RUTHFULLY YOURS

The outrage is that Hijab Solidarity Day will be taking place under the auspices of the City of Ottawa, the capital of Canada. It is not the role of a democratic government to celebrate religious symbols or to help religions proselytize.

The government’s acceptance of an Ottawa Hijab Solidarity Day amounts to accepting a radical legal system that is completely contrary to Canada’s democratic values, and crosses the line that separates Church and State. Endorsing the hijab is endorsing the first step of an extremist ideology that leads to and condones honor killings, female genital mutilation (FGM) and the oppression of women.

In 2007, Aqsa Parvez, a 16-year-old Pakistani Muslim living in Toronto, was strangled to death by her father. Her crime was that, as a free woman in Canada, she chose not to wear a hijab. In another case in Canada, in 2012, four Muslim women were murdered by their own family for refusing to wear a hijab and preferring Western clothing.

This Thursday, February 25, 2016, the city of Ottawa will be holding a public event celebrating the hijab, Islam’s physical repression of women.

The City for All Women Initiative (CAWI) organization, backed by the City Council of Ottawa, is hosting the Ottawa Hijab Solidarity Day celebration, also called “Walking with Our Muslims Sisters,” at City Hall. According to CAWI, the main purpose of this event is to encourage non-Muslim women to wear a hijab to understand life as a Muslim woman.

The outrage is that such an event will be taking place under the auspices of the City of Ottawa, the capital of Canada. Under Islamic Shari’a law, the hijab is an expression of the suppression of women and is used as a tool to persecute women by their male counterparts.

The actual number of crimes in Germany committed by migrants in 2015 may exceed 400,000.

The report does not include crime data from North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state in Germany and also the state with the largest number of migrants. North Rhine-Westphalia’s biggest city is Cologne, where, on New Year’s Eve, hundreds of German women were sexually assaulted by migrants.

“For years the policy has been to leave the [German] population in the dark about the actual crime situation… The citizens are being played for fools. Rather than tell the truth, they [government officials] are evading responsibility and passing blame onto the citizens and the police.” — André Schulz, director, Association of Criminal Police, Germany.

10% of the migrants from the chaos in Iraq and Syria have reached Europe so far: “Eight to ten million migrants are still on the way.” — Gerd Müller, Development Minister.

Migrants committed 208,344 crimes in 2015, according to a confidential police report that was leaked to the German newspaper, Bild. This figure represents an 80% increase over 2014 and works out to around 570 crimes committed by migrants every day, or 23 crimes each hour, between January and December 2015.

The actual number of migrant crimes is far higher, however, because the report, produced by the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA), includes only crimes that have been solved (aufgeklärten Straftaten). According to Statista, the German statistics agency, on average only around half of all crimes committed in Germany in any given year are solved (Aufklärungsquote). This implies that the actual number of crimes committed by migrants in 2015 may exceed 400,000.

Moreover, the report — “Crime in the Context of Immigration” (Kriminalität im Kontext von Zuwanderung) — includes data from only 13 of Germany’s 16 federal states.

The report does not include crime data from North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state in Germany and also the state with the largest number of migrants. North Rhine-Westphalia’s biggest city is Cologne, where, on New Year’s Eve, hundreds of German women were sexually assaulted by migrants. It is not yet clear why those crimes were not included in the report.

The report also lacks crime data from Hamburg, the second-largest city in Germany, and Bremen, the second most populous city in Northern Germany.

Further, many crimes are simply not reported or are deliberately overlooked: political leaders across Germany have ordered police to turn a blind eye to crimes perpetrated by migrants, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiments.

According to the report, most of the crimes were committed by migrants from: Syria (24%), Albania (17%), Kosovo (14%), Serbia (11%), Afghanistan (11%), Iraq (9%), Eritrea (4%), Macedonia (4%), Pakistan (4%) and Nigeria (2%).

The catastrophic failure of Peronist populism was sealed at last by November’s presidential elections and the victory of conservative free-marketeer Mauricio Macri. In the Vatican, however, one can only wonder if the brilliantined dictator’s direct and indirect influence lives on
History is a fair-minded goddess. The Soviet Union got nowhere in the seventy years it applied for, and which the goddess granted, to change the world. In compensation, a leader is now at the helm of the Russian government able to restore a sense of national pride and achievement which augurs well for the future and, all things considered, is vastly preferable compared to what the Soviets had to offer. German Nationalism and Socialism put the hand up, got the nod, but ran out of puff in less than the thousand years they had asked for. To make amends history showered the ruined country with more than a sufficiency of economic prosperity.

