RUTHFULLY YOURS

North Korea said Friday it was holding a U.S. student for committing an unspecified “hostile act,” the latest in a series of detained American tourists and missionaries that Pyongyang has at times used to try to win diplomatic leverage with Washington.

Otto Frederick Warmbier, an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia, was accused of being manipulated by the U.S. government, according to a brief report from the Korean Central News Agency. The report provided no details of Mr. Warmbier’s actions other than to allege that he entered the country “for the purpose of bringing down the foundation of its single-minded unity.”

Mr. Warmbier was detained in Pyongyang on Jan. 2, according to Troy Collins of Young Pioneer Tours, the tour company that took him to North Korea. Mr. Collins declined to provide further details but said Mr. Warmbier’s family had been informed of his detention.

A deal that sent $1.7 billion in U.S. funds to Iran, announced alongside the freeing of five Americans from Iranian jails, has emerged as a new flashpoint amid a claim in Tehran that the transaction amounted to a ransom payment.

The U.S. Treasury Department wired the money to Iran around the same time its theocratic government allowed three American prisoners to fly out of Tehran on Sunday aboard a Dassault Falcon jet owned by the Swiss air force.

The prisoner swap also involved freedom for two other Americans held in Iran as well as for seven Iranians charged or convicted by the U.S.

The announcements coincided with the implementation of the nuclear agreement with Iran, lifting international economic sanctions in exchange for Iran curtailing its nuclear program.

The $1.7 billion financial settlement ended a 35-year legal saga that centered on a purchase of U.S. arms by Iran’s last monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, that were never delivered because of the Iranian revolution in 1979.

The White House described the settlement as a victory for taxpayers, arguing that the U.S. was likely to lose in arbitration under way in The Hague, Netherlands, and could have been held liable for billions more if the process had dragged on.

Reprinted from InvestigativeProject.org.

In the aftermath of New Year’s Eve’s mass rapes of European women by Muslim refugees, the questions have been repeated: Should we have known this kind of thing would happen? Could we have known? And from local bars to parliaments, from family dinners to the nightly news, the answers keep coming back: Yes; we could. Yes, we should.

But interestingly, the people who say this with the most conviction are not right-wing Muslim-bashers, or activists opposed to the settling of Syrian refugees in Europe. They are Muslims, and mostly Muslim women.

Over and over, these women, and other Western women who have worked in the Middle East and North Africa, pointed out the commonality of rape in the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia (the MENASAS region), and noted the oppression of women in most cultures there. (The Kurds form a notable exception.)

Many point to the rapes in Tahrir Square in 2011 and 2013 as cautionary tales, describing the so-called “circle of hell” that women faced then: lone women surrounded by men whose hands groped and pulled, ripped and pressed, and eventually overpowered. A 2013 study conducted after the attacks showed that a stunning 99 percent of Egyptian women had experienced some sort of sexual harassment.

The Palestinian leadership is very busy waging political, economic and propaganda warfare against Israel.

In Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority is holding official funerals to “heroes” who stabbed to death Israelis, and encouraging others to also become martyrs.

In the International arena, the Palestinian Authority is working hard to obtain an Arab League, EU and the UN Security Council resolution that will condemn and declare all Israeli West Bank “settlements” illegal under international law and an obstacle to peace. However, at the same time, Palestinian supporters in Europe and the U.S. are making efforts to delegitimize the Jewish State of Israel. They are successfully lobbying professional groups and universities to ban Israelis.

Today, “71 British doctors have submitted a request to the World Medical Association to have the Israel Medical Association expelled. In London’s Kings College, on January 16, 2016, a group of KCL Action Palestine, stormed an event where the former head of the Israeli secret service Shin Bet and commander-in-chief of the navy, Ami Ayalon was speaking. They threw chairs, smashed windows and set off fire alarms. At least 15 MET police officers were needed to evacuate the building. Despite the violence, and damage to property no arrest were made. Apparently, the police considered this a free-speech demonstration.

Elsewhere in Europe and the U.S. the Palestinians BDS movement to ban Israelis in Academia and business, as well as Israeli products of Jews from Judea and Samaria and the Golan Hights, is in full swing. Last November the European Union decided to allow such warning labels and supermarket chains throughout Europe stopped carrying Israeli products. In the U.S., the latest to join the BDS movement, was the pension fund for the United Methodist Church, one of the largest Protestant denominations in the United States. It has removed five Israeli banks from its investment portfolio.

What to fear in Germany — an ideologically driven leader who unilaterally is changing the demographics of the nation without public support, or an angry populist counter-movement that vows to keep Germans safe by any means necessary when the government won’t? Both, or neither? Is Germany postmodern in erasing borders, or premodern in bullying its neighbors to do the same?

