RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Some of those women and girls have had to watch 7-, 8-, and 9-year-old children bleed to death before their eyes, after being raped by ISIS militia multiple times a day.” — Mirza Ismail, chairman of the Yazidi Human Rights Organization-International.

“An office has been established by ISIS members in Antep [Turkey]; and at that office, women and children kidnapped by ISIS are sold for high amounts of money. Where are the ministers and law enforcement officers of this county who are talking about stability?” — Reyhan Yalcindag, prominent Kurdish human rights lawyer.

“Five thousand people have been taken as captives. Women and children are raped, and then sold. These must be considered crimes.” — Leyla Ferman, Co-President of the Yazidi Federation of Europe.

“Turkey has signed several international treaties, but it is the number one country when it comes to professional non-compliance with human rights treaties.” — Reyhan Yalcindag.

This month, the German television station, ARD (Consortium of Public Broadcasters in Germany), produced footage documenting the slave trade being conducted by the Islamic State (ISIS) through a liaison office in the province of Gaziantep (also known as Antep) in Turkey, near the border with Syria.

In August 2014, Islamic State jihadists attacked Sinjar, home to over 400,000 Yazidis. The United Nations confirmed that 5,000 men were executed, and as many as 7,000 women and girls made sex slaves.

While some have escaped or been ransomed back, thousands of Yazidis remain missing.

This month marks the first anniversary of President Obama’s unilateral rapprochement with Cuba. Upon making the Dec. 17 announcement, the Obama administration immediately moved to ease restrictions on American travel to the island and, by extension, boost revenues for the owners of its tourist industry: the Cuban military.

In May the U.S. removed Cuba from its list of state sponsors of terrorism, even though the dictator Gen. Raúl Castro harbors known terrorists, including the U.S. fugitive Joanne Chesimard, once a member of the now defunct Black Liberation Army and a convicted cop-killer.

In August the U.S. reopened an embassy in Havana. Last week it announced a bilateral agreement to restore direct flights between the U.S. and Cuba.

Cuba’s dissidents have been hard hit. Days after the new U.S. policy was announced, Danilo Maldonado, the Cuban performance artist known as El Sexto, was arrested for mocking the Castros. He spent 10 months in jail, and Amnesty International named him a prisoner of conscience.

The terrorist threat posed by Islamic State morphed from an uncertain menace confined largely to the Middle East into one of the biggest global security challenges since the end of the Cold War.

For the first time the militant group launched major terror attacks from its strongholds against distant targets, including the deadliest-ever on French soil. A couple killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in the worst attack in the U.S. since Sept. 11, 2001; the wife had pledged allegiance to Islamic State.

Islamic State consistently urged sympathizers to strike the West, but until recently the group devoted its energy to seizing territory in Syria and Iraq for a so-called caliphate to be ruled according to its puritanical version of Islam.

“It was clear the group was calling for attacks,” said Raffaello Pantucci, a counterterrorism expert at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London. “But it wasn’t clear there was anything strategic to it. It was more about throwing sand in our eyes.”

That changed with a string of lethal attacks directed at some of the group’s main enemies, including Turkey, Hezbollah and possibly Russia as well as the West.

Growing Iranian involvement in the war in Syria is about to be officially requested by Basher Assad in Tehran later this month.

To assure his safe arrival in and departure through Iraqi airspace, his plane will be guarded by “four strategic Russian fighter jets,” said the Lebanese daily al-Diyar. It also reported that “the US-led international coalition’s air command has been warned not to approach…Assad’s plane to avoid engagement.”

The Iranians claim Assad’s visit aims to celebrate “recent victories of the Syrian army against the Takfiri terrorist groups.” However, they seem to follow in Moscow’s footstep in the charade that their presence and direct involvement in the Syrian war are legitimate.

Why now? It has never been a secret that Iran has been Assad’s main supporter all along.

Thursday marks a bitter anniversary in the Arab world. On Dec. 17, 2010, a Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after the authorities confiscated his goods and beat him. The incident sparked an uprising that within weeks would topple Tunisia’s venal autocracy. Protests spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria. Despots from Morocco to Mesopotamia felt the heat of popular anger. Many couldn’t withstand it.

Yet today the Middle East is less stable, and less hopeful, than it was before the Arab Spring. Five years ago, the denim-clad, smartphone-wielding Arab liberal became the region’s avatar. Now the knife-wielding jihadist and the refugee have risen to prominence instead.

Each Arab Spring country is unhappy in its own way. Tunisia is the only success story among the bunch, having adopted a secular constitution and completed several peaceful power transfers. As Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia’s moderate Islamic Ennahda party, recently told me, “We’ve remained on the bridge of democratic transition while others have fallen off.” True, but the birthplace of the Arab Spring is also the world’s top exporter of fighters for Islamic State, or ISIS.

Richard Prasquier is President of Keren Hayesod France and Honorary Chairman of the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France). This article first appeared in a slightly different form in French. Gatestone thanks the author for his kind permission to publish it in English.

Our reaction should be directed not against the terrorists, but against those who indoctrinate, train and finance them — and on working to eradicate this virus of the mind.

Where are the demands to boycott those who fund ISIS? Their names are well-known.

The “Crusaders” now seem exhausted. They simply do not want enemies.

These attacks — like those before them — were simply meant to sow terror: go kill as many people as you can.

The Pope can insist all he likes that we have entered a Third World War; it is so much more comforting to repeat that the main problem is “Israel’s occupation” is the problem.

