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Ruth King

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Will Saudi Arabia Free Its Women? Imagine the humiliation of a middle-aged mother having to ask a young son’s approval for life decisions. By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

By on March 8th, 2018

Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, is in the United Kingdom this week to meet two female leaders: Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Theresa May. He will see for himself that women have as much to contribute to public life as men.

In Saudi Arabia, governed by Shariah (Islamic law), a woman must live under the authority of a male guardian, her wali al-amr. The Quran (4:34) says, “Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more [strength] than the other, and because they support them from their means.” The General Presidency for Scholarly Research, an official body in charge of Islamic legal opinion, has issued a fatwa construing the verse strictly: “A woman should not leave her house, except with her husband’s permission.”

Saudi women do not have freedom of movement and never become fully independent legal persons. Regardless of age, they need permission from a male guardian to travel overseas, apply for a passport, marry, or be released from prison. The guardian is usually a woman’s father or husband, but can also be a brother, cousin or even son. Imagine the humiliation of a middle-aged woman having to ask a young son’s approval for important and mundane life decisions.

Guardians’ reach doesn’t stop at the border. Last April, 24-year-old Dina Ali Lasloom was held up by Filipino authorities as she changed planes at Manila International Airport. Ms. Lasloom had left Saudi Arabia against her family’s wishes. Her Saudi uncles appeared and whisked her back to Riyadh. An airline official told Human Rights Watch he heard Ms. Lasloom begging for help before being carried out in a wheelchair with duct tape on her mouth, feet and hands. The Saudi government said this was “a family matter,” and she has not been heard from since.

Could things finally be changing? Around the time Ms. Lasloom was returned to Saudi Arabia, King Salman loosened the guardianship law, permitting women to access services such as health care without the approval of a male relative. Since then, he and the crown prince have promised women the right to vote, work, drive and even join the military. But those rights don’t amount to much with the male guardianship regime in place.

As part of his tour of the U.K. and U.S., the crown prince is hoping to persuade investors to back his Saudi modernization plan, Vision 2030. He stood up to Wahhabi clerics to allow concerts and sporting events in the kingdom, and he confronted the country’s wealthy elite last November, detaining those suspected of corruption at the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Russia’s Trail of Poison Another murder attempt in Britain of a former intelligence agent.

By on March 8th, 2018

Another Russian agent in exile, another poisoning in England. Former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, were found unconscious on a bench in Salisbury on Sunday and are in critical condition. Mr. Skripal was a double agent for the British intelligence service MI6. He was sentenced to 13 years for spying, but he and other agents were exchanged in Vienna in 2010 for 10 Russian agents arrested in the U.S. The Skripals have been living openly in Britain.

Scotland Yard called the attack “a major incident involving attempted murder by administration of a nerve agent.” A police officer who found the Skripals fell seriously ill. The poisoning echoes the attack that killed Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in November 2006. A British inquiry concluded that the operation to slip polonium into his tea in a London hotel “was probably approved’’ by Vladimir Putin. Yet Britain made only modest protests, and the accused killers, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, remain at large in Russia despite British demands for extradition.

The obvious suspicion is that the Russians wanted Mr. Skripal dead, and his son and brother have died in unexplained circumstances in the last two years. Mr. Putin is a former KGB agent, so you can draw your own conclusions about the role of the Kremlin. As a demonstration of Russian ruthlessness, the poisoning is more evidence of the nature of the Moscow regime.

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Israeli Innovations Trigger Global Enhancement: Ambassador( Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on March 8th, 2018

Since its 1948-49 War of Independence, the Jewish State has faced clear and present lethal challenges, adversities, assaults and threats, handling them as opportunities in disguise. This state of mind has catapulted Israel to unprecedented heights, commercially and militarily – a uniquely productive partner of the United States.

The scarcity of natural resources and the nature of the Middle East – a prototype of conflict-ridden, violent, intolerant, merciless, unpredictable, shifty and tenuous environment – have shaped Israel’s do-or-die state of mind, producing game-changing innovations in the areas of health, medicine, agriculture, irrigation, science, communications, space, homeland and national security.

