RUTHFULLY YOURS

North Korea conducted its fifth nuclear test Friday, following three missile tests on Monday and about 20 so far this year. The accelerating pace of the Kim Jong Un regime’s nuclear and missile testing shows its determination to threaten Japan, South Korea and the U.S. homeland with nuclear weapons. The question is whether the West is capable of a more determined response.

Every nuclear test leaves forensic clues, and analysts are suggesting this was Pyongyang’s most successful, with an apparent yield of 10 kilotons. This is the North’s second test this year, suggesting it has an ample supply of nuclear material from its restarted plutonium reactor and enriched uranium.

The North said it tested a miniaturized nuclear warhead that could be placed on a missile. True or not, we know its scientists had access to a Chinese design for a partially miniaturized weapon through the proliferation network of Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan. The U.S. believes the North already has small enough warheads to fit on short-range missiles aimed at South Korea.

The North’s workhorse Nodong missile now has a range of more than 600 miles. In June it launched a medium-range Musudan missile from a road-mobile launcher, which makes it hard to detect and destroy. North Korea recently launched a missile from a submarine into the Sea of Japan at a range of 300 miles. This means Pyongyang now has a second-strike capability if the world tried a preventive attack to destroy its nuclear weapons.

A growing worry for the U.S. is the North’s new KN-08 intercontinental missile with the range to hit Chicago. In February the North used a similar rocket to launch a small satellite into space. Significant challenges remain, including a warhead that could withstand the vibration and temperature changes of a long-range missile flight. But the North has repeatedly solved technical problems more quickly than expected.

All of this means the window to prevent the North from becoming a global nuclear menace is closing while the proliferation risks are growing. The North has cooperated with Iran on missile development in the past and may share its nuclear secrets.

Right on cue, the world’s powers condemned the missile launch. And President Obama promised “additional significant steps, including new sanctions to demonstrate to North Korea that there are consequences to its unlawful and dangerous actions.”

Yada, yada, yada. Why should Kim and company fear such words?

Sanctions get passed as a ritual but are never enforced enough to matter. Earlier this year China began to enforce new sanctions, but Beijing let trade with the North resume after Seoul decided in July to deploy the U.S. Thaad missile-defense system. Only sanctions that imperil the regime will force the North to freeze its nuclear program, and Beijing has never been willing to risk undermining its client state. CONTINUE AT SITE

Sunday will mark the 15th anniversary of 9/11. On that fateful day in 2001, the “land of the free and home of the brave” was brutally violated on its own soil. Americans, previously insulated from war and terrorism within the confines of their country’s borders, were suddenly faced with the realization that their sense of security had been false for quite some time.

This shock was not exclusive to citizens of the United States. The entire world watched the unfathomable footage of the collapse of the Twin Towers from television sets at home and in shop windows with shock. Even those who celebrated the humiliation of the world’s only superpower at the hands of rogue actors were incredulous.

Indeed, for that moment, there was universal global consensus that a seismic shift had occurred in one fell swoop, and that life as we knew it would never be the same again. It was like witnessing a chapter — or prediction — of the Bible.

But it was a very different book that became the focus of heated public debate, even before the dust in lower Manhattan had settled. Was the Quran behind such evil, or had it been hijacked, like the planes-turned-bombs? Were all Muslims to be held accountable for the act of a few radicals, or would they join in the fight to root out their bad seeds?

Israelis were just as horrified as everyone else by the scale and scope of the mass murder. We also understood the significance of the targets of the meticulously planned atrocity — key symbols of American financial and military prowess.

But we were not surprised by the event itself. Nor did we concern ourselves with the extent to which the tenets of Islam were to blame. We were in the throes of our own suicide-bombing war, which had been launched against us a year earlier by the Palestinian Authority. The only casus belli for what came to be called the Second Intifada was our utter and repeated capitulation to the demands of PLO chief and arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat. The more we groveled, the more empowered the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, whose aim all along was to annihilate the Jewish state, became.

