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A daily brief about the world's most dangerous places from international war correspondent Chuck Holton
Episodes
Friday Jan 04, 2019
Friday Jan 04, 2019
Italy has enough with migrants, more violence in Gaza and what to do with 1200 ISIS prisoners in Syria?
Howdy folks! Chuck Holton here with another great episode of the Hot Zone for your entertainment and edification. I can't believe we're on episode 20 already. Thanks for your support and feedback. I want this podcast to get better and better at giving you the news and commentary that really matters. See here we're not going to obsess for days about celebrity breakups or inside the beltway shenanigans. There are millions of real people out there around the world who could care less about Kanye or Pelosi because their lives are being turned upside down as we speak. And I don't just want to bring you their stories, I want to give you a way to reach into their lives and help them directly. It's a new kind of news gathering that really hasn't been tried, and you get to be a part of it. Just go to Patreon.com/hotzone and subscribe for three bucks a month and soon (as in within a couple of weeks) I'll be off on my first big trip of the year to Syria, and we'll not only get the ground truth about what's going on there, we'll help some people in need. It'll be fun!
Now speaking of Syria, it's come out that the US is sitting on over 1100 ISIS fighters in Syria, who are being held in camps guarded by Syrian Defense Forces (who are overwhelmingly Kurdish). The SDF Fighters are saying, however, that without US support, they won't have the ability to keep guarding them and will have to set them free.
Many of these terrorists are foreigners - they reportedly represent 32 countries, many of which are in Europe. Their home countries certainly don't want them back, for very good reason. So what do we do with them?
Well, Mark Theissen of the Washington post floated the idea of sending them to Gitmo. The US base on the island of Cuba just celebrated it's 115th year in operation, and has been used as a detention facility for all sorts of baddies since 2002.
What happens if these guys get set loose? Remember, ISIS started with just a few hundred fighters in the aftermath of another precipitous pullout - of iraq by US forces in 2011. In 2014, ISIS took over a third of Iraq with only about 700 fighters, although the area they took over was Sunni area, so it was essentially friendly territory for them. The move to withdraw before the war was truly over by the Obama administration led to ISIS, which led to hundreds of thousands of murders and millions displaced across Iraq and Syria. So it would behoove the Trump administration to learn from history and be very cautious and intentional about the signals we are sending in that region.
Now I'm not saying we need to stay there forever. Well, I HAVE made the point recently on CBN that a permanent base in Kurdistan makes sense. Check this out:
[cbn kurdistan piece]
The bottom line with these 1200 ISIS terrorists that nobody wants? Maybe instead of sending them to Gitmo, we should just skip the PC answer and send them straight to hell where they belong. That's just my opinion.
Well North Korea lost it's ambassador to Italy a couple days ago...literally. Jo Song-gil, the acting North Korean ambassador to Rome just kinda went *poof!* the other day, apparently decided the West had more to offer than the hermit kingdom. He's apparently asking for asylum and hiding out in hopes Kim Jong Un won't send an assassination squad to bring his head home in a bag. Probably a good move.
It's not really surprising that a North Korean diplomat would choose cinque terra over Pyongyang. And he's not the first one to get the idea. North Korea's ambassador to London skipped out in 2016. What's really surprising is that any North Korean who is blessed to travel outside his home country would ever go back. The residents, or should I say, prisoners who live in North Korea are kept quite literally in the dark about what the rest of the world is like. In fact, they are indoctrinated to believe that the rest of the world wants to be North Korea, if you can believe that. But once they have their eyes opened - I'm surprised anyone would ever return.
Well Italy might be okay with letting a North Korean diplomat claim asylum in their country, but they've had it up to here with asylum seekers in general. Because of their location, Italy has tended to be the first stop for many of the millions of third world denizens who brave the Mediterranean, paddling north for a better life. Unfortunately for them and for the Italian Citizens, there aren't enough jobs to go around, and what's worse, there isn't enough tax money to pay for social welfare programs to feed house and clothe all these North Africans, Syrians, and Afghans. Add to that the sharp rise in the crime rate in Italy and you are seeing a major political shift among the population.
