RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

France’s authorities and elites are tearing up, piece by piece, the country’s historical, religious and cultural legacy so that nothing remains. A nation dispossessed of its identity will see its inner strength broken.

No French terrorist who went to cut off heads in Syria lost his citizenship. The magazine Charlie Hebdo is now receiving new death threats, and no major French publication expressed solidarity with their murdered colleagues by drawing Islamic caricatures. Many of the French intelligentsia have been dragged in courts for alleged “Islamophobia”.

The martyrdom of Father Jacques Hamel at the hands of Islamists has already been forgotten; the site of the massacre is still waiting for a visit from Pope Francis as a sign of condolence and respect.

France “sacrificed the victims to avoid fighting the murderers”. — Shmuel Trigano, sociologist.

France is about to commemorate the victims of the terror attacks of November 13, 2015. What has been achieved in the two years since the attacks?

The French authorities are sending compensation to more than 2,500 victims of the jihadist attacks in Paris and Saint-Denis, who will be compensated with 64 million euros. Important victories were also attained by anti-terrorism forces. According to an enquiry by the weekly L’Express, in the last two years, 32 terrorist attacks were foiled, 625 firearms were seized, 4,457 people suspected of having jihadist links were searched, and 752 individuals were placed under house arrest. But the general impression is that of a country “frailing from within”.In 1939, a Spanish anti-Fascist journalist, Manuel Chaves Nogales, fled to France, where he witnessed the collapse of the French Republic under German assault. His book, The Agony of France, could have been written about today. Nogales wrote that while the German soldiers were marching through Paris, the French were swarming out of movie theaters, “just in time for the apéritif at the bistro”.

Of course, shoehorning Koran verses into a Christmas event does nothing but cause misunderstanding.

The whole thing was pretty bizarre, given that (a) Christmas is not an Islamic holy day, and (b) thanks to such misguided innovations, a whole generation of Norwegian children will grow up thinking “that Allah and the Koran have something to do with Christmas.”

The Stigeråsen School’s Christmas plans provide yet another example of dhimmitude: craven European submission to Islam. This year, there might be a couple of Koran verses in a Christmas show; next year, a yuletide event at which both religions are celebrated on an even footing; and not too many years after that, perhaps, a children’s celebration at which there is no cross and no Christmas tree, only prayer rugs, benedictions in Arabic, and hijabs for the girls.

Compared to Americans, as everyone knows, people in the Nordic countries — and here I am speaking of the blond, blue-eyed natives who descend from generations of Christians (and, before that, followers of Thor and Odin) — are not big believers these days, and do not spend a lot of time in church. But that does not mean they are not devoted to their Christian heritage. At least in Norway, which is probably the most culturally conservative of the Nordic lands, Confirmation is still a universal rite of passage. Most of the official national holidays are Christian holy days, even if most people could not tell you exactly what Ascension Day and Pentecost commemorate. At Christmastime, the main streets are decked out with lights and wreaths, every home has a Christmas tree, and you cannot turn on the radio without hearing Christmas songs.

In some regards, the celebration of Christmas goes even further in Norway than it does in the U.S., or at least in some parts of the U.S. Because, until a generation or so ago, almost everybody in Norway was at least a nominal Christian, and because the separation of church and state is a relatively new concept in these parts. The Church of Norway was the nation’s established church until this past January, and continues to be fully funded by, and to have strong ties to, the government. Christmas events at public schools still tend to have a more religious tinge than they do in public schools in the U.S., at least in religiously diverse urban areas such as New York City and Los Angeles.

It drew national attention, then, when Document.no, an online outpost of honesty about Islam, reported on November 7 that the Stigeråsen School, an elementary school in Skien (Henrik Ibsen’s hometown), announced that this year that its Christmas festivities would include not only the usual reading by pupils of verses from the Bible but also a bonus — two verses from the Koran. All of the verses in question are about Jesus, whom Islam considers a prophet, although not, of course, the Son of God.

