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Ruth King

Trump Brings Foreign Policy Back to Earth The goal now is less to make dreams come true than to keep nightmares at bay. By Walter Russell Mead

Forget the tweets, the gaffes and the undiplomatic asides. The most trenchant criticism of President Trump’s foreign policy is that it risks forfeiting America’s hard-won position of global leadership.

It’s a compelling indictment: Mr. Trump is withdrawing from the Paris Accord, “restructuring” the State Department with a chain saw, dumping the Pacific trade deal, and abdicating on human rights while cozying up to authoritarians. The whole of the damage being done to America’s standing is greater than the sum of his tweets.

On the other hand, those hardy souls who defend the administration argue Mr. Trump is so smart that his critics can’t fathom the method to his apparent madness. The naysayers, as this theory has it, are playing checkers, while Mr. Trump is winning at chess.

The truth, as always, is more complicated. Mr. Trump is not the second coming of Bismarck, and his temperament, education and experience have not prepared him to steer American foreign policy at a difficult time. But there is a pattern if not a method to his moves. Moreover, Mr. Trump’s mix of ideas, instincts and impulses is not as ill-suited to the country’s needs as his most fervid detractors believe.

What gives Mr. Trump his opening is something many foreign-policy experts have yet to grasp: that America’s post-Cold War national strategy has run out of gas. During the period of confidence and giddy optimism that followed the Soviet Union’s fall, the list of “important” American foreign-policy goals expanded dramatically.

Promoting democracy in the Middle East; protecting the rights of religious and sexual minorities; building successful states from Niger to Ukraine; advancing global gender equality; fighting climate change: This is only a partial list of objectives recent administrations pursued, sometimes under pressure from congressional mandates. Foreign policy has become as complex and unwieldy as the tax code, even as public support for this vast, misshapen edifice has withered.

Change had to come, and the failure of Mr. Trump’s 2016 rivals—both Republican and Democratic—to offer a less disruptive alternative to gassy globalism helped put him in the White House. Although the president’s antiglobalist and mercantilist instincts blind him to some realities, they enable him to grasp three significant truths.

First, Mr. Trump knows that the post-Cold War policies can no longer be politically sustained. Second, he knows that China poses a new and dangerous challenge to American interests. Third, he sees that foreign policy must change in response. The old approach—on everything from trade and development, to military deployments and readiness, to religious freedom and women’s issues—must be reassessed in the light of today’s dangerous world.

For years foreign-policy thinking was dominated by the idea that the end of the Cold War meant the “end of history”—the inevitable triumph of the so-called liberal world order. This belief shaped a generation of intellectuals and practitioners.

But history isn’t over, and American foreign policy needs to come back to earth. The U.S. isn’t putting the finishing touches on a peaceful global system that is fated to endure for the ages. For the foreseeable future, foreign policy is going to be less about making dreams come true and more about keeping nightmares at bay. CONTINUE AT SITE

Laundering Iran’s Nukes – Again by A.J. Caschetta

While President Obama was busy concocting the fiction that “moderates” in the Iranian regime were worthy of our trust, he knew full well that he was offering concessions to co-conspirators in the 9/11 attacks. The Obama administration had evidence that Iran facilitated Al-Qaeda in numerous ways, but Congress and the American people were in the dark.

Obama gets to boast about his deal, but the people of the U.S. got almost nothing. Everyone knows that Iran will spend the money in ways contrary to American interests. Even John Kerry acknowledged that much of it would go towards supporting Iran’s terrorist proxies. Furthermore,

The result is an emboldened Iran, with the “right to enrich” uranium.

Days away from the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump, outgoing Secretary of State John Kerry boasted about the success of the Obama administration’s signature foreign policy achievement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), on putatively “preventing” Iran’s nuclear capability. “In reaching and implementing this deal,” Kerry said, “we took a major security threat off the table without firing a single shot.”

On the contrary, anyone who examines the JCPOA closely and honestly will come to the conclusion that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the mullahs got just about everything they wanted, while the U.S. got a dubious promise of good behavior that expires after 10 years.