[Italy gun store]
Italy's new government has taken a decidedly unfriendly stance toward illegal migrants, and has even started turning away migrant ships that arrive on their shores. But there are still over half a million migrants in Italy. Mostly from North or West Africa. We saw tons of them this summer when my daughter and I were traveling across the continent. Many live in crowded apartments with dozens of other migrants, and sell cheap chinese trinkets on the street.
The new crackdown on migrants in Italy has led to more and more of them making a dangerous trek across the alps to France, which is for the moment marginally friendlier to their plight. The problem is the weather. This time of year those areas in the dolomites can have many feet of snow and it's easy for these migrants to get hypothermia and stagger off a cliff...in fact thousands have died on the trek, and many aren't found until springtime.
The people who live in that area are pretty unhappy about the hordes of half-frozen africans knocking on their doors at all hours of the day and night, and some are making efforts to help these migrants get through and are being charged with crimes for doing so by the Italian police. I talked about this yesterday. Walking illegally into someone else's home should not be easy. It's not loving to make something easy that should not be easy. We should have compassion for our fellow man, but assisting him in breaking the law is not compassionate. But it's a complicated and thorny problem, and it's not going away anytime soon.
I think part of what has caused this massive wave of migration is the internet. Before the world wide web people who lived in third world countries had only the vaguest idea what the rest of the world was like. Most probably figured it was a lot like where they were born. But the advent of the multimedia information superhighway has served to shrink the distance between countries and cultures. Now, some poor goatherd in Ghana can watch Beyonce shake her tushie in trafalgar square, and then maybe decide he'd like to go see that in person. Faced with the choice of following the back end of a goat around for the rest of his life, the trek to Europe might not seem that bad.
Israel is facing more violence on it's border with Gaza - the Palestinians there have been demonstrating violently at the border wall for the past forty fridays, and every time they get rowdy - by throwing rocks and firebombs, among other things, Israel doesn't hesitate to defend it's frontier. Two weeks ago several Palestinians were killed in the riots and this last friday one was shot in the head. The Palestinians are threatening to launch rockets and use snipers if the Israelis don't stop defending themselves, to which the Israelis are probably saying, "So...business as usual then?".
Look, The Israelis have learned one lesson very well over the past sixty years. The Palestinians only speak one language - the language of violence. It's the only way they know to communicate. So if they are forced into a confrontation, the Israelis don't waste their breath trying to negotiate. They've tried that many times. But it's pretty hard to negotiate with someone whose first and only demand is that you cease to exist. So the violence there will continue, I'm afraid. Pray for peace. It's the most we can do.
Okay, one last story that cracked me up when I saw it. The British military is facing a shortage of soldiers much like the US military. Recruiting last year was reportedly short over five thousand troops. This could be because of another study I saw recently that said the average British man watches 11 years of television in his lifetime. Plus they have the same millenial problem we do here in the states. Kids who have been treated like toy poodles their whole lives are saying "Meh" to the selfless service required by the military. Besides, who wants to carry all that heavy...well anyway, the MOD in England now has an answer to their recruiting problems! The "we want snowflakes" campaign. That's....thats great. Aside from the fact that if someone is a snowflake they probably won't make the kind of soldier that you know, wins battles and stuff...somebody might want to point out to the Ministry of Defence that snowflake is a pejorative term, as is "phone zombie" and "class clown." So insulting the people you are trying to recruit before they signed up might not be the best way to fill the ranks. Just saying.
Okay, that's it for today's show. Please like and share this podcast, and subscribe over at patreon.com/hotzone, and you'll get free books, bonus content and more. I'm Chuck Holton, and I'll see you back on Monday right here on the Hot Zone.
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