RUTHFULLY YOURS

The animosity of Lebanon towards Israel continues today only because it provides a convenient excuse for Hizballah to maintain a formidable arsenal that it uses to control Lebanon and to help its allies in Syria.

If Lebanon had prevented terrorist attacks from its territory against Israel, not one bullet would have been exchanged between the two countries. Today, Lebanon would be enjoying diplomatic relations with Israel, and the benefits of successful trade.

Lebanon has many problems, including sectarian divisions, Iranian influence, spillover from the Syrian civil war, the weakness of its army, the ineffectiveness of its politicians, and the very existence of Hizballah, but Israel’s existence next door is not one of them.

The animosity of Lebanon towards Israel continues today only because it provides a convenient excuse for Hizballah to maintain a formidable arsenal that it uses to control Lebanon and to help its allies in Syria.

Lebanon has a law forbidding its citizens from interacting with Israeli citizens. As Michael J. Totten wrote:

“Lebanese citizens aren’t allowed to have any communication of any kind with Israelis anywhere in the world. If citizens of the two countries meet, say, on a beach in Cyprus or in a bar in New York, the Lebanese risks prison just for saying hello.”

The Lebanese online news source NOW explains that law in detail. Even a dual citizen (of Lebanon and Canada for example) could be jailed for interacting in the most innocuous way with an Israeli.

The Lebanese delegation, for example, recently refused to share a bus with the Israeli delegation at this year’s Olympic Games in Rio, prompting the Israeli minister of culture and sports to describe the incident as, “anti-Semitism, pure and simple, and the worst kind of racism.” The incident was, however, hardly surprising, considering the history of Lebanese animosity towards Israel.
Only one of many incidents of pettiness and bigotry

The Olympics incident is unfortunately not unique.

Incidents in the entertainment industry have been just as visible. In Lebanon’s only attempt to enter the Eurovision song contest, its contestant Aline Lahoud was forced to withdraw in 2005 after Lebanon would not allow the program to be broadcast because it included a performance by an Israeli. Despite his huge popularity in Lebanon, the Jewish Moroccan-French comedian, Gad Elmaleh, was forced to cancel his performances at a 2009 Lebanese festival due to what Reina Sarkis, a Lebanese psychoanalyst living in France, described as Hizballah’s “intellectual terrorism”. In June 2010, a boycott targeted the British Rock band Placebo, performing in Lebanon, resulting in a lawsuit by the Lebanese concert promoter against the groups that organized the boycott. Popular Belgian-Italian singer Lara Fabian cancelled a concert in Lebanon in 2012, after she was the target of threats for supporting Israel.

Such incidents have occurred in academia as well. In March 2010, Palestinian scholar Sari Hanafi, a professor at the American University of Beirut, was verbally assaulted at the university by a crowd of nearly 300 for having worked with two Israeli scholars on a book, even though the book was critical of Israel.

Even Miss Lebanon 2014, Saly Greige, was implicated in this type of incident in 2015, when a photo of her was taken with Miss Israel, Miss Japan, and Miss Slovenia. Lebanese Tourism Minister Michel Pharaon launched a probe into what was considered an incident of national significance. Greige was allowed to keep her crown only after she made the implausible claim that the picture was taken against her will.

Instead of worrying about Islamist terrorism and Molenbeek, Brussels’ nest of jihadists, there are racists in Europe who want to crush Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East.

They all falsely claim to be a “peaceful”, using “economic means” to correct “wrongs” in the Palestinian territories. However, they never seem to try to correct any of the wrongs of the corrupt, repressive governments of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas in Gaza, or even to advocate there for a free press, for the rule of law or for building a stable economy. Their true, racist motives are unmasked.

The pre- or post-1967 lines are only an alibi for these new Nazis. Many consider Israel in its entirety illegal, immoral, or both — even though Jews have lived on that land for 3,000 years — part of it is even called Judea. Their appetite for accusing Jews of having the audacity to “occupy” their own historical, Biblical land only reveals their collusion the darkest lies of Islamic extremists, who are trying to destroy the indigenous Christian Copts in their native land of Egypt, and the indigenous Assyrian Christians whom we see being slaughtered throughout the Middle East. Should the French be accused of “occupying” Gaul? Just look at any map of “Palestine,” which blankets the entire state of Israel: to many Palestinians, all of Israel is a single giant settlement that has to be dismantled.

