RUTHFULLY YOURS

Police in Turku, Finland, shot and detained a man who they allege stabbed at least eight people in the city’s center, killing two. Authorities said it was unclear if it was terrorism.

The attacker was being treated for gunshot wounds, said Stephan Sundqvist, superintendent for the police in Finland’s southwest region. He didn’t name the attacker.

“It might be a terror attack, and it might not be,” said Mr. Sundqvist, describing the rampage in the port town a two-hour drive west of Helsinki. “We won’t speculate about that at this point.”

Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation was looking into the matter and would be responsible for classifying the incident as a terror attack, Mr. Sundqvist said.

Finnish Interior Minister Paula Risikko said the attacker didn’t appear to be a Finnish national. The police said this was still unconfirmed.

Nordic countries have largely avoided the kind of terror attacks that have struck other European countries such as Germany, France, the U.K. and, this week, Spain. But the Turku stabbings echoed recent attacks that were executed with improvised means and targeted random victims.

At the end of last month, a migrant in Germany allegedly committed a knife attack at a supermarket in Hamburg, killing one person and injuring six.

The largest terror attack in recent years in the Nordic region came in April when a rejected residency applicant from Uzbekistan allegedly plowed a hijacked beer truck into a Stockholm shopping promenade, killing four.

It turns out there were all sorts of ways to join the resistance against the Nazis during WWII. Even before Freddie Oversteegen and her sister Truus joined up at the request of the Dutch military, she and her family were hiding people – Jewish and Lithuanian – in their home. Her mother had divorced their father because he contributed little to the household (a pretty ballsy move for the time), so perhaps the fact that she allowed her 14 and 16-year-old daughters to decide for themselves whether they’d like to sign up to resist the Nazis shouldn’t come as a surprise.

http://didyouknowfacts.com/unseen-dutch-resistance-90-year-old-woman-seduced-nazis-teenager-led-deaths/?utm_source=Web&utm_medium=Partner&utm_campaign=AOLHP&utm_term=pubexchange-did_you_know-aol

And when a gentleman visited her family one day, arguing that no one would suspect two young girls of being resistance fighters, that’s exactly what Freddie and Truus Oversteegen did.

The teenaged girls said yes, and after some training in firearms and wilderness survival, the sisters began their missions – to flirt with or seduce Nazi collaborators in bars and restaurants and then invite them to walk in the woods…where resistance fighters would be waiting. Although the girls never shot anyone themselves, they led many a randy man to his death, and, according to Freddie, their naked corpses are likely still buried in those woods.

Freddie worked with the famous Hannie Schaft, the “girl with the red hair,” who had afeature film made about her life. Schaft was buried with honors in the presence of the King and Queen of the Netherlands, and over 15 Dutch streets are named after her.

Freddie’s sister Truus made the rounds as a public speaker at memorial services after the war, then became a well-known artist.

Freddie’s part in the story was more muted until recently, when Dutch filmmaker Thijs Zeeman made the Oversteegen sisters the subject of his latest documentary, Two Sisters in the Resistance. As far as her time in the war, Freddie and her sister, who is now suffering from dementia, talk about it often:

“We never had to say remember when,’ because it was always at the top of our minds.”

Here’s to all of the forgotten stories. May they all be told one day.

Images Courtesy of Vice Netherlands

On Wednesday, President Reuven Rivlin sent a letter of support to the American Jewish community in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last Saturday.

On the surface, his move made sense – the largest Diaspora community is concerned about the growing profile of viciously antisemitic forces on the Right. But at a deeper level, Rivlin’s move was detrimental.

Rivlin’s letter channeled a communal posture that ignores the actual state of the Jewish community. In so doing, it made it more difficult for Jewish Americans to recognize and surmount the dangers they face.

The American Jewish community is rightly concerned about neo-Nazis and other white supremacist groups that are gaining more and more attention these days. The fact that antisemitism was the dominant theme of a rally ostensibly organized to oppose the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a public park reveals the potency and centrality of Jew-hatred as an organizing tool for white supremacists in America.