Argentine populism staked its claim in 1946, was given the call, and for the following sixty-nine years, in and out of government, with or without its founding leader or any of his wives, retained a pre-eminent political position mostly influenced by the Justicialista ideology bequeathed by Juan Perón and principally responsible for bringing the country to its knees. The catastrophic failure of Peronist populism was sealed in November’s presidential elections with the victory of the conservative advocate of free-market economics, Mauricio Macri, whose victory preceded by only a few days the equally decisive triumph of the opposition in the Venezuelan parliamentary elections. Taken together, these two events mark a definitive turning point in the political climate of Latin America, away from the clownish antics of Chávez and the corrupting populism of the Peronists towards a restoration of economic sanity and civic virtue.

Macri brings to his high office valuable experience gained during a successful career in business followed by three impressive terms as the elected mayor of Buenos Aires, which ranks as the principal political office outside the national presidency. It is also quite probable that the consolation that history has up her sleeve for Argentina’s melancholy populist twilight is the appointment of an Argentinian Jesuit to the Holy See, as many of Pope Francis’ public pronouncements are alarmingly consistent with what his Peronist compatriots have been uttering during the past seven decades and it is therefore apposite for his arrival in the Vatican to become immortalised as Perón’s last hurrah.

Stalin’s dissident daughter might well have found sanctuary in Australia. Instead, it was a publisher’s rich advance that drew her to the US, where she eluded the same Soviet gorilla who tried to bundle Mrs Petrov back to Moscow, but never the curse of her father’s infamy
In the comedy Children of the Revolution (1996) Judy Davis’s character bonks Joe Stalin in the 1950s and their love child, Joe, gains a career in the Australian police union. In the real world Australia came quite close to adopting Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, as a political refugee in 1967. Svetlana, then 41, was an unwelcome arrival by taxi at the US Embassy in New Delhi, demanding asylum. The US was trying to mend fences with the USSR, and Washington wanted her thrown back to the unforgiving Soviets.

Too late, they were told: she was already on Qantas to Rome. Actually, the flight had been delayed two hours and Svetlana was still in the departure lounge. The sequel is laconically described in John Blaxland’s “The Protest Years: The Official History of ASIO” (Vol 2, 1963-75), published last October.

Occasionally ASIO was approached by the Americans to consider resettling defectors. Generally, the Australian Government looked favourably on requests to resettle such people but there were instances when it objected.

In 1967, for example, the Americans approached [ASIO director-general Charles] Spry to see if Australia would be prepared to grant asylum to Svetlana Iosifovna Stalin, the daughter of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Spry advised the Minister for External Affairs, Sir Paul Hasluck, and the Secretary of the Prime Minister’s Department, John Bunting, that a number of factors had to be taken into consideration before agreeing to the request, although ‘the difficulties of looking after her would not be insuperable’. Australia had plenty of experience looking after the Petrovs.

Hasluck acknowledged that the principal argument in favour of granting the request was ‘to please the Americans’, but believed that acceding to the request would have significant repercussions on relations with the Soviet Union and South-East Asian countries. Hasluck saw more disadvantages than advantages, and Prime Minister Holt agreed. In the end, soon afterwards, she settled in the United States.

Svetlana defected on March 6, 1967. The flurry of memos began when Svetlana was holed up in secrecy and stateless in Rome. New Zealand turned down a concurrent US request to take her. South Africa offered residence but she refused. Moving on to Switzerland, she had a US-organised disguise as “Fraulein Carlen”, an Irish tourist. The cover was so weak that an ex-Soviet circus performer, now an Australian citizen, mailed her a marriage proposal.

petrov mrsSvetlana made it to New York on a six-month tourist visa. She’d been hiding her manuscript Twenty Letters to a Friend and a US publisher offered $US1.5 million for the rights. This windfall meant she needed no official subsidies and could enter and live in the US as a private citizen.

Margaret Thatcher predicted that it would end in tears. She described “the drive to create a European superstate” as “perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era.” The late British prime minister knew the lesson of the past: When politicians try to impose grand designs on peoples of different histories, languages and cultural allegiances, the edifice totters and collapses.

Once devoutly pro-European, Thatcher had come to worry by the late 1980s that grand projects emerging from Brussels, like the effort to create a single European currency, would centralize power and create a vast bureaucracy. She saw that democratic accountability would be impossible across a wildly polyglot European Union. And she feared that the sort of cronyism and collusion among big business and politicians that she had dismantled in the U.K. would re-emerge in Brussels. Almost every one of her fears has been vindicated.
Britain will soon have the opportunity to decide whether or not to remain a part of the European project that it joined in 1973. After EU leaders agreed late Friday to several key British demands, including a so-called emergency brake to let the U.K. restrict welfare benefits for EU migrants, a nationwide referendum is likely to be held in June, fulfilling a promise made by Prime Minister David Cameron at the last general election. Polls suggest that the outcome of the vote is too close to call, but a British exit—or “Brexit”—is a real possibility. It would also be a wise choice, for the U.K., for Europe and for the U.S.

