RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/european-union-brilliant-insidious-construction/

Unable to change course, the union must and will crash spectacularly.

More than usual, I’ve been thinking about France. Or rather, daydreaming about it. I listen to Stacey Kent records, where she sings in that distinct style of French bossa nova. It’s a style of jazz music that is relaxed, never tired. None of the drug-fueled creativity of American bebop, just that propulsive rhythm section and a chanteuse you’re supposed to love. French people seem to know that they can get away with doing just a little less than the minimum required. It’s part of their style.

And certainly it is true about their politics. In the face of the Yellow Vest protests, French president Emmanuel Macron abandoned his campaign pledge to stand firm behind his reform agenda. He rescinded tax increases and promised more spending outlays, expanding his budget deficit beyond the European Union’s threshold of 3 percent of GDP. The EU’s budget commissioner, Günther Oettinger, said the EU would make an exception and accept the rule-breaking French budget.

No such exception is made for the new Italian government, which seeks approval for a budget that has a 2.4 percent deficit. The EU wants to clamp down on Italy’s debt, which at 130 percent of GDP is more than twice the EU’s limit of 60 percent. (France exceeds the limit as well, however, with a debt roughly equal to its GDP.) And in the eyes of the EU, Italy’s government is an enemy, made up of “populists” and occasional critics of the EU. No allowances are made for them, even though Italy has gone through political upheaval similar to or greater than France’s.

All this should be a reminder that there is nothing much to envy about European Union membership. If you’re a relatively wealthy Western European nation, it is a source of instability. Brexit is treated as a “shambles,” but to an outsider it looks orderly and civilized compared with what is happening in the European Union itself. The immediate political effect of the Leave vote was to strengthen the U.K.’s most long-lived mainstream parties: Tory and Labour. Meanwhile, on the Continent, the traditional political parties in European Union member states continue to shrivel and die. The Yellow Vest protests have moved on from French cities to Brussels. So-called populists parties continue to make gains.

The European Union is a brilliant and insidious construction. Franco-German interests are obviously paramount. But it attracts the political class of smaller countries by removing difficult questions of governing from their parliaments and providing offices of authority without accountability that seem to have more shine than their national governments. Because Germans don’t want to be seen as utterly dominating the bloc, the political offices at the very top are doled out generously to second-tier members such as Belgium, Poland, Slovakia, and Portugal.

https://pjmedia.com/yellowribbonproject/contact-ceases-with-u-s-hosta

An American hostage held by Iran for 1,197 days lost contact with his family nearly two weeks ago, raising fears that Nizar Zakka — already in frail health — may have been removed from his cell to be subjected to torture.

Zakka was heard from again briefly today, according to his attorney, confirming days of punishment at the hands of the Iranians for refusing to relent to their demands.

Zakka visited Tehran in September 2015 at the invitation of the Iranian government to speak at a conference on women’s entrepreneurship and employment, and was seized as he tried to catch a return flight to Washington. The State Department even helped fund his trip, according to his colleagues.

He was sentenced to 10 years on espionage charges a year after his arrest, and his family warned months ago that Zakka is in “very bad health.”

Zakka, a Lebanese-American and permanent U.S. resident, is secretary-general of the D.C.-based IJMA3 group, which lobbies for the information and communications technology industry in the Middle East. Zakka earned degrees from the University of Texas after graduating from the Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, Ga., in 1985. He used to work as a software engineer at contractor Kellogg, Brown & Root in the early ’90s.

Since being invited and kidnapped, Zakka has weathered six protest hunger strikes — all while lobbying on behalf of fellow inmates to improve their conditions and refusing to film any propaganda “confession” video for the Iranians.

Early this year, an Iranian doctor hired by Zakka’s family said the hostage may have cancer, but Iranian authorities were not allowing necessary diagnostics. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2018/12/lone-wolves.html

Canadian Columnist Mark Steyn tackles a term, “lone wolf,” which describes not so much any jihadist as it does the authorities that fossick around a box of Islamic Crackerjacks in search of a motive, in strenuous evasion of the fact that the perps were Muslims motivated by Islam .

The suspects suffer from “mental illness,” their cranial instability probably the most safest label they pin to a killer without being accused of not being “diversity’” friendly.

“This term ‘lone wolf’ is a cop-out…the idea that they somehow have to have a membership card in Islamic State or in al Qaeda for it to be official, fully-credentialed terror, like getting a hairdresser’s license in New York State is completely preposterous” he stated.