Meet the packs of new Nazis, posing as Righteousness and Virtue, pursuing new exterminationist policies against Israel and, right after that, the Jews.

“In Nazi Germany,” noted Brendan O’Neill in the Wall Street Journal, “it was all the rage to make one’s town Judenfrei.”

“Now a new fashion is sweeping Europe: to make one’s town or city what we might call ‘Zionistfrei’ — free of the products and culture of the Jewish state. Across the Continent, cities and towns are declaring themselves ‘Israel-free zones,’ insulating their citizens from Israeli produce and culture. It has ugly echoes of what happened 70 years ago.”

The Nazis said “kauft nicht bei Juden”: do not buy from Jews. The slogan of these new racists is “kauft nicht beim Judenstaat”: do not buy from the Jewish State. The Nazis repeated “Geh nach Palästina, du Jud”: Go to Palestine, you Jew. Racists in Europe shout “Jews out of Palestine!”

Let us take a look at who they are. The city council of Leicester, for one, recently approved banning products “made in Israel.” Think of that: a city without Israeli products. This is not Nazi Germany in 1933; this is a British city under Labour leadership in 2016. Two Welsh councils, Swansea and Gwynedd, blocked commercial partnerships with Israeli companies. In Dublin, a well-known restaurant, Exchequer, decided not to use the Israeli products. The Irish town of Kinvara became “Israel-free”. In Spain, the town of Villanueva de Duero no longer distributes Israeli water in its public buildings. The French city of Lille froze an agreement with the Israeli town of Safed.

TEL AVIV—A knife-wielding Palestinian assailant stabbed an Israeli soldier before being shot dead by security forces in the West Bank city of Hebron on Saturday, the military said, the fourth attack against Israelis in less than 24 hours.

The soldier was taken to the hospital.

Two Palestinians and a Jordanian were also killed on Friday by Israeli forces after launching separate knife and car-ramming attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers, the country’s police and army said.
The bevy of attacks revived a wave of Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed that began last September but had tapered off in recent months as Israel heightened security and Palestinian leaders called for their youth to shun violence.

A Palestinian assailant stabbed an Israeli soldier on Friday afternoon at a checkpoint in the West Bank city of Hebron before being killed, Israel’s military said. The soldier was evacuated to the hospital, it added.

Hours earlier in the nearby Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba, two Palestinians rammed their car into a bus stop full of Israeli settlers, injuring three people, the army said.

Israeli soldiers then fired on the car, killing one assailant and wounding the other, it said.

A knife-wielding Jordanian citizen also on Friday attacked Israeli police near the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City before being killed, a police spokeswoman said. It wasn’t clear why the man was in Israel and an investigation had been launched, police said.

Over the past year, Palestinians have launched more than 300 attacks against Israelis, killing 40 people and wounding more than 500, according to Israeli officials.

Some 200 Palestinians have also been killed by Israeli forces, most after attacks against Israelis, according to Palestinian officials.

The violence had slowed since July, when Israel imposed military and financial restrictions on the Palestinian West Bank after a series of bloody attacks on Jewish settlers in the territory.

BRITISH AMBASSADOR TO SAUDI ARABIA COMPLETES HAJJ PILGRIMAGE AFTER CONVERTING TO ISLAM

British ambassador to Saudi Arabia completes Hajj pilgrimage after converting to Islam
By Raf Sanchez
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/15/british-ambassador-to-saudi-arabia-completes-hajj-pilgrimage-aft/

Britain’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia has been inundated with congratulations from across the Islamic world after it emerged that he converted to Islam and carried out the first Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca ever performed by a senior UK diplomat.

The conversion of Simon Collis, the UK envoy to Riyadh, became public after pictures posted on Twitter showed him and his wife Huda wearing the traditional white garments of Muslim pilgrims in front of the British consulate in Mecca.

