Iran Speeding to Nuclear Weapons Breakout - Bassam Tawil

by Bassam Tawil

Iran, with its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen, has surrounded all the oil fields in the region and is currently busy encircling Jordan, Israel and Palestine.
Iran not only reaches now from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean, but Iranian Shi'ites have been spreading out through Africa and South America.
By the time U.S. President Barack Obama leaves office, Iran will not only have nuclear breakout capability, but also the intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver its nuclear warheads to Europe and North America.
If Iran can finally drive the U.S. out of the Gulf by threatening U.S. assets, it will be free to pursue still further expansion.
If the deal signed with Iran is full of loopholes, it is Obama who will be blamed. Does Obama really want his legacy to be, "The President who was even a bigger fool than Neville Chamberlain"? He will not be seen as "Nixon in China." He will be seen as the Eid al-Adha lamb.

Recently, foreign ministers from the European Union (EU) have been holding meetings with representatives of the Arab and Muslim world, including Turkey and Qatar, with the intention of forming a "joint task force to fight Islamist terrorism."

Turkey and Qatar, for example, directly encourage Islamist terrorism, thus there is no way they can be part of a task force to act against it.

In some Islamic thinking, such nonsense, because of its certain lack of ever seeing the light, is merely a prologue to the ultimate war between Gog and Magog ("yagug wamagu"), and heralds the End of Days.

The Arab-Muslim world engages in perpetual internal strife. Iran, for instance, with its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen, has surrounded all the oil fields in the region, and is currently busy encircling Jordan, Israel and the Palestinians. Iran not only reaches now from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean, but Iranian Shi'ites have been spreading out through Africa and South America. Another sign of the End of Days is the United States' collaboration with Iran against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. It means the world will eventually pay for America's looking the other way while the Iranians are building nuclear bombs in their cellars.

(Image source: Shutterstock/Petr Kratochvila)

These cellars may currently be distant from the shores of the United States, but they are close to all the oil fields in the Middle East. By the time U.S. President Barack Obama leaves office, Iran will not only have nuclear breakout capability, but also intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver its nuclear warheads. Its next target will be U.S. assets in the Gulf. If Iran can finally drive the U.S. "Great Satan" out of the Gulf by threatening U.S. assets, it will be free to pursue still further expansion.

These are or will be the victims of America's determination to drag out the problem of an exploding Middle East. That way, U.S. President Barack Obama can hand the region over to the next president, while forever pretending that the vacuum created by pulling U.S. troops out of the Middle East -- now being filled by Iran, the Islamic State and other terror groups -- had nothing to do with him.

This situation leaves, ironically, the lone voice of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu crying in the wilderness.  As much as many of us may not like him or the people he represents, [Editor: too bad Mr. Tawil had to add these negative words, even while praising Netanyahu for his leadership] he is one of the two world leaders in the West telling the truth, warning of what is to come (Geert Wilders of the Netherlands is the other). This burden of responsibility for his people (how many of us wish our leaders had even a bit of that?) has earned him only the venom of the Obama Administration, who see him as trying to spoil their strategy of leading by procrastination.

It is also becoming increasingly clear that the Obama Administration's policy consists of running after Iran, in order to concede everything it wants, just to be able wave a piece of paper not worth the ink on it, claiming there is "a deal." Iran, for its part, would probably prefer not to sign anything, and most likely will not. Meanwhile, both sides continue strenuously to claim the opposite.

Western leaders just seem not to be programmed to understand the capabilities of other leaders, and how they, too, negotiate, manipulate and hide behind lies. Obama's Russian "Reset Button" did not work; his "Al Qaeda is on the run," did not work; "We shall never let Russia take the Ukraine" did not work; and the unwinnable Israel-Palestinian "Peace Process" did not work.

Obama, in order to wave a piece of paper not worth the ink on it, seems eager to fall victim to bogus promises, worthless treaties and other leaders' outright lies -- only to look an even bigger fool than Britain's former Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. After meeting with Germany's with Adolf Hitler in 1938, Chamberlain returned to Britain boasting of "peace in our time." But Chamberlain did not have the luxury of seeing a Chamberlain duped before him. If the deal signed with Iran is full of loopholes, it is Obama who will be blamed. Does Obama really want his legacy to be, "The president who was an even bigger fool than Neville Chamberlain"? He will not be seen as "Nixon in China." 
He will be seen as the Eid al-Adha lamb.


Bassam Tawil is a scholar based in the Middle East.

Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5213/iran-nuclear-weapons-breakout

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Obama Says Nuclear Deal Imminent If Nuclear Fatwa is True - Elliot Friedland

by Elliot Friedland

President Obama said the the P5+1 is presenting a comprehensive deal to allow Iran nuclear energy that is only awaiting an Iranian decision.

Iran's nuclear negotiation team led by Saeed Jalili

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US President Barack Obama gave a press conference alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel in which he said that a final nuclear deal with Iran was close to completion.

Obama reference a fatwa of Ayatollah Khamenei’s prohibiting the use of nuclear weapons under his interpretation of Islamic law. Yet Obama failed to mention that Iran is governed with the principle of expediency, elevating the interests of the state to a religious duty. 
Under Iran’s theocratic system realpolitik can override religious considerations as and when the Supreme Leader decides.

Furthermore, according to Iranian experts from the Washington Institute for Near East policy “fatwas are issued in response to specific circumstances and can be altered in response to changing conditions. Ayatollah Khomeini modified his position on a number of issues during his lifetime—for instance, on taxes, military conscription, women’s suffrage, and monarchy as a form of government. Thus nothing would prevent Khamenei from modifying or supplanting his nuclear fatwa should circumstances dictate a change in policy.”

Regardless of the existence of such a fatwa, it can be changed or overruled at any time.

The president stated that the P5+1 is “presenting to them [Iran] a deal that allows them to have peaceful nuclear power but gives us the absolute assurance that is verifiable that they are not pursuing a nuclear weapon.”

This is despite the fact that four prominent nuclear experts said at the beginning of February that Iran should already be regarded as a nuclear weapons state.

“The fact of Iran's ICBM capability and their proximity to nuclear weapons necessitates that Iran be regarded as a nuclear missile state — and as a menace to the entire world — right now,” they wrote.

The four experts are:

·         Ambassador Henry F. Cooper, former director of the Strategic Defense Initiative;

·         Fritz Ermarth, former chairman of the National Intelligence Council;

·         Dr. William Graham, chairman of the Congressional EMP Commission;

·         Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security for the Congressional Caucus on EMP and director of the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum.

