RUTHFULLY YOURS

ISIS is celebrating the Muslim holy month of Ramadan with multiple massacres. ISIS’s followers are heeding the message released by ISIS’s spokesman, Abu Muhammed al-Adnani, before Ramadan began. Jihadists must attack to “gain the great reward for martyrdom in Ramadan,” he declared. ISIS looks to the example of Prophet Muhammad himself who defeated his enemies in Mecca in the Battle of Badr, which took place during Ramadan.

In the last week alone, ISIS followers have struck in several cities – Istanbul, resulting in at least 44 deaths, the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka that left 22 dead, and most recently Baghdad, where a suicide bombing on a busy shopping street killed at least 200 people including dozens of children. On the penultimate day of Ramadan, ISIS even struck inside Saudi Arabia. It has reportedly taken credit for a suicide attack in Medina, Islam’s second holiest city.

The Baghdad attack, which occurred in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood, was the deadliest single bombing attack in the Iraqi capital in years. In taking credit for the massacre, ISIS warned in its statement that “the raids of the mujahedeen [holy warriors] against the Rafidha [Shiites] apostates will not stop.” The attack laid bare the folly of President Obama’s decision against military advice to pull out all U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011. It also revealed gaping holes in the Iraqi government’s security measures for the capital. Baghdad residents were so disgusted that they jeered and threw objects at Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi‘s convoy when he visited the devastated area to inspect the damage.

The Ramadan spree of jihadist killings began early in the Muslim holy month when on June 8th ISIS-affiliated Palestinian terrorists struck Tel Aviv, killing four people. They “belonged to the largest Palestinian cell linked to ISIS to be uncovered so far by Israeli security services,” according to DEBKAfile. The plan, DEBKAfile reported, was to have originally included “a mass-murder shooting attack on a crowded train.”

Four days after the Tel Aviv attack, the Orlando massacre was carried out by an individual who had regularly attended a radical Islamic mosque and pledged his allegiance to ISIS during the shooting. Two illegal immigrants from Tunisia, who were ISIS followers, stabbed a 26-year-old transgender man in Brussels the day before the Orlando attack. A man claiming allegiance to ISIS stabbed a police official and his companion to death in France a day after the Orlando attack.

Thirteen-year-old Hillel Ariel, a U.S. citizen, was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist last week while sleeping in her bed in her home near Hebron.

The day after her murder the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the group representing all 57 Muslim-majority nations, tried to insert justifications for Palestinian terror during a United Nations review of its counter-terrorism strategy.

Stephanie Granot of The Jewish Press reports:

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), attempted to introduce language condoning terrorism under certain conditions into a draft of a UN Counter-Terrorism Resolution. The official document is expected to be finalized on Tuesday when the General Assembly concludes a bi-annual Review of its UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy.

The OIC, an organization of 57 member-states that considers itself “the collective voice of the Muslim world”, has Permanent Delegations to the United Nations as well as to the European Union. Several days prior to the start of the Review, OIC Representative Abdallah Y. Al-Mouallimi (Saudi Arabia) sought to insert the following clause to the draft of the resolution: “Terrorism in the name of self-determination and national liberation does not constitute terrorism.”

Shortly after Rep. Al-Mouallimi addressed the General Assembly, Israel’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador David Roet delivered an impassioned and powerful speech…

Subsequent to Ambassador Roet’s speech, some significant diplomatic maneuvering by the Israel’s Mission to the UN, and a steadfast refusal on Israel’s part to allow member-states to compromise draft language for the sake of a unanimous consensus, the clause was ultimately not included in the final draft of the review, entitled “The United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy Review”.

As the article notes, the OIC, which is the second largest inter-governmental body in the world behind the United Nations, has a permanent delegation at the UN.

In May, just a month before the Orlando terror attack that killed 49, the OIC blocked LGBT groups from attending a UN conference on AIDS held days before the attack.

The defense of Palestinian terrorism is a recurring topic of the OIC.

In April 2002, in response to the 9/11 terror attacks, the OIC adopted a declaration on international terrorism. But during the debate the OIC could not agree on a definition of terrorism, but did reject “any attempt to associate Islamic states or Palestinian and Lebanese resistance with terrorism.”