The 60-year-old diplomat, who speaks fluent Arabic, confirmed the news in response to messages on Twitter.

“God bless you. In brief: I converted to Islam after 30 years of living in Muslim societies and before marrying Huda,” he wrote.

The news led to a wave of online congratulations from Saudi Arabia and across the Islamic world, with many Muslims saluting Mr Collis as “Haji Simon” using the title reserved for those who make the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Mr Collis converted in 2011 shortly before marrying his wife, who is Syrian. While his conversion was known to some fellow diplomats it was not public knowledge in Riyadh.

The Foreign Office declined to comment, saying Mr Collis’s religion was a personal matter.

While Mr Collis acknowledged many of the congratulatory messages coming in on Twitter, he declined interviews about his faith.

The UK is building a wall to keep the denizens of the Calais “Jungle” migrant camp from invading cars and trucks after some 22,000 breaches of the port road. The “Jungle” is a nightmare for the local population which has been terrorized by the mob of migrants aspiring to invade the UK.

The French have blamed the British and the British have blamed the French. But the migrant invasion is not the fault of either alone. In a sense it is the fault of everyone in the European Union.

Merkel’s open invitation to a migrant invasion occasioned the same round of finger-pointing, often, as with the Calais crisis, not at those countries that let the migrants in, but those who did not wish to take them in. Eastern European countries were most frequently blamed for not doing their “share” to maintain the wonderful open borders which required accepting anyone wandering through them.

Instead of bringing countries together, open borders create conflicts.

The Schengen Area didn’t unite Europe. Even before the mob of Muslim migrants arrived, the ability of foreign workers to just show up in the UK was generating some of the tensions that led to Brexit.

The biggest source of tension between America and Mexico remains the open border. Not only is the open border bad for America, but it’s bad for Mexico. As profitable as the remittances might be, the cost of the cartels and migrants drawn to that border end up offsetting it.

What globalists fail to understand is that good walls really do make for better neighbors. Countries with walls may occasionally invade each other, but a lack of walls means that the invasion never stops. Walls are torn down in the name of peace, but the lack of walls is what makes peace impossible.

In war, a bunch of foreigners show up to take your entire way of life. The citizens of countless countries are asking whether this is really any different than the peace offered by the borderless world.

When countries control their own borders, they can negotiate an end to conflicts. But when they don’t, all they can do is assign blame. In the absence of the state, borders and nations are recreated by mass migration. The millions of Muslims invading Europe are but one example. There has been a similar mass movement out of Africa along the Middle East for some time. The end result isn’t integration, but tribalism. The borderless world was meant to banish tribalism, but instead it’s stronger than ever.

Tribalism does not go away when you eliminate borders. The ability to limit tribal conflicts does.

After raiding refugee shelters in three towns in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein this week, German authorities detained three suspected Islamic State (ISIS) members linked to the same group that carried out the November 2015 Paris attacks.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere confirmed that three Syrian nationals were arrested on Tuesday, and that one was found to have joined ISIS a year ago.

The young men were said to have entered Germany in November with the intention of “carrying out a previously determined order [from ISIS] or to await further instructions.”

They are thought to have traveled through Turkey and Greece, using fake passports issued by ISIS along with U.S. cash and mobile phones loaded with a communications app.

De Maiziere linked the individuals to the Paris attacks.

“There is every reason to believe that the same trafficking group used by the Paris attackers also brought the three men who were arrested to Germany,” he said [1], adding that their forged passports had also come from the “same workshop.”

More than 200 officers from the German Federal Police and agents from the GSG9 special operations unit took part in the coordinated raids.

Germany has remained on edge following several violent attacks [2] in July, including a suicide bombing attempt near a music festival, and an ax-and-knife attack on a commuter train, both later linked to ISIS.

German police have ramped up security efforts since the attacks. In raids on refugee facilities in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia last month, two men were arrested on suspicion of connection to jihadist movements. One is suspected of planning an attack at a soccer game.

