RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Christian Orthodox Church, which holds an important place in an insurgent Russia, has described its government’s fight against the Islamic State and other jihadi opposition groups in Syria as a “holy war.”

According to Vsevolod Chaplin, head of the Church’s Public Affairs Department:

The fight with terrorism is a holy battle and today our country is perhaps the most active force in the world fighting it. The Russian Federation has made a responsible decision on the use of armed forces to defend the People of Syria from the sorrows caused by the arbitrariness of terrorists. Christians are suffering in the region with the kidnapping of clerics and the destruction of churches. Muslims are suffering no less.

This is not some new gimmick to justify intervention in Syria. For years, Russia’s Orthodox leaders have been voicing their concern for persecuted Christians. Back in February 2012, Vladimir Putin met with representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church. They described to him the horrific treatment Christians are experiencing around the world, especially the Muslim world:

The head of External Church Relations, Metropolitan Illarion, said that every five minutes one Christian was dying for his or her faith in some part of the world, specifying that he was talking about such countries as Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan and India. The cleric asked Putin to make the protection of Christians one of the foreign policy directions in future.

“This is how it will be, have no doubt,” Putin answered.

Vladimir Putin’s air forces are deliberately targeting U.S.-backed Syrian rebels. China is building islands in disputed waters in the South China Sea and militarizing them with airfields, ports and antiaircraft and radar sites. This is what escalation looks like. Either the Obama administration responds to the danger of aggressive powers undermining or directly attacking U.S. interests, or it will risk the erosion of America’s position abroad and invite conflict with Moscow and Beijing.

Escalation takes many forms. In the 1930s, Hitler nibbled and carved away parts of Central Europe for several years before invading Poland. The Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931 and China proper in 1937 before deciding on a coordinated attack on Southeast Asia and Pearl Harbor. During the 1990s, al Qaeda escalated from bombing U.S. naval vessels and embassies to preparing for 9/11. What these cases have in common is that the great powers failed to deter the aggressors, emboldening them to ever larger actions.

Americans love to name places after legislators, mayors and presidents. I have a suggestion. Perhaps New York’s Gowanus Canal should have its name altered. The waterway has been described as “a fetid corpse of water” after decades of industrial dumping and “a toxic-swamp of a river that crawls through much of south Brooklyn.” I can think of several pols that merit the honor.

However, now that President McKinley has been dismounted, the choice may not suit because it is named after after “Gouwane” chief among the Lenape tribe called the Canarsee, who lived and farmed on the shorelines.
In that case, how about the Waste Transfer Station on the upper East side of New York?

A delighted Mick Jagger just visited the Stalinist nation that criminalized his music and herded many of its listeners into forced-labor camps at Soviet bayonet-point as punishment.

The visit was reported by the proud Stalinist regime’s captive (literally!) press this week.

The exact purpose of the visit was not ascertained but the Rolling Stones (renown for their tributes to black music and musicians) seem to be planning a concert sponsored by the lily-white regime that jailed and tortured the most and longest-suffering black political prisoners in the modern history of the Western hemisphere.

In fact, this Castroite jailing and torture of blacks took a nice uptick precisely during Jagger’s visit.

Back in 1985 Rolling Stones’ guitarists Keith Richards and Ron Wood proudly joined Artists United Against Apartheid and played on the ad-hoc music group’s anti-Apartheid anthem titled: “Sun City.” Sun City was a resort in segregationist South Africa during the 1980’s (but this resort wasn’t itself subject to segregationist laws.)