RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last week’s Brussels jihadist bombings, and their links to December’s Paris attacks that, similarly, appear to have been coordinated by the Islamic State terror network, spotlighted the challenge posed by Europe’s unassimilated Muslim communities. As I observed in a recent column, the threat posed by radical Islam is not limited to “violent extremists” (the Obama administration’s preferred sanitization of the term “jihadists­­”); it is exacerbated by the support system the jihadists enjoy in Muslim enclaves that share their sharia-supremacist ideology.

The terrorism in Europe prompted no shortage of discussion about American counterterrorism, including the suggestion by Ted Cruz (on whose presidential campaign I am an advisor) of stepped up surveillance of Muslim communities. In the aforementioned column, I explained that Senator Cruz’s proposal was a prudent call for recommitting to the intelligence-based post-9/11 counterterrorism that aimed to prevent terrorist attacks; that would be a departure from the 1990s Clinton approach, which regarded terrorism as a law-enforcement problem – meaning investigators generally did not kick into gear until after mass-casualty attacks had occurred. Cruz has also penned an op-ed fleshing out his thoughts on the subject.

An obvious question arises: Can the proliferation of Islamic enclaves that has occurred in Europe happen in the United States? For now, the situations are not comparable. The U.S. has a vastly larger population than any individual European country; and compared to Europe, we are geographically remote from the Middle East. Muslims make up only about one percent of our population (as opposed to ten percent of France’s), and because we have historically been a melting pot for diverse immigrant populations, we do a better job of assimilating Muslims into our society than the Europeans have.

Still, as I outlined in my 2010 book, The Grand Jihad, a major challenge of radical Islam’s “civilizational jihad” against the West (to borrow the Muslim Brotherhood’s description of its objective in America) is voluntary apartheid. That is the strategy by which Muslims of the fundamentalist bent integrate but quite intentionally resist assimilation. It is very difficult to assimilate a subpopulation that comes to a host country with the specific intention of changing the country rather than becoming part of that country’s culture.

So is there a large enough, determined radical Islamic faction in the U.S. to trigger the development of sharia-supremacist enclaves – many of which, in Europe, have become “no go zones” hostile to the police and other government authorities?

Back in 2012, France’s President Hollande made good on a campaign promise and imposed a 75% tax on millionaires. There were some high-profile rich Frenchmen who exited the country, including Bernard Arnault, the chief executive of luxury group LVMH, who applied for Belgian nationality, and the actor Gérard Depardieu, who also moved across the border to Belgium before obtaining Russian citizenship.

Predictably, the tax took in far less than advertised before it was dropped. But there was no mass exodus of rich people from the country. You don’t get to be rich by paying taxes; you get rich by shielding your money from the tax man.

But exiting because of terrorism is another matter. And last year, 10,000 rich people left France for greener pastures – an astonishing 3% of all the millionaires in the country.

IBT:

The report was compiled by New World Wealth, an agency that gives information on the global wealth sector. The report was based on data collected from investor visa programme statistics of each country; annual interviews with around 800 global high net worth individuals and with intermediaries like migration experts, second citizenship platforms, wealth managers and property agents; data from property registers and property sales statistics in each country; and by tracking millionaire movements in the media.

According to the report, Millionaire migration in 2015, France topped the list of countries with maximum millionaire outflows as it lost 10,000 millionaires, or 3% of its millionaire population. Among the cities that saw maximum millionaire outflow, Paris, was at the top – losing about 6% of its millionaire population or 7,000 millionaires in 2015 to the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and Israel.

As someone specializing in Islamic jihadism, one would expect I’d have much to say immediately after jihadi attacks of the sort that recently occurred in Brussels (35 killed), or San Bernardino (14 killed), or Paris (130). Ironically, I don’t: such attacks are ultimately symptoms of what I do deem worthy of discussion, namely, root causes. (What can one add when a symptom of the root cause he has long warned against occurs other than “told you so”?)

So what is the root cause of jihadi attacks? Many think that the ultimate source of the ongoing terrorization of the West is Islam. Yet this notion has one problem: the Muslim world is immensely weak and intrinsically incapable of being a threat. That every Islamic assault on the West is a terrorist attack — and terrorism, as is known, is the weapon of the weak — speaks for itself.

