RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Infidels who were enemies of Islam thought they buried Islam in the depths of history when they abolished the caliphate on March 3, 1924 … We are shouting out that we will re-establish the caliphate, here, right next to the parliament.” — Mahmut Kar, media bureau chief of Hizb ut-Tahrir Turkey

“The magazine [Dabiq] creates propaganda for [ISIS]. It has an open address. Why does no one raid its offices?” — Opposition MP Turkey’s Parliament

The government big guns in Ankara just shrugged it off when on June 5, 2015, only two days before general elections in the country, homegrown jihadist militants for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or ISIS or IS) detonated bombs, killing four people and injuring over 100, at a pro-Kurdish political rally. Again, when IS, on July 20, 2015, bombed a meeting of pro-Kurdish peace activists in a small town on Turkey’s Syrian border, killing 33 people and injuring over 100, the government behaved as if it had never happened. After all, a bunch of “wild boys” from the ranks of jihad –which the ruling party in Ankara not-so-privately aspires to- were killing the common enemy: Kurds.

Then when IS jihadists, in October, killed over 100 people in the heart of Ankara, while targeting, once again, a public rally of pro-peace activists (including many Kurds), the Turkish government put the blame on “a cocktail of terror groups,” – meaning the attack may have been a product of Islamists, far-leftist and Kurdish militants. “IS, Kurdish or far-leftist militants could have carried out the bombing,” the prime minister at the time, Ahmet Davutoglu, said. It was the worst single terror attack in Turkey’s history, and the Ankara government was too demure even to name the perpetrators. An indictment against 36 suspects, completed nearly nine months after the attack, identified all defendants as IS members. So, there was no “cocktail of terror.” It was just the jihadists.

The police released a report noting that Sweden is at the top of the EU’s statistics on physical and sexual violence against women, sexual harassment and stalking. The report stated unequivocally that it is “asylum-seeker boys” and “foreign men” who commit the vast majority of the reported crimes.

As far as the widespread sexual assaults at public pools are concerned, the police said that in four out of five cases, the perpetrators have been “unaccompanied refugee children”.

A survey by the National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) suggested that as many as 38,000 women in Sweden may have been subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM). Yet health care services rarely help women with the complications associated with FGM.

A Swedish father was told that he and his two children are being thrown out of the house they are renting from the municipality — to make room for an immigrant family.

May 4: The terrorist who turned out not to be a terrorist, but was chased by the police all over Sweden in November 2015, Mutar Muthanna Majid, demanded 1 million kronor (about $110,000) in damages from the Swedish government. However, the Chancellor of Justice decided that the standard sum for those wrongly incarcerated was enough compensation. Majid was held in custody for four days, which means he gets 12,000 kronor ($1,300).

May 4: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to the defense of Sweden’s Muslim Minister of Housing Mehmet Kaplan, who was forced to resign after his connections to Islamists and neo-Fascists were revealed, as was his defamatory comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany. According to Erdogan, however, the forced resignation of Kaplan was symptomatic for how Muslims are treated in the West: “Just look at what Sweden has done to a Muslim who reached a position in Cabinet,” Erdogan indignantly said.

May 4: It is now up to Sweden’s Supreme Court to decide if an Algerian, Karim Ageri, should be deported from Sweden after knifing a 16-year-old girl because she refused to have sex with him. November 10, 2015, two teenage Swedish girls visited an asylum house for “unaccompanied refugee children” in the Stockholm metropolitan area. Karim Ageri, who claimed to be 16 years old, groped one of the girls, who climbed out a window to get away from him. Ageri then followed her, and slashed her face twice with a knife. The prosecutor in the case argued that Ageri is at least 21 years old, and should therefore be tried as an adult and, after serving his sentence, deported. However, the Municipal Court did not agree, and sentenced the Algerian to juvenile detention. The Court of Appeals increased the sentence to 18 months in prison, followed by deportation. Prosecutor My Hedström says she is now looking forward to having the case tried by the Supreme Court, to get a precedent on how “refugee children” who commit serious crimes should be handled legally.

Europeans are revolting against their transnational elites, with Austria now throwing out its presidential election that cheated the nationalist candidate of victory. Friday last week took Austria through a roller-coaster of emotional news — alarming, then exhilarating or depressing, depending on one’s perspective.

It was first announced that Akhmed Chatayev, the Chechen Istanbul airport terror suspect, had been given asylum in Austria since 2003, then an Austrian passport that allowed him free travel within Europe and beyond. Yet, at the same time, he was on Russia’s wanted list. In multiple incidents that took place in various countries between 2003 and 2015, Chatayev was caught with explosives and ammunitions, or photos of victims killed in a blast. Astonishingly, he would either be acquitted, or released on ‘humanitarian’ grounds. Just once, he served a brief one-year jail sentence in a Swedish prison.