Yes, we Israelis were spending our days trying to calculate which buses might blow up on our way to school or work; which cafe, restaurant or discotheque was too risky to frequent; and which packages, backpacks and sidelong glances were suspicious. As heads were literally rolling in seas of Jewish blood on the streets, our concern was not with the Quran, but with our leaders’ ability to put a stop to the carnage perpetrated by enemies in our midst.

We did not care whether Islam had been “hijacked.” We just wanted to eradicate the phenomenon, by any means necessary. Those naive enough to have believed that the way to do this was through diplomacy were provided with a wake-up call, courtesy of Palestinians wearing and detonating explosive belts. The rest of us already knew that, in the language of Fatah and Hamas, “peace” is a code name for “death and destruction.”

Academic discussions of the reasons for Third World poverty usually sound similar to something Communist Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who lived in luxury while his people starved, declared at a UN conference in 1974: “The division of the world into developed and underdeveloped countries is a result of historical evolution, and is a direct consequence of the imperialist, colonialist, and neo-colonialist policies of exploitation of many peoples.”

That same year, a French professor wrote in a UN publication that “the rich white man, with his overconsumption of meat and his lack of generosity toward poor populations, acts like a true cannibal, albeit indirect. Last year, in overconsuming meat which wasted the cereals which could have saved them, we ate the little children of the Sahel, of Ethiopia, and of Bangladesh. And this year, we are continuing to do the same thing, with the same appetite.”

However, what really destroyed the Third World had nothing to do with the West. The Third World was irrevocably harmed by the scorched-earth economic campaign that was waged against Israel by the oil producing nations.

Bayard Rustin wrote in the NAACP journal The Crisis in April 1974 (and reprinted in Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin):

And yet in raw economic terms, it is the world’s developing nations that will suffer most severely from the oil embargoes and price increases which have been imposed by the Arabs. The Development Forum, which is published by the Centre for Economic and Social Information of the United Nations, notes that prior to the energy crisis the poorest countries were already paying 20 percent more for imported fuel than the industrialized world. The Forum further observed:

“The recent price rises have greatly aggravated their [the underdeveloped nations’] plight. Unless the upward spiral in the price of oil is halted, or some measure of relief provided, it could bring development of the Third World to a dead halt…. Industrial countries are also affected, but they have fallback positions: e.g., rich coal deposits that can be reactivated, and the technology to speed up the development of new resources from nuclear to geothermal and, eventually, solar energy. Above all, they have the financial means to meet the rising price of oil. No such escapes are open to the poorer nations…. Oil, which flows so easily from well to pipeline into tanker, refinery and pump, and eventually, into furnace or generator, is a convenience for the industrial countries. For the developing world, it is a lifeline which is essential to their survival.”

Oh Puleez! Abbas, like his predecessor vermin is a thug put in place and maintained by successive American administrations in their never ending quest to process peace by demanding impossible security risks from Israel….. The only thing that can stop a full blown crisis and protect Jordan is heightened Israeli control over Judea and Samaria….rsk
A Palestinian court on Thursday postponed municipal elections scheduled for Oct. 8 because Palestine’s two largest political factions, Fatah and Hamas, couldn’t agree on terms. The stalemate has been in place since 2006, the last time Palestinians voted, and even led to an internecine war the following year. The Palestinians, split between two separate governments ruling the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, have never recovered.

For Fatah, which rules the West Bank, things are going from bad to worse. The canceled elections come on the heels of a large protest held last weekend in Nablus. An estimated 12,000 Palestinians took to the streets after the West Bank government’s security forces reportedly beat to death Ahmad Halawa, a commander from the al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, a splinter of Fatah. Halawa’s funeral quickly gave way to angry protests against the provisional government of President Mahmoud Abbas.

All of this should serve as a warning to the 81-year-old Mr. Abbas. The Nablus protest, in particular, conjures images of the First Intifada, which broke out after a funeral in 1987, gave way to massive protests against Israel, and in the end lasted for a half decade.

There was a time when Mr. Abbas would have tried to leverage public discontent. Today, a protest of nearly any size is too dangerous to harness for the aging Mr. Abbas, who has every reason to fear that any angry public gathering could quickly turn against him.

