RUTHFULLY YOURS

SEOUL—North Korea issued a new nuclear threat against the U.S. and South Korea as the allies began major joint military exercises.

Pyongyang commonly makes threats during joint exercises—in part, experts say, to solidify support among its military for the North Korean leadership.

This year’s annual spring exercises in South Korea are some of the biggest ever, involving 17,000 U.S. troops and around 300,000 South Korean troops. Starting Monday and running through April, they are intended to ensure readiness for any North Korean attack through a combination of battlefield and computer-simulated exercises.

The simulations will include offensives against North Korea’s top leadership and its nuclear and missile arsenal in the event of a war, South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reported, citing unnamed South Korean military sources.

North Korea responds angrily to any suggestion that dictator Kim Jong Un would be the target of an attack. Its top military body, the National Defense Commission, said in a statement Monday it would take a “pre-emptive and offensive nuclear strike” in response to the exercises. CONTINUE AT SITE

CESME, Turkey—On a mild winter day last week, Capt. Murat Yilmazarslan and his crew bore down on a dinghy packed with people making a dash across the Aegean Sea—a cheerless victory in the Turkish coast guard’s uphill battle to stop smugglers ferrying migrants to Europe’s door.

Soon, their ship—the Umut, or Hope—and two patrol boats had intercepted the dinghy, filled with dozens of Afghans and others in neon orange life jackets, as a helicopter hovered overhead. The migrants, some who wept as they were ordered to board the Hope, gave up without a fight.

It isn’t always so. Caught within sight of their goal, refugees have held babies above the water and threatened to drop them into the sea if they aren’t allowed to proceed to Greece, coast guard officials say. On occasion, intercepted migrants have held knives to their throats and threatened to kill themselves. In those cases, the officials say they alert the Greek coast guard and let the people continue their voyage.

“We have such a big weight on our shoulders,” Capt. Yilmazarslan said the next day in the Turkish port of Cesme. “Turkey is like a sponge that has been fully soaked, and we shouldn’t be left alone to deal with this refugee flow.”

The Turkish captain and his crew are at the front line of an international effort to stop the people smuggling and defuse the pressure on countries in Europe that say they are reaching, or have exceeded, their ability to take in more migrants from the east. A NATO fleet of five ships has been deployed to help overwhelmed coast guard officials like Capt. Yilmazarslan track and deter the smuggling boats, but the mission has been slowed by disagreement between Greece and Turkey over the specifics for the operation. CONTINUE AT SITE

A very worrying development is taking place. People trying to speak the truth about Islam are being silenced. Accounts of social media are being deleted without warning for the ‘crime’ of criticising Islam. Now gofundme.com a crowdfunding website has joined in the censoring of any narrative criticising Islam.

I have been trying to raise money for three victims of Islam on gofundme.com and out of the blue my account has been permanently deleted. The fact is that whilst I had to of course explain WHY the victims of Islam needed help (one was a child grooming gang victim and two were ex-Muslims seeking to escape Muslim countries) I only presented the facts and the truth about their situation. For this my account has been deleted and I can no longer raise money to help these people.

One victim was an ex-Muslim convert to Christianity whose very own family had tried to kill him by beating him up and setting his house on fire. He cannot seek help from the Muslim police as they will also want to kill or imprison him for the ‘crime’ of leaving Islam.

Another victim, Emily was a victim of Muslim rape gangs in Peterborough for 20 years – the truth of this is horrendous, she has chronic physical ailments and PTSD from the years of gang rape and sexual exploitation she suffered. I was trying to raise cash for her to see a private psychotherapist as the ones offered by the NHS were always Muslim, and as you can imagine that would not have been right for her. In fact her home town of Peterborough has an extremely high Muslim population, and she cannot even take taxis as the vast majority of drivers are Muslim. The third was Serkan Engin a Turkish ex-Muslim who was no longer being given work due to his outspoken criticism of Islam. He too was trying to leave Islamic Turkey.

The horrific slaying took place in western Nineveh in Iraq

ISIS terror thugs have forced a 12-year-old girl to execute five women including a doctor who refused to treat their wounded fighters.

The horrific slaying took place in western Nineveh in Iraq yesterday.

One of the victims was alleged to have been a doctor who refused to treat terrorists wounded by anti-ISIS coalition airstrikes.

It is though to be the first incident of its kind in Iraq where a young girl has been forced by ISIS to execute civilians in public.

