Displaying posts published in

August 2017

UN failure is leading to another Lebanon war Benny Avni

‘Precision-guided missile factories” are being built in Lebanon and Syria, and unless the UN stops them, Israel will.

That, more or less, was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s message to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in Jerusalem on Monday.

The new UN chief vowed to “do everything in my capacity to make sure that the [UN Interim Force in Lebanon] fully meets its mandate.” UNIFIL, established after Israel’s 2006 war with Hezbollah in south Lebanon, was charged with disarming Hezbollah. It didn’t.

The UN Security Council is set to renew UNIFIL’s mandate Wednesday. It automatically does so each year, even as Hezbollah, no longer a ragtag organization, now commands a formidable Lebanese-based army that dominates vast swaths in Syria, with tentacles in Yemen, Afghanistan and elsewhere. All while UN forces look on.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah has amassed over 100,000 missiles and other arms, hidden in plain view at private homes, or under schools and infirmaries, ready to hit neighboring Israel. And as Bibi noted Monday, new factories in Lebanon and Syria would allow Hezbollah to manufacture missiles there, rather than risk losing them en route from Hezbollah’s patron, Iran.

“This is something Israel cannot accept. This is something the UN should not accept,” the prime minister told Guterres.

Well, when Israeli leaders say they won’t “accept” something, they usually mean it — the country sets red lines and enforces them. But the UN? Could it actually help prevent a looming war? Not with its current blasé attitude.

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley wants change. On Friday, she told reporters that UNIFIL commander Maj. Gen. Michael Beary of Ireland is the “only person in south Lebanon who is blind” to Hezbollah’s arming. In an unprecedented personal rebuke, Haley added, “That’s an embarrassing lack of understanding on what’s going on around him.”

Haley said she wouldn’t accept an automatic renewal of the force’s mandate, demanding “more robust” action on Hezbollah’s arms.

Is that realistic?

SPLC Warns of ‘Turmoil and Bloodshed’ With New Map Identifying Confederate Monuments, Cities, Middle Schools By Tyler O’Neil

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a far-left outfit that labels mainstream conservative organizations “hate groups” and whose “hate map” inspired a terrorist attack in 2012, has released a map of every Confederate monument in America. But the map does not just include statues: it also lists towns, cities, counties, and even middle schools that bear the names of Confederate generals.

“More than 1,500 Confederate monuments stand in communities like Charlottesville with the potential to unleash more turmoil and bloodshed,” the SPLC posted with the map (emphasis added). “It’s time to take them down” (emphasis original).

The post urges visitors to send a letter to the editor of their local newspaper. “White supremacists incited deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last week in defense of a Confederate monument. We must show the country that [your city’s or county’s name] gives no safe harbor to such hatred. We must remove the monument at [location],” the sample letter read.

“If our government continues to pay homage to the Confederacy, people of color can never be sure they will be treated fairly,” the letter continued. “And we will never solve our community’s problems if an entire group of citizens is alienated or feels targeted for discrimination.”

As is often the case when the SPLC takes up a cause, this issue is far from clear cut. An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that 62 percent of Americans supported leaving “statues honoring leaders of the Confederacy” standing. At the same time, 86 percent of those in the poll said they disagreed with white supremacy and 73 percent said they disagreed with white nationalists.

Even African Americans favored keeping the statues (44 percent to 40 percent). Indeed, a group in Dallas organized to protect Confederate statues — and the members are mostly African-American.

“I’m not intimidated by Robert E. Lee’s statue. I’m not intimidated by it. It doesn’t scare me,” former city council member Sandra Crenshaw, a black woman, told CBS Dallas-Fort Worth. “We don’t want America to think that all African Americans are supportive of” removing the statues. She denounced as “misguided” the idea that “by taking a statue down, that’s going to erase racism.”

But the SPLC not only encourages this “misguided” idea, it warns of “more turmoil and bloodshed” unless the statues are removed.

