RUTHFULLY YOURS

“The whole system failed and that is what has been happening for the last 30 years. And it is PC. People are just too, too afraid to, you know, just too, too afraid to speak the truth.” — Mohan Singh, founder of the Sikh Awareness Society.

MI5, Britain’s domestic security agency, revealed that it has identified 23,000 jihadist extremists living in the country.

Manchester bomber Salman Abedi used taxpayer-funded student loans and benefits to bankroll the terror plot, according to the Telegraph. Abedi is believed to have received thousands of pounds in state funding in the run-up to the attack even while he was overseas receiving bomb-making training. It also emerged that the chief imam of Abedi’s mosque fought with militants in Libya. The mosque was also reported to have hosted hate preachers who called for British soldiers to be killed and non-believers to be stoned to death.

“It is no secret that Saudi Arabia in particular provides funding to hundreds of mosques in the UK, espousing a very hardline Wahhabist interpretation of Islam. It is often in these institutions that British extremism takes root.” — Tom Brake, Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman.

May 1. Army cadets in Scotland were warned not to wear their uniforms in public because they could be targeted by jihadists.

May 1. Three female teenagers were arrested in East London on terrorism charges. The arrests were in connection with an anti-terror operation in London on April 27 in which a woman wearing a burqa was shot by police. Police said that an active terror plot had been foiled.

May 2. Samata Ullah, a 34-year-old jihadist from Cardiff, was sentenced to eight years in prison for five terror offenses, including membership of the Islamic State, as well being involved in training terrorists and preparing for terrorist acts. Ullah, a British national of Bangladeshi origin, was a key member of a group calling itself the “Cyber Caliphate Army” and gave other members of IS advice on how to communicate using sophisticated encryption techniques.

May 3. Damon Smith, a 20-year-old convert to Islam, was found guilty of making a bomb filled with ball bearings and leaving it on a subway train in London. Jurors at the Old Baily court were told that Smith had downloaded an al-Qaeda article entitled, “Make a bomb in the kitchen of your Mom,” which contained step-by-step instructions on how to make a homemade bomb. The court also heard that Smith had a keen interest in Islam, guns and explosives, and had collected pictures of extremists, including the alleged mastermind of the 2015 Paris terror attacks. Smith, who suffers from autism, admitted to making the device but claimed he only meant it as a prank.

May 3. The trial began of four Muslim men who gang-raped a 16-year-old girl in Ramsgate, Kent. The girl was attacked when she got lost after a night out and asked for directions at a Kebab shop. Restaurant owner Tamin Rahani, 37, Rafiullah Hamidy, 24, Shershah Muslimyar, 20, and an unnamed teenager are accused of taking turns raping the girl in an apartment above the restaurant.

May 9. Aine Davis, a 33-year-old British convert to Islam, was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison by a court in Turkey for being a member of the Islamic State. The BBC reported that Davis was one of a four-man IS cell nicknamed “The Beatles” responsible for beheading more than two dozen hostages in Syria. Davis, the only one of the group to face a trial, had denied the charges against him. Davis left his home in West London in 2013 to join the Islamic State. His wife, Amal El-Wahabi, after a trial at the Old Bailey court, was jailed in November 2014 for funding his terrorism.

May 11. A mother and daughter, along with another woman, appeared at Westminster magistrates’ court on charges of plotting a jihadist attack near the British Parliament. Mina Dich, 43, her daughter Rizlaine Boular, 21, and Khawla Barghouthi, 20, are accused of plotting a random knife attack. Dich and Boular appeared in court wearing burkas covering their faces. Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot asked them to lift their veils to reveal their eyes when they were identified in the dock. Barghouthi wore a niqab with her face showing. All three are accused of conspiracy to murder.

May 12. Female drivers in Stockport were warned about a gang of young Muslim males who have been attempting to get into cars stopped at intersections. Several women in the area reported that they had been approached by the men while waiting for traffic lights to change.

May 13. A divorce practice that allows Muslim men instantly to terminate an Islamic marriage simply by repeating the word talaq, meaning divorce, three times to his wife, has been described as “really common” among Muslims in Britain, according to the Times. Women cannot use the method, known as “triple talaq.” Under civil law in Britain, Islamic marriages are not acknowledged, leaving women with little power to escape an unhappy or abusive marriage, or to defend their interests in court when a marriage breaks down. Women often face homelessness and a loss of financial support after divorce. Campaigners have called for an update to Marriage Act 1949 to demand the civil registration of all religious marriages. Christian, Jewish or Quaker marriages must be registered under the law, but Muslim, Hindu and Sikh unions do not. Qari Asim, an imam at the Leeds Makkah mosque, suggested that talaq should initially be uttered just once, and only spoken a second and third time after cooling-off periods of at least three months.

