RUTHFULLY YOURS

Judging by Moscow’s delighted reaction to the news that its athletes will be free to compete at the Rio Games, the IOC has confirmed perceptions of the West as corrupt, weak, easily intimidated and, most of all, lacking the courage of its alleged convictions.
There is a contemptuous saying in the Russian language which, loosely translated, sgoes something like this: ‘Piss in his eyes but he will still say it is a God’s dew’. Despite its crudity, this saying perfectly reflects the habitual pattern of deception by the Russian authorities, who lie, prevaricate and stonewall despite whatever weight of evidence condemns them.

Doping in sport? Never! Crimea? We had no Russian soldiers there! Ukraine? Nothing to do with us. Malaysian aircraft shot down with horrific civilian casualties? Someone else’s fault! And always, “You have no proof!”

The doping scandal and the near miss at the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is a humiliation for the entire country of incomparable magnitude. And, I regret to say, a wasted opportunity by the IOC to declare, clearly and strongly, ‘Enough is enough!’

The IOC did not have the guts to kick out the dope cheats and to send a message to the world that doping is unacceptable. Instead, it preferred to pass the buck and “leave it to the discretion of the individual sports bodies” to decide the fate of the Russian Olympic sports team. Judging by the delighted Russian reaction, this decision has confirmed their contemptuous opinion of the Western institutions, especially European ones, as corrupt, weak and easily controllable by discrete (or should I say – hybrid?) means.

The IOC has made a mockery of integrity. It let countries aspiring to the same level of corruption as in Russia know that all they have to do is respect the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not get caught. And if they do get caught, the appropriate response is to deny and lie, despite all evidence. If that doesn’t work, get the IOC to refer the cheaters to individual sports bodies. Countries, like China, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, North Korea and their ilk will understand the message quite clearly.

The harm IOC inflicted by this decision goes much deeper than sports. It strengthens the Russian and similarly autocratic, corrupt and oppressive countries’ opinion that everyone is as corrupt as they are; that the rule of law is just a figment of the Western propaganda; that Europeans are weak and cowardly; that the niceties of international civilised behaviour and the primacy of individual freedom over the collective predominance is nonsense; that a state can and should interfere wherever it wishes and is not answerable to anyone, least of all to the rule of law.

In effect, the IOC has colluded with the Russian government in blatantly breaching international decency. Declaring its decision as motivated by the desire to be inclusive, it has, by a simple exercise of intellectual dishonesty, approved of the Russian government’s behaviours. The meek and mild IOC decision, in effect, gave the Russian government, which committed a hanging offence, a slap on the wrist. In exchange for what?

A priest was killed and another person was seriously wounded in an attack on a church in a northern French town, police said Tuesday.

Two men entered the church in Saint Etienne du Rouvray in Normandy and took five hostages, including the priest, who was found with his throat cut, police said.

Police surrounded the church and shot the two men as they exited the building, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry said.

The assault is being treated as a terror attack by investigators, said Paris prosecutors in a statement.

France’s President Francois Hollande and Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve are on their way to the small town where the attack took place, government officials said.

The attack comes less than two weeks after the killing of 84 people assembled on France’s Bastille day in Nice on the French Riviera.

This is a developing story and will be updated shortly.

Terror militia Islamic State on Monday claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in southern Germany—the latest in a string of attacks that have shattered the country’s sense of calm and stoked tensions over accepting migrants.

The Sunday night blast that injured 15 people outside a concert venue in the Bavarian town of Ansbach was the second attack to be claimed by Islamic State here in a week and the first jihadist suicide bombing in the country.

The bomber was a 27-year-old Syrian asylum applicant identified by authorities as Mohammad D., who had been in Germany for about two years but was facing deportation. Authorities said he had pledged allegiance to Islamic State’s leader in a video found on his smartphone.
ENLARGE

The revelations focused more attention on the security implications of the more than a million refugees and migrants who arrived in the last year-and-a-half, and raised pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel to ramp up domestic security.

“It is clear that with these attacks in quick succession, the worries and fears in our population will grow,” said Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann, whose conservative Christian Social Union is allied with Ms. Merkel but has called on her to limit the number of asylum applicants.

The run of violence began July 18 when a teenager who had registered as an Afghan refugee injured five people with an ax in Würzburg, an attack also claimed by Islamic State.

On Friday, an 18-year-old Iranian-German who officials say was obsessed with mass shootings went on a shooting spree in Munich, killing nine. And on Sunday, a 21-year-old Syrian asylum applicant killed a 45-year-old Polish woman with a large knife after what police suspected was a personal dispute.

Investigators said the Ansbach attacker, whose surname was withheld under German privacy law, came from Aleppo in Syria and appeared to have war wounds, suggesting he had military experience.

