RUTHFULLY YOURS

China’s seizure of an American underwater drone in international waters in the South China Sea has grabbed the headlines — for good reason. It’s not often that China commits an aggressive, provocative act like this, in full view of the U.S. naval vessel that launched the drone (although China has seized U.S military gear before, as in 2001 when a Navy surveillance aircraft was forced down on Hainan Island after it collided with a chicken-playing Chinese warplane).

But China’s thievery, and our humiliation in doing nothing about it except uttering feeble protests and politely waiting for them to return the drone, is only part of a much larger strategy China has been unveiling over the past seven years. In effect, China is annexing the entire South China Sea and eliminating any claim by other countries — including the United States to navigate its waters or fly through its airspace without China’s permission. It’s essentially an Anschluss of the South China Sea, analogous to Hitler’s takeover of Austria in 1938.

The centerpiece of this effort was also revealed last week, even though it was overshadowed by the drone story. Satellite pictures show that China has built a series of air strips and hardened structures for military aircraft on three islands in the contested Spratly Islands where just three years ago there were no islands at all: Fiery Cross Reef, Mischief Reef, and Subi Reef. China’s on-going dredging operations to build its Great Wall of Sand on those sites have now created enough space for full military installations. Also, on four other nearby artificial island, China is putting antiaircraft batteries and close-in-weapons systems that can target and shoot down cruise missiles.

Those weapons can serve as the future centerpiece of a Chinese network of mobile surface-to-air missile systems installed in the Spratlys. In sum, China will probably be able to keep anyone China doesn’t like — particularly the United States — out of South China Sea airspace.

None of this comes as a surprise to those of us who have been sounding the alarm bells about China’s increasingly aggressive moves in the South China Sea. Nor is the Obama administration’s feeble and completely inadequate response to these moves a surprise. It’s an administration whose specialty has been letting the United States be humiliated, whether it’s by Iran, in the Hormuz Straits, where it grabbed our sailors and made a display of their surrender; or by Russia, in Crimea and Syria; or by China, in the South China Sea. After eight years, the whole world knows that Obama lacks the will to halt those powers that are bent on twisting the rules of the global order to their advantage.

In September, I warned that as Obama’s time in office winds down, Russia, China, and Iran will look for opportunities to seize what they can get before a new president takes office on January 20 — one who will take a very different approach to being bullied and humiliated.

For Western Europe, 2016 began with an apocalyptic frenzy, a nightmarish vision of its possible future – namely, an avalanche of brutal sexual assaults, over a thousand of them, committed on New Year’s Eve by savage Muslim gangs in the streets and squares of Cologne and several other major German cities.

The horrific events of New Year’s Eve didn’t happen out of the blue, of course. For over a generation, thanks to irresponsible immigration policies that had never been submitted for approval to any electorate, as well as to straightforward demographic realities, Western Europe had been steadily Islamized. At first in a few large cities and eventually even in small, remote towns, the presence of Islam became more and more visible. Over time, government officials who had made these developments possible, and who had cut back their own citizens’ welfare-state entitlements in order to feed, clothe, and house newly arrived Muslims, were rewarded not with the gratitude and assimilation they had expected but with the exact opposite. Steadily, Muslim communities developed into crime-ridden, sharia-governed enclaves, increasingly explicit in their hostility to infidels, increasingly aggressive in their rejection of the values of their host cultures, and increasingly insistent on their legal independence from secular authorities. Forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and honor killing became European problems. Hijab proliferated, then (in some places at least) niqab. And authorities reacted to all of it with a feckless passivity.

Along with the quotidian reality of stealth jihad came jihad of the more headline-grabbing sort: terrorism. Only months after 9/11, the Netherlands experienced the coldblooded murder of politician Pim Fortuyn, a vocal critic of Muslim immigration and leading prime ministerial candidate; in 2004, journalist Theo van Gogh, who had just released a documentary about Islam’s treatment of women, was butchered in broad daylight on an Amsterdam street. In 2006, Muslims around the world rioted, committed major acts of vandalism, and massacred dozens in response to a Danish newspaper’s publication of cartoons of their prophet. Bombs took 191 lives in and around Madrid’s Atocha railway station in 2004 and 52 lives in London in 2005; last year saw the assassination of 12 people at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Each time, mainstream media and public officials made haste to insist that the atrocities had nothing to do with Islam, to reaffirm their dedication to the policies that made this bloodshed possible, and to shower Europe’s Muslims with inane, unmerited praise. Europeans didn’t have to be familiar with Islamic theology to understand that, like it or not, they were at war. And they didn’t need to know the term dhimmi to recognize that their elites were kowtowing to would-be conquerors.

