RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16799/afghanistan-taliban-peace-deal

While Mr Trump has fulfilled his side of the bargain by overseeing a significant reduction in America’s military presence from 9,000 to 4,500 troops since the deal was signed, the Taliban has been less forthcoming in terms of honouring its side of the deal.

The upsurge in Taliban violence certainly raises significant questions about whether Afghanistan’s security forces will be able to defend the country once American forces have been withdrawn, with US forces due to be reduced to 2,500 by early next year.

There are also concerns that, if the Taliban succeeds in seizing control of large swathes of the country, they could allow Islamist terror groups like Al-Qaeda to return and use the country as a base from which to launch attacks against the West — the initial cause of America’s military intervention following the September 11 attacks.

The fear now is that, if Mr Trump and his senior advisors are no longer in a position to conclude the peace deal he negotiated earlier in the year, then the Taliban will simply take matters into their own hands and seize control of the country by force.

The latest spate of terror attacks carried out by the Taliban in Afghanistan suggests that the terrorist organisation remains determined to seize control of the country through violence rather than by negotiating a peace agreement with the democratically-elected Afghan government.

Under the terms of the historic agreement that the Trump administration signed with the Taliban in February, Taliban leaders undertook to negotiate a lasting peace deal with President Ashraf Ghani’s administration in Kabul.

The aim of the deal, so far as US President Donald Trump was concerned, was to end America’s long and costly involvement in the Afghan conflict which, most recently, dates back to the September 11, 2001 attacks, and has claimed the lives of more than 2,300 US military personnel and cost the American taxpayer nearly $1 trillion.

As part of the agreement, the US undertook to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan on the understanding that the Taliban would cut all ties with international terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS), and engage in a sincere dialogue with the Afghan government to formulate a lasting peace agreement.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16793/palestinians-arabs-apology

The Palestinian decision to renew ties with Israel comes at a time when the Palestinian media is continuing to condemn other Arabs for engaging in normalization with Israel.

“They [the Palestinians] were trampling on the pictures of our leaders. But we have not seen them trampling on the pictures of Abbas.” — Emirati social media user BintUAE1900, Twitter, November 18, 2020.

Several Palestinians and Arabs took to social media to demand sarcastically that the PA withdraw its ambassador from Ramallah to protest its own decision to “normalize” relations with Israel.

The PA leadership’s decision to restore ties with Israel and return the Palestinian ambassadors to the UAE and Bahrain is viewed by some Palestinians as an apparent attempt to cozy up to a possible new US administration under the presumptive new President-elect Joe Biden. Abbas is also likely hoping that in return, the US and some Gulf states will resume pouring money into the PA coffers — for a start.

Will the Palestinian leadership apologize to Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for accusing them of betraying the Palestinians and Arabs by signing peace agreements with Israel?

Last week, the Palestinian Authority (PA), led by President Mahmoud Abbas, in a surprise move, announced that it has decided to restore all relations with Israel, including security coordination between the PA security forces and the Israel Defense Forces in the West Bank.

Abbas also owes Palestinians an apology because his decision to sever ties with Israel deprived Palestinian patients — except for another prominent Palestinian leader, Saeb Erekat — from receiving medical treatment in Israel. The decision also deprived thousands of Palestinians from receiving full salaries: Abbas had refused to accept tax revenues collected by Israel on behalf of the Palestinians.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16783/caucasus-imperial-dreams

To start with, the mini-victory he [Erdogan] has won against Armenia may have whetted Erdogan’s appetite for further conquests. Pro-Erdogan papers in Turkey are beating the drums about “victory in the Caucasus” as the first time, since the end of the Ottoman Empire, that Turks have managed to “liberate” a chunk of Islamdom from “infidel” rule.

Worse still for Putin, Erdogan has already indicated he wants to involve his Foreign Legion of Jihadis in protecting “Muslim lands”.

By mixing his Muslim Brotherhood jihadism with pan-Turkic themes that recall Enver Pasha, Erdogan hopes to replace the Ataturk narrative with a new narrative of religious nationalism.

It is no accident that he is also sharpening his anti-West rhetoric and tightening ties with the Grey Wolves, a pan-Turkish outfit banned by the European Union as a “terrorist organization.” The “Grey Wolves” dream of a Turkic empire stretching from the Balkans to Central Asia.

As the dust settles after the latest fighting in Transcaucasia we may be witnessing the shaping of a bigger disaster involving more parts of the Western Asian arch of instability spanning from the Caspian Basin to the Mediterranean.

Let’s briefly recall what happened.

Sometime in 2018, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered to help his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliev to reconquer the High Qarabagh enclave captured by neighboring Armenia in the early 1990s, soon after the disintegration of the Soviet Empire. A crash program of training and arming the newly created Azeri army was launched by Ankara, financed by Azerbaijan’s spiraling oil revenues. The fact that the so-called Minsk Trio, the United States, France and Russia, who guaranteed the status quo had lost interest in the whole thing enabled Erdogan to put the new and as yet fragile Azeri republic on a war footing with the help of over 100 Turkish advisers and some 300 Syrian jihadis forming part of a Turkish Foreign Legion.

https://asiatimes.com/2020/11/china-challenge-report-signals-us-tech-war-retreat/

A new policy paper by an A-list of academics and former officials close to the Biden camp proposes cooperation rather than confrontation with China in a wide range of fields, including a role for Huawei in the global buildout of fifth-generation mobile broadband. Entitled “Meeting the China Challenge: A New American Strategy for Technology Competition,” the November 16 report may signal a major change in US policy under the incoming administration.

