RUTHFULLY YOURS

Writing in Politico, Paulina Neuding returns to the topic of Sweden’s crime problem and the unwillingness of the Swedish elite to admit what has been going on:

In a period of two weeks earlier this year, five explosions took place in the country. It’s not unusual these days — Swedes have grown accustomed to headlines of violent crime, witness intimidation and gangland executions. In a country long renowned for its safety, voters cite “law and order” as the most important issue ahead of the general election in September.

The topic of crime is sensitive, however, and debate about the issue in the consensus-oriented Scandinavian society is restricted by taboos.

Indeed it is, although, to be fair, those taboos are fraying fairly rapidly. Nevertheless, Sweden remains a country where, whether by law or, even more so, social convention, free speech is not quite as free as it should be. There is, to borrow a useful Swedish term, an ‘opinion corridor’ (åsiktskorridor) beyond which people are not meant to stray. Again, that corridor has widened—the fact that someone has even defined it is a measure of that—but not yet by enough.

There is also something else. To admit that there was a connection between current crime rates and what was (until recently) an extraordinarily generous immigration policy would be to admit that much of the political and media class has messed up. That is not something that such prominenti are keen to do. Thus, for example, they emphasize the fall in the murder rates. Fair enough, you might think, but…

Neuding:

To understand crime in Sweden, it’s important to note that Sweden has benefited from the West’s broad decline in deadly violence, particularly when it comes to spontaneous violence and alcohol-related killings. The overall drop in homicides has been, however, far smaller in Sweden than in neighboring countries.

https://pjmedia.com/video/katie-hopkins-media-will-not-honest-migrant-violence-sweden/

If you are unfamiliar with Katie Hopkins you’re in for a real treat. There are many political pundits who don’t mind being brutally honest but few do it with the obvious glee that Hopkins exudes. Hopkins is discussing the migrant-related violence in Sweden and the media’s untruthful reporting. When President Trump first got into office he mentioned the problems that Sweden was having and was roundly mocked by the mainstream media. A couple of days later, an immigrant neighborhood in Stockholm was the scene of riots. After detailing the myriad problems in Sweden at the moment, Hopkins excoriates the media for whitewashing the issues, especially when they refer to the migrants as the “new Swedes.” She says, “you can’t take Mohammed, stick a blond wig on him,” then “turn him into a Swede.” And a lot more.

In a 2016 fatwa, the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), Turkey’s highest religious authority, ruled that it was not forbidden in Islam if a father felt lust for his own daughter “on condition that the daughter is older than nine.”

According to celebrity Islamist scholar Nureddin Yıldız, Allah allows men to beat their wives not to torture them or hurt them but only to relax.

Yıldız’s sermon on “what would the ummah lose if women work” is a must-read piece to understand the typical Islamist thinking on gender equality, family and tribal ambitions to grow still more numerous.

The word ulama in its Arabic context denotes scholars of almost all disciplines. In the context of Sunni Islam, however, ulama are regarded as “the guardians, transmitters and interpreters of religious knowledge.” With the rise of Islamism as the dominant, state-sponsored ideology, the Turkish ulama have gained prominence: talk shows, books, newspaper columns, sermons and fatwas come in abundance. Devout Turks take them seriously. Secular Turks often mock them. Yet the Turkish ulama provide a rich context for those who want to understand Islamic piety as interpreted by religious scholars.

Now, according to the Global Gender Gap Report published by the World Economic Forum, Turkey ranks 130th among 144 countries measured. This embarrassing score does not go without good reason. Ironically, women’s rights marchers in Ankara were met with tear gas and arrests on March 5 as they gathered for a protest ahead of International Women’s Day (March 8). After the marchers ignored calls to disperse, Turkish riot police fired tear gas and detained about 15 women. That was how Turkish women “celebrated” Women’s Day.

Child abuse is also increasingly visible in Muslim Turkey. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute, the number of child sexual abuse cases–- just those actually reported to law enforcement — rose from over 11,000 in 2014 to nearly 17,000 in 2016. Experts say of course that many more cases are not reported.

It was either very brave or very foolish to adopt the “Mission Accomplished” slogan that hung behind President George W. Bush as he stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in the early days of the Iraq war. Although President Bush ​never used those words, they were indelibly linked to the fortunes of the United States in the course of the Iraq war. For President Donald Trump to have tweeted it is a poke at the very principle of conventional wisdom.

The US/UK/FR strike on Syria’s Him Shinshar (both the bunker and the storage depot) and the Barzeh “scientific research center,” (the location of chemical weapons research) was a resounding success. Not designed for “regime change” or to end the Syrian civil war, the raid was intended to punish the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime, its protector Russia and its banker Iran. It was to make it harder to do it again. It was to uphold one of the few areas of international consensus in warfare – that CW use is forbidden. That mission was indeed accomplished, but the expected chorus of naysayers would have you believe that it was:
​ a military failure​,​​a​ political failure, or both.

On the military side, as usual, the Russians were out of the gate first, claiming the chemical attack on Duma – for which the allied raid was retaliation – had been staged by the British, and then that Syrian air defenses had destroyed 71 of 103 missiles the allies launched. The Pentagon warned on Saturday, “The Russian disinformation campaign has already begun…There has been a 2,000% increase in Russian trolls in the last 24 hours.”

The Guardian (UK) reported:

Col. Gen. Sergei Rudskoi of the Russian military said the strikes had not caused any casualties and that Syrian military facilities suffered only minor damage… Russia said its advisers had spent the last 18 months completely rebuilding the Syrian air defence system, and said the high number of intercepted rockets spoke to “the high effectiveness of the weaponry in Syria and the excellent training of Syrian servicemen prepared by our specialists.”

