Gates of Vienna News Feed 6/30/2014

After the declaration by ISIS of a caliphate in Iraq and Syria, fighting resumed in Tikrit between Iraqi government forces and the Islamic terrorists. The Iraqi air force launched air strikes against ISIS in the city, and reportedly hit Saddam Hussein’s old palace.

In other news, at the conclusion of a mass trial in Xinjiang, 113 people were sentenced to prison by the Chinese authorities on charges of terrorism.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to Andrea Shea King, C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Insubria, Jerry Gordon, JP, KP, Steen, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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Fjordman: ‘Dialoguing’ with the Muslim Brotherhood and the KGB

Fjordman’s latest essay has been published at FrontPage Mag. Some excerpts are below:

You can tell a lot about a society by watching what kind of people it puts into positions of power and influence.

Thorbjørn Jagland is a former Prime Minister of Norway from the Norwegian Labour Party. Since 2009, he has been the Secretary General of the Council of Europe (CoE). He was reelected to this position for a second term, with the support of parliamentarians from across Europe, on June 24 2014.

The CoE was established in 1949. It is distinct from and less powerful than the European Union. However, it has a formalized cooperation with the EU on a range of issues, for instance those related to immigration. This cooperation has been strengthened under Jagland’s lead. The CoE further enjoys friendly relations with many Islamic organizations and has made combating so-called “Islamophobia” in Europe one of its stated priorities.

In addition to heading the Council of Europe, for years Mr. Jagland has also been the Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the annual Nobel Peace Prize. Under his leadership, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 2009 to Barack Hussein Obama, when he had only been US President for a few months. In 2012, Jagland and the Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to the European Union (EU). The Socialist Jagland has for decades been a passionate supporter of supranational organizations such as the EU.

One of the three women who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011, Tawakkol Karman from Yemen, has close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Norwegian Nobel Committee knew about this and thought it was fine. Jagland told reporters in Oslo that he disagrees with the widespread “perception” in the West that the Brotherhood is a threat to democracy. The very same man has warned repeatedly for years against the allegedly great dangers presented by “Islamophobia” and people who peacefully voice anti-Islamic viewpoints.

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Abducted Israeli Teens Found Dead

Update 2: Israeli jets strike 34 targets in Gaza (Hat tip: Steen).

Update: “We will destroy Hamas”:

Breaking news: The three Israeli teenagers kidnapped several weeks ago by Hamas have been found dead. They were apparently killed shortly after their capture.

The report from Israel National News:

Israel Mourns: Bodies of Kidnapped Teens Found Near Hevron

Intensive 18-day search ends in tragedy as IDF confirms the three kidnapped teens were murdered.

In a tragic end to an intensive search by the IDF, intelligence services and police, it has been released for publication this evening (Monday) that IDF forces have discovered the bodies of the three teenagers abducted 18 days ago as they hitchhiked home near the town of Alon Shvut in the Gush Etzion region.

Eyal Yifrah 19, from Elad; Gilad Sha’ar, 16, from Talmon; and Naftali Frenkel, also 16, from Nof Ayalon, went missing on June 12th, and officials soon identified Hamas as the culprits. Their bodies were found near Hevron, where the search operation for them — dubbed Operation Brother’s Keeper — had been focused.

Last week the IDF authorized for publication the identities of two Hamas terrorists being hunted for being “deeply involved” in the kidnappings of the boys. The two, Marwan Kawasmeh and Amar Abu-Eisha, are well-known Hamas terrorists operating in the Hevron area.

Kawasmeh, 29, was first arrested in 2004 for security violations, and since then has been arrested at least four more times. In an interrogation in 2010, he admitted working on behalf of Hamas in the Hevron area. He has participated in Hamas training camps and has helped the terror group to recruit new members.

Abu-Eisha, 33, was first arrested in 2005, and remained imprisoned until 2006. He was released, only to be arrested again in 2007. His brother was killed while conducting a terror attack in 2005 against an IDF patrol. His father has also been arrested numerous times for security offenses.

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 6/29/2014

The terrorist organization formerly known as ISIS or ISIL has declared itself to be the Caliphate in Iraq and Syria (and the rest of the Levant). From now on it wants to be known simply as the Islamic State, rather than the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria or the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. It has demanded the allegiance of Al Qaeda groups in the area.

In other news, the Islamic terror group Boko Haram murdered at least thirty people in attacks on churches in the vicinity of Chibok, Nigeria.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Insubria, JP, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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The Key Switcher?

