RUTHFULLY YOURS

Western response to jihad in Jerusalem suffers from a moral reflex that contextualizes radical Islamic terror against Israelis while ignoring jihadis’ self-declared motivations. Radical Islamic terrorism in Paris and Jerusalem has reignited the debate in the West over terrorist motivation.

Western leaders and observers continue to condemn Islamic State’s Paris massacres unconditionally.

However, Western response to jihad in Jerusalem suffers from a moral reflex that contextualizes radical Islamic terror against Israelis while ignoring jihadis’ self-declared motivations. Western leaders, policy makers and media pundits should listen carefully to radical Islamic jihadists’ declared motivations to murder, whether in Paris, Brussels, Bamako (Mali) or Jerusalem. Jihadists share the same end: the elimination of non-Muslim sovereign states and the establishment of a Islamic caliphate anywhere Islam has ever ruled and eventually over the entire world.

Some spoke of “resistance,” but to them, resistance meant listening to music. A man on a talk show said he was offering “free hugs.”

A French judge, Marc Trevidic, in charge of all the major Islamic terrorism cases over the last ten years, said a few days before the November attacks in Paris that the situation was “getting worse” and that “radicalized groups” could “carry out attacks resulting in hundreds of deaths.” He was quickly transferred to a court in northern France, where he has been assigned to petty crimes and divorce cases.

France’s political leaders are apparently hoping that people will get used to being attacked and learn to live with terrorism. In the meantime, they are trying to divert the attention of the public with — “climate change!”

The rise of populism is slowly destroying the unelected, unaccountable, and untransparent European Union.

Several weeks have passed since Islamic attacks bloodied Paris. France’s President François Hollande is describing the killers as just “a horde of murderers” acting in the name of a “mad cause.” He adds that “France has no enemy.” He never uses the word “terrorism.” He no longer says the word “war.”

The running melodrama of the world climate-change talks reassembled in Paris this week, and word from the worthies is that this time the 196 nations are poised for a momentous breakthrough. Well, not quite. The politicians want a deal so badly that they’ll accept anything that can pass as one, but it won’t amount to much.

Not that you’d know this from the grandiose rhetoric. President Obama called it an historical “turning point,” the “moment we finally determined we would save our planet.” French President François Hollande declared: “Never have the stakes of an international meeting been so high, since what is at stake is the future of the planet, the future of life.” And Pope Francis chimed in that “if I may use a strong word I would say that we are at the edge of suicide.” The theme is Apocalypse Right Now.
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The last climate talks collapsed in 2009 amid differences between rich and developing nations. The International Energy Agency estimates developing countries will emit 70% of world CO2 by 2030 and contribute 170% of emissions increases between now and then. Without their participation in a deal, atmospheric CO2 will continue to accumulate whatever the U.S. does.

Senator Gardner was a Congressman who defeated Mark Udall the Incumbent Democrat Senator in 2014…rsk
Chaos in the Middle East has diverted Western eyes, but Kim Jong Un’s reign of terror in North Korea continues. Last month one high-ranking official was conspicuously absent from an important military funeral, leading to speculation of a new purge. On Oct. 10, North Korea marked the 70th anniversary of its ruling Workers’ Party with a military parade. “Our party can confidently state,” Mr. Kim said in a speech, “that our revolutionary armament today can deal with any kind of war U.S. imperialists ask for.”

It is time for the U.S. to counter this forgotten maniac. North Korea is a proliferator that has tested nuclear weapons on three separate occasions in violation of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions. This past weekend it test-fired a ballistic missile from a submarine. That attempt failed, but Mr. Kim will try again. “They have the weapons, and they have the ability to miniaturize those weapons, and they have the ability to put them on a rocket that can range the homelands,” Adm. William Gortney, head of the U.S. Northern Command, said in October.

For civilisation to continue in the civilised parts of the world, we have to seal off the Middle East and the pestilence it nurtures. The sooner we start that process, the better. The latest barbarities in Paris are a good enough excuse>
At the time of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, President Bush asked rhetorically if the Iraqi people deserved to be ruled by dictators in perpetuity. Shouldn’t they have the opportunity to embrace democracy and appreciate its benefits, as in the good countries on the planet? Subsequent events proved those liberated from Saddam Hussein unable and unwilling to set aside their tribal hatreds and religious animosities, in effect proving President Bush wrong.

