RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Nigerian terror group reflects the general Islamist hatred of women’s rights. When will the West wake up?

Since the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria last month, the meaning of Boko Haram—the name used by the terrorist group that seized the girls—has become more widely known. The translation from the Hausa language is usually given in English-language media as “Western Education Is Forbidden,” though “Non-Muslim Teaching Is Forbidden” might be more accurate.

But little attention has been paid to the group’s formal Arabic name: Jam’at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-da’wa wal-Jihad. That roughly translates as “The Fellowship of the People of the Tradition for Preaching and Holy War.” That’s a lot less catchy than Boko Haram but significantly more revealing about the group and its mission. Far from being an aberration among Islamist terror groups, as some observers suggest, Boko Haram in its goals and methods is in fact all too representative.

The kidnapping of the schoolgirls throws into bold relief a central part of what the jihadists are about: the oppression of women. Boko Haram sincerely believes that girls are better off enslaved than educated. The terrorists’ mission is no different from that of the Taliban assassin who shot and nearly killed 15-year-old Pakistani Malala Yousafzai—as she rode a school bus home in 2012—because she advocated girls’ education. As I know from experience, nothing is more anathema to the jihadists than equal and educated women.

How to explain this phenomenon to baffled Westerners, who these days seem more eager to smear the critics of jihadism as “Islamophobes” than to stand up for women’s most basic rights? Where are the Muslim college-student organizations denouncing Boko Haram? Where is the outrage during Friday prayers? These girls’ lives deserve more than a Twitter TWTR +4.24% hashtag protest.

Organizations like Boko Haram do not arise in isolation. The men who establish Islamist groups, whether in Africa (Nigeria, Somalia, Mali), Southeast Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan), or even Europe (U.K., Spain and the Netherlands), are members of long-established Muslim communities, most of whose members are happy to lead peaceful lives. To understand why the jihadists are flourishing, you need to understand the dynamics within those communities.

So, imagine an angry young man in any Muslim community anywhere in the world. Imagine him trying to establish an association of men dedicated to the practice of the Sunnah (the tradition of guidance from the Prophet Muhammad ). Much of the young man’s preaching will address the place of women. He will recommend that girls and women be kept indoors and covered from head to toe if they are to venture outside. He will also condemn the permissiveness of Western society.

What kind of response will he meet? In the U.S. and in Europe, some moderate Muslims might quietly draw him to the attention of authorities. Women might voice concerns about the attacks on their freedoms. But in other parts of the world, where law and order are lacking, such young men and their extremist messages thrive.

He’s flogging disaster scenarios to promote his political agenda.

Supervising the Earth’s climate—or at least believing humanity can achieve such miracles—may be the only political project grandiose enough for President Obama. So it shouldn’t surprise that after reforming health care and raising taxes, the White House is now getting the global-warming band back together, though it is still merely playing the old classics of unscientific panic.

On Wednesday the White House released the quadrennial National Climate Assessment, an 829-page report. The theme is that “this is not some distant problem of the future. This is a problem that is affecting Americans right now,” as Mr. Obama told lovable weather personality Al Roker.

His “Today Show” interview was one of eight hits with television meteorologists to promote the report, part of a coordinated political campaign to scare Americans into supporting his anticarbon tax-and-regulation agenda. The report is designed to dramatize the supposed immediacy of climate change by concentrating on droughts, floods, heat waves, torrential rains, wildfires, polar-vortex winters and other indicia of the end of days. Everybody “gets” the weather.

But as a marketing exercise, the report has the feel of that infomercial footage of the people who can’t crack an egg or perform routine household tasks until they acquire this or that as-seen-on-TV product. The cautious findings of serious empirical climate literature are so obviously exaggerated and colored that the document is best understood as a political tract with a few scientific footnotes.

For instance, the report’s “overview” summary asserts that “extreme weather events with links to climate change have become more frequent and/or intense,” climate change is already “disrupting people’s lives,” and “this evidence tells an unambiguous story.” Good thing we’ve been building that ark in the backyard.

Last Friday, the Black Sea port of Odessa saw the worst fighting and loss of life since the Ukrainian crisis began in February.

About 40 people were killed when a pro-Russian mob of about 2,000 attacked a police headquarters and dozens were barricaded in a building that was set afire. The Kiev government continues to blame Russian security forces for the fighting but the world’s reaction is entirely blasé. It’s as if the Western world has already accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s action in taking the Crimea by force and subversion, and is now prepared to accept him doing the same to the entire Ukraine.

Ukraine is not, as the headlines tell us, descending into civil war. Rather, it’s defending against a Russian-instigated insurgency, a bloodier version of what Russia did to take over the Crimea. Let’s remember that the crisis began when Ukrainians revolted against their pro-Moscow president, Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Moscow when protests against his effort to strengthen ties to Russia ignited a rebellion.

Putin crafted an insurgency that deployed Russian special forces troops in key spots in the Crimea and quickly forced the Ukrainian government, by then headed by interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, to withdraw from the entire peninsula.

Last week, Yatsenyuk blamed Russian security services for the loss of life, saying, “What happened in Odessa was part of a plan by the Russian Federation to destroy Ukraine and its statehood.” He is obviously correct. Russia — Putin, that is — is patiently and determinately taking over the Ukraine. His forces — special operations troops and others, wearing masks and no identification on their uniforms — continue to propel the insurgency.