Russia repeatedly demanded his extradition, to no avail. The European Court of Human Rights and Amnesty International advocated twice on his behalf, fearing he would face torture. It is only when Chatayev entered Syria to join the Islamic State in 2015, that he was finally placed on the terror list of both the US and UN.

Chatayev’s case was by no means an isolated one. Austria had for years been a hub for global jihad — a “de facto base for Islamist extremists from southeastern Europe, a place to radicalize, recruit, raise and hide funds, thanks to Austria’s permissive laws and weak enforcement mechanisms.”

But a corner was turned with the 2014 serial arrests of nine Chechens who were legally present in the country as refugees and asylum seekers, planning to wage jihad with ISIS in Syria.

One also remembers the media sensation stirred in the same year by the “Jihad poster girls,” two blue-eyed Austrian teenagers of Bosnian heritage who had run off to Syria to marry jihadists, after undergoing sudden radicalization.

PARIS—A French court on Wednesday convicted seven young men who returned from weeks among the ranks of Islamic State extremists in Syria, including the brother of one of the suicide attackers who targeted Paris in November.

The defendants, ages 24 to 27, were sentenced to prison terms ranging from six to nine years for taking part in a group recruiting French jihadists to join a “terrorist group” in Syria in 2013-14—namely Islamic State—and for participating in military training and other activities.

Karim Mohamed-Aggad, the older brother of one of the extremists who attacked Paris’ Bataclan concert hall on Nov. 13, received a 9-year term, the harshest penalty among the seven, since the prosecutor said he was one of the ringleaders.

Mr. Mohamed-Aggad claimed he went to Syria only for humanitarian purposes and accused the French government of putting him on trial instead of his brother Foued, who returned to France with a Kalashnikov and suicide explosives strapped to his body in an operation that killed dozens in Paris.

Foued also went to Syria with the group.

In its ruling, the Paris court said while some of the defendants left Syria of their own free will, Karim Mohamed-Aggad was “in no hurry to return” to France and “showed a persistence in his active interest for jihadism.”

After the verdict, Mr. Mohamed-Aggad’s lawyer, Françoise Cotta, told reporters the ruling was “a decision of fear, returned in a France of fear, by a judge who is here to respond to the fear.”

“Clash of civilizations,” some say. Others call it the “failure of multiculturalism.” Either way, the cultural conflicts between some Muslims and non-Muslims worldwide continue to play out as Western countries struggle to reconcile their own cultures with the demands of a growing Muslim population.

But herein lies the problem: in many ways, the two cultures are ultimately irreconcilable. There is no middle ground. And hence, the conflicts and the tugs-of-war continue.

Over the past two months, the events surrounding controversial Dutch columnist Ebru Umar have encapsulated that “clash” at its core, a salient metaphor for the tensions, particularly in Europe, between the West’s Muslim populations and its own. More, they illuminate the enormity of the problems we still face.

Umar is no stranger to the spotlight, or to the wrath of Dutch Muslims who read her many columns, most of them published in the free newspaper, Metro. For years, the Dutch-born daughter of secular Turkish immigrants has raged against the failure of other Dutch-born children of immigrants, mostly Moroccan, to assimilate into the culture of their birth. She loudly condemns Dutch-Moroccan families for the shockingly high rates of criminality and violence among Dutch-Moroccan boys – as much as 22 times the rate of Dutch native youth – a phenomenon she ascribes to their Islamic upbringing and their parents’ refusal to allow their children to mingle among the Dutch.

But her critiques have earned her no converts. Instead, Dutch-Moroccan youth, whom she calls “Mocros,” have regularly taunted her, both online and in the street.

This past April, however, Umar added a new team of enemies to her portfolio: when, in response to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erodogan’s demand that a German satirist be prosecuted for insulting him on TV, Umar tweeted “f***erdogan,” Dutch Turks turned on her in fury. “How dare you insult our president!” cried these Dutch-born subjects of Holland’s King Willem-Alexander. And while Umar took a brief holiday on the Turkish coast, one such Dutch-Turk turned her in to the police. She was arrested at her vacation home in Kusadasi, and though released the following day, was forbidden to leave the country. The charge: Insulting the Turkish president. It took 17 days before discussions between Holland’s prime minister and Turkish authorities enabled her to return to the Netherlands.