May 14. Mohan Singh, founder of the Sikh Awareness Society, said that Muslim grooming gangs have been allowed to prosper in Britain because the authorities are afraid they will be labelled racist if they speak out. In an interview with Katie Hopkins at LCB radio, Singh said that political correctness had allowed the gangs to succeed:

“I think it is due to political correctness, but it is also down to nobody wants to be called a racist…. Nobody really is grabbing the bull by the horns and saying ‘No, abuse is abuse.’ But they do not want to be labeled that we are after one community, we are targeting one community. We can see all the reports coming out Rotherham, the failings of the police, the failings of the local councilors. The whole system failed and that is what has been happening for the last 30 years. And it is PC. People are just too, too afraid to, you know, just too, too afraid to speak the truth.”

How will Iraq get rid of the Iranians? Or will it? The chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Qassem Soleimani, has been seen several times in Iraq, most recently near the Syrian border, an indication that Iran has bigger plans than the liberation of Mosul.

The Sunni part of Iraq actually is an essential part of the land bridge being built from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea. There is a second and equally compelling issue for Iran to the southwest: encircling Saudi Arabia in the water.

If Iran is allowed to solidify its Shiite Crescent and its naval obstructionism, American allies across the Middle East and North Africa will pay a heavy price.

We have been looking in the wrong direction. While the West was hoping temporarily to check Iran’s nuclear aspirations, Iran was making plans to advance on the ground and in the water — and the plans are unfolding nicely. For Iran.

After the U.S. withdrew from Iraq in 2011, large swaths of Iraqi territory were easily brought under Islamic State (ISIS) control, culminating in the proclamation in 2014 of “The Caliphate” with its seat in Mosul. Having denigrated its capabilities as “the JV team,” the Obama administration was desperate to get rid of ISIS, but the Iraqi army (trained and armed at a cost of $26 billion between 2006 and 2015 with another $1.6 billion spent in 2016) was unable to handle the job, even with American air power and Kurdish fighters as allies.

The Iraqi army has since been improved, but in the Sunni heartland of Iraq, Shiite “militias” have become America’s ally in the battle for Mosul. Some militias are Iraqi Arab Shiites and some are sponsored and commanded by Persian Shiite Iran. There is no love between the two, and certainly no love between any of the Shiite militias and the U.S.-sponsored Iraqi military. But the battle has largely gone against ISIS. Militias on one side and Iraqi forces on the other are recapturing territory amid evidence of outrageous human rights abuses against Iraqi civilians by all sides. At some point soon, Iraqis (army and militias), Iranians, Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and Americans will be eyeball-to-eyeball in Mosul. This run-in raises two questions:

Could Sunni Iraqi civilians prefer ISIS to Shiite militias, whether Iraqi or Iranian? If they do, Mosul may be liberated, but ISIS may still find havens from which to conduct a grinding guerrilla war.
How will Iraq get rid of the Iranians? Or will it? Some Iraqi Shiite militias have been loosely but legally incorporated into the Iraqi military; the Iranian ones have not. The chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Qassem Soleimani, has been seen several times in Iraq, most recently near the Syrian border, an indication that Iran has bigger plans than the liberation of Mosul.

Germany has a bizarre historical connection with Islam that lies beneath much of the present day crisis in Europe. One could argue that these connections are just the product of historical coincidences, but with Germany the coincidences seem to add up regularly.

When one studies the age of European imperialism, Germany came late to the game, almost as an afterthought. Bismarck, for all his authoritarian faults, felt that imperialism would do Germany no good, and wanted no part of it. He was overridden by public opinion, and Bismarck’s policy was later repudiated by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who wanted Germany to take her “Place in the Sun.”

Imperialism would not have destroyed Germany, per se; smaller and weaker nations such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and even backward Spain all had empires.

But what set Germany apart was a concerted love of Arabs and Islam. There was something deeper and darker to this than mere German MachtPolitik. One of his first acts, upon assuming power as Kaiser, was to visit the Ottoman Empire in 1889, He wore a fez. He offered to arm the Turks.

Sultan Mehmet V greets Kaiser Wilhelm upon his arrival in Constantinople

The Kaiser’s Islamic enthusiasm was fired by an 1889 visit to Turkey, which Bismarck opposed on the grounds that it would gratuitously alarm the Russians. Wilhelm met the murderous Sultan Abdul Hamid II and enjoyed the sinuous gyrations of the Circassian dancers in his Constantinople harem. – New York Review of Books

The Turks were astounded. The Ottoman Empire was on a death watch, and the only reason the European powers did not carve Turkey up is because they feared an intra-Christian war over the pieces. Now, the Kaiser was promising to make Islamic Turkey great again. Kaiser Wilhelm had resurrected the Islamic corpse.

It would only get worse. In 1898, during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the Kaiser made the insane insinuation that were he not already Christian, he would be a Muslim.

A later visit to Jerusalem [in 1898], then under the auspices of the same flattering sultan, left the impressionable Kaiser declaring that, had he arrived agnostic, “I certainly would have turned Mahometan!” Soon the Kaiser was styling himself “Hajji Wilhelm”, the Protector of Muslims. – The Express

If there’s one thing that 31,065 deadly Islamic terror attacks since 9/11 teach us, it’s that there is no way to foster a fact-based discussion of Islam in the halls of Western power.

That’s right — I said fact-based discussion of Islam. After 15-plus years since our Twin Towers burned and collapsed, I am still not talking about “Islamofascism,” “Islamism,” “Islamist extremism,” or any other figleaf-word made up by blushing Westerners to cover up the embarassingly appalling facts about Islam: its defining laws which can be as revolting as they are repressive; its history of violent conquest and “radical” religious and cultural cleansing; its totalitarian goals to apply “sharia” (Islamic law) everywhere to eradicate freedom of conscience, speech, other religions, and, oh yeah, rule the world.

In other words, exactly the things the Powers That Be will not talk about since even before George W. Bush rebounded from the shock of the Islamic attacks of 9/11 to realize that Islam was a “religion of peace.” In the land of the free and the home of the brave, Islamic blasphemy law rules.

Last week’s Senate hearing — even the title of last week’s Senate hearing — was more of the same.

Co-chaired by an affable Sen Ron Wyden and an angry Sen Claire McKaskill, the hearing was called: “Ideology and Terror: Understanding the Tools, Tactics, and Techniques of Violent Extremism.”

Notice no official mention of Islam. Or, more to the point, no official interest in Islam — except to protect it. Sen. Wyden, the “good guy” of the hearing for allowing that there might possibly be some teeny tiny slightly Islamist-ic thing about jihad (not that I heard the word), actually commended the two Muslim-born witnesses on the panel for “bending over backwards” to avoid tarring Islam with a truthful brush (or words not quite to that effect).

Meanwhile, the four Democrats on Team Violent Extremism, all women, ignored the Muslim born witnesses — ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Muslim reformer Asra Nomani, asking neither witness a single question. Instead, they focused obsessively on the non-sense of Mr. See-No-Islam, former NCTC director Michael Leiter (whom we last met here). Perhaps the Democrats saw the two women of Islamic heritage as impediments to the indoctrination in the “Ideology” of “Violent Extremism” that causes “Terror.”

But did the Democrat senators really have that much to fear? I ask this after having read the op-ed Hirsi Ali and Nomani wrote for the New York Times about their dismal experience; also after having then watched much of the hearing. I cannot now un-notice their obvious determination to avoid speaking forthrightly about Islam — same as the Left.

Hirsi Ali and Nomani write:

What happened that day [before the committee] was emblematic of a deeply troubling trend among progressives when it comes to confronting the brutal reality of Islamist extremism …

Here goes, one more time: This “brutal reality” they write about is a consequence of the laws of Islam. It is neither “Islamist,” nor is it a form of “extremism” within Islam. This brutal reality is all part of Islamic Normal.

The women note their own personal suffering growing up in “deeply conservative Muslim families”: genital multilation, forced marriage, death threats for their so-called apostasy.

Despite any and all “ists” or “isms,” such horrors and more are part of mainstream Islam.

Then they point out:

There is a real discomfort among progressives on the left with calling out Islamic extremism…

OK, but there is real discomfort in these two women when it comes to calling out the extremism of mainstream Islam. Just look how confused their discussion becomes on acknowledging fundamental conflicts between “universal human rights” and “Islamic law,” and on listing a series of what they call “Islamist ideas” which, nonetheless, come straight out of any authoritative Islamic law book:

The hard truth is that there are fundamental conflicts between universal human rights and the principle of Shariah, or Islamic law, which holds that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man’s; between freedom of religion and the Islamist idea that artists, writers, poets and bloggers should be subject to blasphemy laws; between secular governance and the Islamist goal of a caliphate; between United States law and Islamist promotion of polygamy, child marriage and marital rape; and between freedom of thought and the methods of indoctrination, or dawa, with which Islamists propagate their ideas.

In sum, whether it’s Claire McCaskill or Hirsi Ali, discussion and education about Islam is completely off limits. “Political Islam,” “Islamism,” “Medina Islam” and Violent Extremism become interchangeable threats to theworldcommunity, including the pink bunnies and buttercups that make up The Real McCoy Islam. The only problem, all agree, are those dwedful extwemists.