The problem has been festering for many years. The previous American President, George W. Bush, took limited action on Iran, placing sanctions restricting access to nuclear materials and missile technology but refraining from a broader campaign to pressure Iran’s economy. Severe sanctions on Iran’s oil industry only began under the Obama administration.

A report was published in September 2014 by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which concluded Iran has failed to prove its nuclear program is not for weapons. The report also admitted that the IAEA is unable to know if Iran has a hidden nuclear weapons program.

In the light of statements made by previous Iranian leaders, these facts further suggest Iran’s intentions lie towards obtaining nuclear weapons, fatwa or not.

Former President Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani said in December 2001: “If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists' strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. 

However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.”

More recently the commander of Iran’s notorious Basij militia, which raped protestors as a means of crowd control during the 2009 Green movement protests , told Fars News Agency at the beginning of January “Our ideal is not [nuclear] centrifuges but the destruction of the White House and the annihilation of Zionism [Israel].”

Perhaps most tellingly, current President Hassan Rouhani, regarded as a moderate by Obama and many in the West, said at a campaign rally in 2013 “Saying ‘Death to America’ is easy. We need to express ‘Death to America’ with action.”


Elliot Friedland

Source: http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/obama-says-nuclear-deal-imminent-if-nuclear-fatwa-true#

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

In the French Utopia, Anti-Semitism is Flourishing - Giulio Meotti

by Giulio Meotti

Zitouni accuses the school of being riddled with "anti-Semitism and Islamism." Of Algerian origin, and a professor of philosophy, Zitouni wrote that he could no longer tolerate what he saw every day in the high school which he called "Islamic territory funded by the state."

France not only let Jewish children be shot in front of a Jewish school in Toulouse. It is now letting anti-Semitism grow in its state-funded schools. 

 

Far north, in France, a few minutes by train from the border with Belgium, we reach Lille. In Lille, there is the high school named Lycée Averroès, located on the second floor of a building boasting Flemish architecture, that houses the Islamic League of the North, a mosque and a Muslim bookstore. Upstairs, there is the prayer room reserved for women, and the Koranic school. It is the first Muslim private school funded by the state in France. 

This is not a madrassa, but an experiment of laicité (secularism), created specifically in response to the events of 1994, when a group of students in Lille were expelled from the public high school Faidherbe, after they had refused to remove their headscarf in the classroom. The school is symbolized by its name, that of the philosopher Averroes, who in the Middle Ages was the bridge between the Western and Eastern cultures. 

 

Now that school, the multicultural utopia, has been rocked by the resignation of one of his teachers, Sofiane Zitouni, who explained his reasons in an editorial in the newspaper Libération. Zitouni accuses the school of being riddled with "anti-Semitism and Islamism." Of Algerian origin, and a professor of philosophy, Zitouni wrote that he could no longer tolerate what he saw every day in the high school which he called "Islamic territory funded by the state." 

After the attack on Charlie Hebdo, Zitouni had written an article wondering if "many Muslims do not have a huge problem with humor". Students attacked Zitouni, calling him a "lackey of the enemies of Islam" and "blasphemous".

 

In his complaint in Libération, the teacher writes that "in twenty years of work as a teacher I have never heard so many anti-Semitic slogans coming from the mouths of students." 

Zitouni wanted to make known to his students the thought and work of the philosopher named after their school, Averroes: 

"I discovered that on the shelves of the school there were no books of the Andalusian philosopher, nor books about him. However, I found the works of the brothers Ramadan, popular in this school"  These are Tariq and Hani Ramadan, the Swiss Islamists connected with the Muslim Brotherhood. "One day I started a course on the philosopher Spinoza and a student asked me why [I am teaching about him], because this philosopher was Jewish" 

Another big problem with his students was: "My alleged Islamic orthodoxy", and the fact that his colleagues, observant Muslims, could perform their ritual ablutions in public toilets and prayers were officiated near the coffee machine.

Four years ago, a French history teacher in Nancy, Catherine Pederzoli, was suspended for breaching the principle of secularism and neutrality after the French education ministry concluded that she was teaching "too much" about the Holocaust. And many schools in France are avoiding the Holocaust and the State of Israel's history to avoid "offending" their pupils.

 

"Death to the Jews" graffiti, however,  appear on many school walls outside Paris and other French cities.

In Andalusia, which during the XIIth century was populated by Christians, Jews, Muslims and ruled by the Arabs, the development of a fundamentalist punitive sect who claimed to be the sole interpreter of Allah's word warned the Caliph, who tried desperately to control the situation by making some concessions to them: the public burning of books, the prohibition of teaching and the exile of Averroes, his former adviser. 

 

Now the reply is the famous lycée, once symbol of French multiculturalism, where anti-Semitism is flourishing. 

Islamic brainwashing takes place under our noses with the complicity of the European authorities. Do we really mean "never again"?

Giulio Meotti

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/16473#.VN-LFi6zchQ

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Can the West rely on Iran? - Dore Gold

by Dore Gold

Does the war against Islamic State provide a basis for the kind of revolution in U.S. policy toward the Middle East that some commentators are describing? Would Iran really become a dependable partner for the U.S. in fighting Islamic State in Iraq, allowing Washington to reconsider its older Middle Eastern alliances with Israel and Saudi Arabia, as Kaplan is advocating?

Since the middle of last year, the U.S. outreach to Iran on the nuclear issue has been accompanied by an assumption in parts of the American foreign policy establishment that the two countries were on the verge of establishing a new political partnership covering the Middle East.

Last October, The Wall Street Journal even ran an article headlined: "U.S. Iran Relations Move to Detente." It suggested that American policy toward Iranian proxies in the Middle East, from Hezbollah to Hamas, might change as well. Dr. Vali Nasr, who advised the State Department on Iran during the Obama administration, commented that "although we see Turkey and the Arab states as our closest allies, our interests and policies are converging with Iran." 

In the January/February edition of the influential journal The Atlantic, Robert Kaplan wrote more bluntly: "Whatever the eventual outcome of the long-running negotiations over Iran's nuclear program, Israeli interests cannot impede a warming of relations between Iran and the United States in the coming years, under either this president or the next." Kaplan is an important figure on the American scene. He has advised the American security establishment on its long-term strategy. 

Indicating the importance of his essay in The Atlantic, " PBS NewsHour" devoted a program to this subject, inviting important opinion-makers in Washington, including Israel's ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer. 

