RUTHFULLY YOURS

Today, the ills of the Middle East are often blamed on colonialism, imperialism or ‘Satans’ great or small. Nonsense, argues the author.

By 1947 the British, who had ruled mandatory Palestine since 1917, lost the will to remain. Their exhaustion was the catalyst for the 1947-48 war and the establishment of Israel. As Sir Alan Cunningham, the British High Commissioner, told the head of Jewish settlement, David Ben-Gurion, who would go on to become Israel’s first prime minister: “The British people are bloody fed up with the whole mess.”

After two costly wars, the disappointments of the misnamed Arab Spring, and the ever-worsening situation in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, Americans can be forgiven for flirting with a similar sentiment today. No doubt some of the support for the feckless Iran deal stems from fatigue at the prospect of confronting another enemy in a region that seems to confound us.

In “The Tail Wags the Dog,” Efraim Karsh cautions against a total mental and literal withdrawal from the Middle East. Yet the author, a longtime professor at King’s College London now teaching in Israel, does propose a certain strategic humility: “Just as no foreign surgeon could have saved the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ (as the Ottoman Empire was famously known) unless he helped himself, so no ‘only remaining superpower’ can fix the Middle East’s endemic malaise,” he writes.

In his fast-paced history of British, American and Russian involvement in the Middle East since World War I, Mr. Karsh argues that foreign powers have had a much more limited impact on regional politics than is sometimes assumed. Success stories like the emergence of Turkey as a secular modern state in the 1920s was not due to British and French foresight but to the near-genius statecraft of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979 was the result of local factors seized upon by local players rather than American diplomacy.

If Hillary Clinton loses this election, it won’t be because of Bernie Sanders. It won’t be because of Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush or Carly Fiorina. It will be because of a 1966 statute.

The Clintons are street fighters, and over their scandal-plagued years they have mastered outwitting the press, Congress, the Justice Department, even special prosecutors. But the reason Mrs. Clinton isn’t winning her latest scandal is because she faces a new opponent—one she can’t beat: the Freedom of Information Act.

Of all the Clinton email revelations this week, none compared with a filing by the State Department in federal Judge Emmet Sullivan’s court in Washington on Monday. The filing was a response to a FOIA lawsuit brought in March by conservative organization Citizens United. The group demanded documents from Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state related to the Clinton Foundation and to the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya. What the State Department revealed was a testament to the power of FOIA.

Congressional investigators can subpoena documents, but even if after long delays they get them, the investigators must trust that the agency handed over everything. The agency usually doesn’t. Under FOIA, by contrast, the agency is required by law to provide plaintiffs with a complete inventory and broad description of every document it has that pertains to the request—but is withholding. This is known as a Vaughn index. The State Department on Monday handed over its Vaughn index to Citizens United and, boy, are these email descriptions revealing.

Vladimir Putin’s Syria strategy is working better than perhaps even he had hoped. The Russian arms flowing into the Latakia military base in western Syria are already propping up his ally Bashar Assad’s teetering government. Now they’re ending the Russian President’s diplomatic isolation, as President Obama agreed Thursday to meet with him next week during the U.N. General Assembly in New York.

“Given the situations in Ukraine and Syria, despite our profound differences with Moscow, the President believes that it would be irresponsible not to test whether we can make progress through high-level engagement with the Russians,” a senior administration official said on Thursday. Translation: Russia is blowing up Mr. Obama’s Syria and Iraq strategy, and he’d better see what the Kremlin strongman wants.

Like wedding anniversaries, state visits by foreign leaders are occasions to celebrate the positive, and that’s what the Obama Administration will stress as Chinese President Xi Jinping tours the U.S. this week. Get ready for an announcement about arms-control in cyberspace, a progress report on a bilateral investment treaty, and bromides about mutual friendship.

These columns have rooted for China’s emergence as a major U.S. trading partner and responsible global power since Deng Xiaoping became the first Chinese Communist leader to visit the U.S. in 1979. And we’ve had more than a few occasions to score China-bashers in Washington, whether over protectionist steel tariffs or allegations of Beijing’s “currency manipulation.”

But it is now impossible to ignore that China is attempting to redefine its relationship to America and the rules of world order. Under Mr. Xi, Beijing sees itself as a strategic rival rather than a partner. Its foreign policy is increasingly aggressive, sometimes lawless, a reality that’s become clear even to the Obama Administration. The U.S. needs to show that it will resist this behavior—even as it seeks to steer China’s leadership back toward global norms.

In 1992, the so-called “Threat and risk evaluation” (Hot- och riskutredningen) established that the government should have the option to seize property, especially summer homes, from the Swedish people in a time of crisis.

Husein wants a Swedish passport so he can go back to the country he claims to have escaped from — to “visit his mom and establish business contacts.”

Despite his systematic criminal activity, he received only a four-year prison sentence, and will not have to face deportation.

“The Immigration Service has hired the activists. They are now officials at the authority!” – Employee at Swedish Immigration Service.

“The situation affects everyone who live and stays in our little county. The climate has grown tougher, many people feel scared and unsafe and with that comes the risk of increased xenophobia, antagonism and exclusion.” – From a letter to the government from local politicians in county of Örkelljunga. The county swiftly received criticism from the mainstream media; and on August 27, the Immigration Service let it be known that they have no intention of helping Örkelljunga.

August 3: After Ahmad El-Moghrabi, 21, who has no driver’s license, was indicted for driving like a madman through the city of Malmö in February, and nearly killing a mother and baby, he traveled in a luxury Mercedes along with some other Arabs, one of whom is a well-known extremist, when the police pulled the car over. But instead of stopping, El-Moghrabi sped away at about 90 mph on the busy inner city street Amiralsgatan, where the speed limit is 25 mph.

Last week both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security warned of risks associated with the emerging Internet of Things. The term IoT often refers to devices that are readable, recognizable, locatable, and controllable via the Internet. Gartner estimates there will be around 26 billion networked devices on the Internet of Things by 2020. Certainly, there are many risks inherent with so many objects connected to networks, but there are also many smart technologies that can enhance security and DHS’s mission to protect the nation.

In public safety, sensors, embedded security systems and surveillance cameras that can monitor public behavior are becoming a norm. In 2005 in London, closed-circuit TV cameras helped lead to the identification of those who carried out the attack on London’s subway and bus systems. More recently, the identification of the prime suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing came in part through security-camera images. Because of the limitations of personnel to constantly patrol areas of cities, surveillance monitoring by video and acoustic devices have enabled law enforcement to magnify their reach and also keep an electronic record of forensic evidence.

How many times has it been said or written sarcastically of us Balkans heretics that “The place she wants you to worry about for terrorism is not in the Middle East or Pakistan, but in the Balkans. She wants you to think that Bosnia/Kosovo is the next Afghanistan.”

Well, over the past three years more and more people have gotten the memo that ISIS is setting up its Great White Hope in Bosnia and Kosovo, while recruits from both continue topping the numbers, proportionally speaking.

It has something to do with the fact that the West created Afghanistan-like potential “in the heart of Europe,” as the Balkans are again emphatically being called, this time not to dramatize some desperately concocted genocide “in the heart of Europe,” but to underscore the juxtaposition of the Middle East making its way into Europe, which is happening thanks in large part to that early help from media and governments in concocting that genocide and the wars they justified with it.

This European Middle East we facilitated is precisely what the Caliphate had pinned its hopes on for infiltrating Europe more expeditiously. How many times have we few tried to explain this, and in how many different ways, in response to criticisms that we were mischaracterizing the vast majority of secular, European, moderate, pro-American “Kosovars” and “Bosniaks,” as if that were the point.

It has been a while since the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the largest and most influential professional body for the study of the region, whose 2,700-plus members inhabit departments of Middle East studies throughout the world, dropped its original designation as a “non-political learned society” to become a hotbed of anti-Israel invective. So deep has the rot settled that the association seems totally oblivious (or rather indifferent) to the fact that its recent endorsement of the anti-Israel de-legitimization campaign, and attendant efforts to obstruct the containment of resurgent anti-Semitism on U.S. campuses, have effectively crossed the thin line between “normal” Israel-bashing and classical Jew baiting.

On February 15 of this year, a MESA referendum approved a resolution, passed by the membership during the association’s annual meeting three months earlier, which not only lauded the “calls for [anti-Israel] institutional boycott, divestment, and/or sanctions [BDS]” as “legitimate forms of non-violent political action” and deplored opposition to these exclusionary moves as an assault on the freedom of speech, but “strongly urge[d] MESA program committees to organize discussions at MESA annual meetings, and the MESA Board of Directors to create opportunities over the course of the year that provide platforms for a sustained discussion of the academic boycott and foster careful consideration of an appropriate position for MESA to assume.”

What would Eleanor Roosevelt say about the election of Saudi Arabia’s Geneva ambassador Faisal Trad, as Chair of the United Nation Human Rights Council’s monitoring panel?
She would wonder how Saudi Arabia, which refused to sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 because it did not comply with sharia, had any representation at the UNHRC.
Instead, the Saudis worked hard to inflict the West with willful blindness. For decades they fuelled Western greed with petrodollars until they achieved the desired result. Led by the Untied States, which during Mrs. Roosevelt’s time symbolized freedom, the West was ready to sell out its core moral principal – the protection of Human Rights.

Back in March 2007, the then newly elected U.N. Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, opened the 4th Human Rights Council session, declaring: “All victims of human rights abuses should be able to look to the Human Rights Council as a forum and a springboard for action.” Now, with the Saudi at the helm, the message is clear: the UNHRC is the springboard to hell.
The Saudi ascendance to a chair at the UNHRC’s monitoring panel began in November 2013 with the election of the Wahhabi sharia-ruled Saudi Kingdom as a member of the organization. The U.S. did not protest.

The Pope could have used his forum in Congress to call attention to the plight of Christians

Unlike Communist Cuba, America hasn’t seized and nationalized Catholic churches and schools. It hasn’t locked up Catholic clergy or installed surveillance equipment in their homes. It hasn’t denounced the Catholic church as “exploiters” and “fascists”. And yet Pope Francis, who had few criticisms of Cuba, came to Congress to denounce the collision between Americans and Indians, and to urge the United States to take in illegal aliens without regard for the law.

There’s a condemnation of the death penalty. Never mind that in the US, the death penalty is used after extensive appeals against some of the worst monsters imaginable, unlike Cuba, where it was used to massacre political opponents of the Castro crime family. And condemnations of selling weapons. Much of this is couched in vague language, but it’s still a sharp contrast from the visit to Cuba.

The Pope even threw in a backhanded defense of Islam…

Our world is increasingly a place of violent conflict, hatred and brutal atrocities, committed even in the name of God and of religion. We know that no religion is immune from forms of individual delusion or ideological extremism. This means that we must be especially attentive to every type of fundamentalism, whether religious or of any other kind…

But there is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners.