RUTHFULLY YOURS

Earlier in 2015, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that he found it difficult to understand what Russia was doing in Syria, since “it does not even border Syria.”

By that logic, Turkey should not be “doing anything” in the Palestinian territories, Somalia, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan or any of the non-bordering lands into which its neo-Ottoman impulses have pushed it.

In a 2012 speech, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, then foreign minister, predicted that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s days in power were numbered and that he would depart “within months or weeks.” Almost three and a half years have passed, with Assad still in power, and Davutoglu keeps on making one passionate speech after another about the fate of Syria.

Turkey’s failure to devise a credible policy on Syria has made the country’s leaders nervous. Both Davutoglu and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have lately resorted to more aggressive, but less convincing, rhetoric on Syria. The new rhetoric features many aspects of a Sunni Islamist thinking blended with illusions of Ottoman grandeur.

On December 22, Davutoglu said, “Syrian soil is not, and will not be, part of Russia’s imperialistic goals.” That was a relief to know! All the same, Davutoglu could have been more direct and honest if he said that: “Syrian soil will not be part of Russia’s imperialistic goals because we want it to be part of Turkey’s pro-Sunni, neo-Ottoman imperialistic goals.”

Hospitals across Britain are dealing with at least 15 new cases of female genital mutilation (FGM) every day. Although FGM has been illegal in Britain since 1984, there has not been a single conviction.

At least 1,400 children were sexually exploited between 1997 and 2013 in the town of Rotherham, mostly by Muslim gangs, but police and municipal officials failed to tackle the problem because they feared being branded “racist” or “Islamophobic.”

Reverend Giles Goddard, vicar of St John’s in Waterloo, central London, allowed a full Muslim prayer service to be held in his church. He also asked his congregation to praise “the God that we love, Allah.”

There has been a 60% increase in child sexual abuse reported to the police over the past four years, according to official figures.

British intelligence are monitoring more than 3,000 homegrown Islamist extremists willing to carry out attacks in Britain.

A Muslim worker at a nuclear power plant in West Kilbride, Scotland, was removed from the premises after he was caught studying bomb-making materials while on the job.

“We try to avoid describing anyone as a terrorist or an act as being terrorist.” – Tarik Kafala, the head of BBC Arabic.

The Muslim population of Britain surpassed 3.5 million in 2015 to become around 5.5% of the overall population of 64 million, according to figures extrapolated from a recent study on the growth of the Muslim population in Europe. In real terms, Britain has the third-largest Muslim population in the European Union, after France, then Germany.

Whether or not violent Islamists represent the ‘true’ Islam is beside the point: they kill and die believing that they do. Logic decrees that the key weapons will never be cruise missiles and drones. Rather, the most potent strategy hangs on a keen and clear-minded willingness to understand what motivates such actions and goals
The recent recapture of Ramadi, Iraq, from the Islamic State is a welcome development to emerge from a region not known for good news. The withdrawal of ISIS fighters displays the jihadists’ military weakness in the face of the American-backed Iraqi national forces. Before pats on the collective back of the anti-IS alliance are shared, however, we need to pause and consider the nature of the threat before us.

The fascination with the Islamic State’s gruesome tactics has meant that the ideological foundations of the caliphate have been underestimated. World leaders might claim a victory against ISIS in the months to come, but this will be a limited triumph; the repercussions of the caliphate will be felt for decades.

The Islamic State was never going to be a conventional army for long, considering the overwhelming firepower facing it. Its ability to capture and control entire cities, a powerful propaganda tool, could not last and the current rolling back of its territory is not surprising. The jihadists’ use of heavy weapons and armed convoys will lessen as they sustain further losses under bombardment from Russia, and the US and its allies in Iraq and Syria.

ISTANBUL—Behind the reinforced door of an unmarked office in this teeming immigrant neighborhood, a man who goes by the name of Hawez Zaman moves money the same way his predecessors in the Middle Ages did, in an off-the-books transfer system critical to today’s spiraling migrant crisis in Europe.
The centuries-old system known as hawala enables users to transfer money from one point to another entirely on the basis of trust—largely without a paper trail and often outside the law. It is the dominant way migrants flooding into Europe pay for their journeys, used for 90% of the transactions in a people-smuggling trade valued at around $2.5 billion a year in Europe, according to European security officials and researchers. It is used for a further $390 billion a year migrants send back home as part of an informal but widely accepted financial system used across the developing world.
The money flows are also drawing renewed attention among terrorist finance investigators, who since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have tried to monitor hawala systems. They are concerned that some of the same hawala systems flourishing from the business of moving migrants could also be tapped by would-be attackers as a source of financing.
“Given what we’ve seen so far, we have very strong suspicions terrorists receive money via hawala,” said Calogero Ferrara, a Palermo-based prosecutor heading a large pan-European people-smuggling investigation. “After the Paris attacks, we have intensified investigations on this front.”

Millions of people around the world are gathering in public places Thursday to celebrate the New Year, which means there’s no holiday for counterterrorist officials, who are on high alert seemingly everywhere.

Turkish police said Wednesday they arrested two people with alleged Islamic State ties on suspicion of planning bombing attacks on New Year’s Eve in Ankara. The pair, who police said had a vest with explosives and a backpack “ready for use,” were arrested while scouting targets in the Kizilay district known for its shopping centers. In October two bomb attacks outside Ankara’s main train station killed more than 100 innocents. No one has claimed responsibility but Turkish officials have blamed Islamic State.

Meanwhile, Belgian authorities cancelled a New Year’s Eve fireworks display scheduled for the historic Grand Place in downtown Brussels. This followed the arrest a day earlier of two members of a motorcycle group for plotting an attack. Police say they found Islamic State propaganda in a raid this week that led to the arrests.

We rarely think about the owners of the wineries when choosing the sparkling wine with which to celebrate. Perhaps we should.

Consider the French champagne house Taittinger, and its California Domaine Carneros estate, which has for the past 15 years sponsored Hollywood’s annual Screen Actors Guild Awards and the SAG Foundation.

In 1943, in Le Journal de Saintes, Pierre Taittinger, the well-known champagne maker and hotelier called for “the creation of a new European order upon which France must work in close collaboration with Germany.” At the same year, papers he owned celebrated both the 10th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and Hitler’s 54th birthday. His papers also carried advertisements proclaiming “Germany will prevail, France will, and Europe will unite through work,” as well as “For a clean France rid of Jews and Freemasons.”

The Vichy government was behind the October 1940 laws, prohibiting Jews from holding public offices and almost all professions; it was behind the laws permitting the “Aryanization” of Jewish property; and was behind the decision to eliminate 30,000 to 60,000 Jewish soldiers from its military ranks, imprisoning them or sending them to labor camps where they were kept until most were deported by the Germans to Auschwitz in August 1942. It was also the Vichy government that turned over tens of thousands of foreign Jews to the Germans and sent tens of thousands more as forced laborers to Germany. Altogether, 90,000 out of 350,000 French Jews were exterminated.

On Nov. 27, exactly two weeks after the terrorist attacks that killed 130 people in Paris, FBI agents swarmed into a private home in Harrisburg, Pa. Their target: 19-year-old Jalil Ibn Ameer Aziz, an American citizen and Muslim whom they’d been watching for several months, largely through his postings on Twitter. Using as many as 57 separate accounts, Aziz had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, called for the killing of non-Muslims, aided others to make hijrah to Syria to join the jihad there, and expressed his own wishes to do the same.

And if that weren’t enough, he promised further to continue the attacks against America, posting, for instance, “Know, O Obama, that we are coming to America, and know that we will sever your head in the White House.”

But as the FBI soon discovered, Aziz’s jihadist lust did not end with just words. At the home he shared with his parents in the Pennsylvania capital, according to the affidavit filed in the case, they found a “go-bag,” or knapsack, containing “five M-4 style high capacity magazines loaded with 5.56 ammunition, a modified kitchen knife with the handle removed and wrapped in cloth and string, a thumb drive, a tin filled with various over-the-counter medications, and a head wrap commonly referred to as a balaclava.”

“In some areas of the Middle East where church bells have rung for centuries on Christmas Day, this year they will be silent,” President Barack Obama said in a statement on December 23. “This silence bears tragic witness to the brutal atrocities committed against these communities by ISIL.” This is a misleading and hypocritical statement for four main reasons.
(1) Obama singles out the Islamic State (IS, or “ISIL” as he still insists on calling it) as the culprit. He is thus creating the impression that anti-Christian “brutal atrocities” had been absent before the IS made its appearance on the Middle Eastern scene, or that such atrocities are limited to the IS-controlled areas today. This is demonstrably untrue.

It is a matter of historical record that the 75 years preceding the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1922 witnessed a more thorough destruction of the Christian communities in the Middle East than any period following the seventh century Islamic conquest. Thousands of Assyrians were murdered in the province of Mosul in 1850, and in 1860 some 12,000 Christians were put to the sword in Lebanon. Successive slaughters of Armenians in Bayazid (1877), Alashgurd (1879), Sassun (1894), Constantinople (1896), Adana (1909) and Ottoman-ruled Armenia itself (1895–1896) claimed a total of 200,000 lives. They were but rehearsals for the slaughter of 1915-1918, which claimed at least a million lives. Two million Armenians lived in what is now Turkey in 1914; some 3% (ca. 60,000) remain today. The proof of the genocide is in the numbers.

Much that is important in Jerusalem right now was visible during a short walk I took around the Old City on a rainy Tuesday in November: Four Border Police officers in riot gear, two men and two women, eyeing their smartphones and Arab passers-by with the same casual interest. Muslim women coming from the al-Aqsa Mosque, eyeing the officers. A blue-and-white flag on a wall declaring one apartment to be a Jewish island inside the Muslim Quarter. A gleaming Arabic sign announcing a new Israeli health clinic serving Palestinian clientele. Palestinian men at a traffic light outside the walls, crossing the invisible line between east and west Jerusalem on their way to work.

I waited at the light-rail stop outside Damascus Gate and boarded a train of Jewish and Arab passengers, fewer of both than usual. I got off downtown, and within an hour there had been a Palestinian stabbing attack on another train and a second attack at Damascus Gate.

The city of Jerusalem is subject to great and contradictory forces, some pulling its 830,000 residents apart and some pushing them together. The forces of disintegration have been evident in the spate of stabbing attacks against Israeli civilians and policemen this fall. In the six weeks beginning October 1 there were two dozen attacks or attempted attacks by Palestinians in Jerusalem alone, most involving knives. They persist, in Jerusalem and elsewhere, as I write. Jerusalem in crisis mode doesn’t resemble an American city during or after a race riot, for example, or a natural disaster. There aren’t burned-out neighborhoods or looted streets. There is no large-scale breakdown of public order. Instead there are small incidents of murderous violence, some localized rioting, and a cloud of unease.