RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-kills-al-qaeda-leader-another-top-terrorist-in-the-arabian-peninsula-trump_3229409.html

President Donald Trump confirmed on Feb. 6 that U.S. forces have killed Qassim al-Rimi, leader of the extremist Islamist group al Qaeda (also al-Qa’ida) in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Al-Rimi claimed responsibility for December’s tragic shooting at the Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida that left three people dead.

Al-Rimi killed in a counterterrorism operation in Yemen, Trump confirmed in a statement on Thursday evening, without elaborating on the date of his death.

“At the direction of President Donald J. Trump, the United States conducted a counterterrorism operation in Yemen that successfully eliminated Qasim al-Rimi, a founder and the leader of al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and a deputy to al-Qa’ida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri,” a statement from the White House read.

Rimi joined al Qaeda in the 1990s, working in Afghanistan for Osama bin Laden.

“Under Rimi, AQAP committed unconscionable violence against civilians in Yemen and sought to conduct and inspire numerous attacks against the United States and our forces,” Trump continued.

“His death further degrades AQAP and the global al-Qa’ida movement, and it brings us closer to eliminating the threats these groups pose to our national security,” the president said.

AQAP, formed in 2009, has long been considered by the United States as one of the deadliest branches of the al Qaeda network founded by Osama bin Laden.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/norways-slime-machine-it-again-bruce-bawer/

On July 22, 2011, a 32-year-old maniac named Anders Behring Breivik set off a truck bomb next to the most important (but almost entirely unguarded) government office building in Oslo, killing eight people, and then gunned down 69 people, mostly teenagers, at a (totally unguarded) indoctrination camp for members of the Labor Party youth group, the Workers Youth League (AUF), on the nearby island of Utøya. Before committing these atrocities, Breivik posted online a compendious document, later referred to as his “manifesto,” that was in part an anthology of thoughtful political texts lifted without permission from various writers and in part a very long stretch of his own exceedingly demented prose, in which he not only explained how to pull off acts of mass slaughter but offered grooming tips and other insane advice for potential butchers of children. Much of the borrowed material was critical of Islam, and the stated objective of Breivik’s actions on July 22 was to punish the Norwegian Labor Party for encouraging large-scale Muslim immigration into Norway and thus threatening the country’s freedom and culture.

In the days after July 22, leading members of the mainstream media and the Norwegian left, from Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg (now head of NATO) on down, gassed on solemnly about how everyone in the country should come together in love and solidarity. At the same time, with ruthless cynicism, these same people exploited Breivik’s atrocities in an effort to demonize, silence, and, if possible, destroy their own political adversaries. Critics of Islam, they proclaimed, had shaped Breivik’s views and thus bore a share of responsibility for his evil acts. Prominent figures called for severe limitations on free speech, at least on the topic of Islam, and for harsh punishments for those who failed to fall into line. “NRK [the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation] and the Labor Party and the Socialist Left Party…are not in grief,” a fellow critic of Islam wrote me shortly after July 22. “They are going for our throats.” A Facebook friend warned of “NRK’s Gestapo hunt for all ‘right-wing extremists.’” It was verboten to suggest that all the rhetoric about the evils of terrorism and the massacre of innocents would have been more effective had the kids on Utøya not been propagandized by their party elders to hate Israel and cheer Palestinian jihadists. AUF began “collaborating” with the youth division of the Fatah terrorist organization in 2006; two years ago, it was announced that AUF and Fatah Youth were now “sister organizations.”

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/01/save-us-from-secular-redeemers/

One of the most troubling aspects of what, as I write this, is the latest Islamist terrorist attack in London, is the reaction to it of Mr David Merritt, father of one of the murdered victims, a young man who believed that he was helping to “rehabilitate” his own murderer, and that he, or others like him, had succeeded in doing so. Mr Merritt said he hoped that his son’s death would not be used to promote more “draconian” sentences.

But what constitutes a draconian sentence for a man who plots seriously to blow up the stock exchange, assassinate a prominent politician, bomb synagogues and kill rabbis, and set up a training camp for terrorists to do more of the same? Such a man is a mass, and probably serial mass, killer in the making. By his remarks, therefore, Mr Merritt implied that freeing such a man after eight years in prison had been the right thing to do, even if it entailed the death of his own son.

Let us try for a moment to imagine what effect his remarks would have on an aspiring Muslim terrorist. This is difficult, of course, but it is one of the things that having an imagination is for: to see ourselves as others see us.

The aspiring Muslim terrorist, having usually participated in what he comes to regard as the Sodom and Gomorrah of Western life, suddenly comes to think that Islam at its most puritanical and uncompromising is the indubitable answer to life’s problems. This is a stupid thing to think, no doubt, but there is no doctrine so stupid that it is incapable of inspiring fanaticism. Our aspiring terrorist believes that it is his duty, as well as his pleasure, to impose his vision of virtue on the world, even to the point of martyrdom rewarded by the kind of genteel or cleaned-up Sodom and Gomorrah in the sky that is his conception of paradise.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15536/uk-jihadists-released-early

“We cannot have the situation…where an offender — a known risk to innocent members of the public — is released early by automatic process of law without any oversight by the Parole Board. — UK Secretary of State for Justice.

“When I was a constable, I could arrest and process a suspect in an hour, maximum. Today, it takes a day or more…. The police are mired in bureaucracy, while the judicial system has become an institutional cloud-cuckoo land.” — Philip Flower, former chief superintendent with the Metropolitan Police, Daily Mail.