Prominent Conservative politicians, including Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Gove, are expected to campaign for Brexit, endangering the unity of the government. But Mr. Cameron, most of his top ministers, the leader of the opposition Labour Party and the country’s largest businesses will hold firm with the EU. They will argue that Britain should not walk away but should remain at the EU’s highest table, helping to fix the continent’s problems. They worry that if Britain leaves the EU, London won’t be able to influence the rules that govern the world’s richest single market, with more than 500 million people. READ MORE AT SITE

As the Russians insist that the Assad government is the only legitimate government, all anti-Assad fighters — ISIS, al Qaeda-related, or U.S.-backed or Turkish-backed “moderates” — are, by definition, terrorists.

Russian — and in particular Syrian — tactics are appalling. Washington would rather not be associated with them, but has a horror of the vacuum that might emerge if Assad is swept aside. Mainly, the U.S. has hung its hat on the International Syria Support Group. The U.S. is muddled, as usual, without a clear goal, clear allies or fixed positions beyond support for a “political process.”

The U.S. is looking less and less relevant, as historic Great Powers do what they have historically done best — fight for their national interests as they define them. President Obama appears to be conceding the lead to Russia and Russian aims.

The shelling of Syrian soldiers by the Turkish military is one more step back into Great Power politics — historic Turkish-Russian enmity played out over Kurds and Syrians. The U.S. appears to believe 21st century wars cannot be won by military force and that battling parties can be induced to set aside their national and religious aims for a negotiated “peace.” Meanwhile, the parties to the conflict are using their armies to pursue victory.

Last week, Turkey attacked Kurdish fighters who were struggling to connect Kurdish territory in northern Iraq with a Kurdish enclave in northern Syria along the Turkish border. The Kurds, backed by Russian air power, want to oust Turkish-backed Syrian rebels from the Azaz region, in order to create contiguous territory from northern Iraq to Syrian Kurdistan, and prevent the Syrian rebels from being resupplied by Turkey. The net effect is to boost Kurdish-Russian cooperation; to provide relief for Assad’s army in the north; to increase Turkey’s hostility toward Russia; and possibly to put Turkey on a collision course with the U.S. — if Ankara believes its position in NATO will protect it from Russian fallout. (It should be noted that although Turkish troops attacked Syrians, they stayed clear of threatening Russia directly.)

The U.S. has urged both Turkey and the Kurds to decrease hostilities, but Turkey dismissed U.S. calls for a ceasefire. Attacks on the Kurds continued as Turkey began to fire on Syrian forces, and Turkey’s President Tayyip Recep Erdogan did not rule out a ground attack inside Syria.

http://acdemocracy.org/

The U.S. bombing of an ISIS training camp in Qasr Talel, Libya, today, killed 43 operatives, including their Tunisian leader, Noureddine Chouchane. This airstrike came shortly after leaks from the defense department that “the Obama administration has turned down a U.S. military plan for an assault on ISIS’s regional hub there,” the port city of Sirte.The U.S. involvement in Libya that begun with Operation Odyssey Dawn‘s airstrikes on Libya in March 2011 assisted Muslim Brotherhood affiliates efforts to oust Muammar Gadhafi.  The help to the anti-Gadhafi opposition resulted in a war-torn country with daily violent clashes. This gave al Qaeda’s adherents the opportunity “to establish well-armed, well-trained and combat-experienced militias,” concluded a report from the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress in August 2012.Libya became a fertile ground for ISIS.Libya’s coastline’s strategic importance as a stepstone to Europe was not wasted on ISIS. In January 2015, ISIS started to ship more than a million Muslim refugees to the Italian island of Lampedusa, just 162 nm from the Libyan coastline. This was followed by repeated calls for ISIS operatives to travel to Libya. Intelligence sources reported that “ISIS earns millions of dollars from taking part in the networks that smuggle migrants to Europe.”It is unknown the ISIS operatives arrived in Europe via Libya as refugees. Indeed, until yesterday, ISIS operatives who travelled to Libya, had the ability to travel to the U.S. from any
country in the  U.S.

https://visaguide.world/us-visa/nonimmigrant/visitor/visa-waiver-program

Recently I found myself in a chance conversation with a former head of the Mossad’s Directorate of Operations. The former master spy, whom I had never met before, knew that I am a journalist.

He was aware of my political views.

Directing his remarks at a friend of mine, he declared that 99 percent of Mossad and Shin Bet officers are leftists. He then added triumphantly that according to a former commander of the air force whose name he cited, 99% of the air force’s pilots are similarly leftists.

