RUTHFULLY YOURS

This fall and winter have seen many of us here in Israel consuming a miserable kind of reality TV: blurry clips of young Palestinian Muslims with knives seeking release in murder and martyrdom, lunging, stabbing, falling stricken to the ground, the action captured by cellphones or security cameras; an imam in Gaza waving a knife and calling on the faithful to render us into “body parts”; a fighter from the Islamic State, our new neighbor, warning us of the violence he and his comrades will inflict when they arrive. The effect was so disturbing that it triggered psychological stress akin to that of a real war, though the fatalities barely added up to a skirmish. No land was conquered or lost, no concessions demanded. With our computers and cellphones, as the director of military intelligence put it, “We’re all brainwashing ourselves.” The battlefield had moved almost entirely inside our own minds.

In the past month or two it has been more apparent than ever that the confluence of unfiltered information, dramatic images of bloodshed, and fanatical interpretations of Islam have converged to become one of the key forces shaping our lives. That makes it worth looking for the moment this force began to make itself felt in earnest. My selection, a subjective one based on my personal experience, can be found on the front page of the Israeli daily Maariv of Oct. 31, 1994.

Two possible futures appear on this page in the form of two stories. The day’s main headline tells us that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is in Morocco, where he met with King Hassan. Israel’s peace treaty with Jordan is a few days old. The photo shows a warm handshake between the prime minister and the king, two men of similar age, and the headline quotes the Israeli leader: “Peace is a house, and the economy will furnish it.” This was what was known at the time as the “new Middle East,” the title of an optimistic book published by Shimon Peres a year earlier, which envisioned a peaceful region where new highways moved citizens of Palestine to shop in Israel and Israeli tourists to the souks of Damascus, past old tanks rusting at the side of the road. Next to the photo of the handshake is an analysis piece titled, “A Bank, Not a Tank.”

After reports of a small, magnitude 5.1 seismic event in the vicinity of North Korea’s Punggye-ri nuclear test site on Tuesday, the state-controlled North Korean news service announced a successful test of a miniaturized hydrogen bomb — which it called a “hydrogen bomb for justice.” A North Korean television anchor said the test elevated North Korea’s “nuclear might to the next level.”

It is very unlikely that this was a test of a true H-bomb, a thermonuclear device in which a primary fission reaction ignites a much larger secondary fusion/fission reaction. The technical challenges of constructing a true H-bomb, which could be over 1000 times more powerful than North Korea’s previous three nuclear tests, are far beyond North Korean capabilities. The real meaning of this nuclear test, regardless of its type, may be an attempt by North Korea to get a nuclear deal similar to Iran’s before President Obama leaves office.

It is possible this was a test of a “boosted-fission” nuclear weapon. In such a device, a small fusion reaction of two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, is initiated in the core. This reaction releases a flood of high-energy neutrons that causes a more efficient fission reaction by the weapon’s enriched uranium or plutonium fuel resulting in an explosive yield several times higher. Boosted fission enables states to construct smaller and lighter nuclear weapons and to make more efficient use of scarce nuclear fuel.

North Korea has been claiming for several years that it was engaged in nuclear-fusion research. In 2010, North Korean officials even said that their nation had mastered nuclear fusion. In January 2013, the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported that a “new higher level nuclear device” that North Korea was threatening to test might be a boosted-fission nuclear device. Last month, North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un said his country had developed a hydrogen bomb.

Although most experts dismissed North Korea’s nuclear fusion claims as bravado, a boosted-fission nuclear test would be the next step in the development of a North Korean nuclear-weapons program. Building such a device would be technically challenging. India, which has a more advanced nuclear-weapons program than North Korea, reportedly conducted a failed test of a booted-fission nuclear device in 1998.

“What happened on January 7th 2015 was terrible. But our response to it made it more terrible, and emboldened civilization’s enemies. With respect to the late Charb, the choice is not between dying standing up or living on our knees – for those who choose to live on their knees will die there, too, cringing and craven. As I said a year ago:

The weepy passive candlelight vigils – the maudlin faux tears and the Smug Moral Preening overdose – aren’t enough. If you don’t want to put out the fire, it will burn your world to the ground.”

