RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israel has conducted approximately 100 strikes inside Syria in the six years of civil war, not to change the course of battle or support one side over the other, but to eliminate weapons and facilities deemed unacceptable threats to Israel — including missile factories, a nuclear reactor and now a chemical weapons factory.

Guterres, Kushner and Greenblatt focused on the narrowest threat in the Middle East — the possibility that the Palestinians will continue to make low-level warfare against Israel. They ignored the role of Iran and its proxies. In effect, they performed the role of Nero with his fiddle.

If you have not been paying attention, the last thing you heard was that Syria had used sarin gas attack on civilians in 2013. President Obama’s “red line” was washed pink in an agreement with Russia to remove the weapons and destroy them at sea. The U.N. Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) special coordinator Sigrid Kaang, in a remarkably precise statement, said 96% percent of Syria’s declared chemical weapons were destroyed. Not 95% or 87% or 43.5%, but 96% on the nose. Secretary of State Kerry said: “In record time, even amid a civil war, we removed and have now destroyed the most dangerous chemicals in the regime’s declared stockpiles.”

It was good PR, but as a solution to a deadly violation of international law, it was a huge, gaping failure. The word “declared” is the giveaway — Syria was allowed to tell inspectors what it had and where, and the inspectors were allowed only to touch those sites. It you think they cheated, you are right.

This week, the Israel Air Force destroyed a “research center” in Syria, one that “researched” chemical weapons. The attack came the morning after U.N. investigators said the Syrian government was responsible for a sarin gas attack in April 2017. Israel has conducted approximately 100 strikes inside Syria in the six years of civil war, not to change the course of battle or support one side over the other, but to eliminate weapons and facilities deemed unacceptable threats to Israel — including missile factories, a nuclear reactor and now a chemical weapons factory.

Here is the lesson. Focus on the real regional threats and push off peripheral issues.

Iran and its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas — oddly enough, Shiite Iran is Sunni Hamas’s biggest backer both militarily and financially. There are more than 100,000 rockets and missiles in southern Lebanon, controlled by Hezbollah and aimed at Israel.

Iran and its occupation of Syria, as the Russians seek to nail down their bases but prefer to exercise influence from Moscow without a large military presence in the country. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said last week that Israel’s interests in Syria “would be taken into account,” but with Russia hoping to leave and Iran planning to stay, Russia’s leverage is questionable.

Iran and its unconventional weapons – it was Iran that facilitated the Syrian chemical weapons program, and Iran and North Korea that built the nuclear facility in Syria that Israel destroyed in 2007.

Iran’s physical presence in the Sunni areas of Iraq in pursuit of a land-bridge from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea. Iran’s harassment of U.S. and other ships in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, encircling Saudi Arabia in the south and potentially cutting off Israel and Jordan’s access through the Bab el-Mandeb Straits to the Indian Ocean. The “Shiite Crescent” is a “Shiite Encirclement.”

See a pattern?

A debate rages among American Jews as to whether right-wing or left-wing anti-Semitism poses the greater danger. Germany has come up with a novel solution to this dilemma that will undoubtedly delight denialists of the left-wing version: Simply redefine Jew-hatred as a “politically motivated right-wing extremist crime,” and by definition, you’ve eliminated all other kinds of anti-Semitism. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/anti-semitism/germany-redefines-anti-semitism-existence/

Last week, the German Interior Ministry released a report on anti-Semitism which stated that during the first eight months of this year, a whopping 92 percent of anti-Semitic incidents were committed by right-wing extremists. That sounded suspicious for two reasons, which I’ll get to later, but since I don’t speak German, I couldn’t scrutinize the report for myself. Fortunately, the German dailyDie Welt found the results equally suspicious, and this week, Benjamin Weinthal of the Jerusalem Post reported on some of the problems it flagged.

Weinthal explained that in a federal report on anti-Semitism issued by the German government earlier this year, “the crime of ‘Jew-hatred’ is classified in the category of ‘politically motivated right-wing extremist crime.’” But once Jew-hatred has been declared a right-wing crime by definition, most of its perpetrators will inevitably be classified as far-right extremists, even if they shouldn’t be.