The group does not only list statues, either. Its Confederate map includes counties named after Confederate generals like Lee County, Fla., in the Fort Myers area. It also includes parks like Confederate Park in Demopolis, Ala. It lists cities like the city of Fort Bragg in California. CONTINUE AT SITE

Christopher Carr The Beijing-Pyongyang Nexus

North Korea will remain an outlaw until China wholeheartedly joins the international effort aimed at bringing Kim Jong-un to heel — a commitment it has made but of which we are yet to see hard evidence. That might change for the better were the US to endorse a nuclear-armed Japan.

How do we deal with North Korea? This is the perennial question, going back to the last decade of the twentieth century. In response to recurring posturing by Pyongyang, successive US administrations have concluded so-called agreements with the rogue state, facilitating aid in return for the regime promising to suspend its nuclear program. As should have been expected, such agreements have proved worthless. Both Kim Jong-il and his son, Kim Jong-un were emboldened and the result is a greatly enhanced and a possibly irreversible nuclear shield.

How often do you hear repeated the popular mantra that Kim Jong-un is a madman likely to start a nuclear war any moment, that he is prepared to risk self-destruction in a final gotterdammerung? Yet, whilst Islamic totalitarians may welcome death in exchange for paradis and 72 virgins, Kim Jong-un, like the communist totalitarians of the twentieth century, is only interested in a socialist paradise in the here and now. Like Stalin and Mao, he is a survivalist. His ideology is evil and insane but in terms of regime survival, Kim Jong-un is tactically rational. Playing the irrational madman is one of the oldest tricks in the totalitarian rule book, designed to keep adversaries in a permanent state of uncertainty.

Far more likely is that the possession of nuclear weapons is the last line of defence for North Korea. For all the belligerent talk, it would seem unlikely that any rocket fired from North Korea would strike the territory of any adversary, except by accident. Firing missiles directly over Japan, as he did this week, cements the madman image and strategy. The prime aim of Kim Jong-un is to sustain his evil regime and profitably exchange nuclear technology with other thug states around the world.

What is China’s role in this current crisis? There is much, possibly misplaced, hope that China might be induced to effectively restrain North Korea. Whilst China joined in the unanimous UN Security Council resolution, tightening economic sanctions against North Korea, we await clear evidence that China is fully abiding by its commitment. In any case, there is little evidence the sanctions will slow Pyongyang’s nuclear program. Instead, the regime, accompanied by xenophobic propaganda, will make the condition of much of the expendable populace even worse. China may be content to play the good cop, bad cop routine, happy to keep the United States and her allies permanently distracted by Kim Jong-un’s antics. I suspect that China would like to see the United States engaged forever and a day in futile efforts to negotiate some sort of settlement.

U.S. Delivers Airstrike to Block Relocation of ISIS Fighters From Lebanese-Syrian Border In deal with Hezbollah, ISIS fighters, families were moving to area close to Iraq By Nancy A. Youssef in Washington and Margherita Stancati in Beirut

The U.S. military on Wednesday carried out two airstrikes aimed at stopping hundreds of Islamic State militants evacuated from the Lebanese-Syrian border from relocating to an extremist stronghold in Syria near the border with Iraq.

The first of the airstrikes came shortly after the U.S. criticized a deal brokered by the Lebanese militia Hezbollah that allowed hundreds of Islamic State militants and their families free passage out of an area straddling Syria’s southwestern border with Lebanon. Their convoy left Monday and was headed to a part of eastern Syria’s Deir Ezzour province very close to the border with U.S. ally Iraq.
Syrian forces members standing on a tank next to a bus waiting to transport Islamic State fighters and their families on Monday. Photo: Louai Beshara/Agence France-Presse/Getty Image

“We created a crater. It was to block them so they could not continue on the road,” a U.S. defense official said on Wednesday, adding the coalition didn’t strike the buses because family members were present.

That airstrike, which also destroyed a bridge, took place after the convoy entered Deir Ezzour province, one of Islamic State’s last strongholds in Syria, from territory controlled by the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

U.S. Central Command said that within two hours of the first strike, it conducted a separate but related second strike west of Deir Ezzour on a handful of logistical vehicles that were known to be affiliated to Islamic State. That strike may have killed Islamic State fighters, the U.S. military said.

