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Trump’s executive order slowing down the admission of people from seven Muslim majority nations drew the expected hysterical and hypocritical criticism from the Democrats. But Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham piled on as well. It’s no secret that neither pol likes Donald Trump, and both are no doubt still angry that Trump crashed their Party. But some of their criticism recycled preposterous received wisdom we’ve been hearing for decades.

“We fear this executive order will become a self-inflicted wound in the fight against terrorism,” the Senators said in a joint statement, explaining that Trump’s executive order “may do more to help terrorist recruitment than improve our security.” This is the tired “infidels made us do it” rationalization apologists for Islamic terrorism have been peddling––and jihadists exploiting–– since 9/11. The Senators’ version is as facile as asserting that Guantanamo, Sykes-Picot, cartoons of Mohammed, an obscure pastor burning a Koran, or Israeli settlements are responsible for “recruiting” jihadists.

This notion that Muslims become jihadist terrorists because of Western slights to their self-esteem is an absurd psychological argument alien to minds formed by Islam and its doctrines, and by cultures and histories very different from our own. Thus it commits the mortal sin of foreign policy and diplomacy: assuming that our adversaries and enemies think exactly as we do, and share the same beliefs about human motivation.

Since we attribute most behavior to material and environmental causes, we slight or dismiss religion and spiritual beliefs as a motivating force in people’s behavior. Or we reduce faith to an epiphenomenon of some deeper material cause such as poverty or a lack of political freedom, and so reduce religion to Marx’s “opiate” or Freud’s “illusion.” Even sillier, we treat other peoples as though they are over-sensitive children prone to “acting out” when their self-esteem is not nourished. So, like grade-school teachers, we should take every opportunity to tell Muslims how wonderful their faith is, how much we respect and honor it, and how diligent we will be in making sure that nobody dares link Islam and its traditional doctrines to “extremist” terror perpetrated by a small minority of “hijackers” and “distorters” of the “religion of peace.”

Obama, of course, was most fanatic about adhering to this fantasy. He began his presidency by going to Cairo and addressing a crowd, including Muslim Brotherhood honchos, about the glories of Islam and the West’s bad behavior toward the faithful. He scrupulously avoided using “Islamist” in speaking of terrorist acts, and he ordered our national security institutions not to mention “jihad” at all in its communications. The result? During his two terms there were three times more jihadist plots and attacks than during George Bush’s presidency. Al Qaeda, ISIS, and a plethora of other jihadist outfits now have a wider geographic base and scope of operations, and are perpetrating or inspiring attacks in Europe and the U.S. The world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism, Iran, is now a global power punching far above its weight, and shaping the Middle East according to its interests as it continues to develop nuclear weaponry.

Such “outreach” and flattery have been no more useful than they were for the Brits in the 20’s and 30’s, when the politicians, pundits, and intellectuals championing appeasement of Germany blamed the Big Four for the “Carthaginian peace” of the Versailles Treaty, which supposedly accounted for Germany’s truculence and aggression. Then and now, such efforts communicated only weakness and fear that emboldened the aggressor and led to massive slaughter.

HYDERABAD, India — When the Islamic State identified a promising young recruit willing to carry out an attack in one of India’s major tech hubs, the group made sure to arrange everything down to the bullets he needed to kill victims. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/world/asia/isis-messaging-app-terror-plot.html?_r=0

For 17 months, terrorist operatives guided the recruit, a young engineer named Mohammed Ibrahim Yazdani, through every step of what they planned to be the Islamic State’s first strike on Indian soil.

Mohammed Ibrahim Yazdani, left, and his younger brother Ilyas, whom he recruited to participate in the Hyderabad plot.

They vetted each new member of the cell as Mr. Yazdani recruited helpers. They taught him how to pledge allegiance to the terrorist group and securely send the statement.

And from Syria, investigators believe, the group’s virtual plotters organized for the delivery of weapons as well as the precursor chemicals used to make explosives, directing the Indian men to hidden pickup spots.
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Until just moments before the arrest of the Indian cell, here last June, the Islamic State’s cyberplanners kept in near-constant touch with the men, according to the interrogation records of three of the eight suspects obtained by The New York Times.

