RUTHFULLY YOURS

“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.

Here she goes again. Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom, demonising Israel.

‘According to the Swedish newspaper Expressen, Wallstrom – who has triggered several diplomatic incidents with Israel since taking up her post in October 2014 – was asked in the Swedish parliament by Liberal MP Mathias Sundin why she has not condemned in strong terms the recent wave of terrorism in Israel.

Wallstrom said that the attacks were “terrible” and “must not happen,” and added that Israel has “the right to defend itself.”But then she went on to say that the response cannot be “extrajudicial executions” or a reaction that is “disproportionate” so that the “numbers of dead on the other side” is several times greater.
Israeli Ambassador to Sweden Isaac Bachman immediately responded, telling Expressen that “To focus on the actions terrorism victims take in self-defense only serves to draw attention away from the horrors of terrorism. Instead, we should condemn and act to stop the perpetrators, the financiers and the inciters of terrorism.”

He added that Israel has a better record than any other Western country in minimizing civilian casualties while fighting terrorism.

The British Labour party recently elected its most left-wing leader in decades, Jeremy Corbyn. So it was a remarkable moment this week when the Labour Party’s shadow foreign secretary, Hilary Benn, broke with Corbyn and gave an impassioned speech in Parliament supporting the conservative government’s motion to extend its bombing campaign against ISIS into Syria.

Conservative Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond called Benn’s remarks “one of the greatest speeches” ever delivered in the British House of Commons.

Benn delivered a clear-eyed assessment of the danger posed by ISIS (aka “Daesh”):

“The carnage in Paris brought home to us the clear and present danger we face from them. It could have just as easily been London, or Glasgow, or Leeds or Birmingham and it could still be. …

We are part of a coalition of over 60 countries, standing together shoulder-to-shoulder to oppose their ideology and their brutality….

Now Mr Speaker, no-one in this debate doubts the deadly serious threat we face from Daesh and what they do, although sometimes we find it hard to live with the reality. We know that in June four gay men were thrown off the fifth storey of a building in the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor. We know that in August the 82-year-old guardian of the antiquities of Palmyra, Professor Khaled al-Assad, was beheaded, and his headless body was hung from a traffic light. And we know that in recent weeks there has been the discovery of mass graves in Sinjar, one said to contain the bodies of older Yazidi women murdered by Daesh because they were judged too old to be sold for sex.

This form of terrorism-really a mini jihad has been going on in Israel on an almost daily basis….imagine of the thugs had guns…rsk

LONDON—Three people were stabbed in a London underground station Saturday night, in an attack that British police said they are treating as a terrorist incident.

The attack, about 7 p.m., left one person with serious, but not life-threatening, stab wounds, and two others with minor wounds, the police said in a statement.

The police arrested a male suspect at the station.

“We are treating this as a terrorist incident,” Commander Richard Walton, who leads the Metropolitan Police’s counterterrorism force, said in the statement.

The U.K. remains on high alert after terrorist attacks in Paris left 130 dead last month. London has been the target of a number of terrorist attacks, including the stabbing–and attempted decapitation–of a soldier in the city in 2013 and the 2005 bombing of the city’s transport system. The government says its intelligence services have thwarted a number of terror attacks this year.

Michel Gurfinkiel, a French journalist and public intellectual, served as editor-in-chief of Valeurs Actuelles from 1985 to 2006, and authored several books on geopolitics, international relations and culture. He is the Founder and President of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, a conservative think thank, and a Shillman/Ginsburg Fellow at Middle East Forum.

France faces a future of ethnic civil war at worst, and periodic terrorist attacks and political tumult at minimum. Yet its difficulties—both geopolitical and demographic—can be overcome with patience and determination.
“For all that, the long-term consequences may not be positive for Jews, and French-Jewish emigration, either to Israel or North America, will likely not subside.”

The November 13 killing spree in Paris came as no surprise. The Islamic State had threatened France explicitly and repeatedly for more than a year, and French government officials high and low issued warnings as well. Most pointedly, Judge Marc Trevidic, who was in charge of antiterrorist investigations in France for ten years, disclosed in September that IS was planning “something big” against France. He spoke of an “overbid logic” among competing jihadi groups: “Each group is eager to strike further and in a heavier way than other groups. They all want to win the Pulitzer prize of terrorism–that is to say to do something as grand and as lethal as 9/11.” Hence ISIS in Paris on November 13, and al-Qaeda in Bamako on November 20.

Western officials believe the terror network behind last month’s massacre in Paris has links to people in the U.K., fueling concerns about the threat faced in Europe.

Several people suspected of having connections to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Islamic State operative and alleged ringleader of the Nov. 13 attacks, are based in the U.K., according to two Western officials. The officials said those people, including some of Moroccan heritage, are based in the Birmingham area, about 120 miles northwest of London.

