RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s less than six years since President Obama mocked presidential contender Mitt Romney for warning about the resurgent threat from Russia. In one of the most memorable lines of the 2012 election, Obama scoffed that “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

Today, there’s plenty of evidence that the Cold War was already on its way back, with a vengeance. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin seized every opening presented by Obama’s policies of “reset,” “flexibility,” appeasement and retreat. During Obama’s second term, Russia made its military reentry via Syria into the conflicts of the Middle East, shored up its ties to Iran, and began reconfiguring the borders of Eastern Europe and the rules of the post-Soviet world order by snatching Crimea from Ukraine. In Washington, American politics has been embroiled since the 2016 election in investigations and bitter quarrels involving allegations of Russian dirty tricks.

By now, the upshot is a global landscape of rising frictions and growing risks of military confrontation between Russia and the United States. For years, Putin’s strategy has been to test the limits of American tolerance — buttressing his projects with a massive military modernization and buildup, while daring the U.S. superpower to stop him. Obama failed this challenge, bequeathing to President Trump the job of redrawing those vanished red lines, and restoring a credible U.S. strategy of deterrence.

That has become far more difficult and dangerous than it might have been a decade ago. As the director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency testified to Congress just last week, “Although Russia repeatedly emphasizes that is it not interested in a new Cold War with the United States, it has also made clear that it will no longer reconcile with the West through concessions or a policy of appeasement.”

Gianni Infantino is the second FIFA president to visit the Islamic Republic, but neither of them “pushed for letting women inside the stadiums. Iran is the only country in the World Cup that bans women from their stadiums and any attempt to watch the games means risk of getting arrested.” — OpenStadiums, Iranian women’s organization.

Infantino has both the power and the duty to hold Tehran accountable in this literal and figurative arena. That he exercised neither, preferring instead to appease Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, is outrageous. In spite of his being touted falsely in the West as a “moderate,” Rouhani is a key part of the problem in Iran, not a solution to it.

Infantino deserves a swift penalty kick out of his job.

A week before International Women’s Day on March 8, thirty-five women and girls dressed as men were arrested in Iran while attempting to sneak into a popular annual soccer match. The women, the youngest of whom was 13, were forcibly removed from the premises of the Tehran Derby and “transferred to a proper place.”

The ban on women attending any sports event in Iran, other than all-female matches in which the players are required to wear full Islamic dress, is but one of many issues at the root of the current mass protests across the country against the oppressive and repressive ayatollah-led regime, which came to power nearly four decades ago. Over the years, sports have been used by both male and female anti-regime activists as a symbol of freedom, as it was one of the first areas after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, which ousted the Shah and ushered in the reign of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to be considered by the ruling mullahs as a dangerous expression of secularism.

The reason that this year’s Tehran Derby was of particular interest – and not only to sports fans — was the attendance of world soccer’s top official, Gianni Infantino. As Infantino is the president of FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), his arrival at the match was seen by freedom-seeking Iranians as an opportunity to force their government to lift the ban on women spectators.

Many years ago, Elvis made a movie Fun in Acapulco. As they say, the movie didn’t have much of a plot but Ursula Andress is worth whatever it costs to watch it online.

We can safely said that no one is making a movie about fun in Playa del Carmen these days.

As you probably know, there is a lot of talk about “el muro” — the border wall — down in Mexico. Sadly, the political class should be talking about the chaos in the country and how this is impacting their economy.

This week we read that the U.S. closed a consulate office indefinitely. This is from news reports:

“The State Department abruptly closed the U.S. consulate in the popular tourist destination of Playa del Carmen late Wednesday evening and ordered U.S. government employees to stay out of the area.

They warn other Americans either in the region or thinking of traveling to it about a “real crime threat” from local drug cartels…”

Maxime Bernier is right: Identity politics dissolves community, reduces a country to subsets of clans, and obscures the diversity of individual lives

There is much to choose from this week, including the infantile wailing and moronic ignorance of social-justice hooligans driven crazy mad (Pavlovian response) by Jordan Peterson giving a lecture, by invitation, at Queen’s University. (Three cheers for Queen’s president and the law faculty for inviting Dr. Peterson.)

Then there is Justin Trudeau inviting the fanatically anti-Alberta-oil Bill Nye to Ottawa for a public chat on science, the highlight of which was the signal revelation of the centrality of breastfeeding to the scientific method — delivered by our PM. When baby wails and the milk flows, can Planck’s constant be far behind?

As well: Jaspal Atwal, failed Sikh assassin, holding what he ludicrously called a press conference. The only takeaway: his lawyer is scarier, though not necessarily more competent.

More fertile than them all however was the brisk, chippy, and entitled Twitter blast levelled by Liberal MP and person of colour, Celina Caesar-Chavannes (Whitby, Ont.), at Conservative MP Maxime Bernier (Beauce, Que.).

Bernier had criticized an earlier tweet by Ahmed Hussen in which the Immigration Minister said the federal budget was historic for “racialized Canadians.”

Bernier said he deplored that tweet’s “awful jargon,” the pitch to “racialized” Canadians, and put out a plea for “colour blindness,” character over skin colour. His critics, Bernier said, implied (he was) a racist because “I want to live in a society where everyone is treated equally and not defined by their race.”

The parliamentary pigeons were duly agitated. Instanter, Caesar-Chavannes fired off her Twitter blast:

“… please tell this highly privileged man that the ultimate goal of fighting discrimination is equity & justice and not, as he states … to create a colour-blind society.”

That wasn’t going to boil the kettle, so there followed another, more imperious swipe: “@MaximeBernier … colour blindness as a defence actually contributes to racism. Please check your privilege and be quiet.”