This was not always the case. For approximately one thousand years, the Islamic world was the scourge of the West. Today’s history books may refer to those who terrorized Christian Europe as Arabs, Saracens, Moors, Ottomans, Turks, Mongols, or Tatars — but all were operating under the same banner of jihad that the Islamic State is operating under.

No — today, the ultimate enemy is within. The root cause behind nonstop Muslim terrorization of the West is found in those who stifle or whitewash all talk and examination of Muslim doctrine and history; who welcome hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants while knowing that some are jihadi operatives and many are simply “radical”; who work to overthrow secular Arab dictators in the name of “democracy” and “freedom,” only to uncork the jihad suppressed by the autocrats (the Islamic State’s territory consists of lands that were “liberated” in Iraq, Libya, and Syria by the U.S. and its allies).

So are Western leaders and politicians the root cause behind Islamic terrorization of the West?

Close — but still not there yet.

Far from being limited to a number of elitist leaders and institutions, the Western empowerment of the jihad is the natural outcome of postmodern thinking — the real reason an innately weak Islam can be a source of repeated woes for a militarily and economically superior West.

The Left has been at it for half a century now, colonising our educational institutions and filling the minds of infantalised students with a mush of doctrine dressed up as history. The UNSW commissars’ guide to “appropriate” terminology is the latest example, and one of the sickest.
No civilization ever survived by making itself stupid. And yet this is what our education system is attempting to do. There are innumerable examples of this deliberate dumbing down, but the recent revelations about the sinister instructions contained in the University of New South Wales teaching guide are an excellent illustration. These edicts institutionalize some of the worst aspects of the History Wars, enshrining an ignorant and negative interpretation of Australian society and its history while prohibiting any questioning or criticism of this arbitrarily imposed view.

According to David Dixon, the Dean of the Law School at UNSW, the guidelines are contained in students’ reading material and are common across tertiary institutions. He claims

The reason that we do this is to help our students, because of a number of incidents in the past where non-Aboriginal students have quite unintentionally said things in class discussion which have caused offence to their Aboriginal peers.

So providing something which is just a way in which people can look at and find out what is the best way to say things, which will not cause offence to people, is I think a really responsible educational approach. And that’s what we’re trying to do.

The notion that this is simply about avoiding offence is disingenuous. The guidelines are based on a radical and racist interpretation of Australian history that demonizes the everything about European settlement and the civilization it brought with it. They all but criminalize a vast range of previously innocuous terms and concepts that are now deemed offensive, and they are used to stifle free and open discussion. Students know they can be severely censured by their universities for inadvertent speech. And above all else, they are very aware of the draconian Section 18C of the RDA and the way in which it can be used by Indigenous students to target and intimidate others, on even the flimsiest pretext.

Aaron David Miller is a vice president at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars and most recently the author of “The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President.” He is on Twitter: @AaronDMiller2.

If elections were held today in Israel, the newspaper Haaretz reported recently, a single list of center-right candidates would edge out Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition and usher in a more centrist one without his Likud Party that could govern with a comfortable majority. A more telling sign that Israelis are tiring of Mr. Netanyahu came in another new Haaretz poll, which found that 51% of Israelis believe that Mr. Netanyahu should “leave political life” rather than run again in the next scheduled election.

Despite this, the chances of Mr. Netanyahu leaving and major change coming in Israeli politics before scheduled elections in 2019 are not great. Here are four reasons why:

Mr. Netanyahu’s political longevity. Should he survive until 2018, Benjamin Netanyahu will be the longest-governing prime minister in Israel’s history, surpassing David Ben-Gurion. Critics of Mr. Netanyahu say that, rather like “Seinfeld,” his tenure has been a show about nothing. Yet he survives. His political wiles have established the perception that he is indeed prime minister material, with tested security credentials. And there is no single Israeli leader on the scene with the stature to challenge him.

