RUTHFULLY YOURS

This is welcome news…both Venezuela and Argentina- where Iran has wielded great influence have overturned tyrants….rsk

It isn’t every day that a police state takes such a beating at the polls that it has to admit defeat in its own rigged election. So kudos to the Venezuelan opposition, which thrashed the government’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) in Sunday’s national assembly election, even taking the two-thirds supermajority needed to pass major economic and judicial reforms.

After 16 years of repressive left-wing rule, this is cause for hope in Venezuela and across the Americas. An impressive 75% of the electorate turned out to vote, driven by plummeting living standards. Hyperinflation, food shortages, crumbling public works and soaring murder rates have made the country miserable.

President Nicolás Maduro, the late Hugo Chávez’s handpicked successor, accepted the vote—at least for now. It’s doubtful he would have done so without pressure from the military, which also seems to be fed up with the country’s accelerating decline.

Number of fighters from North America steady but number from Western Europe more than doubled since 2014, report says

WASHINGTON—More than a year of international efforts to stem the flow of foreign fighters into Syria and Iraq have fallen short, with the number of militants taking up arms for Islamic State and other extremist groups more than doubling in that time frame, a report released Monday found.

Between 27,000 and 31,000 people from at least 86 countries have traveled to the Middle East to join the extremist movement, according to the report, by the security consulting firm The Soufan Group, founded by a former federal official who investigated the 2001 terrorist attacks. By comparison, a June 2014 by the firm issued identified approximately 12,000 foreign fighters from 81 countries who had traveled to Iraq and Syria.

Week one of COP 21, the UN climate conference in Paris, concluded with the adoption of a draft “outcome.” You can read it at CFACT.org.

This was the must-have first step if the UN is to have a chance of adopting a full treaty this week.

While the COP (Conference of the Parties) reached a milestone, the draft is riddled with unresolved divisive issues. The draft contains multiple versions of many key provisions within square brackets and placeholders for future text.

For instance, did the UN adopt a draft of a binding treaty or a toothless nonbinding agreement? No one in Paris can say for sure.

Resolving these disputes is what the negotiators in Paris will be working on as they reconvene at a ministerial level.

It remains to be seen whether the COP can bridge all divides and agree to a final text.

Two factors argue the UN might pull it off.

“Round up the usual suspects” was the brunt of President Obama’s address to the American public after last week’s San Bernardino massacre. Obama offered nothing new, only “airstrikes, Special Forces, and working with local forces who are fighting to regain control of their own country” in the Levant. Like his French counterpart Francois Hollande, Obama thinks that a certain level of terrorism is tolerable, and far preferable to the bloody and difficult work of rooting out jihadist terrorism entirely. There is something to be said for the notion of a tolerable level of terrorism, but neither Obama nor Hollande are likely to achieve this as matters stand.

“Since the attacks in Paris,” the President said, “we’ve surged intelligence-sharing with our European allies. We’re working with Turkey to seal its border with Syria. And we are cooperating with Muslim-majority countries — and with our Muslim communities here at home — to counter the vicious ideology that ISIL promotes online.” None of this is new and none of it is persuasive.

The trouble is that number of terrorist attacks is rising exponentially, along with the number of countries affected, according to the 2015 Terrorism Index of the Institute for Economics and Peace. The notion of a tolerable level of terrorism applied to a world in which Muslims killed each other far from the West. The recent attacks in Paris and California as well as Israel suggest that the old approach to containing terrorism has collapsed, along with the credibility of leaders who advanced it. More than 30,000 people died in terror attacks in 2014, compared to fewer than 8,000 in 2011. More important, 17 countries lost more than 250 people in terror attacks in 2014 vs. only 5 countries in 2011.

‘This is for Syria!”

Echoing the Paris terrorists, a terrorist screamed that ISIS threat as he attacked passengers at a London Tube station Saturday. Fortunately, while he cut the throats of two innocent victims, police Tasered the 29-year-old terrorist before he could fatally wound anyone. Still, British counterterrorism authorities are rightly treating this incident very seriously. The attacker’s knife-wielding neck attacks evoke memories of the 2013 Lee Rigby atrocity in which jihadists decapitated an unarmed British soldier who happened to be walking on a London street. Moreover, although unsuccessful, the attack on Saturday is probably a harbinger of things to come. Unfortunately the U.K. faces a greater counterterrorism challenge today than it did in 2013.

As I’ve outlined over the past two years, the jihadist threat to Britain has been steadily growing. But while ISIS has accelerated this threat, its roots run deeper. The key factor is Britain’s small minority of Muslim young men. “Since the 1990s, they have “turned to hardline Wahhabi and, later, Salafi imams,” I wrote last year at NRO. “These imams manipulated the social discontentment toward a ‘purposeful’ cause of religious fundamentalism.” These extremist Imams preach that the West is guilty for all the injustices of the Islamic world.

Ironically, according to Islamic doctrine, many Muslims may well see themselves as lining up in Europe to supersede the Catholic Church as they pursue their dream to conquer the world for Allah.

Some suggest that if current population trends continue, prodded by the new migration and the extended families that are sure to follow, Islam will soon be the new majority . Such a demographic shift would not only leave Christians in jeopardy, but Jews in double jeopardy —antipathy from their own government and overt hostility from Islam.

