RUTHFULLY YOURS

Maybe he’ll do the wave with Raúl and Joanne, too By Silvio Canto, Jr.

We just learned that Oscar Lopez Rivera will be going to Cuba to receive special recognition or an award, as reported by a state newspaper in the island:

According to a program prepared for the independence activist — the first after his release last May 17th — , the award will be giv

en to Lopez Rivera at the Jose Marti Memorial, located at Revolution Square in Havana.

According to the Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, ICAP, Lopez Rivera will assist in a political-cultural activity on Monday at th

e Havana entity that was host to many solidarity actions for his cause.

The agenda also includes an exchange with students at the University of Havana’s Master Hall, visits to provinces and to the Santa Ifigenia Cemetery in eastern Santiago de Cuba where he will visit the memorials that hold the remains of National Hero Jose Marti and the leader of the Revolution Fidel Castro.

Isn’t that sweet? President Obama opened the U.S. embassy and now Cuba invites a terrorist. You can’t make this stuff up!

My guess is that President Obama got away with commuting his sentence because most Americans don’t know who this man is or was.

His story started in 1974 when the FALN was a deadly domestic terror group based in the US, as we saw in Politico:

The FALN was responsible for over 130 bombings during this period, including the January 1975 explosion in Manhattan’s historic Fraunces Tavern, which killed four and wounded 63. In October of that year, it set off, all within the span of an hour, 10 bombs in three cities causing nearly a million dollars in damage.

Recent events in the Middle East confirm the observation that very little in the Middle East is easily understood. A day after Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman launched a palace purge by arresting several of his fellow royals, a high ranking prince mysteriously died in a helicopter crash. State media did not reveal the cause of the crash, albeit any suggestion of motive would be entirely speculative.

There are conditions that have been established. Dozens of princes, ministers and a billionaire tycoon were arrested as Bin Salman, age 32, attempts to consolidate his power. It would appear as if the Crown Prince wants to eliminate any trace of dissent prior to the formal transfer of power from his 81 year old father who is suffering from a terminal illness.

One of those detained by authorities is Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, an investor who owns a major stake in Twitter, Citigroup and News America. He has also contributed to Middle East Studies programs from Columbia to Yale and points in between. His arrest suggests no one is beyond the reach of the Crown Prince.

Over the last two years Bin Salman has taken over most of the key economic and security posts and is unquestionably the most important figure in government. The Crown Prince is also deputy prime minister (the king is prime minister) and minister of defense. Clearly this seizure of power has given rise to the resistance inside and outside the royal family. In the Saudi system, power has been passed among the sons of the founder of the modern Saudi Kingdom, Idn Saud. Crown Prince Mohammed is putting an end to all of that as political power is migrating to his branch of the family, including all military authority.

Iran’s military is establishing a permanent base inside Syria, just outside Damascus, BBC reported on Friday.

Citing a “Western intelligence source,” the report says that the Iranian military has taken over a compound at a site used by the Syrian army outside El-Kiswah, south of the Syrian capital and just a short 50 km from the border with Israel.

Satellite images of the purported site, commissioned by the BBC, appear to show construction activity at the site between January and October this year. The images show a series of two dozen large and low-rise buildings, likely for housing soldiers and vehicles.

The images do not reveal any signs of large or unconventional weaponry.

Independent analysis of the images says the facility is military in nature, but the BBC noted that it is impossible to independently verify the purpose of the site and the presence of the Iranian military.

Iran and its proxies have been supporting the Assad regime in the Syrian civil war and have deployed a force estimated at 500 Iranian army soldiers, 5,000 Hezbollah terrorists and several thousand guerrillas from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.

As ISIS moves out, Iran moves in,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted last Sunday, following up on previous warnings.

TEHRAN, Iran—A powerful earthquake shook the Iran-Iraq border late Sunday, killing at least 200 people and injuring nearly 1,700, state media there reported.

The government in Baghdad didn’t immediately disclose damage or casualties in Iraq.

The magnitude-7.3 quake was centered 19 miles outside the eastern Iraqi city of Halabja, according to the most recent measurements from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Iranian social media and news agencies showed images and videos of people fleeing their homes in the western Iranian province of Kermanshah.

