RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘Too many people, too many ideas, too little progress,” was the verdict of one veteran climate negotiator on the first week of the conference convened to save the planet. Unlike the Copenhagen climate conference six years ago, when presidents and prime ministers were present at the conference’s disastrous denouement, bets were hedged this year in Paris. Presidents and prime ministers addressed the start of the Conference of the Parties (COP) last week. “I can’t separate the fight with terrorism from the fight against global warming,” the leader of the free world and COP host said in the COP’s opening address. “These are two big global challenges we have to face up to,” François Hollande added.

“I believe we can act boldly and decisively in the face of a common threat,” President Obama declared. “I just want to say to this plenary session that we are running short on time.” Oops, that wasn’t President Obama in Paris in December 2015 but President Obama in Copenhagen in December 2009. It might have done equally well for Paris. When it’s always one minute to midnight to save the planet, speakers can recycle words and sentiments from one COP to the next without anyone noticing or caring. If it feels as if the Obama presidency is taking forever to end, the climate talks have been dragging on for more than two decades since the United Nations climate-change convention was signed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 — and there’s no end in sight.

There is no way Putin can come out a winner in the situation he has created for himself.

When Putin first teamed up with Iran and Assad, the two greatest state sponsors of terror in the world, to commit unabashed genocide against the Sunnis of Syria, there was breathless talk that “Putin Checkmated Obama.” It was as if Putin was playing against Obama. Then, after Turkey shot down Putin’s Mig and the Saudis openly declared that they would continue arming their Syrian proxies, the Syrian ground war got even uglier. For all Putin’s bluster, the very ugly reality of Syria has begun to set in.
Putin has never been fighting Obama; he’s been fighting and will have to come to fight hundreds of millions of Sunni Muslims who are coming to see Putin and Russia as the ultimate evil. What’s worse, whether Putin loses, or Putin “wins,” Putin will ultimately lose, lose big, and lose everything.

Let’s look at Putin’s problem objectively. On the one hand, if Putin “loses,” it will be clear he will have militarily lost, and it will be a truly ugly military loss like Afghanistan. If Afghanistan brought down the great and mighty USSR, Syria will bring down little Putin. For, despite Russia’s virtually infinite raids on the Syrian rebels with no limiting rules of engagement, Russian-Iran ground progress has been, at best, severely challenged. Additionally, with Iran’s soon-in-coming introduction of its own fighter jet squadrons into the Syrian theater to genocidally massacre even more Sunnis, the Saudis and Turks will be forced to deliver shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to take down the Assad barrel-bombs, and the Iranian fighter jets. With those anti-aircraft missiles in Rebels’ hands, Russia will start to suffer catastrophic losses.

For decades, it was impossible to bring Turkish military personnel or other state authorities to Turkish courts. Before the negotiation process between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) began around 2009, Turkish military personnel had full immunity for the crimes they committed against the Kurds. No one could bring them to account. Those who even sought help from the police or gendarmerie could also be exposed to torture, rape or even murder.

It was for that reason so many violations of human rights in Kurdistan could be brought to court only decades after they were committed. To this day, no one has ever been punished. The immunity of state authorities, including “security” officials in Turkey, continues. Human rights cases are dismissed by the courts, one by one.

“We told the court that they did not have the intention of restoring justice, that we had lost our trust in them, and that they were not impartial. And we demanded they change the judge.” — Human rights lawyer Tahir Elci, who was killed by police.

Salafists disguised as aid workers are canvassing German refugee shelters in search of new recruits from among the nearly one million asylum seekers who have arrived this year from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Some Salafists are offering gifts of money and clothing. Others are offering translation services and inviting migrants to their homes for tea.

“The absolutist nature of Salafism contradicts significant parts of the German constitutional order. Specifically, Salafism rejects the democratic principles of separation of state and religion, popular sovereignty, religious and sexual self-determination, gender equality and the fundamental right to physical integrity… The movement also has an affinity for violence.” — Germany’s domestic intelligence agency.

“Come to us. We will show you Paradise.” — Salafist literature distributed in Schleswig-Holstein.

If Islamist attacks continue, as they will, the fabled Islamophobia of which we hear so much will take flesh and make innocent Muslims its victims. When the Grand Mufti and fellow rationalisers take comfort in victimology they do their flock a tragic disservice.

San Francisco, 8 December 1941. Following the Pearl Harbor attacks, the Chairman of the American National Shinto Council issues a response to the horrific assault on the American naval base by Imperial Japanese forces:

“These recent incidents highlight the fact that current strategies to deal with the threat of Japanese ultra-nationalism are not working. It is therefore imperative that all causative factors such as racism, anti-Japanese sentiment, curtailing freedoms through militarization, duplicitous foreign policies and military intervention must be comprehensively addressed.”[1]

Imagine the backlash that Japanese-Americans would have faced in the mid-1940s if a prominent member of that community laid the blame on Pearl Harbor at the feet of the American people. Now imagine if the Attorney-General announced shortly thereafter that her “greatest fear” is the “incredibly disturbing rise of anti-Japanese rhetoric.”[2]

Horrific as was the internment of Japanese-Americans, we cannot conceive of how viciously elements of the greater American public might have struck out against countrymen of Japanese origin or extraction. If the Japanese-American community’s leaders had issued statements along the lines of the Grand Mufti’s response to the Paris massacre, the model for the panel-beaten quote above, ordinary Americans would have felt that neither Japanese-Americans nor their own government was doing anything to keep the country safe.