While it was not French Christians per se who fired the gun on the Jewish shoppers outside Paris in January, it is legitimate to question the role that Christian anti-Semitism plays in creating this climate shift as Jews, yet again, become victims in their own homeland.

The “Supersessionist” DNA, hidden beneath the surface of the society, is what drives secularized Christian nations such as France, Britain and Sweden to appease Islamists, who are working to increase their influence, numbers and decibel levels.

“France does not really oppose Palestinian terrorism. On the contrary, France facilitates it. Every year, the French government pays millions of euros, dollars and shekels to Palestinian NGOs whose stated goal is to destroy Israel… Much of the current rhetoric used by the Palestinians to reject Israel’s legitimacy and justify violence against Jews is found in strategic documents that France paid Palestinian NGOs to write.” – Caroline Glick

The guiding principle of “Replacement Theology” is a silent permission slip to demonize and destroy the Jews and Israel.

The Islamization of France is peeking over the horizon.

In a stinging article commemorating the recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Charles Krauthammer noted,

“The rise of European anti-Semitism is, in reality, just a return to the norm. For a millennium, virulent Jew-hatred — persecution, expulsions, massacres — was the norm in Europe until the shame of the Holocaust created a temporary anomaly wherein anti-Semitism became socially unacceptable….

The publisher of a website for Australian Muslims has made some encouraging noises about the need to see his creed’s local leadership reformed. Alas, many of his readers aren’t so sanguine about the possibility — or, indeed, the need –for change, as their now-deleted comments demonstrate.
Did you happen to read reporter Paul Maley’s profile of Ahmed Kilani, “founder of Australia’s biggest Muslim media organisation” who, as the headline in The Australian put it, wants a “revolution” within the community of his Australian co-religionists. Good stuff, you may have thought: a genuine, flesh-and-blood incarnation of the “moderate” Muslims we hear so much about yet seldom see. Unlike the Mufti, he speaks English and, going by the quotes, who could quibble with his assertion that Muslim leaders are out of touch with the broader Australian society? When Koran-quoting butchers kill scores in Paris (and a few more for good measure in San Bernardino), spiritual leaders who attempt to place such slaughter in the context of grievances against Israel, ASIO and the cult of perpetual victimhood do not open the door to greater understanding.

Ah, but here’s the rub. While Kilani’s willingness to critique the Islamic leadership, or what passes for it, is undoubtedly a force for good, that same “Muslim media organisation” he founded can serve as a vehicle for airing that special brand of paranoid intolerance and aggression of which we have seen quite a bit.

Consider the history of an article posted on Kilani’s Muslim Village site even as he was being quoted about the need for reform, change and sweet reasonableness. Lifted from the UK’s Independent, the piece was headlined “White Supremacy Bigger Threat to US Than Radical Islam.” Spurious nonsense though the report may be, there is nothing unusual about it. Academic grant-snafflers, such as po-mo piffle-mongering “terrorism expert” Professor Anne Aly, preach that same line after every latest Islamist outrage. So does Barack Obama and, of course, our very own ABC.

DAKAR, Senegal—A triple suicide bombing at a market on an island in Lake Chad has killed at least 27 people and injured 90 others, a Chad security official said.

Paul Manka, a Chad police spokesman, said three females carried out Saturday’s attack on Koulfoua Island.

Gen. Banyaman Cossingar, Chad gendarmerie director general, confirmed the attack, saying Nigerian Islamic extremist group Boko Haram is suspected.

The Lake Chad region, which straddles the borders of Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria, has been regularly targeted by the extremists. Chad’s government has already imposed a state of emergency in the area.

“Politicians who deny the role of radical Islam have no answer to San Bernardino or to the next San Bernardino. As ISIS lures more radicalized Muslims to commit terrorism in infidel lands, refusing to confront the enemy for what it is becomes a form of suicide.”

Last week a liberal politician named Hilary broke a taboo by calling Islamist terrorism by its proper name. Shocking things happened: Members of the politician’s political party broke with their leader’s policy. Legislators switched their votes to create a large majority supporting military attacks against Islamic State, or ISIS, in Syria. A conservative newspaper called the liberal politician statesmanlike enough to be head of the government.

This politician was in Britain, not in the U.S., and the speaker was Hilary Benn, not Hillary Clinton. Following the ISIS-inspired massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., perhaps more liberals in the U.S. can also start speaking forthrightly about terrorism and get smarter about stopping it.

BAGHDAD—Islamic State is laying sophisticated booby traps in Ramadi to thwart an Iraqi offensive, with devices that can trigger an explosive domino effect and snipers who target bomb-disposal experts, military officials said on Sunday.

After seizing Ramadi in May, the militants connected large, scattered webs of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, to one trigger wire, expanding the reach of an individual bomb. Iraqi military officials said the booby traps are delaying an offensive to retake the city.

“All of the delays we’re having, the reason was the heavy planting of IEDs,” said Gen. Hattem Al Magsosi, the head of the army’s Explosive Ordnance Division.

Islamic State’s use of IEDs has allowed small groups of insurgents to maintain control of cities against overwhelming numbers of troops, Iraqi military officials said.