As officials around the world have faced a confusing barrage of attacks dedicated to the Islamic State, cases like Mr. Yazdani’s offer troubling examples of what counterterrorism experts are calling enabled or remote-controlled attacks: violence conceived and guided by operatives in areas controlled by the Islamic State whose only connection to the would-be attacker is the internet.

In the most basic enabled attacks, Islamic State handlers acted as confidants and coaches, coaxing recruits to embrace violence. In the Hyderabad plot, among the most involved found so far, the terrorist group reached deep into a country with strict gun laws to arrange for pistols and ammunition to be left in a bag swinging from the branches of a tree.

For the most part, the operatives who are conceiving and guiding such attacks are doing so from behind a wall of anonymity. When the Hyderabad plotters were arrested last summer, they could not so much as confirm the nationalities of their interlocutors in the Islamic State, let alone describe what they looked like. Because the recruits are instructed to use encrypted messaging applications, the guiding role played by the terrorist group often remains obscured.

As a result, remotely guided plots in Europe, Asia and the United States in recent years, including the attack on a community center in Garland, Tex., were initially labeled the work of “lone wolves,” with no operational ties to the Islamic State, and only later was direct communication with the group discovered.
ISIS Attacks, Outside of Its Self-proclaimed Caliphate

In at least 10 executed attacks, officials have found that the assailant was in direct communication with planners from the Islamic State.

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The Islamic State has declared its caliphate to include parts of Syria, Iraq and about a dozen other countries where it has affiliates.

While the trail of many of these plots led back to planners living in Syria, the very nature of the group’s method of remote plotting means there is little dependence on its maintaining a safe haven there or in Iraq. And visa restrictions and airport security mean little to attackers who strike where they live and no longer have to travel abroad for training.

The very act of mentioning bad behavior carried out by members of a specific group seems inherently bigoted.

One of the most important stories related to the September 11 attacks was the one that was deliberately left largely untold. That story is the response of some Muslims in America to the massacre of nearly 3,000 people by Islamic supremacists in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

According to a Washington Post article published on September 18, 2001, in Jersey City, New Jersey, across the river from the destroyed World Trade Center, “Within hours of the two jetliners plowing into the World Trade Center, law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.”

The New York Post reported on September 15, 2001, that Muslim Americans in Patterson, NJ were also seen celebrating the attacks. Word-of-mouth reports abounded in the weeks and months following September 11 of spontaneous celebrations carried out that day in Dearborn, Michigan, in Virginia and other Muslim American communities.

The most notable aspect of the published reports of the celebrations was that there were so few of them.

After all, the notion that any Muslim Americans would celebrate the jihadist attack was certainly newsworthy.

The stories were suppressed at the time by political leaders. Then New York mayor Rudy Guiliani for instance said the celebrations shouldn’t be reported lest they lead to violent attacks against peaceful Muslims.

Then president George W. Bush rushed to defend and uphold Islam as a “religion of peace,” almost immediately after the attacks. Bush insisted that al-Qaida was a fringe movement and ideology in the world of Islam. Its Islamic supremacism did not reflect either the Islamic faith or the ideology of the overwhelming majority of Muslims.

In 2007, then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice banned US officials from using the terms “jihad,” “Islamic” and “Islamism” in describing Islamic jihad and the ideology of Islamism or in conjunction with discussions of Islamic jihad and terrorism.

Under former president Barack Obama, the war on language went into high gear. Not only were all terms relating to Islam banned from use in the federal government, the term “terrorism” was even purged from the official discourse. Obama dumped the Bush-era term, “War on Terror,” for the even more meaningless phrase, “Overseas Contingency Operations.”

Obama barred the FBI from investigating radical Islamic breeding grounds and replaced surveillance operations with a program called, “Countering Violent Extremism.” Under that program, Islamists were given federal support. The notion was that once they were empowered, they would convince their communities to reject violence.

It is not racist to accuse Muslims of wrongdoing; Islam is a religio-political system, not a race. This conflation of two very different things already causes endless confusion and miscarriages of justice. Such scattershot accusations fail to make a distinction between genuine hatred for Muslims and fair and balanced criticism of some of their behavior and their religion.

“Anti-racism… an instrument of intellectual terrorism has become today the greatest channel of the new anti-Semitism”. — Georges Bensoussan.

