RUTHFULLY YOURS

BAQA, Jordan—A self-taught imam and Islamic State recruiter who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Otaiba takes the lectern at his local mosque when the government-approved preacher fails to show, as happens most days.

Soliciting recruits there has become too risky these days because the mosques “are filled with intelligence officials,” he said. So he uses his time to identify those he thinks could be drawn to his radical cause.

“We take them to farms, or private homes. There we discuss and we organize soccer games to bring them closer to us,” he said in a recent interview in northern Jordan.

His words reflect a new boldness among Jordanian jihadists, who are speaking out more openly these days in support of Islamic State.

That openness, along with a rare spate of terror attacks, illustrates how the threat of Islamist extremism has spread in this relatively stable U.S. ally, which has long served as a bulwark against terrorism in the Middle East.

Fidel Castro turned 90 years old on Saturday, adding plausibility to the popular Cuban theory that even hell doesn’t want him. Meanwhile Cuba’s military dictatorship, now headed by his 83-year-old brother Raúl, is cracking down with renewed brutality on anyone who dares not conform to its totalitarian rule.

If President Obama’s December 2014 softening of U.S. policy toward Cuba was supposed to elicit some quid pro quo on human rights from Havana, it has so far failed. Independent groups that monitor civil liberties on the island say conditions have deteriorated in the 20 months since the Obama decision to normalize relations and ease Cuba trade and travel restrictions for Americans. Many dissident groups opposed any U.S. thaw without human-rights conditions attached and say they feel abandoned by the U.S., which they had long relied on for moral support.

Guillermo Fariñas, a 54-year-old psychologist and winner of the European Parliament’s Andrei Sakharov Prize, is one such disappointed Cuban.

In a July 20 letter to Gen. Castro, Mr. Fariñas announced “a hunger and thirst strike” until Castro “designate[s]” a vice president to meet with the opposition and declares an end to the state policy of torturing and arresting dissidents and confiscating their property. Mr. Fariñas has been taken to the local hospital in the city of Santa Clara twice for rehydration, but is now at home. He is gravely ill.

Flirting with death is a sign of desperation and it is difficult not to see a connection between that and Mr. Obama’s decision to drop the longstanding U.S. commitment to the democracy movement on the island so that he can be on better terms with the despots. Mr. Fariñas also has personal reasons for feeling betrayed.

In November 2013 he and Berta Soler, the leader of the dissident group Ladies in White, met with Mr. Obama at the Miami home of Jorge Mas Santos, the president of the Cuban-American National Foundation, who was hosting a Democratic Party fundraising event. After the meeting Mr. Fariñas and Ms. Soler told local press that they had asked the president to ensure that any change in U.S.-Cuba policy consider the views of the nonviolent opposition.

An elated Mr. Fariñas raved about the “words of support from the president of the United States, the most powerful democracy in the world,” according to a report in El Nuevo Herald. The White House did not respond specifically to my request for comment about what Mr. Obama told the dissidents that night.

When Mr. Fariñas was honored in Washington in June by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, he spoke about the great letdown he and his peers felt when Mr. Obama cut his own deal. He said since the announcement the opposition has “lived with the terrible news that the Cuban people, and especially the ones who have fought to establish a democracy in Cuba, were not going to be taken into account” in the continuing negotiations. “Many of us were discouraged.” Still, he said, they decided to fight on.

That fight took on new dimensions for Mr. Fariñas when 28-year-old Carlos Amel Oliva launched a hunger strike on July 13 and more than 20 members of the Patriotic Union of Cuba, many of them young, joined him. CONTINUE AT SITE

The opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games are always a breathtaking spectacle. With each Olympic experience, one wonders what great technical and artistic miracles special effects technicians will produce for future Olympic ceremonies. This year we were told that we could also look forward to seeing the greatest Olympian of all time, Michael Phelps… the winner of 19 gold medals in previous Olympics… marching at the head of the U.S. contingent, proudly carrying the stars and stripes.

But when the U.S. team entered the stadium we were immediately distracted. There, in the first row of athletes, just off Phelps’ left shoulder, was a young Muslim woman wearing a hijab. What were the chances that, of the 554 members of the U.S. team, the one Muslim athlete on the team would end up marching in the front row? Was it an accident… pure chance? Or was she purposely placed in the front row by U.S. Olympic officials in an excess of political correctness?

It didn’t take long for the young woman, Ibtihaj Muhammad, to answer that question for us. In an interview with the Associated Press, she said, “I wish that, not just my life, but the lives of Muslims all over the world were a little bit easier, particularly in the United States. I’m hoping that with my first time appearance as a member of Team USA here at the Olympics, I’m hoping that the rhetoric around the Muslim community will change.” She went on to say, “I am excited to represent not just myself, my family, and my country – but also the greater Muslim community.”

A report in the August 8, 2016 edition of frontpagemag.com, titled “Muslim-American Olympian Criticizes her Country,” explained that, while Michael Phelps was elected by his teammates to carry the American flag, he was pressured to decline the honor in favor of Ms. Muhammad. According to the report, a CNN op-ed piece addressed to Phelps by W. Kamau Bell, suggested, “America has enough tall, successful rich white guys hogging the spotlight,” and that, “Muhammad carrying the flag would be nearly a one-stop inclusion shop.”

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.