RUTHFULLY YOURS

I agree with this column but don’t spare George Bush the minor and Condoleeza Rice whose policies and predictions “pragmatice silence” with respect to North Korea were terrible, and now she attempts to shift the blame for the present situation to Donald Trump….rsk

Less than six months into Donald Trump’s presidency America has awakened to the nightmare of a North Korea armed with intercontinental ballistic missiles that the Trump administration says are capable of reaching Alaska.

U.S., South Korean, and Japanese officials say the North Korean Hwasong-14 ICBM flew approximately 580 miles in 40 minutes and achieved an altitude of 1,500 miles, besting previously reported North Korean test results. North Korea’s successful but unexpected test is a sobering reminder of how urgently the United States needs to ramp up its antiballistic missile program after years of reckless military downsizing by the Obama administration.

The North Korean launch was “the big story we have all been waiting for,” Professor Bruce Bechtol of Angelo State University in Texas told Fox News on Tuesday. “All of the paradigms have changed. It is now time to see what action the USA will take.”

The missile was apparently launched from a mobile launcher, which “nearly destroys our warning time and also means that the North Koreans have a real shot at launching this system at us without us being able to destroy it on the ground.”

North Korea also carried out a successful ballistic missile test on May 14, and the U.S. Missile Defense Agency conducted its first successful interception of an ICBM on May 30. A long-range ground-based interceptor missile launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California hit and destroyed the ICBM launched from the U.S. Army’s Reagan Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

This idea of missile defense, oft-compared to trying to shoot a bullet with another bullet, grew out of President Reagan’s Strategic Defensive Initiative (SDI), derided by left-wingers at the time and for years after as “Star Wars.” Unsurprisingly, Barack Obama used to scoff at the idea that a missile could take out another missile.

Meanwhile, Monday evening after news of the successful Hwasong-14 ICBM test broke, President Trump took to Twitter.

The first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem.

That should be what advisers to the Swedish prime minister should be whispering in his ear constantly, in case he fails to respond to comments made by his spy chief yesterday.

The National (UAE) reports:

Sweden is home to at least 2,000 ISIL sympathisers who are believed to have been radicalised over the internet, the country’s spy chief revealed on Monday.

Anders Thornberg, who heads the domestic intelligence agency Säpo, said the number of ISIL loyalists had increased from a suspected 200 in 2010; a 10-fold leap.

“We have never seen anything like it before,” Mr Thornberg told the Swedish news agency TT. “We would say that it has gone from hundreds to thousands now.

“This is the ‘new normal’ … It is an historic challenge that extremist circles are growing,” he said.

He also reported that Swedish security police are receiving 6,000 intelligence tips on Islamist extremist activity every month.

Last month I reported here at PJ Media that jihadist arrests in the EU had doubled last year from 2015:And since 2007, terrorism in OECD countries has skyrocketed a whopping 900 percent:The scope of the Islamist terror problem in Europe — as the Swedish spy chief now admits — is without precedent.Another remarkable element to this story is that just a few months ago President Trump observed that Sweden has having such issues. The Swedish prime minister responded with mocking:

Reportedly, more than 150 former ISIS fighters have returned to Sweden. And what is the Swedish government’s response? Finding them jobs: CONTINUE AT SITE

The largest music festival in Sweden will not go on next year because, for the second year in a row, more than a dozen sexual assaults of young girls marred the event.

Last year, more than 40 young girls reported being sexually assaulted. Men described as being of “foreign origin” were responsible.

Despite increased security this year, the assaults continued.

Breitbart:

Festival safety manager Ulf Bowein was asked why the sex attacks were continuing to happen despite the increase in the number of personnel and tighter security precautions. He said: “That’s a good question—ask those who commit the infractions instead.”

“Unfortunately, it’s like anywhere in the community. We have a number of individuals who commit the crime,” he added.

Bowein noted the number of attacks had gone down in number since last year. Reports claimed that men, largely described as being of “foreign origin”, had sexually molested up to 40 girls at the festival.

The news prompted British band Mumford and Sons, who headlined the event, to announce a boycott for future performances until the situation was brought under control. The band did not feature at all in this year’s event.

Sex attacks became common at Swedish festivals last year, so much so that officials estimate the number of sex attacks at outdoor music festivals increased by 1,000 per cent in 2016.

The targets of the sex attacks are generally young girls, many of them underage. 17-year-old Alexandra Larsson was one of the victims and she described what happened to her: “First, someone touched me on the butt a few times. I turned around and inquired who had done it, but got no answer.”

