RUTHFULLY YOURS

SYDNEY—Australian police have charged a man with committing a terrorist act and attempted murder after he allegedly stabbed a man multiple times in Sydney on Saturday.

Australia’s New South Wales state police on Sunday said the 22-year-old man was arrested following the stabbing of a 59-year-old man in the Sydney suburb of Minto.

The attack was allegedly inspired by Middle East-based militant group Islamic State, but the man isn’t known to be connected to any terror outfit, said New South Wales state police Deputy Commissioner Catherine Burn.

Police said the 22-year-old man and the victim were not known to each other. The victim is in the hospital in serious condition, said Ms. Burn.

The incident on Saturday came days after Islamic State urged followers to stab, shoot, poison and run over Australians at iconic locations, including the Sydney Opera House, according to the Associated Press.

President Obama says the $400 million he paid Iran in January for the release of four hostages was leverage, not ransom. If so, the mullahs have apparently developed a taste for it. Witness the five-year prison sentence handed to their latest Western hostage, which came to light Friday.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian dual citizen, had traveled to the Islamic Republic to visit relatives. She and her 2-year-old daughter, Gabriella, were detained in April at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Airport as they were about to fly home to London.

The exact charges haven’t been disclosed, but Iran’s Revolutionary Guards accuse her of plotting revolution. Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe works at the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the company that owns the Reuters news agency. She wasn’t involved in coverage of Iran.

One purpose of the harsh sentence is to remind Iranians in the diaspora tempted to return home in the wake of the nuclear deal that the regime sees them as traitors. It’s also no accident that the sentence came shortly after the U.K. upgraded its diplomatic relations back to ambassador level.

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson cheered the new opening to Tehran last Monday, only to receive a rude awakening days later. Now the regime has a new political and financial bargaining chip, and Mr. Obama has created a cash-for-hostages incentive system with his earlier ransom. Let’s hope the British government is wiser than to stuff briefcases with unmarked bills.

“They hold such events to establish hegemony over society, to scare and terrorize people — mainly Alevis, secularists, Christians, and even Muslims who do not agree with their policies. They aim to silence, repress, and standardize the people.” — Kemal Bulbul, Alevi author and community leader.

“Laïcité [secularism] should not be in the new constitution in Turkey.” — Ismail Kahraman, the speaker of Turkey’s parliament, and an MP of the ruling AKP.

Countless churches in Anatolia have been destroyed, left to decay or, used for sacrilegious purposes, such as stables and storehouses.

Islamic supremacists do not aim to establish a system where different communities can meaningfully and peacefully coexist. Instead, they aim for political and social domination in which non-Muslims will be second class citizens — or dhimmis — who will always remain under threat.

At least a thousand Muslims worshipped in the mosque of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s presidential palace in Ankara on August 6. They performed a ceremony known as dhikr (“remembrance” in Arabic).

This event was heavily criticized by the country’s many secularists on the social media.

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Nonie Darwish Moment with Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know.

Nonie discusses Our 15-Year-Trauma After 9/11, unveiling why we are more divided than ever over the Islamic threat.http://jamieglazov.com/2016/09/11/our-15-year-trauma-after-911-a-nonie-darwish-moment/

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch former Senior INS Special Agent Michael Cutler discuss 15 Years After 9/11: Lessons Not Learned, revealing how and why we must immediately change direction:

For some years now, the Obama administration has worked on developing a “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) strategy. Its goals: to be proactive in stopping terrorists from radicalizing and recruiting followers, and to address the factors that allow such actions to occur in the first place. Last week the result of some of these deliberations — a twelve-page strategy fronted by the State Department and USAID — was published.

In its foreword, Secretary of State John Kerry lists some of those countries affected by “violent extremism” (“from Afghanistan to Nigeria”) as well as the identity of violent extremist groups (“Da’esh . . . al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Shabaab, and Boko Haram”). The focus then, seems clear: countries with a significant Muslim population and Islamist terrorist groups. Yet here is where the strategy takes a turn for the surreal, because from the content of the actual strategy, you would not realize any such thing — the document is just that opaque, obfuscatory, and, ultimately, unhelpful.

Regarding why violent extremism takes root, the reader is treated to a variety of possibilities. They include “individual psychological factors . . . community and sectarian divisions and conflicts.” Other explanations are corruption, insufficiently robust courts, and a lack of tolerance among different ethnicities.

Apparently not even worthy of discussion is Islam or Islamism, words that are not mentioned once. This is no accident. There has been a concerted attempt to scrub any religious aspect from the actions of ISIS and al-Qaeda: That is why phrases like “violent extremism” even exist. (First mainstreamed by the British government, “violent extremism” was dreamed up as a way to avoid saying “Islamic” or “Islamist” extremism in the months after the July 2005 suicide bombings in London. The phrase swiftly traveled across the Atlantic and into the U.S. government’s vocabulary.)

The strategy states that “to be effective, CVE efforts must be guided by ongoing research and analysis of the context, drivers, and most effective interventions against violent extremism.” One can only wonder what would happen if this ongoing research and analysis concluded that the biggest context and driver to violent extremism was an ideologically driven reading of religion.

This is a dishonest approach in multiple ways. Consider a White House Fact Sheet on CVE from February 2015, which states that “CVE efforts address the root causes of extremism through community engagement” and that “violent extremist threats can come from a range of groups and individuals, including domestic terrorists and homegrown violent extremists in the United States.”