The open letter from the World Council of Churches (WCC) should have first quoted the three points from my article, then answered them one by one. Such a letter, however, was impossible, because all three points are simply and obviously correct. Instead, the WCC wrote a letter that completely ignored Tveit’s mistakes and falsely claimed that he was using only UN sources, apparently trusting that nobody would read my article.

If the WCC is truly thirsty for Palestinian water justice, why has it not rushed to the defense of Najat Abu Bakr?

Suppose, however, that the WCC wants to start a dialogue based on truth rather than “narratives.” Then there is a way for it to do so.

Two recent Gatestone Institute articles were addressed to the current campaign of the World Council of Churches (WCC) called “Seven Weeks of Water 2016.” In response, the WCC has issued an open letter to Gatestone. This author is responsible only for what his article stated. Conversely, we can examine the WCC’s response exclusively as referring to that article.

The article concerned the “sermon” preached by the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC), Olav Fykse Tveit, when he launched the campaign in a Jerusalem church. The sermon can be downloaded from the WCC’s website.

From this viewpoint, the WCC’s open letter contains a plainly false statement. It says: “The information and statistics we employ in the campaign are derived from United Nations sources. None are from the Palestinian Water Authority.”

Read the sermon from beginning to end and back, and you will find only one reference to a United Nations source: that the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends 100 liters of water per day per person (a target that is missed in many parts of the world). Regarding Palestinian water, Tveit’s “information and statistics” are drawn, as the sermon explicitly says, from the “advocacy group of Palestine, EWASH” (that is, from the Palestinian website “Thirsting for justice”). So, contrary to what the open letter states, Tveit’s sermon, which constituted the opening statement of the campaign and sets the tone for whatever follows, is based on a source openly engaged in pro-Palestinian agitation.

The Tapanila gang-rape shocked the quiet Helsinki suburb, and all of Finland. Many wondered why these second-generation Somalis, citizens of Finland, would carry out such a savage attack.

The rapists were eventually brought to trial. One was sentenced to a year and four months imprisonment, two were given one-year prison sentences and two others were acquitted. Penalties were softened due to the age of the rapists.

“1,010 rapes were reported to the police in 2014, according to the Official Statistics of Finland. The number of suspected immigrants in these cases is about three times higher than of the suspected natives in relation to the population.” – Finland Today.

Hate speech is problematic: there is no clear definition, a lapse that leads to confusion and debates. Finns believe that freedom of speech should be absolute. Unsuccessful attempts to deregulate blasphemy as a religious crime took place between the 1910s until the 1990s.

Finland — an open country that prides itself on respecting different ways of life, cultures and religions — is being greatly tested by the wave of Middle Eastern asylum seekers.

Finland is a homogenous country that has roughly 5.5 million inhabitants, about 4% of which are foreign[1]. Twenty years ago, thousands of Somalis immigrated to Finland. In the last decade or so, more international students came to study, and more foreigners came to live and work.

Finnish universities and the academia are of a high level, and most Finns speak some English. But it is not easy for foreigners to find jobs. The barrier is the language: Finnish, like Hungarian, is a part of the Finno-Ugric languages, and difficult to learn.

As a US battle group heads to area, the next war in Asia may be much closer than we care to imagine. With China’s claim to a few barren shoals and tiny islands representing the flint, the iron resolve of neighbouring nations to resist being reduced to vassal states may well see the region set ablaze.
The South China Sea is a key militarily strategic and economic waterway for the nations bordering it. The area’s economic importance is clear: roughly one-third of the world’s shipping sails through its waters and huge oil and gas reserves are believed to be found beneath its seabed. As there are few resources on the various sets of islands dotting its surface, many not much more than tidal shoals, and because there is almost no fresh water on any of them, they have remained uninhabited, except for seasonal visits by fishermen or, more recently, sporadic occupation by military forces.

For all nations, except China, the South China Sea has long been regarded as a local ‘lake’ available to all for fishing, transit and, more recently, for the possible economic exploitation of the gas and oil deposits that have been detected. Although they have not been accurately quantified, about 7.7Bn barrels of recoverable oil has been identified with a potential for 28Bn barrels in total. This treasure trove is augmented by 266 trillion cubic feet of Natural Gas reserves. In 2014, China began to drill for oil in waters near the Paracel Islands that are disputed with Vietnam. This immense potential wealth has greatly raised the stakes for all claimants to the archipelagos and the surrounding seas.