Anyone who closely and honestly examines the JCPOA “nuclear deal” with Iran will conclude that the Islamic Republic got just about everything they wanted, while the U.S. got a dubious promise of good behavior that expires after 10 years. Pictured: Then Secretary of State John Kerry meets with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in Geneva on January 14, 2015 for negotiations. (Image source: U.S. Mission Geneva/Flickr)

It has long been known that what Michael Doran called “Obama’s Secret Iran Strategy” required the administration to exaggerate the “spirit of reform” in Iran and to keep details about the agreement secret from both Congress and the American public. Recently, however, two seemingly unrelated events demonstrated just how duplicitous the Obama administration was with the American public over its dealings with the Islamic Republic.

The first event occurred on October 31, at the “World Without Terrorism” convention held in Iran. At a press conference, Mohammad Ali Jafari, Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), reminded the world that Iran’s ballistic missiles, though limited to a range of 2,000 km, are still sufficient to target U.S. bases in the region, saying:

“Even though we have the capability to increase this range, in the meantime this range is enough for us, because the Americans are sufficiently situated within a 2,000 km radius around Iran. We will respond to them if they attack us.”

Erdogan’s Interesting New Top Mayors by Burak Bekdil

Istanbul’s new mayor had been one of the lawyers defending Islamist arsonists in what is known as the “Sivas case”.

They set the hotel alight, while policemen allegedly stood by and watched as 37 people were killed. The city’s Islamist mayor refused to send firefighters to put out the blaze. The assault took eight hours, without any intervention from the police, military or fire department.

Ankara, Turkey’s capital, has a population of about five million. Istanbul, the country’s biggest city and commercial capital, has more than 15 million inhabitants. Turkey’s top two cities have since 1994 been uninterruptedly run by elected mayors who feature various blends of religious conservatism, nationalism and Islamism. Recently, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan thought it was time for a changing of the guard in both cities; but the change looks more like old wine in a new bottle.

Melih Gokcek, the eccentric nationalist and Islamist mayor of Ankara, a loyal devotee of Erdogan, has run the capital for 23 years. During his reign, he did not miss a single opportunity to get into verbal fights with half the Turkish nation in addition to “Turkey’s foreign enemies.” In 2014, during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, when large crowds of Turks regularly attacked Israel’s diplomatic missions in Ankara and Istanbul — with hundreds of angry Turks throwing rocks and trying to break into the diplomatic compounds — Gokcek was quoted as saying: “We will conquer the despicable murderers’ consulate”.

In a television debate in 2015, Gokcek claimed that if he gets killed, Israel’s Mossad should be held responsible. In August 2016, he claimed that the United States had subcontracted Israel to perform seismic tests to cause earthquakes in and around Turkey. In October 2016, he once again claimed that the earthquakes in Turkey were the work of the U.S. and Israel — conspiracies plotted against Turkey by foreign powers.

In February 2017 Gokcek claimed that the mild earthquake off Canakkale province on Turkey’s northern Aegean coast was the work of foreign powers who wanted to topple Erdogan’s government. He called on the Turkish Armed Forces to take measures on the Aegean Sea. “At the moment,” he said, “The planned conspiracy against Turkey is to cause economic collapse by means of an earthquake in Istanbul”. Recently, in September, Gokcek, in his Twitter account, called on Muslim believers to pray that disasters worse “than the Irma and Harvey hurricanes” take place.

All that usual “more royalist than the royals” behavior did not help him keep his seat. Erdogan pressed for the resignation of a number of mayors in his party, including the mayors of Ankara and Istanbul, and Gokcek grudgingly had to step down. Who ideally should replace the man loved by religious fanatics but hated by liberals and seculars?

EDWARD CLINE: A LEXICON FOR OUR TIME

Suppose you never “insulted” Islam or Muslims? Or never gave Muslims the “stink eye” in a supermarket or the Mall of America? It wouldn’t matter. Especially if you’re a white infidel. If accused of Islamophobia or being “racist,” how would you reply? Logically, you couldn’t rebut the accusation. You would be trying to prove a negative. Hark that hoary old chestnut, asked by a trial lawyer of the defendant, “When did you stop beating your wife?” If it’s a Muslim defendant, the joke would be lost of him. Islam permits the beating of wives (and of dishonorable daughters) with a fist or a vehicle or a hammer or a machete.

