RUTHFULLY YOURS

Terrorists assaulted a “Mohammed cartoon” event in Texas sponsored by activist Pamela Geller, and the response has been, in part, soul-searching over what’s wrong with Pamela Geller.

Geller is an attention-hungry provocateur who will never be mistaken for Bernard Lewis, the venerable scholar of Islam. Her Texas gathering to award a cash prize for the best cartoon of Mohammed — depictions of whom are considered offensive by many Muslims — was deliberately offensive, but so what?

Two armed Muslim men showed up intending to kill the participants, and were only thwarted when they were shot dead by a police officer who was part of the elaborate security arrangements.

Absent the security, we might have had a Charlie Hebdo–style massacre on these shores, in Garland, Texas, no less, a suburb of Dallas. (The world would be a safer and better place if the forces of civilization everywhere were as well-prepared and well-armed as they are in Texas.)

What accounts for hatred of the West by people who voluntarily spent years here?
One of the stranger things about East–West relations these days is the schizophrenic attraction to, and hatred of, Western culture that characterizes many foreign leaders and celebrities.

Did these mixed-up folk idealistically flock to the West, and then end up bitterly disappointed that their experience did not match their dreams, in the infamous manner of Sayyid Qutb (“The America That I Have Seen”)? The Egyptian intellectual Qutb leveraged his subsidized residence in Colorado into an unhinged and racist screed against Western popular culture; among his targets were provocative women, “primitive Negroes,” rampant divorce, and heartless capitalism. Qutb’s two years in the U.S. were the font of his anti-Western and Islamist thought, which he developed as a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. His work in turn inspired much of the anti-Americanism of al-Qaeda specifically and current radical Islam in general.

Mohamed Morsi was briefly president of Egypt and is the currently jailed head of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, whose attempt to create an Islamic theocracy (in one-election, one-time fashion) was thwarted by a military coup. In his year-long tenure, Morsi sought to institute Islamic law and to bargain for the freedom of the terrorist killer responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Omar Abdel-Rahman, serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison. Morsi labeled Israelis “bloodsuckers” and the “descendants of apes and pigs,” as well as claiming that Israel had no right to the territory it has occupied since 1948.

Bill Clinton recently defended his high-priced speeches by explaining that he’s “gotta pay our bills,” but Peter Schweizer’s much-discussed forthcoming book Clinton Cash suggests that there’s a sense in which Hillary Clinton has been the real family breadwinner of late.

“The really troubling thing about Bill’s speeches is the apparent correlation between his fees and Hillary’s decisions during her tenure as secretary of state,” Schweizer writes in the book, which comes out tomorrow. “The timing of the payments, the much higher than average size of some of them, and the subsequent actions taken by Hillary raise serious questions about just what those who underwrote these exorbitant fees were actually paying for.”

France is selling out Israel – just like it abandoned Czechs in 1938

Just as France betrayed Czechoslovakia to the Nazis, it wants Israel to abandon territory and buoy Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Islamic State.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius intends to propose a UN Security Council resolution that would present a framework for negotiations to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That framework will include the 1967 lines as a basis for negotiations on the border between Israel and the future Palestinian state.

In other words, Fabius, and his superior, President Francois Hollande, want Israel to abandon the territory of Judea and Samaria and turn it over to the Palestinians. The fact that control of this territory is considered of great importance to Israel’s security by the democratically elected Israeli government seems to be of little concern to them.

Je suis Charlie. French for “I am Charlie,” the phrase became a global expression of solidarity and resolve after Islamist gunmen murdered 12 people at the Paris offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.

In a terrifying copycat attack Sunday in Garland, Texas, two men with assault rifles attempted to gun down people attending an event satirizing Muhammad with cartoons. A single police officer managed to shoot and kill both gunmen before they got inside the event. With some 200 people in the building, the potential for another politicized mass murder was great.

On Monday authorities said one of the gunman, Elton Simpson of Phoenix, had been under surveillance for years because of interest he’d shown in joining jihadist groups overseas. He was found guilty of making false statements to the FBI, but a federal judge ruled there wasn’t enough evidence that Mr. Simpson’s activities were “sufficiently ‘related’ to international terrorism.”
Against this backdrop we have the extraordinary—almost comical—irony of some of America’s bien pensant intellectuals boycotting a ceremony Tuesday by the PEN American Center to confer its annual courage award for freedom of expression on Charlie Hebdo. PEN is an association of writers, and six prominent novelists—Peter Carey,Michael Ondaatje,Francine Prose,Teju Cole,Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi—have been trying to repeal the award for Charlie Hebdo.

In the early spring of 1944 a political prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp penned a letter to his wife, Käthe, in Hamburg.

“It looks like we have to count on a long separation, but we must hope strongly for a reunion,” wrote the prisoner, a doctor named Hermann da Fonseca-Wollheim. “Today is Palm Sunday, a sunny, wintry day on our mountain. Tonight at six I will listen to Furtwängler’s concert on the radio. Why don’t you, too, tune in to the radio on Sundays and then we can think about each other fervently.”

It was the last letter Käthe would receive from Hermann. Six weeks later, on May 13, she was notified of his death, supposedly of disease.

Hermann had been arrested by the Gestapo the previous August and held on charges of Ausländerfreundlichkeit, or xenophilia. He was suspected of being friendly to foreign workers, mostly forced laborers from Ukraine, whom he treated in his practice. He had also been overheard saying that sooner or later everybody would have to learn Russian, and was learning some Russian himself. It smacked of defeatism. After the July 1943 firebombing of Hamburg, the Gestapo were keen to make examples of would-be dissenters.

May 8 marks the 70th anniversary of VE Day – the end of World War II in Europe.

Images flash before us – Neville Chamberlain waving a piece of paper said to guarantee “peace for our time,” Hitler giving a stiff-arm salute at a Nuremberg rally, a Czech woman weeping as panzers rolled into Prague, a smiling FDR wearing his naval cape, his cigarette holder at a jaunty angle, Churchill flashing a victory sign, GIs wading ashore on Omaha Beach, skeletal survivors in a liberated death camp, and a Russian soldier raising the Soviet flag on the Reichstag building above the ruins of Berlin.

The war that ended on May 8, 1945 began with the Treaty of Versailles (June 28, 1919), which, despite its reputed harshness, did little to stop a resurgence of German militarism. When he saw the treaty, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, France’s last World War I commander, famously remarked: “This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.” Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 – 20 years and 65 days later.

Thanks to an infection and the antibiotics taken to rid myself of it, I have had several days of being able to do little more than watch the news on television, listen to it on the radio, and reading about it in my daily edition of The Wall Street Journal. If there was anything else happening in the world, you would not know it because it was 24-7 Baltimore, Baltimore, Baltimore.

Specifically, it was about the arrest and death of Freddie Gray, a known drug dealer and user with an extensive rap sheet. There are different descriptions of the manner of his death, but the details of the autopsy are still obscure beyond a reference to having received a blow to his spine. This is attributed to having been placed in the police van, shackled hand and foot, but not having a safety belt applied.

The response from a certain element of Baltimoreans was to begin to loot, vandalize and set fire to their own neighborhoods by way of protesting alleged police brutality. This followed his funeral on Monday. The Mayor’s response was to tell the police to stand down and let the protesters have their way. When that predictably did not work, the National Guard was called in and a curfew imposed.

When President Obama was a student at Columbia College he wrote a paper calling for the “end of nuclear weapons.” It was a time when there were similar calls for the elimination of these weapons of mass destruction; this was ostensibly an idealistic cri de coeur. Unilateral disarmament of the kind this movement demanded was seen as playing directly into the hands of a Soviet rival expanding its nuclear weapons capability.

The emergence of a multi-polar nuclear world has made the once idealistic claim seem polyannish. A unilateral reduction in U.S. nuclear forces, without a reciprocal response from other nuclear powers, only weakens the deterrent effect of our arsenal.

The purpose of the free-speech event was to highlight the threat posed by Islamic supremacists. ‘Even free-speech enthusiasts are repulsed by obnoxious expression.” That acknowledgment prefaces the main argument I’ve made in Islam and Free Speech, a just-released pamphlet in the Broadside series from Encounter Books. Alas, in view of last night’s deadly events at the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas, the argument is more timely than I’d hoped.

In Garland, two jihadists opened fire on a free-speech event that was certain to be offensive to many Muslims. The gunmen wounded a security guard before being killed when police returned fire. The jihadists are reported to be roommates who resided in Phoenix. As this is written, only one of them has been identified: Elton Simpson. The wounded security guard, Bruce Joiner, was treated and released. Joiner works for the Garland Independent School District, which owns the Culwell Center.