RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Infidels who were enemies of Islam thought they buried Islam in the depths of history when they abolished the caliphate on March 3, 1924 … We are shouting out that we will re-establish the caliphate, here, right next to the parliament.” — Mahmut Kar, media bureau chief of Hizb ut-Tahrir Turkey

“The magazine [Dabiq] creates propaganda for [ISIS]. It has an open address. Why does no one raid its offices?” — Opposition MP Turkey’s Parliament

The government big guns in Ankara just shrugged it off when on June 5, 2015, only two days before general elections in the country, homegrown jihadist militants for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or ISIS or IS) detonated bombs, killing four people and injuring over 100, at a pro-Kurdish political rally. Again, when IS, on July 20, 2015, bombed a meeting of pro-Kurdish peace activists in a small town on Turkey’s Syrian border, killing 33 people and injuring over 100, the government behaved as if it had never happened. After all, a bunch of “wild boys” from the ranks of jihad –which the ruling party in Ankara not-so-privately aspires to- were killing the common enemy: Kurds.

Then when IS jihadists, in October, killed over 100 people in the heart of Ankara, while targeting, once again, a public rally of pro-peace activists (including many Kurds), the Turkish government put the blame on “a cocktail of terror groups,” – meaning the attack may have been a product of Islamists, far-leftist and Kurdish militants. “IS, Kurdish or far-leftist militants could have carried out the bombing,” the prime minister at the time, Ahmet Davutoglu, said. It was the worst single terror attack in Turkey’s history, and the Ankara government was too demure even to name the perpetrators. An indictment against 36 suspects, completed nearly nine months after the attack, identified all defendants as IS members. So, there was no “cocktail of terror.” It was just the jihadists.

The police released a report noting that Sweden is at the top of the EU’s statistics on physical and sexual violence against women, sexual harassment and stalking. The report stated unequivocally that it is “asylum-seeker boys” and “foreign men” who commit the vast majority of the reported crimes.

As far as the widespread sexual assaults at public pools are concerned, the police said that in four out of five cases, the perpetrators have been “unaccompanied refugee children”.

A survey by the National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) suggested that as many as 38,000 women in Sweden may have been subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM). Yet health care services rarely help women with the complications associated with FGM.

A Swedish father was told that he and his two children are being thrown out of the house they are renting from the municipality — to make room for an immigrant family.

May 4: The terrorist who turned out not to be a terrorist, but was chased by the police all over Sweden in November 2015, Mutar Muthanna Majid, demanded 1 million kronor (about $110,000) in damages from the Swedish government. However, the Chancellor of Justice decided that the standard sum for those wrongly incarcerated was enough compensation. Majid was held in custody for four days, which means he gets 12,000 kronor ($1,300).

May 4: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to the defense of Sweden’s Muslim Minister of Housing Mehmet Kaplan, who was forced to resign after his connections to Islamists and neo-Fascists were revealed, as was his defamatory comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany. According to Erdogan, however, the forced resignation of Kaplan was symptomatic for how Muslims are treated in the West: “Just look at what Sweden has done to a Muslim who reached a position in Cabinet,” Erdogan indignantly said.

May 4: It is now up to Sweden’s Supreme Court to decide if an Algerian, Karim Ageri, should be deported from Sweden after knifing a 16-year-old girl because she refused to have sex with him. November 10, 2015, two teenage Swedish girls visited an asylum house for “unaccompanied refugee children” in the Stockholm metropolitan area. Karim Ageri, who claimed to be 16 years old, groped one of the girls, who climbed out a window to get away from him. Ageri then followed her, and slashed her face twice with a knife. The prosecutor in the case argued that Ageri is at least 21 years old, and should therefore be tried as an adult and, after serving his sentence, deported. However, the Municipal Court did not agree, and sentenced the Algerian to juvenile detention. The Court of Appeals increased the sentence to 18 months in prison, followed by deportation. Prosecutor My Hedström says she is now looking forward to having the case tried by the Supreme Court, to get a precedent on how “refugee children” who commit serious crimes should be handled legally.

Europeans are revolting against their transnational elites, with Austria now throwing out its presidential election that cheated the nationalist candidate of victory. Friday last week took Austria through a roller-coaster of emotional news — alarming, then exhilarating or depressing, depending on one’s perspective.

It was first announced that Akhmed Chatayev, the Chechen Istanbul airport terror suspect, had been given asylum in Austria since 2003, then an Austrian passport that allowed him free travel within Europe and beyond. Yet, at the same time, he was on Russia’s wanted list. In multiple incidents that took place in various countries between 2003 and 2015, Chatayev was caught with explosives and ammunitions, or photos of victims killed in a blast. Astonishingly, he would either be acquitted, or released on ‘humanitarian’ grounds. Just once, he served a brief one-year jail sentence in a Swedish prison.

Russia repeatedly demanded his extradition, to no avail. The European Court of Human Rights and Amnesty International advocated twice on his behalf, fearing he would face torture. It is only when Chatayev entered Syria to join the Islamic State in 2015, that he was finally placed on the terror list of both the US and UN.

Chatayev’s case was by no means an isolated one. Austria had for years been a hub for global jihad — a “de facto base for Islamist extremists from southeastern Europe, a place to radicalize, recruit, raise and hide funds, thanks to Austria’s permissive laws and weak enforcement mechanisms.”

But a corner was turned with the 2014 serial arrests of nine Chechens who were legally present in the country as refugees and asylum seekers, planning to wage jihad with ISIS in Syria.

One also remembers the media sensation stirred in the same year by the “Jihad poster girls,” two blue-eyed Austrian teenagers of Bosnian heritage who had run off to Syria to marry jihadists, after undergoing sudden radicalization.

PARIS—A French court on Wednesday convicted seven young men who returned from weeks among the ranks of Islamic State extremists in Syria, including the brother of one of the suicide attackers who targeted Paris in November.

The defendants, ages 24 to 27, were sentenced to prison terms ranging from six to nine years for taking part in a group recruiting French jihadists to join a “terrorist group” in Syria in 2013-14—namely Islamic State—and for participating in military training and other activities.

Karim Mohamed-Aggad, the older brother of one of the extremists who attacked Paris’ Bataclan concert hall on Nov. 13, received a 9-year term, the harshest penalty among the seven, since the prosecutor said he was one of the ringleaders.

Mr. Mohamed-Aggad claimed he went to Syria only for humanitarian purposes and accused the French government of putting him on trial instead of his brother Foued, who returned to France with a Kalashnikov and suicide explosives strapped to his body in an operation that killed dozens in Paris.

Foued also went to Syria with the group.

In its ruling, the Paris court said while some of the defendants left Syria of their own free will, Karim Mohamed-Aggad was “in no hurry to return” to France and “showed a persistence in his active interest for jihadism.”

After the verdict, Mr. Mohamed-Aggad’s lawyer, Françoise Cotta, told reporters the ruling was “a decision of fear, returned in a France of fear, by a judge who is here to respond to the fear.”