The bad neighborhood. As the Middle East melts down, the value of a leader’s security credentials goes up. You might argue that Israelis would be looking for a leader with vision and principle to at least extract them from their conflict with the Palestinians, but there’s little faith these days in the peace process or in Mahmoud Abbas or the Palestinian Authority. Mr. Abbas is perceived as either acquiescing in the current wave of terror, unable to stop it, or using it as leverage. A compelling argument could be made that Mr. Netanyahu has been remarkably averse to risk and that he has not provided an answer to the wave of Palestinian stabbing and shooting attacks on Israelis since September or orchestrated a determinative defeat of Hamas in Gaza. Still, he has not blundered into quagmires or unnecessary or unwinnable wars either. CONTINUE AT SITE

WASHINGTON—The Obama administration is preparing to give Iran limited access to U.S. dollars as part of looser sanctions on Tehran, according to congressional staff members and a former American official briefed on the plans.

The proposed move comes amid rising Iranian criticism that the landmark nuclear agreement reached last year between global powers and Tehran hasn’t provided the country with sufficient economic benefits.

Executives at European and Asian banks have said in recent interviews that they remain reluctant to conduct any financial transactions with Iran due to fears they might run afoul of the U.S. Treasury and its regulations that ban dollar dealings with Iranian firms. Most major international trade, particularly in oil and gas, is conducted in U.S. dollars.

The Treasury is considering how to issue licenses to offshore dollar clearing houses for specific Iranian financial institutions, an approach that wouldn’t require the involvement of American banks, according to the congressional officials. The clearing houses, likely involving select foreign banks, would conduct the dollar transactions instead, shielding the U.S. financial system from any direct contact with Iran, these officials said.

“They are looking at a couple mechanisms to allow for this dollar trade, stopping short of normalizing banking transactions,” said a congressional banking official briefed by the administration on its plans, which haven’t been finalized.

Treasury action on Iran’s access to the dollar wouldn’t require congressional approval.

American law still prohibits U.S. and foreign banks from dealing in dollars with Iran, despite the July nuclear agreement. The Treasury Department designates Iran’s entire financial system as a “primary money laundering concern” due to Tehran’s nuclear and missile programs and support for international terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. CONTINUE AT SITE

China has a long record of persecuting its Muslim minorities. Russia has brutally suppressed the separatist movement of the predominantly Muslim Chechens with bombing and shelling. Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered airstrikes against Syrian Muslims without much worry over collateral damage. India has zero tolerance for Islamic radicalism and hits back hard any time Muslim terrorists attack.

Given such severe backlash elsewhere, why do radical Islamists prefer to strike Europeans and Americans — from Paris and Brussels to Boston and San Bernardino?

No place has been more open to Muslim refugees than the United States and the European Union. Together they have accepted several million emigrants from the Middle East since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

The EU and the U.S. lavish foreign-aid money on the Palestinians. America has offered a half-century of support to Jordan and Egypt. It is much easier to be a Muslim in Europe than a Christian in the Middle East.

Barack Obama started his presidency eager to win over the Muslim world. In a 2009 interview with Dubai-based TV news channel Al Arabiya, he emphasized that he has Muslim family members. Obama’s NASA director redefined the space agency’s “foremost” mission as Muslim outreach.

Obama has sought a closer relationship with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan despite Erdogan’s Islamization of Turkey’s shaky democracy. In contrast, Obama alienated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, the most steadfast friend America has in the Middle East.

Obama has publicly deferred to Muslim interests while abroad. He apologized to the Turkish parliament for a host of supposed past American sins — “some of our own darker periods in our history.” In symbolic fashion, Obama bowed to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. The president’s Cairo speech mythologized Islamic contributions throughout history and downplayed Western achievement.

“ISIS have 400 trained fighters in Europe who are poised to unleash more terror attacks with orders to wait for the right time to cause maximum carnage,” the British Daily Mail reported on March 23, 2016. ISIS terror commandos already struck in Paris on November 13, 2015, and in Brussels on March 22, 2016.

Abdel Hamid Abaaoud, the suspected mastermind of the terror attacks in Paris who operated from Belgium, said that around 90 jihadists had traveled from Syria to France and that “they were spread out around the Paris region: Syrians, Iraqis, British, French and Germans.”

ISIS jihadists receive their training in special training camps in Syria and Iraq. The focus of their training is on how to plot and carry out terror attacks in Europe. Last January, the European police organization Europol claimed in an alarming report that such training camps not only are in existence in Syria and Iraq, but also in the European Union and the Balkan countries. Terror attacks on soft targets are also being planned in Europe itself, the report warns. This finding proved to be right: Both terror attacks in Paris and Brussels were partially planned and prepared from Brussels.

