RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON—Libya is emerging as a new destination of choice for extremists, as both Islamic State and al Qaeda have used the chaos since the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi to seize territory and parts of the economy, a report by a security consulting firm said.

Wednesday’s report warned that Libya could become a dangerous new base for terrorist groups because of the country’s ungoverned hinterlands, long, porous borders and huge oil reserves.

Already, the absence of law and proliferation of weapons and violence in Libya “have allowed violent extremist groups such as the Islamic State and al Qaeda to thrive,” said the report by The Soufan Group, founded by a former U.S. government official who investigated the 2001 terror attacks.

Three suicide bombers, all women, killed themselves and 10 other people during an attack on Wednesday in Chibok, the northeast Nigerian town where Boko Haram kidnapped 276 teenage girls from a school in 2014.

The attackers, suspected members of Boko Haram’s Islamist insurgency, struck a market, as well as two residential neighborhoods, said eye witness Bitrus Mark.

Residents of the small town helped carry at least 30 injured people to a nearby clinic, according to local bystander Emmanuel Samuel, who helped tally the number of people killed.

At least 219 of the schoolgirls taken from Chibok in April 2014 remain missing, even as Nigeria records successes in the wider war on Boko Haram. This time last year, Islamic State-allied insurgency controlled a section of Nigeria the size of Belgium. Now, Boko Haram has been chased into hiding, although the group continues to lash out by attacking ordinary people in public places.

PARIS—France’s justice minister resigned Wednesday after a clash with President François Hollande over his proposal to adopt a constitutional amendment stripping some homegrown terrorists of their nationality.

Christiane Taubira “agreed on the need to put an end to her mandate as the debate on the constitutional amendment opens in Parliament today,” the president’s office said. The president appointed Jean-Jacques Urvoas, a senior lawmaker, to succeed Ms. Taubira.

Her departure highlights the fault lines within Mr. Hollande’s Socialist Party over his strategy for tackling terrorism. His government has imposed a raft of state-of-emergency measures—permitting police to conduct warrantless raids and detain people without court orders—that critics say contrast with the French Republic’s status as a beacon of civil liberties.

However, it was Mr. Hollande’s recent decision to strip terrorists of their nationality—an idea long supported by France’s right-wing parties—that opened the divide with Ms. Taubira.

“I’m leaving the government over a major political disagreement,” Ms. Taubira said, after tweeting: “Sometimes you resist by staying, sometimes you resist by leaving.”
In December, the French government unveiled a proposal for constitutional amendments that would shield the state-of-emergency measures from legal challenges and strip dual citizens of their French nationality if they are convicted of terrorism.

French law already allows the government to take away citizenship from convicted terrorists if they are born abroad. But Mr. Hollande was under pressure from France’s right-wing parties to go further.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Nader Modanlo was facing five more years in federal prison when he got an extraordinary offer: U.S. President Barack Obama was ready to commute his sentence as part of this month’s historic and then still-secret prisoner swap with Iran. He said no.
To sweeten the deal, the U.S. administration then dropped a claim against the Iran-born aerospace engineer for $10 million that a Maryland jury found he had taken as an illegal payment from Iran, according to interviews with Modanlo, lawyers involved and U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.
The surrender of the U.S. claim, which has not previously been reported, could add to scrutiny of how the Obama administration clinched a prisoner deal that has drawn criticism from Republican presidential candidates and lawmakers.

A Washington-based spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment on discussions over the $10 million, which the jury found that Modanlo was paid to help Iran launch its first satellite in 2005. Modanlo says the money was a loan from a Swiss company for a telecoms deal.
In the prisoner swap, five Americans held in Iran were released at the same time as seven Iranians charged or imprisoned in the United States were granted pardons or had their sentences commuted. The deal accompanied the Jan. 16 implementation of a landmark agreement that curbs Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

Analogizing Palestinians to the Jewish victims of the Nazis: that’s how the UN is marking this week’s “International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.” The epicenter of modern antisemitism on a global scale is not somewhere over there, but in the middle of Turtle Bay.

For public tour groups, and their busloads of impressionable American students from around the country, the UN ‘s permanent “Palestine” exhibit has now been arranged to be within a few feet of the UN’s permanent Holocaust exhibit.

This week’s activities follow suit.

On January 25, 2016, a temporary exhibit called “Holocaust by Bullets” was opened in the UN visitors’ lobby. The painstaking research of the French organization Yahad-In Unum substantiates how two million Jews were shot to death in the presence of normal folks all over Europe.

But “Holocaust by Bullets” follows the UN’s December exhibition, which is titled “Palestinian Children: Overcoming Tragedies with Hope, Dreams, Resilience and Dignity.” That month-long display in the visitors’ lobby consisted of scenes of Palestinian children suffering from “devastating” wanton, unprovoked Israeli “operations.”

Father Patrick Desbois opened Yahad-In Unum’s exhibit by explaining that his team locates the bodies of Nazi victims and then honors the dead. He is driven to ensure that Europe does not bury “all its values” by building its future on unacknowledged and unvalued human beings in mass graves.

Reprinted from Il Foglio.

Of course it is our fault if there is an Islamist who blows himself up in Mosul, a terrorist who kills cartoonists, a fundamentalist who stabs Israelis, a couple of integralists who carry out a massacre in a center for people with disabilities, a man who in the name of ISIS fires thirteen gunshots against a Philadelphia police officer. The responsibility lies always with the West, the scoundrel who, with its language, its words, its wars and its bombs keeps provoking, in every corner of the world, the reaction of Jihadism and Islamist integralism. We are the ones who provoke; of course, it is not them who act. And maybe, who knows, the best way to stop provoking this reaction is to step aside, to hide, and to do all that is possible to prevent a possible counter action. And so it is better not to speak of Islam, say the “mainstream progressives”, better avoid the nonsense, better not to call things by their name. It is better, far better, to take care to cover the roots of evil and violence under a veil of hypocrisy. It is better, far better, to launch heartfelt calls against the rampant global emergency of Islamophobia. Better to refrain from speaking of the real problems, of the connection between the use of violence and the interpretation of Islam. And in the end, it is better to step aside and avoid problems altogether. The West’s cultural retreat is an issue that unfortunately is quite present in news reports around the world. However, when the retreat turns into surrender, it is high time to stop whistling, stop pretending nothing is happening, and start looking at reality with different eyes.