RUTHFULLY YOURS

BERLIN—As the flow of asylum seekers entering Germany started to break historic records last fall, Continental AG rushed to tap some of the newcomers for its workforce.
But one year after the tire maker began advertising an internship program designed for 50 migrant workers, only 30 of the positions have been filled as it struggles to find suitable candidates or vet their qualifications.

Continental isn’t alone. Answering calls from Berlin to help in the country’s massive integration effort, German companies big and small have scouted refugee shelters and job centers for potential employees. Yet because of administrative bottlenecks and a mismatch in needed skills, the number of migrants in jobs with benefits was only about 25,000 higher in June than a year earlier, despite more than 736,000 arrivals in that time.

Frustrated with the slow pace of hiring, Chancellor Angela Merkel invited senior executives from the 121 companies behind a jobs-for-refugees initiative called “Us Together” to discuss their progress and difficulties on Wednesday.

More than 80 business leaders attended the three-hour meeting. Among those questioned by Ms. Merkel were top executives at Deutsche Bank AG and Lufthansa AG . “It is our common target to integrate more and more refugees into the labor market,” she said beforehand. “If we succeed, it will be a benefit for all.”

Afterward, an “Us Together” spokeswoman said there was “an open exchange” about existing projects.

Failure to integrate the recent arrivals into Germany’s economy, the largest in Europe, could seal Ms. Merkel’s political fate. The chancellor’s popularity has waned, and her party lost badly in recent regional elections as more Germans doubt the wisdom of opening the country’s doors, which has brought well over a million migrants into the country in the past 18 months. Ms. Merkel has until the general election next year to change their minds.CONTINUE AT SITE

“In an implicit criticism of Boko Haram’s strategy until now, Mr. Barnawi told al-Naba that the jihadists should focus on combating Nigeria’s Christians—a target largely ignored by Mr. Shekau in recent years. The new approach should be “booby-trapping and blowing up every church that we are able to reach, and killing all those we find from the citizens of the cross,” Mr. Barnawi announced.”

Some people can be too extreme even for Islamic State.

The self-proclaimed caliphate’s biggest and deadliest franchise outside the Middle East, the “West Africa Province” also known as Boko Haram, fractured in recent weeks over Islamic State’s decision to replace its notorious leader, Abubakar Shekau.

Mr. Shekau hasn’t recognized the August appointment of a rival Boko Haram commander, Abu Musab al-Barnawi, as the group’s new “governor.” The two factions have repeatedly clashed since then and their followers have accused each other of abandoning the true faith.

This split, while weakening Boko Haram in the immediate term, could have dramatic consequences for how jihadists continue their struggle in Nigeria and in neighboring countries. Boko Haram’s areas of influence were cut down by the recent offensives of regional militaries, which were aided by U.S., British and French advisers. But the group still controls large chunks of northeastern Nigeria and operates in parts of Niger, Cameroon and Chad.

Mr. Shekau took over Boko Haram after its founder, Mohammed Yusuf, was killed in Nigerian police custody in 2009. He unleashed a strategy of unbridled terror, treating Muslim villages that didn’t join his organization as legitimate targets. Over the past year, he sent scores of children on suicide missions to blow up markets and mosques—with local Muslim civilians making up the vast majority of the casualties.

“You can’t really be more barbaric and more savage than Shekau. He’s the pinnacle of barbarism,” said Issoufou Yahaya, a political analyst and head of the history department at the Niamey University in Niger.

Dispatching child suicide bombers to Sunni mosques was apparently too much even for Islamic State’s leadership in Syria and Iraq. In August, the organization’s newspaper al-Naba published an interview with Mr. Barnawi that made no mention of Mr. Shekau. Instead it referred to Mr. Barnawi, who is rumored to be a son of the Nigerian group’s founder, Mr. Yusuf, as the new “governor” of the West Africa Province.

A surprised Mr. Shekau responded by accusing his rival of apostasy and by complaining that Islamic State chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been tricked.

Nigeria’s military, which has repeatedly announced Mr. Shekau’s death in the past, claimed to have seriously injured him in a late August airstrike. There has been no independent confirmation of that claim. CONTINUE AT SITE

Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri made a new video that appeared on September 9. It offers little that is new: 9/11 is again praised and portrayed as a product of Muslim grievances and payback for Western crimes; he vows a “thousand more” 9/11s; and warns against apostates being more dangerous than original infidels.