On Saturday March 26, 2016, the Italian anti-terror police arrested Jamal Eddine Ouali, a 40-year-old Algerian who forged lots of identity papers for illegal immigrants and terrorists linked to the ISIS attacks in Paris and Brussels. Ouali was arrested near the southern city of Salerno. He had provided forged identity papers to Mohammed Belkaid, Salah Abdeslam and Najim Lachraaoui, all of whom were members of the ISIS terror commandos that struck in Paris and Brussels.

Erdogan has boasted that he is proud of boldly blackmailing EU leaders into paying him protection money.

Erdogan’s threats were almost criminally sinister: “… the EU will be confronted with more than a dead boy on the shores of Turkey. There will be 10,000 or 15,000. How will you deal with that?”

According to the agreement, 80 million Turkish citizens will have visa-free access to the European Union.

The nightmare scenario for a desperate EU is that no matter how much it bows to extortionist demands from Turkey, the migrant crisis will continue to grow. Even if Turkey closes down all migrant routes from Turkey into Europe, refugees could take new routes through North Africa or the Caucasus.

Meanwhile, 800,000 migrants are currently on Libyan territory waiting to cross the Mediterranean, according to French Defense Minister Jean-Yves le Drian.

“We can open the doors to Greece and Bulgaria anytime and we can put the refugees on buses … So how will you deal with refugees if you don’t get a deal? Kill the refugees?” This was the question Turkish President Recep Taayip Erdogan, in true mafia style, asked European Council President Donald Tusk and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker on November 16, 2015 in a closed meeting in Antalya, Turkey, where the three met after the G20 summit.

While Tusk and Juncker have both declined to comment on whether the meeting took place, Erdogan has since then boasted that he is proud of the leaked minutes of the meeting, where he boldly blackmails EU leaders into paying him protection money.

Erdogan’s threats were almost criminally sinister: “… the EU will be confronted with more than a dead boy on the shores of Turkey. There will be 10,000 or 15,000. How will you deal with that?”

Turkish President Recep Taayip Erdogan (left) has boasted that he is proud of blackmailing EU leaders, including European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (right), into paying him protection money.

Finally, feeding into the denial/ignorance of the European elites, who were at that time reeling from the Paris terror attacks that had occurred just three days earlier, Erdogan — who himself has hosted and supported terrorist groups from Hamas to Hezbollah to ISIS — told his European colleagues, “The attacks in Paris is [sic] all about poverty and exclusion. These people… will continue to be terrorists in Europe”.

The leaked minutes furthermore showed Tusk and Juncker pleading with Erdogan, almost begging him to see reason, pathetically telling him that the EU has been treating him “as a prince in Brussels.”

“Like a prince?” Erdogan retorted, “Of course. I’m not representing a third world country.” He also told Juncker, who is the former prime minister of Luxembourg, not to compare Luxembourg to Turkey: “Luxembourg is just like a town in Turkey.”

According to a report by the Turkish Journalists Association, 500 journalists were fired in Turkey in 2015; 70 others were subjected to physical violence. Thirty journalists remain in prison, mostly on charges of “terrorism.” There are also many journalists among the 1,845 Turks who have been investigated or prosecuted for insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan since he was elected in August 2014.

After the secular daily newspaper Cumhuriyet published evidence of arms deliveries by the Turkish intelligence services to Islamist groups in Syria, President Erdogan himself filed a criminal complaint against Cumhuriyet’s editor-in-chief, Can Dundar, and the Ankara bureau chief, Erdem Gul.

At a March 25 hearing, the Istanbul court ruled for the whole trial to be held in secret.

“We came here today to defend journalism…We said we would defend the people’s right to access information. We defended that and we were arrested.” — Can Dundar, editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet.

The trial clearly exhibits how Erdogan’s authoritarian rule diverges from Western democratic culture.

“Turkey is where many journalists may have to spend more time at their attorneys’ offices or in courtrooms than in the newsrooms, where they should be,” a Western diplomat joked bitterly. “Don’t quote me on that. I don’t want to be declared persona non grata,” he added with a smile.