RUTHFULLY YOURS

TEL AVIV—Israel on Wednesday played down the impact of sensitive Israeli intelligence information that Donald Trump shared with Russian officials, as it prepared to host the U.S. president for a much anticipated visit next week.

Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman and the country’s intelligence and transport minister, Yisrael Katz, reaffirmed the U.S.-Israel alliance, with Mr. Katz saying he had “complete confidence” in the U.S. intelligence community.

U.S. officials said Tuesday that Israel was the source of information that Mr. Trump had disclosed to Russia’s foreign minister and its ambassador to the U.S. during a meeting in the Oval Office last week.

Under the terms of a longstanding intelligence-sharing agreement between Israel and the U.S., the intelligence was meant only for U.S. officials. The information, which concerned a threat by the extremist group Islamic State to airliners, was shared in such a way that could compromise the original source, according to officials.

After U.S. officials acknowledged Israel’s role in the incident, Mr. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke on phone but didn’t discuss the issue, focusing instead on the president’s upcoming two-day visit to Israel and the West Bank, the premier’s office said Wednesday.

National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster said on Tuesday that counterterrorism information that President Trump shared in a meeting with Russians in the Oval Office last week “was wholly appropriate,” following reports that the president had revealed sensitive information. Photo: Reuters

The visit, which starts Monday, will be the second stop on Mr. Trump’s first overseas trip as U.S. president. He will first visit Saudi Arabia and later stop at the Vatican and in Brussels.

As Israel readied for Mr. Trump’s arrival, its reassurances over the president’s use of its intelligence overshadowed a rare public disagreement over moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

At the opening of the mega-mosque, Malmö City Councilor Frida Trollmyr gave a speech in which she continued to use the term “cultural center”, never using the word “mosque”, as if — Soviet-style — the use of certain words could alter reality.

The mega-mosque was never supposed to be a mosque, according to the Wakf’s own application for building permits, but merely a “cultural center” (the application talks about “an activity center for youth and families in Malmö with a focus on Rosengård”).

When the journalist asked Khaled Assi whether his organization was in fact building a mosque, he told her that “there already is a mosque in Malmö” and that the “cultural center” would just contain a “small prayer room”.

On April 28, the Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs of the State of Qatar opened the Umm Al-Mu’minin Khadijah Mosque in Malmö, Sweden. Qatar — the epicenter of Muslim Brotherhood and the base of its proselytizing megaphone, Al Jazeera — paid more than 3 million euros to build the mosque, which is almost 2,000 square meters and accommodates up to 2,000 people, making it the largest mosque in Scandinavia.

One astonishing fact about this new mega-mosque is that, according to Swedish mainstream media, the opening never happened. Not a single Swedish news outlet mentioned the opening. Swedish authorities were also completely silent on the topic. On her Facebook and Twitter accounts, Malmö’s Mayor, Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh, wrote about the opening of a new office for army recruits in Malmö and the Swedish coast guard moving its activities to Malmö harbor, but failed to mention the opening of the largest mosque in Scandinavia. The website of Malmö municipality was also silent on the topic.

For information on what goes on in Sweden, therefore, one has to turn to Qatar News Agency, which reported:

“Director of the Islamic Affairs Department at the Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs Khalid Shaheen Al Ghanim said that the mosque was built and furnished by the State of Qatar at a cost of over 3 million euros, under the supervision of the Ministry of Awqaf and in collaboration with the Wakf of Scandinavia in Malmo, Sweden

“He added that the Umm Al-Mu’minin Khadijah Mosque is the largest mosque in Scandinavia and is located on the first and second floors of the four-story building of the Wakf of Scandinavia in Sweden. The mosque is equipped with facilities for people with special needs to perform prayers and others for children and women.

“The opening ceremony was attended by representatives of Swedish local authorities, representatives of Islamic institutions in Sweden and Denmark, as well as a number of businessmen.”

Sadly, there seems to be no benefit in opposing this extortion: No one in Germany will praise anyone for protecting freedom of speech — on the contrary. As far as the American market is concerned, they seem to think: America is far away, no one will ever know about it.

For those who do not like self-appointed “morality police” entering the political arena and taking part in “boycott” actions against freedom of opinion, they themselves may consider boycotting those companies or reporting about them on Twitter.

The Breitbart boycotters seem to have no qualms about dealing with dictatorial regimes that habitually imprison and torture their citizens. In Iran, Daimler (owner of Mercedes-Benz) wants to become market leader in commercial vehicles. Lufthansa, which allegedly opposes “violence-glorifying, sexist, extremist as well as radical political content,” not only offers flights to Tehran, but praises the torture- and stoning-metropolis on its website.

Reports in January noted how Gerald Hensel, a high-ranking employee of Scholz & Friends, one of the two largest advertising agencies in Germany, used his professional position to launch a private war against the freedom of expression, under the slogan “No Money for the Right Wing!”