Yesterday a reader in Australia sent us a scan of a print article in a newspaper called The Age. I don’t know much about the paper, but Australians tell me it is a predictably lefty rag, and that sensible people refer to it disparagingly as “The Aged”.

The article, written by Chris Johnston, is entitled “The power of hate: Bendigo mosque a rallying cry”. It’s a hit-piece on the Q Society, which opposes the Islamization of Australia and has been one of the leading groups in the campaign against the proposed mosque in Bendigo. But the reason our reader sent it to us is that the author gives Gates of Vienna an honored place among the “far-right extremists” and “racists” who object to Islamization.

The print article was dated June 28, but there is an online version dated the 27th that differs only slightly in wording.

Our blog is featured in the last few paragraphs of the piece. I’d never heard of the term “switcher” until I read this article. In the excerpt below, the author is referring to and quoting from Prof. Andrew Jakubowicz, “a specialist in multiculturalism from the University of Technology, Sydney”:

Professor Jakubowicz is studying global internet racism. He says he has found solid links between Australian anti-Islam groups, such as the Australian Defence League, with international groups in the US and Europe that he calls “switchers”. These groups compile political information and move it through global networks.

The key switcher in Europe, he says, is called Gates of Vienna, a website named after the battle in 1863 [sic] in which Christians beat Turkish Muslim Ottomans who were trying to capture the Austrian capital.

The Norwegian mass killer of 77 people in 2011, Anders Breivik, wrote in his own manifesto that he read Gates of Vienna. Breivik was rabidly anti-Muslim.

Professor Jakubowicz says, ironically, the way Australian far-right groups can learn from international far-right groups then try to infiltrate communities was similar to jihadism.

“They are looking for places to build communities and draw them into campaigns. In a sense, it is a tamer mirror image of jihadism, the social psychology is not dissimilar. The practice is obviously different but the aim is similar. Activist racists in this country are involved in what I would call community development projects.” [emphasis added]

Well…

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Islamisation of Europe: When Will Russia React?

Our Canadian correspondent Rembrandt Clancy has translated a German-language article by C. Jahn from Politically Incorrect about Russia’s possible response to the rise of Islam in Europe.

Previous articles by the same author translated by Rembrandt Clancy: The Kristallnacht of the Multicolored Republic (9 August 2013), The Silence of the Lutherans (14 August 2013).

Islamisation of Europe: When will Russia React?

For how much longer will Russia stand and watch while Western Europe is transformed into an Islamic dominated, nuclear-armed, EU-totalitarian entity? Since Russia is not governed by dreamy ideologues, but by political realists, one may assume that the Kremlin is coming to terms with the consequences for Russian external security of the Islamisation and ‘totalitarianisation’ of EU-West Europe. Russian strategists may be looking at the following themes in particular.

(By C. Jahn)

23 June 2014

1. The Islamisation of EU-West Europe threatens Russia

In spite of the growing opposition movements in some Western European countries such as France and England, it is to be expected that the present Islamisation policy of the Western European governments will remain unchanged. In the future, too, they will bring millions of Mohammedans to Europe, who for their part will continue their “conquest from the within” and step by step will secure for themselves a growing power and influence over policy, administration and the security forces. Particularly in Germany, with its feeble opposition, the government is advancing Islamisation with a singular aggressiveness. Even if it takes three or four decades for the Mohammedan minority to become the majority in important West European heartlands — in Belgium, Holland, large parts of France, England, Germany and Austria — the Islamic influence on the political leadership in Western Europe will have already become so strong in the short term, that Russia and the former Eastern bloc will represent the sole remaining bulwarks against the proliferation of Sharia in Europe and against the spread of the traditionally aggressive, Islamic ideology of world conquest.

An Islamised Western Europe will perforce fall into a cultural-ideological confrontation with Russia together with the rather nationalist-oriented, and in the medium term, the scarcely Islamisable states of the former East block, especially Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. It is to be feared on this account that it will be mainly Germany, being without an opposition but strongly under the influence of Islam, that will agitate against Christian Russia, but also against other countries of the former Eastern block. Merkel’s most recent tirade against Russia and the blatant hostility of the German government toward Hungary may already anticipate this future agitation and renewed front-line positioning in Europe.