The main development that has led to dramatic conclusions of this sort has unquestionably been the perception in Washington that both states are on the same side in the fight against Islamic State. Last fall, President Barack Obama wrote about the threat posed by Islamic State to the interests of both countries in a letter to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Secretary of State John Kerry spoke openly about Iran having a "role to play" in defeating Islamic State. But the administration was careful not to go so far and characterize the new relationship as a military alliance. For example, Kerry rejected the idea that the U.S. would militarily coordinate with Iran in Iraq. 

Does the war against Islamic State provide a basis for the kind of revolution in U.S. policy toward the Middle East that some commentators are describing? Would Iran really become a dependable partner for the U.S. in fighting Islamic State in Iraq, allowing Washington to reconsider its older Middle Eastern alliances with Israel and Saudi Arabia, as Kaplan is advocating? To answer this question, it is necessary to more deeply trace the historical connections between Iran and the movements in Iraq that evolved into Islamic State in recent years. While Iran and Islamic State are today at war, their hostility toward one another is not inevitable; for the two parties have been able to closely coordinate at certain times in the past.

Islamic State is tied to the jihadi networks established by Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian commander of al-Qaida in Iraq, who was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2006. Today, the Islamic State magazine known as Dabiq frequently features quotes from Zarqawi that remind readers of the organization's connection to his past. Prior to 9/11, Zarqawi ran a training camp in western Afghanistan, not far from the Iranian border. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to topple the Taliban regime, instead of fleeing to Pakistan, like most of the senior leadership of al-Qaida, Zarqawi sought sanctuary in Iran, where he spent four months under the protection of the Iranian regime. 

In August 2004, there were indications that Zarqawi developed cooperative relations with the Iranians. The London-based Saudi newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat reported on August 11, 2004 that the commander of the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards, Qassem Sulaimani, admitted that Zarqawi had spent time in a training camp of the Revolutionary Guards near the Iraqi border. Sulaimani reportedly unveiled that he had provided military assistance to Zarqawi in that period. The same point about Zarqawi's ties with Iran was made a few months later by Iraq's interim defense minister. 

The accuracy of these reports is difficult to ascertain. But one thing is certain: Zarqawi's organization, which was fighting the U.S. Army in Western Iraq, was being resupplied from Syria. It is unlikely that the Syrians would acquiesce to this line of supply crossing their territory without obtaining the approval of their senior strategic partner, namely Iran. While Zarqawi became known in Iraq for his attacks on Shiite mosques, which seemed to run counter to the Iranian interest. But more importantly for Iran, Zarqawi's forces were killing American soldiers, creating a sectarian war inside Iraq, and setting the stage for an eventual withdrawal of the U.S. from the resulting chaos in Iraq that he caused. 

In October, 2004, Zarqawi swore his allegiance to Osama bin Laden, and his organization became al-Qaida in Iraq. After his death in 2006, the organization changed its name to the Islamic State in Iraq. Once it became involved in the Syrian Civil War, it changed its name once again to the Islamic State in Iraq and in al-Sham, or ISIS. And despite its new name, the group observed policies reminiscent of those that its mother organization established a decade ago. For example, Islamic State spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adani admitted in 2014 that it had not attacked the Iranians since the organization was established. That had been the policy of al-Qaida, when Islamic State was part of the al-Qaida network. And it was a policy that Islamic State, as an independent organization, was still reluctant to change, though it was being drawn into a more conflicted relationship with Tehran, for now. 

Iran's ability to create sudden partnerships with Sunni extremists, and also go to war with the very same groups, was not confined to the case of Islamic State. In 1998, Iran nearly went to war against the Taliban in Afghanistan who had slaughtered thousands of Afghan Shiites. Iran massed over 200,000 Iranian troops on the Afghan border.

After 9/11, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and some American diplomats began speaking about a new era of cooperation between Iran and the U.S. against their joint enemy, the Taliban. Diplomats from Washington and Tehran met in New York for talks at the U.N. However within two months, the CIA received information that the Iranians had switched sides and now were helping the Taliban. The Revolutionary Guards began moving weapons into Afghanistan to arm the Taliban against the U.S. It appeared that Tehran was initially pleased to see the Taliban defeated but it also did not want the U.S. Army along its eastern border.

The brief period of U.S.-Iranian coordination in late 2001 led to the emergence in the years that followed of a myth that U.S. and Iran had been on the verge of a major diplomatic breakthrough that was missed by the Bush administration. This idea was reinforced in 2003 when the Swiss ambassador to Iran sent a fax to Washington which contained a "grand bargain" that Tehran supposedly offered but senior officials in the State Department did not believe was authoritative. It appeared to be mostly the product of the imagination of the Swiss envoy rather than an initiative undertaken by the supreme leader of Iran himself.

Michael Doran, who once served in senior positions in the Pentagon and the U.S. National Security Council, just wrote a study arguing that these ideas about a possible American-Iranian rapprochement had been incubating in Washington in 2006, when they molded President Obama's thinking about the Middle East just as he arrived in Washington as a senator. What is undeniable is that the mythology about Iran joining the U.S. in defeating Sunni jihadists in a new alliance has many important supporters in Washington who would like to get the administration to embrace their thinking. 

What Iran's history with Zarqawi and the Taliban demonstrates however, is that Shiite and Sunni extremists cannot be relied upon to be locked into a permanent state of hostility, contrary to the oversimplified analysis about how the politics of the Middle East actually work. Moreover, a survey of the websites of the key Shiite militias in Iraq, supported by Tehran, shows unmistakably that they still harbor strongly anti-American sentiments. They argue that ISIS was created by and is still sustained by the U.S. Reflecting the line they hear from their Iranian sponsors, they certainly do not sound like they are about to embrace Washington as their new ally. 

The U.S. would be making a terrible mistake if it comes to believe that it can replace its old Middle Eastern partners with a revolutionary Iranian regime, along with its proxy forces. For it must always be remembered that Tehran's purpose since 1979 has been to reduce American influence across the entire area from Beirut to Bahrain in order to pave the way for its own military domination of the region as a whole.

Dore Gold

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=11585

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Yemen: Obama’s Counter-Terrorism ‘Success’ Story Sinks - Joseph Klein

by Joseph Klein

President Obama’s so-called “strategy” has backfired completely. Shiite Iran is gaining a valuable foothold on the Arabian Peninsula via its proxies, the Houthis, while al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), Sunni jihadists who are determined to strike the U.S. homeland, is becoming stronger than ever.

“This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years,” President Obama assured the American people last September.

Just five months after President Obama touted Yemen as a successful example of his counter-terrorism strategy at work, Yemen has descended into a complete free fall.

The Shiite rebel group known as the Houthis, with the backing of Iran, has taken over Yemen’s capital, Sanaa.  They caused the U.S.-friendly President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to resign last month, along with his cabinet and the prime minister.