President Donald Trump’s remarks on Tuesday, where he claimed that only some of the people participating in the protest were white supremacists and the rest were just there to protect a monument, were hurtful. On Thursday, The New York Times published interviews with rally participants that bore out Trump’s claims. They said they were only at the rally to protect the statue and do not harbor white supremacist views.

Maybe they were telling the truth. But it is hard to believe people who oppose white supremacism and Jew-hatred would willingly march under swastika flags to the roar of Nazi chants.

Whatever the case, Trump’s equivocation was distressing.

But then, it wasn’t unprecedented for a president to obfuscate the potency of antisemitism in political violence.

In February 2015, a terrorist aligned with Islamic State entered the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris on a Friday afternoon and held the Jewish shoppers hostage while killing four of them.

When asked about the event, then-president Barack Obama denied the massacre was an antisemitic attack. He referred to the victims as “a bunch of guys in a deli.” The perpetrators were merely “a bunch of violent, vicious zealots.”

When asked to clarify if Obama really meant to deny the attack was an antisemitic assault, both the White House and State Department spokespeople insisted, repeatedly, that the attack was not antisemitic.

The administration only deigned to acknowledge the truth in clarifications on Twitter, which it belatedly released, and which included the outright lie that the administration had said the attack was antisemitic all along.

The Obama administration’s mind-melting refusal to acknowledge the attack was anti-Jewish bespoke its larger policy of denying that Jews are specifically targeted for annihilation by Islamic terrorists. The implications of the policy of denial for the safety of Jews throughout the world, including in the US, were self-evident.

And yet, the American Jewish community preferred to ignore the whole thing.

Jeffrey Goldberg, Obama’s favored Jewish journalist, tweeted, “FWIW [for what it’s worth], the Obama Administration has been pretty clear in its condemnations of European antisemitism over time.”

Today, the same Goldberg who underplayed and denied what can at best be called Obama’s diffident response to anti-Jewish violence, has been leading the charge against Trump.

Among other things, Goldberg likened the counterprotesters at Charlottesville to the American soldiers who stormed the beaches at Normandy.

In Goldberg’s conflation of neo-Nazis with real Nazis and the far-left counterprotesters in Charlottesville to US forces, we see the real issue at the heart of the maelstrom now dominating US public life.

The real taboo Trump broke in his remarks following last weekend’s deadly riot was not his equivocation about the relative badness of the neo-Nazis. His real offense was his insistence that the counterprotesters – the ones Goldberg and his colleagues liken to World War II partisans and Allied forces – were also violent.

And yet they were. And Goldberg and his colleagues know they were.

In an ironic twist of history’s knife, the day of the riots, the September issue of The Atlantic monthly, where Goldberg serves as editor, hit the newsstands. The cover story, written by Peter Beinart, one of the stars of the American Jewish Left, was inconveniently titled, “The rise of the violent Left.”

Beinart’s article chronicled the violence and lawlessness of Antifa, the radical group that organized the counterprotest in Charlottesville. Antifa is a group of radical goons who stand behind the violence that has plagued US college campuses for the past several years. All the violent protests – from Vermont to California – where conservative speakers were blocked from addressing students by rioting students who burned buildings and assaulted their fellow students who wished to attend the lectures – were Antifa productions.

And Antifa’s operations go well beyond the walls of campuses. As Beinart notes, it was Antifa rioters who physically assaulted Trump supporters as they walked to their cars at the end of a Trump rally in San Jose, California, last summer.

The purpose of Antifa’s violence is not merely to deny freedom of speech to those whose positions it opposes. It is also to prevent normal relations between Democrats and Republicans and between progressives and conservatives.

Hence, as Beinart noted, this past April, Antifa threatened to use physical violence against participants in Portland, Oregon’s annual Rose Festival parade where the local Republican Party was, as usual, scheduled to march along with their Democratic counterparts. The event, which has taken place annually since 1907, was canceled.

Antifa is problematic for American Jews specifically because it operates in a coalition of far-left groups that all hate Israel and believe that just as Republicans and conservatives should be banned from participating in public life, so American Jews who support Israel should be silenced. All of its coalition partners support the destruction of Israel and castigate the Jewish state as criminal. All bar Jews who support Israel – or even are proud of their Jewish identity – from participating in their events.