“This was repeated several times. Finally, someone touched me on the genitals. Then I got angry and turned around and shouted, ‘Whoever it was, you are an idiot!’”

Festivals are not the only locations for sex assaults as various reports have shown that girls in Sweden have been attacked in railway stations, and even in public schools.

It should be noted that authorities have not identified the perpetrators of the assaults this year. Less than a month ago, two “African migrants” were arrested for sexually assaulting numerous women at a railway station.

SEOUL—The U.S. warned North Korea that it is ready to fight if provoked, as Pyongyang claimed another weapons-development breakthrough following its launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile a day earlier.

The regime, having demonstrated its capacity to reach the U.S. with a missile, on Wednesday touted another achievement of the test launch: It claimed that its missile warhead—the forward section, which carries the explosive—can withstand the extreme heat and pressure of re-entering the earth’s atmosphere.

If true—the claim couldn’t be independently verified—that would clear another hurdle in developing a nuclear-tipped missile that can reach American cities.
As tensions between Washington and Pyongyang rose, Gen. Vincent Brooks, the top American military commander in South Korea, said in a statement Wednesday that the U.S. and South Korea are prepared to go to war with the North if given the order.

“Self restraint, which is a choice, is all that separates armistice and war,” Gen. Brooks said. “We are able to change our choice when so ordered.…It would be a grave mistake for anyone to believe anything to the contrary.”
North Korea said it successfully test-fired its first intercontinental ballistic missile, a claim that could escalate tensions between Pyongyang and the rest of the world. Image: KRT/AP

Earlier in the day, allied armies conducted a rare live-fire drill, launching tactical surface-to-surface missiles off the east coast of Korea—an action they said was aimed directly at “countering North Korea’s destabilizing and unlawful actions on July 4.”

The drill and tough language appeared meant to reassure Seoul after North Korea’s successful ICBM test, a significant advance.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson described the development as an escalation of the threat to the U.S. It came despite years of sanctions and warnings aimed at preventing Kim Jong Un’s regime from reaching the milestone.

Washington has considered military action against North Korea, but pulling the trigger presents serious risks. Seoul, a city of 10 million, sits just 35 miles from the North Korean border, where Pyongyang has assembled artillery that could inflict devastating damage on the densely populated South Korean capital.

“A single volley could deliver more than 350 metric tons of explosives across the South Korean capital, roughly the same amount of ordnance dropped by 11 B-52 bombers,” said a report published last year by Austin, Texas-based geopolitical consultancy Stratfor.

While Americans were celebrating Independence Day, North Korea test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile, with a potential range that some experts estimate could reach the United States. As The Wall Street Journal reports, in an editorial headlined “The North Korean Missile Crisis”:

Tuesday’s missile, dubbed the Hwasong-14, has an estimated range of 6,700 kilometers, which puts Alaska within range. America’s lower 48 states may still be out of reach, but the test shows the North has overcome most of the obstacles to a long-range missile.

Enough, already. There is no safe way to end the North Korean menace, but the threats from Kim Jong Un’s regime are amplifying at a clip that suggests it is even more dangerous to allow the Kim regime to carry on. While the world has watched, for years — and while the United Nations Security Council has passed one sanctions resolution after another — North Korea has not only been carrying out ballistic missile and nuclear tests, but enriching uranium and reprocessing plutonium to amass ever more bomb fuel. As the Journal editorial also notes, North Korea by now “has an estimated 20 nuclear warheads as well as chemical and biological weapons.”

The threat is not solely that North Korea — well versed in shakedown rackets — could target the U.S. with nuclear-tipped ICBMs, or that North Korea can add nuclear weapons to the massive arsenal with which it has long threatened Seoul.

A further danger is that North Korea could proliferate its advancing nuclear missile technology, or even the weapons themselves, to other rogue states, such as Iran — with which Pyongyang has trafficked and cooperated for decades in missile development, and according to some press accounts (please see my discussion of reporting by Douglas Frantz), in nuclear weapons development as well.

The Pyongyang regime was part of Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network, supplied taboo nuclear-related materials to Qaddafi’s Libya, and has a record of proliferating nuclear technology (the clandestine Al-Kibar reactor built with North Korean help in Syria, destroyed by a 2007 Israeli air strike). It is alarmingly plausible that when Pyongyang brags up its missile and nuclear tests, the global headlines double as North Korean advertising to actors around the globe who might be interested in North Korea’s illicit wares.