I offer here a short list of my own thoughts on the terms gratuitously employed by the MSM and political establishment to sugar-coat the depredations of Islam and of the Left. As with Islam, because there is no moderate Islam, there is just Islam – Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey – there is no “alt-Left, or a “moderate Left; there is just the Left. “There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.” Or, as the banner of FrontPage reads, “Inside every Progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” The Progressive, writes N. A. Halkides, “believes in precisely two things: his own magnificence and the constructive power of brute force. In combination, they lead him naturally from the role of pestiferous busybody to brutal dictator.”

Islamophobia: Bare Naked Islam has I think the best motto in its site banner concerning Islam: “It’s not Islamophobia if they’re trying to kill you.” Which means that given the countless news stories about jihadist attacks and the number of people murdered in the name of Allah, most people, if they retain some sense and a desire for self-preservation, would naturally develop a phobia or fear of Islam. In 2016, over 11,000 Islamic terrorist attacks were made.

The war on the West is not limited to murdering Westerners. Just the other day Salafist “moderate” Muslims attacked a Sufi mosque in the northern Sinai killing over 300 worshippers. The Sufis are “heretics” according to Salafism’s strict and literal interpretation of the Koran, and deserve to die, as well as all non-Muslims who do not submit. Sufis hate America and the West, too, so no tears for the victims will be shed on my keyboard. Sufi, Salafist, Wahabbist, or Shi’ite, if your’re a member of one of those sects, and feel comfortable swathed, body and soul, in the suffocating “culture” of Islamic traditions and mores, then you’ve already wasted your life. A terrorist’s AK-47 or bomb won’t make a difference.

Christmas Threat Against Times Square in New ISIS Santa Poster By Bridget Johnson

An ISIS supporter released a poster of Santa Claus on the group’s social media haunts. The poster shows Santa overlooking Times Square with a case of dynamite at his side.

In the image, the New York streets are filled with pedestrians at nighttime and Santa carries a bulky red sack.

“We meet at Christmas in New York… soon,” reads the text on the image.

It follows propaganda posters making holiday threats toward Europe, with a hand holding a bloody knife before a market in the neighborhood of the Eiffel Tower and a black-clad jihadist standing over Santa on London’s Regent Street.

The threat also comes as the ISIS-supporting Wafa’ Media Foundation has released numerous threats against the holiday and against the Vatican. In a message to fellow jihadists last week, the group noted that “the crusaders’ feast is approaching.”

In another instance, Wafa’ circulated a poster depicting a vehicle moving toward the Vatican with a cache of weapons, vowing “Christmas blood.”

ISIS followers have favored attacks during the holiday season, with the 2015 attack on a San Bernardino County Christmas party by Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik as well as last December’s truck attack on the Berlin Christmas market by Anis Amri.

And a 2016 video released by the Al-Furat Media Foundation, an official media affiliate of the Islamic State, portrayed a suicide bomber striking Times Square.

That video opened with the tag “USA” in the upper corner and shots of an unseen person assembling a bomb to put in a suicide vest. The person buttons up a blue shirt, straps on the bomb belt, and zips up a dark brown leather jacket to conceal it. He’s wearing a stainless steel wristwatch that reads 9:25.

That was followed by scenes of Times Square and the torso of the leather-jacketed man walking along the street. A TGI Friday’s sign is shown.

In a close-up of the man with no location shown, he’s pulling the ring on his detonator.

It appeared to be mock-up footage from an Al-Jazeera segment, with the network’s logo fuzzed out but still discernible. News footage was then shown of the ABC News building banner in New York scrolling a headline about the November 2015 Paris attacks.

The video then showed Orlando nightclub bomber Omar Mateen along with closeups of the weapons he used in the June 12 attack on the Pulse nightclub: a Sig Sauer MCX .223 caliber rifle and Glock 17 9 mm. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Wages of Inversion By David Solway ****

We are in the midst of an act of culturecide…..

We live in an age in which things are no longer what they are supposed to be. Words have come to denote the opposite of what they signify. Cultural institutions on which we rely to serve our personal and national interests have morphed into caricatures of their original intentions, working against their foundational purposes.

Linguistic and institutional inversion is the time-dishonored strategy of totalitarian systems and is generally associated with the theory and practice of the Left, which has infiltrated the culture and polity of the free world, particularly in the areas of language use, the media, education, the arts and gender relations. The democratic West is now at the mercy of its own reverse polarity.

