RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/anti-semitism-paris-new-york

Anti-Semitism seems to be as ancient as the Jewish people themselves. Hellenistic texts from 300 BC exude stereotypes regarding Jews’ physical traits and supposed love for money. Anti-Semitism, however, comes in many shades, depending on the local culture, just as being Jewish in the diaspora is a varied experience. Living in Paris and New York, I see this difference explicitly. When I first rented a place in Manhattan, I was flabbergasted by the mezuzahs attached at so many entrances, including of commercial establishments. Despite the recent outbreak of anti-Semitic attacks in New York, Jews are not a tiny minority in the city and have no reason to hide. In Paris, we tend to be more discreet; if we have a mezuzah, we will usually place it inside.

In New York, Jews are divided into distinct communities—Conservative, Modern Orthodox, Reform, ultra-Orthodox—not familiar in France. In Paris, where Jews are scattered around the city, the main distinction is between Ashkenazim—Jews with an Eastern European background—and Jews who came to France in the 1960s from Algeria and other North African colonies, following independence. This second group now constitutes a majority and doesn’t always see eye-to-eye politically and culturally with the Ashkenazim, especially on the question of Israel. French society, however, which promotes active laicization as a positive value much more vigorously than does America, has largely secularized all of us. The French generally do not attend religious services, except for weddings and funerals: on Sunday morning, churches stay mostly empty, and the same goes with most synagogues on Saturday. Paris’s Orthodox Jewish community is rather small and concentrated in specific neighborhoods of Paris and its suburbs.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/iranian-analytics/

For all the current furor over the death of Qasem Soleimani, it is Iran, not the U.S. and the Trump administration, that is in a dilemma. Given the death and destruction wrought by Soleimani, and his agendas to come, he will not be missed.

Tehran has misjudged the U.S. administration’s doctrine of strategic realism rather than vice versa. The theocracy apparently calculated that prior U.S. patience and restraint in the face of its aggression was proof of an unwillingness or inability to respond. More likely, the administration was earlier prepping for a possible more dramatic, deadly, and politically justifiable response when and if Iran soon overreached.

To retain domestic and foreign credibility, Iran would now like to escalate in hopes of creating some sort of U.S. quagmire comparable to Afghanistan, or, more germanely, to a long Serbian-like bombing campaign mess, or the ennui that eventually overtook the endless no-fly zones over Iraq, or the creepy misadventure in Libya, or even something like an enervating 1979-80 hostage situation. The history of the strategies of our Middle East opponents has always been to lure us into situations that have no strategic endgame, do not play to U.S. strengths in firepower, are costly without a time limit, and create Vietnam War–like tensions at home.

But those wished-for landscapes are not what Iran has got itself into. Trump, after showing patience and restraint to prior Iranian escalations, can respond to Iranian tit-for-tat without getting near Iran, without commitments to any formal campaign, and without seeming to be a provocateur itching for war, but in theory doing a lot more damage to an already damaged Iranian economy either through drones, missiles, and bombing, or even more sanctions and boycotts to come. If Iran turns to terrorism and cyber-attacks, it would likely only lose more political support and risk airborne responses to its infrastructure at home.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15300/germany-middle-eastern-criminal-clans

“For decades, police turned a blind eye to extended criminal families, in part to avoid being accused of racial discrimination. This has made the present-day challenge all the more difficult as clan structures have solidified, parallel societies have formed, and the enemy has grown.” — Deutsche Welle, February 3, 2019.

“There are now half a million people across Germany who belong to a clan…. Clans behave in their German surroundings as if they were tribes in the desert. Everything outside the clan is enemy territory and available for plunder”. — Ralph Ghadban, a Lebanese-German political scientist and a leading expert on clans in Germany; The German Times, October 2019.

“It is known that the Osmanen Germania gang has received financial assistance from Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development (AKP) party. The gang has essentially functioned as [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan’s armed wing in Germany.” — Sebastian Fiedler, head of the Association of German Criminal Investigators.

The clans see the state as, “an object of ridicule, a target for exploitation” — Falko Liecke, Neukölln’s deputy district mayor and district councilor for youth and health. The German Times, October 2019.

