RUTHFULLY YOURS

It seems that almost every month since the nuclear agreement with Iran, the “Obama Bomb” deal, was announced last summer there have been new revelations about how the agreement is weaker that Obama administration claimed and side deals that the administration failed to disclose to Congress and the American people.

For example, although President Obama and Secretary Kerry claimed in July 2015 that under the deal Iran would honor UN Security Council resolutions barring Iranian ballistic missiles tests for right years, it turned out that the text of the agreement said nothing about missile tests – this language was included in an annex to a Security Council resolution that endorsed the deal. This means sanctions against Iran lifted by the nuclear deal can’t be reimposed due to Iranian missile tests conducted over the last month and last fall.

There also was a secret side deal allowing Iran to inspect itself for evidence of nuclear weapons-related work.

Last month, we learned the IAEA has dumbed-down its reports on Iran’s nuclear program because it claims the nuclear agreement removed certain mandates that were the basis for some of its previous inspections. However, new IAEA Iran reports have few details on issues the agency is authorized to investigate which may indicate another side deal with Iran which has long opposed detailed IAEA reporting on its nuclear program.

The latest development is a possible new concession the Obama administration reportedly plans to make to Iran to give it access to U.S. financial markets. According to the Associated Press “the Obama administration is leaving the door open to new sanctions relief for Iran, including possibly long-forbidden access to the U.S. financial market,” specifically granting “Iranian businesses the ability to conduct transactions in dollars within the United States or through offshore banks.” Iran also would be permitted to “dollarize” payments.

Obama officials reportedly are considering opening U.S. financial markets to Iran because Tehran has been complaining that it did not receive enough sanctions relief from the nuclear deal. Apparently $150 billion in sanctions relief and a reported $1.7 billion dollar payment by the United States was not enough.

If true, this move would violate assurances provided to Congress by Treasury Secretary Jack Lew last July that the nuclear deal would not allow Iran access to U.S. financial institutions or enter into financial arrangements with U.S. banks.

Just days after the Brussels bombings, a British extremist released a pro-jihad screed filmed on a rainy city street as a passerby strides through the shot without skipping a step.

The material he was filming was promoted and distributed Thursday via ISIS Telegram channels.

London-based bus driver Abu Haleema, an associate of extremist Anjem Choudary, was arrested in spring 2015 by Scotland Yard; he’d warned in a video two months before that “we’re going to see the black flag of sharia in the White House, we’re going to see the black flag of sharia over Windsor castle, we’re going to see the black flag of the khilafah on the Suez Canal.”

He was freed on bail — on the condition that he stop stoking jihad through his active YouTube, Facebook and Twitter accounts.

“Officers from the counter-terrorism command SO15 arrested a 37-year-old man in a west London street on suspicion of encouragement of terrorism contrary to Section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2006,” British law enforcement officials said at the time. “He was taken to a central London Police Station and has since been bailed to a date in mid-June pending further enquiries. The man was detained under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.”

Early this year, Abu Haleema turned his focus to stoking jihad in Australia, with videos attacking more moderate Muslim leaders, including one who issued a fatwa confirming Australian Muslims can join the police and military.

He was featured in a January documentary, The Jihadis Next Door, released by Britain’s Channel 4.

Last week’s Brussels jihadist bombings, and their links to December’s Paris attacks that, similarly, appear to have been coordinated by the Islamic State terror network, spotlighted the challenge posed by Europe’s unassimilated Muslim communities. As I observed in a recent column, the threat posed by radical Islam is not limited to “violent extremists” (the Obama administration’s preferred sanitization of the term “jihadists­­”); it is exacerbated by the support system the jihadists enjoy in Muslim enclaves that share their sharia-supremacist ideology.

The terrorism in Europe prompted no shortage of discussion about American counterterrorism, including the suggestion by Ted Cruz (on whose presidential campaign I am an advisor) of stepped up surveillance of Muslim communities. In the aforementioned column, I explained that Senator Cruz’s proposal was a prudent call for recommitting to the intelligence-based post-9/11 counterterrorism that aimed to prevent terrorist attacks; that would be a departure from the 1990s Clinton approach, which regarded terrorism as a law-enforcement problem – meaning investigators generally did not kick into gear until after mass-casualty attacks had occurred. Cruz has also penned an op-ed fleshing out his thoughts on the subject.