Hence, Linda Sarsour, the BDS leader who was elevated to the top of the US feminist movement when she served as co-chairwoman of the Women’s March against Trump, insists that Zionists cannot be feminists.

Hence Black Lives Matter, the anti-police group that is a core member of the Antifa coalition, libeled Israel in its mission statement. Israel, BLM declared, is an “apartheid” state which is carrying out a “genocide” against the Palestinians.

Hence, Democratic Socialists of America, another core group in the Antifa coalition, just passed a resolution at its annual convention to officially join the BDS movement. The vote was reportedly greeted with jubilant chants of “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.”

The fact is that the rhetoric of white supremacists on Israel and Jews is largely indistinguishable from the language of the far Left. Both insist that “Zionists” control the US government, media and banking system and use their control to advance the fortunes of the illegitimate “Jewish ethno-state.”

David Duke, one of the leaders of the white supremacists in the US, wrote a fan letter to Roger Waters, the far-left, openly antisemitic musician who leads the BDS movement.

So from the American Jewish community’s perspective, there ought to be no distinction between its abhorrence and concern over the white supremacists and its concerns and abhorrence of the radical Left. Indeed, the community should be more concerned over the latter because its assaults are more direct and more frequent.

And even more ominously, whereas no Republican leaders – including Trump – wish to be associated with white supremacists, mainstream Democratic leaders are increasingly supportive of the BDS movement and other anti-Israel groups. So it is that formerly pro-Israel New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and formerly pro-Israel New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker are embracing the BDS movement.

And yet, rather than sound the alarms or fight the growing power and influence of the anti-Jewish far Left in their political home, the American Jewish leadership is ignoring the danger and devoting itself to criminalizing Trump, his advisers and supporters.

Whereas the Anti-Defamation League had nearly nothing to say about either Sarsour or Cong. Keith Ellison, with his anti-Jewish record of statements from his service in the antisemitic Nation of Islam, ADL leader Jonathan Greenblatt insisted Monday that Trump must investigate his closest advisers for alleged ties to white supremacists.

The alleged “ties” of the likes of Trump aides Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka to white supremacists are the invention of The Forward newspaper, which has relentlessly libeled both men – and particularly Gorka – without ever producing a shred of evidence to back up its allegations.

Rather than acknowledge its errors, this month the Forward took its campaign a step further when it published an extraordinary op-ed titled “19 people Jews should worry about more than Sarsour.”

Prominently placed between Gorka and Bannon and the neo-Nazis on the one side and the leaders of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, and Trump himself on the other, was Mort Klein, the president of the Zionist Organization of America.

In other words, for the Forward, pro-Israel American Jews of the type assaulted by Antifa and its comrades, and pro-Israel presidential advisers are more dangerous to the community than Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and of course, Sarsour herself who embraces Jew-killing terrorists and says that Jewish Israel-supporters must be shunned.

Trump’s electoral victory was a revolutionary event in US history. Tens of millions of American voters supported Trump because he promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington and serve the needs of the people who the swamp cast asunder.

A big part of that swamp is the Left that insists it is above criticism while its opponents on the Right are deplorable racists unworthy of consideration. When Trump called out the far Left along with the neo-Nazis for their violence at Charlottesville, he was keeping his pledge to his voters and upending one of the most cherished myths of the hated “establishment.”

Given that the white supremacists and radical leftists converge in their hatred of Jews, it is important for the American Jewish community and for America as a whole to embrace Trump’s actions. He is not engaging in moral equivalence between good and evil. He is exercising moral clarity. Without such clarity, the forces of Jew-hatred in the US will never be defeated. Without such clarity, the political position, security and freedom of American Jews will grow increasingly imperiled.

Israel’s job, to the extent it has one in the current fight plaguing the US, is to point out this truth, not join the bandwagon in obfuscating it. Trump is far from a perfect mouthpiece for this essential battle against Jew-haters on the Right and the Left.