As China has grown in economic and military power, the South China Sea has become both Beijing’s front line for naval defence and a limitation to its global projection of its power, as the island states to its east limit its access to the open waters of the Pacific Ocean. To be recognized as a world naval power the Chinese Navy (PLAN) must control both the South China Sea and the egress from it. This is the real basis for the aggressive Chinese claim to almost the whole of the sea, in some parts nearly to the shorelines of the littoral nations. Gaining control of these blue-water exits is also one reason for the Chinese government’s recent, more accommodating political relationship with Taiwan. This improved relationship has seen the unhindered transit of Chinese warships through the northern Taiwan Straits exit into the Pacific Ocean.

Hundreds of thousands of Afghans are seeking refuge in Germany from their country’s turmoil. Berlin plans to increase its deportations and scare tactics in order to lower the number of asylum-seekers from the region.

Here at least, things seem to be safe. The grounds of the German consulate in downtown Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan are surrounded by a massive concrete wall. The Americans turned the former hotel into a fortress before they rented it to the Germans: There are vehicle gateways with automatic steel gates, thick bullet-proof window panes, panic rooms and heavily armed police officers in combat uniforms.

On this sunny afternoon in early February, Hayatullah Jawad is tasked with conveying the truth to the German Interior Minister in the consulate’s unadorned conference room. “Everyone who can is currently leaving the country,” the migration expert says, before letting the sentence sink in for a moment.

Thomas de Maizière only has one question: Why? “There are three reasons,” says Jawad. “Firstly: the departure of foreign troops. The people don’t believe that the Afghans can take care of security by themselves. Secondly: It is simple to reach Europe.” And thirdly? Jawad keeps a straight face. “Smiley government.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s message of welcome to the refugees has made all the difference, he says. Everyone is getting a passport as quickly as possible. After all, who knows how long the German government’s warmth will last.

And it can’t last. There are simply too many. Since the fall, the number of Afghan refugees who reach Germany has grown markedly. In the past year they represented the second largest group among asylum applicants. This January, one out of five refugees registered in Germany came from the Hindu Kush region.

If Merkel wants to lower the number of refugees as she has pledged to do, then the chancellor absolutely needs to take Afghanistan into account. But it’s a difficult proposition. Since its military intervention a decade and a half ago, the West has carried a special responsibility for the country — a land that is now once again in danger of sinking completely into civil war. The idea of categorizing Afghanistan as a safe country of origin, like the Balkan states, is unthinkable. On the contrary: The security situation is getting worse. If it continues along these lines, millions of Afghans could be entitled to protection under the Geneva Convention. And the smugglers on the route to Europe are highly professional. This maelstrom is a nightmare.

In order to have more power to deport people to Afghanistan, the government has declared part of the country safe. But the Taliban are constantly expanding their influence. The government in Kabul is weak, the economic prospects are dire. “Afghanistan is at serious risk of a political breakdown during 2016,” US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper recently said during a Senate hearing.

Despite this, the German government is hoping to convince a high four-digit number of Afghans to voluntarily make the return trip. A week ago, 125 Afghans returned to Kabul in a Czech charter plane with the media watching. In exchange, Germany is giving them €700 ($760) for a new start in their homeland.

But according to current plans by the government, rejected asylum applicants who do not want to return of their own free choice will soon also be deported in larger numbers. According to an internal German government memo, forced repatriations will be “tackled” in a next step, which is already being prepared behind the scenes.

Worsening Situation in Afghanistan

This marks yet another change of direction in German asylum policy. For years, a general ban on deportations to Afghanistan had been in place, with only 47 people having been sent back to the country since 2011. Last year, just nine were sent packing.

Deportations to Afghanistan are morally dubious, laborious and costly. But the interior minister doesn’t see any alternative. In 2015, three times as many Afghans applied for asylum than in 2014. In total, 154,000 refugees came from the Hindu Kush. A further 18,099 were registered by the authorities this January. For that reason, measures like the one taken last Wednesday are mostly meant to have a symbolic effect. De Maizière is hoping that the news will spread around Afghanistan that the generous times have passed. The welcome mat has been rolled up.

Since the withdrawal of the International Security Assistance Force’s (ISAF) protective troops in 2013, the security situation in the country has deteriorated dramatically. “There are safe provinces and there are less safe provinces,” de Maizière said during his visit in early February — an optimistic description. A Western diplomat in Kabul expresses it this way: “There are unsafe and less unsafe provinces.”

