RUTHFULLY YOURS

Apparently the British don’t care much for their daughters. That can’t be true. But I only know what I read in the papers.So I’m reading that it’s beginning to dawn on British parents that their daughters are being sexually assaulted at a rate that can only be called an epidemic.

Here’s a snippet:

“The scale of the abuse in Oxfordshire, a county in southeast England, mirrors similarly shocking accounts of the sexual exploitation of white British girls by Muslim gangs in Bristol, Derby, Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford, and implies that the problem is not isolated, but endemic.”

We expect this to be happening in Muslim countries like France, Denmark and Sweden. But the English speak our language.

My own introduction into the crisis came some time ago from a report about Rotherham, where the locals took it in stride, that their girls, some as young as 8, were being sexually molested by Pakistani Muslim men. People were afraid to speak up. They’d be labeled Islamophobic. So they let it go, and the raping of thousands continued. Read this for the timeliest drama about the clash of civilizations.

President Barack Obama has yet to meet with the new head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and won’t see Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg this week, even though he is in Washington for three days. Stoltenberg’s office requested a meeting with Obama well in advance of the visit, but never heard anything from the White House, two sources close to the NATO chief told me.

The leaders of almost all the other 28 NATO member countries have made time for Stoltenberg since he took over the world’s largest military alliance in October. Stoltenberg, twice the prime minister of Norway, met Monday with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa to discuss the threat of the Islamic State and the crisis in Ukraine, two issues near the top of Obama’s agenda.

SEOUL — If international sanctions on Iran are lifted pronto — a condition Iran is demanding as part of any nuclear deal — how hard might it be to reimpose them, in the likely event that Iran cheats? For a glimpse of just how tough it could be, take the case of Iran’s Bank Mellat, headquartered in Tehran, but with a branch in Seoul — where, during a recent trip to South Korea, I dropped by for a look.

Occupying spacious quarters on the 13th and 14th floors of a high-rise office building in Seoul’s busy Gangnam district, this branch of Bank Mellat appeared to have no customers on the premises. That was no surprise, because for several years now, Bank Mellat in Seoul has been under sanctions by the U.S., United Nations and the South Korean government.

You’ll have to forgive President Obama. The leader of the free world is still having difficulty accepting that the Israeli people get to choose their own prime minister, never mind his preferences.

The latest White House tantrum in the wake of Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election last week took the form of a speech delivered Monday by Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, in which he declared that “an occupation that has lasted for almost 50 years must end.”

When a chief of staff speaks in public, especially as the keynote speaker at a scheduled event, the President has signed off. In this case the audience was also carefully chosen: the annual conference of J Street, a left-leaning Jewish lobbying group that has never met an Israeli concession it didn’t like. Which makes it all the more distressing that Mr. McDonough would talk about Israel in language usually associated with Palestinian terror groups.