Breaking the news of these plans, reporter Hanne Tolg noted that some such change in traditional holiday programming was probably inevitable, given that 40% of the kids at the Stigeråsen School speak Norwegian as a second language (if they speak it at all). Still, added Tolg, the whole thing was pretty bizarre, given that (a) Christmas is not an Islamic holy day, and (b) thanks to such misguided innovations, a whole generation of Norwegian children will grow up thinking “that Allah and the Koran have something to do with Christmas.”

Never mind that the holy books of Islam quite clearly spell out the doctrine of jihad and the heavenly rewards that await jihadist martyrs. No, according to MSNBC “terrorism expert” Malcolm Nance, Manhattan attacker Sayfullo Saipov’s butchery was “anti-Islamic”.

According to Nance’s theory, every Islamic terrorist in our time somehow overlooked the real lessons of Islam and instead made exactly the same flub, mistaking Osama bin Laden’s bloodthirsty lesson of murderous violence for the thoroughly peaceful tidings of the Koran.

To fail to see a continuity between, on the one hand, the Islam of the terrorists, and, on the other, the Islam of forced marriages, honor killings, female genital mutilation (FGM) and the niqab is to engage in denial and a total whitewash. But then, whitewashing Islam is the true area of expertise of so many of these so-called terrorism experts.

Thank heaven for the “terrorism experts.” After Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov mowed down pedestrians and bicyclists in Manhattan on Halloween, murdering eight innocent people, what would we have done without Malcolm Nance, who, identified as an “MSNBC Terrorism Analyst,” assured viewers of that cable network that Saipov’s action was

“not Islam, whatsoever. None of this is condoned. Including the, you know, sacrificing and getting yourself killed at the end of a terrorist attack, none of that is Islamic, it’s anti-Islamic.”

Weirdly, Nance even chuckled partway through that last sentence, as if the idea that jihad is jihad were too absurd to take seriously.

Never mind that Saipov is an Uzbek Muslim; never mind that he shouted “Allahu Akbar” after his act of mass slaughter; never mind that the holy books of Islam quite clearly spell out the doctrine of jihad and the heavenly rewards that await jihadist martyrs. No, according to Nance, Saipov’s butchery was “anti-Islamic,” period. Nance explained: Osama bin Laden “corrupted Islam” and taught “multiple generations to follow what he believed.” The Islamic terrorists of our time, in Nance’s view, either have a “mental defect” or “some loss or vacuum in their world,” and chose to act upon bin Laden’s ideology because they believed their actions would “validate them once and for all in their life.”

So little practical consequence does the relationship between the Iranian government and al-Qaeda have that, had not the recently released “Bin Laden papers” revealed it, hardly anyone would notice it. Both sides are getting from it what reality allows.https://amgreatness.com/2017/11/08/reflections-on-terrorism-iran-and-bin-laden/
Iran looms large for al-Qaeda’s sequestered and largely impotent leadership. But as Iranian foreign policy deals with big issues to which bin Laden’s little band is marginal, it sets the price of its services. Some have expressed surprise that any relationship should exist between the center of Shia power and ultra-Sunni al-Qaeda. Yet it exists precisely to the extent of the coincidence between the two sides’ power and interests.

Comparing and contrasting al-Qaeda’s present relationship with Shia Iran and its past relationship with Sunni-led Iraq helps us understand the nature of the relationships that exist between the Muslim world’s governments and terrorist groups in general. Al-Qaeda is a prime example of the fact that these relationships are constantly shifting with circumstances, but that the states are always calling the shots.