Although President Obama claimed last week that ISIS has been “contained,” the inconvenient truth is this:

The number of foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria has more than doubled since last year to at least 27,000, a report by an intelligence consultancy said on Dec. 8, highlighting the global dimension of the conflict. The figures, compiled by the Soufan Group, indicate that efforts by countries around the world to stem the flow of foreign fighters to Iraq and Syria and blunt the appeal of violent organizations such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) appear to have made little impact.

In its report, the New York-based security consultancy says:

The foreign fighter phenomenon in Iraq and Syria is truly global. The Islamic State has seen success beyond the dreams of other terrorist groups that now appear conventional and even old-fashioned, such as Al-Qaeda. It has energized tens of thousands of people to join it, and inspired many more to support it.

According to Israeli defense officials, it’s only a matter of time before Islamic State terrorists perpetrate a major attack on the Jewish state.

You don’t have to be a Hezbollah or Hamas rocket scientist to have figured this out. ISIS has been increasing the frequency of its warnings to Israel on YouTube. And by now, anyone who doesn’t take such threats seriously is an idiot, a left-wing ideologue or the president of the United States.

This is not to say that Israel needs further proof that Islamists mean business when it comes to executing plans or innocent people. Nor do we Israelis really care what the jihadis in our midst or along our borders are called. “Daesh” is just another group to which terrorists out for our blood attach themselves. The fact that rivalries exist among them only matters where cutting their funding or other self-defense strategies are concerned.

But the rest of the world likes to categorize terrorists as “moderates” or “extremists,” and rank panic levels accordingly. The current bogey man happens to be ISIS, not only due to its flamboyant videos of beheadings and other atrocities, but because it took responsibility for the Paris, Mali and San Bernardino massacres.

Last year’s release of Capital in the Twenty-First Century catapulted Thomas Piketty to international stardom. In the 700-page tome, the French economist argued that inequality is a grave social evil and capitalism is the root of all inequality. Now he’s added a spurious spin to his thesis: inequality is responsible for the rise of ISIS. As the Washington Post reports, Piketty asserts in a recent Le Monde column that “Inequality is a major driver of Middle Eastern terrorism, including the Islamic State attacks on Paris earlier this month—and Western nations have themselves largely to blame for that inequality.” Piketty’s supposedly revelatory argument is symptomatic of the materialist mindset that transfixes the Western elite and thus leaves the West vulnerable to—and hapless against—the global jihad.

Piketty claims that Middle Eastern wealth, concentrated among several oil monarchies governing small populations in “semi-slavery,” has created conditions ripe for jihadism. In Piketty’s reading of history, the West is responsible for driving oil “to the emirs” through military interventions such as the first Gulf War, and then backing such petro-regimes “militarily and politically.” The Obama administration was derided earlier this year for promoting what critics called “jobs for jihadis” as a means of tackling the “root causes” of terrorism. But while poor economic conditions may typify Europe’s most fertile jihadist breeding grounds, poverty in itself isn’t the cause of jihadism. Throughout history, billions of people have lived in squalor without strapping on suicide bombs or taking up arms against “the infidel.” Wealthy Muslim regimes in Saudi Arabia have financed jihadist groups, and Osama bin Laden was born to a wealthy family.

Now the Israelis are trying to circumvent us by means of agreements with the Arab countries. They may not have much to offer the Arabs, except for advances in technology, agriculture and medicine, but now they all have a common enemy: Iran.

Our demands are the result of the greed of our leaders, who do not want a Palestinian state alongside Israel, they want a Palestinian state instead of Israel. Recently we openly exposed our desire to destroy the Jewish state. That is why we demand Jerusalem for ourselves, insist on the right of Palestinians refugees to “return” and threaten the Jews.

Like Hezbollah, we interpret Israel’s political left as a sign of weakness and dissention. We all sense their hypocrisy, arrogance, disdain, and how they patronize us as if we were stupid. That is why the Palestinians have always respected the Israeli right: they always tell us the truth.

The Europeans attempt to weaken Israel with territorial concessions that would make it possible for the Palestinians to fire rockets at Israel’s main cities and airport from the West Bank.

After seeing the results of their withdrawal from Gaza, the Israelis doubtless think one would have to be crazy ever to give up control of the border with Jordan.

Before Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s trip to the United States to meet President Barack Obama, administration officials there said they had given up hope of establishing a Palestinian state during the president’s term of office. One could only think that if as the Palestinian project failed during the current administration, which supports the Palestinian cause, and with a secretary of state as highly motivated as John Kerry, the probability of its ever succeeding was fading away.