The Palestinian Authority, like any other autocratic Arab regime, has never welcomed spontaneous protests. But now Palestinian opinion polls show a majority of voters want Mr. Abbas to resign. What’s more, since 2006, the only forms of democratic expression under the Abbas government has been a local election or student-council vote; and in each of those, Mr. Abbas’s Fatah party has lost. As Mr. Abbas enters the 12th year of his four-year presidency, even minor elections are increasingly seen as referendums on his rule.

Exacerbating this instability is the uncertainty of who will succeed Mr. Abbas. The leader himself refuses to name a successor, which has inspired a heated debate among the Palestinian elite but also sporadic factional violence across the West Bank. Armed gangs regularly skirmish with Palestinian Authority forces, while Mr. Abbas’s rivals, such as the exiled Palestinian leader Mohammad Dahlan, continue to foment opposition. CONTINUE AT SITE

“I hate Christians and Jews. I don’t know why. I don’t have any apparent reason to hate them but I always hear my mom talking badly about them. She hates them too, and this is why I hate them, I guess. Mom has always told me that Muslims are Allah’s favorite people,” — F., a 15-year-old Tunisian girl.

“They said that non-Muslims deserve to die; we should have no pity for them. They will burn in hell, anyway.” — M., a 16-year-old Tunisian boy.

People who do not read tend to fear things they do not know, and this fear can turn into suspicion, aggression and hate. These people need to fill the void, to remove the discomfort, so they turn to terrorism to create a goal in their lives: defending Islam.

As most Tunisians do not read, they watch TV a lot. “After watching ‘The Sultan’s Harem,’ I wanted to be one of the Sultan’s concubines, to live in the Ottoman Empire era; I wanted to be like them,” said S., a 14-year-old Tunisian girl.

A Pew Research Center report, published in 2013, entitled, “The World’s Muslims, Religion, Politics and Society,” explored attitudes and opinions of Muslims around the world regarding religion and its impact on politics, ethics and science.

A sample of 1450 Tunisian Muslims from all the 24 governorates of Tunisia were interviewed between November and December 2011. According to the study, 50% of Tunisians consider themselves living a conflict between their religion and the modern world. According to the report, 32% of Tunisians consider divorce unethical — the highest rate in the Arab and Muslim world — compared to 8% in Egypt, 6% in Lebanon and 3% in Jordan. Although 46% respondents said that religion is compatible with the modern world, the study indicated that the Tunisian population is more prone to advocate individual choice — with 89% favoring — in wearing the niqab (face-veil).

Similarly, based on the United Nations report and research from the Quilliam Foundation in 2014, Tunisian terrorists represent the highest number (3,800) of foreign terrorists in Syria and Iraq. Syrian authorities also confirmed that the number of Tunisian terrorists is more than 10,000, out of a total of 48,000 terrorists in Syrian territory.

What are the main reasons for Tunisia’s high rate of terrorism?

Apparently what Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal understands of democracy is totally different than what the term means in more civilized parts of the world.

If Prince Al-Waleed so passionately defends democracy, he should spend less of his office time in showing solidarity with undemocratic leaders, and more in giving at least a bit of democratic breathing space to his own people.

In the Saudi Kingdom, the primary source of law is the Islamic sharia, based on the principles of a school of jurisprudence (Hanbali) found in pre-modern texts. Ultra-puritanical judges and lawyers form part of the country’s Islamic scholars.

But there is another main source of law: royal decrees. Simple death penalty along with beheading, stoning to death, amputation, crucifixion and lashing are common legal punishments. In the three years to 2010, there were 345 beheadings. But the legal system is usually too lenient for cases of rape and domestic violence.

The common punishment for offenses against religion and public morality such as drinking alcohol and neglect of prayer is usually lashings. Retaliatory punishments are also part of the legal system, such as, literally, an eye for an eye. Saudis can also grant clemency, in return for money, to someone who has unlawfully killed their relatives.

It is not surprising to anyone that Saudi Arabia is widely accused of having one of the worst human rights records in the world — the Kingdom is one of the few countries in the world not to accept the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There is capital punishment for homosexuality. Women are not allowed in public places to be in the presence of someone outside the kinship. They are not allowed to drive.