As NATO commander US Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove predicted last week, what we’re most likely to see in the coming weeks is for Putin to “…continue doing what he’s doing, discrediting the [Ukrainian] government, creating unrest, trying to set the stage for a separatist movement” to ensure Moscow maintained a hold on eastern Ukraine.

The wonder of it is how come we have so much but know so little. I have just discovered that my TV has 800 different channels.

I remember when there were only three.

I also remember when those three networks gave no more than five minutes of news. Five minutes and we called it a day.

Then someone suggested, “Let’s try fifteen,” and even the wisest honchos thought that to be too much.

Television was only expected to provide a taste of what’s happening. For depth there was the daily newspaper.

When 15 minutes of TV news worked out, someone else suggested going for a half hour (minus commercials) and the experts thought he was nuts. But it made sense when along around this time the JFK assassination provoked a demand for more comprehensive broadcast coverage.

Then this! In a move thought to be corporate suicide, KYW in Philadelphia switched from music to ALL news ALL the time in 1965 to become one of the first radio stations in the nation to take such a risk. It took a while but it caught on, big, and after a long stint as columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, before switching to novels, I came along as KYW editor in the 1980s, so I saw it all close-up.

In his now infamous September 14, 2012 email, Benjamin Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting, had it exactly backwards. The September 11, 2012 attacks on the Cairo embassy and the Benghazi consulate were rooted in a broad failure of policy, not an internet video, which was later politically transformed by the Obama Administration from a pretext to the cause of the attacks.

The planned demonstration outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was announced on August 30, 2012 by the Salafist Gamaa Islamiyya (IG), a State Department-designated terrorist group. It was designed to protest the ongoing imprisonment of its spiritual leader, Sheikh Omar abdel Rahman, who is serving a life sentence for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Interest in the anti-Islam video titled “Innocence of Muslims” spread throughout the Egyptian media beginning on September 8, 2012, when Khaled Abdullah, an ultraconservative Salafi, showed it on the Egyptian al-Nas channel.

Spontaneous anger over the video has been widely cited as the cause of the embassy protest in Cairo, but clear evidence shows that jihadists including senior members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), a group that merged with al Qaeda, and a senior IG leader who has longstanding ties to al Qaeda’s senior leadership used clips from that film that appeared on Egyptian television as a pretext to incite a mob.

After meetings between the American political officer and the Salafists, the embassy leadership in Cairo attempted to mitigate the video’s impact by releasing a statement before the protest (6am Washington time) distancing the United States from its content. The press release was requested by Deputy Chief of Mission Marc Sievers, written by visiting public affairs officer Larry Schwartz and approved after release by Ambassador Anne Patterson, who was on route to Washington DC.

“The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”

Critics have gushed over “Ida,” the new film by Pawel Pawlikowski, perhaps mesmerized by the moody gray cinematography that telegraphs the message that this somber art film is weighty and meaningful. The plot concerns a young novitiate about to take her vows who is sent by the Mother Superior to meet her only living relative, a woman who had previously spurned the convent’s attempts to summon her. Obediently, the young laconic woman goes to meet this unknown aunt from whom she discovers that she is actually a Jew whose parents were killed during the holocaust. Unfortunately, this film comes after this year’s “The Jewish Cardinal,” “Aftermath,” “The German Doctor” and numerous movies from previous years that touch on the subject of what happened to the Jews of Poland. We are no longer shocked or even startled by the news that a young Polish nun in the 1960’s might have been a Jewish child – orphaned, rescued and brought to a convent.

Neither is the actress who plays the part of Ida – her expression remains unchanged throughout most of the movie as she impassively observes the people and situations of life outside the convent without appearing to emotionally absorb them. Though eventually she hears the details of her parents’ violent murder and recaptures their bones for proper burial in a cemetery, Ida remains an enigmatic cipher. She is far less interesting than her flamboyant and tortured aunt who rescues the film from monotony by her self-flagellation for the sins of her communist past and one additional tragedy that cuts much closer to the bone. This performance by Agata Kulesza, though vivid and varied, relies too heavily on the Bette Davis props of constant smoking and drinking as shorthand for character development. Remembering the subtlety of Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Sophie in that eponymously titled movie makes you realize the difference between the visceral feeling of plunging into a character’s soul as opposed to watching an actor find devices to keep her hands busy. I don’t expect every actor to be compared with Meryl Streep but I like to think that critics reserve their superlatives for only those rare great performances, not ones for which the words “well done” would suffice.

Rejection by Nigel Farage, head of Britain’s UKIP, and Morten Messerschmidt, lead candidate for the Danish People’s Party in the up-coming European elections effectively dashes Marine Le Pen’s hopes of presiding over an influential 7-country Eurexit group at the EU Parliament. The main issue is anti-Semitism.

While granting that National Front leader Marine Le Pen has shown courage and perspicacity on some crucial issues, Nigel Farage says she has failed to rid the party of its endemic anti-Semitism.

In a mail to Dispatch International, MEP Morten Messerschmidt writes that from the beginning he has distanced himself from theNational Front.
“As I read the party and its history, it has deep anti-Semitic roots. Regrettably it seems to attract support. This can only be explained by the fact that the other French parties have failed the French people, who only have the National Front to vote for if they want to express their criticism of the EU,” says Messerschmidt.
“At the election in 2009, Nicolas Sarkozy managed to appeal to EU-skeptical Frenchmen by criticizing the EU’s immigration policy and open borders. But today they have been forced into the arms of Le Pen. That is a bad omen for France and Europe. I will not cooperate with a party like the National Front,” says Morten Messerschmidt.