Efforts by United Nations Special Envoy to Yemen, Jamal Benomar, to forge a political dialogue between the Houthis and Yemen’s main political parties are going nowhere.

President Obama’s so-called “strategy” has backfired completely. Shiite Iran is gaining a valuable foothold on the Arabian Peninsula via its proxies, the Houthis, while al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), Sunni jihadists who are determined to strike the U.S. homeland, is becoming stronger than ever. AQAP reportedly has grown to nearly 1000 members, more than tripling in size since 2009 when President Obama began his first term. ISIS is also beginning to recruit members in Yemen, but does not yet have a local presence anywhere near the size of AQAP.

The Houthis and AQAP hate each other to be sure, mirroring the deep Shiite-Sunni schism found in the entire region. However, their common enemy is the United States. AQAP has tried repeatedly to attack the United States homeland. One of its leaders last fall referred to the United States as “the head of the snake,” and called for Muslims to unite against the “Crusader enemy.”  Meanwhile, the Houthis’ slogan reads, “God is the Greatest. Death to America. Death to Israel. Damn the Jew and Victory to Islam.”

Things are now so bad in Yemen that the State Department announced on February 11^th it was closing its embassy in Yemen for security reasons. To add insult to injury, rebels are now driving vehicles that belonged to U.S. embassy staff, and our marines were ordered to surrender their weapons before they evacuated. France and the United Kingdom are also closing their embassies.

Although exiting Yemen hastily in the wake of the Houthis’ take-over, the Obama administration is still claiming, in the words of the State Department Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf, that the U.S. ally, President Hadi, “remains the president of Yemen.” That would be news to Mr. Hadi himself, considering that he resigned under pressure weeks ago and retains no power whatsoever.

The Houthis, Ms. Harf said during her rambling February 6^th news briefing, do not deserve recognition “because they didn’t follow the process by which Yemen can change its government.”  Yet at the same time, according to Ms. Harf, “the Houthis are engaged in a fight against AQAP as well, so there’s a lot of complications on the ground here.”

Ms. Harf could not give an intelligible answer to the question whether we are “working with a government that doesn’t exist but is recognized” by the United States or whether the U.S. is working with a de facto government that does exist but which the U.S. does not recognize, the one that the Houthis have established. Her incoherent statements encapsulate the lack of any coherent strategy on the part of the Obama administration in dealing with Yemen, much less the global war the jihadists are waging against anyone they consider “infidels.”

In an effort to consolidate their political power, the Houthis dissolved parliament and installed a cousin of the group’s leader Abdel-Malik al-Houthi as the new president. But the cousin may be just a figurehead. Abdel-Malik al-Houthi appears to be the man really in charge of the Houthis’ take-over. He warned on February 10^th that it was “in the interest of every power, domestic and foreign, to stabilise this country.” He threatened “repercussions on the interests of these powers” if there were any “attempt to sow chaos or harm this country.”

Al-Houthi’s warning was certainly not directed at the Iranian regime, which views the latest developments in Yemen as extending its sphere of influence. Iran has been supplying money, weapons and training to its Houthi allies. Iranian Brigadier General Baqir Zada boasted that the Houthi victory in Yemen was “a historic victory for the Iranian Islamic revolution.”

However, despite the Houthis’ bravado and their patron Iran’s trumpeting of a great victory for the Iranian Islamic revolution, the Houthis’ control falls far short of extending to the entire country. The Houthis are expanding into areas in central Yemen that lie close to Yemen’s oil and gas infrastructure, but chaos is also spreading. Secessionists in the south of Yemen continue their own fighting, and other tribes in the country refuse to accept the Houthis’ assertion of power. And feeding like vultures on the carcasses of the fleeting Arab Spring that had given some Yeminis false hope, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has grown into a more potent threat than ever in spite of the Obama administration’s drone strikes.

According to an assessment of AQAP by the Council of Foreign Relations, “Analysts rate the Yemen-based group as the most lethal Qaeda franchise, carrying out a domestic insurgency while maintaining its sights on striking Western targets.”

The intelligence consulting organization known as the Soufan Group described what it called AQAP’s “lethal attributes”:

“What makes AQAP so dangerous is its success in exploiting the instability resulting from Yemen’s fractured, impoverished, and fragile conditions to consolidate its power base in the country’s ungoverned regions. AQAP’s strength also derives from its leaders’ domestic tribal connections, local resentment against the central government, and the appeal of its extremist jihadist ideology. That ideology espouses the goal of purging Muslim countries of Western influence and replacing secular ‘apostate’ governments—especially those in Yemen and Saudi Arabia—with fundamentalist Islamic regimes operating under strict sharia law. The group intends to achieve these goals in part through attacks that target not only Western interests in the region, such as embassies and energy facilities, but also the far enemy on the US homeland.”

The latest jihadist terrorist attack for which AQAP has taken credit was last month’s massacre at the Paris headquarters of Charlie Hebdo.

If President Obama thinks that he can orchestrate some sort of internecine fight between the Iran-backed Shiite Houthis and the Sunni AQAP, while continuing targeted drone strikes to further weaken AQAP, he is living in his own dream world rather than in reality. Iran’s brand of Shiitism and AQAP’s brand of Sunniism differ fundamentally on Islamic doctrine, but they share a belief in absolute Islamic supremacy and the use of violence in support of their respective paths to achieving Islamic supremacy worldwide. For the Iranian Shiite theocracy, adding Yemen to its sphere of influence would constitute yet another milestone in fulfilling their end-of-times prophecy in which the imminent appearance of the Mahdi or 12^th Imam will lead to final victory over the enemies of Islam everywhere. For al Qaeda as well as ISIS Sunni jihadists, a supreme global Islamic caliphate is the end goal.

Both paths require in common to reach their end goals the destruction of Western civilization, most notably the United States, and the killing or subjugation of all infidels.

Yemen exemplifies the failure of President Obama’s counter-terrorism strategy, such as it is, and the flawed assumptions on which it is based. When he cannot even correctly identify the enemy we are fighting and candidly explain its animating Islam-based ideology to the American people, he is at best just spinning his wheels. At worst his lack of real leadership is putting all Americans in danger.


Joseph Klein is a Harvard-trained lawyer and the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom and Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations & Radical Islam.