But at least he is using his mouth to sound the battle cry. For this he should be applauded by Israelis and American Jews alike.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

From my friend Nidra Poller journalist and novelist: ”
“One of t most interesting details were the Facebook pages of Driss Oubakir Soprano. Anti-Zionist with a vengeance! Including the business about how the Jews kill Palestinian children. And Zionism lets them kill Christians like dogs.The panel truck ended its 500-meter killing spree right next to a kosher restaurant, the Maccabi. It couldn’t drive into the restaurant, it smashed into a kiosque. And here is more about a linked attack in Cambrils…..N.Poller

BARCELONA, Spain — The Catalan government said an attack in the seaside resort town of Cambrils was linked to the vehicle attack on a popular Barcelona promenade that killed 13 people, as a new arrest was made amid a manhunt for the driver in the first attack.

The region’s Interior Minister Joaquin Forn told local radio RAC1 early Friday that the Cambrils attack “follows the same trail. There is a connection.”

He did not explain what connected the attacks. He confirmed the driver in the Barcelona attack remains at large.

Forn told Catalunya Radio later Friday that a third person was arrested in connection with the Barcelona van attack that killed at least 13 people.

The suspect was taken into custody in the northern Catalan town of Ripoll, he said.

The Cambrils attack involved five suspects who carried bomb belts. Police shot and killed the suspects and detonated their explosives in a controlled blast.

Media reports said a car crashed into a police vehicle and nearby civilians and police shot the attackers, one of whom was brandishing a knife.

Police did not immediately say how the attack was carried out.

A police officer and five civilians were injured; two were in serious condition.

Police are working on the theory that the Cambrils and Barcelona attacks are connected, as well as a Wednesday night explosion in the town of Alcanar in which one person was killed.

Mayor Cami Mendoza said the suspects centered their attack on the narrow path to Cambrils’s boardwalk.

Meanwhile, a manhunt is continuing for the driver in the Barcelona attack who drove his van onto a sidewalk along the popular Las Ramblas boulevard, killing 13 and injuring over 100.

One need not go back centuries to the Muslim conquest of the Christian late classical world — the medieval Barbary corsair raids, the Ottoman yoke in Central and Eastern Europe or the slave markets of Kaffa in Tatar Muslim Crimea — to understand that this violence clearly predates the European colonial era, the creation of the modern state of Israel, or the issue of climate change.

Countries such as China, Nigeria or Kenya that are not Western, not “imperialist”, not whatever the excuses that Islamists make, are still spectacularly attacked by similar stabbings. Month on month, there seems almost nowhere that Islamic terror did not strike.

Volumes of revered Islamic texts establish in great detail the grounds of violence and oppression of non-believers and those deemed heretical. These supposed grounds — made alive daily in madrassas and mosques across the world before being acted upon by religiously-trained terrorists — are childishly dismissed by Western liberals as immaterial.

The first step towards a solution is to question the received knowledge tirelessly dished out by media pundits in the West. What is lacking is simply seeing a huge body of evidence of theological justification for Islamist terror.

How thin can excuses wear every time an atrocity is committed in the name of Islam?

When 13 people were killed and scores more injured this week in a vehicle-ramming attack in Barcelona, Spain, and stabbing men shouting “This is for Allah!” on London Bridge and in Borough Market in June, what the victims least cared about was the Western elite pontificating that the latest atrocity “had nothing to do with Islam”.

British Prime Minister Theresa May said, “It is time to say enough is enough” and promised a review of her country’s counter-terrorism strategy.

In the absence, however, of an honest and tempered look at the root causes of this terrorism, sacred or not, and a painful soul-searching by Muslims themselves of the grounds in their religion that give rise to such violence, it will never be “enough”.

On June 4, British PM Theresa May said, “It is time to say enough is enough” and promised a review of her country’s counter-terrorism strategy. In the absence, however, of an honest look at the root causes of this terrorism, and a painful soul-searching by Muslims of the grounds in their religion that give rise to such violence, it will never be “enough”. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

One need not go back centuries to the Muslim conquest of the Christian late classical world — the medieval Barbary corsair raids, the Ottoman yoke in Central and Eastern Europe or the slave markets of Kaffa in Tatar Muslim Crimea — to understand that this violence clearly predates the European colonial era, the creation of the modern state of Israel, or the issue of climate change.