The Bin Laden papers dispose summarily of the Sunni/Shia conflict: the Iranians are as much the enemies of unbelieving Westerners as are the Sunni Bin Laden followers. One can only imagine the Iranian side reciprocating. According to al-Qaeda’s headquarters, Iran’s practical importance is as a channel to the outside world—presumably because Sunni Pakistan, al-Qaeda’s headquarters, is not allowing the group to do business through its territory. But Iran’s contribution to AQ does not extend beyond transit of people and money. Some of that sustains AQ affiliates in Syria which are “frenemies” to groups fighting under Iranian leadership. No doubt Iran’s intimate acquaintance with this traffic gives it intelligence as well as the opportunity to “turn” these “frenemies.” It may well demand a cut of the money from the Gulf. Al-Qaeda seems to have little alternative.

Whatever grandiose ideas Bin Laden might have had during the 1980s of using contributions from friends in the Gulf to weld international Islamist recruits into military units to defeat the Muslim world’s bad guys evaporated fast. Unable to survive in the post-Soviet Afghan environment, he moved his band to Saudi Arabia. In 1990, King Fahd laughed when Bin Laden urged him not to call on the Americans to stop Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait because AQ’s troops could do it.

LONDON—The second minister in just over a week resigned from Prime Minister Theresa May’s government, as the British leader tried to regain command after a series of blunders by members of her cabinet.

Mrs. May summoned Priti Patel, the international development secretary, back to London from an official trip to Uganda after details emerged about unauthorized meetings Ms. Patel had in August and September with Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mrs. May said in a letter to Ms. Patel that work with Israel should be done “formally and through official channels.”

The development is the latest in a quick succession of challenges for Mrs. May, who has struggled to contain political fires and rein in ministers since losing her party’s majority in a June election gamble.

The British leader is also grappling with stalled talks on Brexit, the country’s greatest foreign-policy shift in decades, and a wave of sexual-misconduct allegations in Parliament. Defense Secretary Michael Fallon resigned last week following allegations of inappropriate conduct toward women, saying that his past behavior was below the “high standard” of the armed forces.

Ms. Patel, a rising star who was largely known for her strong Brexit support, apologized this week for not informing the prime minister and foreign secretary about her meetings in Israel, which she said occurred during an August family vacation.

Mrs. May wrote in a letter to Ms. Patel that she had been satisfied with the apology, but had to take action after information had surfaced that Ms. Patel had also met Israeli officials in September in London and New York. “Now that further details have come to light, it is right that you have decided to resign,” she said.

“While my actions were meant with the best intentions, my actions also fell below the standards of transparency and openness that I have promoted and advanced,” Ms. Patel wrote in her resignation letter. The international development department said the foreign office was aware of the Israel meetings while they were under way, but not in advance. CONTINUE AT SITE

Thieves broke into an immigration office in the Moabit district of Berlin and stole up to 20,000 blank passports and other immigration documents, as well as official stamps and seals

The Federal Prosecutor’s Office opened more than 900 terrorism cases during the first nine months of 2017. Of those cases, more than 800 involved Islamists.

Violent crime, including murder, rape and physical assault, is running rampant in German asylum shelters, according to an intelligence report leaked to the newspaper Bild. German authorities, who appear powerless to stem the rising tide of violence, justified their failure to inform the public about the scale of the problem by citing the privacy rights of the criminal offenders.

October 1. The Network Enforcement Act (Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, NetzDG) — also known as the Facebook law — entered into force. The measure requires social media platforms with more than two million users to remove “blatantly illegal” hate speech within 24 hours, and less obviously illegal content within seven days, or face fines of up to €50 million ($58 million). Critics argue that the definition of hate speech is ambiguous and subjective and that the new law is a threat to online free speech. The German government plans to apply the law more widely — including to content on social media networks of any size, according to Der Spiegel.

October 2. Germany’s partial ban on face coverings “must be expanded” to include a full ban on the burqa in public, said Andreas Scheuer, the secretary general of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU). “A ban is possible and necessary,” he said a day after a burqa ban went into effect in neighboring Austria. “We will not give up our identity, we are ready to fight for it, the burqa does not belong to Germany,” he said. The deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, Stephan Harbarth, said that the partial ban “goes to the limit” of what is constitutionally possible: “I fear that a more far-reaching ban would not be compatible with the Basic Law.”