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/joseph-klein/yemen-obamas-counter-terrorism-success-story-sinks/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Nightmare scenario unfolding for Obama at Ayn al-Assad Air base - Thomas Lifson

by Thomas Lifson

President Obama’s dream of US withdrawal from Iraq was realized, only to turn into a nightmare, as it became clear that without US support, the Iraqi military would crumble before the ISIS threat. Now, that support is in danger

The massive air base at Ayn al-Assad in Iraq’s Anbar Province hosts 400 US Service members, who are training Iraq Air Force personnel. They now are in danger of serving as hostages to ISIS, which has conquered the nearby city of Al Baghdadi and already threatened the perimeter of the base.

As a result, US helicopters have been brought in to provide close ground support for the Iraqi boots on the ground. CNN:

Robert Baer, a former CIA officer, said the battles may indicate a deepening involvement of U.S. troops in the fight against ISIS.
"I think what we're seeing here is mission creep," he said Friday night. "The Iraqi army is not up to the task. And without the United States Air Force and the military on the ground, a lot of these ... bases would be overrun."

President Obama’s dream of US withdrawal from Iraq was realized, only to turn into a nightmare, as it became clear that without US support, the Iraqi military would crumble before the ISIS threat. Now, that support is in danger:

Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby described the battle at the air base, saying, "It looks like they at least got to the outer base limits. We're still looking at this and it's hard to say whether they breached the perimeter or not. But they certainly got to the perimeter level at the very least."
He said 20-25 people led by suicide bombers made the attack. Most, if not all, of the attackers were wearing Iraqi military uniforms, Kirby said.

Obama’s ultimate nightmare is a US pilot being shot down and falling into the hands of ISIS. Helicopters, for all their armor, are vulnerable to ground fire. God forbid such a thing happen, for the pilot would undoubtedly be exploited on video and subjected to a hideously cruel death. In such an instance, public opinion in the United States would demand serious military engagement.

Under the half-hearted leadership of Obama, such engagement could lead to a major disaster. It all seemed so simple under the illusion that if only the malign US presence were ended, peace, love and happiness would result.
We are living in perilous times.

Thomas Lifson

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/02/nightmare_scenario_unfolding_for_obama_at_ayn_alassad_air_base.html

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Chapel Hill murders inspire POTUS to fight Islamophobia - M. Catharine Evans

by M. Catharine Evans

In Obama’s America when 3 Muslims are killed, it’s a hate crime because we went to see American Sniper. When an 8-year-old boy is blown to bits by jihadists in Boston or military personnel are shot to death by a Islamic terrorist yelling ‘Allahu Akbar,’ well, don’t you know,  it’s our own damn fault.

Three young lives were snuffed out in Chapel Hill by a nutcase on Tuesday, allegedly over the killer’s long running obsession with parking spaces, and because the victims were Muslim, Obama is all over the hate crime thing.

Funny how in 2009, neither the media nor President Obama reported the religion of the American servicemen and women murdered by Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood.

Were they Christian, Mormon, Protestant? Didn’t matter. And even though Hasan shouted Allahu Akbar as he shot them dead and wounded many others, Obama could not bring himself to call Hasan a Muslim jihadist.

Mr. Obama considered the Ft. Hood shooting a random act of workplace violence and the Boston Marathon bombers were a couple of lone wolves driven to extremism. A hatchet attack by a radical Muslim on two NYPD officers was another lone wolf. When a Muslim terrorist went into a Jewish market in Paris and executed 4 Jews, Obama said the victims were “a bunch of folks” shot randomly.

He called the massacre by an Islamic terrorist  at Ft. Hood a “horrible incident.” He referred to the victims as  the “wounded and the fallen.” The next day after his meeting with FBI Director Mueller he promised to investigate “what caused one individual to turn his gun on his fellow servicemen and  women, and I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts.” Just another lone “individual.”

But what a difference it makes to our commander-in-chief when Muslims are killed.

Obama not only jumped to conclusions in his post-Chapel Hill statement, he got more personal, listing the full names of all three victims, even quoting one of them. This was no “horrible incident” without religious motivation, like Ft. Hood, these were “brutal and outrageous murders.”

From whitehouse.gov:

Yesterday, the FBI opened an inquiry into the brutal and outrageous murders of Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, Deah Shaddy Barakat, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  In addition to the ongoing investigation by local authorities, the FBI is taking steps to determine whether federal laws were violated.  
No one in the United States of America should ever be targeted because of who they are, what they look like, or how they worship.

Except “teabaggers,” Christians, and old white males.
In his June, 2009 Cairo speech Obama made it clear whose side he is on.

…that partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn’t. And I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.

In Obama’s America when 3 Muslims are killed, it’s a hate crime because we went to see American Sniper. When an 8-year-old boy is blown to bits by jihadists in Boston or military personnel are shot to death by a Islamic terrorist yelling ‘Allahu Akbar,’ well, don’t you know,  it’s our own damn fault.

Read more Evans at   exzoom,net

M. Catharine Evans

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/02/chapel_hill_murders_inspire_potus_to_fight_islamophobia.html

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Obama: Mainstreaming Jew-Hatred in America - Caroline Glick

by Caroline Glick

No matter that Coulibaly called a French TV station from the kosher supermarket and said he was an al-Qaida terrorist and that he chose the kosher supermarket because he wanted to kill Jews.

As far as the leader of the free world is concerned, his massacre of four Jews at the market can teach us nothing about anything other than that some random people are mean and some random people are unlucky.

US President Barack Obama is mainstreaming anti-Semitism in America.

This week, apropos of seemingly nothing, in an interview with Mathew Yglesias from the Vox.com website, Obama was asked about terrorism. In his answer the president said the terrorism threat is overrated. And that was far from the most disturbing statement he made.

Moving from the general to the specific, Obama referred to the jihadists who committed last month’s massacres in Paris as “a bunch of violent vicious zealots,” who “randomly shot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.”

In other words, Ahmedy Coulibaly, the terrorist at Hyper Cacher, the kosher supermarket he targeted, was just some zealot. The Jews he murdered while they were shopping for Shabbat were just “a bunch of folks in a deli,” presumably shot down while ordering their turkey and cheese sandwiches.

No matter that Coulibaly called a French TV station from the kosher supermarket and said he was an al-Qaida terrorist and that he chose the kosher supermarket because he wanted to kill Jews.

As far as the leader of the free world is concerned, his massacre of four Jews at the market can teach us nothing about anything other than that some random people are mean and some random people are unlucky.

And anyway, Obama explained, we’re only talking about this random act of senseless violence because as he said, “If it bleeds, it leads.” The media, desperate for an audience, inflates the significance of these acts of random violence, for ratings.

Obama’s statement about the massacre of Jews in Paris is notable first and foremost for what it reveals about his comfort level with anti-Semitism.

