RUTHFULLY YOURS

For all the attention attracted by the battle against Islamic State in the Middle East, Islamism is also wreaking havoc in Africa. Jihadist groups control territory stretching from the Horn of Africa to the Mediterranean coast and south to Nigeria, and that crescent was ablaze this weekend.

Al Shabaab on Saturday took responsibility for a bomb that ripped a yard-long hole in a Daallo Airlines plane while it was flying from Mogadishu to Djibouti on Feb. 2. The would-be bomber blew himself out of the cabin, while in a miracle the other passengers and the crew survived.

Al Shabaab, which is al Qaeda’s Somalian franchise, called the attack “retribution for the crimes committed by the coalition of Western crusaders.” Al Shabaab said it intended to bomb a Turkish Airlines flight but switched targets after bad weather forced the Turkish carrier to cancel. The Daallo plane was carrying many of the passengers from the cancelled Turkish flight. Ankara, a NATO member, is building a military base in Somalia and contributes to antiterror efforts in Africa. READ MORE AT SITE

Welcome to Permanent War, as Russian Prime Minister Dimitri Medvedev dubbed today’s Middle East. It isn’t as bad as it sounds, provided, of course, that you’re not in it. The bonfire built on tribal enmity and national disillusionment will have to burn itself out over time. The risk lies in the possible spread of the fire outside the region.
First, a quick review of what is not going to happen in Syria, rhetoric to the contrary:

Neither Turkey nor Saudi Arabia will send ground troops into northern Syria and fight US-backed Kurdish militia. Turkish Defense Minister Ismet Yilmaz declared on Sunday that his country had “no intention” of sending its army into Syria, while Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir said that deployment of Saudi forces is up to the United States.
Turkey won’t send combat aircraft into Syria to be shot down by Russian air defenses. Turkey would only sacrifice its aircraft in the hope of drawing the United States into a showdown with Russia, and the United States has evidently told Ankara that it’s on its own. Saudi Arabia may base some aircraft in Turkey, but won’t use them. The United States does not want to finnd out how good Russia’s S-400 air defense system actually is; Pentagon analysts believe that it is very good indeed.
The Russian-Iranian reduction of Aleppo will add little to the flood of Syrian refugees. Perhaps 40,000 people have fled Aleppo and nearby towns. Syria’s refugee count had already reached 5 million in late 2013.
Russia and the United States will not stumble into a strategic confrontation over a long-since-unsalvageable patch of Levantine desert.

While Western civilization often caves in nowadays to demonstrations of Islamic supremacy one small, appeasing step at a time, a European academic institution firmly stood its ground recently and upheld Western values against one such Islamist test probe.

The Technical University of Dortmund (TUD) in Dortmund, Germany, finally had enough of Muslim students bullying others, especially women, after the former had taken over for a prayer room an area the university had set aside as a quiet space for all students. Located in the physics building, TUD recently closed the facility.

“We set up the “Quiet Room” in 2012,” said university spokeswoman Eva Prost in an interview with Der Spiegel magazine. “A few months after that, there were already endeavours to make a Muslim prayer room out of it.”

The university had originally intended the room to be a “religion and world-view neutral” space to accommodate students of different faiths attending TUD from around the world. Until 2012, it was reported Catholic and Protestant institutions near the university had provided such students with rooms for this purpose.

“Our “Quiet Room” was rather an offer to everyone who was looking for peace and a place to rest in the often stressful, daily life of a university,” said Prost, adding that it was permitted to say a prayer there “if it did not disturb others or exclude anyone from use of the room.”

But instead of relieving stress, the TUD’s well-intentioned idea was rather to cause a lot of it.

University officials may have been unfamiliar with the doctrine of Islamic supremacy, which claims the superiority of Islam over all other religions, when they made the decision to open such a facility. Along with the equality-of-faiths-be-damned attitude, inherent in Islamic supremacism is also a condemnation of a fundamental, underlying value of Western civilization, that of tolerance.