The total abrogation of personal autonomy for the parents of baby Charlie Gard as courts in the United Kingdom and in Europe simultaneously and arbitrarily decided what his parents can and cannot do for their extremely ill child is another symptom of the chilling or, should I say, killing world of socialism.

In his 2004 collection of readings for the humanities titled Being Human, editor Leon Kass writes about Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky who was held in the USSR as a political prisoner from 1963 until his release in 1976. Kass writes that “Bukovsky reflects on the ‘soul of man under socialism,’ this ‘new type of man’ who is subject to totalitarian rule.” Bukovsky ponders what it “means to retain one’s human dignity as a citizen of a state” when socialists demand a dream of universal equality while ensuring the “suppression and ultimate destruction of the individual, in body and in spirit.”

And while the pervasive rallying cry of socialists is “equality,” Bukovsky writes that “the defining characteristics of a socialist regime is that ‘the individual may not possess the least inalienable right’ and that the system requires ‘slaves, not conscious citizens.'”

Thus, “the regime is immovable, infallible, and intransigent, and the entire world is left with no choice but to accommodate itself to this fact.”

Despite the fact that the Gards raised money to continue treatment for their baby, the European powers-to-be have denied them this choice. To add salt to the wound, they cannot even take their child home to die.

Ms. Yates said: ‘We’ve been talking about what palliative care meant. One option was to let Charlie go home to die. We chose to take Charlie home to die. That is our last wish. We promised our little boy every single day that we would take him home.’

His father Chris, 32, said: ‘Our parental rights have been stripped away. We can’t even take our own son home to die. We’ve been denied that. Our final wish [was] if it all went against us can we take our little boy home to die and we are not allowed.

‘They even said no to a hospice.’

The couple, who have previously lost battles in the High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court, claim they also asked doctors to allow them a final weekend with Charlie but say this request has been denied.

‘We begged them to give us the weekend,’ Ms. Yates said, ‘Friends and family wanted to come and see Charlie for the last time. But now there isn’t even time for that. Doctors said they would not rush to turn off his ventilator but we are being rushed.

‘Not only are we not allowed to take our son to an expert hospital to save his life, we also can’t choose how or when our son dies.’

Bukovsky writes that in “a regime of terror the individual cannot have any rights — the least inalienable right possessed by a single individual instantly deprives the regime of a morsel of power. Every individual from childhood on must absorb the axiomatic fact that never in any circumstances or by any means will he be able to influence the regime one jot.”

In fact, “socialized medicine’s killing isn’t just about money, but power.” As Daniel Greenfield explains, “it would have cost the NHS less to allow his parents to take Charlie to America” but this would have sent the “message that socialized medicine is flawed.” It would expose the horrible underbelly of the socialist regime.

Yet far too many still do not understand that we can never “acquire freedom and security, until we refuse categorically to recognize this paranoid [socialist] version of reality and oppose to it our own reality and our own values.”

“Moral opposition” is critical as government control becomes all consuming. But it is frightening that so many millennials who have not been educated on this “ism” are found to favor it. Bukovsky writes that “it is difficult for man to resist this dream and this noble impulse, particularly for men who are impetuous and sincere.” But the reality of this pseudo-nirvana must be revealed.

“While terrorism’s origins have many factors, Islamic terrorists, as heinous as their acts are, they are often merely doing what the scriptures are telling them.” — Tanveer Ahmed, Muslim psychiatrist.

In Australia, according to judges, women and children must accept sexual assaults because it is part of the “Islamic culture” of their attackers. It would seem that in parts of Australia, this “Islamic culture” has replaced the rule of law. None of the above, however, seems to be enough to appease Muslim sentiments. In March, Anne Aly, Australia’s first female Muslim MP, said that racial-discrimination laws should be expanded to cover insults based on religion as well.

In March, a teacher at Punchbowl Primary School quit her job after she and her family received death threats from the children in the school, with some of them saying they would behead her. The teacher’s complaints to the New South Wales Department of Education were dismissed.

During the month of Ramadan alone, the world witnessed 160 Islamic attacks in 29 countries, in which 1627 people were murdered and 1824 injured. Nevertheless, the dual efforts to deny any links between Islamic terrorism and Islam on the one hand, and the efforts to accommodate Islam to the greatest extent possible on the other, seem to continue unaffected by the realities of Islamic terrorism — in Australia, as well, which is experiencing its own share of sharia and jihad.

At the end of May, the Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA) called on the Australian Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade to:

“…include a recommendation in its report that disavows the notion that there is any inherent link between Islam and terrorism… The Committee should condemn any politician who refers divisively (expressly or implied) to any religious or ethnic group for the purpose of political gain.”