Only a fortnight ago, 29 Christian Copts were killed for refusing to say, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet” while on a trip to an Egyptian monastery on May 26. Separately, an unconfirmed number of Christians were killed and taken hostage by a mix of Saudi, Pakistani, Chechen, Moroccan and local jihadists in the southern Philippines during the past few weeks. In addition, 90 people were killed in a bombing in Kabul on May 31, and 26 people were killed at an ice cream parlor in Baghdad during Ramadan. None of these massacres had anything to do with “Bush’s war” in Iraq or U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s proposed “Muslim ban”.

Here are the latest updates:

Spanish Prime Minister Marian Rajoy said the attack was “jihadi terrorism.”
A few hours ago, Spanish police killed 5 suspected terrorists in Cambrils, 120km south of Barcelona. They were reportedly wearing explosives and believed to be plotting a follow-up attack. Six civilians and one police officer were injured.
Two suspects are under arrest but neither is believed to be the driver of the van who ran down the pedestrians in the Las Ramblas shopping district popular with tourists. One is from Morocco, the other from Melilla — a Spanish enclave across the Strait of Gibraltar.
Reports reveal that victims of the attack come from 18 different countries. At least one fatality has been confirmed to be a Belgian tourist.
One of the terrorists, Moussa Oukabir, had posted on social media: “Kill all the infidels and leave only Muslims.”
His brother, Driss Oukabir, claims that Moussa stole his identity to rent the vans and that he wasn’t involved.
The explosion at a house yesterday in Alcanar which killed two is believed to be related to the attack. It was originally attributed to a gas line explosion, but police are saying the house was being used as an IED factory. Twenty-plus gas canisters were found at the scene. The premature explosion may have prompted the terror cell to act earlier than planned. Two VBIEDs could have killed considerably more.
ISIS’ Amaq news agency claimed its “soldiers” committed the attack. They are encouraging more vehicle attacks via their official social media channels.
The CIA had reportedly told Spanish police that Las Ramblas was a likely terror target two months ago.
Fog of war: Early reports that the terrorists had taken hostages in a restaurant proved to be false. A driver who drove through a police checkpoint injuring two police officers before being shot and killed is not believed to be involved in the terror attack.

This is the sixth Islamic terror attack since July 2016 in which civilians were targeted by terrorists driving vehicles: Nice, France; Berlin, Germany; Stockholm, Sweden; and twice in London.
As I reported here at PJ Media earlier this month, there have already been **eight** terror attacks this year in France.
Barcelona has been an active hub of jihadist activity in Spain. More than 30 percent of Spanish ISIS supporters radicalized and detained are from the Barcelona area. In January 2008, a major terror cell plotting to target Barcelona’s public transit system was disrupted by police.

China’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s opposition escalated Thursday as a court jailed student pro-democracy leaders. By imprisoning the three popular figures, the government is blocking them from running in the next legislative by-elections and it marks another step in the slow but relentless strangulation of Hong Kong’s freedoms.

Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow received sentences of six to eight months for leading hundreds of thousands of protesters who occupied the city’s downtown for 75 days in late 2014. Hong Kongers were angry that Beijing reneged on its promise to allow the city to elect its chief executive by universal suffrage. Instead of allowing an open system of nominations, Chinese authorities wanted to pick a lineup of candidates based on their loyalty to the central government.

For their role in the civil disobedience, the student leaders were sentenced last year to community service and a suspended jail term by a lower court. They completed their punishments and the case seemed to be closed. But then this year the government appealed to the High Court for tougher sentences, including jail time.

This is part of a wider effort to marginalize the opposition after September’s legislative election. Beijing was alarmed that opposition candidates, including some who called for greater autonomy for the city, won 58% of the popular vote and secured 30 of the 70 seats. The opposition had the votes and the mandate to filibuster legislation and pressure the government for more democracy.