In practice, the Interior Ministry is already well aware of this. Each week the officials of the Group 22 in the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) compile an Afghanistan briefing based on the most up-to-date information available. It is a litany of horrors: military clashes, suicide bombings, kidnappings, assassinations. According to the latest statistics released by the UN’s Afghanistan mission, the number of civilians injured or killed last year — 11,002 — is the highest since the toppling of the Taliban.

In order to determine the level of security in a province, the German Federal Administrative Court has developed a macabre “body count” calculus. If the ratio of civilian victims to overall inhabitants is lower than 1:800, then the risk to life is too low to receive protection in Germany.

The last thorough situation analysis by the German Foreign Ministry and the BND foreign intelligence service makes for grim reading. It describes a “downward spiral.” The “performance, reliability and operational morale” of the Afghan army is sinking and after the Taliban’s brief conquest of Kunduz in September 2015, the militants see themselves “justifiably in a position of strength against the government.” In addition to the Taliban, the Islamic State terror militia is also gaining a foothold in some provinces.

For the BAMF and the German administrative courts, the situation is has become rather chaotic, with officials left to answer some very tough questions. Is someone who flees from the Taliban in Kunduz safe in Kabul? Does a man have a right to asylum in Germany if he is supposedly being forced to fight by two opposing militias and he’d rather stay neutral? Can a feud between two rival clans be a justification for asylum? Or a planned forced marriage?

According to an internal report by the German Foreign Ministry about the “situation pertaining to asylum and deportation” the status of women has improved since the end of Taliban rule, but their human rights are “still frequently violated” by way of abuse, forced marriages, sexual assaults or murder. Children have been forcibly recruited, sexually abused and afterwards sometimes killed. “Within the ranks of army and police in particular,” it claims, the sexual abuse of children and youths is a “large problem.”

New Guidelines in Germany

Still, the German Foreign Ministry has picked out individual regions in which “the situation is comparatively stable despite selective security incidents.” In the view of the German government, rejected asylum applicants can be sent to these provinces.

BAMF is now expected to investigate more thoroughly whether “domestic refuge alternatives” are feasible — ie. whether it is imaginable that a person could stay afloat in one of the country’s safe regions. They are considering young men who are fit to work, who are neither pursued by the Taliban nor persecuted for their religion, and merely made the journey to Europe with the hope of a better future.

Members of the German government believe the new guidelines will lead to a decrease in the number of Afghan applicants ultimately granted asylum status. But it’s unclear whether the calculation will pay off. The administrative courts have the final word in decisions. These courts can also be soft in their rulings.

It’s 9 a.m. on Feb. 23 in a Berlin court. A young Afghan stands in front of Administrative Judge Claudia Perlitius. With its green carpet and gray chairs, the environment has an aura of bureaucratic sadness. The Afghan’s application for asylum has been rejected by BAMF, and now he is taking legal action against it. The man grew up in Iran, which isn’t rare: About 1 million Afghans have fled to their neighboring country.

The judge explains clearly that the man has no right to asylum in Germany because he is not being persecuted in Afghanistan. And the so-called subsidiary protection as a refugee from civil war doesn’t apply to him. But during questioning, it becomes clear that the man doesn’t have any contact with his relatives in Afghanistan. The judge decides it is untenable to send a man to Afghanistan who has no network of family there to provide him with support. The judge lifts the deportation and orders that the man can stay in Germany.

After Syria, Iraq and Eritrea, it is Afghans who are most frequently granted asylum status in Germany. And even a rejected application doesn’t necessarily result in deportation. Obstacles could include medical treatment that cannot be interrupted, or a missing passport. Of the approximately 200,000 foreigners who are set to be deported in Germany, the orders have been dropped in almost 150,000 of those instances.

News of that fact has also spread in Afghanistan. Reports on social media suggest that Afghans have little to worry about in terms of getting deported back to the Hindu Kush, an internal Foreign Ministry memo states. This, in turn, has spurred the refugee smuggling business in the country, where market forces appear to be alive and well. High demand has created a wide array of offerings, sophisticated infrastructure and sinking prices in trafficking.

One and a half years ago, migration expert Hayatullah Jawad explains, his uncle had to pay $15,000 to get his relatives to Vienna. Their trip took three months. Now an entire family can come to Europe via Iran or Turkey in only 12 days for the same price.