In Thou Shalt Innovate (How Israeli ingenuity repairs the world), Avi Jorisch – a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council – documents the worldwide positive impact of Israel’s groundbreaking and cutting-edge hightech innovations upon critical challenges facing mankind.

Jorisch highlights the cardinal Jewish tenet of repairing – not controlling – the world (Tikkun Olam in Hebrew). This has generated a tailwind to Israel’s systematic sharing of its research and development with the world at-large, feeding reality-based optimism and upgrading the standard-of-living in the USA, India, Russia, China, Canada, Europe, Australia, Latin America, Asia and Africa. For example, since 2013 Israel has treated more than 2,500 Syrians seeking medical care, in addition to the dispatching of aid delegations to Turkey, Argentina, Mexico, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Rwanda, etc.

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ELECTIONS ARE COMING: Democrats Sing the Texas Blues This week’s primaries shattered the dream of turning the Lone Star State purple. Karl Rove

By on March 8th, 2018

Tuesday’s Texas primaries were supposed to show “rising Democratic enthusiasm,” in the words of National Public Radio’s Jessica Taylor, following reports that more Democrats were participating in early voting than Republicans in the state’s 15 most populous counties. “Such a swell in a bulwark red state could be an even more ominous sign for Republicans nationally,” Ms. Taylor wrote.

She was not alone. The New York Times’s Nate Cohn suggested that “surging Democratic tallies” in early voting may be “a sign that Texas may emerge as a fairly competitive state in the mid-term elections.” Vox’s Tara Golshan wrote that Democrats hope to “make Texas blue—or at the very least, purple” and that “a massive surge in voter enthusiasm is giving them hope.”

But with all the votes tallied, it turned out to be a case of “never mind,” as Gilda Radner, playing Emily Litella, used to say on “Saturday Night Live.”

Not only did more Texas Republicans (804,581) vote early than Democrats (565,355), but more Republicans than Democrats turned out Election Day. There were 1,543,674 total votes in the Republican primary—the GOP’s highest midterm total ever—compared with 1,037,779 in the Democratic primary. This gap of nearly 506,000 is less than the GOP’s margin in the 2014 and 2010 primaries (roughly 783,000 and 804,000, respectively), but still comparatively healthy.

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The Flat Mind of Robert Friedman Like the French Bourbons, he has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Helen Andrews

By on March 8th, 2018

The French statesman Talleyrand famously observed about the Bourbons, “they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” Something similar might be said about New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Once upon a time he was the avatar of a new age of economic interdependence that would lead to global peace. No two countries that each had a McDonald’s, he wrote, would ever go to war with each other. Then came the Balkans Wars in the 1990s. So much for the flat and interdependent world that Friedman purported to have discovered.

In a column of February 18, Friedman was in familiar form. Which is to say flat earth mode. Once more, his judgments were sweeping and apodictic. He declared a “code red” on the state of American democracy. “President Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians or is a towering fool, or both, but either way he has shown himself unwilling or unable to defend America against a Russian campaign to divide and undermine our democracy.”

The piece attracted more than 2,700 comments, “a personal record” according to Friedman, who credited the powerful public response to its being “the right column at the right time.” Funnily enough, he wasn’t even supposed to file a column that day. It wasn’t his turn in the weekly rotation. But he was so annoyed by Trump’s tweets in response to special counsel Robert Mueller’s most recent round of indictments that he emailed editor James Bennet to ask if he could file a bonus column, just for the web. “Not my day. Not in print. And it may be the most widely circulated column I’ve ever written,” he told CNN.

It is hard to know what exactly Friedman was so worked up about. It can’t be the Mueller indictments themselves, because nothing in the document released by the Department of Justice on February 17 suggests any collusion between Russians and the Trump campaign, much less Trump himself. It specifically describes the campaign staff who interacted with the paid Russians trolls as “unwitting.”

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Passing the Torch to China? By Lawrence J. Haas

By on March 7th, 2018

UNFOLDING EVENTS IN Washington and Beijing raise the disturbing specter of a global passing of the torch from the United States to China, one with frightening implications for freedom and democracy.

First, President Donald Trump seemed to applaud from afar as China’s leader consolidates his power over a more authoritarian government at home, while the regime promotes its model of governance in increasingly aggressive terms abroad. Second, Trump announced that he will slap steep tariffs on steel and aluminum and welcome a trade war that most of the world, and most of his own Republican Party, dreads.

