RUTHFULLY YOURS

How Israel’s “peace partners” react when women and children are ruthlessly murdered.

The calm in Tel Aviv was shattered Wednesday night when two Arab gunmen in their 20s from the Palestinian Authority-controlled village of Yatta drew automatic weapons and began to systematically gun down every civilian in sight. When the carnage was over, four people – two men and two women – were dead and about a dozen others were wounded, three of them critically. Both terrorists were caught alive, though one sustained serious wounds during his apprehension. Israeli doctors performed life-saving emergency surgery on him while his victims were either dead or dying.

The blood on the pavement hadn’t even dried before “Palestinians,” as is their custom, celebrated the “heroic Tel Aviv operation.” In Palestinian lexicon, terrorist attacks targeting innocent civilians – men, women and children – are routinely referred to as “heroic” or “martyrdom operations.”

As Israelis were burying their dead, celebratory fireworks were going off in Hamas-controlled Gaza while elsewhere, in the PA-controlled West Bank, Palestinian Arabs were cheering and passing out sweets in recognition of their comrades’ bestial slaughter. Even the so-called “moderate” Palestinian President for Life, Mahmoud Abbas, couldn’t bring himself to call the Tel Aviv massacre, “terrorism” or “murder.” Instead, all he was able to muster was half-hearted disapproval. He issued a repulsive and disingenuous statement noting that the PA is opposed “to any ‘operation’ that harms civilians by anybody, regardless of the justifications.” Note use of the word “operation” to describe wanton violence and depravity.

A window slightly opening or simply more window dressing?

That is the question anti-slavery activists are asking after a court in the West African country of Mauritania surprisingly jailed two persons last month for owning slaves.

“Two men were… handed five-year prison sentences – one year to be served and four years suspended – and ordered to pay compensation to two victims in only the country’s second ever prosecution for slavery since it was criminalized in 2007,” reported a Thomson Reuters story.

The activists’ hesitation to heap praise on Mauritania for the recent legal decision is understandable. Mauritania is regarded as the world’s worst slave state, achieving this number one ranking on the Global Slavery Index in 2013. It was also the last country in the world to outlaw this obscenity in 1981, while declaring it a crime against humanity only last year.

The one person successfully prosecuted since criminalization in 2007 served only four months of a two year sentence for owning two boys, aged 10 and 11. In last month’s case, the maximum prison sentence the slaveholder could have received was ten years. This was doubled to 20 years in 2015.

While Mauritania’s top ranking as a slave state is not in dispute, the actual number of slaves in this largely desert country is. Some are owned by nomadic tribes that are often on the move, which makes it difficult to determine a true figure. But the estimated number is about 140,000 in a country of 3.5 million people. Indigenous anti-slavery organizations say the number may even be as high as 600,000.

The slaves in Mauritania are all black Africans, called the Haritin class. They are chattel slaves, belonging body and soul to their masters, who can buy and sell them at will. Children born to slaves also become property of their parents’ masters.

For a decade, the top search result for “EU referendum” on Google was the political blog EU Referendum. Then it was abruptly displaced by solidly pro-EU media outlets. It appeared that someone at Google had decided that search traffic should be driven to pro-EU sites. Ingrid Carlqvist, a Swedish columnist who covers, among other things, migrant violence, at Gatestone, had her Facebook account deleted after posting a video detailing migrant rapes in Sweden.

These seemingly isolated incidents fit into a larger pattern as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter helped create and signed a “code of conduct” banning hate speech. Facebook had already become notorious for its political agenda while Twitter had created a Trust and Safety Council filled with extremist left-wing groups like Feminist Frequency to censor the politically incorrect.

Google has historically been a pro-free speech outlier. Its politics have never been ambiguous, but it has eschewed the overt censorship of some of its new partners working to keep the EU free of political dissent. But the code of conduct goes well beyond censorship. The companies will be working to strengthen their “ongoing partnerships with civil society organisations who will help flag content that promotes incitement to violence and hateful conduct”. That amounts to empowering left-wing advocacy groups to dictate content removal to major companies. It means that not only Twitter, but Facebook, Google and Microsoft will get their own Trust and Safety Council. It may be called something else. It may not even have a name. But it will have power. That’s what this really means.

