RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Politicians who deny the role of radical Islam have no answer to San Bernardino or to the next San Bernardino. As ISIS lures more radicalized Muslims to commit terrorism in infidel lands, refusing to confront the enemy for what it is becomes a form of suicide.”

Last week a liberal politician named Hilary broke a taboo by calling Islamist terrorism by its proper name. Shocking things happened: Members of the politician’s political party broke with their leader’s policy. Legislators switched their votes to create a large majority supporting military attacks against Islamic State, or ISIS, in Syria. A conservative newspaper called the liberal politician statesmanlike enough to be head of the government.

This politician was in Britain, not in the U.S., and the speaker was Hilary Benn, not Hillary Clinton. Following the ISIS-inspired massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., perhaps more liberals in the U.S. can also start speaking forthrightly about terrorism and get smarter about stopping it.

BAGHDAD—Islamic State is laying sophisticated booby traps in Ramadi to thwart an Iraqi offensive, with devices that can trigger an explosive domino effect and snipers who target bomb-disposal experts, military officials said on Sunday.

After seizing Ramadi in May, the militants connected large, scattered webs of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, to one trigger wire, expanding the reach of an individual bomb. Iraqi military officials said the booby traps are delaying an offensive to retake the city.

“All of the delays we’re having, the reason was the heavy planting of IEDs,” said Gen. Hattem Al Magsosi, the head of the army’s Explosive Ordnance Division.

Islamic State’s use of IEDs has allowed small groups of insurgents to maintain control of cities against overwhelming numbers of troops, Iraqi military officials said.

Here she goes again. Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom, demonising Israel.

‘According to the Swedish newspaper Expressen, Wallstrom – who has triggered several diplomatic incidents with Israel since taking up her post in October 2014 – was asked in the Swedish parliament by Liberal MP Mathias Sundin why she has not condemned in strong terms the recent wave of terrorism in Israel.

Wallstrom said that the attacks were “terrible” and “must not happen,” and added that Israel has “the right to defend itself.”But then she went on to say that the response cannot be “extrajudicial executions” or a reaction that is “disproportionate” so that the “numbers of dead on the other side” is several times greater.
Israeli Ambassador to Sweden Isaac Bachman immediately responded, telling Expressen that “To focus on the actions terrorism victims take in self-defense only serves to draw attention away from the horrors of terrorism. Instead, we should condemn and act to stop the perpetrators, the financiers and the inciters of terrorism.”

He added that Israel has a better record than any other Western country in minimizing civilian casualties while fighting terrorism.

The British Labour party recently elected its most left-wing leader in decades, Jeremy Corbyn. So it was a remarkable moment this week when the Labour Party’s shadow foreign secretary, Hilary Benn, broke with Corbyn and gave an impassioned speech in Parliament supporting the conservative government’s motion to extend its bombing campaign against ISIS into Syria.

Conservative Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond called Benn’s remarks “one of the greatest speeches” ever delivered in the British House of Commons.

Benn delivered a clear-eyed assessment of the danger posed by ISIS (aka “Daesh”):

“The carnage in Paris brought home to us the clear and present danger we face from them. It could have just as easily been London, or Glasgow, or Leeds or Birmingham and it could still be. …

We are part of a coalition of over 60 countries, standing together shoulder-to-shoulder to oppose their ideology and their brutality….

Now Mr Speaker, no-one in this debate doubts the deadly serious threat we face from Daesh and what they do, although sometimes we find it hard to live with the reality. We know that in June four gay men were thrown off the fifth storey of a building in the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor. We know that in August the 82-year-old guardian of the antiquities of Palmyra, Professor Khaled al-Assad, was beheaded, and his headless body was hung from a traffic light. And we know that in recent weeks there has been the discovery of mass graves in Sinjar, one said to contain the bodies of older Yazidi women murdered by Daesh because they were judged too old to be sold for sex.