In May, China’s third-ranking Politburo Member, Zhang Dejiang, said in a speech that Beijing was determined to consolidate its control over Hong Kong. First the National People’s Congress reinterpreted the city’s constitution, the Basic Law, to disqualify six opposition legislators, with eight more at risk of losing their seats.

With the opposition now lacking the votes to filibuster, pro-Beijing lawmakers changed the legislature’s rules to prevent future blocking of new laws. One Chinese official hailed these decisions as “the rainbow after the storm.”

Mr. Zhang also reiterated Beijing’s stand that the judiciary is subordinate to the executive branch and judges should “learn the Basic Law.” Other officials criticized Hong Kong’s use of foreign judges, who are supposedly too sympathetic to separatist elements.

Chinese officials have stepped up pressure for the city to pass antisubversion laws that would make advocating greater autonomy a crime. That would make it easier to suppress opposition politicians and their supporters.

Hong Kong now has its first political prisoners, and if Beijing has its way they will be followed by many more. That will force the city’s residents into a stark choice of whether to continue fighting for the rights China promised when it guaranteed 50 years of Hong Kong autonomy or accept that the former British colony’s special status is fading into history.

The latest European terrorist attack – by Barcelone wolves – hit a country that made a conscious choice thirteen years ago to opt for a quiet life. So much for that. One of the psychological changes that has happened since the Madrid bombings of 2004 is that Spaniards and other Europeans now accept, albeit mostly implicitly, that this is less to do with foreign policy, or foreign soldiering, than with domestic matters, such as immigration and multiculturalism.

I’ll have more to say on this subject with Tucker Carlson live on Fox News on Friday evening at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific. Meanwhile, here is what I had to say about the Madrid attacks in my bestseller America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. I think most of it holds up. The mourners in the streets marched under placards bearing the single word “Basta” – “Enough”. They didn’t mean “enough” terrorism, but “enough” with Bush’s wars and being a fully participating member of the “coalition of the willing”. So the Spaniards caved, folded, walked away – and, as they learned today, for the Islamic supremacists it still wasn’t “enough”:

If the critical date for Americans in the new century is September 11th 2001, for Continentals it’s a day two-and-a-half years later, in March 2004. On the 11th of the month, just before Spain’s general election, a series of train bombings in Madrid killed over 200 people. That day, I received a ton of e-mails from American acquaintances along the lines of: “3/11 is Europe’s 9/11. Even the French will be in.” Friends told me: “The Europeans get it now.” Doughty warriors of the blogosphere posted the Spanish flag on their home pages in solidarity with America’s loyal allies in the war against terrorism. John Ellis, a Bush cousin and a savvy guy with a smart website, declared: “Every member-state of the EU understands that Madrid is Rome is Berlin is Amsterdam is Paris is London is New York.”

All wrong.

On Friday March 12th, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards filled Madrid’s streets and stood somberly in a bleak drizzle to mourn their dead. On Sunday, election day, the voters tossed out José María Aznar’s sadly misnamed Popular Party, and handed the government to the Socialist Workers’ Party. Aznar’s party were America’s principal Continental allies in Iraq; the Socialist Workers campaigned on a pledge to withdraw Spain’s troops from Iraq. Throughout the campaign, polls showed the Popular Party cruising to victory. Then came the bomb.

Having invited people to choose between a strong horse and a weak horse, even Osama bin Laden might have been surprised to see the Spanish opt to make their general election an exercise in mass self-gelding. Within 72 hours of the carnage, voters sent a tough message to the terrorists: “We apologize for catching your eye.” Whether or not Madrid is Rome and Berlin and Amsterdam and Paris, it certainly isn’t New York.

To be sure, there were all kinds of Kerryesque footnoted nuances to that stark election result. One sympathized with those voters reported to be angry at the government’s pathetic insistence, in the face of the emerging evidence, that the bomb attack was the work of Eta, the Basque nationalist terrorists, when it was so obviously the jihad boys. One’s sympathy, however, disappeared with their decision to vote for a party committed to disengaging from the war. And no one will remember the footnotes, the qualifications – just the final score: terrorists toppled a European government.