The OIC’s Islamic Fiqh Council published a January 2003 resolution explicitly endorsing Palestinian terror attacks, saying suicide attacks are a legitimate form of jihad:

3- The Islamic Fiqh Council asserts that jihad and martyr operations done to defend the Islamic creed, dignity, freedom and the sovereignty of states is not considered terrorism but a basic form of necessary defense for legitimate rights. Thus the oppressed peoples who are subjected to occupation have the right to seek their freedom via all means possible.

4- The Islamic Fiqh Council stresses that martyr operations are a form of jihad, and carrying out those operations is a legitimate right that has nothing to do with terrorism or suicide. Those operations become obligatory when they become the only way to stop the aggression of the enemy, defeat it, and grievously damage its power.

5- It is not allowed to use terms such as “jihad”, “terrorism”, and “violence”, which have become frequently used by today’s mass media as scientific terms, to mean other connotations beyond their basic well known meanings.

In between its unashamed defense of terrorism, the OIC has taken up the cause of suppressing freedom of speech in the name of combating “Islamophobia.” CONTINUE AT SITE

A new poll in the Netherlands shows that Geert Wilders would, if an election were held today, lead his Party for Freedom (PVV) to 36 seats, or 50% more than the seats that would be obtained by the nearest rival party.

The Brexit results appear to have significantly boosted the popularity of the PVV. The same poll conducted a year ago had the PVV projected to receive 20 seats, almost half the level of current support.

Euroskepticism appears widespread in the Netherlands. When asked their opinion about the statement that “[t]he EU has made a significant contribution to economic growth in the Netherlands,” just 14% of PVV supporters and 50% of the overall public agree.

Similarly, only 14% of PVV voters and 51% of the public agreed that the “EU has helped to ensure that there are fewer wars in Europe.”

Only 2% of the PVV base and 14% of the Dutch public want the EU to become one country. An overwhelming percentage (83%) of PVV voters and 46% of all Netherland residents believe that the EU will fall apart within a decade.

Almost all PVV supporters (91%) and half (49%) of the public want to eliminate the Schengen Agreement, which involved the abolishment of internal border checks between EU members.

Support for a full withdrawal from the EU is high among PVV voters (86%) and at nearly 40% among the general public. Similar levels of support are seen for removing the Netherlands from the Euro.

Just 20% of the public (down from 50% in 2011), and effectively no PVV supporters, want to see any more powers transferred to Brussels.

About half the public worries about the outbreak of another world war, and a similar proportion sees a likelihood of revolutions across Europe during the coming years. Both percentages are substantial increases compared to how the Dutch public felt five years ago.

Donald Trump says NATO is obsolete, too expensive and lacks the right makeup to deal with terrorism. He may be right, but if he wants to abandon NATO he may not get the chance because the European Union may beat him to it. It’s part of the fallout from the U.K. vote to leave the EU in the “Brexit” referendum.

The EU may cast NATO aside — not because the threat NATO faced is ended — but because the European Union’s members think it’s more important to punish Britain for Brexit than defend themselves against Russia, Iran and China.

Five days after the June 23 Brexit vote, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, released a new defense strategy plan that envisions replacing NATO with an all-EU defense structure. She’s aiming for a strategic independence that cannot exist inside NATO.

Ms. Mogherini’s “global strategy” proposal is part of the grandiose plan envisioned in Article 42 of the EU’s 2009 Lisbon Treaty. That article mandates a common security and defense policy for the EU and implies the need for a separate EU armed force outside NATO.

Ms. Mogherini, according to a Financial Times report, suggests “streamlining our institutional structure” in common security and defense policy which the FT characterizes as “a nod to calls for a joint EU military and planning headquarters.” In short, NATO without the United States and the U.K.

“Former German President Christian Wulff said: ‘Islam belongs to Germany.’ That is true. This is also my opinion.” — Chancellor Angela Merkel, January 12, 2015.

“Angela Merkel’s statement obscures the real problem: A growing proportion of Muslim citizens in Europe does not share the Western system of values, does not want to culturally integrate and seals itself off in parallel societies.” — Thilo Sarrazin, renowned former central banker and a member of the Social Democrats, January 20, 2015.

“Islam is not a religion like Catholicism or Protestantism. Intellectually, Islam is always linked to the overthrow of the state. Therefore, the Islamization of Germany poses a threat.” — Alexander Gauland, AfD party leader for Brandenburg, April 17, 2016.

“An Islam that does not respect our legal system and even fights against it and claims to be the only valid religion is incompatible with our legal system and culture. Many Muslims live according to our laws and are integrated and are accepted as valued members of our society. However, the AfD wants to prevent the emergence of Islamic parallel societies with Sharia judges.” — AfD Manifesto.

