Radicalism

Jeremy Corbyn Was a Communist Spy

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Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has been a controversial player in British politics for decades. Back in the 1980s, when the anti-nuclear cause was at its peak, his strong left-wing views placed him in the anti-NATO movement, while his long-term contacts with Irish Republican Army terrorists made Corbyn a subject of interest to the Security Service, popularly known as MI5.

However, a disturbing new report in The Sun reveals that Corbyn was much more than just a left-wing activist in the 1980s—he was spying on his own country for the Warsaw Pact. Although The Sun is a tabloid and not always meticulous with details, this report is based on the files of Communist Czechoslovakia’s State Security, known as the StB. To its credit, after the Soviet empire fell, the Czech Republic made StB files accessible to researchers. The Corbyn report is one of many bombshells to emerge from the musty files of Prague’s former version of the KGB.

The files in question appear entirely legitimate, and for Corbyn they are damning. They reveal that in 1986, when he was a Labour Member of Parliament, Corbyn was approached by an StB officer masquerading as a diplomat in London by the name of Jan Dymic. They met in the House of Commons on November 25 of that year, along with the activists Tony Gilbert and Sandra Hodgson of the far-left Liberation movement, who facilitated the encounter. In espionage terms, Gilbert and Hodgson functioned as StB cut-outs.

Based on Dymic’s report, the meeting went well. He assessed Corbyn, who was known as a sharp critic of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Britain’s close ties with the Americans, as “negative towards the USA, as well as the current politics of the Conservative government.” Corbyn was exactly the sort of rising Western politico that, in the 1980s, the KGB and its satellite partners like the StB were looking to work with.

Read the rest at The Observer …

Mysterious Balkan Assassination Threatens Regional Peace

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The always narrow and winding path to peace in Southeastern Europe hit a major obstruction this morning with the murder of Oliver Ivanović, the leader of the Serbs of Kosovo, who was gunned down in a drive-by killing in Kosovska Mitrovica. That city is precariously divided between Kosovo’s Albanian majority and Serbian minority, and Ivanović had been the latter’s political boss since the 1999 war that dragged NATO into that messy ethnic conflict.

The 64-year-old Ivanović was murdered in front of his political party’s office by a gunman in a moving car. Local media in Kosovo claim the car has been found, burned out, but as of this hour no suspects have been officially named, much less located. Shot five times with a pistol, Ivanović was dead on arrival at a local hospital.

His murder fell on the exact day that representatives of Serbia and Kosovo were set to meet in Brussels to normalize relations between them. Since the 1999 war, Belgrade has remained unreconciled to the loss of its former province—keeping Kosovo in Serbia was the issue that led to the rise of Slobodan Milošević, while its loss at the hands of NATO caused his downfall—and finally there seemed to be some hope for progress, after years of cajoling by the European Union. Ivanović’s murder has undone any forward movement on the Kosovo issue.

Already, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić has denounced the assassination as an “act of terror” while convening an emergency national security meeting in Belgrade to discuss the killing and its aftermath. Predictably, today Serbian representatives in Brussels walked out of the long-awaited meeting with Kosovo Albanian counterparts in protest over Ivanović’s murder.

Read the rest at The Observer … 

Russia Conducts Nuclear Exercises Amid Orthodox End-Times Talk

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One of the more interesting aspects of Cold War 2.0 is the ideological struggle between the postmodern West and Russia—a struggle that most Westerners deny even exists. President Barack Obama, after Moscow seized Crimea in early 2014, pronounced that there was nothing big afoot: “After all, unlike the Soviet Union, Russia leads no bloc of nations, no global ideology.”

Obama’s statement was wrong then, and it’s even more wrong now. As I’ve explained, there is an undeniable ideological struggle between Vladimir Putin’s neo-traditionalist Russia and the post-modern West—one that prominent Russians talk about all the time. In the Kremlin’s imagination, this fight pits the godless, materialistic, doomed 21st century West, too lazy to even reproduce, against a tough, reborn Russia that was forged in the murderous fire of 74 years of Bolshevism.

The yawning gap between Russian and Western values can be partly explained by the fact that Communism shielded the former from the West’s vast cultural shifts since the 1960s. Living under the Old Left provided protection against the New Left. As a result, Russians are living in our past and find current Western ways incomprehensible and even contemptible.