“Irreconcilable #ISIS terrorists should be killed on the battlefield, not bused across #Syria to the Iraqi border without #Iraq’s consent,” Brett McGurk, U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy for combating Islamic State, tweeted ahead of the airstrike. “Our @coalition will help ensure that these terrorists can never enter #Iraq or escape from what remains of their dwindling ‘caliphate.’”

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi also criticized the Hezbollah deal.

“We consider it an insult to the Iraqi people. Moving this number of terrorists for such a long distance through Syria is unacceptable,” Mr. Abadi told reporters on Tuesday night. “We are fighting terrorism in Iraq and we are killing them in Iraq. We don’t send them to Syria.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Nuclear Missiles Over Tokyo Accepting a nuclear North Korea probably means a nuclear Japan.

Residents of northern Japan awoke Tuesday to sirens and cellphone warnings to take cover as a North Korean rocket flew overhead. The intermediate-range missile test will further roil the politics of security in Northeast Asia and is another prod toward Japan acquiring its own nuclear deterrent.

Pyongyang tested long-range missiles over Japan in 1998 and 2009, claiming they were satellite launches. The first shocked Japanese and led to cooperation with the U.S. on theater missile defense. After the second, Tokyo curtailed the North’s funding sources within Japan’s ethnic Korean community. Tuesday’s launch is even more threatening because U.S. and allied intelligence agencies assess that North Korea now has the ability to hit Japan with a miniaturized nuclear warhead mounted on a missile.

Much of Japan is protected by its own missile defenses as well as systems operated by U.S. forces in the region. Japan also recently deployed four Patriot PAC-3 missile-defense batteries to the west of the country, but these didn’t cover the northern island of Hokkaido overflown by Tuesday’s missile.

Japan’s ultimate security is the U.S. defense and nuclear umbrella, with its treaty guarantee that the U.S. will respond if Japan is attacked. But the logic of deterrence depends on having a rational actor as an adversary, and rationality can’t be guaranteed in North Korea. Its recent development of an ICBM capable of hitting the U.S. mainland also changes the equation. If North Korea attacked Tokyo and the U.S. responded with an attack on Pyongyang, U.S. cities might then be endangered.

Japanese leaders have long resisted building their own nuclear arsenal, but that could change if they conclude America isn’t reliable in a crisis. Or Japanese may simply decide they can’t have their survival depend on even a faithful ally’s judgment. Some Japanese politicians are already talking about their own nuclear deterrent. And while public opinion currently opposes nuclear weapons, fear could change minds. Japan has enough plutonium from its civilian nuclear reactors for more than 1,000 nuclear warheads, and it has the know-how to build them in months.

This prospect should alarm China, which would suddenly face a nuclear-armed regional rival. The U.S. also has a strong interest in preventing a nuclear Japan, not least because South Korea might soon follow. East Asia would join the Middle East in a new era of nuclear proliferation, with grave risks to world order. This is one reason that acquiescing to a North Korea with nuclear missiles is so dangerous.

Will this Man be Norway’s First Muslim Prime Minister? Sharia in sheep’s clothing? Bruce Bawer

Born in Norway to Pakistani parents, Abid Q. Raja studied law, criminology, and psychology at the universities of Oslo, Southampton, and Oxford, and later worked in Norway at several law firms, the Immigration Appeals Board, and the Police Department’s Immigration Office. He was also active in groups with names like the Center against Ethnic Discrimination, the Council for Crime Prevention, and the Equality and Anti-Discrimination Tribunal.

