RUTHFULLY YOURS

After announcing that Germany would not place limits on the number of asylum-seekers it accepts, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is now considering a quota system. The turnaround wasn’t her choice.

In early September, German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued an order to bring thousands of refugees who were stranded in Hungary to Germany. Germany’s basic right to asylum has no upper limits, she said.

It was a moment of unaccustomed conviction from a chancellor who had become notorious for her ability to avoid making decisions until the last possible moment. But she went even further. She equated the refugee issue with other significant turning points in the history of her party, the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU). Issues such as West Germany’s integration into Western alliances and Kohl’s commitment to keeping nuclear weapons stationed in West Germany in the 1980s. It was as though she were elevating her refugee policy into the pantheon of Christian Democratic basic principles.

And she didn’t even bother to inform the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), before doing so.

Now, though, Merkel is in the process of preparing a reversal of her refugee policy. At the G-20 summit in Antalya, Turkey at the beginning of the week, she spoke of quotas — fixed numbers of refugees that Europe is willing to accept. On the one hand, of course, introduction the idea of quotas is a concession to reality, because the chancellor knows that the ongoing arrival to Germany of up to 10,000 refugees every day is not sustainable.

Analysts falsely believed Islamic State was too weak to carry out terror attacks abroad. But IS views terror as a means to an end — and will launch attacks as long as they continue to serve its broader strategy.

“It was a terrible night. We heard the roar of the jets, the detonations. Then, the power suddenly went out and everything sunk into darkness,” the young woman on the phone says. She said that she could only see the flashes from the explosions, with one bomb landing right near where she was. “But I don’t want to die after all that we have already gone through here.”

The woman is from Raqqa, where Islamic State has its headquarters in Syria. She lives there together with her parents and brothers. Still. As do so many other civilians. On the phone, she was describing the first wave of attacks in the “war” that French President François Hollande declared against Islamic State following the attacks in Paris. The bombs dropped by French fighter jets hit both used and abandoned IS bases, the former army camp of Bashar Assad’s Division 17, the polyclinic, the horse racetrack and a main power cable. The woman’s brother is a taxi driver, and he witnessed numerous injured fighters being brought to the hospital, which had been closed to civilians.

Still, the raid isn’t likely to have hit any Islamic State leaders. The air strikes over the weekend were apparently an attempt to kill Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who is thought to have been a key figure behind the Paris attacks and who the French initially thought might be in Raqqa. He was ultimately killed in Wednesday morning police raids in the Paris suburb of Saint Denis.

But the upper echelons of IS have been living for months in the city’s densely populated residential areas and are careful to keep their movements inconspicuous. As such, they have likely been able to escape the US-led coalition’s airstrikes, which have been ongoing for 15 months.

After factoring in family reunifications, the actual number of migrants could exceed 10 million, and some believe that Germany’s Muslim population is on track to nearly quadruple to an astonishing 20 million by 2020.

N24 television news reports that up to 50% of the asylum seekers arriving in Germany have gone into hiding and their whereabouts are unknown by German authorities.

“It cannot be that offenders continue to fill the police files, hurt us physically… and there are no consequences. … We are losing control of the streets.” — Tania Kambouri, a German police officer.

“We are not excluding anyone, we are just trying to run a business. If we ignore the complaints of our female guests, we have to expect that many of our regular customers will stay away…. Financially, we do not know how long can we cope with this.” — Thomas Greil, manager of the discotheque “Brucklyn,” Bad Tölz, Bavaria.

“We are reproducing faster and faster. You Germans are not getting any children. In the best case you get two children. We make seven to eight children. Okay mate? And then we take four wives each, then we have 22 children. Maybe you Germans have one child and a dog. Huh? And that’s it.” — Video showing a Muslim threatening a German man openly on the street.

In Berlin, lawmakers are considering emergency legislation that would allow local authorities to seize private residences to accommodate asylum seekers. The proposal was kept secret from the public until November 9, when the leader of the Free Democrats (FDP) in Berlin warned the measure would violate the German Constitution. Berlin Mayor Michael Müller now wants to expand the scope for warrantless inspections to include “preventing homelessness.”

ISTANBUL—The Turkish military shot down what is likely to be a Russian jet fighter along the Syrian border on Tuesday after the plane violated Turkey’s airspace and ignored warnings to return, Turkish officials said.

Turkish authorities didn’t give the nationality of the jet but Russia separately said one of its jets had been downed in the region, it said the jet had flown exclusively in Syrian airspace and that the plane had likely been brought down by shelling from the ground.

The Turkish military said two of its F-16s shot down the jet fighter after it crossed into Turkish airspace and ignored 10 warnings in five minutes to return to Syrian airspace.

Television footage showed a jet catching fire and crashing into the mountains along the Turkey-Syria border.

The plane crashed on a part of the border where Russian and Syrian planes have been targeting Turkmen fighters, a group that has been seeking more support from Ankara in their fight against the Syrian regime.

The State Department said Secretary of State John Kerry finally called the Massachusetts family of a teen killed last week in a West Bank terror attack.

But that was just a couple of days after a State Department official, previewing Kerry’s visit this week to the Middle East, said the administration was just “a bit concerned” about attacks on Americans by Palestinians.

