RUTHFULLY YOURS

The law stated that the homes and workplaces of those non-Muslims who could not afford the tax would be sequestered.

Under the AKP rule, Turkey’s dwindling Jewish community, now at around a mere 17,000, as well as other non-Muslims, have come under systematic intimidation from government politicians and bureaucrats. These non-Muslim minorities are also often the targets of racist attacks.

It was 1942 when, one day, Hayim Alaton, a Jewish yarn importer in Istanbul, received two payment notices from the tax office: He was asked to pay 80,000 liras in total — a fortune at that time. He ran to the tax office to object, but was told to pay the whole amount within 15 days. It was the infamous Wealth Tax, passed on Nov. 11, 1942 and it remained in effect for a year and a half until it was repealed on March 14, 1944.

The Wealth Tax exclusively targeted Turkey’s non-Muslims at a time when 300,000 Orthodox Greeks and 100,000 Jews were living in Istanbul (where total population was one million). The law stated that the homes and workplaces of those non-Muslims who could not afford the tax would be sequestered. Alaton was able to pay no more than 11,000 liras. That was the start of “black years,” as Alaton’s son, 15 years old at that time, would later recall.

Wordy and as banal as Brooking’s mantra “Its stated mission is to “provide innovative and practical recommendations that advance three broad goals: strengthen American democracy; foster the economic and social welfare, security and opportunity of all Americans; and secure a more open, safe, prosperous, and cooperative international system”. rsk

For several years, President Barack Obama has operated under a set of assumptions about the Middle East: First, there could be no return of U.S. ground troops in sizable numbers to the region; and second, undergirding the first, the U.S. has no interests in the region great enough to justify such a renewed commitment. The crises in the Middle East could be kept localized. There might be bloodshed and violence—even mass killing, in Syria and Libya and elsewhere, and some instability in Iraq—but the fighting, and its consequences, could be contained. The core elements of the world order would not be affected, and America’s own interests would not be directly threatened so long as good intelligence and well-placed drone strikes prevented terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Even Islamic State could be “degraded” and “contained” over time.

These assumptions could have been right—other conflicts in the Middle East have remained local—but they have proven to be wrong. The combined crises of Syria, Iraq and Islamic State have not been contained. Islamic State itself has proven both durable and capable, as the attacks in Paris showed. The Syrian conflict, with its exodus of refugees, is destabilizing Lebanon and Jordan and has put added pressure on Turkey’s already tenuous democracy. It has exacerbated the acute conflict between Sunnis and Shiites across the region.

BRUSSELS—Belgium raised the terror alert in Brussels to the highest level on Saturday, as Prime Minister Charles Michel warned of the risk of attacks in the capital similar to those that rocked Paris eight days earlier.

“The level four was set for Brussels based on a serious and imminent threat,” Mr. Michel said at a news conference following a meeting with cabinet members. “This is the result of relatively precise information of a risk of attacks, similar to those that took place in Paris.”

The move meant the city’s metro system was closed until Sunday, some tram stations stopped operating and soldiers were deployed outside the entrances of many hotels and throughout the capital. It came a week after Paris was struck by a series of attacks that killed 130 people, which French authorities have said were plotted in Brussels.

Mr. Michel said public transport as well as shopping districts were at particular risk. He declined to give further details on continuing investigations and whether any specific terrorist plots had been thwarted.

The U.S. Embassy in Brussels urged Americans to “shelter in place,” stay at home and avoid public transit. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, whose headquarters are in Brussels, also recommended that staff and their families avoid public transit and public gatherings in Brussels. The city is also home to the European Commission and many European Union institutions.

There were few details about the specific intelligence that led Belgian authorities to issue the terror warning or prompt the U.S. and NATO to issue guidance to their personnel. Officials said releasing more information could jeopardize investigations.

After the terrorist attacks in Paris, Canadian journalist and entrepreneur Ezra Levant hopped on a plane to France. His mission? To interview French Muslims about the attacks. He wanted to know their views: who committed these horrific attacks, does it have anything to do with islam, and does this mean France is at war? If so, a war against whom?

Now, Levant published a 20-minute video with highlights of these interviews. Although the conversations are in French, his organization Rebel Media put English subtitles below them. The results are both troubling and, in some way at least, reassuring.

Let me start with the reassuring part. Most French Muslims Levant talked to condemned the attacks. They made clear they don’t want to have anything to do with ISIS and don’t share the organization’s views and goals.

As another Islamic terrorist attack occurred in Mali’s capital of Bamako, where Muslim gunmen attacked a luxury hotel full of foreigners, killing innocents and taking 170 people hostage (see update), reports confirm that the terrorists demanded that hostages recite the Shahada (the Muslim declaration of faith) and that those who were able to do so were allowed to leave the hotel.

The terrorists were also shouting “Allahu Akbar”, which media reports perpetually inform us means “God is great” in Arabic.

But does “Allahu Akbar” really mean “God is great”?

In response to the terrorists’ shouts of “Allahu Akbar” and the media’s “translation” of it for us, The Glazov Gang is running its feature interview with Daniel Greenfield in which he discussed The Real Meaning of ‘Allahu Akbar’, explaining why you should be suspicious of the meaning the media ascribes to the Arabic expression after every Jihadi attack.

Don’t miss it!

The Palestinian “victims” — victims of their own credulousness — are known as shuhadaa, martyrs for the sake of Allah, victims of the misconception that Allah wants us to die for him. But Allah forbids us to murder. Muhammad forbids us to murder. The Qur’an forbids us to murder.