And it’s only a starting point in a larger propaganda initiative.

From the Republic of China on Taiwan, freely elected President Tsai Ing-wen tells the People’s Republic of China that democracy is nothing to fear: “Democracy is a good and fine thing.”

In Beijing, the authorities tighten security and carry out arrests. When Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, during a visit to Canada, is questioned by a reporter about China’s human rights record, he rejects the question as “irresponsible.” He says, “We welcome goodwill suggestions but we reject groundless or unwarranted accusations.”

And so we arrive at the 27th anniversary of Tiananmen: June 4, 1989, when China’s Communist Party rulers turned the guns of the People’s Liberation Army against their own people, to end China’s 1989 democratic uprising.

Does it still matter? On many counts, 27 years is a long time. In Beijing, a generation has more than come of age with no firsthand memory of the gunfire, or of the ruts in the streets in the summer of 1989, made by the treads of tanks. Whatever China’s one-party rulers could pave over of that uprising, they have long since paved. Outside China, we now read articles such as an anonymously authored piece, published June 3, and apparently written from inside China: “China’s Youth Think Tiananmen Was So 1989.”

The implication is that Tiananmen, June 4, 1989, will fade away, officially erased inside China and antiquated abroad — a relic of the past century. The suggestion is that beyond fodder for professional historians, there will be little left except the photo of the lone man facing down a column of tanks — a symbol of heroic, peaceful defiance, adopted by the world, but increasingly detached from today’s China.

Except that’s wrong. Tiananmen has not gone away. It haunts China still. It haunts us all. It was too big to just disappear.

Tiananmen was not solely a student protest, though the students occupying Beijing’s vast Tiananmen Square were the epicenter. It was a mass uprising, spreading through the major cities of China — of students, workers, ordinary people desperate for justice. It was an uprising in which the murderously repressive apparatus of the world’s most populous communist state lost control of its country’s capital for two full weeks.

It is important to understand just how big that was, and what determination and courage it took on the part of China’s people to defy their government. The Soviet-engendered communist experiment of the 20th century, responsible for the deaths of scores of millions, was starting to crack up. But in the spring of 1989, that had not happened yet. The Berlin Wall had not yet fallen; the Ceausescus still ruled Romania; the Soviet Union still stood. In Burma, beggared by decades of the “Burmese Way to Socialism,” the military regime just a year earlier, in 1988, had put down mass protests by killing thousands.

China’s uprising, in 1989, was the leading edge of a desperate bid by people living under the brutal constraints of communism to break free. Materially, they were far more deprived than are most of China’s more than 1.3 billion people today. But their chief demands were not for more food, or lucre, or any of the things that the children of the free West are currently demanding under the rubric of “free stuff.” What they demanded was democracy, accountable government, freedom of speech and assembly. They wanted liberty. CONTINUE AT SITE

When Europe agreed to open its borders to Syrian refugees in response to one of the greatest humanitarian crises of our age, officials assured the Western world: we’ve got this. There will be no jihadists among them; and if there are, we’ll be sure they won’t get in.

But it wasn’t exactly true. Jihadists, we now know, have been among them. They have gotten through. And now those same officials are starting to admit things might get even worse.

On Saturday, only weeks after Germany’s national security agency confessed it had been alerted to the presence of jihadists who posed as asylum-seekers, German police arrested three Syrians on charges of planning a major attack in Dusseldorf. The arrests followed a confession by a fourth suspect, arrested earlier in France, who had informed officials there about the plot. All four suspects, reported the Washington Post, had traveled to Europe along the well-worn, so-called Balkan Route. Prosecutors say the attack aimed to kill “as many bystanders as possible with guns and other explosives,” as had a plot foiled days earlier in Antwerp.

Europeans already are on edge as a result of the multiple terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels over the past 18 months. But news of these arrests, coupled with heightened concerns among German intelligence officials, alarmed communities both in Germany and in neighboring countries. Yet despite this development, intelligence officials in the Netherlands, which shares a border with Germany, maintained until just last week that there is minimal chance that any asylum seeker there is a terrorist.