These elites inhabited a bubble of privilege, protected from the consequences of their own policies. Most Western Europeans did not. In the space of a few years, they’d seen their neighborhoods dramatically transformed. Their once-safe streets were dangerous. Their children were harassed at school. Jews, especially, were terrorized. There was no sign of a reversal in this rapid process of civilizational decline and destruction. And if they tried to discuss the issue honestly, they risked being labeled bigots, losing their jobs, and even being put on trial. Here and there, voters found, and supported, politicians who articulated their concerns. But the political establishment erected cordons sanitaires around them, denying them power and, when possible, dragging them, too, into court. Instead of heeding the voice of the people, officials doubled down.

The Iranian government, with these two cases (Kabis and Noor 1), seems to hold in its hands a bomb that can blow up the Greek economic and political system. If Greek authorities seriously investigate these cases, they will trigger a domino-effect of disclosures that could well destabilize Greece’s government.

Iran can blackmail and manipulate its political influence inside Greece, or Iran can use its ability to destabilize a member of NATO and Eurozone, Greece, to strengthen its international position.

As Sunnis and Shiites are fighting for regional hegemony in the Middle East — Syria, Yemen — Greece, as geographical gate for Europe and the Balkans, is a trophy country for the Iranian regime. In recent years, the Iranians have been exploiting the corrupt establishment’s thirst for money. Through drug dealing and oil smuggling, Iran seems to be trying to buy political influence and access to the Greek media. Well-informed diplomatic sources say that the Iranian Embassy in Athens is extremely active in Greece’s political and economic life behind the scenes.

Until now, the Greek political and economic regime, after the junta in 1974, had always been extremely friendly to Sunni political Islam. During the Iran-Iraq war, the Greek regime sided with Iraq. Andreas Papandreou, former Prime Minister of Greece, was a close friend and supporter of the PLO and its chairman, Yasser Arafat. Greek businessmen and media owners always had close economic relationships with the Gulf States’ petrodollar business, and lobbying by Greek ship-owners, who carry Arab oil to international markets, always favored Sunni Arabs.

The influence of Sunni Islam in Greece is also large in the political and economic systems — many times stronger than in other countries of the European Union, with the Greek media always on the side of the Palestinians, Hezbollah and in recent years, many did not hide their sympathy for Hamas.

Dimitris Kabis, a professor at the University of Piraeus and recently a ship-owner — as president of Empire Shipping Limited — seems to be the protagonist in a network of oil-smuggling, arms-dealing and lobbying in Greece for the Iranian regime.

In March 2013, the US froze Kabis’s accounts, after accusing him of violating the US and EU sanctions on Iran, by bringing oil from Iran to China.

Dimitris Kabis was accused by the US that, with $500 million from Iran, he bought eight tankers for the National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC). Each of the eight tankers carried oil worth $200 million — per shipment — to China, in violation of the sanctions imposed on Tehran. In 2014, the NITC reportedly returned five of the eight tankers, but he illegally sold the remaining three in India and Bangladesh and received $100 million, which he apparently embezzled from the Iranian government.

Kabis, with the Iranian funds and a network of 20 Greek businessmen, for years supplied Iran with pharmaceuticals, weapons, high-technology products, money-laundering services and everything else Tehran needed. Among the Greek businessmen, at least one was confirmed as a TV station owner who has close relationships with Kabis.

Kabis seems to have violated an agreement signed by him and the NITC, and in July was arrested in Tehran and sent to prison. Although Tehran’s “special” court acquitted him, the Iranian seized took his passport. Kabis now resides in the Greek Embassy in Tehran, but does not have the necessary documents to return to Greece. That is why he sent a letter to the Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs to help him come back.