RUTHFULLY YOURS

ISTANBUL—The Turkish military shot down what is likely to be a Russian jet fighter along the Syrian border on Tuesday after the plane violated Turkey’s airspace and ignored warnings to return, Turkish officials said.

Turkish authorities didn’t give the nationality of the jet but Russia separately said one of its jets had been downed in the region, it said the jet had flown exclusively in Syrian airspace and that the plane had likely been brought down by shelling from the ground.

The Turkish military said two of its F-16s shot down the jet fighter after it crossed into Turkish airspace and ignored 10 warnings in five minutes to return to Syrian airspace.

Television footage showed a jet catching fire and crashing into the mountains along the Turkey-Syria border.

The plane crashed on a part of the border where Russian and Syrian planes have been targeting Turkmen fighters, a group that has been seeking more support from Ankara in their fight against the Syrian regime.

The State Department said Secretary of State John Kerry finally called the Massachusetts family of a teen killed last week in a West Bank terror attack.

But that was just a couple of days after a State Department official, previewing Kerry’s visit this week to the Middle East, said the administration was just “a bit concerned” about attacks on Americans by Palestinians.

President Obama and Kerry have been mum on the attack in which Ezra Schwartz, 18, of Sharon, Mass., was killed Thursday.

Schwartz was a gap-year student attending Yeshivat Ashreinu in Beit Shemesh. He was in a van with five other friends taking food to IDF soldiers Thursday near the Gush Etzion junction when a Palestinian terrorist opened fire on cars stuck in traffic. The terrorist then rammed his car into another vehicle and was arrested.

Over the years since President Obama first took office, he has lectured Americans about the receding tide of war, al Qaeda on the run, and, more recently, ISIS (or, as the administration has it, ISIL) being degraded, slated for ultimate destruction, and, even more recently, “contained.” Meanwhile, the world is getting ever more dangerous. Over the past six months alone, the State Department in its efforts to keep up with the turmoil and threats has issued more than three dozen travel warnings for Americans thinking of visiting places from Eritrea to Mali, Lebanon, Colombia, Sudan, El Salvador, Nigeria, Tanzania, Cameroon, Burma, Nepal, Mali, the Philippines, Kenya, Turkey… and of course Syria, Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

Now, in the aftermath of the ISIS terrorist attacks on Paris, with ISIS threatening strikes on America, and Brussels heading into its fourth day on lockdown, the State Department is taking a more wholesale approach. Today, as PJ Media’s Bridget Johnson reports, the State Department issued a “Worldwide Travel Alert,” warning U.S. citizens of “possible risks of travel due to increased terrorist threats.”

Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens remarked that terrorism in Europe
was no longer limited to Jews and law enforcement officials, but now
affects targets of a different profile, including the general public,
The Guardian reported on Sunday.

Geens, the justice minister, said that the Paris attacks had shown
that the profile of potential targets had changed. “It’s no longer
synagogues or the Jewish museums or police stations, it’s mass
gatherings and public places,” he said.

By the calculations of the social scientists at the World Economic Forum, the United States’ gender-equality ranking has slipped from 20th place to 28th since 2014. WEF’s Global Gender Gap Index 2015 found that the U.S. is outranked not only by such leftist Valhallas as Iceland (first) and Sweden (fourth), but also, among others, by Mozambique (27th), Namibia (16th), Rwanda (sixth), and Burundi (23rd).

Yes, according to this report, American women who want to enjoy greater gender equality should move to Burundi — a small East African country whose president held a sham election to garner an unconstitutional third term and who is currently threatening to commit genocide against his own people in order to keep power. Burundi also has a continuing history of widespread rape committed by both private citizens and government officials.

Or there’s Burundi’s neighbor Rwanda, whose government recently recruited Burundian refugees, apparently to wage an armed insurgency within Burundi.

Also outranking the U.S. are the Philippines (seventh), where human-rights abuses such as extrajudicial killing are normal; Bolivia (22nd), where corruption and gender-based violence prevail; and Nicaragua (twelfth), where property rights are tenuous and the press faces judicial and legal harassment from the Ortega administration.

The murder of 27 hotel guests in Mali’s capital city by Boko Haram, now an al Qaeda franchisee, highlights yet again the delusional futility of asserting that, as Hillary Clinton put it in a tweet, “Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” Like Obama, Hillary also vigorously condemns the use of a phrase like “Islamist radicalism.”

These evasions are contrary to the history and doctrines of Islam consistent over 14 centuries, and contradict the professed motives for the continuing violence perpetrated across the globe––27,295 deadly attacks just since 9/11–– by Islamic terrorist groups who emulate the Prophet and take seriously his injunction to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captive and besiege them, and lie in wait for them in every ambush” (9.5), one of 109 verses––the direct commands of Allah–– that order war against infidels.

