RUTHFULLY YOURS

A French national of Chechen origin stabbed a person to death on the streets of central Paris on Saturday evening and wounded four others, in an assault that French investigators were treating as a terrorist attack.

Police shot and killed the man shortly after the attack began, French authorities said.

Paris prosecutor François Molins said the man yelled “Allahu Akbar!”—“God is great” in Arabic—during the stabbing, indicating the attack was the latest in a string of assaults committed by Islamist extremists in France.

A French judicial official said the man had previously been flagged as a potential terror risk in one of France’s security databases, where the government keeps the names of thousands of people who have expressed sympathy for radical Islam.

Islamic State quickly claimed the assault via its Amaq media service, calling the assailant a “soldier” of the extremist group.

The attack took place near the Palais Garnier, the opulent Parisian ballet and opera house, a neighborhood packed with restaurants and bars that was crowded with Saturday evening revelers. Police cordoned off the area for hours, interviewing witnesses and searching for any potential accomplices of the attacker.

The judicial official described the slain assailant as a French citizen who was born in Chechnya, without releasing his name.

France has been on high alert since January 2015 when gunmen killed 17 in the Paris region, including 12 at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. In November 2015, a team of militants sent by Islamic State from territory it then controlled in Syria killed 130 people in and around Paris, one of the worst terrorist attacks in European history.

Chechnya, a predominantly Muslim region in the south of Russia, has been a major source of foreign fighters in the ranks of Islamic State. Western security officials have also been concerned about radicalization among Chechens living in Europe and the U.S.CONTINUE AT SITE

The U.S. on Monday will officially open its new embassy to Israel in Jerusalem. This will correct a surreal policy whereby, since Israel’s independence 70 years ago, the U.S. and other nations have refused to recognize its sovereignty over its capital city. President Trump announced in December he would reverse the old policy. By moving the embassy he now translates words into deed.

The embassy’s exact location within Jerusalem has gotten much less attention, but it is equally consequential. It will be housed in buildings used by the American Consulate, as well as in an adjacent former hotel purchased by the State Department in 2014. Most of that complex is located on the far side of the armistice line that divided Jerusalem from 1949 to 1967. Thus the embassy site demonstrates that the U.S. not only sees Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, but also—consistent with bipartisan calls from Congress—recognizes the city as unified.

The “Green Line” was created in the wake of Israel’s 1948-49 War of Independence. Upon the country’s founding, Jordan and its allies invaded, with the goal of preventing the creation of a Jewish state. Although they failed at that goal, the Arab armies did occupy significant territory when the armistice was called, including what is now widely referred to as the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Jordan subsequently expelled all Jews from the areas under its control.

Richard Kemp commanded British forces in Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans. He has spent time on the Gaza border in recent weeks, observing the Hamas-orchestrated violence and Israeli military reactions.

The true and malevolent purpose of Hamas’s plan is to incite violence in such a way that the IDF has no choice but to respond with lethal force, killing Gaza civilians.

If that happens, the UN and EU, human rights groups and many Western media organizations will have helped bring it about.

The UN, EU and a range of human rights groups and media organizations have devoted their efforts to unjustly condemning Israel’s actions. If there was genuine concern for human life and human rights among these people, rather than a fixation on unfairly vilifying Israel, they would harshly condemn Hamas.

I predict a riot — and much worse. The Palestinian terrorist group Hamas is orchestrating a ‘demonstration’ at the beginning of this week of up to 200,000 people on the Gaza border with Israel, and is intent on turning it into an orgy of death and bloodshed. If that happens, the UN and EU, human rights groups and many Western media organizations will have helped bring it about.

Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, is planning the bloody culmination of six weeks of violence along the border that has so far led to the deaths of around 50 of their own people and wounding of hundreds more. Now they intend to pile the bodies higher still, exploiting what they see as a perfect storm. It is the seventieth anniversary of the creation of the modern State of Israel — a date that Palestinians revile as ‘Nakba’ or ‘Catastrophe’ Day. It coincides with the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem, a move abhorrent to those who consider the existence of the Jewish State illegitimate. And it is the beginning of the Islamic festival of Ramadan, a time when violence throughout the Muslim world often spirals.

Hungary, the Czech Republic and Romania, in coordination with Israel, blocked a joint EU statement criticizing the relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, Axios.com reported on Friday, quoting sources.

Axios recalls that according to European diplomats and Israeli officials, the draft statement circulated in European capitals had three points:

-Jerusalem should be the capital of both states — Israel and the future state of Palestine.
-The final status of Jerusalem should be negotiated and only determined through negotiations between the parties.
-The member states of the EU will not follow the U.S. and will not move their embassies to Jerusalem.

According to European diplomats and Israeli officials, the French and other member states wanted to publish the statement on Friday as a statement by the EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini supported by all 28 EU members, but Hungary, the Czech Republic and Romania announced they object to the statement and made it impossible to reach the consensus needed to publish it.

“The Hungarians didn’t want to poke Trump in the eye and the Czechs and the Romanians are considering to move their embassies to Jerusalem against the EU position. This is the state of the EU these days,”
a senior diplomat told Axios.