Die Welt cited one particularly blatant example from summer 2014 when Israel was at war with Hamas in Gaza. The war sparked numerous anti-Israel protests, and during one, 20 Hezbollah supporters shouted the Nazi slogan “Sieg Heil” at pro-Israel demonstrators in Berlin. Hezbollah supporters are Islamic extremists, not neo-Nazis, even if they chose to taunt German Jews by hurling Nazi slogans at them. Nevertheless, the incident was classified as a far-right extremist crime, thereby neatly removing a case of Islamic anti-Semitism from the statistics.

There are two good reasons for thinking the linguistic acrobatics, in this case, represents the rule rather than the exception. First, a 2014 study of 14,000 pieces of hate mail sent over a 10-year period to the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the Israeli embassy in Berlin found that only three percent came from far-right extremists. Over 60 percent came from the educated mainstream–professors, PhDs, lawyers, priests, university and high-school students. And these letters were definitely anti-Semitic rather than merely anti-Israel; they included comments such as “It is possible that the murder of innocent children suits your long tradition?” and “For the last 2,000 years, you’ve been stealing land and committing genocide.”

Sending hate mail is an anti-Semitic incident in its own right, even if it’s not reported to the police (as most of these letters undoubtedly weren’t). Thus unless you want to make the dubious claim that Germany’s educated mainstream–unlike that of other Western countries–consists largely of far-right extremists, it’s clear that far-right extremists aren’t the only people actively committing anti-Semitic acts.

Sixteen years ago, nineteen members of al Qaeda, an Islamic terrorist group, boarded four planes in three cities. Within minutes, three thousand people were dead. It was the first act of war by a foreign group on continental U.S. since the burning of Washington, D.C. in August 1814. More people died that bright sunny morning than American servicemen at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, or American soldiers on June 6, 1944.

The war against Islamic militants continues to this day. For anyone who does not believe they pose a threat to western civilization, your naivete is only exceeded by your ignorance. Since 9/11, tens of thousands lie dead in dozens of countries, on every continent except Antarctica, victims of the murderous rampage of Islamic extremists from numerous groups, like ISIS and Boko Haram. Make no mistake; it is religion that drives them. They believe they are serving God. Osama bin Laden is dead, thank goodness, but al Qaeda has quietly rebuilt. It is estimated that they have 20,000 fighters in Syria, 7,000 in Somalia and 4,000 in Yemen.

The end can only come when millions of moderate Muslims rise-up, against those who have hi-jacked their religion.

But this day is also one my family celebrates, for it was on this day 51 years ago that our first child was born – a son and now husband to a beautiful and talented wife and father to four wonderful grandchildren.

These two events are reminders that in death there is birth, that life moves on. They are reminders that, while the past is all of ours, the future belongs to the young. And the greatest legacy we can leave is a knowledge of history, the willingness to face facts unafraid, and to love all those we hold dear.

Who are the Rohingya?

The Rohingya are a minority living in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, where they are not recognized by the government as an official group and are denied citizenship. An estimated 1 million Rohingya are stateless Muslims in an overwhelmingly Buddhist country that has long been hostile to their presence.
Why did the Rohingya exodus from Myanmar begin?

The mass evacuation from Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state began Aug. 25 after a group of Rohingya militants attacked police outposts and a military base, killing a dozen officers. The military responded with what it deemed “clearance operations” to root out fighters it said might be hiding in villages. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have escaped the military crackdown and vigilante attacks that have burned villages and killed hundreds.
What is the U.S. saying?

The United States said it is “deeply troubled” by the Myanmar crisis. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the Trump administration continues to condemn the violence between Rohingya Muslims and Myanmar security forces.
What is Iran saying?

Iran’s Supreme Leader strongly denounced the killing of Muslims in Myanmar. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the deaths of Rohingya Muslims is a political disaster for Myanmar because it is being carried out by a government led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. He called her a “brutal woman.”