Cut to the current day. Parts of Iraq and Syria are now controlled by ISIS which does the basic functions of a state, including collecting garbage, running schools and hospitals, and so on. ISIS also likes to inflict murder and mayhem on other countries near and far. The state of ISIS runs at a loss so it is kept in business by funding originating in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and by support from Turkey and the United States.

You read the last bit correctly. ISIS does not grow enough food to keep body and soul together. Starvation is averted by imported grain, supply of which is organised by UN agencies with the full approval of the United States. At the same time the United States is conducting an air campaign against ISIS — but that is more aimed at behaviour modification of the regime, rather than changing facts on the ground. Australia is contributing to this Children’s Crusade-level endeavour, with our aircraft operating under rules of engagement which make them ineffectual.

The consummate sleazebag, thief and all-round corruptocrat who launched and shaped the UN effort to rid the world of CO2 has died, appropriately enough as his heirs gather in Paris to rob the world blind. Good riddance
Editor’s note: Five years ago, Quadrant Online published this profile of Maurice Strong (left), the man who, more than any other, redefined a trace gas as the meal ticket for tens of thousands of climate functionaries — the same people whose light-fingered heirs are today gathered in Paris. To mark his passing, we once again present John Izzard’s profile of the man who did very nicely by costing everyone else dearly.

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The Yellow Brick Road to Climate Change

January has certainly been a defining month in the quest for truth about climate change, and the custodians of that “truth” aren’t looking that flash at the moment. Indeed in the month of January some of the major doomsday prophecies unravelled and the prophets themselves seemed to undergo vows of silence. Kevin Rudd, Penny Wong, Tim Flannery — who are never lost for words — seemed, well… totally lost for words!

Like Dorothy, Lion, Tin Man and Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, we’ve all been dancing down the Yellow Brick Road of “settled science” in search of answers from the Emerald City, only to find that what we suspected all along — the Wizard has been telling us fibs.

But who exactly is the Wizard? And where did this seeming-madness all begin?

Undoubtedly there are many “wizards”, but the man behind the green curtain, the man who managed to get the climate industry to where it is today is a mild mannered character by the name of Maurice Strong. The whole climate change business, and it is a business, started with Mr Strong.

The Schengen Agreement led to Europe’s borderless Schengen Area. comprising 26 European countries that have abolished passport and any other type of border control at their common borders, also referred to as internal borders. It mostly functions as a single country for international travel purposes. rsk
Watching all the videos and news coverage of Americans blitzing the stores on the day after Thanksgiving, the day we know as Black Friday, I found myself thinking about our priorities. The news cycle reminds me daily that they aren’t quite in order. I learned last Friday from Reuters that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the malevolent author of the latest terrorist attacks in Paris, “boasted of the ease with which he had re-entered Europe from Syria via Greece two months earlier, exploiting the confusion of the migrant crisis and the continent’s passport-free Schengen system….”

Now, I know there are some who really think the Schengen Agreement is an indispensable part of the newer, better, enlightened Europe. But I’m going to be straight with you about this: it strikes me as odd that anyone could place so much emphasis on passport-free travel as a measure of our civilisation’s moral worth. After all, those most likely to be titillated by the Schengen ideal are generally the same people who think the government should decide what kind of lightbulbs we use in our homes. How odd that these obsessed micro-managers become total anarchists at the border, one of the few places the state should have a say.

The jihadists struck Paris on November 13. On that Friday the 13th, the band on stage in the Bataclan theater, where 89 people were murdered, was Eagles of Death Metal. The song it was playing was “Kiss of the Devil.” The details sound like something out of Hollywood, but the horror was deadly real. In total, the terrorists would murder 130 people, the vast majority in the prime of their lives.