“Bluntly, how would you feel if you were told to keep track of known terrorists who have been released from prison to satisfy the politically correct assumptions of our justice system?” — Philip Flower, former chief superintendent with the Metropolitan Police, Daily Mail.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has vowed to toughen sentencing guidelines for convicted terrorists after a newly-released prisoner carried out a jihadist attack in London.

On February 2, Sudesh Amman, a 20-year-old jihadist from Harrow in north-west London, stabbed two people in a knife rampage on Streatham High Road before he was shot dead by police. He had been released from prison just days earlier after serving less than half of his sentence for terrorism offenses.

Amman, who was carrying a 10-inch kitchen knife, wearing a fake suicide bomber vest, and shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the Greatest”), had been under active police surveillance at the time of the attack, which London police described as an “Islamist-related terrorist incident.”

In December 2018, Amman was sentenced to three years and four months in prison after pleading guilty to 13 counts of expressing support for Islamist terrorism and possessing and sharing Islamic State and al-Qaeda propaganda. He was 18 years old at the time.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15512/muslim-terrorists-deradicalized

“What we found [in prisons] was so shockingly bad that I had to agree to the language in the original report being toned down. With hindsight, I’m not sure that was the right decision.” — Ian Acheson, British expert on prisons.

“There were serious deficiencies in almost every aspect of the management of terrorist offenders… Frontline prison staff were vulnerable to attack and were ill-equipped to counter hateful extremism on prison landings for fear of being accused of racism. Prison imams did not possess the tools, and sometimes the will, to combat Islamist ideology. The prison service’s intelligence-gathering system was hopelessly fractured and ineffectual.” — Ian Acheson, “London Bridge attack: I told ministers we were treating terrorist prisoners with jaw-dropping naivety. Did they listen?”, London Times, December 1, 2019.

“Obedience is achieved by violence and intimidation carried out by members of the group known as enforcers. ‘Those who had committed terrorist crimes often held more senior roles in the gang,’ the study found, ‘facilitated by the respect some younger prisoners gave them.’ The study found that terrorist groups such as al-Qaida did not see prison as an obstacle. Quite the opposite, they viewed it as an opportunity to organize and expand.” — Patrick Dunleavy, former Deputy Inspector General for New York State Department of Corrections, June 18, 2019.

On Friday November 29, 2019, an Islamist terror attack took place in London. Two young people, both recent Cambridge University graduates, Jack Merritt (25) and Saskia Jones (23), were stabbed and killed by a single attacker. It was a terrible and unnecessary loss of life.

The special irony about Jack and Saskia’s deaths is that they (and a colleague) had been involved with Cambridge University’s Learning Together prison-rehabilitation program, similar to the US version known as Inside-Out, both of which bring prison inmates together with students to learn together. The British programme is run by Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology, from which both Merritt and Jones had received M.Phils in criminology.

On that Friday, the fifth anniversary of the program, they were attending a conference on offender rehabilitation. The event, dedicated to work on reintegrating prisoners after their release, took place in the stately Fishmongers’ Hall at the north end of London Bridge. It was attended by a mix of academics, students, graduates and former prisoners, some with tags.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15309/isis-women

“Female members of ISIS are often perceived as being passive, naïve, or even as victims. This is a dangerous and wildly inaccurate characterization.” — Free Yezidi Foundation.

It is important to stress that the true victims of ISIS’s hateful practices are not the thousands of women and girls who willingly joined ISIS and actively participated in the group’s horrendous crimes against humanity, but rather the hundreds of thousands of Christians, Yezidis and Muslims whom they displaced, tortured and killed.

The recent case of Samantha Marie Elhassani (née Samantha Sally) — an American mother-of-two who left her home in Indiana to join the now-defunct Islamic State (ISIS) caliphate in Syria — sheds light on the issue currently debated in the West about the degree of culpability of terrorists’ wives, and whether they should be viewed as victims or perpetrators.

On November 25, in a U.S. Federal Court, Elhassani pled guilty to, and was convicted of “providing financial support to individuals who desired to support ISIS.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/cuba_the_grim_reality_of_life_in_a_communist_country.html

Thanks to Obama’s reopening official relationships with Cuba, as well as the fondness that Hollywood and the media have for that Caribbean island, young Americans grow up thinking that Cuba is cool and that communism can’t be that bad. Four young men who traveled there, though, discovered the ugly truth: communist countries are every bit as bad as traditional Americans have been saying for the last 100 plus years.

One of the most shocking things about the 2020 election is how many people support a man who has had a lifelong love affair with totalitarian governments. We’re used to the fact that, for decades now, Democrats have viewed soft-socialist Europe as superior to a free and constitutionally governed America. They never did figure out that Europe had that kind of glamorous socialism because America footed the bill by absorbing all of Europe’s defense costs.

Bernie, however, has no time for the weak sauce that is European socialism. Bernie’s love is for hardcore communism. Everyone knows that he honeymooned in the Soviet Union and praised the wonders of breadlines. Some, though, forget that he has also had a love affair with Cuba’s communist dictatorship. Bernie wants the real socialist deal: the end of all private forms of ownership, the consolidation of everything in government hands, and himself as the head of the government. He’s not a cute, crazy grandfather. He’s a wannabe Lenin.