‘Have You Thought About It?’

That’s what Hussain Saydi wants. The electrical engineer is a member of the Shiite Hazara minority. He comes from the Qarabagh district in the eastern part of the country. Now he’s sitting in the living room of a friend in Kabul. Saydi is waiting for his passport, and next week he wants to leave — for Germany.

As an employee at a human right’s organization, the 28-year-old once wrote an article about the “double standard” of men who believe themselves to be good Muslims because they attended the mosque, but don’t allow their wives or daughters to leave the house or go to school. After it came out, the Qarabagh ulama, the local council of Muslim clerics, summoned him, at which point Saydi says he was threatened. Now he’s planning his escape together his wife, who studied business administration.

It’s expected to cost $10,000, with each smuggler immediately receiving a portion after performing his part of the service. Arrival in Germany is guaranteed.

None of this is good news for Thomas de Maizière. That’s why the German government is now testing a Facebook campaign to try to deter young Afghans from fleeing to Germany. Large signs in Pashtu and Dari read: “Leaving Afghanistan? Have you given this careful consideration?” It sounds rather discursive and many people wouldn’t consider that much of a deterrent. The Australians, for example, air ads on Afghan television that dispel any illusions. They show a grim officer in a uniform: “If you travel by boat without a visa, you will not make Australia home. There are no exceptions!”

Sexual violence in Germany has skyrocketed since Angela Merkel allowed more than one million mostly male migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East into the country. The crimes are being downplayed by the authorities, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiments.

“The moment they [male migrants] see a young woman wearing a skirt or any type of loose clothing, they believe they have a free pass.” — Restaurant owner at a mall in Kiel.

“Every police officer knows he has to meet a particular political expectation. It is better to keep quiet [about migrant crime] because you cannot go wrong.” — Rainer Wendt, the head of the German police union.

Police are warning about a potential breakdown of public order this summer, when women who are lightly dressed are confronted by young male migrants.

Jakob Augstein, an influential columnist for the magazine Der Spiegel, says that Germans worried about migrant crimes are motivated by racism. His views shed light on the worldview of German multiculturalism: Migrants who assault German women and children are simply rebelling against German power structures. Germans who criticize such assaults are racists.

Police in Cologne received more than 1,000 complaints from women, including 454 reports of sexual assaults, related to New Year’s Eve. Police in Hamburg received complaints from 351 women, including 218 reports of sexual assault that took place on the same evening.

A mob of asylum seekers from Afghanistan assaulted three teenage girls at a shopping center in the northern German city of Kiel. The attack — which occurred over two-hours on the evening of February 25, and mirrored the mass assaults of German women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve — shows, once again, that public spaces in Germany are becoming increasingly perilous for women and children.

Ahead of one more “make or break” summit on Europe’s migration crisis on Monday, an unstated plan of sorts already seems to be going into effect: Sink the Continent’s system of borderless travel into a medically induced coma and hope the patient can heal itself during the snooze.

That’s the best interpretation as a growing number of countries impose border controls on frontiers that used to be crossed freely under the Schengen agreement for passport-free travel. The latest enforcers include Belgium along its frontier with France, and Austria and nine Balkan states that are trying to seal off Greece from the rest of Europe. They join Sweden, Hungary, Denmark and others in imposing controls of various sorts.

The aim is to contain the crop of Middle Eastern and African migrants currently in Europe where they are right now. Belgium wants to prevent them from decamping from Calais to the Flemish ferry port of Zeebrugge as they try to get to Britain. Austria and the Balkan states want to block the migrant path from the Aegean up to Germany. In recent days, thousands of migrants have piled up along the newly closed border between Greece and Macedonia. Border closures would deter migrants, especially those coming for economic opportunity.

It’s no coincidence European Council President Donald Tusk travelled to a nearly closed-off Greece this week to warn economic migrants to stay home. Europe faces a brewing humanitarian disaster as a result of the border closures, but perhaps less of one than would develop if migrants started appearing by the hundreds of thousands as the weather warms this spring.

One aim of Monday’s summit with Turkey will be to goad Ankara into accepting economic migrants who are deported from Europe. Speeding up the application of European immigration and asylum laws in this way would still leave Europe with the many thousands of legitimate refugees pouring out of Syria and Iraq, but discouraging economic migrants would take some of the strain off Europe’s already overloaded system. CONTINUE AT SITE