In 1999, Raja began to appear frequently on Norwegian TV and in the newspaper op-ed pages as a commentator on immigration and integration issue and as a spokesman for the nation’s Muslims. As it happens, that was the same year I moved to Norway, so I’ve followed his entire public career. During those early years, Raja came off as angry and radical. In 2004, while serving as a spokesman for an Oslo mosque called World Islamic Mission, he argued that the Norwegian government should pay to build a school in Pakistan for the children of Pakistani Muslims living in Norway. (Many Muslims in Europe send their kids to schools “back home” to prevent their Westernization.) In 2005, after a Norwegian court found a father and son guilty of forcing a family member to marry, Raja wrote an article for Aftenposten in which he insisted that not all arranged marriages are forced marriages. Some young people, he risibly maintained, “can’t manage to find their own spouse,” while some “don’t want to find their own spouse” and therefore ask their parents to do the job for them. Yeah, right.

In 2004, after a TV2 discussion program called Holmgang addressed the recent jihadist slaughter in Amsterdam of Islam critic Theo van Gogh, Raja went on the warpath, making several TV appearances in which he charged that the show’s host, Oddvar Stenstrøm, had “stigmatized” Muslims. (Stenstrøm reacted angrily to what he described as Raja’s “purely personal attacks” and outright lies: “In my nearly forty years as a journalist I’ve never experienced anything like it.”) Three years later, when Holmgang addressed the question of whether radical Islam represented a threat to Western values (99% of viewers said “yes”), Raja wrote a furious op-ed demanding that Stenstrøm be fired. It’s not clear what happened behind the scenes at TV2, but Stenstrøm was gone within a few months.

At some point – I don’t remember exactly when – I noticed that Raja had tamed his rhetoric. He was trying to sound reasonable, trying to come off as cool and reasoned. He even made the occasional, very carefully worded criticism of this or that aspect of the Muslim subculture. I didn’t believe for a second that he had actually changed his opinion about anything. As far as I was concerned, it was all an act. Raja, I surmised, was cynically modifying his image. The only question was: why? The answer seemed obvious: he wanted to pursue a political career. And he wouldn’t be satisfied with just being a member of Parliament, representing a mostly Muslim constituency: if that was all he was after, he wouldn’t have to undergo any kind of makeover.

No, this was a guy who was determined to go straight to the top. I had no doubt whatsoever that he could make it. He’s articulate and can put on the charm. He has an extremely slick, lawyerly way of fielding ticklish questions – not that the Norwegian media ever ask him ticklish questions. No, they fawn over him and give him protection, the way the U.S. media did with Obama. Given this – and given Raja’s high level of name recognition, the rapid rise in Norway’s Muslim population, and the number of Norwegian voters who are eager to prove at the ballot box that they’re not Islamophobes – he could eventually be a shoo-in. In short, when I looked at the newly made-over Raja, I realized I was looking at the man who someday might well become Norway’s first Muslim prime minister.

Indeed, Raja did end up pursuing a political career. He became active in the smallish Venstre (Liberal) Party, which loves two things: the environment and mass Muslim immigration. In 2009 he won an “alternate” seat in Parliament; the next year he founded Minotenk, a think tank devoted to “minority politics.” He said he wanted to be a “bridge-builder.”

Until Obama became president, I was invited every year to the Fourth of July garden party at the residence of the American ambassador to Norway. At one of the last parties I attended, I noticed a familiar figure in the middle of the crowd. It was Raja. He was surrounded by a circle of admirers, holding court, shaking hands, flashing a big smile. Clearly, this was a man on the make, a star on the ascendant.

False Choice: Ending DACA or Building the Border Wall President Trump doesn’t have to choose. And he shouldn’t. Michael Cutler

Though there is no shortage of “fake news” appearing in the mainstream media, there are a number of reports claiming that members of the Trump administration are attempting to convince President Trump to renege on his campaign promise to rollback the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in exchange for funding for the construction of the border wall.

Before we consider this news, let’s be clear about the absolute need to secure the dangerous U.S./Mexican border. I have frequently compared securing that border with a wing on an airplane. Without a wing an airplane will not fly. However, a wing by itself goes nowhere. Though it has been estimated that nearly half of all illegal aliens did not run the southern border, and instead were admitted through America’s 325 ports of entry, securing that border is nonetheless a vital element of our immigration law enforcement system and national security.

