RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13840/north-korea-discussion

It may be the North Korean leadership wants only to survive, keep its nuclear weapons, and work to secure sufficient funds to take care of its ruling elite — and wait for the day that US forces leave the peninsula.

What if North Korea regarded its nuclear program as the very leverage necessary to bargain concessions from the US and South Korea? What if the goal were to secure an extremely important concession — the removal of US military forces from the Korean peninsula, a goal long-sought, put on the table before North Korea even acquired nuclear weapons?

The Trump administration took office after eight years of “strategic patience,” which led only to more North Korean missiles, nuclear bombs and weapons shipments to terror states. The proponents of these policies — having failed miserably — now lecture the Trump administration about what America’s North Korean policy should be. They seem, however, unwilling to see that the very nature of the discussion has now been changed — to a necessary focus on North Korea’s nuclear capability and not on the US military presence or ostensible US “hostile policy” in the region.

The rationale for the summits between US President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Chairman Kim Jong-Un may well be misunderstood by the critics of the American administration. By meeting with the North Korean leader, the administration is seeking to change the “accepted” narrative about the Korean peninsula and Western Pacific, just as it has with respect to the Middle East.

Whether the administration can be successful is an open question, but changes already secured in the Middle East give support to the administration’s strategy and goals.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13838/aid-organizations-jihadists-syria

It appears that many radical Islamists in Turkey have established an international network to sustain the jihadist terrorists in Syria.

Because this network operates under the guise of “charity,” European governments are having difficulty monitoring its activities — particularly in jihadist-controlled territory — and holding the perpetrators to account.

“We get most of our donations from abroad through the bank accounts we share on social media,” Fukara-Der’s president Hasan Süslü said in a 2014 interview. “And most of the donations are from the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium.”

Turkish police recently raided the homes of, and detained, more than a dozen nationals suspected of “joining conflicts in Syria, providing logistics and money, and recruiting for [terrorist] organizations.”

Four days after the raids, which were carried out on January 13, all thirteen detainees were released — eleven of them pending trial and the other two on judicial control. The Turkish government-run Anadolu Agency, which reported on the detentions, later removed the story from its website and social media pages.

Among the detainees was Hasan Süslü, president of the NGO Fukara-Der (Aid and Solidarity Association for the Poor), suspected of aiding Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) — a coalition of al Qaeda-affiliated groups, formerly known as the al Nusra Front, and currently the dominant jihadist force in Idlib in northern Syria.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sincerely-emmanuel-11551831254

As political campaign tactics go, we’ve seen better than the open letter that French President Emmanuel Macron sent this week laying out a pan-Europe agenda ahead of May’s European Parliament elections. He manages to combine bad ideas with off-putting self-promotion.

Mr. Macron is trying to rally voters around a centrist, “pro-European” message amid fears that euroskeptic parties could win a third or more of the seats in the next parliament. Violent protests against a fuel-tax hike at home have thwarted Mr. Macron’s effort to build a pan-European political movement, so he’s making do with the letter published in newspapers across the Continent in 22 languages. His platform is “freedom, protection and progress.”

Some ideas are merely impractical. European voters increasingly demand more effective border enforcement, especially after 2015’s migration crisis. Mr. Macron’s call for more stringent border controls around the passport-free European Schengen zone may resonate. But his demand for more burden-sharing in processing asylum claimants will flop. Voters in Poland don’t want to be obliged to house migrants that countries such as Germany or Italy have welcomed or proven powerless to stop.