Language

One recalls the famous slogans of Orwell’s Ingsoc: War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. These contradictions are no longer as absurd as 1984 makes them out to be. What Orwell called Newspeak has entered the practice of the West at levels never before seen. A society in which language has been so denatured as to operate on the principle of inversion, beyond even the institutional euphemisms of political correctness, has no future. Samuel Butler saw this coming in his premonitory steampunk novel Erewhon, an anagram for Nowhere. We have got things backward.

Thus a blood-saturated religion is rinsed for public consumption as the “religion of peace.” An insurgent army of fascist brownshirts calls itself Antifa. “Inclusion” has come to mean the exclusion of those who do not conform to a prescribed ideology. “Diversity” is an antonymic synonym for monolithic groupthink. “Affirmative action” affirms racism in the guise of anti-racism. Sexual jokes, lewd comments and even innocent displays of affection or interest on the part of men are subsumed under the category of “sexual assault” and are said to constitute infallible signs of male depravity; similarly the term “rape culture,” prominent on campus, refers to a non-existent entity and has come to describe normal sexual and romantic behavior.

The mantra of “Social Justice” is the conceptual umbrella under which all such aberrations take shelter. It is nothing but a stand-in for flagrant injustice, exacting tribute from decent hardworking people and struggling entrepreneurs to benefit a largely parasitical class of those who claim to be oppressed or who affect to be offended. Indeed, what Michael Walsh calls the “decriminalization of crime in the name of ‘social justice,’ long a goal of the cultural-Marxist left, [leads to] social disruption, mistrust, resentment, lawlessness and, if left unchecked, anarchy and civil war.” What social justice has to do with a just society escapes us almost perfectly. In fact, the former is the diametric opposite of the latter. As philosopher Roger Scruton writes in The Meaning of Conservatism, “the greatest threat to just dealings between people is the attempt to remake society from above, in conformity with a conception of ‘social justice’.”

The Media

In her recent book The Smear, investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson, ostracized by the press elite for her unvarnished truth-telling, has analyzed the scandal of today’s “industry of smears and fake news,” which she calls “transactional journalism,” i.e., returning favors for privileged information, writing what you’re told to write. This has “opened the floodgate to clandestine collusion between reporters and special interests. As a result, it can be impossible to separate fact from fiction.” Moreover, the line between news reports and partisan editorializing has become blurred, so that opinions are routinely cast as fact. “The media had functioned as a powerful institution,” writes Daniel Greenfield, “because of its pretense of objectivity. When it tossed aside objectivity, all it had left was power”—that is, the power to obfuscate, deceive and drive the course of events toward its own political ends.

This violation of journalistic ethics is now pretty much universal. News is agitprop and editorials are political spin, almost always under the sign of left-wing advocacy masking as objective scrutiny and disclosure. Attkisson reminds us of Joseph Goebbels’ dictum in his Diaries, “those who control news policies [must] endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose.” Just as today’s universities have taken a page from the Nazified German universities of the 1930s and the installation of the Nuremberg Laws, so contemporary journalism has learned from the dark master of deception and persuasion. A lie—the bigger the better—repeated with dinning regularity becomes, as Goebbels instructed us, the truth.

Roger Franklin A Case for Immigration Reform

Official policy facilitated the importing of a teenage bride destined for an arranged marriage and, ultimately, the death by a mother’s hand of her 14-month-old daughter. Why, Minister Dutton, is the trade in chattel brides permitted while applicants who might do much for the country get a hard time?

In April, 2016, Sofina Nikat took 14-month-old daughter Sanaya Sahib for a walk in a Melbourne park, smothered her by the banks of a creek and tipped the little corpse into the water, subsequently informing police the infant had been abducted by a drunk of African appearance. Three days later under police questioning, the mother finally conceded her “shoeless African” did not exist and admitted it was she who had killed her toddler. Charged initially with murder, later downgraded to the offence of infanticide, Ms Nikat was yesterday sentenced by Justice Lex Lasry, who took note of the 529 days she had been held pending trial. Concluding that was quite enough time behind bars, he imposed a year of community service and turned her free.

Reaction on Melbourne talkback radio was swift and much of it involved the accusation that Justice Lasry is soft on infanticide. This seems remarkably unfair to the judge, as the maximum penalty for killing a baby in Victoria is a mere five years and, given Ms Nikat’s lengthy stretch on remand, she would not have served much more time even if the full weight of the law had been brought to bear. Worth noting is that Justice Lasry last year presided at the trial of a woman who drowned three of her children after driving an SUV into a pond. He gave her 26 years.