But she could not return home. In her absence, Umar’s home had been burgled and vandalized, the word “whore” scrawled on a stairway wall. Death threats followed her both in Turkey and on her return. When it became clear she could not ever return to the apartment she had lived in for nearly 20 years, she announced on Twitter (Ebru Umar posts constantly on Twitter) that she would be moving out.

Meantime, in Metro and elsewhere, she continued her criticism of Moroccans and, as she herself notes, of Islam overall.

Hallel Yaffa Ariel, a 13-year-old girl, was asleep when she was murdered in her own bedroom. She had just graduated 8th grade. It was her summer vacation and she was taking it easy. The Muslim terrorist who broke into her bedroom stabbed her over and over again. Eventually he slit her throat.

The mattress that she slept on was soaked in blood. Her room with its casual teenage disarray, clothes tossed around carelessly, was stained red with the last gush of life from the girl who had played there, danced there and dreamed of the future that would never be hers.

The murder happened in Israel, but Hallel was an American citizen. Her government not only failed to protect her, it financed her bloody death. And it will go on rewarding her killer’s family.

Muslim terrorists in Israel, no matter which specific Islamic terrorist group they claim allegiance to, whether they are described as members of a cell or lone wolves, have their attacks funded by the terrorist administration of the Palestinian Authority which provides salaries to terrorists and their families. The Palestinian Authority is funded almost entirely by foreign aid, most of it from us.

Obama insisted that Abbas, the terror boss of the Palestinian Authority, had “renounced violence”. This would have come as news to Abbas who boasted, “There is no difference between our policies and those of Hamas.” Last month, an Abbas adviser had said, “Every place you find an Israeli, slit his throat.”

That’s what Mohammed Tarayrah, the Muslim terrorist who murdered Hallel in her bedroom, did.

The core components of the Palestinian Authority, including its official news agency, called him a “martyr”. Mohammed’s mother, who will be richly rewarded by the Palestinian Authority and its international financiers, for her son’s horrific crime, said, “My son is a hero. He made me proud.”

At her funeral, Hallel Yaffa Ariel’s mother tried to hug her daughter one last time. “Halleli, goodbye, sweetie. Have one last hug from mom.”

The United States has officially condemned Hallel’s murder. Its current government however will do nothing to stop the Palestinian Authority from funding terrorism. Instead it will continue using its power to fight for the same cause as Abbas and Mohammed.

BERLIN—German police have arrested a 28-year-old German on suspicion of belonging to the Somalia-based Islamist group al-Shabaab and preparing an act of violence, the country’s federal prosecutor said Tuesday.

Police arrested the man identified as Abshir Ahmed A. on Monday at Frankfurt’s airport when he returned to Germany from Somalia, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

The prosecutor’s office said a preliminary investigation showed that the man in 2012 joined al-Shabaab, an al Qaeda-aligned militant group that has stepped up the pace and the intensity of its attacks in recent months.

The 28-year-old allegedly received training in the use of weapons in Somalia and then was stationed in a defensive position for the militant group in the country, the prosecutor’s office said. CONTINUE AT SITE

Global jihad extended its streak of near-daily attacks on Monday with a trio of bombings in Saudi Arabia. The attack on the Kingdom can hardly be thought of as incidental. Islamic State and other jihadist groups would like nothing more than to destroy the pro-American House of Saud and seize Islam’s holiest cities for themselves.

The attacks claimed fewer victims than recent atrocities in Orlando, Istanbul, Dhaka and Baghdad, though the potential for carnage was great. A bomber at the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina killed four security guards, while another one at the U.S. consulate in Jeddah only managed to blow himself up. A third attack, on a Shiite mosque in the eastern city of Qatif, also killed only the bombers.
No group had claimed responsibility for the attacks as we went to print, though the choice of targets suggests Islamic State; al Qaeda generally frowns on indiscriminate attacks on Muslims, including Shiites. Most alarming is the attack on the Prophet’s Mosque, which is said to be the place where Muhammad is buried. Saudi legitimacy rests on securing Islam’s holy sites, and a successful bombing could call Saudi competence into question and prompt a backlash against its modernizing Deputy Crown Prince, Mohammad bin Salman, who is trying to moderate the role of religion in everyday life. CONTINUE AT SITE

The House Select Committee on Benghazi report confirms what we pretty much already knew. The Obama administration and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton completely politicized this country’s foreign policy in order to ensure the reelection of Obama and to serve the future presidential ambitions of Hillary Clinton. Along the way Obama, Clinton et al. made dangerous decisions, such as establishing the consular outpost in Benghazi, and ignoring the consul’s pleas for more security. They also ignored the many warning signs of incipient attacks, bungled the response to the attack on September 11, 2012, and then obfuscated, spun, and outright lied in the aftermath. The House report adds new details that flesh out the story, but enough had already been leaked to confirm Clinton’s despicable sacrifice of American lives on the altar of her obsessive ambition.