By de-judaizing the victims, who were targets only because they were Jews, Obama denied the uniqueness of the threat jihadist Islam and its adherents pose to Jews. By pretending that Jews are not specifically targeted for murder simply because they are Jews, he dismissed the legitimate concerns Jews harbor for their safety, whether in Diaspora communities or in Israel.

If nothing distinguished Coulibaly’s massacre at Hyper Cacher from a mugging or an armed robbery gone bad, then Jews have no right to receive unique consideration – whether for their community’s security in London or Paris, or San Francisco – or for Israel’s security.

As subsequent statements from administration spokespeople made clear, Obama’s statement was not a gaffe. When questioned about his remarks, both White House spokesman Josh Earnest and State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki doubled down on Obama’s denial of the anti-Semitic nature of the massacre at Hyper Cacher. Earnest said that the Jews who were murdered were people who just “randomly happened to be” at the supermarket.

Psaki said that the victims didn’t share a common background or nationality, pretending away the bothersome fact that they were all Jews.

Just as bad as their denials of the anti-Jewish nature of the attack on Hyper Cacher, were Psaki’s and Earnest’s belated revisions of their remarks. After coming under a storm of criticism from American Jews and from the conservative media, both Psaki and Earnest turned to their Twitter accounts to walk back their remarks and admit that indeed, the massacre at Hyper Cacher was an anti-Semitic assault.

Their walk back was no better than their initial denial of the anti-Jewish nature of the Islamist attack, because it amplified the very anti-Semitism they previously promoted.

As many Obama supporters no doubt interpreted their behavior, first Obama and his flaks stood strong in their conviction that Jews are not specifically targeted. Then after they were excoriated for their statements by Jews and conservatives, they changed their tune.

The subtext is clear. The same Jews who are targeted no more than anyone else, are so powerful and all controlling that they forced the poor Obama administration to bow to their will and parrot their false and self-serving narrative of victimization.

The administration’s denial of the unique threat Jews face from jihadists is not limited to its anti-Semitic characterizations of the attack at Hyper Cacher.

It runs as well through Obama’s treatment of Israel and its actions to defend itself against its jihadist enemies from Hamas to Hezbollah to Iran.

Today, the most outstanding example of Obama’s exploitation of anti-Semitic tropes to diminish US support for Israel is his campaign to delegitimize Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu ahead of his scheduled speech before the joint houses of Congress on March 3.

As we belatedly learned from a small correction at the bottom of a New York Times article on January 30, contrary to the White House’s claim, Netanyahu did not blindside Obama when he accepted Speaker of the House John Boehner’s invitation to address the Congress. He informed the White House of his intention to accept Boehner’s offer before he accepted it.

Netanyahu did not breach White House protocol.

He did not behave rudely or disrespectfully toward Obama.

The only one that behaved disrespectfully and rudely was Obama in his shabby and slanderous treatment of Netanyahu. It was Obama who peddled the lie that Netanyahu was using the speech not to legitimately present Israel’s concerns regarding the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran, but to selfishly advance his political fortunes on the back of America’s national security interests and the independence of its foreign policy.

It was Obama and Vice President Joe Biden who spearheaded efforts to coerce Democratic lawmakers to boycott Netanyahu’s speech by announcing that they would refuse to meet with the leader of the US’s closest ally in the Middle East during his stay in Washington.

So far only 15 members of the House and three Senators have announced their intention to boycott Netanyahu’s speech. But even if all the other Democratic lawmakers do attend his speech, the impact of Obama’s campaign to defame Netanyahu will long be felt.

First of all, if all goes as he hopes, the media and his party members will use his demonization of Netanyahu’s character as a means to dismiss the warnings that Netanyahu will clearly sound in his address.

Second, by boycotting Netanyahu and encouraging Democrats to do the same, Obama is mainstreaming the anti-Semitic boycott, divestment and sanctions movement to isolate Israel.

Moreover, he is mobilizing Democratic pressure groups like J Street and MoveOn.org to make it costly for Democratic politicians to continue to support Israel.

There is another aspect of the Hyper Cacher massacre, which was similarly ignored by the White House and that bears a direct relationship to Obama’s attempt to destroy the credibility of Netanyahu’s warnings about his Iran policy.

Whereas the journalists murdered at Charlie Hebdo magazine were killed because their illustrations of Muhammad offended Muslim fascists, the Jews murdered at Hyper Cacher were targeted for murder because they were Jews. In other words, the Islamist hatred of Jews is inherently genocidal, not situational.

If Islamists have the capacity to annihilate the Jews, they will do so. And this brings us back to Obama’s statement to Vox.com. As is his habit, Obama refused to use the term Islamic to describe the “violent, vicious zealots” who randomly targeted Jews at the Hyper Cacher.

Since the outset of his presidency, Obama has vigilantly denied the connection between Islamism and terrorism and has mischaracterized jihad as peaceful self-reflection, along the lines of psychotherapy. Last week his denial of the Islamist nature of jihadist assaults worldwide rose to new heights when in his remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast he compared today’s jihadists to the Crusaders from a thousand years ago. And whereas he identified the Crusaders as Christians, he refused to acknowledge that today’s mass murdering zealots act in the name of Islam.

Obama’s stubborn, absurd and dangerous refusal to mention the word Islam in connection with the war being waged worldwide by millions in its name, coupled with his eagerness to always compare this unnamed scourge to the past evils of Western societies, indicates that his defense of Islamic supremacism is not merely a policy preference but rather reflects a deeper ideological commitment. The perception that Obama either does not oppose or embraces Islamic extremism is strengthened when coupled with his appalling attempts to ignore the fact of Islamic Jew-hatred and its genocidal nature and his moves to demonize Netanyahu for daring to oppose his policy toward Iran.

It is in this policy and in Obama’s wider Middle East strategy that we find the real world consequences of Obama’s denial of the unique victimization and targeting of Jews and the Jewish state by Islamic terrorists and Islamist regimes.

Loopholes in Obama’s interim nuclear framework deal with Iran from November 2013 have allowed Iran to make significant advances in its nuclear weapons program while still formally abiding by its commitments under the agreement. Iran has stopped enriching uranium to 20 percent purity levels, and sufficed with enriching uranium to 3.5% purity. But at the same time it has developed and begun using advanced centrifuges that enrich so quickly that the distinction between 3.5% and 20% enrichment levels becomes irrelevant. Iran has made significant advances in its ballistic missile program, including in its development of intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to carry nuclear warheads. It has continued its development of nuclear bombs, and it has enriched sufficient quantities of uranium to produce one to two nuclear bombs.