Take the reaction to America’s present panic about sexual harassment, which is felling celebrities and politicians left and right. In Moscow, this looks like madness, punishing powerful men for doing what powerful men have always done. Their late-night TV uses our sex panic as a punchline, proof that Americans are weak and feminized, held hostage to radical ideology. Andrei Konchalovsky, one of Russia’s top film directors (including some Hollywood hits), expressed his view plainly: “Thank God we live in a country where political correctness has not reached the point of absurdity.”

Read the rest at The Observer …

Jihadist Horror in Egypt

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The Sinai Peninsula has never seen anything like it. Yesterday, on the main highway to Gaza, outside the town of Bir al-Abed, murderers approached the al-Rawda mosque with massacre on their minds. It was toward the end of Friday prayers, just after midday.

A bomb shattered the serenity of prayer, then 25 to 30 killers disgorged from five off-road vehicles and began to rake the mosque with machine gun fire. They blocked doors and windows and poured fire inside. They threw grenades into the ranks of defenseless worshippers. There was considerable planning involved, and the terrorists torched several cars parked outside the mosque to block escape routes from the massacre.

When ambulances began arriving to aid victims, the gunmen shot at them, too. Only when the terrorists fled the scene could emergency workers tend to the victims—and there were hundreds of them. It took many hours to arrive at an accurate casualty count, given the chaos. According to Egyptian authorities, this terrible attack killed 305 innocents—27 of them children—and injured 128. This is the bloodiest terrorist strike in Egypt’s history, which isn’t exactly short on mass violence, especially by Islamist radicals.

The gunmen are widely believed to be followers of the Islamic State, which has put down deep roots in Sinai. Although there have been no claims of responsibility to-date, survivors report that the killers brandished the trademark black flag of jihad, an IS symbol. Some of the terrorists were masked, while others eschewed the usual IS get-up of long hair with thick beards—they looked like professional killers, clad in black t-shirts and camouflage-print trousers.

Read the rest at The Observer …

Two Decades Later, Algeria Protects Mystery of Bentalha Massacre

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Twenty years ago tonight, around sunset, masked gunmen approached the village of Bentalha, on the outskirts of Algeria’s capital, Algiers. They infiltrated quietly, clad in black and wearing hoods to hide their identities, and proceeded to murder anyone they encountered. They used guns, knives, and machetes to butcher the unarmed, in a terrible slaughter that lasted nearly 10 hours.

By daybreak, the extent of the massacre became evident. The exact number of dead has never been agreed upon, but the best estimates place the toll of the butchered north of 400 – many of them women, children, and the elderly. Something like one-fifth of Bentalha was dead, many of the victims having been slaughtered ritualistically, even decapitated. Some of the women had been raped before being butchered, while babies had been bashed to death against walls.

The horror of the Bentalha massacre briefly captured the world’s attention – an iconic photo of a local woman discovering her family’s dead, proclaimed as “the Madonna of Bentalha,” won awards – but that soon faded. Five years into Algeria’s hideous civil war, massacres had become so commonplace that it was difficult to keep track of them. Less than a month before Bentalha, at the village of Rais, only a few miles down the road, mysterious masked butchers had murdered hundreds of civilians in a similar fashion.

While massacres of civilians grew depressingly routine in the bitter fight between the Algerian military regime and Islamist rebels, they peaked in 1997, and Bentalha was a rare example that got some attention abroad, fleetingly. In truth, Algeria’s fratricide never got much Western press outside France, with its long colonial history with the country plus a considerable Algerian diaspora. Even though the death toll of the civil war that engulfed Algeria for years beginning in 1992 claimed some 200,000 lives, most of them civilians, that bloody conflict got a mere fraction of the Western media attention showered on the concurrent Bosnian war, which killed half as many people.

In fairness to journalists, the junta in Algiers didn’t want foreigners looking closely into what was happening in the country, and when responsibility for the Bentalha massacre was claimed by the Armed Islamic Group, the notorious GIA, the blood-thirstiest jihadist gang on earth in the mid-1990s, not many Westerners were eager to dig more deeply – particularly when both sides in Algeria’s civil war didn’t care about protecting journalists asking unwanted questions.

Read the rest at The Observer…

How to Avoid America’s Coming Years of Lead

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Violent extremism constitutes a real threat to public order and safety — it’s time to cool it

In the aftermath of the Charlottesville fracas between far-right and far-left protestors, which left one dead and dozens injured, America has undertaken a self-examination of sorts regarding our homegrown extremism problem. The public now realizes that our country possesses violent fringes which, though small in numbers, display an ardent desire to create mayhem in the public square.