Does the world want Germans to stand up, reassert their pride in Western liberality and tolerance, and insist that migrants either integrate and follow Western values or go back home and stay there? Or does it want Germans to more or less continue to repress any expressions of cultural confidence?

To even the least-informed observer, German chancellor Angela Merkel’s recent decision to allow tens of thousands of young Muslim migrants — about two-thirds of them young men — into Germany from the war-torn and terrorist-infested Middle East seemed unhinged. Over a million migrants entered Germany in 2015 alone, the vast majority of them young, male, Muslim, from the Middle East. They were not refugees by any classical definition. Apparently Merkel in particular, and Germans in general, must assert that they are the most recklessly postmodern of all Western nations in order to reassure the world, 77 years after the outbreak of World War II, that they are no longer the most recklessly nationalistic.

Even a cynic who saw Germany’s demographic crisis and need for unskilled labor as the catalyst for welcoming in hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern males could not figure out why Merkel would bring such chaos to what is otherwise usually the least chaotic nation in the world. That migrants are currently harassing and, at worst, assaulting German women is the logical, not the aberrant result of dumping thousands of young Muslim men from the Middle East into one of Europe’s most affluent and most progressive cultures.

Walter Laqueur is the author of, among other books, Weimar, A History of Terrorism, Fascism: Past, Present, Future, and The Dream that Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union. His newest book, Putinism: Russia and Its Future with the West, has just been released by Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s.

For the sake of Europe’s future, it would pay to revisit the many warning signs that, though pointed out at the time, were mocked, dismissed, or denied.

According to Daniel Johnson, Europe is in grave trouble. These days, few would disagree. To the many longstanding and unsolved problems facing the continent over the last decades, several new ones have recently been added: the economic disaster in Greece and similar economic straits elsewhere, the mass invasion of refugees from the Middle East and Africa, and the looming prospect of a British exit (“Brexit,” for short). Among the latest books about the condition of Europe, none bears the confident title of Mark Leonard’s Why Europe will Run the 21st Century, published only a short decade ago.

Does Europe have a future? That’s the question Johnson asks, and it’s the right question. But there are other questions, one of which is whether today’s crisis came as a total surprise or whether unmistakable warning signs existed that were systematically ignored or denied. This is not a matter of historical interest alone; there might well be lessons to be gleaned for, yes, the future of Europe.

These creepy leaflets are testament to a much deeper malaise.

Something deeply disturbing is happening in Europe. Take a look at the multi-language leaflet, produced by the Health and Social Services Department of the Swiss city of Lucerne. It informs migrants not to assault women ahead of Lucerne’s upcoming carnival. It features a cross next to a cartoon of a man hitting a woman and a man beating a child, and a tick next to a picture of a man kissing a man, a woman kissing a woman, and a woman kissing a man. Similar flyers – emphasising local rules of behaviour – have been produced in towns throughout central Europe. In Bornheim in Germany, the authorities have gone a step further and banned male migrants from a public swimming pool after women complained of being sexually harassed

Although the educational propaganda produced by local authorities for migrants is full of modern, right-on terms like ‘appropriate behaviour’, the principal focus is sex. So a leaflet circulated in the German town of Hardheim might ask migrants not to relieve themselves in parks and gardens, but it’s mainly concerned with telling migrants to avoid contact with young women. These leaflets recycle the traditional narrative of protecting the ‘weaker sex’ from uncivilised types in the ostensibly value-free language of multicultural Europe.

It is particularly disheartening that these instant rules of conduct echo failed and discredited attempts to ‘educate’ immigrants in the past. The classic example of a well-meant but misguided attempt to educate Muslim immigrants in the values of a host nation is the 2006 film produced by the Dutch government. To The Netherlands told viewers that ‘people do not make a fuss about nudity’, ramming the point home with footage of an attractive woman sunbathing topless. It also explained that homosexuals possess the same rights as heterosexuals, including the right to marry. To illustrate the point, the film lingers on two men kissing in a meadow.

Some 90 young men — “mostly Afghan refugee kids,” according to police — were apprehended in connection with the mass sexual assaults at the concert.
A recurring theme in recent articles by prominent feminists is the assertion that ethnic Swedish men act exactly the same as migrant gang-rapists.
One can draw only one conclusion: Feminists would rather protect Muslim men from criticism than protect Swedish women from sexual assaults.
None of the women’s shelters would admit that the mass sexual abuse of Swedish women might have anything to do with the perpetrators’ ethnicity or religion. They did not wish to “generalize,” they said — then hung up.
What Swedish politicians intend to do about the “Rapefugees” that are now in the country is anyone’s guess.