October 3. Beatrix von Storch, the deputy leader of the anti-immigration party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), said that political Islam has no place in Germany. “Islam does not belong to Germany,” she told the BBC. “We are in favor of religious freedom of course, but Islam is claiming political power, and this is what we oppose.”

October 3. Approximately 1,000 mosques in Germany opened their doors to visitors as part of the 20th annual “Day of Open Mosques.” The event, which has been held since 1997 on Germany’s national holiday, the Day of German Unity, was conducted under the slogan “Good Neighborhood – Better Society,” and aimed at creating transparency and reducing prejudice.

October 4. A 47-year-old migrant from Kazakhstan at a refugee shelter in Eggenfelden castrated a 28-year-old Ukrainian migrant, who bled to death at the scene. It later emerged that the Kazakh man had been raped by the Ukrainian man, who was aided and abetted by a group of migrants from Chechnya. The case drew attention to runaway crime in German refugee shelters.

One hundred years ago today, November 7, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin overthrew the newly established Russian republic and its provisional government with the help of disaffected soldiers from the Petrograd garrison and sailors from the nearby Kronstadt naval base. The next day, November 8, Lenin installed himself and his Marxist Bolshevik cronies as the new government of Russia, dubbed the Council of People’s Commissars. Barely a shot had been fired; the number of people killed in the Bolshevik coup in the Russian capital would hardly fill a Cadillac Escalade. But from that day until today, Lenin’s legacy would be the single most lethal political system ever devised.

A year after seizing power Lenin would change this system’s name from Bolshevism to Communism, and as we reflect on the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the salient fact to remember is that it has been 100 years of hell — of revolution, oppression, starvation, mass murder, genocide, and terror without historical parallel.

It’s quite simple, really: From the Soviet Union and Mao’s China to Mengistu’s Ethiopia, Castro’s Cuba, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, untold millions were shot or killed by the agents of an oppressive totalitarian system aiming at total control and the elimination of “class enemies” or any form or even thought of opposition. Many millions more were slowly starved to death in Communist-generated mass famines that were either the result of deliberate engineering (Stalin’s Great Famine in Ukraine) or spectacular mismanagement of the food supply (Mao’s Great Leap Forward and modern-day North Korea). Tens of millions more survived, forced to live under the thumb of a vicious and unrelenting police state in a state of perpetual psychological fear and material poverty. They’re still suffering today.

This is not to even mention those who have spent the last century fighting to keep their countries free from Communism, in places like Vietnam, Korea, Malaysia, Greece, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola, and Russia itself. Nor does it account for the tens of thousands of military men and women of the free world — Americans chief among them — who would suffer and die in the jungles of Vietnam and on the frozen mountain slopes of Korea to halt Communism’s advance.

And that is just the system’s quantifiable human toll. For nearly five decades during the Cold War, Americans and Europeans had to live in the shadow of nuclear holocaust, as our leaders were forced to confront the possibility that the only way to defeat Communism and the Soviet Union might be unleashing the most unimaginably destructive weapons ever created, and reducing civilization to a burned-out pile of ashes in which, as the saying went, “the living would envy the dead.” For those decades we all had to live with the thought of the unthinkable, in a tense nuclear stand-off that managed to keep the Soviet Union at bay until it finally collapsed in 1992.

Yet a centenary review of Lenin’s legacy is still not complete. Lenin’s whole rationale for seizing power that day, and for creating the Soviet police state over the next year, was that through terror and violence he could force a new, better order to emerge. He lived by the same maxim that Karl Marx did, the quotation from Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust: “Everything [that] exists deserves to be destroyed.” Today, it’s the de facto motto of those groups whose commitment to terror and violence is, like Lenin’s was, rooted in that dark corner of the human psyche where totalitarianism merges into nihilism: ISIS, al-Qaeda, and their brethren.