“Right wing” websites — those which have criticized the German government for its policies on, for example, Muslim mass-migration, the euro rescue or climate policy — should, according to Hensel, be cut off from advertising revenues. If they have no more money, so the thinking goes, it will be more difficult for them to stay in business; perhaps they would give up, and opinions differing from the mainstream would not be put into circulation.

Hensel explained his strategy on his private blog, which featured a red Soviet star: Large conglomerates that want to advertise on the Internet usually do not directly contact specific websites. Instead, computer programs recognize who is interested in a particular product or service, based on the user’s search behavior. The advertisement is personalized: a car maker will only approach users who are looking for cars. The advertisement, however, will not only appear on car websites, but on all sites the user visits in the following hours or days.

Hensel urged all of those who are disturbed by diverse views on the internet to exert pressure on companies, by branding particular websites as “right wing.” This pressure alone, according to his calculation, would ensure that the company would block the website in question.

International enforcement regarding cyber-intrusions is weak and in many cases nonexistent.

There was a joke going around thirty years ago, a not very good joke but like any two-edged sword it cut either way, that said that Israel was a “one disk” country. The meaning was that everyone copied stuff from their friends and didn’t pay for it.

At that time there was not much worry about computers or security, there were no smartphones (the Blackberry was just emerging), and the Internet was there but not the gargantuan edifice it is today.

But copying at that time was mostly a problem for the music industry, and as computer processors, storage and memory improved, it also became a worry for film producers who feared losing revenue. But still we were in early days.

Today much of the fraud in the computer business is illegally copied software. Big American companies, and probably big companies in Europe and some in Asia, are careful to use only licensed software because of the fear they might get caught pirating software from commercial vendors. But smaller companies are less inclined to worry about such things and, in some countries, stealing commercial software is quite common, even for major industries including banking.

That is why it is so interesting that Russia and China experienced a large number of ransomware attacks recently, part of the WannaCry exploit. In Russia, there are a large number of users (including probably some in government agencies) who use pirated software. One of the problems of pirated software is that you cannot easily keep the software up to date. That’s because in most cases to do so requires that you go with your registered and authenticated copy to the software manufacturer for updates. If yours is illegal, you don’t do that, or perhaps you try to figure out what the patch or update is, and install it yourself. By and large this left computers in Russia heavily exposed to the ransomware attack, which angered Vladimir Putin who, partly correctly, blamed NSA in the United States for his troubles.

“Venezuela has changed forever.”

Hugo Chavez (1954-2013)

President of Venezuela 1999-2013

As Mr. Chavez said, Venezuela has changed – from the richest country in South America to one of the poorest, from an economy based on abundant natural resources, including the largest oil reserves in the world[1], to one where people are starving, from a free country to a dictatorship.

Unlike many tragedies, the one in Venezuela is man-made. No natural storm or Biblical plague visited Venezuela. It was men – two in particular – who, in the pursuit of personal power and under the guise of socialism, destroyed the country and rendered its people impoverished. Venezuela, with a population of 31.2 million, is in north-eastern South America, with 1700 miles of coastline on the Caribbean and the Atlantic. Just north of the equator, it has a topography that ranges from rain forests in the Amazon basin to alpine glaciers in the Andes. The lushness of its forests prompted novelist Romulo Gallegos to write poetically of “the golden spring of the araguaneyes.” Venezuela is ranked 7th in the world, in number of plants – and now ranked near the bottom in terms of freedoms and wealth.

Besides oil, Venezuela had been an exporter of coffee, cocoa and manufactured products. Last year, the Frazier Institute’s “Economic Freedom of the world: 2016 Annual Report” ranked it dead last, as its citizens struggled to gain necessities, like food, water and even toilet paper. It has the weakest property rights in the world, according to the Heritage Foundation. How does Nicolas Maduro reward his loyalists, with oil revenues down more than 60% from their peak? Amanda Taub and Max Fisher of the New York Times recently suggested: “…the most valuable resource in Venezuela is access to favorable exchange rates. By leveraging official government rates, which value the bolivar considerably higher than the unofficial rate, someone with the proper connections can generate a small fortune out of thin air.”

There are those who blame Venezuela’s troubles on falling oil prices, or on a drought that effected hydro-electric power production, but other countries have dealt with such problems. Those industries, and many others, including agriculture and banking, were expropriated and nationalized by Chavez and his successor Mr. Maduro, which meant by-passing the inherent fairness and equality embedded in free markets.

