terrible things.

For Merkel and most of Germany’s elite, the appearance on Germany’s threshold of millions of Muslim refugees is a final chance at redemption, an opportunity for Germany to redeem itself from the crimes of its past through a transcendent act of selflessness.

Denke ich an Deutschland in der Nacht
Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht

If I think of Germany in the night
It kills my sleep.

– Heinrich Heine.

Once there was an old man who in his youth committed a terrible crime, the murder of many innocents. He no longer could remember what drove him to do this; he tried not to think about it, and his memories came to mind unwillingly and infrequently. Rage and guilt had faded long ago into a vague residue of disgust. He worked hard and found some distraction in the monotony of daily tasks. He sought diversion in tasteless entertainment; he followed football, looked at pornography, watched the dubbed version of American comedies, and took vacations at the beach.

He had a child but no grandchildren; his child knew that he once did unforgivable things, but did not want to know what they were, and the old man did not want to tell him. The old crime hung like a black curtain between them.

The old man could feel that he did not have long to live. Ahead of him he saw only days clouded with boredom, illuminated only by the occasional flash of regret. He let the days come and go one at a time until their count might come to an end, for he did not know any other way to live. Because he had no ties to life, he had no way to prepare for death.

One day the old man met a street urchin and on an impulse invited him back to his apartment. He fed the strange boy and gave him a place to sleep. The next morning the old man bought the urchin new clothes, and gave him things — a smartphone, a video-game system, a football jersey. The street kid made himself at home and said little.

Israelis live under constant threat of attacks that can occur anywhere, anytime, any way – from suicide bombings to stabbings to being run over with cars. (And this doesn’t even address the threat of large-scale attacks that loom on the horizon.)

The West has had the relative luxury of looking at Israel from afar and feeling a sense of how different life is here, compared to there. But times are changing as evil gains ground. Westerners can no longer cast their eyes to Israel and sense a great divide between us and them anymore. The Israeli reality has become the West’s reality as we face increasing terror attacks that crop up anywhere, anytime, any way.

These events are no longer occasional (though that would be bad enough). They’re not even every month or two (though that would be bad enough). Jihad has become a daily reality. Here is a sampling from just last week of some of the horror that the religion of horrors served up.

Bavaria: A group of Nigerian “refugee” women attacked a refugee center worker, attempting to strangle him while they held their babies in front as human shields so the man would not fight back. (here)

Brussels: Muslim adolescent boys sexually assaulted a teenage girl on a train. (here)

Denmark: A 15-year-old convert to Islam was arrested for possessing explosives. (here)

Canada: Two Muslims attempted to shoot up a nightclub full of people. A Muslim serial rapist was arrested after having raped at least ten teenage girls. (here, here, and here)

Germany: Three Muslim teenagers stoned two “transgender” people. (There really is no such thing as a “transgender” person, but for the sake of this report, the term is being used.) The attackers were apprehended and told the police: “such persons must be stoned.” Teenage girls were sexually assaulted and raped by “Syrian migrants” at a swimming pool. A Muslim man kicked a woman in her face and broke her cheekbone while attempting to rape her. Christians continued to be targeted by Muslims at asylum centers. (here, here, here, and here)

France: A Muslim teenager attacked a Jewish teacher with a machete and a knife, stating that he was acting in allegiance with the Islamic State. (Life for Jews in France has become so perilous that Jewish men are being urged not to wear yarmulkes in public.) Women continued to come forward to report sexual assaults from New Year’s eve. (here, here, and here)

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is yet another toothless U.N. body that is in for a whirlwind of frustration when it inspects Iran’s nuclear program sites. The provisions of the agreement negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry and his team of sycophants make Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” negotiations with Hitler look like a stroke of genius.

Iran’s Islamic regime is an incredibly dangerous foe. Like ISIS (or Daesh, a moniker that group loathes), Iran has an apocalyptic view of current and near-future events. But this time around, a group of believers in Shia Iran, with tremendous resources, are intent upon forcing the issue, making the conditions so dire that they leave the reluctant Saheb-ul-Zaman, the Lord of the Age, the Mahdi, their messianic myth, no choice but to appear and assume his universal reign.

Devotees drive both, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic State, to quicken the End Times apocalypse. Iranian leaders hold to a Shia brand. ISIS leaders hold to a Sunni brand. But both are obsessed by a belief that their messiah is coming. The Iran Shiites believe they must lay the groundwork for the messiah (Mahdi) to come and build their Kingdom or Imamate. ISIS isn’t really waiting. They have propelled a jihadist storm to build the Caliphate now, so that the Mahdi will come soon.

TAIPEI — Taiwan’s first female president, Tsai Ing-wen, takes a novel approach to politics on an island renowned for its legislative brawls and fiery standoffs with Beijing.

The 59-year-old former law professor, who won a landslide election victory on Saturday, shuns confrontation, listens rather than lectures, and is happiest poring over policy details, say people who know her.

Even so, in over two decades in politics and government, they say she has proven to be a tough negotiator, having shepherded Taiwan’s entry to the World Trade Organization, and she’s a passionate believer in Taiwan’s democracy as its defining feature — rather than its divisive relations with China, which sees the island as its territory.

Her quiet pragmatism struck a chord with voters, winning the presidency and helping secure a legislative majority for her Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, which espouses independence from the mainland.

The presidential nominee for Taiwan’s pro-independence opposition defeated rival Eric Chu, of the ruling Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, in Saturday’s election. The KMT also lost control of the legislature for the first time.