In a recently aired documentary by German broadcaster ARD, about Germany’s Middle Eastern criminal family gangs — or clans, as they are called in Germany — the head of Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Agency (BKA) Holger Münch, said “In about one-third of proceedings, suspects also included immigrants — and that means that we need to keep a very close eye on this phenomenon”.

Münch seems to have been referring to the fact that migrants who arrived in Germany from Syria, Iraq and other countries during the migrant crisis in 2015-16 are now starting to compete with Germany’s long-established criminal family gangs whose original founders arrived in Germany from Lebanon in the late 1970s during Lebanon’s civil war.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-arrives-for-soleimani-11578085286?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

“The least credible criticism is coming from American Democrats, especially those who worked for the Obama Administration. Their policy was to appease Tehran with a nuclear deal that would supposedly induce its leaders to join the civilized world. Instead the deal’s cash windfall empowered Soleimani to export revolution.”

For a generation, Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani bestrode the Middle East spreading terror and death. President Trump’s decision to order the general’s death via drone attack in Baghdad Thursday night is a great boon for the region. It is also belated justice for the hundreds of Americans whom Soleimani had a hand in killing.

One reason the U.S. could track and kill Soleimani near Baghdad International Airport was the impunity he had cultivated. The general often appeared in public, especially in Syria and Iraq, as he sought to build Shiite militias and spread Iranian influence. He was killed with Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, an Iraqi-Iranian militia leader who had met Soleimani at the airport and was outside the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad this week during an assault that Soleimani had approved.

Soleimani arrived in Baghdad with “plans to attack American diplomats and service members,” the Pentagon said in a statement. Mr. Trump’s critics are demanding to see the evidence of such plans. But why does it matter? Soleimani has killed enough Americans over the years to justify the strike as a defensive act to deter other attacks and send a message that killing Americans won’t be tolerated.

https://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2020/01/03/after_soleimani_confronting_irans_dangerous_regime_211888.html

News reports say Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the powerful commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, was killed Thursday in a rocket attack near Baghdad Airport. U.S. officials have been tight-lipped about the operation, but the speed and precision of the strike clearly point to American forces.

It is hard to overstate the importance of the news, mainly because Soleimani was so important to Iran’s regional power. He reported directly to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. As head of the Quds Force, Soleimani led proxy militias in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, and he worked hand-in-glove with Hezbollah in Lebanon and with Islamist forces in Gaza. Soleimani was far more than a field general. He was a major architect of Tehran’s arc of influence, which stretches from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. He met directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the actions of their countries’ forces in Syria. He was behind a foiled plot to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in a restaurant in Washington, D.C. When Iran-backed militias attacked the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, their graffiti proclaimed Soleimani as their leader.

Iran will not let his death go unanswered. His loss is simply too important. But their retaliation, if it is large and provocative enough, could force yet another strike from Washington, raising the grim possibility of tit-for-tat escalation with unpredictable consequences and no sure end.

Neither Tehran nor Washington wants a full-scale war, but both sides have been ratcheting up the pressure since U.S. President Donald Trump led America out of the multilateral agreement on Iran’s nuclear program and began to impose harsh economic sanctions. Those sanctions have done more than cripple the Iranian economy. They have endangered the regime itself, sparking widespread demonstrations even in areas that were once loyal to the Mullahs.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/03/trumps-strike-on-soleimani-is-about-america-firs

Now Iran knows America is unconstrained by politically correct rules of engagement, and no longer acting out of delusions about bribing a jihadist regime into peace.

On New Year’s Eve, Iran-backed militias attempted to storm the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, engaging in an unsuccessful act of war as American forces secured the compound. In the aftermath, President Trump warned Iran that it would “be held fully responsible for lives lost, or damage incurred, at any of our facilities,” and “pay a very BIG PRICE. This is not a Warning, it is a Threat. Happy New Year!”

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei shot back, “You can’t do anything.” A day later, President Trump did something.

His decision to strike Qassem Soleimani was a game-changing act with immense substantive and symbolic implications.  It finally brought a modicum of justice for the hundreds of Americans murdered and thousands injured at the hands of the head of the terrorist Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force, his henchmen, and their proxies.

