RUTHFULLY YOURS

In every Muslim-majority country, especially in the Middle East, the Islamic terrorist genie came out from under the ashes, built the Islamic state and threatened the West — both with terrorist operations and from inside, in a more surreptitious, seemingly peaceful manner, as the Muslim Brotherhood does.

It is important to understand that Islam is a religion that includes, in its structure, political power that governs and controls and spreads the force of arms.

US President Donald J. Trump has succeeded in naming a jihadi problem, political Islam, but it is hard to single out defective products from the factory without closing the factory — if one does not want them to appear again.

This does not mean that what Trump intends to do is not important; on the contrary, we need him after most Western politicians faced Islamic terrorism awkwardly, if they faced it at all. Sometimes they even cooperated with these terrorist organizations, invited their members to the White House; to Iftar dinners during Ramadan, and hugging what they falsely call “moderate Islam” — especially the Muslim Brotherhood, the incubator that most terrorist organizations come out of — instead of the true “moderate Muslims” who have been struggling to be heard above the crush of “influence,” infiltration and petro-dollars.

We can say that so far “Trumps’s recipe” for facing radical Islam had been tried before and failed. Dictatorships and military regimes in the Middle East, such as the presidents of Egypt Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak, and now el-Sisi, faced political and radical Islam. Russia did, and Saddam did in Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya, Bourguiba in Tunisia and others.

Perhaps the saddest failure is the Turkish model. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk built a dictatorship-state on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. He decisively confronted all forms of political Islam, and destroyed the military wing of the army that dreamed of restoring that Empire. Atatürk founded a dictatorship guarded by the army’s broad powers, but within a constitutional and legal framework, to deter Islamists who might want to change his modernist structure. It was also meant to stop any move to Islamic rule that might want to change the relatively open and pro-Western ideas of the Kemalist Republic.

In September, I met with Ami Horowitz for an interview about Sweden and immigration, for a documentary he was making on the topic. Horowitz had heard of the work I had done on the issue, such as my reports in the Washington Examiner on the recent mass sexual attacks at music festivals in Sweden that the media and police covered up, as well as my essays on Sweden’s growing problem of jihadi tourism.

Horowitz and I met up in a sleepy Swedish town and spoke for almost half an hour, of which four minutes ended up in the final cut of his documentary, Stockholm Syndrome. The film also includes an interview with two Swedish policemen and the director’s own running commentary. The documentary received some attention at the time it was released, but not much more than the occasional link appearing in my newsfeed. But — as we now know — that has since changed.

President Trump mentioned Sweden in a speech in Florida on February 18. I first learned about it from my father, who called me early the next morning to ask whether I was perhaps involved in an international incident. As soon as I went on Twitter and saw the outrage, I started to connect the dots. After sifting through the many angry tweets, I could conclude that not only had the international media severely misconstrued what Donald Trump had said about Sweden but also that the newly elected president had put his finger on exactly what ails Sweden as well as the entire European continent.

For the past week, I have been under tremendous pressure to rescind my statements and to swear off not only Amy Horowitz but also the entire premise that Sweden has problems relating to its immigration policies. Trump’s statement, however confusing, highlighted the most taboo topic in Swedish society and the well-oiled apparatus that does its utmost to keep it under wraps. And now that the world has its collective eye fixed on our country, the Swedish establishment is fighting hard to convey the party line.

Part of the reason for the outrage is that Sweden has a long-standing, complicated, love-hate relationship with the United States, defined by an equal mix of envy and distain — the U.S. being both that place we are better than and the country we secretly long to be. Sweden’s self-image is that of a country with solid liberal values, institutionalized equality, and social justice. Having an American president question that is a direct affront to the one thing we had going for us: our carefully cultivated sense of moral and intellectual superiority. The solution to this conundrum is to belittle and mock President Trump, making him seem ignorant and racist, poking fun at his statements through a barrage of colorful memes. But what all of these methods fail to address is the underlying issue and the truth at the heart of the president’s words.