North Korea reportedly conducted its fifth — and largest to date — nuclear test just hours after President Obama wrapped up a meeting with Asian allies in Laos.

Obama was due to arrive back at the White House from the ASEAN summit shortly after midnight Friday — which is North Korea’s National Day.

The U.S. Geological Survey detected a blast as powerful as a moderate earthquake at 9 a.m. Pyongyang time.

“Possible explosion, located near the location where North Korea has detonated nuclear explosions in the past,” the USGS said of the magnitude 5.3 event. “If this is indeed an explosion, the USGS National Earthquake Information Center cannot determine what type of explosion it may be, whether nuclear or any other possible type.”

North Korea said it conducted a “nuclear warhead explosion” in response to perceived U.S. hostility. “We sent out a message that if the enemies attack us, we can counterattack.”

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff called it “an artificial quake” that was detected near North Korea’s Punggye-ri nuclear test site.

Pyongyang previously held nuclear tests in 2006, 2009, 2011 and this past January, which was followed by a UN Security Council resolution in March. “We estimate the North has carried out the biggest-ever test,” the South Korea statement said.

“We are aware of seismic activity on the Korean Peninsula in the vicinity of a known North Korean nuclear test site,” National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said. “We are monitoring and continuing to assess the situation in close coordination with our regional partners.”

Yonhap news agency reported that South Korean lawmakers will convene for an emergency session today. “It would be a crucial violation of the U.N. Security Council resolution if it turns out to be an actual nuclear test,” Rep. Yeom Dong-yeol of South Korea’s ruling Saenuri Party said.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye condemned the test and called for “much stronger sanctions” along with utilizing “all possible means” to stop Kim Jong-un’s nuclear program. Without elaborating, Park’s office said she spoke with Obama about the test.

Last month, Japan’s Kyodo News reported that North Korea has openly restarted plutonium production and is on pace to produce highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons “as scheduled.”

“We have reprocessed spent nuclear fuel rods removed from a graphite-moderated reactor,” North Korea’s Atomic Energy Institute said, a move in response to what Kim views as threats from Washington. Pyongyang hinted at the time of an upcoming nuclear test.

“US Sends Iran Two More Loads of Cash.” So blared the headline on the front page of the September 7 issue of The Wall Street Journal about the latest transfer of enormous amounts of money ($1.3 billion in this latest installment) by President Barack Obama from the US Treasury to the government of Iran.

This is the very same genocidal regime whose leaders proclaim at every opportunity their intention to destroy the state of Israel, and whose (treaty-violating) nuclear-capable ballistic missiles are marked, in Farsi, with the motto “Israel must be erased from history,” as well as the declaration, in Hebrew no less, “Israel must be erased from the earth.”

President Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry had already agreed to “return” $130 billion to the mullahs as a kind of signing bonus for their consent to the scandalous JCPOA nuclear “deal,” a vast addition to Iran’s ability to make war — which it has in fact already done, directly in Syria and Iraq, and indirectly against Israel via Hezbollah and Hamas. Earlier news had been of a mere $400 million — paid secretly, and in Mafia-style cash bundles — as ransom for some, though by no means all, Americans held hostage by Iran.

The mind reels, the heart sinks: can anyone, even his harshest critics, imagine President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, after Adolf Hitler had made clear, in the Nuremberg laws (1935), in Kristallnacht (1938), and in countless speeches, his intention to destroy European Jewry, lavishing billions of American dollars in courtship of the Nazi regime?

Just a week earlier, on August 30, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in a written response to a pro-Israel German parliamentarian named Volker Beck, declared (not for the first time) that Germany will not “normalize” relations with Iran until Tehran recognizes the state of Israel and its “right to exist.” Merkel is unusual among European heads of state in assigning importance to moral considerations, especially where Jews (dead or living) are concerned. Despite her party’s recent electoral setbacks, she still stands at the head of a country that, in the years 1933-45, destroyed European Jewish civilization. That was (to use one of President Obama’s favorite locutions) “the verdict of history” pronounced by Europe upon its Jewish minority, which it is now replacing with a rather different (and much more quarrelsome) Muslim minority. European Christendom, over the course of centuries, had, in Raul Hilberg’s famous formulation, progressed from the historical verdict, “You [Jews] have no right to live among us as Jews,” to “You have no right to live among us,” to “You have no right to live.”