Initially, I dismissed his comments as obnoxious chest-beating by a man who felt like irritating a group of right-wingers.

But given the source, it is impossible to simply brush off what he said. And to be clear, far more troubling than the prospect that Israel’s security establishment is uniformly leftist is the notion that there is any intellectual or ideological uniformity of any kind in the ranks of our defense community.

But given our defense community’s record in recent years, there is ample reason to believe that there is more than a grain of salt in the spy chief’s boast.

Consider Israel’s handling of Gaza.

According to a number of senior officers, at the end of Operation Protective Edge in 2014, the IDF’s senior commanders convened in Tel Aviv to determine how to handle the Hamas regime going forward.

During Protective Edge, Israel learned a few things about Hamas and about the strategic balance of power between Israel and Hamas in the region and the world.

On the ground Israel learned that Hamas bases its offensive capabilities on civilian infrastructure.

Hamas placed its missiles, its communications centers and its operational commands inside civilian buildings including private homes, hospitals, clinics, schools, mosques and UN offices.

As far as the strategic balance and resources of both sides, during the war Hamas enjoyed the de facto backing of the Obama administration.

Throughout the war, the administration pressured Israel to accept Hamas’s cease-fire terms as dictated by its state sponsors Qatar and Turkey.

On the other hand, Israel was able to avoid bowing to the US’s pro-Hamas demands because throughout the conflict we enjoyed the open support of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

In other words, during the war, Israel discovered that Hamas’s military strategy was based entirely on an implicit alliance with the West, which attacked Israel for targeting Hamas’s military infrastructure, which, again, was all based in civilian structures.

I am in bewilderment of those who have made a fifty year career, costing billions of dollars, in pursuit of an elusive Two-State Solution.

Personal disclosure. I was a member of this cult until the harsh reality of truth hit my hometown of Netanya in the form of post-Oslo Accord, Arafat-inspired, Palestinian terrorism.

I was fortunate. I was hit with a psychological smack in the head. I got off easily. Too many of our citizens were killed or badly injured by the incessant suicide bombings, car bombs and shootings that only stopped by Operation Defensive Shield which targeted the terrorist cells under Palestinian control.

It is shocking how persistent people are to pursue this Two-State Solution as if it is the only oasis in a barren, arid, desert. But this fifty year trek toward a shimmering distant mirage draws sloggers toward an unreachable goal. Had they looked left or right they may have discovered alternative routes to peace, rather than doggedly plod toward a fantasy.

Way back in January 1988, a New York Times article stated that “Gaza could be the Singapore of the Middle East.” So it could if Gazan Arabs weren’t so passionately and religiously bound to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The twisted tribal code of Arab honor leaves them with a sense of shame and inferiority when Israeli cooperation and assistance is offered to them. Rather than benefit and prosper they grudgingly accept largesse while plotting to chop off the hand extended to them in peace. The resentment can be seen in the ‘anti-normalization’ campaigning of BDS activists encouraged by a large segment of the Palestinian leadership.

Truth be told, the signs were there for all to see decades ago. Resear

Back in the days when Garrison Keillor was still funny, he told stories about the pioneering settlers who founded Lake Woebegon, Minnesota in the 19th century. In the story, Norwegian immigrants settled in the coldest part of Minnesota because it reminded them of home – and then, when winter came, they remembered why they had left there in the first place. German Catholics wandered into Lake Woebegon by mistake, “but they refused to admit it.”

So they stayed.

Today, Angela Merkel’s Germany is making another suicidal gesture by opening the borders to tens of thousands of predatory, war-indoctrinated jihadis – young men of military age, who have been taught to despise, hate, and beat up anybody outside their own Muslim sect. They are indoctrinated in war theology – the last major war theology on Earth. Merkel and the EU have drifted into this suicidal fiasco by mistake – but they still refuse to admit it.

It’s the German Catholics and Lake Woebegon again. Sweden and Germany (especially Prussia) have a long folk reputation for getting completely stuck in whatever the current absolutist ideology happens to be. This kind of fanatical belief led to centuries of bloody warfare between German-speaking Lutherans and Catholics. Then it was Prussian imperialism with Frederick the Great and later Bismarck, who turned the independent provinces of Germany into one unified and self-glorifying Reich. Prussian egomania turned into Karl Marx’s “philosophy” and Richard Wagner’s ideology in 1848; Marx preached revolutionary terror, and Wagner led directly to Hitler. But the absolutist pathology over there was still the same. Only the slogans changed.

Today Angela Merkel and the EU preach peace, peace, but they stupidly let in 50 million easily indoctrinated Muslims – so there will be no peace. Isaiah (48:22) was right again. The Swedes, Germans, and French still yearn for that Napoleonic absolutism, and the EU is always frantically denying that it plans to become another Roman Empire.