President Obama and Kerry have been mum on the attack in which Ezra Schwartz, 18, of Sharon, Mass., was killed Thursday.

Schwartz was a gap-year student attending Yeshivat Ashreinu in Beit Shemesh. He was in a van with five other friends taking food to IDF soldiers Thursday near the Gush Etzion junction when a Palestinian terrorist opened fire on cars stuck in traffic. The terrorist then rammed his car into another vehicle and was arrested.

Over the years since President Obama first took office, he has lectured Americans about the receding tide of war, al Qaeda on the run, and, more recently, ISIS (or, as the administration has it, ISIL) being degraded, slated for ultimate destruction, and, even more recently, “contained.” Meanwhile, the world is getting ever more dangerous. Over the past six months alone, the State Department in its efforts to keep up with the turmoil and threats has issued more than three dozen travel warnings for Americans thinking of visiting places from Eritrea to Mali, Lebanon, Colombia, Sudan, El Salvador, Nigeria, Tanzania, Cameroon, Burma, Nepal, Mali, the Philippines, Kenya, Turkey… and of course Syria, Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

Now, in the aftermath of the ISIS terrorist attacks on Paris, with ISIS threatening strikes on America, and Brussels heading into its fourth day on lockdown, the State Department is taking a more wholesale approach. Today, as PJ Media’s Bridget Johnson reports, the State Department issued a “Worldwide Travel Alert,” warning U.S. citizens of “possible risks of travel due to increased terrorist threats.”

Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens remarked that terrorism in Europe
was no longer limited to Jews and law enforcement officials, but now
affects targets of a different profile, including the general public,
The Guardian reported on Sunday.

Geens, the justice minister, said that the Paris attacks had shown
that the profile of potential targets had changed. “It’s no longer
synagogues or the Jewish museums or police stations, it’s mass
gatherings and public places,” he said.

By the calculations of the social scientists at the World Economic Forum, the United States’ gender-equality ranking has slipped from 20th place to 28th since 2014. WEF’s Global Gender Gap Index 2015 found that the U.S. is outranked not only by such leftist Valhallas as Iceland (first) and Sweden (fourth), but also, among others, by Mozambique (27th), Namibia (16th), Rwanda (sixth), and Burundi (23rd).

Yes, according to this report, American women who want to enjoy greater gender equality should move to Burundi — a small East African country whose president held a sham election to garner an unconstitutional third term and who is currently threatening to commit genocide against his own people in order to keep power. Burundi also has a continuing history of widespread rape committed by both private citizens and government officials.

Or there’s Burundi’s neighbor Rwanda, whose government recently recruited Burundian refugees, apparently to wage an armed insurgency within Burundi.

Also outranking the U.S. are the Philippines (seventh), where human-rights abuses such as extrajudicial killing are normal; Bolivia (22nd), where corruption and gender-based violence prevail; and Nicaragua (twelfth), where property rights are tenuous and the press faces judicial and legal harassment from the Ortega administration.

The murder of 27 hotel guests in Mali’s capital city by Boko Haram, now an al Qaeda franchisee, highlights yet again the delusional futility of asserting that, as Hillary Clinton put it in a tweet, “Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” Like Obama, Hillary also vigorously condemns the use of a phrase like “Islamist radicalism.”

These evasions are contrary to the history and doctrines of Islam consistent over 14 centuries, and contradict the professed motives for the continuing violence perpetrated across the globe––27,295 deadly attacks just since 9/11–– by Islamic terrorist groups who emulate the Prophet and take seriously his injunction to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captive and besiege them, and lie in wait for them in every ambush” (9.5), one of 109 verses––the direct commands of Allah–– that order war against infidels.

Moreover, that most Muslims do not engage directly in such violence, or may even condemn it, does not change the fundamental doctrines that justify it, no more than the millions of Catholic women who use birth control invalidate the church’s doctrine against contraception. The doctrine of jihad has been part of Islam from its beginning, enjoined by the Koran and Hadith, and confirmed and celebrated by the most eminent Islamic historians, jurisprudents, and theologians. One of the most famous, the late-14th century writer Ibn Khaldun, wrote in the Muqaddimah, “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” When we see Muslims in the 21st century killing and dying in service to this traditional religious imperative created in the 7th century, it is perverse blindness to claim that there is no connection between Islam and Islamic terrorism.

Stockholm opened what is believed to be the world’s first rape clinic for men. More and more men are being subjected to homosexual rape in multicultural Sweden. 370 sex crimes against boys and men were registered in 2014, although the actual number of incidents is thought to be significantly higher.

Sweden’s strategy seems to be to keep the borders open and then redistribute the asylum seekers to EU countries that have an immigration policy completely different from Sweden’s open borders and generous welfare benefits. Whether other EU countries want to relieve Sweden’s burden remains to be seen.

Police documents show that 70% asylum seekers whose applications are rejected ignore the decision and stay illegally in Sweden.

The councilman argued that one should be able to talk about everything, so long as it is true. Two days later, he was forced to apologize and stress that he is not a racist.

Swedish authorities care more about the murderer’s future in his native Eritrea than they do about the risk that he will kill more Swedes.

Weapons smugglers have figured out a way to drive through customs checkpoints without being pulled over. The customs officers have orders never to stop cars with more passengers than there are customs officers present, according to the Lokaltidningen weekly newspaper.