These events may seem unrelated, but they’re really sides of the same coin, for they both signal a U.S. retreat from defending the Western liberal order of free-market capitalism and democratic government that it did so much to nourish in the decades since World War II.

Let’s take these one at a time.

In Beijing, the Communist Party is amending China’s constitution to end presidential term limits, enabling Xi Jinping to remain as party chief and Chinese president for as long as he likes and, thus, become China’s most powerful leader since Mao.

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Palestinians: The Arabs Do Not Care about Us by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on March 7th, 2018

The Palestinians appear to be the only ones in the Arab world who are coming out on a daily basis against a plan no one has seen.

This Arab apathy towards the Palestinians is the result of a long-standing belief in the Arab world that the Palestinians are an ungrateful people who do not hesitate to bite the hand that feeds them.

When Trump finally does announce his Middle East peace plan, the Palestinians will discover that they are alone in threatening to thwart it.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has been working hard to persuade the Arab countries to support its position in the standoff with the US administration.

The PA leadership in Ramallah fears that without the backing of the Arab countries, the US administration will “impose” President Donald Trump’s “deal of the century” — the yet-to-be-announced plan for peace in the Middle East.

The Arab countries, however, appear to be preoccupied with other matters. For now, the Palestinians are getting much lip service from their Arab brothers, including promises to put pressure on the Trump administration possibly to “modify” its plan to make it less “harmful” to Palestinian demands and aspirations.

What is actually happening is that the PA leadership is terrified that many of the Arab countries will support the Trump plan, thus abandoning their Palestinian brothers and leaving them exposed to international pressure to accept the “deal of the century.” This fear does not seem to be unjustified.

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Peter Smith ‘Gender’ Warriors Drop the Ball

By on March 7th, 2018

Heinz gets by with a mere 57 varieties, while the latest fashion in human sexuality purports to discern 112 strains of gender. What academics and activists won’t acknowledge is the injustice of conventional women being bulldozed by a 6’6″ ruckperson formerly known as Bruce.

These days you can find ‘educated people’ correcting you if you use the word ‘sex’ to refer to either of the two categories which divide humans (and most other beings) according to their reproductive function. Do you mean “gender” they will say. Hmm? The fairer gender?

You will read John Stuart Mill’s essay on The Subjection of Women without once coming across the word gender. Plenty of “sex” no “gender.” Gender is a modern construction when applied biologically to distinguish men from women. It has caught on because it lends itself to fragmentation. Sex is binary. Gender, apparently, can be a continuum of finely divided sexual orientations.

Those in the know claim there are many complex gender variations among folk on the planet. As I am not one of those in the know I Googled. Prominently, on the first page of search results, was a site, apath.org. It listed 63 genders broken down by physicality, personality, preference and descriptor. For example, number 57 was an “Androgyne, female-attracted hermaphromale.” Mindboggling.

Another site lifehacker.com.au was less ambitious in referring to a Queensland University survey which listed in less exotic terms 33 different genders. Even so, the meaning of descriptors such as neutrois, genderqueer, demigender, and trigender, are not immediately obvious (to me). I re-Googled with a slightly different query. Up popped Tumblr, wherein ambition knows no prosaic bounds. Tumblr is a social-network blogging site; which, I concede, heretofore, has escaped my attention. On my count, it lists 112 different gender types. Maybe it’s a spoof? I would like to think so. Take the first one on the list.

“Abimegender: a gender that is profound, deep, and infinite; meant to resemble when one mirror is reflecting into another mirror creating an infinite paradox.”

This and most other of their gender types are even more mysterious to me than are cryptocurrencies and blockchains. I am out of my depth and must move on.

What I am moving onto is men’s and women’s sports, which I do understand. Or I did. Now I have a deep sense of unease about the whole business of sex-segregated sports. Even mixed doubles in tennis is open to interpretation as to how mixed it is or has to be.