Only one angle stands out—again, not because it is new, but because it sheds light on a growing phenomenon: black violence against police in general, in the context of Black Lives Matter in particular. In last week’s video, Zawahiri called on American blacks to convert to Islam, asserting that they will never receive justice and will always live in “humiliation” until they convert to Islam and rebel against the “white majority.” He even showed footage of the Nation of Islam’s Malcolm X preaching.

While many conclude that al-Qaeda is opportunistically trying to exploit groups like BLT, the reality may be that BLT has from the start long been influenced by al-Qaeda’s rhetoric and propaganda (which, as usual, is quietly disseminated on the ground, not by al-Qaeda, but by its many Muslim sympathizers in America). For Zawahiri has in fact for years been calling on American blacks to turn against whites and quoting Malcolm X.

Nearly a decade ago, Zawahiri issued a similar message:

That’s why I want blacks in America, people of color, American Indians, Hispanics, and all the weak and oppressed in North and South America, in Africa and Asia, and all over the world, to know that when we wage jihad in Allah’s path, we aren’t waging jihad to lift oppression from Muslims only; we are waging jihad to lift oppression from all mankind, because Allah has ordered us never to accept oppression, whatever it may be…This is why I want every oppressed one on the face of the earth to know that our victory over America and the Crusading West — with Allah’s permission — is a victory for them, because they shall be freed from the most powerful tyrannical force in the history of mankind.

American blacks, however, were Zawahiri’s primary targets. He again praised and quoted from Malcolm X: “Anytime you beg another man to set you free, you will never be free. Freedom is something you have to do for yourself. The price of freedom is death.”

Jeremy Corbyn — who could possibly become British prime minister at the next election – felt obliged to write something about the anniversary of 9/11 on Sunday. What he said is outrageous. At least it’s outrageous on a certain reading. The problem is, I don’t know how else to take it. Indeed many people have taken it in exactly the same way I’ve taken it.

Here’s Corbyn’s short tweet:

“My thoughts are with those whose lives were shattered on 9/11/2001 — and in the wars and terror unleashed across the globe in its aftermath.”

It’s crystal clear that Corbyn felt a strong need to politicise these commemorations. And he did so in a particular way.

Let’s be clear about that interpretation.

i) Corbyn states that his “thoughts are with those whose lives were shattered on 9/11/2001”.

ii) He then says: “and in the wars and terror unleashed across the globe in its aftermath”.

What connects the first clause with the second? They must have some kind of connection otherwise the whole sentence would be a non sequitur.

Why would a terrorist attack which was “the victims’ blow to the motherland” (as Chomsky once put it) — and after which tens of thousands of Muslims celebrated on the streets — have “unleashed war and terror across the globe”? After all, this was a successful act of terror for al-Qaeda and tens of millions of other Muslims.

That must mean that what followed 9/11 — not 9/11 itself! — “unleashed terror and war across the globe”. What followed 9/11? The intervention in Afghanistan in October 2001 and the Iraq War in 2003. Thus in a tweet seemingly to commemorate the victims of 9/11, Corbyn couldn’t stop himself from pointing the finger at Blair and Bush (plus another 23 states!) and indeed at all “Western capitalist powers”.

When the inquiry’s report was published on June 30, it turned out to be what most Jews and pro-Israel activists had suspected it would be from the beginning: a whitewash. It opens with the words: “The Labour Party is not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or other forms of racism”. But nobody had ever suggested that it was.
The report is vague and waffly, 28 pages saying almost nothing about the subject under question, anti-Semitism, which is throughout subsumed under general issues of racism.
The working definitions of anti-Semitism for the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia and the US State Department, along with others, agree that exaggerated, mendacious, or malicious criticism of the Jewish state, or the setting of double standards for Israel that are used for no other nation, is anti-Semitic. It is precisely accusations of this kind that make up the bulk of the Labour Party’s anti-Semitic comments, including statements still being made by some party members, including Jeremy Corbyn himself.