The far-right element, with its Nazi and Confederate flags, is catchier on camera, displaying transgressive desires and frequently absurd attire. They seem better at shocking than fighting, however, considering how Charlottesville played out. Few have noted that the kook-right, despite making a nationwide push to get everybody to come to Virginia for the “unite the right” rally, managed to gather only a few hundred followers. In a pattern that’s familiar in Europe, the far-right was significantly outnumbered by left-wing counter-protestors in Charlottesville.

Not to mention that America’s far-right has fallen on hard times after the Virginia debacle. While neo-Nazis managed to get the attention of the nation, indeed the world, in Charlottesville, the repercussions in its aftermath have been severe. Since said movement exists more online than in the real world, post-Charlottesville efforts to get them off the Internet have hit the kook-right hard indeed.

Their most noxious website, The Daily Stormer, infamous for its incantations of violence against Jews and others, has been run off the Internet. After multiple shutdowns, the avowedly Nazi site now resides on the Dark Web, where its site traffic is surely far lower than before Charlottesville. Similarly run off the Internet is Stormfront, an online message board that’s been a focus for the far-right since 1995, when it was founded by Don Black, a former KKK leader.

The far-left has faced less public scrutiny than their sparring partners after Charlottesville. Part of this is the habitual double-standard about genocidal totalitarianisms in our country: carrying a Nazi flag is considered unthinkably offensive, while brandishing a Soviet one is viewed as much less awful – and possibly only quirky – notwithstanding that Stalin murdered more people than Hitler did.

Indeed, in recent weeks quite a few mainstream liberals have gushed about the “anti-fascists” on the left who engage in violent street theater with the far-right. It’s easy to detect more than a whiff of envy among some liberals for Antifa fighters, who get to punch Nazis whenever they feel like it. Even before Charlottesville, some on the mainstream left positively gushed about black-clad Antifas and their eagerness to do battle with the evil forces of Trumpism.

Read the rest at The Observer …

Richard Spencer and His Kook-Right Ilk are Agents of Russian Influence

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Kremlin intelligence is manipulating the far-right. It’s time to push back.

The weekend’s bloody chaos in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a far-right protest devolved into rioting and murder, has shaken the country and shocked the world. The bucolic college town was transformed into a charnel house when a right-wing young man barreled his car through a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one and injuring 19, six of them gravely.

The accused killer, James Alex Fields, age 20, was quickly taken into custody, and he turns out to possess all the expected traits: a young man with an unstable home life and mental health problems serious enough to have kept him out of the military, possessing an affection for Nazi memorabilia and views. These are precisely the sort of maladjusted young people – nearly all of them male – who under slightly different circumstances turn to jihadism. Our domestic radicalism problem knows no specific background, religion, or ideology.

The Charlottesville mayhem has concentrated minds on the continuing presence of the kook-right among us, angry young white men who assemble brandishing flags of the Confederacy and Nazi Germany. Make no mistake: the weekend was their triumph, notwithstanding that most of them resemble cosplayers more than hard-bitten radicals. A movement which barely exists outside the Internet got a few hundred members together and garnered world attention.

Nothing about the weekend’s ugliness has gotten more attention than our president’s stunning inability to condemn these neo-Nazis and their violence. Why Donald J. Trump singularly failed to rapidly denounce Fields and his ilk is a troubling question – not to mention one that’s difficult to answer. After all, the kook-right is tiny in numbers, are hardly major campaign donors, plus are repulsive to normal Americans, so why would any president delay condemning them?

The Nazified far-right thereby has joined the highly select pantheon of people whom President Trump won’t denounce no matter how badly they misbehave – whose only other member is Vladimir Putin. It bears examining whether Trump’s stunning silence may not be a coincidence.

Read the rest at The Observer …

 

Homegrown Terrorism Festers in America’s Toxic Political Environment

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The US needs to look at its violence problem without ideological blinders

It’s happened again. This week’s horrifying assassination attempt against Congressional Republicans as they practiced for a bipartisan charity baseball game reminds Americans that violence is ever present in our society.

Four innocent people were shot and the highest-ranking victim, Rep. Steve Scalise, remains in critical condition at this hour. However, the fact that Scalise is the majority whip in the House of Representatives may be the only reason there wasn’t a far worse massacre. As the third-ranking Republican in the House, Scalise travels with bodyguards from the Capitol Police (two of whom were shot while protecting Congress-members). Had they not been present, a much bloodier event would have surely transpired.