“Anyone who believes Islam belongs to Germany should not hesitate to go one step further and declare: Sharia law belongs to Germany. Without Sharia law, there is no authentic Islam.” — Henryk Broder, German journalist, May 16, 2016.

Her economic policies reek of ratbaggery, so let us hope she doesn’t use her Senate clout to revive protectionism and tariffs. On multiculturalism and de-funding Big Climate’s fools and charlatans, however, she is with the angels. No wonder the ABC is already spitting insults.
Pauline Hanson is now a powerful force in a divided Senate. She may head a team there of two, three (with a NSW seat) or even four senators, on a platform including a Royal Commission into the corruption of global warming science. “This whole climate change is not based on empirical evidence and we are being hoodwinked,” she says. “Climate change is not due to humans.”

The Hanson policies will now, unavoidably, be brought into the mainstream political conversation. Hitherto, the media has chosen to treat her and her policies as “racism and bigotry” (they aren’t), “divisive” (code for “intolerable for us Leftists”) and as a butt for sex gibes.

The ABC has just now displayed a caricature of her as “Pauline Pantsdown”. The ABC’s only pretext for this crudity is “Simon Hunt’s Pauline Pantsdown character (right) was popular in the 1990s.”

Somehow I can’t imagine our ABC running an equivalent caricature of Labor’s Penny Wong as “Penny Pantsdown”, ditto Julia Gillard.

Expect new ABC managing director, Michelle Guthrie, to crack down hard on her myrmidons responsible for this sexist crudity against Hanson. Expect feminist Anne Summers to fly to Hanson’s defence any minute now. Expect ex-General David Morrison, Australian of the Year, to issue a new missive deploring ABC sexism – as he says, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. Oh, and expect pigs to fly. The ABC illustration, published apropos of nothing at all, is below.

Actually, worse things have been done to Hanson by way of misogynist abuse. On March 15, 2009, while she was in her final week’s campaign as an independent for the Queensland State election, News Corp’s Sunday Telegraph and four other Murdoch tabloids published nude photographs purporting to be of Pauline Hanson in 1975. The papers paid a paparazzo $15,000 for them. Hanson’s election bid was defeated amid taunts and mockery, but the pictures of “Hanson” were manifestly fakes. In May Sunday Telegraph editor Neil Breen published a signed three-paragraph apology to her saying, “We have learnt a valuable lesson”. She obtained an out of court settlement.

Hanson is no longer easy prey. She is very likely to have as her running mate in the Senate the prominent climate sceptic Malcolm Roberts. He has been project leader for a sceptic think-tank, the Galileo Movement, founded by Case Smit and John Smeed.[i]

Roberts is an engineering honors graduate and MBA from Chicago Graduate School of Business. He is a one-time underground-coal miner and project executive, and his primary motive for joining Hanson is the fight against global warmists. The Galileo website says Roberts had been “statutorily responsible for thousands of people’s lives based on his knowledge and real-world experience of atmospheric gases, including carbon dioxide.”

Roberts explains his move to the Hanson party: “She is not as the media and political opponents have portrayed. Pauline is intelligent, quick, honest, courageous and persistent. We are passionate about bringing back our country.”

Anything is possible among Senate minor candidates and Fred Nile’s Christian Democrats includes up-front warming sceptics[ii] and a sceptical/agnostic view of the warming panic. This includes a halt to warmist propaganda in school.

What a conundrum for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his side-kick, Greg Hunt, who brought their faux carbon tax into operation last week, under the emissions trading label. Turnbull said last month that Hanson “is not a welcome presence on the Australian political scene.” She responded reasonably that this was the electors’ call, not Turnbull’s.

What a conundrum for Tony Abbott, who organized the funding for the legal persecution of Hanson, claiming she had committed electoral irregularities. Hanson in 2003 was sentenced to three years gaol for fraud and served eleven weeks in maximum security, including some time in solitary confinement. In November, 2003, the Court of Appeal quashed her conviction but she was still left $500,000 out of pocket.

What a conundrum for The Greens, with their agenda to suicidally switch Australian energy to those expensive unreliables, wind and solar. Hanson outpolled the Greens in the Senate on Queensland first preferences, 9.15 per cent to 7.57 per cent.

Islamic terrorism has had a banner few weeks, with 49 Americans gunned down in Orlando, 45 travelers killed in Istanbul, 20 diners butchered in Dhaka, and more than 200 Iraqis blown up in Baghdad.

