RUTHFULLY YOURS

Theresa May herself is also not entirely to be trusted in this area. Despite her calls for no tolerance for extremism, she has recently been widely criticized for blocking publication of a major report into foreign funding of extremist Muslim groups.

For years now, radical preachers, terrorist recruiters, and fundamentalists who openly hate this country, its democratic values, and its tolerance for all faiths, have walked British streets, campaigned on university campuses, and converted and radicalised young men and women.

What seems not to be understood about “the religion of peace” is that “peace” comes only after the entire world has been converted to Islam so that a “Dar al-Harb”, the “Abode of War,” will no longer even exist.

Since the beginning of March, 17,393 people have been listed as terror suspects. — French Senate report: “Prevention of Radicalism and Regional Authorities”, April 2017.

On May 26, four days after the major terrorist attack on an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, British intelligence officials stated that they had identified 23,000 jihadist extremists living in the UK, all of them considered potential terrorist attackers. According to The Times,

About 3,000 people from the total group are judged to pose a threat and are under investigation or active monitoring in 500 operations being run by police and intelligence services. The 20,000 others have featured in previous inquiries and are categorised as posing a “residual risk”.

The two terrorists who have struck in Britain this year — Salman Abedi, the Manchester bomber, and Khalid Masood, the Westminster killer — were in the pool of “former subjects of interest” and no longer subject to any surveillance.

A police officer stands guard near the Manchester Arena on May 23, 2017, following a suicide bombing by an Islamic terrorist who murdered 22 concert-goers. (Photo by Dave Thompson/Getty Images)

The report adds that the two men who beheaded British soldier Lee Rigby in London, in 2013, had been known to the security services, just as Abedi and Masood were, but had been dropped to low priority.

David Anderson, QC, the former reviewer of anti-terrorism laws, noted concerns in his 2015 report about the “speed with which things can change” around suspects and “the difficulties in knowing how best to prioritise limited surveillance resources”. Senior police have also spoken of the difficulty in identifying the triggers that might “reactivate” extremist behaviour.

Others had expressed similar concerns about how the jihadi ideology, based in radical religious belief, is so intensely ingrained that it never leaves individuals and may easily reactivate a desire to commit atrocities.

“2016 was the worst year on record for antisemitic crime [in Britain],” — National Antisemitic Crime Audit, published on July 17, 2017.

“Britain has the political will to fight antisemitism and strong laws with which to do it, but those responsible for tackling the rapidly growing racist targeting of British Jews are failing to enforce the law.” — Gideon Falter, Chairman of the Campaign Against Antisemitism.

The first “Palestine Expo” — a two-day festival in London, self-described as the “biggest social, cultural and entertainment event on Palestine to ever take place in Europe” — was held over the weekend of July 8, 2017 at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in Westminster. The gathering, attended by an estimated 15,000 people, included political panels, workshops and food courts — ostensibly to highlight and honor “Palestine history and heritage.”

Given the identity of its organizers, however, its true impetus — to demonize the Jewish state — was clear from the outset. Sponsored by the Leicester-based Friends of Al-Aqsa (FOA), a group that openly supports the Islamist terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah, the event aroused the anger of pro-Israel activists and the British government alike.

About a month before the Expo was scheduled to take place, Communities and Local Government Secretary Sajid Javid sent a letter to the FOA — which promotes the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, and figures such as Holocaust denier Paul Eisen — expressing his concerns and threatening to call off the event.

FOA founder Ismail Patel replied that Javid had “failed to provide any satisfactory reason as to why they have chosen to cancel an event which seeks to celebrate Palestinian culture and heritage.” He also resorted to a classic anti-Semitic trope, accusing the government of being influenced by the Jewish lobby.

As Javid set the date of June 23 for his final decision on whether the Expo would be canceled, Patel began a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for legal representation to challenge the government in the event of a cancellation. Neither materialized, however, when the controversy was upstaged by the deadly Grenfell Tower fire, which erupted on June 14, the day of the exchange of letters between Javid and Patel.

A week later, Javid gave the green light for the event.

Among the speakers at the Expo was South African Islamic scholar Sheikh Ebrahim Bham, know for having quoted Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels comparing Jews to fleas. Patel defended his decision to host Bham at the event by saying:

“Shaykh Bham clearly uses it to demonstrate how terrible the treatment of the Jews under Nazi persecution was.

“He then goes on to state that similar treatment is now being experienced by Palestinians under Israeli occupation – that of being sub-human.”

Other speakers included openly anti-Israel academics, some Jewish, all with a history of anti-Semitic writings, remarks and social media postings, as well as the highly controversial former UK National Union of Students president Malia Bouattia.Jason Silver, a Jewish resident of London who attended the event “to record what I knew would be a hate fest of antisemitism and more blood libels and incitement to hatred,” sent a letter to the Daily Mail detailing his experience. He also posted the letter on Facebook, along with video footage he recorded during the three hours he was there, before being forced by organizers to leave.

Silver wrote that talks by “key speakers were truly vile, both to Jews and against the UK for the Balfour Declaration,” a reference to the 100-year-old document supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine — for which the Palestinian Authority has threatened to sue Britain.

Silver said that he encountered no problems with participants — most of whom were wearing Muslim garb — until he donned his Jewish skull cap. Within 10 minutes, he wrote, he was told he was not welcome, and must exit the premises. When he asked why he was being ordered to leave — after having been there for a full three hours with no mishap — he was not given a reason.

North Korea test-launched on Friday its first ballistic missile potentially capable of hitting America’s East Coast. It thereby proved the failure of 25 years of U.S. nonproliferation policy. A single-minded rogue state can pocket diplomatic concessions and withstand sustained economic sanctions to build deliverable nuclear weapons. It is past time for Washington to bury this ineffective “carrots and sticks” approach.

America’s policy makers, especially those who still support the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, should take careful note. If Tehran’s long collusion with Pyongyang on ballistic missiles is even partly mirrored in the nuclear field, the Iranian threat is nearly as imminent as North Korea’s. Whatever the extent of their collaboration thus far, Iran could undoubtedly use its now-unfrozen assets and cash from oil-investment deals to buy nuclear hardware from North Korea, one of the world’s poorest nations.

One lesson from Pyongyang’s steady nuclear ascent is to avoid making the same mistake with other proliferators, who are carefully studying its successes. Statecraft should mean grasping the implications of incipient threats and resolving them before they become manifest. With North Korea and Iran, the U.S. has effectively done the opposite. Proliferators happily exploit America’s weakness and its short attention span. They exploit negotiations to gain the most precious asset: time to resolve the complex scientific and technological hurdles to making deliverable nuclear weapons.

Now that North Korea possesses them, the U.S. has few realistic options. More talks and sanctions will fail as they have for 25 years. I have argued previously that the only durable diplomatic solution is to persuade China that reunifying the two Koreas is in its national interest as well as America’s, thus ending the nuclear threat by ending the bizarre North Korean regime. Although the negotiations would be arduous and should have commenced years ago, American determination could still yield results.

Absent a successful diplomatic play, what’s left is unpalatable military options. But many say, even while admitting America’s vulnerability to North Korean missiles, that using force to neutralize the threat would be too dangerous. The only option, this argument goes, is to accept a nuclear North Korea and attempt to contain and deter it.

The people saying this are largely the same ones who argued that “carrots and sticks” would prevent Pyongyang from getting nuclear weapons. They are prepared to leave Americans as nuclear hostages of the Kim family dictatorship. This is unacceptable. Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has it right. “What’s unimaginable to me,” he said last month at the Aspen Security Forum, “is allowing a capability that would allow a nuclear weapon to land in Denver.” So what are the military options, knowing that the U.S. must plan for the worst?

First, Washington could pre-emptively strike at Pyongyang’s known nuclear facilities, ballistic-missile factories and launch sites, and submarine bases. There are innumerable variations, starting at the low end with sabotage, cyberattacks and general disruption. The high end could involve using air- and sea-based power to eliminate the entire program as American analysts understand it.

Second, the U.S. could wait until a missile is poised for launch toward America, and then destroy it. This would provide more time but at the cost of increased risk. Intelligence is never perfect. A North Korean missile could be in flight to a city near you before the military can respond.

Third, the U.S. could use airstrikes or special forces to decapitate North Korea’s national command authority, sowing chaos, and then sweep in on the ground from South Korea to seize Pyongyang, nuclear assets, key military sites and other territory.

All these scenarios pose dangers for South Korea, especially civilians in Seoul, which is within the range of North Korean artillery near the Demilitarized Zone. Any military attack must therefore neutralize as much of the North’s retaliatory capability as possible together with the larger strike. The U.S. should obviously seek South Korea’s agreement (and Japan’s) before using force, but no foreign government, even a close ally, can veto an action to protect Americans from Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons. CONTINUE AT SITE