After those arrests, Rainer Wendt, a police officer and head of the German Police Trade Union, called for increased monitoring of asylum seekers.

“What happened here in North Rhine-Westphalia showed that it’s right to observe these people and, at the right time, to take them into custody,” he said.

Last weekend De Maiziere warned in an interview [3] with the Bild daily that there were 520 “potential” Islamist attackers in the country, as well as a further 360 “relevant persons” under surveillance, closely affiliated with potential attackers.

Jibril Rajoub, chairman of the Palestinian Football Association and a top official of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, made the offensive remarks during a recent interview with an Egyptian television station.

Many Palestinian Christians said that Rajoub’s derogatory remarks would further heighten tensions between them and Muslims. They pointed out that the top PA official was excluding them from being an integral part of the Palestinian people.

Christians see Rajoub’s derogatory remarks as part of the widespread persecution of Christians in Arab and Islamic countries, which has claimed the lives of thousands of Christians over the past few years and prompted many of them to flee to the US, Canada, Australia and Europe.

In an open letter to Rajoub, who previously commanded the PA’s notorious Preventive Security Force, and served 17 years in Israeli prison for terror-related charges, Bethlehem Pastor Danny Awad wrote: “We have been here for more than 2000 years… We are not strangers or guests or aliens who speak a foreign tongue.”

Rajoub’s disparagement of Palestinian Christians is indeed likely to encourage Christians to leave the Western-funded PA areas. Such comments are particularly unwelcome at a time when Christians in Syria, Iraq and Egypt face a campaign of terrorism and intimidation by Muslim extremists.

A senior Palestinian official has enraged Palestinian Christians by referring to them as the “Merry Christmas Group” and accusing them of supporting the Islamist movement, Hamas. Jibril Rajoub, chairman of the Palestinian Football Association and a top Fatah official who previously served as commander of the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) notorious Preventive Security Force in the West Bank, made the offensive remarks during a recent interview with an Egyptian television station.

Referring to the Palestinian local elections, which were supposed to be held on October 8 but were suspended due to the continued power struggle between Fatah and Hamas, Rajoub said in the interview:

“Even some of our brothers, the ‘Merry Christmas Group,’ voted for Hamas [in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary election]. Today, no one will vote for Hamas. What has Hamas given them? Hamas has brought nothing but destruction.”

Hmmm……not word here about the rapes, attacks the “refugees” have perpetrated in Germany…..rsk

BERLIN—Violent clashes erupted between young migrants and far-right sympathizers late Wednesday in the German town of Bautzen, the latest in a string of brawls amid rising anti-refugee sentiment.

Police in Bautzen said some 100 officers were forced to intervene after fighting broke out between a group of asylum seekers and about 80 demonstrators described as mainly from the “right-wing political spectrum.” The demonstrators were gathered at the town’s central square, propagating slogans such as “Bautzen to the Germans,” police said.
Between 15 to 20 asylum seekers living in a shelter in town threw stones at the neo-Nazis, who then attacked the migrants, police said. The confrontation escalated into street fights between the groups, Bautzen police chief Uwe Kilz said in a press conference.
When police intervened, the young asylum seekers who had come to Germany without their parents, threw bottles at officers, who used pepper spray and police batons to defend themselves, he added.

“I’m angry and shocked,” the Mayor of Bautzen Alexander Ahrens said in a statement. “I strongly condemn this violence and I say that very clearly, regardless of where it came from.”

Bautzen and other towns in eastern Germany have been the scene of tension between asylum seekers and local far-right extremists in recent months, highlighting the growing unrest in Germany, particularly in the East, over Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policies.

In February, locals cheered when a fire broke out in a building in Bautzen that was set to be turned into an asylum-seeker shelter, sending shock waves through the country. When German President Joachim Gauck visited the town a few weeks later, he was heckled as a “traitor of the people” in the street.