The U.S./Mexican border is particularly dangerous because of endemic corruption of the Mexican government on all levels and the extreme level of violence in Mexico, both attributable to the Mexican drug cartels. Mexican government officials are given the choice of “silver or lead.” Either take a bribe (silver) or expect to be shot (lead).

That violence and potential for corruption flows across our border: The majority of violent crimes in the United States have a connection to the drug trade and drug addiction.

For years I have written about how the most reliable metric to determine the level of border security for the United States is not the arrest statistics by the Border Patrol, but the price and availability of heroin and cocaine in the United States since those substances are not produced in the country. Every gram of those narcotics is smuggled into the United States.

Today the United States is experiencing unprecedented levels of heroin addiction that wreaks havoc on lives and our communities. Drug smugglers also engage in human trafficking and smuggle transnational gang members into the United States.

While not all drug smuggling involves the U.S./Mexican border, a huge amount of narcotics does enter the United States along that dangerous corridor that stretches roughly 2,000 miles.

Furthermore, the 9/11 Commission made the compelling case for making border security a cornerstone of national security policy. This conclusion, in point of fact, was laid out in the preface of the official report, “9/11 and Terrorist Travel: Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.”

Now let’s consider the wrong-headed program created by the Obama administration, DACA.

The mainstream media and immigration anarchists have, since the inception of the illegal implementation of the DACA program on June 15, 2012 by the Obama administration, provided blatantly false and misleading statements about this program, duping Americans into believing that DACA is for alien children.

While President Obama sold this program to the American people as providing lawful status for young aliens, in reality aliens as old as 31 years of age could qualify if they claimed to have entered the United States prior to their 16th birthdays.

Antifa Demands The U.S. Be Destroyed But few high-level Democrats are willing to denounce these terrorists. Matthew Vadum

Video has surfaced showing masked Antifa thugs in Berkeley, California, last weekend calling for the destruction of the United States.

“No Trump, no wall, no USA at all!” the large gathering of cowardly black bloc-style protesters chanted at a conservative “No to Marxism” rally.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Antifa, short for anti-fascists, are the de facto militant arm of today’s Democratic Party, just as the Ku Klux Klan functioned as the murderous terrorist wing of the party many years ago.

“This is a political militia that is doing the bidding, in effect, of Nancy Pelosi and Governor Jerry Brown and the mayor of Berkeley and all these supposedly mainstream Democratic politicians, and this is a militia hurting American citizens for saying what they think,” Tucker Carlson said on his Fox News Channel show Monday.

Democrat office-holders are loathe to condemn the Antifa terrorists because Antifa sympathizers are their political base. Antifa enthusiasts in the mainstream media and in social media treat Antifa like courageous Freedom Riders and liken them to the troops who stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day to liberate Europe from the real-life Nazi menace. There may be some radical, dangerous kooks in the Republican Party, but they are vastly outnumbered by the radical adrenaline-fueled crazies who run in Democrat circles.

Left-wingers like the stunningly obtuse media personality Touré romanticize Antifa. “If white supremacists are American terrorists then those willing to physically fight them are doing heroic work,” he tweeted.

But who’s to say which people are “white supremacists”? The Left smears everyone it doesn’t like as racists and neo-Nazis.

Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer is a leading apologist for Antifa violence. After the Antifa-initiated rioting that police allowed at the “No to Marxism” rally in Berkeley last weekend, he tweeted, “The narrative forming of today online is that it was super violent in Berkeley. There were some fights, but overall it wasn’t actually.”

Besides, the Antifa had good intentions, he implied. “There were thousands demonstrating against hate.”

Police said 13 suspects “were arrested on suspicion of various offenses, including assault with a deadly weapon, felony assault and violating the Berkeley Municipal Code.” Six people were reportedly injured.

This brings to mind the quotation attributed to Stalin: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”

And maybe one can’t, after all, expect much from the Democratic Party, which by way of a DNC resolution supporting Black Lives Matter, officially endorses black-on-white violence and the murder of police officers. Condemning vicious radical left-wing hooligans hurts their reelection chances as they risk being characterized as soft on “fascism.”