Consequently in the coming decades an Islamised EU-West Europe, because of the war-readiness and battle-preparedness intrinsic to Islam, will then become militarily more offensive in its thinking and become a confrontational and potentially hostile sphere of influence to the west of Russia. This antagonistic power base in the West will constitute a geographical supplement to the hostile Islamic sphere of influence which already exists today to the south (Chechnya, Turkic states etc.). Since an EU membership is foreseeable for the recently re-Islamised and ever dangerous, nationalistic Turkey, Russia, in the not too distant future will find herself both in the west and in the south, completely trapped in a pincer movement by predominantly Islamic powers which are latently or openly hostile.

2. The EU will accelerate on its totalitarian course

The anti-democratic development of the EU will intensify in the coming years; the totalitarian trend inside the power apparatus of the EU will gain momentum. Almost all leading parties in Western Europe support a policy favouring a still more concentrated EU centralism, accompanied by democratically elected state parliaments surrendering their powers. This trend, comparable to the development of the conglomerate of states of the USSR, will ultimately result in a dictatorship of unelected bureaucrats whose power is no longer democratically legitimised at all, or only marginally so, and whose exercise of power, by analogy with the USSR, will take on absolutist features.

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 6/28/2014

Dozens of people were killed when a car bomb exploded near the Syrian capital Damascus, and 25 Iraqi security personnel were killed fighting extremists near Baghdad. Meanwhile, 50,000 Iraqi Christians are said to be fleeing the Nineveh valley, headed towards Kurdistan.

In other news, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Bosnian Serbs unveiled a statue of Gavrilo Princip, whom they consider a hero.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, JP, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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The War That Never Ended

One hundred years ago today a Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie. The grand duke — the heir to the Austrian throne — was shot while traveling in what would today be called a motorcade. He was paying an official visit to Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was then a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Princip’s action was the trigger for a four-year catastrophe that eventually became known as the Great War or the World War. Later events forced a renaming, and it became the First World War or World War One.

Four and a half years after that summer day, Bosnia, Austria-Hungary, and the entire traditional political order of Central and Eastern Europe had ceased to exist. The German, Austrian, and Ottoman Empires were no more. Austria and Hungary were no longer politically conjoined. The Russian Empire had been ejected from Central Europe, and its tsar had been replaced by a cabal of Communist revolutionaries whose murderous brutality would have made even the most bloodthirsty of the tsars blanch. Independent states sprang up where for centuries none had existed. Yet the variegated statelets of the Balkans were cobbled together into a single artificial entity called Yugoslavia whose weakness and instability suited the interests of the victorious Western Allies who created it. In contrast, the remains of the Ottoman Empire were carved up into political entities with arbitrary boundaries drawn by the same Allies, once again according to their own state interests.

And so the world that we know today was created out of the ashes of the one that preceded it. The arrangements made by the victors after the Great War maintained and exacerbated earlier tensions while removing the inhibitions imposed by the now-discarded imperial structures. The result guaranteed an eventual reprise of the Great War. Armies and paramilitaries and revolutionaries and partisans rampaged across Europe in one direction or another, over and over again, until the entire continent had been soaked in blood, all except Sweden and Switzerland — which served as arms factory and banker, respectively, for the belligerents.

Gavrilo Princip’s gunshots opened the door to the charnel house known as the 20th century. The Great War was billed as the “war to end all wars”, but instead it ushered in a never-ending war. Cold, lukewarm, or hot: that war is still with us today, a hundred years later.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

We’ve written before about the assassination of Grand Duke Franz Ferdinand and the fateful events of the summer of 1914, so I won’t be covering them in detail here. They began with Gavrilo Princip’s pistol shots and ended with the guns of August. The inexorable chain of events leading from the one to the other included (in chronological order):

  • Austrian ultimatum to Serbia
  • Evasive reply by the Serbs
  • Bilateral conferences and consultations between different pairs of countries, with no meaningful result
  • Mobilization of Austria against Serbia
  • Mobilization of Serbia against Austria
  • Austrian declaration of war on Serbia, followed by the bombardment of Belgrade
  • General mobilization by Russia
  • German ultimatum to Russia
  • General mobilization by Austria
  • General mobilization by France
  • General mobilization by Germany
  • German declaration of war on Russia
  • German declaration of war on France, followed by the invasion of France through Belgium
  • British declaration of war on Germany
  • Austrian declaration of war on Russia
  • French declaration of war on Austria
  • British declaration of war on Austria

By August 12, all the major dominoes had fallen, and the Great War was underway. In the memorable words of British Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”

The unprecedented mechanized slaughter on the Western Front became the deepest single trauma experienced by the collective psyche of the Western world since the days of the Black Death. It began with the stalemate on the Marne in the fall of 1914 and continued for four interminable bloody years until the entry of the United States into the war and the attrition of German resources made an Allied victory possible.