Britain’s Labour Party, out of power since 2010, more or less cut its own throat when its members (plus fresh recruits who, instead of taking out membership, paid £3 to vote in the leadership election in 2015) chose Jeremy Corbyn, a formerly marginalized far left socialist, as the new head of the party. Ordinary Labour voters were horrified, knowing from day one that Corbyn could never lead the party to government and was not either remotely Prime Ministerial material. But vast numbers of young extreme left-wingers, flushed with victory and dedicated to an idealistic coming revolution and led by a new Corbyn-worshipping movement called Momentum, were determined to take traditional working- and middle-class voters in a direction that had little or no appeal to them at all.

From the outset, Labour was split almost down the centre. That divide proved dangerous for the political system in Britain, where government has been unevenly but broadly shared between the Tory and Labour parties in what was effectively a two-party arrangement. With the almost total collapse of the centrist Liberal Democrats, who had just been in an ill-judged coalition with the Tories in government from 2010 to 2014, Britain faced the possibility that the two-party system would founder after many decades, should Labour split and leave the country with three unbalanced parties and the real threat of a one-party state emerging, so long as neither Labour group remained unelectable.

That something has gone wrong within the Labour party is clear. After the referendum vote to leave the European Union, Corbyn came under severe pressure to resign as leader, and a battle ensued with loyal Corbynites both in and outside Momentum backing him to the hilt, but with the parliamentary Labour Party, made up of members of parliament, urging him to bow to the inevitable and go.

“[Britain wants] to be like Switzerland but they don’t know that Switzerland has to pay an enormous amount to the EU… They will have to accept the free movement of people and pay high fees and accept some laws which they would have no influence on.” — Daniel Pedroletti, president of the Swiss community group New Helvetic Society London.
Norway is the only country that has adopted all EU directives before their deadline. Norway, which is supposedly not a member of the EU, thus implements EU rules and regulations more obediently than do the founding members France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
Most of Norway’s laws are currently written by bureaucrats in Brussels, not by elected parliamentarians in Norway.
The citizens of Norway rejected membership in the EU, twice. Opinion polls today show that a very large majority of Norwegians are against membership in the EU. Despite this, the nation’s politicians have made the country more or less a member of the EU, only without any influence or voting rights — in opposition to the popular will, and possibly also in violation of the country’s Constitution.
The British should study the case of Norway closely. But mainly as a negative example of what to avoid.

On June 23, 2016, 51.9% of the voters in the United Kingdom voted for leaving the European Union (EU). The turnout was high, and the British referendum gained great international attention. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front, praised the result, calling Brexit “the most important moment since the fall of the Berlin Wall.” Le Pen said that if she wins France’s 2017 presidential election she would call a referendum on leaving the EU.

Nigel Farage stepped down as leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) shortly after winning the historic vote. Many death threats against him and his family from supporters of the EU reportedly affected his decision.

The complicated divorce process between the UK and the EU could take years of negotiations. Some people have looked to Switzerland and Norway, two of the wealthiest countries in Europe, as possible models to follow, yet both maintain a close cooperation with the EU. There are also concerns in Switzerland and Norway about how Brexit will impact their own relationship with the EU.

Days after Rodrigo Duterte called Barack Obama a “son of a whore,” the Philippine President announced he would expel U.S. counterterror forces from the southern Philippines, cease joint South China Sea patrols with the U.S. Navy and begin buying arms from Russia and China—a trifecta of policy shifts that will harm regional security.

“I do not like the Americans. It’s simply a matter of principle for me,” Mr. Duterte said Monday. His record backs him up.

Before winning election in May, Mr. Duterte was the longtime mayor of Davao in the restive southern province of Mindanao, where he railed against the presence of U.S. forces who were invited by previous national governments to fight al Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf terrorists. As mayor he kept U.S. drones out of Davao, refused to become Philippine Defense Minister for fear of working with Washington, and expressed “hatred” for the U.S. over a 2002 explosion in a Davao hotel for which he blames the FBI.

U.S. operations in Mindanao over the past two decades—counterterror raids, training of local forces, economic development—helped calm an insurgency that was killing Filipinos and foreigners by the hundreds, corrupting Philippine armed forces and bedeviling national leaders in Manila. But Mr. Duterte prefers to see the U.S. as an ex-colonial overlord trying to reimpose its will.

Many Filipinos assumed Mr. Duterte’s views would moderate once he became President. His predecessor, Benigno Aquino, initially courted China but then dramatically deepened security ties with the U.S. after Beijing escalated its assault on Philippine rights in the South China Sea. But three months into his tenure, and despite the landmark international-tribunal verdict against China’s maritime behavior in July, the new leader is increasingly spurning Washington for Beijing.