One year ago today – January 7th 2015 – two Muslim fanatics burst into the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and killed a dozen people, including the bulk of the senior editorial staff and some of France’s best known cartoonists. I heard about the attack shortly before I went on that morning’s John Oakley Show in Toronto. Throughout the very bad year for free speech that followed, I have thought often of Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier, the editor of Charlie Hebdo and a great cartoonist in the French style. Two years before his death, he said:

It may seem pompous, but I’d rather die standing than live on my knees.

He did. He was an heroic figure, and he paid for it with his life. One reason for that is because, when everyone else is on their knees, the guy standing up kinda stands out. And Charb & Co had been standing out for almost ten years. As I said to Megyn Kelly at Fox News later that night:

STEYN: Yes, they were very brave. This was the only publication that was willing to publish the Muhammad — the Danish Muhammad cartoons in 2006 because they decided to stand by those Danish cartoonists. I’m proud to have written for the only Canadian magazine to publish those Muhammad cartoons. And it’s because The New York Times didn’t and because Le Monde in Paris didn’t, and the London Times didn’t and all the other great newspapers of the world didn’t – only Charlie Hebdo and my magazine in Canada and a few others did. But they were forced to bear a burden that should have been more widely dispersed…

We will be retreating into a lot more self-censorship if the pansified Western media doesn’t man up and decide to disburse the risk so they can’t kill one small, little French satirical magazine. They’ve gotta kill all of us.

The temptation in most world capitals will be to denounce North Korea’s Wednesday nuclear test but do little beyond attempting to bribe dictator Kim Jong Un with more cash in return for more disarmament promises. The more realistic view is to see this as another giant step toward a dangerous new era of nuclear proliferation that the world ignores at its peril.

Pyongyang says the explosion, its fourth so far and first since 2013, was a “completely successful” test of a miniaturized hydrogen bomb. That would represent a technological leap, as H-bombs can be thousands of times stronger than the atomic weapons that North Korea tested previously. Pyongyang often lies, and the White House said Wednesday the initial U.S. analysis suggests it wasn’t an H-bomb.

But even an upgraded atomic bomb using boosted fission would give Kim a more powerful weapon than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kim is estimated to have enough uranium and plutonium production for 50 to 100 bombs by 2020.

TEL AVIV— Nasdaq Inc. is jumping into Israel’s tech boom.

The stock-market operator said Wednesday it is joining forces with the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in a venture to nurture startups, including offering advice and mentoring for private, growth-geared companies and creating an exchange here to help them raise capital.

The move comes amid long-standing complaints among Israeli startup founders and investors that the country lacks the infrastructure to foster stock-market listings for its exploding technology sector. Instead, critics say companies have been forced to seek listings overseas, particularly in the U.S., or sell themselves to foreign firms to raise capital and keep growing.

The two exchange operators described the new Tel Aviv exchange as a private, “secondary market for liquidity events and debt financing services.” Nasdaq said more details about the new market will be disclosed early this year.

Gal Landau-Yaari, chief risk officer at the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, or TASE, said the new exchange will help connect foreign investors and Israeli companies, offering investors access to private shares, debt and secondary offerings. The exchange announcement coincided with a separate agreement by TASE to use Nasdaq technology for stock, derivative, bond, fixed-income and commodities trading, as part of an overhaul to attract more Israeli and foreign listings.

On January 3, a Chinese plane touched down on a remote island airfield where, two years ago, there was no island, let alone any airfield — only a lonely stretch of reef in the South China Sea. That reef in the Spratly Islands, known as Yongshu Jiao to China and Fiery Cross Reef to everyone else, has become the eye of an international diplomatic storm.

At issue is who owns the Spratlys, a collection of reefs, rocks, and tiny islets; no fewer than six governments (China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and the Sultanate of Brunei) claim sovereignty over part or — in China’s case — all of them.

Fiery Cross, for example, is partly claimed by Vietnam, which has dubbed the Chinese-built airfield “illegal” and the plane landing as “a serious infringement of the sovereignty of Vietnam on the Spratly archipelago.”

A Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman shot back, “China has indisputable sovereignty” over the Spratlys, which Beijing calls the Nansha Islands, as well as “their adjacent waters,” and that “China will not accept the unfounded accusation from the Vietnamese side.”

Uwe Siemon-Netto has been an international journalist for almost sixty years. In 2015 his memoir Triumph of the Absurd: A Reporter’s Love for the Abandoned People of Vietnam appeared in four languages. He and his wife share their time between their homes in southern California and the Charente region of France.