Oh, and some Israeli settlers were killed, too. But they’re not quite in the same category, right?

In November, after Islamic State’s massacres in Paris, John Kerry offered some unscripted thoughts on how the atrocity differed from others. “There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that,” he said, referring to the January 2015 attack on the satirical French newspaper. He continued:

“There was a sort of particularized focus [to the Hebdo attack] and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of—not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday [in Paris] was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people.”

Mr. Kerry’s remarks again betrayed the administration’s cluelessness about ISIS, which aims to annihilate anything it doesn’t consider . . . Islamic. Understanding its takfiri version of Islam, with its sweeping declarations of apostasy, is essential to understanding how it thinks and operates.

But no less telling was Mr. Kerry’s view that not all terrorism is fundamentally alike; that some acts of terror have a rationale “you could attach yourself to.” The comment is striking not for being unusual but for being ordinary, another formulation of the conventional wisdom that terrorism, like war, is politics by other means. From such a view it’s a short step to treating some acts of terror as legitimate, or nearly so.

Which brings me to the case of Hallel Yaffe Ariel, a 13-year-old Israeli girl who on Thursday was stabbed to death in her sleep by a 19-year-old intruder named Mohammad Tra’ayra. It’s difficult to imagine any act as evil or as cowardly as murdering a child in her sleep. But Hallel lived with her family in the West Bank Israeli town of Kiryat Arba, making her a settler, while Tra’ayra, who was shot dead on the scene, came from a nearby Palestinian village.

What happened to Hallel has happened to countless settlers: five members of the Fogel family, butchered in their beds in 2011; the three teenage boys who were kidnapped and murdered by Hamas in 2014; the rabbi who was shot and killed on Friday on a West Bank road while driving with his wife and two children. Yet their deaths are supposed to be different from those of other terrorism victims, since they were all “occupiers” whose political crimes rendered them complicit in their own tragedy. That’s how much of global public opinion has long treated terrorism when the target is Israel. It has a rationale. It’s understandable, if not justifiable. It’s Israel’s problem, Israel’s fault, and has no bearing on the rest of us.

For many years, the Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan made common cause with Hamas. Israeli officials have accused Turkey of hosting a Hamas command center—a key point of contention in Jerusalem’s efforts to reconcile with Ankara—and Mr. Erdogan has repeatedly met with Hamas leader Khaled Mashal, including just days before last month’s airport attack.

The Turkish people deserve full sympathy for that atrocity. But no sympathy is owed a Turkish potentate who has been sympathetic to terrorists as long as they aimed their fire at Israel or other convenient targets. All the more so since until recently Mr. Erdogan’s attitude toward Islamic State matched ambivalence with indifference, to put it diplomatically.

What’s true of Turkey goes for other recent victims of terrorism. Pakistan has long played a double game with terrorists, supporting groups that hit civilian targets in Afghanistan and India, only to be shocked when the same groups, or their cousins, turned against the mother country.

Saudi Arabia’s former interior minister, the late Prince Nayef, was for years the head of the Saudi Committee for Supporting the Al Aqsa Intifada, in which capacity he distributed millions to “the families of martyrs.” As late as November 2002, he blamed 9/11 on a Zionist plot, only to be disabused of the view once al Qaeda began attacking Saudi Arabia directly. CONTINUE AT SITE

The findings of this inquiry have now been published and amazingly the Labour party has found itself innocent.

In British left-wing politics, you cannot even clear yourself of accusations of anti-Semitism without having an outbreak of it right there and then.

Readers who have followed the UK Labour party’s recent travails will be surprised to hear the results of the party’s latest inquiry into its own behaviour. After a slew of anti-Semitic comments emanated from a Member of Parliament, a number of councillors and a member of the party’s executive committee, party leader Jeremy Corbyn finally ordered an inquiry into anti-Semitism in the party. The findings of this inquiry have now been published and amazingly the Labour party has found itself innocent. But even that has not gone down without incident.

The Labour party’s anti-Semitism problem began to be exposed at the start of this year when stories of routine anti-Semitism emerged from a junior wing of the party — specifically the Oxford University Labour Club. That scandal involved a number of resignations, and revelations of the use of anti-Semitic language as routine and commonplace among Labour students at Britain’s most prestigious university. An inquiry into these events, ordered by the party and conducted by Labour’s own Baroness Royall, promptly found “no evidence” of “institutional anti-Semitism.”