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Daniel Greenfield Moment with Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center who writes the blog The Point at Frontpagemag.com.

Daniel discussed The Burkini Ban Protects Women, explaining why France’s burkini ban is right.

Don’t miss it!

Winston Churchill called Russia a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. We could say Obama’s energy and climate policy is confusion wrapped in muddled thinking inside obfuscation – and driven by autocratic diktats that bring job-killing, economy-strangling, racist and deadly outcomes.

President Obama was recently in China, where his vainglorious arrival turned into an inglorious snub, when he had to use Air Force 1’s rear exit. He was there mostly to join Chinese President Xi Jinping and UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon, to formally sign the Paris climate treaty that Mr. Obama insists is not a treaty (and thus does not require Senate “advice and consent” under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution) because it is not binding – yet.

However, once it has been “signed and delivered” by 55 nations representing 55% of global greenhouse gas emissions, it will be hailed as binding. China and the US alone represent 38% of total emissions, so adding a few more big nations (Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan and Germany, eg) would reach the emission threshold. Adding a bunch of countries that merely want their “fair share” of the billions of dollars in annual climate “adaptation, mitigation and reparation” cash would hit the country minimum.

Few if any developing nations will reduce their oil, natural gas or coal use anytime soon. That would be economic and political suicide. In fact, China and India plan to build some 1,600 new coal-fired power plants by 2030, Japan 43, Turkey 80, Poland a dozen, and the list goes on and on, around the globe.

Meanwhile, the United States is shutting down its coal-fueled units. Under Obama’s treaty, the USA will be required to go even further, slashing its carbon dioxide emissions by 28% below 2005 levels by 2025. That will unleash energy, economic and environmental impacts far beyond what the Administration’s endless, baseless climate decrees are already imposing.

Federal agencies constantly harp on wildly exaggerated and fabricated “social costs of carbon” – but completely and deliberately ignore the incredible benefits of carbon-based energy.

The battle is now shifting to natural gas – methane. Hillary Clinton and Democrats promise to regulate drilling and fracking into oblivion on federal lands. California regulators are targeting cow flatulence!

EPA continues to expand ethanol requirements, even though this fuel additive reduces mileage, damages small engines, uses acreage equivalent to Iowa, requires enormous amounts of water, fertilizer, pesticides, gasoline, methane and diesel fuel – and releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than it removes.

Today, institutional slavery conjures images of pre-Civil War Southern ownership of African slaves. However, slavery is an ancient practice dating from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, as well as early Amer-Indian empires in Mexico and Central America. It was also well established and ideologically sanctioned in the Muslim world from the days of Mohammed.

Concurrently with African enslavement in the Americas, a flourishing slave trade existed from 1500 to 1800 of white Christian Europeans by the Muslims of North Africa’s Barbary Coast. In his book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, Ohio State history professor Robert Davis takes a close look at this rarely discussed aspect of modern history.

Originating from the life of the Prophet Mohammed, slavery is deeply embedded in Islamic law and tradition. Muslims are required to follow the teachings of Mohammed, who was a slave owner and trader. Further, a large part of the sharia – in the Sunna of Mohammed and the Koran – is dedicated to the practice of slavery. Muslim caliphs typically had harems of hundreds of slave girls captured from Christian, Hindu, and African lands. Slavery is still practiced today in several Muslim countries and glorified by present-day jihadist groups.

In Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, Davis describes how, from 1500 to 1800, Muslim corsairs from the Barbary Coast systematically enslaved white Christians from Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Iceland, Great Britain, Ireland, and Greece. The Muslims raided ships at sea and attacked coastal villages in an activity called “Christian stealing.” During that time, Davis explains, the Mediterranean had a reputation as the sea where people vanished: fisherman or sailors on board boats, shepherds tending flocks, farmers toiling near the shore, and townspeople, including women and children, living in coastal communities. Coastal dwellers and those who traveled by ship constantly risked capture, violence, and exploitation at the hands of Barbary Coast Muslims.

As part of this jihad against Christianity begun in 1500, piracy and slaving were the main instruments used to deprive infidel communities of useful, productive citizens and to acquire booty. Davis estimates that during three centuries of Muslim predation, as many as 1.25 million Europeans were permanently and stealthily removed from their families and communities.