The state-run IRNA news agency reported the increase in casualties early Monday and said rescue work was continuing overnight and would accelerate during the daytime.

The semiofficial ILNA news agency said at least 14 provinces in Iran had been affected by the earthquake.

Officials said schools in Kermanshah and Ilam provinces would be closed on Monday because of the tremor.

Iranian state TV also said Iraqi officials reported at least six people dead inside Iraq, along with more than 50 people injured in Sulaymaniyah province and about 150 in the city of Khanaquin.

In Sweden, car-burnings are not major news anymore; they have become a part of daily life. Cars are torched in Swedish towns on a regular basis.

Between January and September 2017, Sweden experienced 6000 car-burnings. That equals roughly 22 car fires per day. Schools and other buildings are sometimes targeted by arsonists as well.

Meanwhile, a report claims that Swedish students and other citizens have been pushed to the back of the public-housing queue. The authorities thus sometimes prioritize recently-arrived asylum seekers and immigrants over the country’s native population.

If you search for crime, you can find it in any society. Sadly, in Sweden today, you do not have to search very hard. A casual look at newspapers on any random day will be filled with stories about armed robberies, sexual assaults, rapes, public gang shootings and perhaps explosives in restaurants. This crime wave is no longer merely confined to the major cities. Many smaller towns and some rural communities are now affected as well.

In some Swedish municipalities, harassment and violent threats have become major issues even at public libraries. In the town of Trelleborg, in the autumn of 2017, a gang of 30-50 youths effectively occupied the local library. One mother, who asked that her name not be used, explained that she is now scared to visit the library with her children. The last time she went, visitors were harassed by a loud, aggressive youth gang. When a guard asked the gang-members to leave, they surrounded him. The local police say that they are aware of this problem, but that they do not have sufficient staff to patrol the library every day.

In October 2017, an 81-year-old Swedish woman in the town of Mölndal was harassed and threatened by some youths while walking her dog. A few boys around the age of 12 walked in front of her and blew cigarette smoke in her face; one of them threatened to attack her dog and her. Then he spat her in her face. The woman now says that she is afraid to go out. The local police confirm that elderly people are harassed in similar ways. In a separate incident, some youths stole a loaf of bread from another woman in her 80s.

On the evening of October 29, 2017, a car was torched in the Muslim-dominated district of Rosengård in Malmö. On October 30, another car was torched in the same area. The local daily Sydsvenskan mentioned these incidents with just a couple of sentences. Why? Because car-burnings have become a part of daily life. They are not major news anymore. Cars are torched in Swedish towns on a regular basis.

Between January and September 2017, Sweden experienced 6000 car-burnings. That equals roughly 22 car-burnings per day. (Insurance companies estimate that about half of these incidents are attempts at insurance fraud.) Schools and other buildings have been targeted by arsonists, as well.

This latest Muslim terrorist attack took place near Toulouse. You may remember Toulouse as the location of the vicious Muslim terror spree by Mohammed Merah which included the murder of Jewish children in a school. There was widespread support for Merah’s actions among Muslim colonists in France.

Now we have yet another terrorist attack.

Abdellah B, a 28-year-old, rammed a Renault Clio into three students at the IGS campus, in a suburb of Toulouse. The victims are Chinese students in their early 20s. Two women and one man.

The French authorities are pivoting to their usuals standby, psychiatric problems. Most media accounts emphasize the psychiatric angle without using the terrorist’s name.

But the L’Express account offers something more.

“When he was arrested, he told the police, ‘I am on a mission,'” one of our sources said. The prosecutor’s office of Toulouse also specifies that he said he planned his attack “for a month”.

Abdellah (Slave of Allah) had the usual criminal record that most of these attackers do.

The Mayor of Toulouse is very shocked. And the French media is compulsively interviewing shrinks. But here’s a little context about Islamic terrorists and mental illness.

A Muslim terrorist stabbed four people at a train station near Munich while screaming, “Allahu Akbar”. In between proclaiming the glory of Allah, he also shouted that his victims were all “unbelievers”. A woman heard him say, “Infidel, you must die”.