Canadian diplomatic families are being recalled from Cuba after new research suggested a mysterious illness that afflicted some embassy staff was a “possible acquired brain injury.”

The decision to turn the Canadian embassy in Havana into an “unaccompanied post” comes just four months after the federal government said it wouldn’t pull diplomatic staff from the Caribbean country following reported but unproven “sonic attacks.” Other unaccompanied posts include Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and South Sudan.

“Canadian diplomats posted to Cuba will not be accompanied by their dependants. Arrangements will be made to support our diplomatic staff and their families returning to Canada in the coming weeks, as well as for those families who had expected to be posted to Cuba this summer,” wrote Global Affairs Canada in a statement released April 16.

This is the latest in a saga that began in late 2016, when American diplomats stationed in Cuba began complaining of headaches, dizziness, nosebleeds, vision and hearing problems, and a lack of concentration. They reported hearing “buzzing,” “grinding,” and “piercing squeals,” according to the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Brain Injury and Repair.

Middle Eastern crime clans now control large swathes of German cities and towns — areas that are effectively lawless and which German police increasingly fear to approach. The crime families, which have thousands of members, have for decades been allowed operate with virtual impunity: German judges and prosecutors were unable or unwilling to stop them, apparently out of fear of retribution.

“The police cannot win a war with the Lebanese because we outnumber them.” — Criminal clan members to Gelsenkirchen Police Chief Ralf Feldmann.

Peter Biesenbach, now Justice Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, had repeatedly called for an official inquiry to determine the scope of clan activity. Those pleas had been rejected by his predecessor, because such a study would be politically incorrect.

German authorities have launched a crackdown on Middle Eastern crime families in Essen, a city in North Rhine-Westphalia where some 70 Turkish, Kurdish and Arab-born clan members regularly engage in racketeering, extortion, money laundering, pimping and trafficking in humans, weapons and drugs.

Middle Eastern crime clans now control large swathes of German cities and towns — areas that are effectively lawless and which German police increasingly fear to approach.

The crime families, which have thousands of members, have for decades been allowed operate with virtual impunity: German judges and prosecutors were unable or unwilling to stop them, apparently out of fear of retribution.

Donald Trump’s order last Friday to launch missile strikes against Syria’s chemical weapons infrastructure has exposed the divisions among Americans over foreign policy. Some Trump supporters think the President has walked back from his America-first nationalism. Globalists of both parties agree that Bashar al Assad needed to be punished for brutally violating international conventions against chemical weapons. And the rabid anti-Trump left views the attack as a “wag-the-dog” diversion from Trump’s legal troubles.

So is there a legitimate reason for bombing Syria and possibly provoking Russian retaliation that risks dragging us deeper into the Middle East quagmire?

Many Americans, sick of a decade-and-a-half of American military presence in the region believe that “we don’t have a dog in that fight,” as the first Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker said of the brutal conflicts in the disintegrating Yugoslavia of the early nineties. Some may remember George W. Bush’s willingness to be the “world’s policeman” ––after he campaigned against “foreign policy as social work” ––when he launched two wars in the region. They voted for Donald Trump in part because he was a critic of the endless war in Iraq and the still active war in Afghanistan and their delusional nation-building aims, and vowed to put “America first.”

The problem with this understandable “pox on both their houses” attitude to foreign conflicts is that American security and interests have long been intimately bound up in a world that for more than century has been growing closer and more interdependent. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were the gruesome illustration of that reality. The attackers easily travelled by air thousands of miles from their homes, and lived freely in this country as they prepared the attacks. Armed only with box-cutters, they turned commercial airliners into the smartest of smart bombs simply by navigating them into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, killing in a few hours about the same number of Americans who died in the British invasion between 1812 and 1815. At the cost of half a million dollars––less than half the cost of one cruise missile–– they struck devastating blows against history’s greatest military and economic power, onw they knew intimately from globally distributed news and entertainment, and had grown to hate because its very existence challenged orthodox premodern Islamic doctrine.

The U.S. strikes last week on suspected chemical weapons sites near Damascus and Homs exemplify how not to use military force. Their only consequence is to highlight the poverty of the foreign policy of which they are part: driven by questionable intelligence, the “CNN effect,” and an inability to come to grips with real problems.

The strikes did a little harm to Syrian leader Bashar al Assad, who is a dependent of Iran and Russia and who is nearly helpless vis à vis our newest enemy, Turkey. Iran is extending its reach to the Mediterranean and threatening war on Israel. Russia is solidifying hegemony over the Middle East. Turkey is making war on the Kurds, the only real allies the United States has had in the region in a generation. Instead of braking any of these ominous developments, the U.S. government, reverting to type, destroyed a few buildings and hyped its own virtues in garbled neo-Wilsonian lingo.

The U.S. government’s claim that the Assad regime used chlorine gas and sarin together (that would be a first) against civilians separately from movement of ground troops (military nonsense) may or may not be correct. The government presented no evidence except videos. When it does have evidence, it usually crows. “Tin foil hats” are not necessary for skepticism, given U.S. intelligence’s historic and unbroken allergy to checking information that comes over the transom, its reflexive reaction to cable news reports of reported atrocities, and its own penchant for grandstanding.

No Geopolitical Significance
But the provenance of those chemical attacks, if any, is irrelevant to policy.

U.S. intelligence does not know what was in those buildings. But their destruction has little to do with the production of simple chemical weapons. Tokyo terrorists cooked up sarin in garages. Strikes at 3 a.m. did nothing to degrade the Assad regime’s human expertise in this field. Moreover, if Russia and Iran were complicit, as claimed, they can easily make up what was destroyed.

In short, the strikes’ military significance is tiny, and the geopolitical significance is nil.