SAGAMIHARA, Japan—A man broke into a residence for disabled adults outside Tokyo early Tuesday morning and stabbed to death 19 people, authorities said, one of the worst mass murders in recent decades in a country known for its low crime rate.Officials at the facility described the 26-year-old suspect, Satoshi Uematsu, as a troubled former employee who quit in February of this year after being warned to stop making abusive comments about the severely disabled people living thereThey said Mr. Uematsu broke a window in the middle of the night to gain entrance to the home, then tied up some of the caregivers before attacking dozens of residents with a knife.

Top government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said Mr. Uematsu surrendered himself to police shortly afterward and was arrested. Footage from a security camera aired on local television showed a person who appeared to be Mr. Uematsu returning to his car parked outside the home at about 2:50 a.m. and driving off. Public broadcaster NHK said Mr. Uematsu drove to a nearby police station to turn himself in.

Mr. Uematsu appears to have given a warning that he planned to kill disabled people.

A Japanese parliament official said a man believed to be Mr. Uematsu visited Parliament on Feb. 15 and hand-delivered a letter addressed to the lower-house speaker. The official declined to reveal its contents, but Kyodo News quoted Mr. Uematsu as writing in the letter that he wanted to carry out “euthanasia” on severely disabled people “to revitalize the global economy and prevent World War III.”

At last count, members of the European Union spent more than $200 billion a year on defense, fielded more than 2,000 jet fighters and 500 naval ships, and employed some 1.4 million military personnel. More than a million police officers also walk Europe’s streets. Yet in the face of an Islamist menace the Continent seems helpless. Is it?

Was France helpless in May 1940?

Let’s stipulate that a van barreling down a seaside promenade isn’t a Panzer division, and that a few thousand ISIS fighters scattered from Mosul to Marseilles aren’t another Wehrmacht. But as in France in 1940, Europe today displays the same combination of doctrinal rigidity and loss of will that allowed an Allied army of 144 divisions to be routed by the Germans in six weeks. The Maginot Line of “European values” won’t prevail over people who recognize none of those values.
So much was made clear by French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who remarked after the Nice attack that “France is going to have to live with terrorism.” This may have been intended as a statement of fact but it came across as an admission that his government isn’t about to rally the public to a campaign of blood, toil, tears and sweat against ISIS—another premature capitulation in a country that has known them before.

Mr. Valls was later booed at a memorial service for the Nice victims. It would be heartening to think this was because he and his boss, President François Hollande, have failed to forge a strategy to destroy ISIS. But the public’s objection was that there hadn’t been enough cops along the Promenade des Anglais to stop the attack. In soccer terms, it’s a complaint about the failure of defense, not the lack of a proper offense.

“The United States is full of anglicized German names, from Smith to Steinway, from Miller to Schwartz. The reason: integration was made easier. … I think that German citizens of foreign origin should also have this possibility.” — Ruprecht Polenz, former secretary general of Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic Union.

Non-Muslim immigrants generally choose traditional German names for their children to facilitate their integration into German society. By contrast, Muslim immigrants almost invariably choose traditional Arabic or Turkish names, presumably to prevent their integration into German society. A 2006 study found that more than 90% of Turkish parents give their German-born children Turkish first names.

A 2016 study found that 32% of ethnic Turks in Germany agree that “Muslims should strive to return to a societal order such as that in the time of Mohammed.” More than one-third believe that “only Islam is able to solve the problems of our times.” One-fifth agree that “the threat which the West poses to Islam justifies violence.” One-quarter believe that “Muslims should not shake the hand of a member of the opposite sex.”

Muslim migrants in Germany who feel discriminated against should be given the right to change their legal names to Christian-sounding ones, according to a senior German politician.

The latest innovation in German multiculturalism is being championed by Ruprecht Polenz, a former secretary general of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He believes the German law which regulates name changes (Namensrecht) should be amended to make it easier for men named Mohammed to become Martin and women named Aisha to become Andrea.

German law generally does not allow foreigners to change their names to German ones, and German courts rarely approve such petitions. By custom and practice, German names are only for Germans.

According to Polenz, who served as a member of parliament for nearly two decades, the law in its current form is “ignorant” and should be changed:

“An ignorant law: the United States is full of anglicized German names, from Smith to Steinway, from Miller to Schwartz. The reason: integration was made easier. It no longer appeared as though a family was not from the USA. I think that German citizens of foreign origin should also have this possibility.”

BERLIN—Four acts of violence in seven days have shattered Germany’s calm and revived an emotional debate over the security implications of taking in more than one million migrants and refugees in the past 20 months.

Police identified asylum applicants as suspects in three apparently unconnected high-profile attacks in the past week, from an ax attack on a train last week to a knife killing and a suicide blast late Sunday.

Only the ax rampage, in which a teenager registered as an Afghan refugee wounded five people, has been identified as Islamist terrorism. But all four incidents—including a German-Iranian teenager’s shooting spree in Munich on Friday that killed nine—have put the European Union’s most populous country on edge.