In America, Omar Ahad, a co-founder of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), probably summed up best the Islamic supremacist doctrine. When making a speech in California, he stated: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”

Perhaps because our species comes with ten fingers, ninth anniversaries are popularly viewed as dates of little significance in the grand scheme of things. There can be exceptions, however, and this coming weekend — February 20, to be precise — will be just such an occasion, the reason being not so much the circuits of the sun our planet has completed since a momentous decision was made, but the identity, acumen and credibility of the individual who made that initiative’s implementation his personal and moral crusade.

Take a bow, Malcolm Turnbull!

As of Saturday, it will be nine years since he began the process that banned old-fashioned, cheap and reliable incandescent light globes and mandated their replacement with planet-saving compact fluorescent ones (if you ignore their mercury content, health risks and landfill contamination).

Oh, but it was to have been golden era, albeit illuminated by the eye-straining white light and virtuous green penumbra of Turnbull’s great gift to Big Fluoro. What manufacturer does not dream of seeing inexpensive, off-patent technologies replaced by products, their products, costing ten times as much? That negative received little attention at the time and, when it was mentioned, carbonphobics dismissed such concerns as beneath contempt. Quibble about a few extra dollars when the fate of the Earth hangs in sweaty balance? How dare you!

The Sydney Morning Herald, to cite but one institution beset then as now by the dimmest of dim bulbs, perceived in the initiative further proof of the unique radiance that beams from every orifice of the man who would become the nation’s leader. Here is a little of that report from 2007:

Though the days of supermarket shelves full of 40-cent light bulbs may be numbered, the lighting industry predicts the price shock will not last long. In many cases, compact fluorescent lamps sell for about $10 each, but typically last six times as long as their predecessors.

Like Western Europe, Canada, and the United States, Australia has been on the receiving end of a growing stream of Muslim immigrants, to the great advantage of the domestic political leftist parties. The Australian Labor Party, which is currently the opposition to the centrist Liberal/National coalition that has formed the government, has long favored Muslim immigration.

Now that Muslims located in Sydney’s western suburbs form a significant voting bloc, the ALP is going hard against Israel. Andrew Bolt, syndicated columnist based at the Melbourne Herald-Sun is denouncing this in no uncertain terms:

Labor, desperate for Muslim votes in Western Sydney, is openly pandering to bigots and anti Semites:

NSW Labor delegates to this weekend’s state conference have proposed … 18 policy agenda items relating to Indigenous affairs and 24 about the environment. But there are a staggering 28 motions regarding Israel, most of them critical, out of the entire 45 foreign policy items up for discussion.

Shame on them. Shame. (snip)

If Labor passes such motions, any Jew who backs the party is a collaborator to Jew-hatred.

He documents the foreign policy obsession of the party:

Talk to Israelis about the United States these days and you will provoke a physical reaction. Barack Obama is an eye roll. John Kerry is a grimace. The administration’s conduct of regional policy is a slow, sad shake of the head. The current state of the presidential race makes for a full-blown shudder. The Israeli rundown of the candidates goes roughly as follows: “Hillary—she doesn’t like us.” “Cruz—I don’t like him.” “Rubio—is he done for?” “Sanders—oy vey.” “Trump—omigod.”

As for Israel’s own troubles—a continuing Palestinian campaign of stabbings; evidence that Hamas is rebuilding its network of terror tunnels under the Gaza border and wants to restart the 2014 war; more than 100,000 rockets and guided missiles in the hands of Hezbollah—that’s just the Middle East being itself. It’s the U.S. not being itself that is the real novelty, and is forcing Israel to adjust.
I’ve spent the better part of a week talking to senior officials, journalists, intellectuals and politicians from across Israel’s political spectrum. None of it was on the record, but the consistent theme is that, while the Jewish state still needs the U.S., especially in the form of military aid, it also needs to diversify its strategic partnerships. This may yet turn out to be the historic achievement of Benjamin Netanyahu’s long reign as prime minister.

On Sunday, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon publicly shook hands with former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal at the Munich Security Conference. In January, Israeli cabinet member Yuval Steinitz made a trip to Abu Dhabi, where Israel is opening an office at a renewable-energy association. Turkey is patching up ties with Israel. In June, Jerusalem and Riyadh went public with the strategic talks between them. In March, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi told the Washington Post that he speaks to Mr. Netanyahu “a lot.”