It took off the battlefield a genocidal military mastermind responsible for spreading Iran’s Islamic Revolution globally, constructing its Shiite Crescent in the Middle East, and threatening America and our allies at home and abroad.

It represented a decisive response to Iran’s act of war in Baghdad, as well as its repeated assaults on Iraqi coalition bases including last month’s rocket attack that killed one American and injured several others, and additional imminent strikes for which Soleimani would have been responsible. It was about putting America first.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/citizens-across-middle-east-celebrate-us-take-down-of-qassem-soleimani

As politicians and pundits in the United States debated the merits of President Trump’s order to take out Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Quds Force leader, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, citizens of countries across the Middle East celebrated the swift killing of Iran’s top military mind.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo shared a video of Iraqi citizens celebrating in the street after hearing the news of Soleimani’s death.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/476736-targeting-soleimani-trump-was-justified-legally-and-strategically

“If a war be made by invasion of a foreign nation, the President is not only authorized but bound to resist force by force. He does not initiate the war, but is bound to accept the challenge without waiting for any special legislative authority.”

So said the Supreme Court in the Civil War-era Prize Cases more than 150 years ago. It has been the law of the United States as long as there has been a United States. It reflects the venerable law of nations, derived from natural law and long pre-existing our republic.

When there are forcible threats to the United States, the president has not merely the power but the obligation to repel them. In large measure, that is why there is an Office of the President. The Framers grasped, in a time of dire peril to the fledgling nation, that national security cannot be achieved by committee. A single chief executive, the president, was necessary to marshal the might of the nation with dispatch when America was under siege.

These are rudimentary principles. Alas, they obviously need restating in the wake of the attack President Trumpauthorized late Thursday that killed General Qassem Soleimani, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), founder of its jihad-exporting Quds Forces, and Tehran’s terror master nonpareil.

Soleimani was taken out near the airport in Baghdad, along with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy chief of the Iranian-backed Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq. The PMF make up one of several networks that Soleimani and the mullahs forged on the model of Hezbollah, their longtime terrorist faction in Lebanon — indeed, the outfit al-Muhandis directly led is known as the Hezbollah Brigades, or Kata’ib Hizbollah.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/bye-bye-suleymani-kenneth-r-timmerman/

The killing of Iranian terror-meister Qassem Suleymani in a targeted U.S. air strike in Baghdad on Thursday will have a dramatic impact on Iran’s ability to conduct oversea terrorist operations and the stability of the Iranian regime.

But the real impact, one can legitimately wager, will be quite different from what you’ve been hearing so far from most of the U.S. and international media.

Rather than engendering some massive Iranian “retaliation,” as many talking heads have been warning, I believe this strike will throw the Iranian regime back on its heels, as wannabe successors contemplate their careers vaporizing in a U.S. drone strike and Iran’s civilian leaders fret that they have been exposed as emperors without clothes.

Put simply, the aura of the Iranian regime’s invincibility is over.

They have pushed us and our allies repeatedly, and have been encouraged by the modest response from U.S. political and military leaders until now.

But with this strike, the gloves are off. And the leadership in Tehran – and more importantly, the people of Iran – can see it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/at-the-direction-of-the-president-the-u-s-military-has-taken-decisive-defensive-action-to-protect-u-s-personnel-abroad-by-killing-qasem-soleimani/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=first

This is an incredibly bold move that shows that Trump’s red line against harming Americans was very real. The conventional wisdom that Trump is just a Twitter tiger, which was driving news and analysis as of a couple of hours ago, is now emphatically OTBE. Soleimani is commonly called a terrorist, obviously true enough, but not only that — he was a major figure in the Iranian regime, a key strategist with unique skills who led the Iranian imperial project in the Middle East. He was also a cold-blooded killer of Americans who deserved to die. His assassination has to be a staggering blow to the regime, which will feel compelled to respond. Trump now may well face the first true foreign-policy crisis of his presidency, although we can, assuming the will, hit the Iranians back harder whatever their next move is (challenging us more forthrightly in Iraq would seem an obvious possibility). Let’s hope we are prepared for whatever comes next, and congratulate all involved in this successful operation to rid the world of a cunning and ruthless killer.