“I thought Germany was safe—no shooting, no terror,” said Faruk Sazil, a 30-year-old of Turkish origin, who owns and runs a Munich kebab stand next to the McDonald’s where the shooting spree began Friday. “Now I don’t know. Who can know?”

Authorities say the Munich shooter had been treated for depression and was obsessed by mass killings.

If there’s one lesson to be learned on the 10th anniversary of the Second Lebanon War, it is that ‎brokered cease-fires and U.N. resolutions are not to be trusted in the Middle East, where the ‎definitions of “victory” and “defeat” are elusive.‎

For 34 days during the summer of 2006, Hezbollah pummeled the Jewish state with rockets, and the ‎Israel Defense Forces conducted airstrikes to destroy the infrastructure and weaponry of the ‎bloodthirsty Shiite organization, which — in typical Arab terrorist fashion — were strategically placed in ‎and around the homes and schools of civilians.‎

When the war was over, both sides declared victory, though then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s ‎announcement sounded feeble to most Israelis. The regular IDF soldiers and reservists who ‎participated in the fighting felt particularly deflated and bitter. When the war was over, their stories of ‎inadequate equipment and lack of training for the missions they were sent to conduct emerged to ‎everyone’s horror and disgust. One friend of mine recounted having to improvise all the time — for ‎example, by using chocolate spread as face camouflage, and operating a tank with which he was ‎completely unfamiliar.‎

The Winograd Commission, set up in the aftermath of the war, delved into these and other mishaps ‎on the leadership and military levels. But the real culprit was a false assessment, reached more than a ‎decade earlier, that the “conventional battlefield” was a thing of the past. According to this ridiculous ‎theory, it would be wasteful to expend energy and resources training for ground incursions, when the ‎era of high-tech sorties from the air was the wave of the future.‎

Still, analysts pointed to the major blow suffered by Hezbollah in the war, pointing to the “restoration ‎of quiet” in the north and the heavy losses incurred by the terrorist group. One such optimist was ‎Iranian-born, London-based Middle East expert Amir Taheri, who visited the Jewish state in May 2007, ‎less than a year after the war was over — on the eve of the release of the Winograd Commission’s ‎interim findings. ‎

Hamas was one of the many entities rushing to congratulate Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on his successful quashing of the attempted coup against his government last weekend. Like leaders of other countries worldwide, the heads of the terrorist organization ruling the Gaza Strip hailed Erdogan’s success as a “victory for democracy.”

Unlike those who waited for the military takeover to fail before applauding the autocrat in Ankara, Hamas was genuinely relieved. After all, the Islamist Palestinian group has no greater friend than Erdogan.

Thus, Hamas has been able to proceed with its summer activities in a particularly festive manner. Two of these activities are particularly worthy of note.

The first is a special exhibit marking the second anniversary of Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s 2014 incursion into Gaza to destroy the terrorist infrastructure — tunnels and missile-launchers — used by Hamas to kidnap and kill innocent Israelis.

Though Israel managed to decimate much of the infrastructure, leaving swaths of Gaza in ruins, Hamas did not feel defeated; nor should it have. No military match for the mighty Israeli army, it nevertheless succeeded in sending the Israeli populace into bomb shelters several times a day, while retaining political power and several tunnels and subsequently buckets of money and materials with which to keep its terror mill running.

To boost morale and demonstrate that it is doing its job properly, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades — amusingly known as Hamas’ “military wing” — has created a death-and-destruction Disneyland for family fun, free of charge. This consists of a display of various authentic weapons deployed in the slaughter of Israelis, and an extra-special tour of a tunnel bordering the Jewish state.

REUTLINGEN, Germany—A Syrian man used a long knife to kill a woman here on Sunday in an apparent personal dispute, and injured two other people before being detained, police said.

The suspect is a 21-year-old asylum seeker from Syria, the police said. The man was known to the police and had been charged in the past with assault.

The incident quickly made national news in a country on edge in the wake of a spate of violence across Europe that has fanned fears of a rising terror threat. Another asylum seeker, registered as a 17-year-old Afghan, injured five people in an ax attack last Monday in Würzburg, a two-hour drive from here.

But unlike the Würzburg assault, in which Islamic State claimed responsibility, the Reutlingen incident appeared to be the result of a personal dispute, police said.

“There is no evidence that it was religious or terrorist-motivated,” a police spokesman said.

Germans have been anxious amid a series of high-profile violence in Europe, including the July 14 truck attack in Nice, France; the Würzburg assault; and Friday’s shooting spree in Munich that killed nine.

The police initially described the man’s weapon as a machete but later said it was a long knife, likely a kitchen knife. They said the man and woman had some kind of personal dispute, but said they didn’t yet know the nature of their relationship. Police said they weren’t able to immediately identify the woman and didn’t know her nationality.

It also wasn’t clear when the man came to Germany. More than 300,000 Syrians have applied for asylum in Germany since January 2015, according to government figures. Reutlingen, a city of 110,000, is in the southwest German state of Baden-Württemberg.