Michael David Danby is an Australian politician who has been an Australian Labor Party member of the Australian House of Representatives since October 1998, representing the Division of Melbourne Ports, Victoria.

Nearly half a million people have been killed in Syria in the last four years.300,000 civilians are trapped in Aleppo – surrounded by Iranians and Hezbollah and being carpet bombed by the Russian and Syrian governments – yet hypocritical far-Left unionists like Paul Elliot remain completely silent on the slaughter in Syria.
Michael Danby

Michael Danby

Displaying their entrenched hypocrisy, Elliot’s far-Left unionists show there are no limits to their attacks on the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, by adopting a ‘boycott, divestment and sanctions’ (BDS) policy against Israel.

The medical scientists, pharmacists and phycologists who pay their union subscriptions to the ultra-left HSU No 4 branch will need to ask whether the union’s discriminatory BDS policy instructions mean they will have to rip out the Israeli-made computer chips from their computers and cease prescribing medications which were developed or produced in Israel.

Member for Melbourne Ports – Michael Danby MP – lambasted Paul Elliott and other participating members of the HSU saying; “they (the union) should be more concerned with the fact that the general public think they are a union of crooks, rather than taking up the insignia position of the Nazis and boycotting Israeli and Jewish businesses.”

Mr Danby said that the motivations of the people who run the international BDS campaigns are very clear; what they are on about is the elimination of Israel, not some critiquing of its internal politics. [1]

“I call on those responsible to reconsider and immediately withdraw this discriminatory policy” Mr Danby said.

The Victorian branch of the Health Services Union (HSU) were singled out for praise however, having distinguished themselves from their extremist colleagues.

The internal pushback within the union has been led by Dianna Asmar who represents hundreds of aged-care workers who work in Jewish aged-care services in Melbourne Ports.

Ms Asmar has expressed her outright opposition to the anti-Israel boycott.

A new ISIS magazine released by its propaganda wing in charge of foreign-language outreach advises jihadists to target teens playing sports after school or even flower sellers hawking blooms on the street.

The first edition of the new magazine — Rumiyah, meaning Rome — was published in English, Turkish, German, French, Indonesian, Russian, Pashto and Uyghur. The name, of course, is symbolic of ISIS’ apocalyptic goal of the conquest of Rome.

The design of the magazine is more simple than English-language Dabiq. It’s also much shorter: 38 pages compared to the 82 pages in the last issue of Dabiq.

The new effort by ISIS’ Al-Hayat Media Center is likely an effort to reach broader audiences on a more frequent basis. The articles are similar to other ISIS material: heavily on Quranic verse yet not so much in a Western tone, like al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine.

In one article on the Muslim’s responsibility to shed the blood of the kafir [disbelievers], the writers stress that “Allah did not only command the ‘fighting’ of disbelievers, as if to say He only wants us to conduct frontline operations against them. Rather, He has also ordered that they be slain wherever they may be – on or off the battlefield.”

“…All of this becomes all the more apparent for those who have realized that the blood of a kafir is cheap, filthy, and permissible to shed.”

The article heavily quotes scholars citing the Quran to justify targeting civilians. “None of this should be surprising to any Muslim who has studied his religion, as this matter of a kafir’s blood being halal to shed is something upon which scholars have recorded consensus,” the author concludes.

“Muslims currently living in Dar al-Kufr [land of the disbelievers] must be reminded that the blood of the disbelievers is halal, and killing them is a form of worship to Allah, the Lord, King, and God of mankind,” readers are told. “This includes the businessman riding to work in a taxicab, the young adults (post-pubescent ‘children’) engaged in sports activities in the park, and the old man waiting in line to buy a sandwich.” CONTINUE AT SITE