At least one person connected to the attacks is believed to have traveled to the U.K. before the shootings, the officials said.

London’s Metropolitan Police, the lead service on counterterror issues in the U.K., declined to comment. Metropolitan Police officers stationed in Paris are helping with the French investigation.

According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik were linked to ISIS and Al Qaeda.The ISW is characterizing the San Bernardino massacre along the lines of Mumbai (2008), the Westgate Mall in Kenya (2013) and the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris (2015) and marking it as the first successful Al Qaeda/ISIS-related attack in the U.S. with skilled marksmen employing long guns and explosives.This assessment is based on reports that Tashfeen Malik pledged allegiance to ISIS, that Farook had contact with Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab and Jabhat Al Nusra as well as the very nature and preparation for the attack. It is particularly striking that the couple was able to acquire weapons, combat gear, ammunition and explosive devices without detection. They also developed technical expertise in the bomb-making techniques made available by Al Qaeda and affiliated groups.The ISW believes that more attacks are likely to follow the success of the San Bernardino incident.Follow the link to the timeline to better understand the various connections……Janet Levy

Key Take-away: The San Bernardino shooting of December 2, 2015 was a terrorist attack conducted by perpetrators inspired by the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) and possibly linked with and inspired by al Qaeda. The attack displays some of the sophistication and signatures of past al Qaeda attacks. Drawing a sharp dividing line between al Qaeda and ISIS threat groups when it comes to attacks on the homeland is difficult despite differences between them in the Middle East. The U.S. must expect that both groups will devote even greater resources to encouraging and supporting such attacks here and in Europe now that their feasibility has been demonstrated in both regions. American and Western efforts against al Qaeda and ISIS globally are failing and require fundamental reassessment.

View this timeline online here.

Individuals inspired by the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) and with links to al Qaeda conducted the terrorist attack in San Bernardino on December 2. This attack was the first al Qaeda- or ISIS-related in the U.S. by a skilled shooter team using both guns and explosives, a technique that both groups used in the attacks in Mumbai of November 2008; on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya in September 2013; on the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015; and on several targets in Paris on November 13, 2015. It marks a step-change in the threat that both al Qaeda and ISIS pose to the security of the American homeland.

Turkey shot down a Russian jet. No gain, but plenty of damage to its economy. Russia gave up one jet to Turkey and has made its military presence in Syria and the strategic eastern Mediterranean permanent.

Turkey can no longer speak to Russia about the possibility of ousting Assad.

Putin seems to be making sure that NATO will do nothing.

At this year’s G-20 summit in Antalya, Turkey, Russian President, Vladimir Putin, said that the radical jihadist Islamic State (IS) was being financed by donors from at least 40 countries, including some G-20 member states — clearly pointing his finger, without naming names, at Saudi Arabia and Turkey. A few days later, two Turkish F-16 jets shot down a Russian SU-24 warplane, and claimed that the Russian jet had violated Turkish airspace for 17 seconds on the country’s Syrian border — a violation Russia denies. This was the first time a Soviet or Russian military aircraft was shot down by a NATO air force since the end of WWII.

Anthony Daniels’s latest book, published under his pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple, is the essay collection Out into the Beautiful World (New English Review).

The social security system in Britain makes it possible, and perhaps even profitable, for parents — the word is used only in the biological sense — to bring children into the world without thought or care. That indifference is matched by the police.
One should not read too much into a single case, of course: but not too little either. A 24-year-old man in England called Lee James was sentenced to life imprisonment for having kicked the head of his victim so many times (while shouting “Have some of that!”) that he died. Then he and a neighbour dragged the body to a public place, doused it in white spirit and set fire to it.

The dead man was called Bijan Ebrahimi, an immigrant from Iran who had become disabled through disease of his back. He was subjected to a long campaign of abuse by neighbours who accused him of being a paedophile. This was because Mr Ebrahimi filmed some local children destroying his flower-pots and also James drinking and smoking while in charge of one of his children on the lawn just outside his, Ebrahimi’s, window.

James complained to a passing police patrol of Ebrahimi’s “paedophilia”, and though James almost certainly had a criminal record, was known to be a violent “partner” of the mother of his children, and had a visage of inspissated malignity that could have been used by Lombroso as evidence for the plausibility of his theories, the police arrested Ebrahimi, who had long complained to them about the abuse he had suffered from James and others. James, who openly threatened that he would take the law into his own hands if something was not done about Ebrahimi, told the police that he was prepared to go to prison if he attacked Ebrahimi, and that his children would, when they were old enough, be proud of what he had done to protect them. A mob of local people cheered and shouted abuse as Ebrahimi was taken away by the police.