It has been socialism that has brought this country to its knees – the arrogant belief that government can assume the means of production, dictate distribution methods and affix prices better than markets. The consequence of its failure can be seen in the starving faces of children and in the desperate countenances of demonstrators. Last year, CNBC reported that the economy shrank by 18.6 percent, with inflation at 800 percent. Official unemployment rates are around 7%, but unofficially rates are between 18 and 25 percent. Real numbers are certainly higher, probably much higher, with no relief on the horizon.

Margaret Thatcher warned: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” Keep in mind, politics is about power. Governments control enormous budgets. According to the 2017 Index of Economic Freedom, Venezuela’s government accounted for 40.2% of GDP over the past three years, with deficits averaging 16.1% of GDP. Public debt is equivalent of 48.8% of GDP.

Washington has stopped trying to figure out the “Arab Street.” From what I can tell it happened somewhere around Nov. 9, 2016. America is probably better off for it.

I’m not saying we should ignore public opinion in the Arab world. Nor should we ignore its politics. The Middle East, and what happens there, is of crucial concern to American policy makers and interests.

But at least since I arrived in Washington in 2002, the foreign-policy establishment has been on a quixotic quest to tap into the thoughts of an estimated 365 million people. Armed with language lessons, history books and advanced degrees, America’s Middle East analysts labored to understand why Arab populations cheered the 9/11 attacks, jeered the 2003 Iraq invasion, and brought down dictators during the Arab Spring. I was among them, taking trips to dangerous places in the hope that I could acquire “ground truth” that would help in America’s battle for hearts and minds.

The only “ground truth” I could ever discern was that the Arab world is a complex patchwork of national identities that are influenced heavily by clan, family, tribe and—of course—religion. The people speak different dialects and embrace different cultures. Sure, there are commonalities among Arabs, but the more you travel the region, the more you find yourself focusing on the differences.

There is not one Arab Street, in the same way that there is not one Main Street in America (consider the differences among New York City, Biloxi, Miss., Des Moines, Iowa, and Los Angeles). Numerous ideological currents run through our 50 states and 320 million residents. Just ask the pollsters who got it wrong in November.

In a rather poetic twist of fate, the Arabs are now sending delegations to Washington in their own quest to glean ground truth. Some have come to visit me. Others have popped in on other policy shops around town. The conversations vary, but the questions are basically the same. With the political sands shifting dramatically in Washington, the Arabs are desperately trying to understand the thinking of the new leadership, but also the thinking of Main Street Americans who were instrumental in bringing about this change.

Can I explain what’s happening in America right now? Probably about as well as the Arab intellectuals who tried to explain things to me over the years. Shifting demographics, economics and religion all play a role. But I have yet to read a compelling narrative that explains the changes that have taken place across diverse populations nationwide. There is no ground truth here, either.CONTINUE AT SITE

Danish Minister of Justice Søren Pape hopes to solve the issue by prosecuting the imam. However, Danish politicians appear to miss the critical fact that there is clearly a thirsty audience for sermons like this.

This sermon is a call to violence against Jews.

As the Quran cannot be changed, it is crucial to make more broadly known what is in it, so at least people can see the facts confronting them, to help them determine what choices they might care to make for their own future and that of their children.

In 2015, Omar El-Hussein listened to the imam Hajj Saeed, at the Hizb-ut-Tahrir- linked Al-Faruq-mosque in Copenhagen, decry interfaith dialogue as a “malignant” idea and explain that the right way, according to Mohammed, is to wage war on the Jews. The next day, El-Hussein went out and murdered Dan Uzan, the volunteer Jewish guard of the Jewish community, as he was standing in front of the Copenhagen synagogue. El-Hussein had also just murdered Finn Nørgaard, a film director, outside a meeting about freedom of speech.

Two years later, nothing has changed. A visiting imam from Lebanon at the Al-Faruq mosque, Mundhir Abdallah, is preaching to murder Jews:

“[Soon there will be] a Caliphate, which will instate the shari’a of Allah and revive the Sunna of His Prophet, which will wage Jihad for the sake of Allah, which will unite the Islamic nation after it disintegrated, and which will liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque from the filth of the Zionists, so that the words of the Prophet Muhammad will be fulfilled: ‘Judgement Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. The Jews will hide behind the rocks and the trees, but the rocks and the trees will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ …”

The “words of the Prophet” are from a well-known hadith, number 6985.

Far from hiding this incitement, the mosque posted the sermon, delivered on March 31, on the YouTube page of Al-Faruq Mosque on May 7. The invaluable research organization, MEMRI, translated it.

A reporter from Danish TV channel TV2 news, who recently spent two hours around the Al-Faruq mosque, could not find a single Muslim willing to condemn the imam. “I don’t think he meant anything bad by it,” said Bayan Hasan, a female student. Another Danish Muslim, Mohammed Hussein, incorrectly replied, “According to Islam, Muslims are not allowed to kill”. The Quran verse 8:12, to mention one of many examples, says otherwise: “…I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieved, so strike [them] upon the necks and strike from them every fingertip.”