That changed suddenly on Tuesday, with the disclosure by the same French suspect that the militants arrested in Dusseldorf had been part of a group of 20, divided between asylum centers there and in the Dutch city of Nijmegen.

Not that this should be a surprise. Since the beginning of the crisis, Holland’s screening of migrants has been sloppy. A report released in May by Holland’s Ministry of Security and Justice noted that several screening centers were careless and inadequate, failing to meet established standards. Perhaps as a result of hastened procedural demands as the stream of refugees has increased, neither computer systems nor inspectors seems prepared to meet the challenges: as Dutch daily the Telegraaf observed, the system for checking fingerprints crashes daily; document screeners fail several times a week; and “it is unclear whether all baggage of the asylum-seekers is being properly inspected.”

Across Europe, cartoonists, artists and writers are forced to live under police protection, and also often face criminal prosecution — all for the “crime” of offending Islam. “‘Respect’ means, for them, submission.” It starts with censoring cartoons… Here is Gatestone Institute’s Giulio Meotti in our latest video:

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The failure of France’s “peace” conference, on the one hand, and the success of Netanyahu’s fourth visit to Moscow on the other hand, were poetic bookends of the week.

There was something poetic about the events that bookended the past week of diplomacy. This week began with French President François Hollande’s “peace” conference and ended with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s state visit to Moscow.

From the perspective of both substance and style, the contrast between the two events couldn’t have been more striking.

France hosted yet another anti-Israel diplomatic pile-on. Hollande had hoped to show that France was stepping into the void left by the US’s abandonment of its position as world leader. But all the confab served to do was show how irrational and self-destructive France – and Western Europe – has become.

Neither Israeli nor Palestinian representatives were present at the conference which aimed to dictate Israel’s final borders. Their absence made the event seem like a throwback to the era of European colonialism. It was as if Hollande wanted to reenact France’s glory days in Syria and Algeria.

In his opening remarks, Hollande recycled the tired claim that the way to defeat jihad is by forcing Israel to give Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to Islamic terrorists. The document the French Foreign Ministry circulated among participants ahead of the conference recommended setting a timetable for forcing Israel to give the PLO Judea, Samaria and large swaths of Jerusalem, for the benefit of global security.

The French planned their event before the mobs in Ramallah, Hebron, Jerusalem and Gaza publicly celebrated the cold-blooded massacre of Israeli diners at Tel Aviv’s Sarona Market on Wednesday night. But the latest massacre wasn’t necessary to show the absurdity of France’s plan to defeat jihad by empowering jihadists at Israel’s expense.

After all, Israel surrendered Gaza to the Palestinians 11 years ago. Far from ameliorating the problem of jihad – in Europe and throughout the world – the scourge of Islamic war has grown geometrically in the past decade.

James A. Lyons, a retired U.S. Navy admiral, was commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and senior U.S. military representative to the United Nations. He is a Member of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi

China’s determined efforts over the past two decades to seize control of almost the entire South China Sea is nothing short of classic aggressive imperialism. What’s remarkable is that it has been done without basically firing a shot, using the Chinese People’s Liberation Army concept of “military soft power.” This tactic is designed to defeat the enemy without fighting. Make no mistake: China views the United States as the enemy. Under President Obama’s strategy to fundamentally transform America, our country doesn’t confront our enemies, it embraces them. China has the perfect enemy.

When the United States withdrew its forces from the Philippines in 1992, this created a vacuum, which presented China with an unprecedented opportunity to expand its influence and territorial objectives. In 1993, China announced its illegal claims to almost the entire South China Sea as part of its territorial waters. The claim is based on China’s questionable Nine-Dash Line maritime claim and includes large sea areas of internationally recognized economic zones belonging to Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan and Japan.

There is no question that what China has accomplished over the past two decades – both economically and militarily – has been remarkable. When I took the first U.S. Navy Task Force back to mainland China on Nov. 3, 1986, 37 years after the Communists seized power in 1949, its navy was nothing more than a coastal navy, and not a threat to anyone. However, since then, China – with a double-digit increase in its military budget – has dramatically modernized its military forces and specifically built a navy designed to confront the U.S. Navy. More recently, Chinese President Xi Jinping is in the process of transforming China’s military force’s mission from just a defensive posture and regional power to one that will potentially be capable of challenging the United States globally.