The CCIF’s charge of “Islamophobia” is almost certainly built, not so much about Arabs but about perceptions of a refusal by Muslim immigrants from North Africa to integrate into French society,

“To say that one drinks in anti-Semitism from one’s mother’s milk means that it is transmitted culturally. I have not spoken of a transmission through blood, which implies a genetic transmission. And I maintain that in some Arab families in France, anti-Semitism is taught. … I have not invented the Kouachi brothers, who, after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, asked the printer with whom they took refuge if he was Jewish.” — Georges Bensoussan.

“This visceral anti-Semitism proven by the Fondapol survey by Dominique Reynié last year cannot remain under a cover of silence. Conducted in 2014 among 1,580 French respondents, of whom one third were Muslim, the survey found that they were two times and even three times more anti-Jewish than French people as a whole”. — Georges Bensoussan.

Why should this be surprising? Anti-Jewish feelings in Muslim countries and elsewhere are deeply embedded, with roots in the Qur’an, the Hadith, Islamic law-books, and general social attitudes from the 7th century onwards.

If Bensoussan is convicted, the CCIF and other organisations like it will start further prosecutions of other innocent people and succeed in shutting down debate about what is the greatest single threat to the stability not only of France and Europe, but the West.

The French historian and philosopher Georges Bensoussan is best known for his studies of matters relating to the Jewish world, on topics such as the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from Arab countries after the declaration of Israel’s independence in 1948 and the signal defeat of Arab armies which invaded the new state between then and 1949. He himself was born in Morocco in 1952, but moved with his family to France in his early years.

After a doctorate in history from the University of Paris I in 1981, Bensoussan became director of a journal for Holocaust history (Revue d’histoire de la Shoah) and went on to develop a training service for Holocaust education. Over the years, he has published several well-researched books on the Holocaust, Zionism, and related topics. Juifs en pays arabes: Le grand déracinement 1850-1975 (2012) covers the too-little known history of the way in which nearly a million Jews in Arab countries were reduced in fewer than thirty years to about 5,000. His intellectual and political history of Zionism, Une histoire intellectuelle et politique du sionisme 1860-1940 (2002), counters the modern use of the term Zionist as a pejorative.

Given these credentials as a leading opponent of Europe’s oldest form of racism, one might very well expect that Georges Bensoussan would be one of the last people fit to be labelled a racist. And you would be correct. But on January 25, Bensoussan was obliged to present himself at the 17th chamber of the Tribunal Correctionel of Paris to face a charge of “provocation of racial hatred” (“provocation à la haine raciale”). A more honest description of the charge would have read “provocation of ‘Islamophobia'”. It is not racist to accuse Muslims of wrongdoing; Islam is a religio-political system, not a race. This conflation of two very different things already causes endless confusion and miscarriages of justice.

Some thirty parties will compete with each other for the favor of Dutch voters on March 15. Because there are only 150 seats in the Dutch Parliament, the largest party will not be able to get much more than 35 to 40 seats. The favorite right now to become the largest party in parliament is Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV).

A shocking new poll has been released in the Netherlands. According to Kantar Public, PVV has opened a large lead over the second largest party in the polls, the VVD, which is currently part of the governing coalition. This makes Wilders the absolute favorite to succeed current Prime Minister Mark Rutte as the political leader of the country.

According to the Kantar Public poll, the PVV would get 35 seats in the 150-seat Dutch Parliament if elections were held today. By Dutch standards, that’s an impressive result. This is especially true because of the significant gap between PVV and the VVD. The party led by current Prime Minister Mark Rutte wold have to settle for a mere 22 seats, 19 fewer seats than they currently occupy.

Wilders is profiting from a general feeling of unease about the direction in which the country is heading and public outrage at the refugee crisis. The Dutch government has allowed the borders to remain open, thereby allowing tens of thousands of “refugees” to come to the Netherlands every single year. This while there already were significant problems caused by (mostly) Islamic immigrants who refuse to assimilate into Dutch culture and society.

Voters’ explanations make clear that the ruling VVD party has a very serious problem. Says one voter:

Enough. Enough with everything!

Another angry voter adds:

The VVD has become the party for the rich and they never deliver on their promises.

That voter refers to Rutte’s promise during the campaign of 2012 that he would give every working Dutchman a taxbreak of 1.000 euros. Once he put together a coalition with the social democrats of the PvdA, however, he actually raised taxes. Additionally, Rutte promises to halt mass immigration. As is clear, he has done no such thing.