The catastrophe of 1914-18 was not anticipated by any of the Great Powers, but it should have been. The Crimean war of 1853-56, and especially the American Civil War of 1861-65, provided a foretaste of what lay ahead at Verdun and Passchendaele. Yet the general staffs of Germany, Russia, France, and Britain had planned for a conflict that bore a closer resemblance to the Napoleonic Wars — the proverbial “last war”. Technological innovations — including long-range artillery, rifled muskets, the machine gun, and the tank — transformed the Great War into hellish indiscriminate slaughter. Yet no tactics had been devised to break the resulting horrific stalemate.

Mass conscription of cannon fodder for the front made certain that every city, town, and village gained a direct, immediate understanding of what modern warfare had become. A large proportion of fit young European men were killed, maimed, or “shell-shocked”. Virtually every family felt the effects.

It was through this universally experienced trauma that the Great War created the modern world. Later catastrophic effects extended and enhanced the trauma of 1914-18, infecting an entire culture with post-traumatic stress disorder.

So many small decisions, so many enormous consequences. What would have happened if the German general staff had not decided to ship Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a.k.a. Lenin, in a sealed train from Switzerland to the Finland Station in St. Petersburg in April 1917? What if Alexander Kerensky had remained as the head of the Provisional Government, keeping Russia in the war and forcing an earlier armistice?

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‘Militants’? Pull The Other One!

The following article by our Israeli correspondent MC is a more comprehensive report on today’s rocket attack on Sderot. It’s a follow-up on his post from earlier this evening.

‘Militants’? Pull The Other One!
by MC

Hamas have to justify their kidnapping of Israeli children somehow, so in typical Jihad fashion they commit even more ‘war crimes’ by sending missiles over, targeting Israeli civilians on this motzei Shabbat evening. They hit a factory which appears to have plastic or paint in it. This caused an immediate conflagration, with poppings and fireballs as chemicals exploded. The fire brigade were on to it very quickly and contained the fire.

My son and my daughter were visiting friends a couple of roads over. The friends have three young children, aged 2, 4 and 5. They were even closer to the blast than we were.

I had just flushed the loo as the Sever Adom went off. As I came down the stairs the explosions started. At least two missiles came in, but I heard three detonations (maybe Iron Dome got the other missile). The one buzzed and whined as it went over (my children say it went over their heads and then flash-lit the house).

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Too Close for Comfort

There was another rocket attack on Sderot tonight, launched from Gaza by Hamas, the peace-loving “partners” of Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah, and the Palestinian Authority. According to YNet:

Gaza rocket hits Sderot factory, setting it ablaze

A rocket fired from Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip hit a factory in the Sderot industrial area on Saturday, causing it to catch on fire. A second rocket fell in an open area near Sderot.

Our Israeli correspondent MC was very close to the blast area — too close. He sent us this brief note:

This was very close to us; attached is a photo I took from our verandah.

The Code red sounded and the thing whistled as it came over, there were some bangs (I think Iron Dome ‘missed’), and then a large explosion.

There is now a big toxic cloud as if plastic were burning. probably lots of dioxins…..

We can hear the sounds of a retaliatory strike now as well.

A report on the same incident from The Jerusalem Post:

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 6/27/2014

Hundreds of cases of the MERS virus have been reported throughout the Middle East, but the greatest number have been in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis report more than 800 cases, with 286 deaths so far. The disease is now thought to have been brought in from the Horn of Africa with infected camels.

In other news, a zookeeper in France beat an ostrich to death and blamed it on the zoo’s pony. Meanwhile, a 15-year-old boy in Sweden was arrested and charged with a hate crime for painting a swastika on the wall of a church using chocolate milk.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Caroline Glick, Fjordman, Insubria, JP, Steen, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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Obama: Carrying Out a Program That Was Written For Him?

Andrey Fursov is a historian at the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The following video was recorded just after Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009. In it Mr. Fursov discusses what was to be expected from an Obama presidency. Compare what he had to say back then with what has happened since, and see what you think of his evaluation.

Many thanks to Russkiy for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

Transcript:

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