RUTHFULLY YOURS

Security procedures and background checks were top topics on news programs after Russian Metrojet Flight 9268 crashed October 31 shortly after taking off from the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, destined for St. Petersburg, Russia.

Yesterday’s attacks in Paris, believed to have been conducted by ISIS terrorists, have now eclipsed coverage of the downing of the Russian airliner, but this post will focus on the airline disaster, also believed attributable to ISIS.

The most recent speculation is that a bomb had been planted onboard the airliner before takeoff which, if true, begs the question how the bomb was put on the doomed airliner. There are two apparent ways that this could have happened. A passenger could have secreted the device in luggage (either in checked luggage or in something brought into the cabin of the airliner), or someone who serviced the airplane before departure might have hidden the device in the cargo hold beneath passengers’ feet.

Immediately news programs turned to the question of how carefully airport workers with access to aircraft are vetted, both overseas and inside the United States.

Clearly terrorists want to bring down airliners, so those who have access to airplanes must be effectively vetted. We must not lose sight, though, of the fact that a terrorist who enters the U.S. is not unlike a child turned loose in a toy store with a platinum credit card. Airplanes may be obvious targets but hardly the only vulnerability.

Just as people in Paris were murdered one day last week, Jews in Israel are murdered virtually every day.

Undoubtedly, Rabin wanted peace — virtually all Israelis want peace — but not at any price. He never envisaged the creation of a Palestinian state: the Oslo Accords provided for the establishment of a “provisional self-government,” not a state.

Rabin did not contemplate infinite and unconditional negotiations: the Oslo Accords call for a five-year period of negotiations, and include the possibility of breaking off the talks if one of the parties does not respect the spirit in which the Accords were to be implemented.

In addition, Rabin, seeing the rise of violence, wanted during the last weeks of his life to break off the talks. If the Oslo talks did not live up to their expectations, it was in continuing to pursue the vain and useless negotiations — exactly the opposite of what Rabin had envisioned.

Palestinian leaders have an overwhelming responsibility for what has happened during the last twenty years. Not only have they continued to make the very demands that Rabin rejected — and that no leader in a comparable situation could ever accept; they have done worse.

Israel cannot make peace, because there is no one to make peace with.

Peace implies conditions. One of the first is that those with whom a country intends to make peace also want to make peace. Nothing, however, indicates that Palestinian leaders have the slightest intention of making anything that even resembles peace.

One hopes the French will not surrender to terrorists; neither should the Israelis.

First, let me say how much I sympathize with the Parisians. I lived there for 16 months, in the 12th arrondissement (district), doing odds and ends, helping out a couple of churches.

We all sense it, and AT has posted blogs about it. Here’s the chain of responsibility for the Paris massacre, in causal order, as far as the U.S. is concerned:

1. The proximate cause: the eight or so killers who pulled the triggers.

2. Then come Islamic planners behind the scenes (obviously a military hit squad that came into France recently, but with homegrown help).

3. ISIS, who swept into the void and conflict, taking territory the size of Indiana.

4. Obama policy and his campaign promise, coming out of his misguided beliefs, that said Iraq is at peace so we can withdraw from the region. Do I need to mention the red line that got blown away by the desert sands and poison gas? Iraq may have been at peace, but his generals told him not to withdraw.

5. The left’s ideology that consistently misreads the world.

PARIS—One of the assailants in Friday’s deadly attacks in and near the French capital recently entered Europe as a Syrian migrant, people familiar with the matter said, exposing gaps in the continent’s security as it copes with the biggest refugee crisis in decades.

French investigators were able to match the remains of one of the suicide bombers who attacked France’s main stadium to a Syrian passport that was used to enter Europe’s free-travel area and apply for asylum, the people familiar with the matter said.

European security officials have worried that Islamic State operatives would bring terror by mixing with the cohort of Iraqi and Syrian migrants who are fleeing war each week.

Screening migrants represents a formidable security challenge at a time when European intelligence agencies are straining to keep track of thousands of their own nationals who have rallied to Islamic State, officials say.

PARIS—French police on Sunday named a 29-year-old French national as one of the seven attackers who killed at least 129 people in the brutal onslaught in Paris that has sent shockwaves around the world.

Police said that Omar Ismail Mostefai was identified from a severed finger found at the Bataclan concert hall, where gunmen killed at least 89 people before blowing themselves up using explosive belts when police moved in.

The man, born in a Paris suburb, had eight convictions between 2004 and 2010 for petty crime and was on a watch list since 2010 for his alleged radical beliefs, Paris prosecutor François Molins said Saturday. French police haven’t yet named any of the other attackers.

Police detained seven of the Frenchman’s friends and family for questioning, including his brother and his father. Under France’s counterterrorism rules, they can be held in custody for 96 hours before prosecutors have to press charges or release the men.