Al-Qaeda has called for jihadists to report to Burma to fight for the Rohingya minority as they fall victim to “a conspiracy hatched by the forces of International Disbelief against Islam and Muslims.”

In a statement issued by al-Qaeda’s general leadership, the terror group said the “conspiracy” is “marked by the usurpation of the rights of Muslims, occupation of their lands, defilement of their holy places, all under the guise of fighting terrorism!”

“The usage and espousal of the term ‘the fight against terrorism’ has become the latest trend which every ruler must keep up with as a pledge of allegiance and devotion to the powerful in the system – a sacrament of penance to secure remission of all his crimes and failings and to be rewarded perhaps with a Nobel Prize for Peace – a badge worn by every professional criminal and murderer,” the statement added.

That’s a reference to Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who was awarded the prize during her opposition to the junta and has been called out by the United States and others for not acting on the violent pushback against Rohingya people — largely Sunni, with a Hindu minority — after the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army attacked an army base Aug. 25. That has resulted in a flood of refugees — some 300,000, according to the White House — heading for safety in Bangladesh.

“In Rakhine State, the plight of the Rohingya in particular is one of the greatest human tragedies anywhere in the region,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Southeast Asia Patrick Murphy told reporters Friday. “They’re not the only ethnic minority facing challenges even in that area. I mentioned earlier the ethnic Rakhine, themselves a minority population, suffering from underdevelopment and limited rights over many, many years. But the Rohingya certainly stand out, and the fact that over a million of them inside the country have been devoid of basic rights for generations has been a longstanding issue and a longstanding concern for us in the United States. It needs to be addressed.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement Monday evening that “the massive displacement and victimization of people, including large numbers of the ethnic Rohingya community and other minorities, shows that Burmese security forces are not protecting civilians.”

“We are alarmed by the allegations of human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings, burning of villages, massacres, and rape, by security forces and by civilians acting with these forces’ consent,” she said.

UN High Commissioner on Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein told the Human Rights Council on Monday that the United Nations has “received multiple reports and satellite imagery of security forces and local militia burning Rohingya villages, and consistent accounts of extrajudicial killings, including shooting fleeing civilians.” The government claims that villagers have been burning their own homes. CONTINUE AT SITE

Turkey controls 900 mosques in Germany and feels free to say that a “liberal mosque” in Germany is “incompatible” with Islam.

Can you imagine Germany offering Iraq, Syria and Egypt to build “200 new churches” to reconstruct the derelict and dispossessed Christian communities there? No, because in the Middle East, Christians have been eradicated in a forced de-Christianization.

Christians in Germany will become a minority in the next 20 years, according to Die Welt.

We risk losing not only our churches, but more importantly, our cultural strength and even confidence in the values of our own civilization.

Jan Fleischhauer, a journalist of the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, coined an expression to define the free fall of German Christianity: Selbstsäkularisierung (“self-secularization”). It is the Church being liquidated?

The German Bishops’ Conference just released the data on the decline of Catholicism in Germany for 2016. In one year, the German Catholic Church lost 162,093,000 faithful and closed 537 parishes. From 1996 to today, one quarter of the Catholic communities have been closed. “The faith has evaporated,” said Cardinal Friedrich Wetter, the Archbishop of Munich and Freising from 1982 to 2007.

Christians in Germany will become a minority in the next 20 years, according to Die Welt. Around 60% of the country is currently Christian, with 24 million Catholics and 23 million Protestants. But that number is falling by 500,000 a year through deaths alone. “Those statistics are embodied by what visitors observe in German cities on Sunday: largely empty churches”, the Catholic theologian George Weigel wrote.

German Protestantism is facing the same crisis. Die Zeit revealed that in 2016, 340,000 Protestants passed away, and there were just 180,000 baptisms. Some 190,000 people left the church and just 25,000 people chose to join it.