On New Year’s Eve, the same kind of mass sexual assaults that happened to women in Cologne — in Arabic called the “Taharrush” game — also took place in Sweden, but the police and the media have chosen to bury the information. The men, it turned out, were mainly Afghan, and claiming to be “unaccompanied refugee children.”

In reality, many of them are much older than 18, and are now commonly referred to with the recently coined name, “Rapefugees,” rather than “refugee children.”

It recently emerged that the Immigration Service urged its administrators to accept as a “child” everyone who looked under the age of 40 — apparently without any thought as to how inappropriate it is to place grown men in elementary and secondary schools with teenage girls. As Sweden — until December — kept its doors wide open to the migrants of the world, the country has accepted vastly more asylum seekers than its Nordic neighbors. Statistics for 2012-2015 are available via Eurostat, and provide the following statistics on the number of migrant arrivals:

Sweden: 342,635
Norway: 63,370
Denmark: 41,290
Finland: 40,470
Iceland: 675

Many who seek asylum in Sweden come from war-torn Syria: 51,338 in 2015. Afghanistan comes in at second place with 41,564 for the last year — an increase of a staggering 1,239% compared to 2014. Most of the Afghans seeking asylum claim to be children, and are therefore fast-tracked to being admitted within six months of the asylum application.

You might have seen reports that Sweden is instructing Muslim refugees in the fine art of sniping, and you might further have wondered what officials could be thinking. Well, rest easy. Marksmanship is being taught, but the designated targets are bullseyes, not infidels.
So the Swedish government is arranging courses on sniping for its young Islamic arrivals, to help them mingle on the range with locals and boost their Swedish language skills. This is the story doing the rounds on the blogophere. True? False? Crazy nonsense? You be the judge. Please remember Quadrant Online always provides nuanced coverage and does not regurgitate internet hoaxes.

The original story about the sniper-training is a nicely-illustrated spread in the Swedish newspaper Allehanda. This is a real newspaper, circulation around 70,000. It previously gained some éclat in the West for publishing a cartoon of Mohammad as a “roundabout dog”, a form of public art which Swedes seem to enjoy. This caused much Islamic offence and the standard reaction of Religion of Peace adherents: protests, threats, bombings, attempted assassination of the artist etc.

sniper storyThe Allehanda story (right) about the “sniper training” for happy-go-lucky Islamic teens is dated June 2, 2013. It’s an oddity that it laid doggo (no pun) all this time. The headline is “Laddade för prickskytte”, the first word google-translating as “charged (up)” and the third word, “sniping”. It is more precise than the word for “shooting” (skytte) or “target practice” (tävlingsskytt).

But because of the recent fuss, the Allehanda news editor has now issued this clarification:

“Because of the recent international citations of the 2013 Allehanda article ‘Laddad för prickskytte’, I as News Editor feel that a few clarifications are in order. Several websites refers to the immigration project in Sollefteå as ‘sniper training’. This is not a correct description. The word sniper training implies military combat education which is something completely different from this.

Although the refugees in the pictures can be seen holding what looks like sniper rifles, it is in fact biathlon sports equipment. Biathlon is since the 1960s recognised as an Olympic discipline, and the Sollefteå Ski High School runs an international upper secondary school programme for elite competitors. This is where the refugees were invited to try rifle shooting, the only element of biathlon possible in the summer. It was done by the authorities as part of their work with local immigration. I hope this clarifies the circumstances surrounding this article.”

So really, the Swedish government has only been training young Muslims to aim well at inanimate targets and miss as few times as possible. This is not the same as actually training them to be military-grade snipers a la Chris Kyle of American Sniper fame.

TAIPEI—No dogma is more important to Beijing than “One China,” the concept that Taiwan is a part of a single Chinese nation—just temporarily estranged.

America and much of the rest of the world acquiesce to that position, denying the reality that Taiwan has set its course as an independent state. Last weekend’s vote, in which the Taiwanese electorate overwhelming endorsed a party that rejects Beijing’s “One China” formula, confirmed the direction in the most emphatic way to date. That not only puts China in a bind, but the U.S. too.

Like it or not, the political equation has changed, forcing Washington to look at Taiwan in a different light.

To be sure, an American challenge to the “One China” doctrine is unthinkable. It’s the one move that could realistically provoke a war between the world’s two strongest powers. Yet some diplomats and scholars think that a postelection Taiwan may get more sympathetic treatment in Washington.

“Taiwan occupies a bit of a different space now,” says Donald Rodgers, a professor at Austin College in Texas, who was in Taiwan observing the elections.

He predicts the U.S. will be somewhat less worried about offending China by opening more direct channels of communication with Taiwan on issues from security to the environment and health. Such dialogue must now be conducted in a cloak-and-dagger style lest it suggests state-to-state relations. U.S. arms sales to Taiwan routinely incur Beijing’s wrath.