According to leaked reports, the permanent nuclear deal that Obama seeks to convince Iran to sign would further facilitate Iran’s ascension to the nuclear club. Among other things, the deal will place a time limit on the already ineffective inspections regime, thus blinding the world entirely to Iran’s nuclear activities.

At the same time that Obama is facilitating Iran’s emergence as a nuclear power, he is doing nothing to stop its regional empowerment. Today Iran controls Syria, Iraq and Yemen and holds sway over Lebanon and Gaza. It threatens Saudi Arabia, and its Muslim Brotherhood allies threaten Egypt and Jordan.

As for Obama’s allied campaign against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the largest beneficiary to date of the US-led campaign has been Iran. Since the US-led campaign began last fall, Iran has achieved all but public US support for its control over the Iraqi military and for the survival of the Assad regime in Syria.

The trajectory of Obama’s policies is obvious. He is clearing the path for a nuclear armed Iran that controls large swathes of the Arab world through its proxies.

It is also clear that Iran intends to use its nuclear arsenal in the same way that Coulibaly used his Kalashnikov – to kill Jews, as many Jews as possible.

Perhaps Obama is acting out of anti-Semitism, perhaps he acts out of sympathy for Islamic fascism.

Whatever the case may be, what is required from Israel, and from Netanyahu, is clear. Speaking to Congress may be a necessary precondition for that action, but it is not the action itself.

Caroline Glick is the Director of the David Horowitz Freedom Center's Israel Security Project and the Senior Contributing Editor of The Jerusalem Post. For more information on Ms. Glick's work, visit carolineglick.com.


Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/caroline-glick/obama-mainstreaming-jew-hatred-in-america/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Sweden: Rape Capital of the West - Ingrid Carlqvist and Lars Hedegaard

by Ingrid Carlqvist and Lars Hedegaard

Forty years after the Swedish parliament unanimously decided to change the formerly homogenous Sweden into a multicultural country, violent crime has increased by 300% and rapes by 700%. Sweden is now number on the list of rape countries, surpassed only by Lesotho in Southern Africa.
Significantly, the report does not touch on the background of the rapists. One should, however, keep in mind that in statistics, second-generation immigrants are counted as Swedes.
In an astounding number of cases, the Swedish courts have demonstrated sympathy for the rapists, and have acquitted suspects who have claimed that the girl wanted to have sex with six, seven or eight men.
The internet radio station Granskning Sverige called the mainstream newspapers Aftonposten and Expressen to ask why they had described the perpetrators as "Swedish men" when they actually were Somalis without Swedish citizenship. They were hugely offended when asked if they felt any responsibility to warn Swedish women to stay away from certain men. One journalist asked why that should be their responsibility.

In 1975, the Swedish parliament unanimously decided to change the former homogeneous Sweden into a multicultural country. Forty years later the dramatic consequences of this experiment emerge: violent crime has increased by 300%.

If one looks at the number of rapes, however, the increase is even worse. In 1975, 421 rapes were reported to the police; in 2014, it was 6,620. That is an increase of 1,472%.

Sweden is now number two on the global list of rape countries. According to a survey from 2010, Sweden, with 53.2 rapes per 100,000 inhabitants, is surpassed only by tiny Lesotho in Southern Africa, with 91.6 rapes per 100,000 inhabitants.

Rape rate per 100,000 population, comparison by country (selected top and bottom countries), 2012 statistics taken from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

According to figures published by The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brottsförebyggande rådet; known as Brå) -- an agency under the Ministry of Justice -- 29,000 Swedish women, during 2011, reported that they had been raped (which seems to indicate that less than 25% of the rapes are reported to the police).

Strange explanations

Rather than doing something about the problem of violence and rape, Swedish politicians, public authorities and media do their best to explain away the facts. Here are some of their explanations:

• Swedes have become more prone to report crime.
• The law has been changed so that more sexual offences are now classed as rape.
• Swedish men cannot handle increased equality between the sexes and react with violence against women (perhaps the most fanciful excuse).

A long-held feminist myth is that the most dangerous place for a woman is her own home -- that most rapes are committed by someone she knows. This claim was refuted by Brå's report:

"In 58% of cases, the perpetrator was entirely unknown by the victim. In 29% of cases the perpetrator was an acquaintance, and in 13% of cases the perpetrator was a person close to the victim."

Brå reports that there are no major differences between women of Swedish and foreign background when it comes to the risk of being raped. Significantly, the report does not touch on the background of the rapists.

Without parallel

Back in 1975, the year when politicians decided that Sweden was to become multicultural, the Swedish population stood at 8,208,442. By 2014 it had grown to 9,743,087 -- an increase of 18.7%. This growth is entirely due to immigration, as Swedish women on average give birth to 1.92 children compared to the 2.24 average of immigrant women. One should, however, keep in mind that in the statistics, second-generation immigrants are counted as Swedes.

Sweden's recent population growth is without parallel. Never before in the country's history has the number of inhabitants increased so fast. Sweden is now the fastest growing country in Europe.

Over the past 10-15 years, immigrants have mainly come from Muslim countries such as Iraq, Syria and Somalia. Might this mass influx explain Sweden's rape explosion? It is difficult to give a precise answer, because Swedish law forbids registration based on people's ancestry or religion. One possible explanation is that, on average, people from the Middle East have a vastly different view of women and sex than Scandinavians have. And despite the attempts by the Swedish establishment to convince the population that everyone setting foot on Swedish soil becomes exactly like those who have lived here for dozens of generations, facts point in an altogether different direction.

The latest statistical survey of immigrant criminality compared to that of Swedes was done in 2005. The results are practically never mentioned. Not only that; anyone who dares refer to them, for example on social media, is viciously attacked.

Denigration of ethnic groups

Michael Hess, a local politician from Sweden Democrat Party, encouraged Swedish journalists to get acquainted with Islam's view of women, in connection with the many rapes that took place in Cairo's Tahrir Square during the "Arab Spring". Hess wrote, "When will you journalists realize that it is deeply rooted in Islam's culture to rape and brutalize women who refuse to comply with Islamic teachings. There is a strong connection between rapes in Sweden and the number of immigrants from MENA-countries [Middle East and North Africa]."

This remark led to Michael Hess being charged with "denigration of ethnic groups" [hets mot folkgrupp], a crime in Sweden. In May last year, he was handed a suspended jail sentence and a fine -- the suspension was due to the fact that he had no prior convictions. The verdict has been appealed to a higher court.