President Obama allowed Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter to run wild in recent years. Obama even rewarded riot-inciters and those who support killing police by hosting them at the White House. Instead of protecting citizens and their property, some politicians even admit pro-rioting policies openly, as when then-Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D) acknowledged in April 2015 that authorities “gave those who wished to destroy space to do that.”

Many of those same Democrats who stridently insisted to every TV news camera they could find for days that President Trump had to condemn by name, political affiliation, and ideological affinity the groups involved in the misnamed “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, over and over again are strangely silent when it comes to their terrorist Antifa friends.

Is Trump Adopting the Diplomacy Delusion? The end of fighting to win. Bruce Thornton

Recently, two announcements regarding Afghanistan and the Arab-Israeli conflict suggested that the Trump administration is following the old failed strategies for dealing with the challenge of modern jihadism. If so, he is setting us up for the same old failures caused by the same old failure of imagination.

First, Trump announced a bold plan for dealing with Afghanistan, that 16-year-old conflict now in its third presidential administration. He set out an ambitious aim: “From now on, victory will have a clear definition — attacking our enemies, obliterating ISIS, crushing al-Qaida, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan and stopping mass terror attacks against America before they emerge.” He clarified that he would not make the mistakes of past administrations: no nation-building, no announcements of troop levels or withdrawal dates, no restrictive rules of engagements.

So far so good. But he also hinted that a diplomatic solution would be sought: “Someday, after an effective military effort, perhaps it will be possible to have a political settlement that includes elements of the Taliban and Afghanistan, but nobody knows if or when that will ever happen.” And he added that given such uncertainty, “America will continue its support for the Afghan government and the Afghan military as they confront the Taliban in the field,” suggesting that the war will continue indefinitely.

Yet all this depends on adding an unspecified number of troops, perhaps 4,000, whose mission will be mainly to support and train the Afghan army––pretty much what’s been going on for years. How this mini-surge will work when Obama’s surge of 33,000 soldiers in 2009––which raised the total number of troops to 100,000 by 2010––didn’t, isn’t quite clear. Prissy ROE and micromanagement from D.C. alone can’t account for that failure.

Worse, soon after Trump’s announcement, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson undercut Trump’s “We will always win,” by saying “We are there to facilitate and ensure that there is a pathway for reconciliation and peace talks. As the pressure begins to take hold, we believe we already know there are certain moderate elements of the Taliban [sic!] who we think will be ready and develop a way forward.” Even more astonishing, after he said the Taliban “will not win a battlefield victory,” he went on, “We may not win one, but neither will you.” Contra Trump, Tillerson implies that we are not fighting to destroy the enemy, but to “begin a process, a lengthy process, of reconciliation and a peace accord in Afghanistan.”

Once again, the delusions of diplomatic settlements take precedence over destroying the enemy and those who harbor him. I guess people have forgotten that LBJ’s similar strategy of fighting the North Vietnamese just enough to bring them to the negotiating table was a complete failure.

Meanwhile, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has asked Mahmoud Abbas and Palestinian Arabs “to hold back on their threat to take unilateral diplomatic initiatives against Israel for a period of some four months, in exchange for an American commitment to submit a comprehensive diplomatic plan within that time frame to advance the diplomatic process,” as World Israel News reported. Trump plans to meet Abbas at the UN is September, where he will present his “road map for peace.” According to a White House statement, “Both sides agreed to continue with the US-led conversations as the best way to reach a comprehensive peace deal.” But they deny the quid pro quo of Palestinian constraint for a comprehensive plan.

Once again, the shibboleths and clichés generated by decades of diplomatic failure are passed around, despite the overwhelming evidence that the Palestinian Arabs are not interested in “two peoples living side-by-side in peace,” and use negotiation and complaints of “settlements” as a tactic in their “stages” strategy for destroying Israel. Meanwhile the terror continues, the incitement starting in preschool trains the next generation of “martyrs,” and the PA uses danegeld from the West to subsidize the families of jailed or killed terrorists.