Bashing the Bishops and Free Speech Too. Australia’s bishops are being dragged before Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Commission for allegedly “crossing the line” by asserting that, on the whole, a child will do best with a mother and a father. The real offence is the agency’s government-funded violation of common sense.
Tasmanian Greens candidate Martine Delany who used to be Martin, has had struggles with her sexual identity. I would imagine that to be a difficult thing to live with and overcome. Well done to her if she has now reached a stage in her life where she happy about who she is. Apparently, she has a female partner and they are caring for a young child. She has strong views on (so-called) marriage equality, as well she might in view of her situation.

I think she has the right to express her views strongly, openly and often. But she doesn’t have a right, in my view, to prevent others from expressing contrary views. When I say ‘right’ in this context, I mean the right of freedom of speech as, for example, set down without a rider in the first amendment to the US Constitution in 1791. Now, of course, in some jurisdictions, Tasmania included, that right comes with the rider that speech must not be ‘offensive’. Voltaire wept.

Australian Catholic Bishops issued a pastoral letter to all Australians on the ‘same-sex marriage’ debate titled: “Don’t Mess with Marriage”. This was distributed in the form of a booklet to parents of Catholic high school students throughout Australia. Ms Delaney complained to Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Commission that the Catholic Church had been offensive. And the Commission in its wisdom (no guffawing) decided that there was a case to answer.

The West, especially Europe, continues to be taken aback every time a new terror attack occurs, as if each one were the first.

“We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples, as well as a different understanding of society and law.” — From a leaked German intelligence document.

The current generation of European political leaders has exhibited an irresponsibility and lack of leadership that is almost infantile.

One of the most surprising aspects of the terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday night is how “deeply shocked” members of the European political establishment appeared to be.

“So I say again: What’s the happy ending here? Because if M Hollande isn’t prepared to end mass Muslim immigration to France and Europe, then his “pitiless war” isn’t serious. And, if they’re still willing to tolerate Mutti Merkel’s mad plan to reverse Germany’s demographic death spiral through fast-track Islamization, then Europeans aren’t serious. In the end, the decadence of Merkel, Hollande, Cameron and the rest of the fin de civilisation western leadership will cost you your world and everything you love.

So screw the candlelight vigil.”

As I write, Paris is under curfew for the first time since the German occupation, and the death toll from the multiple attacks stands at 158, the vast majority of them slaughtered during a concert at the Bataclan theatre, a delightful bit of 19th century Chinoiserie on the boulevard Voltaire. The last time I was there, if memory serves, was to see Julie Pietri. I’m so bloody sick of these savages shooting and bombing and killing and blowing up everything I like – whether it’s the small Quebec town where my little girl’s favorite fondue restaurant is or my favorite hotel in Amman or the brave freespeecher who hosted me in Copenhagen …or a music hall where I liked to go to hear a little jazz and pop and get away from the cares of the world for a couple of hours. But look at the photographs from Paris: there’s nowhere to get away from it; the barbarians who yell “Allahu Akbar!” are there waiting for you …when you go to a soccer match, you go to a concert, you go for a drink on a Friday night. They’re there on the train… at the magazine office… in the Kosher supermarket… at the museum in Brussels… outside the barracks in Woolwich…

Earlier this year, following the Charlie Hebdo massacre and related terrorist attacks in and around Paris, I wrote Islam and Free Speech, a “Broadside” that is part of the series published by Encounter Books. The following is an excerpt.

How did we get to this historical anomaly in France where, as the estimable scholar Daniel Pipes observes, “a majority population accepts the customs and even the criminality of a poorer and weaker community”? It is the result of a conquest ideology taking the measure of a civilization that no longer values its heritage, no longer regards itself as worthy of defense.

France’s population of 66 million is now approximately 10 percent Islamic. Estimates are sketchy because, in a vestige of its vanishing secularist tradition, France does not collect census data about religious affiliation. Still, between 6 and 7 million Muslims are reasonably believed to be resident in the country (Pew put the total at 4.7 million back in 2010 – other analysts peg it higher today). To many in France, the number seems higher, due to both the outsize influence of Islamist activists on the political class and the dense Muslim communities in and around Paris – approximating 15 percent of the local population. An online poll conducted by Ipsos Mosi in 2014 found that the average French citizen believes Muslims make up about a third of the country’s population.

The West has an ambiguous approach to the jihad, as we see over Israel, and a broad denial about what it is we are at war with.
For the second time this year, the global jihad has come to Paris. Dozens have been slaughtered, and it may not be over yet. First thoughts, of course, go to the families.

As night turns into morning, there will be people in the French capital who still do not know if their loved ones are alive or dead.

But we must also turn our attention to the perpetrators. During and after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January, France and much of the wider West descended into denial. Incredibly, political leaders and many journalists in the mainstream media described the events as “an attack on Islam”.

The BBC was reluctant to even mention the Islamic motivations of the attackers.

We are at war. And if we frightened to name our enemies, it is a war we are going to lose.