RUTHFULLY YOURS

Freedom and human rights have had a bad run in Latin America in the past decade. Venezuela has become a Cuban satellite and holds scores of political prisoners. Pluralism hangs by a thread in Bolivia, El Salvador and Ecuador. Yet the collapse of democracy may be most poignant in Nicaragua, which fought back against the Communist Sandinistas during the Cold War only to see them return with a vengeance amid U.S. indifference.

Last month Sandinista President Daniel Ortega purged Nicaragua’s opposition from Parliament. In November he will run for a third five-year term with his wife, Rosario Murillo, as his vice-presidential candidate. Elections under Mr. Ortega have never been transparent and he has barred international observers from this one. He has blocked serious presidential challengers, so this won’t be much of a contest.

Readers may recall how Mr. Ortega led the Sandinista revolution that toppled Anastasio Somoza in 1979 with the help of the Soviet Union. He moved quickly to establish a Communist beachhead in Central America. This spawned the grass-roots Nicaraguan resistance known as the Contras aided by the U.S. Mr. Ortega won one rigged election in 1984. But when he agreed to another with international observers in 1990, he lost to Violeta Chamorro.

The Sandinistas accepted defeat but refused to surrender their weapons or their judiciary seats. The “commandantes” of the revolution had enriched themselves by confiscating property in what was known as “the piñata,” and many Nicaraguan property owners have never been compensated.

Mr. Ortega has returned to power by exploiting democratic rules and then changing them once in power. Center-right President Arnoldo Aleman (1997-2002) negotiated a deal with Mr. Ortega to lower the threshold for a first-round victory in the presidential election to 35%. That allowed Mr. Ortega to split the anti-Sandinista vote in 2006 and win. CONTINUE AT SITE

In 1983, Marxist unrest in the tiny Caribbean Island of Grenada threatened the safety of roughly 1,000 Americans residing there. Many of them were medical students at the island’s medical school. President Ronald Reagan did not hesitate. He dispatched 6,000 U.S. troops to evacuate the Americans and secure the island. Within a week, U.S. objectives were met. The Americans were safe, the Cuban mercenaries were expelled and rule of law was reestablished.

There was a time when being a U.S citizen held significance and carried weight, when two-bit dictators and petty thugs would think twice before harming Americans. In the age of Obama, that time remains but a distant, faded memory. Holding U.S. citizenship now is not only meaningless, it paints a broad target on one’s back. The Benghazi debacle serves to reinforce this view.

The brazen, preplanned September 11, 2012 terror attack against the American consulate in Benghazi needlessly cost the lives of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, the first U.S. ambassador killed in the line of duty since 1979. Obama’s State Department, run by his inept and malevolent secretary of state, is largely to blame. Indecisiveness, bureaucratic bungling and poor intelligence led to a series of mistakes that hampered relief efforts.

The extreme ineptitude demonstrated by the Obama-Clinton duo in protecting Americans during the Benghazi fiasco recently repeated itself in a disturbing incident eerily similar to events unfolding on that hot September night. On July 11, rampaging South Sudanese “soldiers” – savages would be a more appropriate term – attacked a sprawling hotel compound in the capital city of Juba inhabited by Western relief workers, journalists and South Sudanese elites. In the following 24 hours, the Westerners as well as some South Sudanese were forced to endure gang rape and torture. One South Sudanese journalist was shot dead while an American woman was raped by as many as 15 South Sudanese soldiers. Americans were singled out for particular cruelty.

Unbelievably, the carnage could have been prevented. There was a significant United Nations force staffed by Chinese, Ethiopian and Nepalese troops stationed nearby, just a few minutes’ drive away. Minutes after the South Sudanese soldiers forced their way into the Terrain Hotel complex; UN forces as well as the U.S. embassy in Juba were deluged with frantic calls for help. Emails, Facebook messages and texts were inexplicably ignored. One American who succeeded in escaping in the early stages of the assault made his way to the nearby UN compound but his pleas too fell on deaf ears.

Since the completion last year of a landmark deal limiting Iran’s nuclear program, the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has lashed out again and again at the U.S. for its supposed failure to live up to its end of the bargain. But a speech he gave on Aug. 1 in Tehran took his anti-American rhetoric to a new level. He accused the Obama administration of a “bullying policy” and of failing to lift sanctions in a way that benefited “the life of the people.” Mr. Khamenei ruled out cooperation with the U.S. in the fight against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, telling his audience that Iran’s experience with the nuclear deal “showed us that we cannot speak to [the Americans] on any matter like a trustworthy party.” Many in the crowd chanted anti-U.S. slogans.