Europeans, in general, obviously want the Jews dead — so long as the murder cannot be traced back to them. They seem to be hoping that their boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, combined with Arab and Iranian “hit men,” will do the job for them.

Also tragically, it has taken Mahmoud Abbas too long to realize that the ultimate objective of Hamas, the local representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, after killing Israelis, is to have this violence cost the Palestinian Authority its existence in the West Bank. There, they openly plan to set up another Islamic emirate, like the one in the Gaza Strip.

The knife-wielding Palestinian children — and the other young people who commit murder — are also not a spontaneous occurrence. They do not simply “spring” full-blown from “imperialism,” “Syrian bombings” or an “endangered Al-Aqsa.” They are the product of a careful, methodical, ongoing tactic of brainwashing about how glorious it is to become a shaheed [martyr] by murdering.

We do need to liberated, but not from the people you think. We do not need help being liberated from Israel, which, even if it is harsh, has always been fair to us, but from the self-satisfied diplomats even now — in our name — swanning down the glossy halls of Europe.

The Palestinians have taken it upon themselves to sacrifice our younger generation — on the altar of pointlessness — again.

Old habits are hard to break, and in Europe, it would seem, almost impossible. First, Swedish Foreign ‎Minister Margot Wallstrom said that “to counteract the radicalization, we must go back to the ‎situation such as the one in the Middle East, of which not least the Palestinians see that there is no future: We must either accept a desperate situation or resort to violence.”

Then Dutch ‎Socialist Party Chairman Jan Marijnissen did not hesitate to link the Islamic State terror attacks on Paris to the Palestinian ‎issue:‎ “Their behavior eventually is connected also to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The guys — I assume they were guys — who carried out the attacks probably come from a ‎group of outraged people from the French suburbs.” The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he added, “is ‎the growth medium for such an attack.”‎

Le Monde, a leading French newspaper, echoed this sentiment in its analysis, saying that it was necessary ‎that France demand that the international community immediately establish a Palestinian state and that ‎Israel return to the pre-1967 borders.‎

This is classic European scapegoating. While that strategy may have worked for Europe one way or an‎other in the past, this time it will not. Islamic State is targeting the very heart of European cities — their ‎transportation systems, bars, restaurants, concert halls, and sports stadiums — and the Europeans can try ‎all they want to run away from the reality of this, but the truth is that there is nowhere to hide. ‎Europe has pandered to the Arab world and tried to appease it for decades and all that it has brought ‎Europeans is carnage, bloodbaths and hell on earth. This hell did not begin on Friday, Nov. 13. It ‎began, on a truly large scale, with Madrid in 2004, when 191 people were murdered and 2,000 wounded ‎in terrorist attacks. Still, even now, Europeans are talking of meeting the seething hatred and ‎determination of Islamic State with love and understanding and — of course — a state for the Palestinians.‎

The bodies of slaughtered Parisians were still unburied when our president, the leader of the most powerful country in history, beclowned himself on the world stage. In Turkey Obama gave a speech that surpassed even his long record of narcissistic petulance and juvenile snark. What we are witnessing is a willful destruction of America’s prestige and authority unprecedented in our history. It’s a sad day when the President of the United States makes a milquetoast French socialist like François Hollande sound like George S. Patton.

A jihadist organization, the most prominent of a metastasizing global movement, had just murdered 129 Europeans in the worst attack since the Madrid train-bombings of 2005. But for Obama, this was a “setback.” This tin-eared word choice came from an alleged silver-tongued orator. But lack of oratorical skill is not the cause of his gaffe, but rather Obama’s need to maintain the narrative of success he had peddled for months. Rather than acknowledge the wages of his disastrous foreign policy of appeasement and retreat, he had tried to dismiss ISIS as a “jayvee” team that had been “contained.” Of course, ISIS was spawned by his precipitate withdrawal from Iraq, reliance on “redline” bluster in Syria, and groveling concessions to Iran.

Gunmen took 170 people hostage on Friday morning at a hotel in Bamako, the capital of Mali, a West African nation where French troops are at war with al Qaeda militants.

Soldiers and police surrounded the Radisson Blu hotel in a standoff, said Capt. Baba Cissé, an army spokesman. The Brussels-based Rezidor Hotel Group, which operates the hotel, said two gunmen were holding 30 of its workers and 140 of its guests inside.

The U.S. embassy asked its citizens to stay indoors.

Mali is a somewhat forgotten front in the West’s war on Islamist insurgencies. Al Qaeda allies took control of the country’s desert north, including the fabled city of Timbuktu, in 2012. In 2013, French troops and United Nations peacekeepers arrived to combat those terrorists.

When no one is out there to protect freedom and democracy, groups masquerading as democratic forces move in to serve the designs of their masters.

Anyone questioning the authorities’ interpretation of Islam is dealt with in a barbaric fashion, from the 2am “knock on the door” to sham trials, public floggings, protracted imprisonment, rape, beatings, torture and extrajudicial murder. In some countries, the lawyers who represent such clients are also murdered.

Mauritania passed a new anti-slavery law this year, but has yet to start jailing slave-owners instead of anti-slavery activists. The government has yet to release award winning anti-slavery activist Biram Dah Abeid, arrested last year for organizing a peaceful demonstration against slavery.

Many theocracies have little-to-no respect for law; freedom of expression; equal justice under the law; freedom of (or from) religion; for women’s rights; tolerance of homosexuals or other sexual preferences — but they condone the sexual assault of children.