RUTHFULLY YOURS

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia—Russian authorities identified a 22-year-old man from the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan as the suicide bomber who caused a deadly subway-train blast in Russia’s second-largest city on Monday, underscoring Moscow’s concerns about radicalization in Central Asia.

In a statement Tuesday, Russia’s Investigative Committee identified the attacker as Akbarjon Jalilov.

The explosion occurred Monday on a train between Sennaya Ploshchad, a busy downtown subway intersection, and Technological Institute station.

According to the statement, forensic experts found genetic traces of Mr. Jalilov on a bag containing an explosive device that was found and disarmed at Ploshchad Vosstaniya, another subway station not far from the site of Monday’s explosion. Investigators also drew their conclusions based on surveillance-camera footage, the statement said.

Russian Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova said Tuesday morning that 14 people had been killed and 49 remained in hospital.

Earlier Tuesday, the Investigative Committee said that an explosive device could have been detonated by a man whose fragmented remains were found in the third carriage of the subway train.

Rakhat Sulaimanov, the official representative of the Kyrgyz security agency, said the person responsible was likely a native of Kyrgyzstan who then became a Russian citizen. Mr. Sulaimanov said Kyrgyz security services were in contact with Russian authorities over the matter, but declined to provide further details.

No group has claimed responsibility for the blast. It occurred during a visit to the city by Russian President Vladimir Putin, raising official concerns that the attack was timed to his stay. CONTINUE AT SITE

I think one of the most astounding, arguably dense articles to be published anywhere on the issue of censorship vs. freedom of speech was published in one of the most unlikely quarters of the world, New Zealand. A correspondent sent me the text and link to an article titled: “Want equality? Curtail free speech.” It was written for “Stuff” by a fellow by the name of Jacob Van De Visser. “Stuff” was described by the correspondent, Lindsay Perigo, as IslmoMarxist.

Freedom of Speech? Stuff and nonsense! It’s a short article, so, instead of beginning with my own comments, I’ve reproduced the article here so you can guffaw or be astonished as you will. Mr. Perigo, in his own remarks, wondered if the piece was tongue-in-cheek satire because it is so blatantly irrational and hostile to freedom of speech

I’m not certain of its sincerity, either, but given the avalanche of anti-speech articles and the ubiquity of actions that have taken place before and after Donald Trump’s election (see the Gatestone column here about American campuses opposing or shutting down speech, except that which doesn’t violate student “safe spaces”) in November 2016, together with the tone and content of Stuff’s other articles, it is wholly consistent with the irrationality of what is occurring in the West.

It’s time for New Zealand to criminalize Islamophobia!

On March 23, New Zealand awoke to the horrific news of yet another terrorist attack, this time in London.

A deranged individual ploughed a car into innocent pedestrians and brutally stabbed a police officer to death before being shot. Five people died, including the attacker. [Italics mine]

The Twittersphere was soon abuzz with conjecture and accusation. Who was to blame? What were the motives?

I felt sick as I read comments saying “Islam is to blame” and “it must be another Muslim”.

The fact that the attacker was a Muslim is irrelevant. The issue is that Islamophobia was the first response.

If you are a Muslim, you continually have to defend your faith against people who accuse it of being a dangerous and violent set of ideas. Islam is the religion of peace; anyone who understands this knows it has no part in the ideology of ISIS.

Life is a constant fight for other minorities, too.

If you are a member of the LGBTQAA+ community, you must battle for your rights. You are forced to choose from just two bathroom choices when often you don’t fit either. Workplaces often fail to be inclusive to this community, refusing them places in the boardroom.

No political observer in his right mind would have expected at the beginning of 2016 a Brexit vote in Britain in June, the resignation of David Cameron, a dogfight between the two main Brexit supporters and propagandists within the Tory party, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, and eventually the rise of Theresa May. Nor would he have foreseen, for that matter, the election of Donald Trump in the United States on November 8.

Something similar is happening in France now — on a much larger and trickier scale. A few months ago, it was taken for granted that François Hollande’s ineffectual socialist administration would be succeeded after the 2017 election — on April 23 and May 7 — by a conservative government led either by former president Nicolas Sarkozy or former prime minister Alain Juppé: a simple matter of the swing of the pendulum, as is the rule among democracies. What the French are facing now, however, is an unprecedented upsurge of the National Front, the elimination of a generation of political leaders on almost all sides, and the collapse or near collapse of classic Left and Right parties. While many voters welcome the change, others are just in a state of shock. On March 18 — one month or so ahead of the first ballot — 34 per cent of the electorate and 43 per cent of voters under 35 had still not decided whether to vote or not.

On March 20, the five most prominent candidates debated for three and a half hours on TV. About 10 million people watched intently. It was indeed a great show — and probably a defining moment in the campaign.

All five candidates are rebels. Marine Le Pen, 48, the National Front leader, is a rebel by definition. She has managed to upgrade in many ways the party she inherited from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2011, to purge it of many unsavoury elements, to trim its formerly racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric (including Holocaust denial) and to switch from Vichy nostalgia to a near-Gaullist statism. In fact, she has even been increasingly reluctant to use the name National Front, and has floated alternative labels, such as Rassemblement Bleu Marine (“Navy Blue Rally”, a play on words with her first name which means “Navy” in French).

For all that, she is still sticking to a binary, undemocratic and utterly revolutionary view of the world, positing a bitter fight between what she calls “the System” (the political and cultural elite, of both Right and Left, the “lobbies”, globalisation, multiculturalism, immigration, the European Union, the euro) and “the people” (the ordinary Frenchmen) whom she claims to represent exclusively. The implication is that either you side with the people and her against the System, and opt for a fully sovereign and autarkic France under her guidance, or you are, willingly or not, an enemy of the people. Interestingly enough, she used this logic against her own father, as he resisted the revamping and defascisation of the National Front, and did not flinch from expelling him from the party at the age of 86.

At the other end of the political spectrum, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 65, a former minister of vocational education, rebelled against the Socialist party in 2008 to found the more hardline Parti de Gauche (Left Party) and then the Front de Gauche (Left Front) in association with a diminutive Communist Party. He eventually started a new movement in 2016, France Insoumise (Indomitable France).