Denmark’s Minister of Integration, Inger Støjberg, called on the mosque and all Muslims in Denmark to condemn the sermon. “If this had happened in a Danish church, it would not have been necessary to ask people to condemn it. It would have been automatic”, she said.

On April 19, the campaign of Jakarta’s radicals chanting, “We want a Muslim governor!” paid off, as Ahok was defeated in the gubernatorial election. Exit polls on election day indicated that religion was the main factor behind the voting.

On May 10, Indonesia’s radicals scored a second victory, when Ahok was found guilty of blaspheming Islam and sentenced to two years in prison.

The verdict came as a surprise even to the prosecutors of the case — they had requested only a suspended sentence for the offense of “inciting hatred”.

In the two decades since the fall of Indonesian President Suharto’s 32-year reign in 1998, the use of the accusation of “treason” as a governmental tool to quash political opposition gradually reemerged in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.

Today, however, those trying to overthrow the leadership are Islamists intent on unraveling the fabric of a pluralistic society.

This situation has led to the debate over freedom of speech and the separation of church and state — or, here, mosque and state.

Four recent rallies in the capital city of Jakarta illustrate the nature of what has become a full-blown controversy. In each case, protesters gathered outside mosques after Friday prayers for what they claim are “spontaneous” demonstrations made necessary by their clerics’ lack of financial resources to plan and stage such events. But evidence collected by Indonesian authorities indicates otherwise.

The first such protest took place on October 14, 2016. Its purpose was to demand that criminal proceedings be launched against Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama — familiarly known as Ahok — for “blasphemy.”

Ahok, a Christian of Chinese descent, was appointed to his position in 2014, when Joko Widodo became president of Indonesia. Hardline Muslim groups argued that a Christian should not be allowed to govern a Muslim-majority city. To back up their claim, they cited the Quran.

Their fury grew even greater when Ahok was running for reelection: he asked fishermen in Pulau Seribu not to be “deceived” by politicians using the Quranic verse, al-Maidah 51 (“…do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies”), to dissuade them from supporting him.

North Korea test fired yet another missile on Sunday. This time the test did not end in a fiasco. The missile was fired somewhere between 430 to 500 hundred miles, staying aloft for about 30 minutes at an altitude exceeding 1,240 miles, before landing in the Sea of Japan 60 miles south of Russia’s Vladivostok region. It exceeded in distance and altitude an intermediate-range missile that North Korea successfully tested last February. While reportedly not an intercontinental missile, North Korea is demonstrating with this successful test, according to at least one expert, a missile with a range as far as 3700 miles, putting Hawaii potentially at risk. The North Korean regime’s missile program is firing on all cylinders, including the use of mobile land-based and submarine launch platforms. It is only a matter of time before North Korea also conducts another, more powerful nuclear test in its relentless march towards achieving a strategic nuclear deterrence that would provide it with the leverage to extort its neighbors and threaten the U.S. mainland at will.

The White House issued a statement noting the proximity to Russia of the landing of its latest tested missile, and reiterating the U.S.’s firm commitment to protect its interests and those of its allies against North Korea’s provocations: “With the missile impacting so close to Russian soil – in fact, closer to Russia than to Japan – the President cannot imagine that Russia is pleased. North Korea has been a flagrant menace for far too long. South Korea and Japan have been watching this situation closely with us. The United States maintains our ironclad commitment to stand with our allies in the face of the serious threat posed by North Korea. Let this latest provocation serve as a call for all nations to implement far stronger sanctions against North Korea.”

South Korea’s newly elected President Moon Jae-In, while indicating more receptiveness to diplomatic talks with North Korea than his predecessor, called the missile test-launch a “clear” violation of UN Security Council resolutions, adding that “we should sternly deal with a provocation to prevent North Korea from miscalculating.”

North Korea’s leader Kim Jung-un appears oblivious to such condemnations and rhetorical threats. The latest missile launch was timed to send a clear message to South Korea’s new government, sworn in just days ago, that North Korea would not back down in the face of joint military exercises or other demonstrations of force by the United States, South Korea or their allies. If anything, such demonstrations are having the opposite effect, further convincing Kim Jung-un and his fellow leaders that North Korea’s only path to survival is a nuclear strike capability strong enough to dissuade the U.S. from daring to launch a pre-emptive military strike or invasion.

Sanctions are also clearly not enough to stop the North Korean regime from pursuing its nuclear arms and ballistic missile delivery objectives. Kim Jung-un could care less whether his people starve to death or not, as long as he can control them. North Korea has also proven to be very adept at evading sanctions through front organizations. According to a UN Panel of Experts report issued earlier this year, North Korea has successfully used front companies to obtain access to the international financial system.