RUTHFULLY YOURS

ISTANBUL—Behind the reinforced door of an unmarked office in this teeming immigrant neighborhood, a man who goes by the name of Hawez Zaman moves money the same way his predecessors in the Middle Ages did, in an off-the-books transfer system critical to today’s spiraling migrant crisis in Europe.
The centuries-old system known as hawala enables users to transfer money from one point to another entirely on the basis of trust—largely without a paper trail and often outside the law. It is the dominant way migrants flooding into Europe pay for their journeys, used for 90% of the transactions in a people-smuggling trade valued at around $2.5 billion a year in Europe, according to European security officials and researchers. It is used for a further $390 billion a year migrants send back home as part of an informal but widely accepted financial system used across the developing world.
The money flows are also drawing renewed attention among terrorist finance investigators, who since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have tried to monitor hawala systems. They are concerned that some of the same hawala systems flourishing from the business of moving migrants could also be tapped by would-be attackers as a source of financing.
“Given what we’ve seen so far, we have very strong suspicions terrorists receive money via hawala,” said Calogero Ferrara, a Palermo-based prosecutor heading a large pan-European people-smuggling investigation. “After the Paris attacks, we have intensified investigations on this front.”

Millions of people around the world are gathering in public places Thursday to celebrate the New Year, which means there’s no holiday for counterterrorist officials, who are on high alert seemingly everywhere.

Turkish police said Wednesday they arrested two people with alleged Islamic State ties on suspicion of planning bombing attacks on New Year’s Eve in Ankara. The pair, who police said had a vest with explosives and a backpack “ready for use,” were arrested while scouting targets in the Kizilay district known for its shopping centers. In October two bomb attacks outside Ankara’s main train station killed more than 100 innocents. No one has claimed responsibility but Turkish officials have blamed Islamic State.

Meanwhile, Belgian authorities cancelled a New Year’s Eve fireworks display scheduled for the historic Grand Place in downtown Brussels. This followed the arrest a day earlier of two members of a motorcycle group for plotting an attack. Police say they found Islamic State propaganda in a raid this week that led to the arrests.

We rarely think about the owners of the wineries when choosing the sparkling wine with which to celebrate. Perhaps we should.

Consider the French champagne house Taittinger, and its California Domaine Carneros estate, which has for the past 15 years sponsored Hollywood’s annual Screen Actors Guild Awards and the SAG Foundation.

In 1943, in Le Journal de Saintes, Pierre Taittinger, the well-known champagne maker and hotelier called for “the creation of a new European order upon which France must work in close collaboration with Germany.” At the same year, papers he owned celebrated both the 10th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and Hitler’s 54th birthday. His papers also carried advertisements proclaiming “Germany will prevail, France will, and Europe will unite through work,” as well as “For a clean France rid of Jews and Freemasons.”

The Vichy government was behind the October 1940 laws, prohibiting Jews from holding public offices and almost all professions; it was behind the laws permitting the “Aryanization” of Jewish property; and was behind the decision to eliminate 30,000 to 60,000 Jewish soldiers from its military ranks, imprisoning them or sending them to labor camps where they were kept until most were deported by the Germans to Auschwitz in August 1942. It was also the Vichy government that turned over tens of thousands of foreign Jews to the Germans and sent tens of thousands more as forced laborers to Germany. Altogether, 90,000 out of 350,000 French Jews were exterminated.

On Nov. 27, exactly two weeks after the terrorist attacks that killed 130 people in Paris, FBI agents swarmed into a private home in Harrisburg, Pa. Their target: 19-year-old Jalil Ibn Ameer Aziz, an American citizen and Muslim whom they’d been watching for several months, largely through his postings on Twitter. Using as many as 57 separate accounts, Aziz had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, called for the killing of non-Muslims, aided others to make hijrah to Syria to join the jihad there, and expressed his own wishes to do the same.

And if that weren’t enough, he promised further to continue the attacks against America, posting, for instance, “Know, O Obama, that we are coming to America, and know that we will sever your head in the White House.”

But as the FBI soon discovered, Aziz’s jihadist lust did not end with just words. At the home he shared with his parents in the Pennsylvania capital, according to the affidavit filed in the case, they found a “go-bag,” or knapsack, containing “five M-4 style high capacity magazines loaded with 5.56 ammunition, a modified kitchen knife with the handle removed and wrapped in cloth and string, a thumb drive, a tin filled with various over-the-counter medications, and a head wrap commonly referred to as a balaclava.”

“In some areas of the Middle East where church bells have rung for centuries on Christmas Day, this year they will be silent,” President Barack Obama said in a statement on December 23. “This silence bears tragic witness to the brutal atrocities committed against these communities by ISIL.” This is a misleading and hypocritical statement for four main reasons.
(1) Obama singles out the Islamic State (IS, or “ISIL” as he still insists on calling it) as the culprit. He is thus creating the impression that anti-Christian “brutal atrocities” had been absent before the IS made its appearance on the Middle Eastern scene, or that such atrocities are limited to the IS-controlled areas today. This is demonstrably untrue.

It is a matter of historical record that the 75 years preceding the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1922 witnessed a more thorough destruction of the Christian communities in the Middle East than any period following the seventh century Islamic conquest. Thousands of Assyrians were murdered in the province of Mosul in 1850, and in 1860 some 12,000 Christians were put to the sword in Lebanon. Successive slaughters of Armenians in Bayazid (1877), Alashgurd (1879), Sassun (1894), Constantinople (1896), Adana (1909) and Ottoman-ruled Armenia itself (1895–1896) claimed a total of 200,000 lives. They were but rehearsals for the slaughter of 1915-1918, which claimed at least a million lives. Two million Armenians lived in what is now Turkey in 1914; some 3% (ca. 60,000) remain today. The proof of the genocide is in the numbers.