Steyn added that the rhetoric of “lone wolf” terrorists allows those who do not want to admit that radical Islam is a problem to brush off terror as isolated incidents, saying “all jihad is local. That actually suits them, to say, ‘oh no this is just some mentally ill guy in Ottawa and this is another guy who’s a bit goofy in New York and there’s no connection between the two.’ Because otherwise you have to treat it like your other big story. You have to treat it like ideological Ebola and you have to stop the infection…”

In other words, the term “lone wolf” permits authorities to hopscotch over the reality of Islam-fueled terrorism, and thus avoid the hypothetical unpleasantness of offending Muslims or their “religion,” and probably the accusation of “racism” (even though the practice of Islam is not confined to any one race; but apparently this is a difficult concept to communicate).

https://www.steynonline.com/9111/lone-but-motley

A week before Christmas two young ladies from Scandinavia vacationing in Morocco – Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24, from Denmark, and Maren Ueland, 28, from Norway – were brutally stabbed and decapitated and then had the final moments of their lives uploaded as triumphal snuff videos to Facebook, Twitter, 4Chan and Reddit, the Four Horsemen of the Social-Media Apocalypse.

Fortunately, if you were thinking of getting a little nervous about your next holiday in the Maghreb, this bloody double-murder was the work of merely another “lone wolf”:

In a press conference in Rabat yesterday, police and domestic intelligence spokesman Boubker Sabik labelled the suspects “lone wolves”…

Wait a minute: “lone wolves” plural? You mean, the wolf wasn’t lone? No, indeed:

What ‘lone wolf’ gang did before Scandinavian tourist beheadings

There’s a whole gang of lone wolves?

A motley crew of “lone wolves”, including two street vendors, a plumber and a carpenter, hunted backpackers to kill in the Moroccan mountains.

At last count, nineteen “lone wolves” have been arrested for the double-murder. That’s a rugby team plus bridge four of lone wolves. They’re the least lonesome lone wolves in town.

And are they really that “motley”? (See photo above for representative three-nineteenths of the lone wolf pack.)

For almost a decade, I have made mocking reference to Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves. But there’s no point to jokes, is there? Because, as absurd as they are, you wait a year or two and everybody’s doing them entirely straight-faced. The phrase “lone wolf” was created by the Pansy Media to ward off the suggestion that all these lone wolves might have something in common. Just as “all politics is local”, all jihad is lone. And, if you use the phrase often enough, it has such a pleasing anesthetizing effect you don’t even notice that you’re sitting there typing, perfectly seriously, about a gang of nineteen lone wolves.

Same number as the 9/11 hijackers, by coincidence. But we hadn’t yet taken refuge in such halfwit evasions.

Needless to say, the decapitation video went “viral”. Among those who were “spammed” with pictures of the severed heads were the mums of the girls, whose first Christmas without their beloved daughters was further enlivened by social-media enthusiasts posting snaps of the decapitated women to their mothers’ Facebook pages. But Big Social Brother knows its priorities: It was too busy banning Robert Spencer, whose Jihad Watch website is one of the few remaining outlets that doesn’t take refuge in platitudinous drivel about “lone wolves”.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272321/cartel-jihad-rap-dawn-perlmutter

Chérif Chekatt, the 29-year-old perpetrator of the December 11, 2018, mass shooting in Strasbourg, France was designated a gangster jihadist by French Police. The term refers to people previously convicted of various crimes and radicalized in prison. Chekatt, a French born citizen was a hardened criminal with 27 convictions in France, Germany, and Switzerland.

Gangster-jihadists are not just recruited in prison by Islamic extremists. The Sinaloa Cartel appears to have seized upon the opportunity to recruit and exploit hundreds of locals in France and Germany, including children and refugees already primed by jihadist propaganda, many possessing criminal records and combat experience. International law enforcement agencies have long known that Hezbollah launder money for the Sinaloa cartel. Recently, German law enforcement have been aggressively disrupting the criminal operations of traditional Arab Clans in Berlin and even the operations of La Cosa Nostra. Neither are known to have been affiliated with Sinaloa or Hezbollah. Sinaloa have quickly filled the narco-vacuum, similar to how the Cali Cartel took over Pablo Escobar’s market after the DEA killed him. The sudden and alarming proliferation of top-shelf weaponry among Hamas and Hezbollah on the Israeli border is very likely the consequence of a renewed and strengthened alliance between them and Sinaloa, in which German-based “refugees” deal Sinaloan coke and heroin and kick part of the profits back to their Iran-based handlers, Hezbollah who, in turn, shuffle weapons over to Lebanon. This arrangement provides Iran deniability, while also providing Sinaloa broader access to and deeper penetration of the German narco market, as well as plenty of easy money to SUV-driving, Gucci-toting “refugees.”

