RUTHFULLY YOURS

This week the New York Times – to much fanfare — has dedicated its entire magazine to the story of “how the Arab world came apart.” Called “Fractured Lands,” the title over-promises. It offers a snapshot of a region in crisis, not an explanation for its collapse. Any examination of Arab disunity that focuses — as the Times does — on the Iraq War and the Arab Spring is going to grotesquely narrow an inquiry that depends on more than a thousand years of competing (and sometimes complementary) religious, tribal, and political forces.

In other words, the piece suffers a bit from recency bias — the temptation to over-use recent experience to explain present trends. But it’s still an important read. It’s a painstakingly reported examination of the lives of activists, former militants, migrants, and soldiers from Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Kurdistan. And in their stories one sees all the symptoms of one of the Middle East’s two terrible diseases — tribalism.

Reading their accounts — wonderfully written, by the way — it’s extraordinary challenging to sort through all the competing factions and shifting loyalties. The Kurds appear united to the outside world but are in reality divided by their own factions. Syrians shift loyalties in the civil war with alacrity, with militias hopping from faction to faction. Egyptians — despite living in a land with perhaps the strongest national identity in the Muslim Middle East — are torn between strongmen and Islamic fundamentalists. ISIS arises, and even some of its fighters join mainly to settle local scores or to earn handsome paychecks.

Indeed, one is tempted to simply reject the whole region. Where are the good guys? Where is even the possibility of not just a happy ending but any sort of lasting peace? The author, Scott Anderson, highlights the argument that enduring peace will only follow splits along tribal, sectarian, or ethnic lines, but he’s shrewd (and experienced) enough to know that there is simply no easy path to stability.

And that’s not just because of tribalism. There is a second disease that plagues the Middle East, and it’s present mainly at the margins of Anderson’s story. It’s the disease that keeps us from throwing our hands in the air and leaving the region to work out its own problems. Competing with tribalism is universalist, aggressive, jihadist Islam. Anderson quotes a young Syrian who declares that “ISIS isn’t just an organization, it’s an idea.” Yes indeed it is. It’s an idea with ancient roots in the Islamic faith, and it’s an idea that not only once conquered the Middle East and vast sections of Africa and Asia, it very nearly conquered Europe.

ZURICH—Swiss police said Sunday that a 34-year-old woman has died as a result of injuries from an attack a day earlier on a train in eastern Switzerland that also wounded five others.

The alleged assailant, an unnamed 27-year-old man, also died from injuries sustained in the attack, police said Sunday.

Armed with a knife, the man poured flammable liquids that caught fire on the train, police in the canton of St. Gallen said in a statement. The wounded were taken to local hospitals, among them a child whose injuries were considered serious, police said Sunday.

Police said the assailant’s motive was unclear and there was no evidence that the attack was politically motivated or related to terrorism.

The authorities searched the home of the man, who didn’t have a criminal record in St. Gallen or his neighboring home canton, but the results weren’t made public.

The incident, which was captured on video, happened at 2:20 p.m. local time on Saturday as the train neared the station in Salez, near the border with Liechtenstein. According to police, a passenger who was standing on the rail platform dragged the alleged attacker from the train. The footage indicates that the alleged perpetrator acted alone, police said Sunday.

The wounded included two women aged 17 and 43, and two men aged 17 and 50 in addition to the child.

SAN’A Yemen—An airstrike on a school purportedly carried out by the Saudi-led coalition fighting Houthi rebels in Yemen killed at least 10 children and wounded dozens more on Saturday, Yemeni officials and aid workers said.

The Islamic school said in a statement that the strike in Saada, deep in the Houthis’ northern heartland, was part of raids that have resumed against the rebels after peace talks collapsed earlier this month.

Aid group Doctors Without Borders condemned the attack on social media, saying the 10 killed and 28 injured were between 8 and 15 years old. The school released some of the names of those killed.

The conflict in Yemen pits the internationally recognized government backed by the Saudi-led coalition against the Shiite Muslim rebels, who captured the capital in September 2014.

The war has left a security vacuum throughout parts of the country. Both al Qaeda and its rival militant group, the Islamic State, have exploited the turmoil and expanded their footprint in the country’s southern region.

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/ RISKING RETRIBUTION AGAINST HERSELF AND HER FAMILY My brave friend Darya Safai again risked retribution from Rouhani’s Iranian regime after she held up a sign at the Rio Olympics Iranian volleyball match asking that women be permitted to attend matches in Iran. Darya has been forced to live in exile from what New York […]

Across the African continent, black children and teenagers are being kidnapped and raped in routine recruitment tactics for various Islamic terrorist groups. In Nigeria, Boko Haram has taken children as young as 5, forcing them to use weapons, to witness beheadings and to agree to kill even their parents if necessary. It’s estimated that Boko Haram has taken 10,000 boys as well as many hundreds of girls, subjecting them to starvation, torture, drugs, rape and pregnancy, jihadist videos and becoming suicide bombers themselves. In Yemen, Somali and Mali, Al Qaeda has done the same. Yet Black Lives Matter, the militant organization headed by people who call themselves African/American has said little to nothing about this continuing enslavement and murder of its own kin.

Instead, Black Lives Matter has focused on Israel , which it accuses of genocide of brown people – not black. It calls for ending U.S. military aid to Israel which is described as an “apartheid state.” It stands in solidarity with BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) and with Muslim people despite the daily deadly violence perpetrated by Muslims specifically against African blacks. No mention of ISIS or any other terrorist group which enslaves young blacks by the most barbaric tactics. Why bother to use African as part of your ethnic identification if you are determined to ignore the fate of your own people? How do other Black activists and leaders reconcile their own failure to rally against these horrific abuses at the UN, in front of the White House , in Union Square and the various other public forums they have used as venues for their protests. And how shameful that the very same organization that is seeking reparations for slavery two centuries ago has blinded itself to current mass slavery and its ravages.

Jews in the United States have a long history of standing in the forefront of civil rights activism and blacks perversely , have a long history of anti-semitic railing against the very people who have contributed so much to their liberation. Their embrace of Islam in the face of Islamic brutality in Africa is a sober reminder of how politics make strange bedfellows and how important causes can be dangerously subverted by the notion of inter-sectionality. The plight of young African blacks has nothing in common with Islamic Palestinians who are neither enslaved, tortured , kidnapped, starved or raped. What they do both share is being oppressed by Muslims; the former by radical terrorists and the latter by their own leadership which refuses to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state, preferring to keep Palestinians in the faux state of “refugee” status indefinitely rather than make that concession to reality. Black Lives Matter loses both credibility and rationality by espousing the Palestinian cause instead of showing solidarity with the African/ black victims of radical Islam.