RUTHFULLY YOURS

The early Cold War wisdom that “we must stop politics at the water’s edge” has never been entirely true. In endeavors as human as politics, no such altruistic aspiration ever will be. But Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s adage does reflect a principle critical to effective national security: The United States is imperiled when partisan politics distorts our understanding of the world and the threats it presents.

We’ve been imperiled for a long time now. The most salient reason for that has been the bipartisan, politically correct refusal to acknowledge and confront the Islamic roots of the threat to the West. It has prevented us from grasping not only why jihadists attack us but also that jihadists are merely the militant front line of the broader civilizational challenge posed by sharia supremacism.

Inevitably, when there is a profound threat and an overarching strategic failure to apprehend it, disasters abound; and rather than becoming occasions for reassessment of the flawed bipartisan strategy, those disasters become grist for partisan attacks. From 2004 through 2008, the specious claim was that President Bush’s ouster of Saddam Hussein created terrorism in Iraq. Now it is that President Obama is the “founder of ISIS,” as Donald Trump put it this week.

The point here is not to bash Trump. He is hardly the first to posit some variation of the storyline that Obama’s premature withdrawal of American forces from Iraq led to the “vacuum” in which, we are to believe, the Islamic State spontaneously generated. Indeed, this narrative is repeated on Fox News every ten minutes or so.

The point is to try to understand what we are actually dealing with, how we got to this place, and what the security implications are. There is no denying that American missteps have exacerbated a dangerous threat environment in the Middle East to some degree. It is spurious, though, to suggest that any of these errors, or all of them collectively, caused the catastrophe that has unfolded.

The problem for the United States in this region is Islam — specifically, the revolutionary sharia-supremacist version to which the major players adhere. There is no vacuum. There never has been a vacuum. What we have is a bubbling cauldron of aggressive political Islam with its always attendant jihadist legions.

Germans with dual nationality will lose their German citizenship if they fight for militant Islamist groups abroad under new anti-terror proposals.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere also announced plans to speed up the deportation of foreign criminals.

He announced extra personnel, equipment and surveillance powers for the police.

But he rejected banning the public wearing of the burka (the Islamic full veil). And he resisted pressure to ease medical confidentiality.

Some of his conservative Christian Democrat (CDU) colleagues have urged a burka ban but Mr de Maiziere said it would be “problematic” and “you cannot ban everything that you reject”.

Mr de Maiziere was responding to recent attacks linked to militant Islamists. Two terror attacks by Islamist migrants shocked Germany last month – in Wuerzburg and Ansbach.
Citizenship debate

“I propose that German citizens who are fighting with terror militias in other countries, and take part in combat operations there, if they have a second nationality – and only then – they would lose German citizenship,” he told a news conference.

There was a move in France recently to deprive jihadists of their French citizenship, but it did not get through parliament.

German media report that the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) – the CDU’s coalition partners – strongly oppose any general ban on dual citizenship. The Greens are also against the idea.

For months experts and the media insisted that it was inconceivable and impossible for Muslim terrorists to enter Europe or America by pretending to be Syrian refugees. Now it’s just a fact of life. That’s the way it usually is with the left. The disastrous outcomes of their policies are denied and then they’re just a reality that we’re expected to cope with.

German intelligence services have evidence that “hit squads” from the Islamic State terror group have infiltrated the country disguised as refugees, the deputy head of Bavaria’s spy agency told the BBC Thursday.

“We have to accept that we have hit squads and sleeper cells in Germany,” Manfred Hauser, the vice president of the Bavaria region’s intelligence gathering agency, BayLfV, told the Today program.

“We have substantial reports that among the refugees there are hit squads. There are hundreds of these reports, some from refugees themselves. We are still following up on these, and we haven’t investigated all of them fully,” said Hauser.

Why do we have to accept them? Because we keep accepting Muslim migrants who claim to be refugees. We have to keep eating the whole bowl of candy wondering which of the pieces is poisoned.

In the wake of the recent rise in Islamic terror attacks, German conservative officials are calling to ban the burqa, a traditional Muslim grabs that covers a woman’s entire body, usually donned by the most extreme devotees of the religion.

A handful of state interior ministers from the Christian Social Union and Christian Democratic Party (Chancellor Angela Merkel’s own party) drafted a proposal this week aimed at controlling the spread of radical Islam, cutting off the financing of terrorism-promoting mosques and banning Islamic dress that signals extremist affiliations.

“Freedom of religion is a central, fundamental right. However, religious extremism and the abuse of religious symbols have no place in Germany,” the proposal said, adding:

Freedom of expression is for us non-negotiable. The brutalization of our language and in particular hateful messages posted on social media will not be tolerated. We need to return to our civic virtues. Respect, courtesy and mutual consideration of one another are the foundations for a peaceful coexistence,” the proposal states.

Pointing to the fact that terror attacks in Germany have been mostly committed by Muslims with dual citizenship, the proposal called on Germans to decide where they stand.

“Dual citizenship is a huge obstacle for integration,” the proposal stated bluntly. “We object to this split loyalty. Whoever wants to engage themselves with the politics of foreign governments, we would advise to leave Germany. We call for people to make a conscious choice for the values of our free, democratic constitutional order.”