A third voter explains his current support for the PVV by referring to Wilders’ eurosceptic attitude:

Wilders is the only one willing to address the major problems caused by Europa and mass immigration.

Is Italeave fast approaching? From the looks of it, it could be!

The future is looking increasingly bright for those of us who are rooting for the downfall of the European Union and, especially, the grand Europroject, which has caused more human suffering in Europe than almost every other megalomaniac project in history. British Prime Minister Theresa May wants to lead her country out of the EU as soon as she can and already has the backing of Parliament. That’s wonderful enough, but it gets even better: according to the latest polls, eurosceptic parties could very well win the elections in Italy.

An analysis of the political setup in Italy shows eurosceptics are on the verge of taking control of the country.

The only missing ingredient is an early election. And early elections are now the odds-on favorite.

In normal circumstances, new elections would be held in 2018. However, former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi — who leads the Italian Democrat Party (PD) — is calling for early elections. His thinking is obvious and purely Machiavellian: because he was forced to resign last year after he lost the referendum on a proposed change to the Italian constitution, he fears he’ll be replaced as leader of the PD if he gives his internal enemies more time. Additionally, the leader of the populist Five Star Movement, Beppe Grillo, is also calling for early elections because he believes that he’ll win them. Recent polls indicate he could very well be right:

As the Zero Hedge website explains, most pollsters have a reputation for overestimating the Democrats and underestimating Grillo’s Five Star Movement (M5). Considering the marginal difference between the two parties in most polls, that’s an important disclaimer. But there’s more to this story. According to Italian observers and Zero Hedge, the PD could very well break apart into a pro-Renzi faction and a faction that opposes him. The latter believe they can draw away almost half of Renzi’s voters if they create their own left-wing party, which is what they threaten to do if Renzi goes ahead and agrees to early elections.

In short, it’s increasingly likely that Italy will soon get an anti-euro government.

Add that development to the rise of eurosceptic populists in the Netherlands and it’s clear that the European house of cards is on the verge of collapsing. If that isn’t good news for those of us who support national sovereignty, I don’t know what is.

An Iraqi satellite network has reported that the Islamic State cut off the hands of two boys in western Mosul for refusing to kill in the name of ISIS.

Iraqi forces have liberated eastern Mosul; the fight west of the Tigris is shaping up to be more difficult and a more painstaking advance because of the dense neighborhoods there.

“The coalition has liberated about 60 percent of ISIL-held territory in Iraq. ISIL remains on the back foot in Mosul,” Operation Inherent Resolve spokesman Col. John Dorrian told Pentagon reporters via video link from Baghdad last week. “Its leaders are accusing citizens of spying, and tragically, they are executing people who don’t cooperate with them in some cases. They’ve also lost trust in some of their fighters and they’ve even done executions against their own fighters.”

Iraq’s Alsumaria News said Thursday that sources reported two boys had their hands amputated by ISIS fighters tasked with training youths for jihad, according to Iraqi News.

“The Islamic State’s leaders issued orders to train a group of children on fighting in the group’s camps in Nables neighborhood, in the western side of Nineveh,” the source reportedly told the network. “Meanwhile, members of the Islamic State terrorist group amputated the hands of two children, for refusing to carry out the execution sentence on two civilians in front of their families.”

The boys were estimated to be around 10 to 12 years old.

ISIS has long places emphasis on its “cubs” program to indoctrinate kids into jihad, and the group has released videos lately showing younger and younger jihadists.

In one video out of Raqqa, kids were sent on a live-fire exercise through an abandoned building with some dummy targets in the rooms and a handful of live targets: prisoners with their hands zip-tied behind their backs, trying to elude the child jihadists in the multi-story, debris-strewn building.

A video released last month out of ISIS’ Khayr province in Syria was a more gory follow-up, showing children as young as preschool age murdering prisoners tied to broken carnival rides.

The Syrian Democratic Forces, which are conducting an offensive to retake Raqqa from ISIS, recently released a video showing three young teen boys, who had reportedly been kidnapped from their families, on the front lines as ordered by the Islamic State. The boys surrendered to the Kurdish-Arab-Christian coalition and were reunited with their relatives.