What seems to have been so far ignored in the Nikat matter is the light it shines on this nation’s immigration policies. Consider

Raised in Fiji, 18-year-old Ms Nikat was shipped to Australia as the chattel in an arranged marriage.

Questions: Is an arranged marriage acceptable grounds for seeking and obtaining residence in Australia? The ABC seems to think such unions represent you-beaut cultural enrichment, but is this Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s view? If not, would he deem it a good idea to institute a rigorous screening process?

Observation: A Singapore-born journalist of Quadrant Online’s acquaintance, a woman with several degrees, including one from Oxford, had to jump through hoops to obtain even short-term Australian residency, despite a job offer from News Corp. The process cost her a large sum for lawyers and fees which, after two years, she was expected to repeat in order to stay on the right side of the law. She chose instead to leave and now works for the New York Times. Smart, industrious and never likely to be a charge on the public purse, Australia has lost her. Perhaps, had she agreed to an arranged marriage, she would still be here — at considerably less cost to herself and the nation’s future productivity.

THE NEW ISRAEL FUND….BAD NEWS

The New Israel Fund (NIF) is headquartered in New York, and maintains offices throughout the U.S. as well as in Canada, the UK, Switzerland, and Germany. Since its founding in 1979, as a political framework following the 1977 Israeli elections which brought Likud to power, NIF has provided over $300 million to more than 900 Israeli organizations.
Shatil is the Israel-based “operating arm” of the NIF,” that creates and nurtures coalitions of NGOs, attempts to influence laws and bills in Israel, and holds workshops for staffers of NIF-funded NGOs.
Declared objectives: “to strengthen and expand the pro-democracy, progressive forces in Israel” and help “Israel to live up to its founders’ vision.” According to the NIF, the Israeli government and public have strayed from the vision of Israel as a “Jewish homeland and a democracy.”
A common theme of NIF fundraising and campaigning is the supposed “erosion of Israeli democracy.” In September 2016, the Israeli Ambassador to Switzerland refused an invitation to participate in an NIF event, titled “Is Israeli democracy in danger?” The Israeli Foreign Ministry explained that the “provocative” title and NIF involvement were the reasons for the refusal.
To achieve these goals, the NIF “brings the broad range of civil rights, social justice and religious tolerance issues to the attention” of individuals and institutions, including the media and the Knesset. It presents itself as the “only” group working on such issues, attempting to restore Israeli democracy to its founders’ vision.
In New York, NIF participation in the Celebrate Israel Parade is the subject of controversy and criticism.
Engages in intense confrontation with “rights wing” opponents, including Israeli government officials, MKs, and NGOs such as Im Tirtzu,.
Finances

Expenses in 2015 were $31 million, approximately the same as in 2014.
Total authorized grants to Israeli NGOs were approximately $13.8 million in 2015 (including donor-advised grants), a 5.8% decrease from 2014 ($14.7 million). (See Appendix 1)
Although NIF grants are for organizations based in Israel, the organization is not registered with the Israeli Registrar of Non-Profits.
NIF publishes a list of donors in its annual reports; some appear as “anonymous.”

The Push to Make French Gender-Neutral Can changing the structure of a language improve women’s status in society? The Atlantic Annabelle Timsit

“My homeland is the French language,” author Albert Camus once wrote—and many French people would agree. That’s why any attempt at changing the language is often met with suspicion. So the uproar was almost instantaneous when, this fall, the first-ever school textbook promoting a gender-neutral version of French was released.

It was a victory for a subset of French feminists who had argued that the gendered nature of the language promotes sexist outcomes, and that shifting to a gender-neutral version would improve women’s status in society. Educating the next generation in a gender-inclusive way, they claimed, would yield concrete positive changes, like professional environments that are more welcoming to women.

Many others found this idea outrageous. They complained that implementing it would badly complicate education, and that there’s not enough evidence that changing a language can really change social realities. Clearly in the second camp, the office of Prime Minister Edouard Philippe announced this week that it’s banning the use of gender-neutral French in all official government documents.