In his most famous lecture, Pope Benedict XVI famously said that the West, including those who do not accept transcendence, should act “etsi Deus daretur”, as if God does exist. The old-fashioned Christian society will never come back, but it is critical for even a secular West to stay based on — and profoundly inspired by — its Judeo-Christian values.

The next stage seems to be a German cultural and religious landscape dominated by atheists and two minority religions: Islam and Christianity. If the secularists do not take Western Christian heritage — or at least the Judeo-Christian values from which it sprang — more seriously and start defending it, both atheists and Christians will soon be dominated by the rising political and supremacist religion, Islam. A prominent Muslim fundamentalist organization in Germany, banned by the federal government, calls itself “The True Religion” (“Die Wahre Religion”). They apparently think they are overtaking Judeo-Christian values.

There are dramatic instances of Christian decay in Germany. In the diocese of Trier, for example, site of the oldest Catholic community and the birthplace of Karl Marx, the number of parishes will drop from 903 to 35 by 2020, according to bishop Stephan Ackermann — a decrease of more than 90%. In the diocese of Essen, more than 200 parishes have been closed; their number has fallen from 259 to 43.

Today marks the 16th anniversary of al-Qaida’s 9/11 attacks. We learned much that tragic day, at enormous human and material cost. Perilously, however, America has already forgotten many of Sept. 11’s lessons.

The radical Islamicist ideology manifested that day has neither receded nor “moderated” as many naive Westerners predicted. Neither has the ideology’s hatred for America or its inclination to conduct terrorist attacks. Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution brought radical Islam to the contemporary world’s attention, and it is no less malevolent today than when it seized our Tehran embassy, holding U.S. diplomats hostage for 444 days.

The Taliban, which provided al-Qaida sanctuary to prepare the 9/11 attacks, threaten to retake control in Afghanistan. Al-Qaida persists and may even be growing worldwide.

While ISIS’s caliphate in Syria and Iraq will not survive much longer, countries across North Africa and the Middle East (“MENA”) have destabilized or fractured entirely. Syria and Iraq have ceased to exist functionally, and Libya, Somalia and Yemen have descended into chaos. Pakistan, an unstable nuclear-weapons state, could fall to radicals under many easily predictable scenarios.

The terrorist threat is compounded by nuclear proliferation. Pakistan has scores of nuclear weapons, and Iran’s program continues unhindered. North Korea has now conducted its sixth, and likely thermonuclear, nuclear test, and its ballistic missiles are near to being able to hit targets across the continental United States. Pyongyang leads the rogue’s gallery of would-be nuclear powers, and is perfectly capable of selling its technologies and weapons to anyone with hard currency.

During Barack Obama’s presidency, he ignored these growing threats and disparaged those who warned against them. His legacy is terrorist attacks throughout Europe and America, and a blindness to the threat that encouraged Europe to accept a huge influx of economic migrants from the MENA region, whose numbers included potentially thousands of already-committed terrorists.

CAIRO—Islamic State militants armed with guns and a vehicle bomb attacked Egyptian police forces in the Sinai Peninsula, killing at least 18 civilians and policemen, the interior ministry said, the deadliest assault in months in the restive region.

The roadside bomb blew up after intercepting a group of police vehicles west of the city of Al Arish, an interior ministry statement said, and an ensuing gunbattle erupted between security forces and the militants. The hourslong clash left three militants dead, according to state newspaper Al-Ahram. Ambulances had difficulty reaching the injured as it wore on, the paper said.

Five people were wounded, an interior ministry spokesperson said. He didn’t say how many of the dead were police.

Islamic State claimed Monday’s assault through its official Amaq news agency, saying its fighters had ambushed the outskirts of Al Arish, a hotbed of activity for Egypt’s growing insurgency.

It marks the bloodiest day in Sinai—home of a militancy led by Islamic State’s powerful Egyptian affiliate—since July 7, when 23 soldiers were killed and wounded in attacks orchestrated by the group.

The resurgent violence came the same day as Egypt’s army chief of staff, Lt. General Mahmoud Hegazy, met in the capital, Cairo, with Lt. General Joseph Votel, commander of the U.S. Central Command.