Moreover, the proposal addressed the politically-contentious issue of “uncontrolled immigration,” suggesting that it is a primary driver of violence in the country.

“Uncontrolled immigration and with that the link to people smuggling create unease within the population and simplify the process of sneaking into Europe for criminals and violent Islamist criminals,” the proposal asserted.

Leftist politicians have pushed back, arguing that the conservatives are straddling between between hate and xenophobia.

“Members of the Die Linke (Left Party) have already voiced criticism of the draft proposals. Bundestag Left Party member Frank Tempel told broadcaster Deutschlandfunk that a burqa ban proposal has nothing to do with fighting terrorism,” reports The Local.

Almost all the perpetrators of sexual assaults who attacked in groups and who have been apprehended, are citizens of Afghanistan, Eritrea and Somalia — three of the four largest immigrant groups in Sweden who fall into the category of “unaccompanied refugee children.”

A few days later, it turned out that many of the perpetrators who sexually assaulted women at the “Putte i parken” music festival in Karlstad wore the “Don’t grope” bracelet.

Many people were therefore aghast to learn that the organizers of the Trästocksfestivalen music festival in Skellefteå had decided to arrange free bus rides to the festival for the local “unaccompanied refugee children.” They claimed they were “proud to be the first music festival in Sweden that encourages a significant increase of newly arrived migrants in the audience.” By the time the Trästocksfestivalen ended, the police counted twelve reported sexual assaults.

Apparently, Swedish girls and women should learn to live with being groped and raped — or leave the public space altogether. The latter seems quite in line with what Islamic sharia law prescribes.

In the wake of the New Year’s Eve attacks in Cologne, Germany, news broke in Sweden that a large number of sexual assaults against girls and women had occurred at the music festival “We Are Sthlm” [short for Stockholm] in both 2014 and 2015, but had been covered up by both the police and the media. The National Police Commissioner, Dan Eliasson, immediately launched an investigation to find out the scope of the problem.

The results were presented in May, in a report, “The current situation regarding sexual assault and proposals for action” — and the conclusions are frightening. Almost all the perpetrators who attacked in groups and who have been apprehended, are citizens of Afghanistan, Eritrea and Somalia — three of the four largest immigrant groups in Sweden who fall into the category of “unaccompanied refugee children.”

This is about distance, and detachment, and a kind of historic decoupling between the top and the bottom in the West that did not, in more moderate recent times, exist.

Recently I spoke with an acquaintance of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and the conversation quickly turned, as conversations about Ms. Merkel now always do, to her decisions on immigration. Last summer when Europe was engulfed with increasing waves of migrants and refugees from Muslim countries, Ms. Merkel, moving unilaterally, announced that Germany would take in an astounding 800,000. Naturally this was taken as an invitation, and more than a million came. The result has been widespread public furor over crime, cultural dissimilation and fears of terrorism. From such a sturdy, grounded character as Ms. Merkel the decision was puzzling—uncharacteristically romantic about people, how they live their lives, and history itself, which is more charnel house than settlement house.

Ms. Merkel’s acquaintance sighed and agreed. It’s one thing to be overwhelmed by an unexpected force, quite another to invite your invaders in! But, the acquaintance said, he believed the chancellor was operating in pursuit of ideals. As the daughter of a Lutheran minister, someone who grew up in East Germany, Ms. Merkel would have natural sympathy for those who feel marginalized and displaced. Moreover she is attempting to provide a kind of counter-statement, in the 21st century, to Germany’s great sin of the 20th. The historical stain of Nazism, the murder and abuse of the minority, will be followed by the moral triumph of open arms toward the dispossessed. That’s what’s driving it, said the acquaintance.

It was as good an explanation as I’d heard. But there was a fundamental problem with the decision that you can see rippling now throughout the West. Ms. Merkel had put the entire burden of a huge cultural change not on herself and those like her but on regular people who live closer to the edge, who do not have the resources to meet the burden, who have no particular protection or money or connections. Ms. Merkel, her cabinet and government, the media and cultural apparatus that lauded her decision were not in the least affected by it and likely never would be.

Nothing in their lives will get worse. The challenge of integrating different cultures, negotiating daily tensions, dealing with crime and extremism and fearfulness on the street—that was put on those with comparatively little, whom I’ve called the unprotected. They were left to struggle, not gradually and over the years but suddenly and in an air of ongoing crisis that shows no signs of ending—because nobody cares about them enough to stop it.

The powerful show no particular sign of worrying about any of this. When the working and middle class pushed back in shocked indignation, the people on top called them “xenophobic,” “narrow-minded,” “racist.” The detached, who made the decisions and bore none of the costs, got to be called “humanist,” “compassionate,” and “hero of human rights.”

And so the great separating incident at Cologne last New Year’s, and the hundreds of sexual assaults by mostly young migrant men who were brought up in societies where women are veiled—who think they should be veiled—and who chose to see women in short skirts and high heels as asking for it.

Cologne of course was followed by other crimes. CONTINUE AT SITE