Then came the scandal of Naz Shah MP, who was suspended from the party pending an investigation into messages on social media, as well as the suspension of a number of Labour councillors for posting anti-Semitic content on Facebook and other sites.

Kerosene was promptly thrown onto this smouldering fire by National Executive Committee member, Ken Livingstone. The former Mayor of London used the opportunity of an anti-Semitism row to go on the BBC and talk about which early policies of Adolf Hitler’s he thought the Jewish people had agreed. The resulting firestorm culminated in Mr Livingstone locking himself in a disabled lavatory at the BBC while journalists shouted questions about Hitler under the door. Sensing that his party was in difficult public-relations waters, Jeremy Corbyn ordered an inquiry into the Labour party’s anti-Semitism problem, and asked left-wing campaigner Shami Chakrabarti to conduct the inquiry. Chakrabarti promptly joined the Labour party and started work.

On June 27, 1976, Air France Flight 139, in route from Tel Aviv to Paris, had a layover in Athens. There four terrorists, two from a German group and two from the Palestinian Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, hijacked the plane. After a stop in Benghazi, Libya, the flight continued to the airport in Entebbe, Uganda.

One hundred forty-eight non-Israeli and non-Jewish passengers were separated in a process hauntingly familiar to the hostages and were released in two separate groups. Ninety-four passengers and the 12 crew members remained. The four hijackers were joined by three more, and demands were made for the release of 40 terrorists from Israeli prisons and 13 from other incarceration.

Israel’s policy of non-negotiation with terrorists was well known, but understandably, the families of the Israeli hostages begged for Israel’s leaders to comply with the hijackers’ demands.

On July 3, four C-130 Hercules jumbo planes left Israel with 190 elite troops plus 20 non-combatants to execute the most daring rescue operation in modern history. In six amazingly short days from the hijacking, the Israeli Defense Force assembled a crack team, collected intelligence from the released hostages and the Israeli construction firm that built the airport, quickly devised a complex plan, repeatedly rehearsed the rescue to precision, and argued the risks and mechanics of the rescue. Israeli officials entered into negotiations with the terrorists to buy much needed time.

The first C-130 landed at 1:00 AM at the Entebbe airport. Imitating Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who had visited the hostages, a black Mercedes with soldiers in blackface rolled out of the plane and toward the terminal with the hostages. As they pulled up to the terminal, the soldiers burst in, yelling in Hebrew and English for the hostages to remain on the ground. They quickly found and killed all of the hijackers and within six minutes were escorting the hostages out of the terminal to the additional planes that had just landed, precisely as planned.

Three hostages were killed in the crossfire: Jean Jacques Maimoni (19), Pasco Cohn (55), and Ida Borochovitch (56). A fourth, Dora Bloch (75), had been taken to a hospital and was killed by Ugandan soldiers after the raid. Ten hostages were wounded.

Soldiers from the additional planes engaged Ugandan soldiers, killing over thirty, and destroyed eleven Mig jets on the ground. Five soldiers were wounded, and only one was killed by a sniper in the terminal tower: Yonatan (Yoni) Netanyahu, brother of Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

The planes took off with the soldiers and hostages 58 minutes after arrival. In spite of the wounded and the losses, the rescue force was prepared for much worse, and the operation was considered a remarkable success.

It seems that either al-Qaeda, with or without the Islamic State, has been linking up with Bangladesh’s indigenous radical networks.

If the Hasina government cannot restore a sense of normalcy, the booming Bangladeshi economy is likely to stagnate, Western corporate investment may dry up, and liberal technocrats probably will seek security elsewhere. If this happens, Bangladesh’s minorities will feel even further isolated.

“They believe that we are all going to hell, and no matter how they treat us, that they will all go to heaven.” — Former Catholic seminarian.

Friday’s Islamic terrorist attack in the swankiest section of the Bangladesh’s capital of Dhaka, in which 20 people were murdered, had been expected by the country’s law enforcement services. When this attack took place, the government had been in the midst of a nationwide crackdown on known terrorist sympathizers. The police had made hundreds — some reports claim thousands — of arrests. They had also seized explosives, firearms, machetes and jihadi tracts. Most of the arrests consisted of members of indigenous, outlawed jihadist groups such as the Jamaatul Mujahedeen Bangladesh, Hizb ut-Tahrir, Harakat-ul Jihad-al Islami Bangladesh (HuJI-B), and Ansarullah Team.