Most of the document is unremarkable, indeed modest in its recommendations. It proposes for example to increase the National Science Foundation’s annual funding for artificial intelligence (AI) to $1.8 billion from $1 billion. By contrast, the city of Shanghai alone plans to spend 270 billion yuan ($40 billion) during the next five years to support AI and the Internet of Things; the National People’s Congress in May proposed a $1.4-trillion technology budget. China fought the Covid-19 pandemic by linking its vast network of sensors to AI servers that helped to anticipate surges in infection and direct forensic testing to potential hotspots.

But the report’s authors, who include Professor Susan Shirk, a former State Department official under the Clinton Administration, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work and former US trade representative Charlene Barshefsky, depart radically from the Trump Administration by declaring that the US has to learn to live with Huawei and other Chinese telecom equipment providers. They write:

The United States should not attempt to win a race between Huawei and a new American  national champion. Instead, the United States should adopt a forward-looking strategy to  enable a variety of new entrants to enter the 5G innovation space successfully…

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16772/arabs-biden-islamists

“These observers pointed out that, behind the Council’s statement, there is a Saudi message saying that the Brotherhood’s rush to welcome and embrace Biden and its attempt to win his sympathy while inciting against important countries in the region will not change Saudi Arabia’s steadfast position of considering the group a terrorist organization and a real incubator for all militant groups.” — The Arab Weekly, November 12, 2020.

Abdullatif Al-Sheikh, the Saudi Minister of Islamic Affairs, responding to the Council’s statement, said …. that his warning came out of concern for “our religion, our country, our citizens, and all Muslims.” — Twitter, November 10, 2020.

The statement of the [Saudi] Council of Senior Scholars came after a long and careful study of the methodology and thinking of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood organization, which views non-Muslims as infidels.”

“The group’s [Muslim Brotherhood’s] extremism and violence are an inherent feature of its ideology, and there is no point in reforming or changing it.” — Dar-Alifta.org, November 11, 2020.

The analysts and experts added that the world has realized that the existence of this terrorist organization represents a real threat to the identity and stability of states, and stress that the Brotherhood group does not represent the approach of Islam.

Several Arab political analysts and columnists, particularly in the Gulf, have voiced similar sentiments. The message they are sending to Biden and the Democrats: We do not want to go back to the bad old days when the US administration aligned itself with Islamist terrorist groups.

These Arabs are determined to prevent the Islamists from returning to power in Egypt or raising their heads in other Arab countries. It remains to be seen if the future US administration will cooperate in this effort.

In a clear message directed to a possible US administration under Joe Biden, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have warned against supporting the Muslim Brotherhood organization. They state that it gives birth “to extremist terrorist groups who wreak havoc on the country and the people.”

On November 10, Saudi Arabia’s Council of Senior Scholars, the kingdom’s highest Islamic religious body, issued a warning amid growing fear in some Arab countries that a Biden administration may return to former President Barack Obama’s policy of empowering and appeasing the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Saudi warning was immediately endorsed by Egypt’s senior Islamic religious institute, Dar al-Ifta, and prominent Egyptian writers and political analysts.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/habibullah-ahmadi-guilty-murdering-anne-widholm-lloyd-billingsley-0/

Last Friday, Habibullah Ahmadi, 24, was found guilty of second-degree murder in the October 8, 2017, beating of Sara Anne Widholm in Windsor, Ontario. Justice Bruce Thomas referred to a “savage” beating Ahmadi “knew was likely to cause her death.”

As the trial revealed, Habibullah Ahmadi approached Anne Widholm, punched her in the face, then delivered repeated blows before picking her up and repeatedly “slamming her head into the ground.” Anne Widholm’s face was unrecognizable, her skull “crumbled,” and she fell into a state “worse state than death,” according to Dr. Balraj Jhawar. In 2017, the neurosurgeon  told the Windsor Star the multiple brain hemorrhages, fractured skull and vertebrae were “among the most brutal things I’ve seen in my career,” and “not just another random attack.”

Habibullah Ahmadi fled the scene, scaled a six foot barbed-wire fence and hid in the bushes. When police arrested the suspect, he was covered in Widholm’s blood. Habibullah Ahmadi was first charged with aggravated assault, changed to attempted murder after Widholm died from her injuries in December of 2018.

News reports described Habibullah Ahmadi as a “Windsor man,” also known as “Danny.” The accused made no public statements and nothing from any relative, friend, fellow student or colleague appeared in local media. At this writing, no photo of Habibullah Ahmadi has appeared in any report on the case. This stood in stark contrast to other murder cases in the city, and even juvenile defendants got more publicity.

