RUTHFULLY YOURS

LONDON—The U.K. has begun airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria, only hours after lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in favor of extending Britain’s bombing campaign into the war-torn country.

“Four British Tornados were in action after the vote last night attacking oil fields in Eastern Syria,” British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon told the BBC. All four jets have arrived back at their base in Cyprus, with an assessment of the strikes now ongoing.

“Our initial analysis of the operation indicates that the strikes were successful,” the British Defense Ministry said in a statement hours after the raid.

U.K. lawmakers voted 397 to 223 in favor of a government motion to extend airstrikes to Syria from Iraq, where the U.K. military has been conducting bombing campaigns for more than a year.

“The vote last night freed the [Royal Air Force] up. They have been able to attack these terrorists from one side of the border, now they’ve been able to attack some of their key targets on the other side of the border as well,” Mr. Fallon said.

If you want to make a big noise and rattle a bigger cup at the latest climate fest, it pays to be a dictator with a history of bloodshed, oppression, graft and ballot-rigging. Just ask Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe or the Maldives’ Abdulla Yameen Gayoom
Two important blocs posturing at the Paris climate talks are the Alliance of Small Island States bloc ( AOSIS, 44 countries) and the African bloc (54 countries). The island-states’ representative since January is the strongman president of the Maldives, Abdulla Yameen Gayoom, whose democracy-friendly predecessor, Mahomed Nasheed, is now doing a 13-year term in an insanitary Maldives prison. The African bloc’s spokesman is Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, who needs no introduction.

It’s hard to plumb the depths of the hypocrisy involved, especially about the proposed $US100 billion annual green handouts to Third World despots and kleptocrats. But I’ll give it a try.

Maldives President Yameen has sent a message to Paris describing AOSIS as the “moral voice” of the UN Paris talks, and he has called for the $US100 billion per annum to be “scaled up in the years to come”. And that not all that he and his AOSIS team want. In 2013, the Warsaw climate conference waffled about an extra fund for the likes of Maldives, called “an international mechanism on Loss & Damage”. This will require further ratification in 2016 and Yameen is very keen on it.

Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say, but as 20,000-or-so warmists congeal in Paris for their latest round of posturing and room service, it remains difficult to grasp in full the means by which a trace gas has come to prompt so much fear on the part of fools and so many climate dollars for the settled scientists and their hangers-on. In his latest post at the Black Jay blog, physicist John Reid sheds some light:

So the fluid dynamics people, who already used fluid dynamic computer models to make weather forecasts, told everybody they could do the same thing for climate. Obviously, they thought, if you can predict the weather a week ahead, with a bit of tweaking you can predict the climate centuries into the future and so estimate the effect that CO2 will have on the planet.

Instead of educating our children, as they do in the West, to be part of the Startup Generation, we follow the lead of darkest Africa, where children are armed with assault rifles and sent out to kill other children.

If the Palestinians really want to pick a fight with Israel, why do they send children to fight a “holy war” instead of fighting it themselves, like men?

The only difference is that the members of ISIS go out themselves to kill; the Palestinians send their young. Why are these not “war crimes”?

We sacrifice our sons and daughters in the name of Allah, as though Allah were a pagan statue with an altar and had to be appeased with the blood of children.

Here, the Islamists want to “liberate” Jerusalem from the infidel Zionist-Crusader occupation. Next, they want to “liberate” occupied Spain, once Muslim Andalusia, and return it to the bosom of Islam. After that, they want to occupy the Vatican and establish the Islamic Emirate on the ruins of Christianity.

A state of emergency has been declared in France.

So far, everyone, right and left, seems to agree that the country must resort to drastic means to restore safety. Commentators frequently point to Israel as an example to be followed.

Border controls loosened under the Schengen regime have been re-established, there have been arrests, mosques seen as hotbeds of radicalism may be closed, and some foreign imams may be expelled. Security forces in combat gear have been guarding public buildings and public spaces.

Still, one wonders how effective such policies can be.

According to Vincent Desportes, a former general and author of a book on national defence, France’s security apparatus is crippled and overstretched.

The existence of “no-go zones” in predominantly Muslim areas in Europe has been a major topic of conversation since the latest Paris massacre on Nov. 13, primarily due to the assailants’ many connections to Molenbeek, a heavily Muslim district of Brussels. This discussion brings to mind my visit to a drug- and crime-infested slum of 7,000 inhabitants in Marseilles, France, on Jan. 29, to see the situation for myself.

A typical housing block for immigrants in Marseille, France.

I entered the housing complex in an unmarked but recognizable city-owned car driven by a city employee who had been tasked with showing me around. Unfortunately, being mostly a paper-pusher and not experienced in the field, he got spooked and abruptly turned around to leave, raising suspicions among the drug dealers around us, who proceeded to set off the alarm.

A motorcyclist and a truck then zipped ahead of us and boxed us in on a nearby highway. Sitting in the car’s front passenger seat, I was accosted and threatened by four young thugs. The city rep pleaded with them, telling them I was a visiting sociologist. They responded first with threatening comments and then by throwing a piece of concrete the size of a football through the back window. Luckily no on was injured, and they let us leave after the intimidating incident had concluded. I provided the mayor’s office with audio, video, and still photographs of the thugs and their license plates.

I have kept quiet about this incident for ten months in the hopes that the French judicial system would function. As of today, however no one has been apprehended, no charges have been filed, and to my knowledge, no real investigation ever took place.