Toxic ambition, sheer incompetence, and the self-serving politics of the individuals involved mean they bear the primary responsibility for this disaster. But Benghazi illustrates as well the climate of bad ideas that make such decisions possible. Bad politicians eventually go away, but malignant ideas and received wisdom are deeply rooted in our institutions, transcending individuals. The Benghazi fiasco illustrates two particularly tenacious ones.

The military intervention in Libya, the origin of the Benghazi tragedy, was another act of Western wishful thinking about “democratizing” and “reforming” the Muslim world. Despite the failure of George W. Bush’s efforts to bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, the so-called “Arab Spring” revolutions encouraged the Wilsonian “freedom and democracy” promoters in 2011 to make Libya yet another poster-child for this doomed project. Moreover, intervention seemingly could be done on the cheap. No troops need be deployed, since jets and missiles could topple the psychotic Muammar Gaddafi––an autocrat straight out of central casting, whose genocidal bluster gave the West a pretext for intervention.

For Hillary and Obama, this was the perfect opportunity to show those neocon militarists what “smart power” was all about, and strike a contrast with the “cowboy” Bush’s “unilateralist” bumbling in Iraq. A UN resolution was secured, and a NATO-led coalition of 19 states assembled for enforcing a no-fly zone. The mission soon escalated into bringing about regime change and the death of Gaddafi.

For a while, this was a perfect, low-cost, quick little war that would illustrate the various shibboleths of moralizing internationalism: international diplomatic approval for the use of force, multilateral coalition building, a reliance on air power that minimized casualties among participating militaries, and a smaller role for the US, which would be “leading from behind,” as an Obama advisor said. This last idea reflected Obama’s belief that the US needed to diminish its role in world affairs and avoid the arrogant overreach that stained its history abroad, most recently in Iraq. This notion of America’s global sins is another bad idea reflecting ideology, not historical fact.

For Secretary of State Clinton, the Libya intervention would be the showcase of her tenure at State and proof of her superior foreign policy skills and presidential potential. Of course, we all know that the toppling of Gaddafi has been a disastrous mistake. Gaddafi was a brutal creep, but he kept in check the jihadists from Libya eager to kill Americans in Iraq and foment terror throughout the region. His departure created a vacuum that has been filled with legions of jihadist outfits across North Africa, including ISIS franchises. They are armed in part with weapons plundered from Gaddafi’s arsenals such as surface-to-air missiles, assault rifles, machine guns, mines, grenades, antitank missiles, and rocket-propelled grenades. Yet eager to protect her defining foreign policy achievement, Hillary kept open the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi even as other nations pulled out their personnel because of the increasing danger caused by the new Libyan government’s inability to control and secure its territory.

We have reached the point where moral equivalence has become a moral atrocity.

The smart set in the West has insisted for over a generation that Israel and the Palestinians are morally equal. There are extremists, on both sides, they say. Both sides are responsible for the absence of peace.

The first serious outcry against this lie came immediately after the Palestinians began their terrorist war against Israel in September 2000. That war, incited, directed, funded, commanded and celebrated by Yassir Arafat and his henchmen, including his successor Mahmoud Abbas, began two months after Arafat overturned the table at Camp David in response to then prime minister Ehud Barak’s offer to withdraw from 95 percent of Judea and Samaria, all of Gaza and half of Jerusalem to enable the establishment of an independent state of Palestine in the areas.

The areas in question, Barak said, would be handed over to the PLO Jew free. The hundreds of thousands of Jews living in the areas set to become Palestine, would be forcefully evicted from their homes to ensure that the delicate, sensitive Palestinians, wouldn’t be troubled by the Jews with their “dirty feet,” in the words of Abbas.

That, of course, wasn’t enough for Arafat. And it was insufficient not because Barak failed to give him what he demanded. It was insufficient because his demands were insatiable. Arafat was never interested in peace.

As his deputy Faisal Husseini said at the time, the peace process was a “Trojan Horse.”

Its purpose was to get the PLO bases of operation inside of Israeli territory in order to expand its ability to destroy the Jewish state. This is the reason that despite the fact that the international community has given them more financial assistance than any other people in the history of humanity, the Palestinians have not built a society. They have received tens of billions of dollars in development aid and failed to develop an operating economy.

This failure isn’t due to incompetence or corruption.

It is simply that the Palestinians don’t want those things. They chose not to develop independent institutions.