Is Iran preparing to walk away from the accord? It’s unlikely. Mr. Khamenei’s speech was classical political posturing intended to rally his hard-line followers. But more than that, his bluster conceals a deeper strategic calculus. For all his complaints about American treachery, Mr. Khamenei and his allies recognize that the nuclear deal has produced significant benefits for their hobbled theocracy and may serve to further entrench the regime brought to power in the 1979 revolution.

President Barack Obama defined the nuclear deal primarily as an arms-control exercise, designed to constrain Tehran’s nuclear program for at least a decade and to keep the U.S. from becoming embroiled in yet another Middle East war. But the White House and its top diplomats, including Secretary of State John Kerry, also quietly suggested that the agreement might open the door to a broader rapprochement between Tehran and Washington and empower Iran’s moderate political forces, particularly its elected president, Hassan Rouhani.

U.S. officials have always cautioned that it would take time for the salutary effects of engagement with Iran to take effect. They have even conceded that, in the short term, the agreement might energize hard-liners opposed to engagement with the West—and that, indeed, seems to be what is happening. CONTINUE AT SITE

In September 2015, a Canadian broadcaster, Ezra Levant, suggested that what Europe was experiencing, was not primarily an influx of “refugees” fleeing conflict, but rather a new Gold Rush, in which young men from the Muslim world were seeking to improve their fortune at Europe’s expense.

Rome-based journalist Barbie Latza Nadeu seriously asked whether Italy was “enabling the ISIS invasion of Europe.”

Profits in the people-smuggling business often flow to terrorist-backed gangs operating in Italy. The numbers drowning in the Mediterranean continue to mount.

Chaotic scenes have erupted on the coastal Mediterranean frontier between Italy and France. On August 4, for instance, hundreds of migrants, chiefly from Eritrea, Ethiopia and the Sudan sought to storm the crossing in their attempts to make it to Northern Europe.

“Both the Italian and French forces at the border were taken by surprise,” remarked Giorgio Marenco, a police commander in Ventimiglia, where tear gas was used to disperse the migrants. Others merely braved the choppy waters of the sea to breach the crossing by swimming towards their goal.

The Italian town contains the last train station in Italy near the border. The besieged terminus lies three miles from the French Riviera. It has been a gathering point for the predominantly Muslim migrants since June 2015. A fractious tent city for migrants has sprung up, mirroring others spread across Italy. The capital of the French holiday district is Nice, which experienced a jihadist massacre on July 14.

Although mercifully free from mass terrorist outrages this year, Italy has already endured several alarming scenes of disorder and protest resulting from the pressure of accepting increasing illegal migrants.

On May 7, violent attempts by “open borders” activists took place, aimed at forcing open the frontier between Italy and Austria. On May 21, various groups in Rome organized mass demonstrations against Italy’s “invasion” by migrants. Apparently the prevalence of populist politics in the country has created movements which do not lie within the usual “Left-Right” political spectrum in which analysts usually classify parties.

The chief example is the presence in Italy of the Five Star Movement, founded in 2009 by the comedian Beppo Grillo, and now considered Italy’s second largest political force. Having taken a back seat after frequently being condemned for his “Islamophobic” anti-mass immigration rhetoric, Grillo’s party nevertheless helped to elect Virginia Raggi, in July, as the new mayor of Rome.

Despite the assurances of Angelino Alfano, the Italian Interior Minister, that Ventimiglia would not turn into “our Calais” — a reference to migrants amassed at the French channel port who are seeking illegal entry into the United Kingdom — the challenges faced by Italy lie not merely in numbers.

At a conference on Wednesday held by Darkenu — a self-described “grass-roots movement of the ‎Israeli moderate majority” — former Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barak ‎blasted incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for endangering the country’s security. As someone ‎who turned imperiling the Jewish state into an art form, Barak ought to know better.‎

It was Barak, after all, who made grandiose offers of territory and other concessions to Palestine Liberation Organization chief ‎Yasser Arafat which, had they been accepted, would have done Israel in. It was he who exposed ‎the truth — the one the rest of us knew already — that the Palestinian terror master and Nobel Peace prize ‎laureate was ever-bent on annihilating the Jews in his vicinity. ‎

Indeed, when Barak made his final appeasement offer at Camp David in 2000, Arafat returned the ‎favor by launching a suicide-bombing war against innocent Israelis. Yet Barak proceeded to blame ‎his successors for a lack of a two-state solution.‎

And let’s not forget Barak’s hightail-it-out-of-there retreat from southern Lebanon that left a ‎vacuum for Iran to fill. Barak’s response since then is to spew more vitriol at Netanyahu than at ‎Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah.‎

But, hey, such is the manner of washed-up has-beens. To stay relevant on the think tank and ‎lecture circuit, they need something to say, and it isn’t “I’m sorry.”‎