The German authorities came to the inescapable conclusion that the attack had nothing to do with Islam. Instead the Muslim terrorist had been “mentally ill” and was probably not even fit to stand trial. The Koran wasn’t to blame. It was the fault of his psychological problems.

In Russia, Muslim monster Gyulchekhra Bobokulova beheaded a 4-year-old girl and displayed her head in the street while shouting, “Allahu Akbar. I hate democracy. I am a terrorist. I want you dead.” Faced with these bafflingly inscrutable statements, the authorities blamed mental illness.

Seventy-five years ago this month, the Soviet Red Army surrounded — and would soon destroy — a huge invading German army at Stalingrad on the Volga River. Nearly 300,000 of Germany’s best soldiers would never return home. The epic 1942–43 battle for the city saw the complete annihilation of the attacking German 6th Army. It marked the turning point of World War II.

Before Stalingrad, Adolf Hitler regularly boasted on German radio as his victorious forces pressed their offensives worldwide. After Stalingrad, Hitler went quiet, brooding in his various bunkers for the rest of the war.

During the horrific Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted more than five months, Russian, American, and British forces also went on the offensive against the Axis powers in the Caucasus, in Morocco and Algeria, and on the island of Guadalcanal in the Pacific.

Yet just weeks before the Battle of Stalingrad began, the Allies had been near defeat. They had lost most of European Russia. Much of Western Europe was under Nazi control. Axis armies occupied large swaths of North Africa. The Japanese controlled most of the Pacific and Asia, from Manchuria to Wake Island.

Stalingrad was part of a renewed German effort in 1942 to drive southward toward the Caucasus Mountains, to capture the huge Soviet oil fields. The Germans might have pulled it off had Hitler not divided his forces and sent his best army northward to Stalingrad to cut the Volga River traffic and take Stalin’s eponymous frontier city.

By the time two Red Army pincers trapped the Germans at Stalingrad in November, Russia had already suffered some 6 million combat casualties during the first 16 months of Germany’s invasion. By German calculations, Russia should have already submitted, just like all of the Third Reich’s prior European enemies except Britain.

Instead, the Red Army drew the Germans deeper into the traditional quagmire of Russia until the 6th Army was low on supplies, freezing in the winter cold, and trapped more than 1,500 miles from Berlin. How did the Red Army not only survive but go on the offensive against the deadly invaders?

In part, it had no choice. Germany was intent on not just absorbing Russia, but wiping it out or enslaving millions of its citizens. In part, Britain and the United States under the Lend-Lease policy began sending huge amounts of material aid, providing everything from boots to locomotives. In part, Red Army soldiers were terrified of their own communist strongman, Josef Stalin.

Article 57 of the French Civil Code states that the name chosen by parents must be in “the best interests of the child.” If the public prosecutor thinks the name “Jihad” is contrary to the law, he can ask a judge to order the name to be changed. If the parents are unable or unwilling to choose a new name, the judge has the right to choose a name.

Of the 1,900 French jihadists fighting with the Islamic State, as many as one-fifth have received as much as €500,000 ($580,000) in social welfare payments from the French state, according to Le Figaro.

Henda Ayari, in an interview with Le Parisien, gave detailed public testimony accusing Tariq Ramadan of sexually assaulting her in Paris. She said that Ramadan believes that “either you wear a veil or you get raped.”

October 1. A 29-year-old illegal immigrant from Tunisia stabbed two women to death at the central train station in Marseille. Witnesses heard the assailant shout “Allahu Akbar” as he lunged at the women with a 20-centimetre (eight-inch) knife before threatening soldiers, who shot him dead. The man, identified as Ahmed Hanachi, was using seven different identities and had a long criminal history. He had been arrested in Lyon for shoplifting just days before the attack, but those charges were dropped due to a lack evidence. He was released, despite not having the documents needed to live in France. Why he was never deported remains unclear.

October 2. Five people were arrested in Paris after police found four makeshift bombs at a building in the 16th arrondissement, one of the city’s most exclusive neighborhoods. Police said there was no one living in the apartment block who might be considered a target for jihadists. Interior Minister Gérard Collomb surmised that the bomb was simply meant to create fear: “Blowing up a building in a posh neighborhood shows that no one is safe…that it could happen anywhere in France.” He added: “This shows that the level of the threat in France is extremely high…yes, even if the Islamic State has suffered military setbacks, we are still in a state of war.”