An obvious question arises: Can the proliferation of Islamic enclaves that has occurred in Europe happen in the United States? For now, the situations are not comparable. The U.S. has a vastly larger population than any individual European country; and compared to Europe, we are geographically remote from the Middle East. Muslims make up only about one percent of our population (as opposed to ten percent of France’s), and because we have historically been a melting pot for diverse immigrant populations, we do a better job of assimilating Muslims into our society than the Europeans have.

Still, as I outlined in my 2010 book, The Grand Jihad, a major challenge of radical Islam’s “civilizational jihad” against the West (to borrow the Muslim Brotherhood’s description of its objective in America) is voluntary apartheid. That is the strategy by which Muslims of the fundamentalist bent integrate but quite intentionally resist assimilation. It is very difficult to assimilate a subpopulation that comes to a host country with the specific intention of changing the country rather than becoming part of that country’s culture.

So is there a large enough, determined radical Islamic faction in the U.S. to trigger the development of sharia-supremacist enclaves – many of which, in Europe, have become “no go zones” hostile to the police and other government authorities?

Back in 2012, France’s President Hollande made good on a campaign promise and imposed a 75% tax on millionaires. There were some high-profile rich Frenchmen who exited the country, including Bernard Arnault, the chief executive of luxury group LVMH, who applied for Belgian nationality, and the actor Gérard Depardieu, who also moved across the border to Belgium before obtaining Russian citizenship.

Predictably, the tax took in far less than advertised before it was dropped. But there was no mass exodus of rich people from the country. You don’t get to be rich by paying taxes; you get rich by shielding your money from the tax man.

But exiting because of terrorism is another matter. And last year, 10,000 rich people left France for greener pastures – an astonishing 3% of all the millionaires in the country.

IBT:

The report was compiled by New World Wealth, an agency that gives information on the global wealth sector. The report was based on data collected from investor visa programme statistics of each country; annual interviews with around 800 global high net worth individuals and with intermediaries like migration experts, second citizenship platforms, wealth managers and property agents; data from property registers and property sales statistics in each country; and by tracking millionaire movements in the media.

According to the report, Millionaire migration in 2015, France topped the list of countries with maximum millionaire outflows as it lost 10,000 millionaires, or 3% of its millionaire population. Among the cities that saw maximum millionaire outflow, Paris, was at the top – losing about 6% of its millionaire population or 7,000 millionaires in 2015 to the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and Israel.

As someone specializing in Islamic jihadism, one would expect I’d have much to say immediately after jihadi attacks of the sort that recently occurred in Brussels (35 killed), or San Bernardino (14 killed), or Paris (130). Ironically, I don’t: such attacks are ultimately symptoms of what I do deem worthy of discussion, namely, root causes. (What can one add when a symptom of the root cause he has long warned against occurs other than “told you so”?)

So what is the root cause of jihadi attacks? Many think that the ultimate source of the ongoing terrorization of the West is Islam. Yet this notion has one problem: the Muslim world is immensely weak and intrinsically incapable of being a threat. That every Islamic assault on the West is a terrorist attack — and terrorism, as is known, is the weapon of the weak — speaks for itself.

This was not always the case. For approximately one thousand years, the Islamic world was the scourge of the West. Today’s history books may refer to those who terrorized Christian Europe as Arabs, Saracens, Moors, Ottomans, Turks, Mongols, or Tatars — but all were operating under the same banner of jihad that the Islamic State is operating under.

No — today, the ultimate enemy is within. The root cause behind nonstop Muslim terrorization of the West is found in those who stifle or whitewash all talk and examination of Muslim doctrine and history; who welcome hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants while knowing that some are jihadi operatives and many are simply “radical”; who work to overthrow secular Arab dictators in the name of “democracy” and “freedom,” only to uncork the jihad suppressed by the autocrats (the Islamic State’s territory consists of lands that were “liberated” in Iraq, Libya, and Syria by the U.S. and its allies).

So are Western leaders and politicians the root cause behind Islamic terrorization of the West?

Close — but still not there yet.

Far from being limited to a number of elitist leaders and institutions, the Western empowerment of the jihad is the natural outcome of postmodern thinking — the real reason an innately weak Islam can be a source of repeated woes for a militarily and economically superior West.