The gunman was fatally wounded by those bodyguards – thereby saving uncounted lives – in a wild melée with dozens of rounds expended in a firefight on a suburban baseball diamond. James Hodgkinson, a 66-year-old from the St. Louis suburbs, was exactly the sort of angry ne’er-do-well commonly associated with such killings. A man with a lengthy arrest record known for violent outbursts, Hodgkinson descended into ever-greater anger until he traveled to Virginia to kill his political enemies.

On social media and in person, Hodgkinson exuded hatred for Republicans in general and President Donald Trump in particular. Whether the difference between this killer’s ideological venom and that of millions of perfectly peaceful liberals was one of degree or kind looms as an important question right now. Regardless, it would help the country if citizens on both sides of the aisle took this week’s tragedy as an opportunity to tone down our increasingly shrill political rhetoric.

Read the rest at The Observer …

Jihad Takes Ankara, Zürich, Berlin

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ISIS commands its followers to attack anywhere they can this holiday season

Monday, December 19 was supposed to be noted in the history books as the day the Electoral College formally made Donald J. Trump our 45th president. That did happen, as anticipated—Democratic dreams of electors defecting in droves to overturn the ballot box proved wholly illusory—but that news was overshadowed by a series of brutal terrorist attacks that have shocked the world.

First, Ankara. Early on Monday evening, at an art gallery in a suburb of the Turkish capital, Andrei Karlov, the Russian ambassador, approached the podium to make a few words, only to be gunned down from behind with several shots fired by an off-duty Turkish policeman. A career diplomat who had served the Kremlin for four decades, including serving as Russia’s minister to Ankara since mid-2013, Karlov succumbed to his numerous wounds. His horrific end was caught in gripping footage which has taken the Internet by storm.

His killer, 22-year-old Mevlüt Mert Altıntaş, a member of a police special unit, didn’t live much longer than his target, being killed by fellow policemen shortly after the assassination. There’s not much room for doubt about his motivation, since after gunning down the ambassador, Altıntaş proceeded to utter a stream of jihadist clichés in a mixture of Arabic and Turkish. There was the customary tekbir, the proclaiming of God’s greatness—Allahu akbar—followed by boasting that the shooting was payback for the fate of Aleppo, the long-besieged Syrian city now living under Russian bombs.

It’s too soon to say whether Altıntaş was a self-starting lone jihadist or he was acting under orders from a bona fide terrorist organization, but his crime certainly appears to be the terrorist act which the Kremlin has stated it is. The Islamic State claimed the attack as their own, as is their wont whenever anything that appears remotely jihad-linked happens anywhere these days—and Turkey is unquestionably crawling with large numbers of ISIS-connected jihadists. Thanks to the policies of its Islamist strongman president, Recep Erdoğan, extremists in neighboring Syria’s civil war may now be turning on Turkey with a vengeance.

Read the rest at The Observer …

It’s Almost Too Late to Get Serious About Jihadism

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Yet another angry, lost Muslim immigrant has gone on a killing spree

It’s happened again. Yesterday, on the campus of Ohio State University, an angry young man used his car as a weapon, plowing through a group of bystanders, whom he then attacked with a butcher knife. Eleven innocent people were injured, though mercifully all are expected to make a full recovery.

This time, we got lucky. A campus cop was on-scene within a minute and, when the madman running amok refused to follow orders to drop his knife, the policeman opened fire, killing him before he struck lethally. Which was clearly his intent, as described by a student who witnessed the event unfold: “He seemed like a crazed animal. He seemed like he was determined. He seemed like he was there for one reason—to do as much damage as he could.”

Before any facts were established, the left-wing online outrage machine went into overdrive, like clockwork, with Democratic politicians and activists denouncing their usual suspects. One was Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, recently the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, who tweeted, “Deeply saddened by the senseless act of gun violence at Ohio State this morning.” Countless fervent Social Justice Warriors took to social media to express their deep hope that the shooter was a white racist—presumably inspired by President-elect Donald Trump and his message of “hate.”

Embarrassingly for the Left, the failed spree killer in Columbus turned out to have no gun at all. Worse for the liberal smart-set, he was a Somali refugee—hardly a redneck domestic terrorist. The disappointment felt online was palpable as it turned out the perpetrator was a Muslim of color, plus an immigrant to boot. He seemed to be practically a caricature drawn from Trump’s repeated warnings about the dangers posed by importing Muslims to America.

Virtually every liberal cliché was on display here. The dead man, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, an 18-year-old (some sources say 20), was a recent refugee arrival from Somalia, via Pakistan. His family moved to the United States in 2014 and Artan got an associate’s degree in 2016, then transferred to Ohio State to continue his studies.

Read the rest at The Observer …