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Steve Kates The Future is a Judgmental Father- A Review of Jordan Peterson’s Book

By on March 7th, 2018

Jordan Peterson, Canadian academic and scourge of the politically correct, begins his Australian tour this month. Here, liberated from the paywall of our latest issue, is Steve Kates’ review of his book “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos”. Please subscribe and make sure there are more.

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
by Jordan B. Peterson
Allen Lane, 2018, 448 pages, $35
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Jordan Peterson may well be the deepest, clearest voice of conservative thought in the world today. In the space of less than a year he has risen from being a relatively obscure professor of psychology at the University of Toronto to becoming perhaps the most articulate defender of the values of the West to have arisen in the last fifty years. I can think of no one in recent times who has been able to reach such depths of understanding, but with such an extraordinary ability to make plain his meaning to such large numbers of people. You should, of course, read his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, but you should also watch as many of his online presentations as you can if you are interested in understanding, and preserving, the values of our Western civilisation.
This review appears in the latest Quadrant.
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He came to my attention in three stages. The first was through a battle he fought with the government of Canada over amendments to its Human Rights Act. What drew my attention were only in part the issues themselves, but probably more important for me was that he is a professor at my own alma mater in the city where I was born and grew up. The issue that made him newsworthy was that the Canadian government had made it illegal not to use the specific pronouns an individual wished to have applied to them in conversation. As Peterson put it as part of his testimony to the Canadian Parliament, the issue was that “refusing to refer to a person by their self-identified name and proper personal pronoun” constitutes gender-based harassment which could get you fined, and if you refused to pay the fine, could land you in jail. This is from his testimony:

I don’t think the people who initiated this legislation ever expected that there would be an absolute explosion of identities, first of all, and also of so-called personal pronouns, as there has been. I think Facebook now recognizes something like 71 separate gender identity categories, each of which in principle is associated with its own set of pronouns. So linguistically, it has become a parody. It has become linguistically unmanageable. Words can’t be introduced into the language by fiat. I can’t think of a time when that actually worked. We are not sure how words enter the common parlance, but it’s certainly not that way. So the legislation devolves into a kind of absurdity.

He then goes beyond the issue of personal pronouns into a full-scale attack on the cultural Marxism that is now standard in universities across the globe:

I’ve been following the battle of ideologies on campus for a long period of time. I suppose I have some expertise in that. There is an ideological war that is ripping the campuses apart. It’s essentially between an ideological variant that is rooted in what has come to be known as post-modernism, with a neo-Marxist base, and modernism, I would say. That’s accounting for all the turmoil on the campuses. I see this as an extension of this campus turmoil into the broader world …

I said that I believe that this is a vanguard issue in a kind of ideological war and that I’m not going to participate on the side of the people whose ideological stance I find unforgivable and reprehensible, especially the Marxist element of it. I announced that I wasn’t going to use these words because I don’t believe they are instantiated to protect anyone’s rights. I believe the ideologues who are pushing this movement are using unsuspecting and sometimes complicit members of the so-called transgender community to push their ideological vanguard forward.

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Why Christians Support Israel By Dennis Prager

By on March 7th, 2018

They believe in supporting American allies and supporting countries that share their moral values.

In speeches to fellow Jews around America, I often point out that many American Jews are experiencing cognitive dissonance. The institution Jews most admire — the university — turns out to be the most significant source of Israel hatred in America and the rest of the West. At the same time, the people many Jews most distrust — Christians (especially Evangelical and other conservative Christians) — turn out to be the Jews’ and Israel’s best friends.

Given that these two facts are undeniable, how do many American Jews deal with this dissonance? They largely ignore the Israel hatred on campuses, and they dismiss the authenticity of the Christian support. They dismiss it by denying it is genuine. Christians who support Israel, they (and non-Jews on the left) argue, do so for two deceptive reasons.

One is they seek to convert Jews.

That Christians seek to convert non-Christians is, of course, true. The primary aim of Christianity, after all, is to spread belief in Christ. But why would anyone think supporting Israel will convert Jews? Does anyone think that Christians who support Israel’s enemies are making Muslims convert to Christianity? The fact is there isn’t a shred of evidence that Jews have converted to Christianity because of Christian support for Israel. Indeed, the Jews who most support Israel are either the most religious or the most strongly identifying secular Jews. Neither is a candidate for conversion.

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