We hadn’t traveled together outside the country—the country, in our case, being Norway—all summer, so a few weeks ago we decided to plan a brief, cheap trip to somewhere else in Europe. We put together a list of our favorite cities, plus a few we haven’t yet gotten to. We checked out airfares and hotel prices. And we consulted a color-coded map of Europe that I’d run across online. The darker the color of the country, the greater the likelihood, according to experts, that it will be a terrorist target in the near future. We love Berlin and Munich, but Angela Merkel’s madness has made those cities unappealing destinations, so we crossed them off immediately. We also love Paris, but the recent terrorist attacks there, not to mention the ever-worsening immigrant crime situation and the pictures we’d seen of refugees camped out on the streets, led us to cross it off our list.

Mind you, it’s not just a matter of not wanting to be blown up. It’s about the fact that places like Paris and Berlin just don’t feel the same. It’s also about not wanting to make even a piddling contribution to the economy of a country that has pursued irresponsible immigration and integration policies. London? No. I don’t want to spend my vacation money in a country that lets in jihad-preaching imams while banning Robert Spencer.

I’d go to any of these places for work reasons, but not for a vacation. Even a war correspondent doesn’t vacation in a war zone.

A sensible choice would have been Prague or Budapest: on the color-coded map, the nations of Eastern Europe, owing to their sensible border policies, are white or pale yellow, meaning very safe. But we just didn’t feel like Eastern Europe this time around.

So we decided on Barcelona. We’d been to Spain multiple times, but never its second most-populous city. It seemed a sensible choice: it didn’t come up often in discussions of possible terrorist targets.

We were planning to go sometime around now. We’d picked out a hotel and found a decent airfare. But at the last minute, we decided that we didn’t feel sufficiently adventurous. It would have involved long days of walking and visits to several must-see places, from the Sagrada Familia to the Picasso Museum. So we opted for Copenhagen, a more familiar, closer destination, where we could drop in to our favorite bars, wander around Tivoli, and have some nice dinners.

There’s an old Cole Porter tune called “Let’s Not Talk about Love.” It’s not one of his most delightful works, but it does fall into the ample category of Porter “list” songs. Here’s an excerpt:

Let’s talk about frogs, let’s talk about toads,

Let’s try to solve the riddle why chickens cross roads,

Let’s talk about games, let’s talk about sports,

Let’s have a big debate about ladies in shorts.

And so on. And on. And on. The point soon becomes clear: let’s discuss absolutely everything. Everything! With one single, solitary exception:

But let’s not talk about love.

I’ve been thinking about Porter’s song today while watching the TV coverage of the Barcelona terrorist attack. On the BBC, on Sky News, and on CNN (I live in Norway, and therefore was unable to watch the U.S. broadcast networks), reporters and newsreaders talked about the specifics of the carnage, caused by a truck whose jihadist driver deliberately steered it off the road and onto the pavement, killing at least thirteen pedestrians. The newsfolk displayed maps of Barcelona and explained in detail where La Rambla (also known as Las Ramblas), the location of the terrorist attack, is located in relation to other major spots in the city. They showed pictures of the body-strewn avenue itself, with the corpses themselves blurred out of respect for the dead.

They discussed the popularity of La Rambla as a tourist destination, and went into some detail about the nationalities of vacationers currently thronging the city. They noted that La Rambla is Barcelona’s chief tourist street, essentially its counterpart to the Champs-Elysées in Paris, the Kufürstendamm in Berlin, Fifth Avenue in New York – and, perhaps most significantly, La Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, where, in July of last year, eighty-six people were killed in a similar jihadist atrocity.

They pondered the apparent lack of sophistication of this particular crime, the biographical background of the truck driver, the timeline of the atrocity, the apparent speed and weight of the truck itself, and so on. They talked about the wounded, about the degree to which they had been wounded, about how many had been sent to hospitals.

But they didn’t talk about Islam. They didn’t talk about jihad. CONTINUE AT SITE