It also underscores Islamic State’s fallback on guerrilla-style warfare, including suicide bombings, as it suffers crippling battlefield losses in its Syrian and Iraqi strongholds. All but defeated in Iraq, it now faces an assault from U.S.-backed Syrian forces on its de facto capital, Raqqa.

Egypt has for several years battled its increasingly ferocious Islamic State-led homegrown insurgency, which regularly targets military and government installations in Sinai, killing thousands of police and security forces.

The extremists have in recent months also begun carrying out a campaign of violence against Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority, targeting civilians and houses of worship across the country.

The violence has sharpened criticism among Egyptians of President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, the former army chief who swept to power in a 2013 military coup promising to serve as a regional bulwark against terror.

Despite the endorsement of new U.S. President Donald Trump, who has lauded Mr. Sisi’s counterterrorism efforts, the failure to eradicate the Sinai militancy is piling pressure on the Egyptian leader ahead of a presidential race scheduled to be held next year.

Islamic State accuses Copts of supporting the coup led by Mr. Sisi against Islamist President Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood official who was Egypt’s first democratically elected president. Since coming under attack in January, thousands of Christians have fled their homes in Sinai.

Since coming to power, Mr. Sisi has staged a sweeping crackdown on his political opponents, including many members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate,” a terrorist declares on the Flight 93 cockpit recording. That’s followed by the sounds of the terrorists assaulting a passenger.

“Please don’t hurt me,” he pleads. “Oh God.”

As the passengers rush the cabin, a Muslim terrorist proclaims, “In the name of Allah.”

As New York firefighters struggle up the South Tower with 100 pounds of equipment on their backs trying to save lives until the very last moment, the Flight 93 passengers push toward the cockpit. The Islamic hijackers call out, “Allahu Akbar.” The Islamic supremacist term originated with Mohammed’s massacre of the Jews of Khaybar and means that Allah is greater than the gods of non-Muslims.

Mohammed Atta had advised his fellow terrorists that when the fighting begins, “Shout, ‘Allahu Akbar,’ because this strikes fear in the hearts of the non-believers.” He quoted the Koran’s command that Muslim holy warriors terrorize non-believers by beheading them and urged them to follow Mohammed’s approach, “Take prisoners and kill them.”

The 9/11 ringleader quoted the Koran again. “No prophet should have prisoners until he has soaked the land with blood.”

On Flight 93, the fighting goes on. “Oh Allah. Oh the most Gracious,” the Islamic terrorists cry out. “Trust in Allah,” they reassure. And then there are only the chants of, “Allahu Akbar” as the plane goes down in a Pennsylvania field leaving behind another blood-soaked territory in the Islamic invasion of America.

Today that field is marked by the “Crescent of Embrace” memorial.

Thousands of Muslims cheered the attack in those parts of Israel under the control of the Islamic terrorists of the Palestinian Authority. They shouted, “Allahu Akbar” and handed out candy.

But similar ugly outbreaks of Islamic Supremacism were also taking place much closer to home.

On John F. Kennedy Boulevard, in Jersey City, across the river from Manhattan, crowds of Muslim settlers celebrated the slaughter of Americans. “Some men were dancing, some held kids on their shoulders,” a retired Jersey City cop described the scene. “The women were shouting in Arabic.”

Similar Islamic festivities broke out on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a major Islamic settlement area, even as in downtown Manhattan, ash had turned nearby streets into the semblance of a nuclear war. Men and women trudged over Brooklyn Bridge or uptown to get away from this strange new world.

Many just walked. They didn’t know where they were going. I was one of them.

That Tuesday was a long and terrible education. In those hours, millions of Americans were being educated about many things: what happens when jet planes collide with skyscrapers, how brave men can reach the 78th floor with 100 pounds of equipment strapped to their backs and what are the odds are of finding anyone alive underneath the rubble of a falling tower. They were learning about a formerly obscure group named Al Qaeda and its boss. But they were also being educated about Islam.