In French, pronouns, nouns, and adjectives reflect the gender of the object to which they refer. So, le policier is a policeman; la policière is a policewoman. The language has no neutral grammatical gender. And there are many nouns (including those referring to professions) that don’t have feminine versions. So, a male minister is le ministre and a female minister is la ministre. What’s more, French students are taught that “the masculine dominates over the feminine,” meaning that if you have a room full of ten women and just one man, you have to describe the whole group in the masculine.

Feminists who believe that these features of the French language put women at a disadvantage disagree about how best to remedy them. Most recommend creating feminine versions of all professional nouns and/or using neutral nouns whenever possible. Many also recommend a grammatical tool that consists of adding a “median-period” at the end of masculine nouns, followed by the feminine ending, thus indicating both gendered versions of every noun (like musicien·ne·s, which would read as “male musicians and female musicians”). Some have even recommended creating a gender-neutral pronoun (the equivalent of how “they” is sometimes used in English, or “hen” in Sweden). These and other recommendations have collectively become known as “inclusive writing.”

Many linguists I spoke to stressed that changing a language doesn’t guarantee a change in perception; this leads some of them to say that inclusive writing just isn’t worth the trouble. But at least one major school of linguistic thought concludes that language and perception are intimately related.

Western Authorities Anticipate Christmas Market Terror Attacks By Patrick Poole

Back in August after the terror attack in Barcelona that killed 15 people and injured 131 more in the La Rambla downtown tourist area, I noted here at PJ Media that Islamic vehicle-ramming terror attacks were literally remaking the face of Europe and America.

#NEWSGRAPHIC Fatal vehicle-ramming attacks in Europe since July 2016 @AFP pic.twitter.com/DF9BQMqE3J
— AFP news agency (@AFP) August 18, 2017

Now with ISIS fanboy channels buzzing with calls for similar terror attacks during the Christmas season, European authorities are increasing security for holiday-related events across the continent.

If you’re celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ this holiday season, they fantasize about killing you: https://t.co/U5XNjUSdNT #Christmas
— #PJMedia (@PJMedia_com) November 15, 2017

Here in the U.S., just a month after the terror attack in Manhattan that killed 8 and injured 11, and nearly a year after the vehicle-ramming attack at Ohio State University that injured 11, homeland security officials are also preparing for possible terror attacks.

But gift-wrapping traffic bollards and painting concrete barriers to look like Legos barely conceal the new grim reality.

In Germany, which saw an attack last year on the Berlin Christmas market that killed 12 and injured 40 by an illegal Tunisian immigrant who was scheduled for deportation and who was already known to intelligence officials, traffic bollards are going up everywhere.

+ Bochum verpackt Terrorsperren als Geschenke https://t.co/CEtEO0QiYf #DerTag pic.twitter.com/XWfnQP1F2J
— ntv (@ntvde) November 23, 2017

Weihnachtsmarkt: Hier werden Terrorsperren liebevoll in Geschenkpapier eingewickelt https://t.co/rmZNRD7lv5 pic.twitter.com/cVwQ7kmS2V
— WELT (@welt) November 24, 2017

Deutsche Welle reports:

Bochum authorities placed a string of 1.2 ton pellet bags in the downtown area to avert potential terror attacks ahead of the seasonal opening of the local Christmas market.

On Thursday morning, however, the bags took on a holiday look, with the city’s official marketing service turning them into novelty Christmas presents.

“For us it was very important to fit in those ugly barriers into the beautiful overall atmosphere,” said the head of Bochum Marketing Mario Schiefelbein.

The move surprised both local residents and the police, as the service reportedly giftwrapped up all of the 20 bags overnight without forewarning […]

Bochum is not the only city to put a bow on new security measures. In the Bavarian city of Augsburg, for example, authorities will use decorated trucks belonging to Christmas market stall owners as car barriers. Munich officials plan to block the streets with planters containing season-appropriate evergreen plants.

The first Christmas market in Berlin was opened earlier this month and is surrounded by concrete bollards and armed police:

Potsdamer Platz: Berlins erster #Weihnachtsmarkt eröffnet – hinter Betonpollern https://t.co/E1kngQsGR6 pic.twitter.com/0hcCmjE9X4
— Berliner Zeitung (@berlinerzeitung) November 3, 2017

And the site of the last year’s terror attack in Berlin is also receiving new decorations: CONTINUE AT SITE