Washington should think more than twice about allowing Turkey and Saudi Arabia, its Sunni allies, militarily to engage their Shiite enemies in Syria. Allowing Sunni supremacists into a deeper sectarian war is not a rational way to block Russian expansion in the eastern Mediterranean. And it certainly will not serve America’s interests.

Turkey and Saudi Arabia are too weak militarily to damage Russia’s interests. It is a Russian trap — and precisely what the Russians are hoping their enemies will fall into.

After Russia’s increasingly bold military engagement in war-torn Syria in favor of President Bashar al-Assad and the Shiite bloc, the regional Sunni powers — Turkey and its ally, Saudi Arabia — have felt nervous and incapable of influencing the civil war in favor of the many Islamist groups fighting Assad’s forces.

Most recently, the Turks and Saudis, after weeks of negotiations, decided to flex their muscles and join forces to engage a higher-intensity war in the Syrian theater. This is dangerous for the West. It risks provoking further Russian and Iranian involvement in Syria, and sparking a NATO-Russia confrontation.

After Turkey, citing violation of its airspace, shot down a Russian Su-24 military jet on Nov. 24, Russia has used the incident as a pretext to reinforce its military deployments in Syria and bomb the “moderate Islamists.” Those are the Islamists who fight Assad’s forces and are supported by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The Russian move included installing the advanced S-400 long-range air and anti-missile defense systems.

The reports of the death of Polish democracy, to paraphrase the oft told line of the eminent American writer, satirist, and political critic Mark Twain, have been greatly exaggerated.

Contrary to the alarmist media reports emanating from the media mandarins of the mainstream Western press, most Poles on the ground, constituting a silent majority as clearly indicated by the recent Presidential and Parliamentary elections, want to reassure those in the West that in Poland today the threats to democracy being “spun” by the global media complex are grossly mischaracterized and even wholly manufactured.

Democracy in Poland is the healthiest it has ever been in the post-1989, modern era.

The mainstream Western press apparatus however, taking its cues from the Polish mainstream press and those connected to the last government – freshly ejected from office due to its brazen, systemic corruption and its agenda of deeper EU integration – continues to criticise the recently and democratically elected new government and to deliver egregiously incomplete accounts of the actions on the ground; well parsed to ensure no inconvenient truths make it to the Western reader.

This active “spin” is meant to obfuscate the truth about the last eight years as well as to “poison the well” for those elected with the largest democratic mandate in modern Polish history, the former opposition party, Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc– PiS).

Undeniably, this is the first government elected in the post-Communist period with a unilateral imprimatur to govern without coalition partners, but that rarely gets disclosed in recent printed “analysis” as that would undermine the “fascist coup” narrative being vociferously peddled by media, foreign and domestic, and unelected EU apparatchiks who are seeing widespread European rejection of their policies and control.

1. Abject surrender to PLO demands for unilateral recognition of a Palestinian State outside the parameters defined by Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, the Oslo Accords and the Bush Roadmap.

2. A desperate attempt to appease France’s 4.7 million Muslims as they protest against the continuing state of emergency declared after the series of co-ordinated attacks by Islamic State in Paris last November that saw 130 people murdered and 368 wounded.

France made its intentions clear in the following statement released on 30 January by Foreign Affairs Minister Laurent Fabius:

“France will engage in the coming weeks in the preparation of an international conference bringing together the parties and their main partners, American, European, Arab, notably to preserve and make happen the two-state solution”

Mr Fabius issued this veiled threat on France 24:

“If this attempt to achieve a negotiated solution reaches a dead end, we will take responsibility and recognize the Palestinian state”

Respected commentator Aaron David Miller has already delivered his verdict on the proposed International conference in a scathing tweet:

“Another bone headed French play.Convene a peace conference doomed to fail; then recognize a faux Palestinian state”

In its Spring 2015 Global Attitudes Survey the Pew Research Centre found that 76 per cent of France’s population had favourable views of France’s Muslim population whilst 24 per cent had unfavourable views.

France no doubt hopes that calling this pro-Arab international conference will stem any growth in the anti-Muslim view in the next Pew Survey. Given the violent ongoing Muslim demonstrations such hope is doomed.