The multiple massacre left France reeling, vulnerable, and also deeply confused—but not about the nature of the operation. Islamic State (IS) took responsibility for the attacks, which were clearly another spillover from the Syrian civil war. Their so-called mastermind, the Belgian Abdelhamid Abaaoud, had spent time in Syria as the head of an IS unit devoted to dispatching jihadis to Europe. Earlier in the year, in a profile in Dabiq, IS’s propaganda magazine, Abbaoud flaunted the fact that he was planning acts of mass murder. “We spent months trying to find a way into Europe,” he said, “and by Allah’s strength, we succeeded in finally making our way to Belgium. We were then able to obtain weapons and set up a safe house while we planned to carry out operations against the Crusaders.”

So the problem was clear, as was the threat: global jihad enjoyed a safe haven in Syria, which allowed it to build jihadi networks across Europe and the Middle East. French confusion stemmed not from identifying that threat but from figuring out what, practically, could be done about it. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, stepped forward. France, he said, is “in the worst of situations. We are sufficiently prominent to be a target, but not prominent enough to eradicate these barbarians.” His solution: “[T]he Russians must be associated with the work of the coalition to destroy [Islamic State].”

Sarkozy’s proposal was not new. Vladimir Putin himself had first floated the idea of a unified alliance against Islamic State two months earlier, at the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. At the time, the government of François Hollande responded tepidly, observing that Russia was less interested in defeating Islamic State than in propping up the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad: a vicious sectarian actor whose wholesale slaughter of Sunni Muslims was IS’s greatest recruiting tool. In the view of the French government, Assad’s barbarism, abetted as it was by the Russians and the Iranians, was thus also the main cause of the refugee crisis plaguing Europe; until he was deposed, a stable new order would never arise.

Then there is the question of just how long Russia can afford to sustain its expensive military adventure in Syria. The Russian economy already has enough difficulties without having to bear the cost of Mr Putin’s latest act of military aggression.

Russian President Vladimir Putin may well come to regret agreeing to Iran’s request for Moscow to intervene militarily in Syria’s brutal civil war.

The shooting down of a Russian warplane over the Syrian border by Turkey has graphically illustrated the risks Moscow faces after the Kremlin agreed to intervene on behalf of Syria’s beleaguered President Bashar al-Assad.

Mr Putin took his fateful decision to launch military action in Syria after meeting Major-General Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s notorious Quds Force, in Moscow last August. Visiting Moscow shortly after the conclusion of June’s deal on the future of Iran’s nuclear programme (JCPOA), Soleimani delivered a blunt warning to the Russian leader that the Assad regime, Russia’s long-standing strategic ally in the Middle East, faced defeat without outside support.

The global-warming crusade (we mustn’t call it a “jihad”) is a strange exercise in Protestant virtue. Consider the endlessly repeated argument: “Even if the threat is being exaggerated; even if the models aren’t as reliable as they say; even if the scientific consensus isn’t quite so iron-clad as the activists claim, wouldn’t we be better off, still, if we consumed less, conserved more, and invested in efficiency and green alternatives?”

This is a question of virtue masquerading as a question of engineering.

There is One True American Faith, and Joel Osteen (in the shadow of whose church, a former professional-sports arena, I type these words) is its prophet, the latest in a line that includes such diverse figures as Cotton Mather, Norman Vincent Peale, and Dave Ramsey.

One current of that faith is the so-called prosperity gospel, the belief that if one performs the proper offices honoring God, then He will proffer blessings in this world, as well as in the life to come. Put another way, some Christians believe that the One who commands us to take up our crosses and follow Him also cares a great deal about who wins at bingo and whether you get a preferential rate on your mortgage. (“Not a sparrow falls,” etc.) Material prosperity of supernatural origin comes with some indentures, however, and thus we have the ancient American cult of thrift, the deep-seated prejudice against indulgence and extravagance (our Protestant friends sometimes lament the fact that Europe’s Catholic altars are garnished with priceless masterpieces), and the mania for efficiency in American life. The ancient Calvinists believed debt to be wicked; Ramsey, their modern torchbearer, merely insists that “debt is dumb, and cash is king.” King of kings, for some, to be sure.