For many years, Michael Hess lived in Muslim countries, and he is well acquainted with Islam and its view of women. During his trial, he provided evidence of how sharia law deals with rape, and statistics to indicate that Muslims are vastly overrepresented among perpetrators of rape in Sweden. However, the court decided that facts were irrelevant:

"The Court [Tingsrätten] notes that the question of whether or not Michael Hess's pronouncement is true, or appeared to be true to Michael Hess, has no bearing on the case. Michael Hess's statement must be judged based on its timing and context. ... At the time of the offense, Michael Hess referred neither to established research nor to Islamic sources. It was only in connection with his indictment that Michael Hess tried to find support in research and religious writings. The Court therefore notes that Michael Hess's pronouncement was obviously not a part of any reasoned [saklig] or trustworthy [vederhäftig] discussion. Michael Hess's pronouncement must therefore be viewed as an expression of disdain for immigrants with an Islamic faith."

Statistical evidence

What may one conclude from the available statistics?

As part of the evidence Michael Hess presented in court, he made use of whatever statistics existed on immigrant criminality in Sweden before the statistical authorities stopped measuring. Michael Hess tried to find answers to two questions:

1. Is there a correspondence between the incidence of rape and the number of people with a foreign background in Sweden?
2. Is there a correspondence between the incidence of rape and some specific group of immigrants in Sweden?

The answer to both questions was an unequivocal Yes. Twenty-one research reports from the 1960s until today are unanimous in their conclusions: Whether or not they measured by the number of convicted rapists or men suspected of rape, men of foreign extraction were represented far more than Swedes. And this greater representation of persons with a foreign background keeps increasing:

• 1960-1970s – 1.2 to 2.6 times as often as Swedes
• 1980s – 2.1 to 4.7 times as often as Swedes
• 1990s – 2.1 to 8.1 times as often as Swedes
• 2000s – 2.1 to 19.5 times as often as Swedes

Even when adjusted for variables such as age, sex, class and place of residence, the huge discrepancy between immigrants and Swedes remains.

Research reports on crime in Sweden have become a rarity, but among the eighteen that were done during the 1990s and the 2000s, eleven dealt with rape. Two of these reports dealt with the connection between rape and immigration, and they both confirmed that there is a link.

These figures are available to the authorities, the politicians and the press, yet they insist that these numbers do not mirror reality.

Glaring discrepancy

How is it, then, that in 2008, Sweden's neighbor Denmark only had 7.3 rapes per 100,000 inhabitants compared to 53.2 in Sweden?

Danish legislation is not very different from Sweden's, and there is no obvious reason why Danish women should be less inclined to report rape than their Swedish counterparts.

In 2011, 6,509 rapes were reported to the Swedish police -- but only 392 in Denmark. The population of Denmark is about half the size of Sweden's, so even adjusted for size, the discrepancy is significant.

In Sweden, the authorities do what they can to conceal the origin of the rapists. In Denmark, the state's official statistical office, Statistics Denmark, revealed that in 2010 more than half of convicted rapists had an immigrant background.

Foreigners overrepresented

Since 2000, there has only been one research report on immigrant crime. It was done in 2006 by Ann-Christine Hjelm from Karlstads University.

It emerged that in 2002, 85% of those sentenced to at least two years in prison for rape in Svea Hovrätt, a court of appeals, were foreign born or second-generation immigrants.

A 1996 report by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention reached the conclusion that immigrants from North Africa (Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia) were 23 times as likely to commit rape as Swedish men. The figures for men from Iraq, Bulgaria and Romania were, respectively, 20, 18 and 18. Men from the rest of Africa were 16 times more prone to commit rape; and men from Iran, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, 10 times as prone as Swedish men.

Gang rapes

A new trend reached Sweden with full force over the past few decades: gang rape -- virtually unknown before in Swedish criminal history. The number of gang rapes increased spectacularly between 1995 and 2006. Since then no studies of them have been undertaken.

One of the worst cases occurred in 2012, when a 30-year old woman was raped by eight men in a housing project for asylum seekers, in the small town of Mariannelund. The woman was an acquaintance of a man from Afghanistan who had lived in Sweden for a number of years. He invited her to go out with him. She obliged. The Afghan man took her to a refugee housing project and left her defenseless. During the night, she was raped repeatedly by the asylum seekers and when her "friend" returned, he raped her too. The following morning she managed to call the police. Sweden's public prosecutor has called the incident "the worst crime of rape in Swedish criminal history."

Seven of the men were sentenced to between 4.5 and 6.5 years in prison. Prison time is usually reduced by a third, so it won't be long before the men will be ready for new assaults -- presumably on infidel women.

In cases of gang rape, culprits and victims are most often young and in almost every case, the perpetrators are of immigrant background, mostly from Muslim countries. In an astounding number of cases, the Swedish courts have demonstrated sympathy for the rapists. Several times the courts have acquitted suspects who have claimed that the girl wanted sex with six, seven or eight men.

One striking incident occurred in 2013, in the Stockholm suburb of Tensta. A 15-year-old girl was locked up while six men of foreign extraction had sex with her. The lower court convicted the six men but the court of appeals acquitted them because no violence had occurred, and because the court determined that the girl "had not been in a defenseless position."

This month, all major Swedish media reported on a brutal gang rape on board the Finnish Ferry Amorella, running between Stockholm and Åbo in Finland. Big headlines told the readers that the perpetrators were Swedish:

• "Several Swedish Men Suspected of Rape on the Finland Ferry" (Dagens Nyheter).
• "Six Swedish Men Raped Woman in Cabin" (Aftonbladet).
• "Six Swedes Arrested for Rape on Ferry" (Expressen).
• "Eight Swedes Suspected of Rape on Ferry" (TT – the Swedish News Agency).

On closer inspection, it turned out that seven of the eight suspects were Somalis and one was Iraqi. None of them had Swedish citizenship, so they were not even Swedish in that sense. According to witnesses, the group of men had been scouring the ferry looking for sex. The police released four of them (but they are still suspects) whereas four (all Somalis) remain in custody.

The internet radio station Granskning Sverige called the mainstream newspapers Aftonposten and Expressen to ask why they had described the perpetrators as "Swedish men" when they were actually Somalis. That is irrelevant, said the journalists. They were hugely offended when asked if they felt any responsibility to warn Swedish women to stay away from certain men. One journalist asked why that should be their responsibility.

"If the women knew, then perhaps they would have stayed away from these men and avoided being raped," said the reporter from Granskning Sverige. Whereupon the journalist slammed down the phone.


Ingrid Carlqvist and Lars Hedegaard are editors-in-chief of Dispatch International.

Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5195/sweden-rape

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.