As Swedish-Iranian economist Tino Sanandaji observed at NRO last week, we see a remarkable lack of statistics showing a correlation between immigration and crime in Sweden — not because there is no such correlation, but because there are no statistics. There are no statistics because the government has consistently chosen not to release them or bring the issue to light. This secrecy has sparked the rise of a populist right in Sweden, and it has also failed the most vulnerable — the immigrants subjected to extremism and crime in urban neighborhoods where the pundits and politicians never go — sacrificing them on the altar of political correctness.

SYDNEY—Australia has arrested a man it says offered to help Islamic State develop a long-range guided missile and a detection system for incoming bombs.

“Police will allege that the man arrested has sought to advise ISIL on how to develop high-tech weapons capability,” Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Tuesday. He said the man was arrested in the rural town of Young, northwest of the capital Canberra, after an 18-month investigation, and that the operation wasn’t related to any planned attack in Australia.

The man—an Australian-born citizen, according to Andrew Colvin, commissioner of the Australian Federal Police—was identified in local press reports as Haisem Zahab. He appeared in court later Tuesday where he was charged with two foreign-incursion offenses that carry a maximum penalty of life in prison.

He wasn’t available for comment and it is unclear whether he has a lawyer.

Australia has stepped up security in recent years, giving police and intelligence agencies more power against homegrown militants. It has also sent troops and warplanes to combat Islamic State as part of the U.S.-led coalition, as well as supporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The country’s five-tier terrorism-threat system has been set at “probable,” the third-highest level, since September 2014. That December, a gunman, later identified as Iranian immigrant Man Haron Monisj, took hostages in a Sydney cafe and held them for 16 hours before being killed by police. The cafe’s manager and a female customer also died.

Since then there have been four attacks and 12 others have been disrupted, most recently in December—an Islamic State-inspired plot to set off bombs in central Melbourne. More than 50 people have been arrested on terrorism offenses. CONTINUE AT SITE

North Korea successfully tested a solid-fueled missile earlier this month, the latest in a series of technological leaps. Instant experts allege Pyongyang is not yet a serious nuclear threat to the U.S. Some reporters say North Korea does not have “miniaturized” nuclear warheads for missile delivery and that its weapons are primitive—even after five nuclear tests. These are dangerous delusions.

Google the history of nuclear testing and weapons development, and North Korea’s tests suddenly seem a lot more serious. This has all been done by the U.S., the Soviet Union, China, Britain, France, Israel, South Africa, India and Pakistan. History suggests North Korea already has nuclear-missile warheads and a sophisticated array of nuclear weapons.

Testing is not necessary to develop nuclear weapons. The first atomic bomb, which used enriched uranium, was never tested: Hiroshima was the test. The second one, which used plutonium, was tested once and worked perfectly at Trinity and on Nagasaki.

France entered the nuclear club in 1960 with a sophisticated high-yield fission weapon that worked perfectly on its first test.

According to the Wisconsin Project and defector Mordechai Vanunu, Israel developed a sophisticated array of nuclear weapons from the 1960s to the ’80s—all without testing. Its arsenal ranges from high-yield thermonuclear missile warheads to low-yield tactical weapons, including neutron warheads.
South Africa also developed nuclear weapons and designed a missile warhead without testing. India and Pakistan designed atomic bombs, thermonuclear warheads and neutron warheads 20 years before testing.

North Korea built its first atomic weapons by 1994, more than a decade before testing. Yet the yield of North Korean nuclear tests isn’t known. Estimating yields from seismic signals is inexact. Press reporting on estimates for North Korea’s January 2016 test range from 4 to 50 kilotons. The estimated yield for North Korea’s fifth nuclear test, in September 2016, is between 20 and 30 kilotons.

Less known: North Korea could conduct decoupled tests to hide their true yield. Decoupling entails detonating a device in a cavity to dampen the signal by as much as 10-fold. A 100 kiloton test could look like 10 kilotons.

And low-yield tests may indicate more-advanced nuclear technology. High-yield testing is usually done for political reasons and to study nuclear-weapon effects. Low-yield testing is scarier because it is usually done to verify design principles for a more advanced generation of nuclear weapons.