Anne Widholm’s autopsy was never made public and details of the attack came from Dr. Jhawar, not police or media. A trial reportedly slated for January, 2019, did not take place. On November 25, 2019, a Windsor Star report claimed a preliminary hearing ended two months earlier, but news stories provided no testimony or evidence.  Ahmadi pleaded not guilty and during the trial his possible motive for attacking a grandmother of 75, out walking after church on a Sunday morning, grew more obscure.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/europe-rude-awakening-lars-hedegaard/

Mogens Lykketoft, Denmark’s former Foreign Minister, sometime President of the U.N. General Assembly and a Social Democrat, is a good man to listen to, if one wants to gauge Europe’s reaction to the recent American elections. In the Copenhagen daily, Berlingske, he writes this scathing comment: “For the USA as well as for most of the world it will be an enormous relief to be rid of this shameless narcissistic liar.” He is of course referring to President Trump.

The antipathy against Donald Trump is spread across the political spectrum. Even the foreign policy spokesman of the hard-right Danish People’s Party, Søren Espersen, expressed his hope that Hillary Clinton would win in 2016.

The point about the lying president is widely shared by media all over Western Europe. They seem to have forgotten that for four years they bought into every baseless accusation leveled at the President: the Russia Hoax, claims that he wanted to undermine NATO, his supposed hatred of non-whites and women, his wish to destroy the planet and whatnot.

For over four years, Radio Denmark, the state-owned radio and television outlet, has been pumping out anti-Trump propaganda as has Denmark’s other major TV-channel, TV2. For months on end they peddled the Russia collusion narrative and when that imploded, they quickly dropped the matter and went on to COVID-19, for which they blamed Trump, hardly mentioning that the President has limited possibilities of intervening. And, of course, they had little to say about the mayhem caused by violent Trump haters. Even after the Democrats had been forced to abandon the Russia Hoax, Denmark’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Uffe Ellemann-Jensen from the center-right Liberals, kept talking of murky conspiracies involving the President.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16733/europe-security-islamist-terror

“I expect an end to the misconceived tolerance, and for all the nations of Europe to finally realise how dangerous the ideology of political Islam is for our freedom and the European way of life.” — Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, Die Welt, November 3, 2020.

“We see very clearly that terrorist actions can actually be led by some people who use migratory flows to threaten our territory.” — French President Emmanuel Macron, Politico, November 5, 2020.

For once, the sudden upsurge in terror attacks appears to have prompted European leaders to acknowledge the glaring deficiencies in their ability to protect Europe against Islamist-inspired acts of terrorism.

The latest wave of Islamist-inspired terror attacks to strike Europe has yet again exposed lamentable flaws in the ability of European security agencies to provide adequate protection for their citizens.

In all three instances — the attacks in Paris, Nice and Vienna — it has emerged that those held responsible for carrying out the attacks had links to global jihadi networks that went undetected by European security officials.

Moreover, the ease with which some of those involved in the attacks were able to travel freely across the continent has once more raised concerns about Europe’s lax border controls as defined by the European Union’s Schengen Agreement, and the ability of radicalised jihadis to exploit them.

In the most recent attack in the Austrian capital Vienna on November 2, it transpires that the 20-year-old gunman who killed four people and wounded 22 others before he was himself shot dead by police had travelled to neighbouring Slovakia in July to buy ammunition.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/shame-for-the-uk-at-the-united-nations?toke

Once again, the British government has chosen a strange way to demonstrate its purportedly close friendship with the State of Israel.

Last week saw another typical episode of Israel-bashing at the UN. Its General Assembly Special Political and Decolonisation Committee passed no fewer than seven resolutions condemning Israel.

One of these denounced it for “repressive measures” against Syrian citizens in the Golan Heights, simply because Israel remains in control there. Since the only reason Israel is in the Golan is to repel Syrian aggression, this is clearly absurd.

Three other resolutions addressed the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), one of them renewing its mandate.

According to the NGO UN Watch, none of these noted the corruption in the agency that had been exposed by a UN investigation.

Not to mention, of course, the fact that UNRWA’s very existence is designed to perpetuate hostility to Israel, by creating in the classification of Palestinian “refugees’’ a unique category that actually multiplies them over time; nor that most of UNWRA’s staff are under the thumb of Hamas.

As the UN Watch director Hillel Neuer pointed out, the UN stayed silent when the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group recently attacked Israeli civilians with a barrage of rockets from Gaza. Yet two weeks later, the UN bashed Israel instead in this slew of resolutions.

Said Neuer: “While France, Germany, Sweden and other EU states are expected to support most of the estimated 20 resolutions to be adopted against Israel by December, the same European nations have failed to introduce a single UNGA resolution on the human rights situation in China, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Turkey, Pakistan, Vietnam, Algeria, or on 175 other countries. Where’s their supposed concern for international law and human rights?”

The only one of these seven resolutions on which the UK abstained rather than voted in support renewed the mandate of a UN special committee to investigate “Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people”. But worse still was one of the seven that the UK did support.

This expressed concern over “the tensions and violence in the recent period throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and including with regard to the holy places of Jerusalem”.