October 2. The trial began of Abdelkader Merah, the 35-year-old brother of Mohamed Merah. In March 2012, Mohamed in March 2012 had gone on a nine-day shooting spree in southern France, killing three soldiers and gunning down a teacher and three children at a Jewish school before being shot dead by police. Abdelkader stands accused of “knowingly” helping to facilitate the “preparation” of the attack, in particular by stealing the scooter used for the three separate shootings. He appeared alongside 34-year-old Fettah Malki, accused of giving Mohamed Merah a bulletproof jacket, an Uzi submachine gun and the ammunition he unloaded on his victims. Abdelkader Merah faces a possible life sentence while Malki could get 20 years in prison.

October 5. Six gas canisters attached to a “crude detonator device” were found under several trucks at a cement company in Paris. The trucks, parked in the French capital’s northeastern 19th arrondissement, belonged to Franco-Swiss cement company Lafarge-Holcim. Lafarge is being investigated over claims that it paid taxes to the Islamic State and other armed groups in Syria to keep a plant running in a war zone. The company admitted that it resorted to “unacceptable measures” to continue operations at a now-closed cement factory in northern Syria in 2013 and 2014, after most French groups had quit the war-torn country.

October 6. A French woman who travelled three times to Syria in support of her jihadist son was sentenced to 10 years in prison for being part of a terrorist conspiracy. Christine Rivière, 51, was sentenced for her “unfailing commitment” to jihad and for helping a number of young women travel to Syria to marry jihadists, including her son, Tyler Vilus. Rivière, a Muslim convert who was nicknamed “Mama Jihad,” said of her son: “I didn’t want to push him to die a martyr, but that could happen. Then he would be in heaven, near Allah.”

October 6. French prosecutors charged three men in connection with a makeshift explosive device made of gas canisters, placed inside an apartment block in western Paris. Amine A, his cousin Sami B, and Aymen B., were charged with “attempted murder in an organized group in connection with a terrorist enterprise” and placed in pre-trial detention. All three were arrested on October 2, two days after the device was found in the exclusive 16th arrondissement. Amine A., 30, and Aymen B., 29, are both on the terror watch list.

October 9. French police and intelligence services are surveilling around 15,000 jihadists living on French soil, according to Le Journal du Dimanche. Of these, some 4,000 are at “the top of the spectrum” and most likely to carry out an attack.

October 10. President Emmanuelle Macron announced a plan to open immigration offices in Niger and Chad to identify persons eligible for asylum on lists provided by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and bring them directly to France. The stated aim is to “better prevent an influx of economic migrants” who are not eligible for asylum. In all, France will take in 10,000 people, not only from Niger and Chad, but also from Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, by October 2019.

October 11. Interior Minister Gérard Collomb announced the dismissal of the central government’s top representative in the southern Rhône region, after a report criticized “errors of judgement” and “serious faults” in handling foreigners whose papers are not in order. The report was commissioned after 29-year-old Tunisian Ahmed Hanachi stabbed two women to death at the central train station in Marseille on October 1.

October 11. A 20-year-old woman was arrested in Rouen on suspicion that she may have played a role in a jihadist attack on a church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray. On July 26, 2016, two jihadists had broken into the church and murdered Father Jacques Hamel while he was celebrating mass. While leaving the church, they were shot dead by the police. A few hours later, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack. Police say that shortly before the attack, the woman had been in contact with one of the jihadists.

October 12. A French intelligence agent accidentally sent a text message to the mobile phone of a jihadist, inadvertently warning him that he was under surveillance and being monitored, according to M6 television. The target, a “proselytizing Islamist” living in Paris, responded by directly calling the agent and informing him of his mistake.

October 12. The interior ministry announced that France will maintain border checks with its European neighbors until April 30, 2018, because of “persistent” terror threats. The 1985 Schengen Agreement ended passport checks and other protective measures on borders, but after the jihadist attacks in Paris in November 2015, France resumed them.