Violence against asylum seekers has been surging since the migrants numbers peaked last year, particularly in the former communist states, according to police statistics. CONTINUE AT SITE

BERLIN—As the flow of asylum seekers entering Germany started to break historic records last fall, Continental AG rushed to tap some of the newcomers for its workforce.
But one year after the tire maker began advertising an internship program designed for 50 migrant workers, only 30 of the positions have been filled as it struggles to find suitable candidates or vet their qualifications.

Continental isn’t alone. Answering calls from Berlin to help in the country’s massive integration effort, German companies big and small have scouted refugee shelters and job centers for potential employees. Yet because of administrative bottlenecks and a mismatch in needed skills, the number of migrants in jobs with benefits was only about 25,000 higher in June than a year earlier, despite more than 736,000 arrivals in that time.

Frustrated with the slow pace of hiring, Chancellor Angela Merkel invited senior executives from the 121 companies behind a jobs-for-refugees initiative called “Us Together” to discuss their progress and difficulties on Wednesday.

More than 80 business leaders attended the three-hour meeting. Among those questioned by Ms. Merkel were top executives at Deutsche Bank AG and Lufthansa AG . “It is our common target to integrate more and more refugees into the labor market,” she said beforehand. “If we succeed, it will be a benefit for all.”

Afterward, an “Us Together” spokeswoman said there was “an open exchange” about existing projects.

Failure to integrate the recent arrivals into Germany’s economy, the largest in Europe, could seal Ms. Merkel’s political fate. The chancellor’s popularity has waned, and her party lost badly in recent regional elections as more Germans doubt the wisdom of opening the country’s doors, which has brought well over a million migrants into the country in the past 18 months. Ms. Merkel has until the general election next year to change their minds.CONTINUE AT SITE

“In an implicit criticism of Boko Haram’s strategy until now, Mr. Barnawi told al-Naba that the jihadists should focus on combating Nigeria’s Christians—a target largely ignored by Mr. Shekau in recent years. The new approach should be “booby-trapping and blowing up every church that we are able to reach, and killing all those we find from the citizens of the cross,” Mr. Barnawi announced.”

Some people can be too extreme even for Islamic State.

The self-proclaimed caliphate’s biggest and deadliest franchise outside the Middle East, the “West Africa Province” also known as Boko Haram, fractured in recent weeks over Islamic State’s decision to replace its notorious leader, Abubakar Shekau.

Mr. Shekau hasn’t recognized the August appointment of a rival Boko Haram commander, Abu Musab al-Barnawi, as the group’s new “governor.” The two factions have repeatedly clashed since then and their followers have accused each other of abandoning the true faith.

This split, while weakening Boko Haram in the immediate term, could have dramatic consequences for how jihadists continue their struggle in Nigeria and in neighboring countries. Boko Haram’s areas of influence were cut down by the recent offensives of regional militaries, which were aided by U.S., British and French advisers. But the group still controls large chunks of northeastern Nigeria and operates in parts of Niger, Cameroon and Chad.

Mr. Shekau took over Boko Haram after its founder, Mohammed Yusuf, was killed in Nigerian police custody in 2009. He unleashed a strategy of unbridled terror, treating Muslim villages that didn’t join his organization as legitimate targets. Over the past year, he sent scores of children on suicide missions to blow up markets and mosques—with local Muslim civilians making up the vast majority of the casualties.

“You can’t really be more barbaric and more savage than Shekau. He’s the pinnacle of barbarism,” said Issoufou Yahaya, a political analyst and head of the history department at the Niamey University in Niger.

Dispatching child suicide bombers to Sunni mosques was apparently too much even for Islamic State’s leadership in Syria and Iraq. In August, the organization’s newspaper al-Naba published an interview with Mr. Barnawi that made no mention of Mr. Shekau. Instead it referred to Mr. Barnawi, who is rumored to be a son of the Nigerian group’s founder, Mr. Yusuf, as the new “governor” of the West Africa Province.

A surprised Mr. Shekau responded by accusing his rival of apostasy and by complaining that Islamic State chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been tricked.

Nigeria’s military, which has repeatedly announced Mr. Shekau’s death in the past, claimed to have seriously injured him in a late August airstrike. There has been no independent confirmation of that claim. CONTINUE AT SITE