Music and accompanying videos of German Rappers further indicate a new alliance of transnational criminal organizations drug trafficking and Islamic State terrorism. Jihadist sympathizers and Islamic State fighters have long embraced hip-hop culture, specifically gangsta rap, to promote and disseminate their message via the Internet and social media. ‘Jihad Rap’ was a successful recruitment tool targeting young men who felt dispossessed and marginalized, one of the most notorious being the German rapper and ISIS terrorist, Denis Cuspert, aka “Deso Dog”. After the fall of the Islamic State Caliphate a new form of gangsta rap emerged in Germany. Best described as ‘Cartel Jihad Rap’ it is a combination of Islamic State nasheed, jihad rap and narco-cultura.

Fawzi Yamouni aka Fousy is a German rapper and producer of Algerian origin from Siegen, Germany. Chérif Chekatt’s most recent prison sentence was served in Singen, Germany. He was radicalized in the infamous area of Konstanz, a town that borders France and has been a hub of Islamic radicalism since the mid-1990s. Many of Germany’s prisons are now effective recruiting stations and training camps for cartel jihadis. Chekatt was expelled to France after his release in 2017.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13477/palestinians-silencing-intimidating-critics

Palestinian columnist Sami Fuda denounced the Hamas crackdown on its critics in Gaza: “Apparently, freedom of expression is unacceptable to the de facto rulers of the Gaza Strip… The policy of intimidating and imprisoning writers will not deter them and is completely ineffective and unacceptable.”

While these few Palestinians have expressed concern over Hamas’s effort to silence its critics, international human rights organizations, including some that operate in the Gaza Strip, continue to turn a blind eye to this assault on public freedoms. They are either afraid of Hamas, or they do not give a damn about human rights violations unless they can find a way of pointing an accusatory finger at Israel.

Hamas is prepared to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a rally marking the 31st anniversary of its founding, but says it cannot afford to provide financial aid to impoverished Palestinians. Meanwhile, any Palestinians who dare to ask Hamas the wrong questions will find themselves behind bars.

What does the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas do when it is not firing rockets at Israel or sending Palestinians to clash with Israeli soldiers along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel? It sends its security officers to arrest, interrogate, intimidate and harass anyone who dares to criticize Hamas.

It is not as if anyone was expecting Hamas to act differently. The terms democracy and freedom of expression have never been in Hamas’s dictionary. For Hamas, it is either you are with us or you are against us. There is no third option for Palestinians living under Hamas’s rule in the Gaza Strip, even for those who were previously associated with Hamas, but later changed their minds and dared to express a different opinion or, worse, criticize the Islamist movement.

In the past week alone, Hamas has arrested two Palestinian academics on suspicion that they voiced criticism of the group: professor of biology Salah Jadallah and writer Khader Mihjez.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13404/turkey-eu-marriage

In Freedom House’s democracy index, Turkey belongs to the group of “not free” countries, performing worse than “partly free” countries including Mali, Nicaragua and Kenya.

Just as there cannot be a “not free” member of the EU, there cannot be a member that blatantly ignores rulings of the European Court of Human Rights.

“I think that, in the long term, it would be more honest for Turkey and the EU to go down new roads and end the accession talks … Turkish membership in the European Union is not realistic in the foreseeable future.” — Johannes Kahn, EU Enlargement Commissioner; interview in Die Welt.

When Turkey first applied for full membership in the European Union in 1987, the world was an entirely different place — even the rich club had a different name: the European Economic Community. U.S. President Ronald Reagan had undergone minor surgery; British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had been re-elected for a third term; Macau and Hong Kong were, respectively, Portuguese and British territory; the Berlin Wall was up and running; the demonstrations at the Tiananmen Square were a couple of years away; the Iran-Contra affair was in the headlines; the First Intifada had just begun; and what are today Czech Republic and Slovakia were Czechoslovakia.

In March 2003, just a few months after he was elected Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that Turkey was “very much ready to be part of the European Union family.” In October 2005, formal accession negotiations between Turkey and the EU began.

Today, 31 years after the first date, the alliance seems to be broken, with no signs in the foreseeable future of a marriage between two perfectly unsuitable adults. Knowing that, both sides in the past decade have played an unpleasant diplomatic game of pretension: not be the one that throws away the ring. This boring opera buffa is no longer sustainable.

Turkey’s democratic deficit has grown just too bitterly huge to make it compatible with Europe’s democratic culture. According to the advocacy group Freedom House:

“In addition to its dire consequences for detained Turkish citizens, shuttered media outlets, and seized businesses, the chaotic purge has become intertwined with an offensive against the Kurdish minority, which in turn has fueled Turkey’s diplomatic and military interventions in neighboring Syria and Iraq.”