As we have seen, China has instituted an aggressive reclamation program, creating man-made islands out of shallow reefs and inlets to reinforce its South China Sea claims. Since 2014, China has reclaimed more than 3,200 acres. Airfields and other permanent facilities have been built on these islands. The islands, in effect, have become stationary aircraft carriers. China has already deployed significant air, naval and missile forces to its newly reclaimed stationary carriers.

The history of nations is mostly characterized by ethnic and racial uniformity, not diversity.

Most national boundaries reflected linguistic, religious, and ethnic homogeneity. Until the late 20th century, diversity was considered a liability, not a strength.

Countries and societies that were ethnically homogeneous, such as ancient Germanic tribes or modern Japan, felt that they were inherently more stable and secure than the alternative, whether late imperial Rome or contemporary America.

Many societies created words to highlight their own racial purity. At times, “Volk” in German and “Raza” in Spanish (and “Razza” in Italian) meant more than just shared language, residence, or culture; those words also included a racial essence. Even today, it would be hard for someone Japanese to be fully accepted as a Mexican citizen, or for a native-born Mexican to migrate and become a Japanese citizen.

Many cultures reflected their suspicion of diversity by using pejorative nouns for the “other.” In Hebrew, the “goyim” were all the other non-Jewish nations and peoples. “Odar” in Armenian denoted the rest of the world that was not ethnically Armenian. For Japanese, the “gaijin” are those who by nationality, ethnicity, and race cannot become fully Japanese. In 18th-century Castilian Spain, “gringo” meant any foreign, non-native speakers of Spanish.

The Balkan states were the powder kegs of 20th-century world wars because different groups wanted to change national boundaries to reflect their separate ethnicities.

The premise of Nazi Germany was to incorporate all the German “Volk” into one vast racially and linguistically harmonious “Reich” — even if it meant destroying the national borders of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

The constitution of Mexico unapologetically predicates national immigration policies on not endangering Mexico’s ethnic makeup.

Countries, ancient and modern, that have tried to unite diverse tribes have usually fared poorly. The Italian Roman Republic lasted about 500 years. In contrast, the multiracial Roman Empire that after the Edict of Caracalla in AD 212 made all its diverse peoples equal citizens endured little more than two (often violent) centuries.

The Islamic State has given us a rather horrific string of public executions, some of which they have recorded for the entire world to see their unbridled brutality. They burned a captured Jordanian pilot alive. They executed Christians for refusing to renounce their faith. They reportedly blew up a baby for “training purposes.” It was a demonstration in how to properly use explosives. There was also the video where they killed “16 men by drowning them in a cage, decapitating them with explosives and firing a rocket-propelled grenade into a car.” Oh, and let’s not forget the beheadings of American journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley. Now, they’ve reportedly burned to death 19 Yazidi women for refusing to have sex with their ISIS husbands (via YNetNews):

Nineteen Yazidi women were brutally executed last weekend in Mosul, Iraq, after refusing to have sex with their husbands – all members of ISIS.

Eyewitnesses told news agencies that the women were put in an iron cage and burned alive in front of a crowd of hundreds of spectators.

They were burnt to death while hundreds watched,” an eyewitness told the Syrian news agency ARA. “No one could do anything to save them from the horrific punishment.”

Abdullah al-Mala, another witness, said that “they were punished because they refused to have sex with ISIS militants.”

ISIS militants kidnapped the nineteen women, along with thousands of others, after having taken control of Yazidi territory in Iraq in August 2014, and used them as sex slaves.

Of course, given this group’s history with women, this shouldn’t be surprising, though it’s horrific all the same. In March, the State Department finally declared that the Islamic State was engaging in genocide against Christians in Iraq and Syria. On top of their barbarism, they have also engaged in a prolonged campaign against countless historical sites. Lastly, they’ve engaged in terror attacks across Europe. Last November, they killed over 100 people in coordinated attacks in Paris, and they’ve claimed to be responsible for the recent bombing in Belgium.

Horrific executions, sex slavery, genocide against Christians, and involvement in international terrorism—all the more reason to take them out, though we won’t see such actions from the Obama administration.