The Mood Music of Mohammed by Mark Steyn

It’s what? ten? no, eleven days since the attacks in Spain that left 14 people dead in Barcelona plus one woman in the nearby seaside town of Cambrils. For once there wasn’t even the pretense that this was a “lone wolf” terrorist. It was an extremely large cell, organized by an imam called Abdelbaki es Satty, who prematurely self-detonated the night before when he and his conspirators accidentally blew up the house they’d filled with TATP.

I thought these novel aspects might hold the attention of the media. The imam/cell leader would seem to belie the view of the US National Security Advisor H R McMaster that Muslim terrorists who commit terror in the name of Islam do so out of “ignorance” of their faith – a view so fiercely held by Mr McMaster that it has resulted in the systematic cleansing from the White House of all those who dissent therefrom. And had Imam es Satty managed to get the TATP into the back of the van the death toll would have been many times higher.

But he didn’t, so it wasn’t. And fifteen dead on a glamorous and glittering European boulevard at the height of the tourist season now barely rates a #JeSuisWhatever hashtag, never mind an all-star pop concert with an audience of sorrowful, tilty-headed locals promising that no matter how often you blow us up we won’t change – by, say, adopting a less tilty-headed and sorrowful expression. The imam’s plan – to destroy the spectacular landmark church of the Sagrada Família – is oddly similar to the plot of Brad Thor’s new thriller, Use of Force, where the equivalent Spanish target is the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. Indeed, the imam’s van driver has the same name as Mr Thor’s key plotter: Younes. But what’s thrilling in a thriller in now just the humdrum background music of real life in the new Europe.

So Barcelona came and went before I had a chance to write about it. So did Finland. You don’t remember that one? No imams, no TATP. Just a lone stabber going full Allahu Akbar in a shopping mall in Turku. Two women dead, eight injured. As it happens, I was in Turku last year, driving up the west coast of Finland all the way to Kemi, a somewhat unprepossessing burg at the top of the Bay of Bothnia, where I’d had an extensive conversation, in the pedestrian shopping arcade, with an elderly “refugee” in a dingy dishdash. And I’d intended to write something about how absurd it was that clothing designed for the deserts of Araby was now a not unfamiliar sight in southern Lapland, in a town that’s more or less the last stop before Santa’s Grotto.

But ten stabbing victims in Finland barely makes the papers at all: Foot-of-page-27 “News in Brief” stuff. Just the umpteenth confused fellow acting out of “ignorance” of his religion. If only H R McMaster had become a bigshot ayatollah and opened a seminary in Qom or Cairo, all this “ignorance” could have been avoided.

There was more “ignorance” afoot in Europe last night. On the boulevard Émile Jacqmain in the heart of Brussels a Somali was shot dead after yelling “Allahu Akbar” and taking his machete to a bunch of soldiers, and Buckingham Palace was reported to be in “lockdown” after another guy with another machete and another cry of “Allahu Akbar” took on another security detail. As A A Milne put it:

They’re stabbing the guard at Buckingham Palace
Christopher Mahmoud went down to kill Alice…

Lest you detect a pattern of behavior here, the Palace perp is reported to be “a 26-year-old man from Luton”. The Brussels stabber is not from Luton. So no general conclusions can be drawn: It’s not like Charlottesville, where one Caucasian in an automobile is an indictment of the entirety of American history necessitating the demolition of Stone Mountain and Mount Rushmore.

The Queen is older than almost all those around her, certainly older than her guards and the 26-year-old Lutonians lunging at them with machetes. And she must occasionally reflect that not so long ago one didn’t hear words like “machete” and “lockdown” in connection with Buckingham Palace: “baldachin”, “porte-cochère” certainly; but not “lockdown”. Yet, if such thoughts should rise unbidden in one’s mind, it is prudent to suppress them. Consider the cautionary tale of Sarah Champion, Member of Parliament for Rotherham and spokesperson for “Women and Equalities” in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. Ms Champion penned a column for The Sun earlier this month:

Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.

There. I said it. Does that make me a racist? Or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is?