PHAA Chief Executive Michael Moore said that there is no inherent link between any religion and acts of terror:

“When you look at terrorism and the IRA, I don’t think many people blamed Christianity for terrorism when clearly there was an overlay. In fact there’s nothing ­inherent in Christianity that links to terrorism”.

Since when are public health officials qualified to make authoritative statements on the theology of Islam or its linkage to Islamic terrorism?

Muslim psychiatrist Tanveer Ahmed, would disagree. Speaking in June about the Australian media’s disproportionate focus on “Islamophobia” he said:

“While terrorism’s origins have many factors, Islamic terrorists, as heinous as their acts are, they are often merely doing what the scriptures are telling them.”

While Australian officials rush to declare that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, revealingly they have referred to Islam or Islamic culture to exonerate Muslims on several occasions. In April, despite pleading guilty to sexually assaulting eight women and girls on a beach in Queensland, a young Afghan man was acquitted. The reason for the acquittal: “Cultural differences”. According to the judge, “seeing girls in bikinis is different to the environment in which he grew up”. The teen received two years’ probation without being convicted of anything.

Similarly, in 2014 , a registered sex-offender and pedophile, Ali Jaffari, was accused of attempted child-abduction. However, Australian police dropped all charges against him, after a magistrate told prosecutors that he would have difficulties finding Jaffari guilty. According to news reports:

Magistrate Ron Saines said if he was hearing the matter, he would have reasonable doubt, citing “cultural differences” as one factor, which would result in the charges being dismissed.

“[W]e have a president of the United States who is completely and totally opposed to the regime in Tehran… he completely opposes the Iran nuclear deal signed by his predecessor.” — Ambassador John R. Bolton.

“The fact is that the Tehran regime is the central problem in the Middle East. There’s no fundamental difference between the Ayatollah Khamenei and President Rouhani — they’re two sides of the same coin. I remember when Rouhani was the regime’s chief nuclear negotiator — you couldn’t trust him then; you can’t trust him today. And it’s clear that the regime’s behavior is only getting worse… the declared policy of the United States of America should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran.” — Ambassador John R. Bolton.

Any fundamental change in Iran’s theocratic establishment will reverberate across the region. Many terrorist groups will lose their major financial and weapons support. Syrian dictator Bashar Assad will lose his hold on power, which he has wielded for far too long. Iran’s major player, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which constantly damages the US and its allies’ national interests and incites anti-Semitism, will disappear; Hezbollah will lose its funding; “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” will fade away.

Tens of thousands of people came together in Paris on July 1 from all different corners of the world, to unite against the unspeakable atrocities committed by the Islamist state of Iran. It was the largest gathering of Iranians abroad of its kind.

The conference, organized by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), was spurred by the desire to speak up for human rights, peace, women’s rights, freedom, democracy, and to demand victory over terrorism. Its focus was to generate awareness of the plight of Iran’s innocent and vulnerable citizens, against whom the Iranian government has been wreaking havoc — with no consequences — for decades.

Leaders, journalists, prominent figures from around the world, and scholars joined the rallying cry of “Free Iran”. The array of speakers included several prominent Americans, including former US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton; former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich; former Attorney General Michael Mukasey; former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge; former FBI Director Louis Freeh, and Congressmen Ted Poe, Robert Pittenger and Tom Garret.

(Image source: Maryam Rajavi video screenshot)

During the eight years of Obama’s appeasement policies towards the Islamist regime of Iran, the mullahs became significantly empowered and emboldened. Iran’s opposition hopes that the appeasement of the theocratic regime in Tehran has come to an end. Ambassador Bolton pointed out:

“[W]e come at a time of really extraordinary events in the United States that the distinguish today from the circumstances one year ago. Contrary to what virtually every political commentator said, contrary to what almost every public opinion poll said, contrary to what many people said around the world, Barack Obama’s first Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is not the president of the United States.

“So for the first time in at least eight years that I’ve been coming to this event, I can say that we have a president of the United States who is completely and totally opposed to the regime in Tehran… he completely opposes the Iran nuclear deal signed by his predecessor.”

The Iranian regime is still the world leading funder of international terrorism, including the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996, the bombings of a U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon in 1983, attacks on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.

It does not matter who the regime’s president is; the core imperialist foreign policy of the Iranian regime is the same as it has been for almost four decades. With the passage of time, particularly since the nuclear agreement gave them an even stronger sense of power, Iran’s regime has become more daring and destructive, leaving multitudes of human rights violations in its wake. As Bolton stated: