RUTHFULLY YOURS

“When in Rome, do as the Romans do” evidently does not apply to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. During his visit to Rome this week, Rouhani was spared an encounter with ancient nude Roman statues. Nude statues at Rome’s Capitoline Museums, including a centuries-old Venus, were covered up in deference to Rouhani’s Islamic faith, as the Iranian president proceeded to meet with Italian government officials and sign 17 agreements with Italy. This was but the latest exercise in ongoing European submission to Muslim cultural norms in the name of multiculturalism.

Responding to backlash, Italian government officials tried to cover up whom had actually decided on the statues’ covering. Italy’s culture minister even took it upon himself – belatedly – to criticize the decision as “incomprehensible.” For his part, Rouhani denied that his government had requested such statuary modesty, but he was appreciative of the gesture nevertheless. “I thank you for this,” he said when asked about the temporary accommodation.

Submission to Iran’s Islamic cultural norms not only does a disservice to Italy’s own rich history and culture. It sends the wrong signal to Iranian citizens living in Iran, who are trying to seek more individual freedoms.

An Iranian women’s group, My Stealthy Freedom, posted a scathing criticism of the statue covering in a Facebook page addressed to Italian news outlets and female politicians:

“As you know, your country has just censored some of your highly celebrated artwork in a bid to welcome the delegation from the Islamic Republic of Iran. This censorship reminds us the way that the Iranian regime has been forcing millions of women in Iran to cover up. The politicians of our country, regardless of whether a woman is Muslim or not, force women in Iran to cover up and their justification is, ‘You, as a woman, should be shrouded in front of my eyes in order not to provoke me’. This way of thinking is completely unacceptable.”

“Italy, for the sake of pleasing the Islamic Republic, has not hesitated to conceal some of the masterpieces of its own history, which gives the impression that for them respecting the requirements of the Islamic Republic and its unpopular laws take precedence over their own history and cultural heritage. One has to bear in mind that these same laws are being challenged by millions of Iranian women who have been risking all kinds of dangers in Iran to be themselves.”

“Why should we children have to grow up in such fear?”

That is the very reasonable question 16-year-old German teenager Bibi Wilhailm asks, in her 20-minute YouTube video, garnering her some much-needed recognition in cyberspace. Her video had first appeared on Facebook, but was taken down for reasons that still remain unclear.

But Wilhailm doesn’t seem to care too much for fame. In her first ever YouTube appearance, she says she only wants her old life back. It is a life that she describes as “toll” (fantastic), before Chancellor Angela Merkel allowed one million, mostly male and Muslim, refugees into Germany last fall. Since then, Wilhailm says, “life has become very unsafe on the streets for young women like me and my friends.”

“This is the truth. We are no longer allowed to walk outside,” said Wilhailm. “We are no longer allowed to wear our clothes. We are no longer allowed to live the German life. This is the sad truth.”

Wilhaim’s fears are neither unfounded nor exaggerated. A security official as prominent as the police chief of Vienna, Gerhard Purstl, confirmed Wilhailm’s claim when he warned women not to venture out at night alone and to “avoid suspicious-looking areas.” Purstl’s warning came after several sex attacks in Austria by migrants.

If anyone possessed any doubts about Muslim migrant attitudes toward the ‘infidel’ women of their host countries, these doubts should have been painfully and publicly dispelled last New Year’s Eve at Cologne’s central train station. A thousand of the new arrivals, mostly young Arab men, gathered there that evening and, like packs of hyenas, molested hundreds of women, raping several.

“We are so scared,” said Wilhailm, expressing the fear young women are now forced to face. “We don’t want to be scared to go to the grocery store alone after sunset.”

Twelve years ago, I wrote a small book, The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God, in which I argued that Europe’s fecklessness in the face of both its own domestic problems and the jihadist threat was the logical, if deeply disturbing, result of what I styled a “crisis of civilizational morale.” This indictment did not go down well on the banks of the Charles River, where the Harvard eminento Stanley Hoffmann cleared his Gallic throat, harrumphed, and informed the readers of Foreign Affairs that my book was a “rambling attack on contemporary European secularism [written] with a condescension exceeding that of Robert Kagan.” I hope Professor Hoffmann, prior to his death last September, never learned that Bob Kagan used to play third base on a softball team that had Scooter Libby at shortstop and me at second base; who knows what nightmares of conspiracy would have plagued his latter years?

In any event, I do wonder what Professor Hoffmann, from his present position on the Other Side, thinks of recent events in Italy, where the government of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi covered the nude sculptures in Rome’s Capitoline Museum, and then denied his dinner guests wine, in order not to offend the sensibilities of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani and thereby not inhibit Italy’s entrepreneurs from getting their share of the post-Iranian-nuclear-“deal” swag. For if those gestures of cravenness were not evidence of a crisis of civilizational morale in its terminal, or hospice-care, stage, I’m not sure what would be.

The tender-minded will, I suppose, suggest that Renzi’s surrender to the aesthetic and culinary mores of the seventh-century Arabian peninsula were gestures of respect for difference and, coupled with the fulsome reception President Rouhani received in the Vatican, signs of a new opening to interreligious dialogue with the dominant Iranian form of Shia Islam. Two incidents from the life of Pope St. John Paul II, who knew something about both civilizational morale and interreligious dialogue, ought to put paid to such self-demeaning rubbish.

Among ISIS’s exploits, satellite photos now show, was the destruction in 2014 of St. Elijah, Iraq’s oldest Christian monastery.

The Guardian reports that it was 1,400 years old and had “26 distinctive rooms including a sanctuary and chapel.” The photos reveal that its “walls have been literally pulverized.”

“St. Elijah’s,” The Guardian notes, “joins a growing list of more than 100 religious and historic sites looted and destroyed [by ISIS], including mosques, tombs, shrines and churches. Ancient monuments in the cities of Nineveh, Palmyra and Hatra lie in ruins. Museums and libraries have been pillaged, books burned, artwork crushed or trafficked.”

Second only to the terror group’s horrific crimes against living human beings are these erasures of treasures of history and faith, evoking universal shock and outrage.

There is one part of the Middle East, though, where a people’s attachment to treasures of history and faith does not seem to count. When it comes to the West Bank (or Judea and Samaria) and the Golan Heights, the U.S. administration and the European Union have been upping the pressure on Israel to regard these areas—rich in biblical and historical sites—as something it has no rights to at all.

The EU had already announced in November that it would be labeling Israeli products from these areas as “made in settlements” instead of “made in Israel.” Israel and supporters have objected that, out of 200 territorial disputes in the world, this is the only one for which the EU resorts to labeling, evoking anti-Semitic practices. It falls on deaf ears.