After the November 13 attacks in Paris, there were concerns in the media that Europe did not fully understand the gravity of the threats posed by radical Islam. Frances’s Minister of the Interior, Bernard Cazeneuve, however, certainly did not hide his prediction that, this year, a large scale attack would take place in France. It was not a matter of “if,” but “when” and “where.”

Thoughts first were for the victims, for those who will suffer all their lives — young people who went out just to enjoy some music or eat with friends.

Next came the questions: about the claim of responsibility by ISIS, and how the coordinated attacks would nullify the “lone wolf” theory — a hypothesis largely refuted anyway. These were commandos trained to kill, and to kill themselves too.

Israel’s Channel 10 broke a story Thursday night that is the kind of scoop journalists celebrate. Unfortunately, however, this one is very bad news.

According to sources in the Prime Minister’s Office, Israel and Turkey are on the verge of restoring full diplomatic relations. Translated into plain English, this means that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is about to make a deal with the devil.

The demon in question, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had already hinted on Monday that he was sniffing around his Jewish nemesis when he said that renewed ties between the two countries would have “a lot to offer to us, to Israel, to Palestine and also to the region.”

So it probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise to learn that a secret meeting was held on Wednesday in Switzerland between Turkish Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioglu and newly appointed Mossad chief Yossi Cohen, accompanied by Netanyahu’s long-time special envoy to Turkey, Yossi Ciechanover, for the purpose of reaching an agreement.

Nor is Erdogan’s timing due to a gradual change of heart. Rather, it is because the Ankara Islamist with hegemonic fantasies has become a pariah in the Muslim world he dreamed of ruling, while Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready, willing and able to pummel him into oblivion.

Iran is already in flagrant violation of its obligations under United Nations Security Council resolutions referenced in the nuclear agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed on July 14, 2015, by Iran, the five permanent members of the Security Council and Germany. Nevertheless, the Obama administration is making excuses for Iran. It is still on track to reward Iran soon with the freeing up of over $100 billion in frozen assets and the lifting of economic sanctions.

First, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was not able to complete the full investigation of Iran’s suspected past work on a nuclear explosive device, which was supposed to be a precondition for moving forward with implementation of the JCPOA’s terms. Even with the limited information it was provided, including samplings and photographs taken as a result of Iran’s own self-inspection, the agency concluded that, at least through 2009, Iran had conducted such activities. The agency also stated in its report that Iran had appeared to cover its tracks at its Parchin military site:

“Since the Agency’s first request to Iran for access to the particular location of interest to it at the Parchin site in February 2012, extensive activities have taken place at this location. These activities, observed through commercial satellite imagery, appeared to show, inter alia, shrouding of the main building, the removal/replacement or refurbishment of its external wall structures, removal and replacement of part of the roof, and large amounts of liquid run-off emanating from the building…The Agency assesses that the extensive activities undertaken by Iran since February 2012 at the particular location of interest to the Agency seriously undermined the Agency’s ability to conduct effective verification.”

America has much to learn from Europe’s current condition. In Europe, the decline in religious faith has led to a universal weakening of society and a loss of confidence in the value of its civilization. And the effects of this have been grave: throngs of unassimilated immigrants, unchecked military threats from abroad, and confusion about national identity threaten Europe’s future. America, by contrast, still shows many signs of strength. Nonetheless, should we lose our sense of shared identity, Europe’s path likely awaits.
The threats confronting Europe also confront America: mass immigration of people whose loyalty cannot be guaranteed, the purging of religious assumptions from the public square, and the state’s growth which squeezes out civil society.

In a gloomy but strangely enthralling book published at the end of the First World War, the historian and polymath Oswald Spengler wrote of the decline of the West, arguing that Europe was moving inevitably to its end according to a pattern that can be observed among civilizations from the beginning of recorded history. Each historical superorganism, he argued, displays its distinctive and defining spirit through its culture. That of the West is “Faustian”—involving an outgoing and conquering attitude to the world displayed in the science, art, and institutions that came to fruition at the Reformation, spread themselves far and wide through the Enlightenment, and then reached a crisis at the French Revolution.

After that great period, things began to ossify into rigid legal and bureaucratic forms. Thus was born the period of “civilization,” typified by Napoleon’s new rationalization of the old spirit of France. Culture leads to civilization, which in turn leads to decay and then death. The culture of the West, Spengler argued, will dwindle to a purely mechanical simulacrum of its former greatness before disappearing entirely.

In 2003, Samantha Power won the Pulitzer Prize for A Problem from Hell, her searing critique of American responses to genocides from Bosnia to Iraq. More than a decade later, the unrestrained brutality in Syria has turned the administration that appointed Power as UN Ambassador into the deadliest case study of our time.
It’s hard to imagine a greater foreign policy failure than the American response to the conflict in Syria, which has mushroomed into one of the worst humanitarian crises since the Second World War.

What started as a series of peaceful demonstrations for democratic and civil society reform in 2011 has since degenerated into a brutal multi-front conflict involving the Assad regime in Damascus, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Iranian-backed Hezbollah, a smorgasbord of mostly Islamist rebel groups including al-Qaeda, secular left-wing Kurdish militias, and, of course, ISIS—the most psychopathic army of killers on the planet.

Rather than live up to his earlier and undeserved reputation as a “reformer,” President Bashar al-Assad has proven himself the most violent dictator in the Middle East since Saddam Hussein.

ISIS, meanwhile, rather than living up to U.S. President Barack Obama’s description as al-Qaeda’s “JV team,” has evolved from a ragtag terrorist organization to a full-blown genocidal army massacring its way through Syria, Iraq and beyond.

The American response so far is only a tad more robust than the sound of chirping crickets.