Moreover, that most Muslims do not engage directly in such violence, or may even condemn it, does not change the fundamental doctrines that justify it, no more than the millions of Catholic women who use birth control invalidate the church’s doctrine against contraception. The doctrine of jihad has been part of Islam from its beginning, enjoined by the Koran and Hadith, and confirmed and celebrated by the most eminent Islamic historians, jurisprudents, and theologians. One of the most famous, the late-14th century writer Ibn Khaldun, wrote in the Muqaddimah, “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” When we see Muslims in the 21st century killing and dying in service to this traditional religious imperative created in the 7th century, it is perverse blindness to claim that there is no connection between Islam and Islamic terrorism.

Stockholm opened what is believed to be the world’s first rape clinic for men. More and more men are being subjected to homosexual rape in multicultural Sweden. 370 sex crimes against boys and men were registered in 2014, although the actual number of incidents is thought to be significantly higher.

Sweden’s strategy seems to be to keep the borders open and then redistribute the asylum seekers to EU countries that have an immigration policy completely different from Sweden’s open borders and generous welfare benefits. Whether other EU countries want to relieve Sweden’s burden remains to be seen.

Police documents show that 70% asylum seekers whose applications are rejected ignore the decision and stay illegally in Sweden.

The councilman argued that one should be able to talk about everything, so long as it is true. Two days later, he was forced to apologize and stress that he is not a racist.

Swedish authorities care more about the murderer’s future in his native Eritrea than they do about the risk that he will kill more Swedes.

Weapons smugglers have figured out a way to drive through customs checkpoints without being pulled over. The customs officers have orders never to stop cars with more passengers than there are customs officers present, according to the Lokaltidningen weekly newspaper.

And so now we have the considered position of Kerry, Clinton and Obama: Terrorism is to do with everything except Islam.
The British Home Secretary, Theresa May, was a little behind the curve when she reacted to the bloodbath in Paris by insisting that “the attacks have nothing to do with Islam”. This is the old spin that, although some terrorists might claim to be Muslim, there’s nothing inherently Muslim about their terrorism.

But why be so modest? In the United States, the most senior members of the Democrat establishment are taking it to the next level. Secretary of State John Kerry:

It has nothing to do with Islam; it has everything to do with criminality, with terror, with abuse, with psychopathism – I mean, you name it.

As my friend Douglas Murray remarked:

So long as you don’t name it ‘Islam’.

Quite. Secretary Kerry doesn’t care what you name it as long as you don’t name it “Islam”. Because the not-naming of Islam is more important than the actual naming of whatever it is. Even the qualification that many have been careful to make over the years – of course, most Muslims aren’t terrorists but an awful lot of terrorists unfortunately happen to be Muslim – will no longer suffice. As President-in-waiting Hillary Clinton assures us:

Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.

So not only is terrorism nothing to do with Islam, but Muslims have “nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism”. She said this a few hours before yet another US citizen was killed by terrorists shouting “Allahu Akbar!” – this time in a mass slaughter at the Radisson Hotel in Bamako, Mali. Hostages were given a stark choice: if they could recite from the Koran, they would live; if they were incapable of reciting from the Koran, they would die. So whoever these terrorists were – “you name it” – they knew enough about Islam to be able to recognize quotations from the Koran. Yet they can’t be Muslims because Muslims have “nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism”.

So who does have something to do with terrorism? Republicans mainly. Republicans are the greatest recruiting tool for terrorism that has ever been devised – far more effective than jihadist snuff videos on social media. Just ask President Obama:

MANILA, Philippines — President Obama on Wednesday angrily accused Republicans of feeding into the Islamic State’s strategy of casting the United States as waging war on Muslims, saying the GOP’s rhetoric has become the most “potent recruitment tool” for the militant group…

Stonewalled in his efforts to grasp how US scientists turned an 18-year pause into a temperature increase, a powerful congressman is on the warpath. Even as the climate-change establishment heads to Paris, its scam is much closer to surfacing than the heat they now insist is hiding in the deep ocean
A grandiose United Nations Climate Change conference is to be held in Paris at the end of the month. It has been extensively billed as the last chance for world leaders to sign up to the massive expenditure supposedly necessary to save the world from the global warming disaster. A previous effort of this sort in Copenhagen six years ago went horribly wrong, so it is not surprising that the propaganda associated with the lead-up to the Paris conference has been vastly more intrusive and hysterical. As a consequence, the apparently coherent scientific story behind the politics is beginning to fall apart.

Senior U.S. intelligence officials now say they’re almost sure—one of them calls it “99.9% certain”—that a Russian plane that crashed into the northern Sinai Peninsula on October 31 was brought down by a bomb. (Update: Russia now confirms it.)Although the attacks in Paris on Saturday, November 14, which killed about 130, have gotten far more media attention, the Russian crash exacted a considerably higher toll with 224 people killed, mostly Russian holidaymakers returning from the Sharm al-Sheikh resort in Sinai.

One of the reasons the Paris attacks had a greater impact is that ISIS was clearly behind them. But U.S., British, and Israeli intelligence officials are now saying it was apparently behind the Sinai crash, too.

That assessment is based on chatter that was picked up after the crash between Sinai Province—an ISIS affiliate in Sinai that claims credit for the atrocity—and ISIS Central.

Investigators also say the plane’s cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder indicate that the crash was no accident and an explosion was involved.