RUTHFULLY YOURS

The lands that once housed Jewish settlements were supposed to transform the Gaza Strip into the Middle East’s Singapore.

Instead, all the grandiose and ambitious plans went down the drain when Hamas seized control over the Gaza Strip in 2007. Since then, the entire Gaza Strip has been transformed into a base for various Islamist groups, which have used Gaza to launch terror attacks against Israel and threaten Egypt’s national security.

By stealing their people’s land and distributing it among their followers, Hamas and Fatah are further undermining the Palestinian dream of establishing a proper state based on the principles of democracy, accountability, transparency and the rule of law.

The beleaguered Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas, has found an original way to solve its financial crisis. The movement is now planning to pay its unpaid civil servants with former Israeli settlement land in the Gaza Strip.

Abandoned by Israel in 2005 as part of the “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip, the land was supposed to provide a solution to the severe housing crisis in the Palestinian-controlled area. Back then, there was much talk about building new housing projects for thousands of Palestinian families in the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli “disengagement” prompted some oil-rich Arab countries to propose plans to help solve the severe housing crisis in the Gaza Strip. The lands that once housed Jewish settlements were supposed to transform the Gaza Strip into the Middle East’s Singapore.

NIAMEY, Niger—Just over a month ago, Ibrahim Foukori’s home village of Baroua in eastern Niger was a bustling farming community of 3,000 people. Now, it is burned to the ground and abandoned.

The villagers, like hundreds of thousands of others in the region, have escaped the advances of Boko Haram—the West African affiliate of Islamic State that is infamous for its unrestrained butchery and enslavement of hundreds of teenage schoolgirls.

“Every man took their children and wives and just ran for their lives,” said Mr. Foukori, who represents the area on the western shores of Lake Chad in the parliament of Niger. “Boko Haram first pillaged everything, and then came back to torch what was left of my village.”

Boko Haram—which is usually translated as “Western education is forbidden”—started out as radical Islamist sect in northern Nigeria’s Borno province more than a decade ago. For most of the time since then, it focused on battling the Nigerian state, which it considers illegitimate.

This year, however, Boko Haram dramatically expanded its campaign of killings and bombings far beyond Nigeria’s borders. It attacked the three other countries in the Lake Chad area—the former French colonies of Niger, Cameroon and Chad.

— Turkey often appeals to the West for support, given its longtime membership in NATO. Now, Turkish leadership is in a shouting match with Russia’s provocative president, Vladimir Putin, over Turkey’s downing of a Russian jet in probable Turkish airspace. Each country has accused the other of helping terrorists in Syria.

The problem with Turkey and the West, however, is that their relationship is decades out of date. What was once an alliance is now nothing special at all.

Barack Obama used to lecture reluctant Europeans about why they should accept Turkey into the European Union as its first Islamic member. Obama boasted of a “special friendship” with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. As president, Obama suddenly forgot the promise he made as a senator to formally acknowledge the Armenian genocide committed by the Turks in the early 1900s.

Turkey has become a favorite stop abroad for Obama to lecture his fellow Americans about their ethical shortcomings, from past treatment of Native Americans to their present supposed xenophobia over not accepting Syrian refugees en masse.

There are two countries that I once regarded as home: Canada, where I have spent most of my life, and Greece, where I lived for five years. Both are now lost to me. Governed by a leftist administration and effectively submitting to the adhan—the call of the muezzin—each is now under siege.

Greece has become a way-station for a vast press of Muslim refugees sowing disorder and mayhem in their wake. Fishermen on the island of Lesbos, which I know well, have seen their livelihoods disrupted, and are unable to navigate through the filth and garbage littering their shores. Elsewhere the migrants reward their hosts by going on rampages. A graphic video shows what lies in wait for this once anti-Islamic country, which endured over 400 years of Ottoman oppression. As one Greek respondent says, “We are under occupation.”

As for Canada, the future augurs poorly. Under the partisan and incompetent administration of Justin Trudeau—like Barack Obama the most unqualified and dangerous person ever to occupy his nation’s highest office—we are witnessing the importation of a veritable Muslim army that will ultimately change the face of the country beyond recognition. Trudeau, who has ended Canada’s military contribution to the war against ISIS and vowed to weaken anti-terrorist Bill C-51, is opening the gates with intemperate haste to 25,000 Muslim refugees, aka “Syrians,” a number proportionately equivalent, as author Howard Rotberg points out, to 225,000 Muslims flooding in short order into the U.S. CTV News reports that up to 900 Syrians a day are set to land in Montreal and Toronto, starting December 1.

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.