Shortly before ISIS struck Paris in November killing 130 people, I committed what must have been utter idolatry in the eyes of its iconoclastic Muslim exterminators. I drove to Bourges, a medieval city in the centre of France, and spent a few hours in St Etienne’s Cathedral to let its twenty-two thirteenth-century stained-glass windows tell me the story of my Christian faith in a mighty burst of colours.

At first I stood alone that sunny morning in the ambulatory at the east end of this magnificent Gothic sanctuary, but quickly I found myself engaged in a long and daunting dialogue with a cultured Frenchwoman about the looming demise of our common civilisation to which these windows testified. It was a conversation so troubling that I will remember it for the rest of my life.

She seemed to have appeared from nowhere. “How long, monsieur, before this becomes the next Palmyra?” she asked me softly, referring to ISIS’s recent destruction of the Temple of Baal in that ancient Semitic city in Syria, a Unesco World Heritage site just like this church. She went on:

“When will these barbarians be here to raze Chartres cathedral, level our vineyards and smash the vats of Burgundy and Bordeaux? How soon will red wine flow down the street as it did in America during Prohibition, but this time mixed with blood? Will Christians in Europe be enslaved, beheaded or crucified like the Chaldeans in Iraq at this very moment?”

“I was born in Leipzig in Germany, madame,” I answered. “My home church was the Thomaskirche where Johann Sebastian Bach is buried. A few years ago, I sat there in the chancel with my feet resting on Bach’s tomb. The Thomaner, the boys’ choir he headed almost three centuries ago, had just begun the opening chorus of his Christmas Oratorio when I was overcome by a premonition similar to yours. Will the day come when the Muslims will forbid these children to sing, I wondered? Will they rip out the church’s two mighty organs? Will they smelt its bells and replace them with a muezzin? Will they outlaw concerts and art shows? Will they butcher educated women?”

Self contradiction here….if the overwhelming majority of Palestinian Arabs support an armed campaign against Israel, it is illusory to pretend there can be a “peaceful demilitarized ” state…rsk
Opinion polls show that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians support an armed campaign against Israel, and want to see Israel destroyed and a State of Palestine built on its ruins. The polls also show a troubling increase in popular support in the West Bank for Hamas, and a decrease in support for Mahmoud Abbas.

The greatest tragedy of the Palestinians is not 1948, it is 2015. The only thing the Palestinian leadership and terrorist organizations can agree on is their obsession to destroy the State of Israel.

It is particularly disappointing that we keep trying to defraud the Israelis and Americans with fictitious messages of peace and “two states for two peoples.” We assume they have no intelligence at all, do not understand Arabic and cannot read our Facebook pages.

The time has come to try creating — for the first time — a peaceful and demilitarized Palestinian state, which the Israelis have indicated for decades they would be happy to help us achieve.

This past week, the Israelis arrested 25 Hamas terrorists in the West Bank, most of them students from Al-Quds University in Abu Dis. Not rebels without a cause or the unemployed with a chip on their shoulder, but the finest minds we have, the intellectuals of the future Palestinian academia! The group, which dealt with recruiting and guidance and was being handled by Hamas in Turkey and its terrorist wing the Gaza Strip, was planning to carry out suicide bombing attacks inside Israel.

SEOUL—North Korea said it successfully staged its first test of a more powerful form of nuclear weapon, expanding the U.S.’s foreign-policy challenges and highlighting the limits of China’s ability to rein in its volatile ally.

North Korean state television said in a midday broadcast that scientists had successfully detonated a hydrogen bomb at around 10 a.m. local time.

The U.S. Geological Survey reported that it detected a magnitude 5.1 earthquake at that time near North Korea’s nuclear test site in the country’s northeast.

Experts have said it was unclear whether North Korea had developed the ability to build a hydrogen bomb. The magnitude of the latest explosion was the same as a 2013 test of an atomic bomb.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said the U.S. couldn’t confirm North Korea’s claims of a nuclear test but is monitoring the situation.

“We are aware of seismic activity on the Korean Peninsula in the vicinity of a known North Korean nuclear test site and have seen Pyongyang’s claims of a nuclear test,” Mr. Kirby said.