RUTHFULLY YOURS

Thursday marks a bitter anniversary in the Arab world. On Dec. 17, 2010, a Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after the authorities confiscated his goods and beat him. The incident sparked an uprising that within weeks would topple Tunisia’s venal autocracy. Protests spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria. Despots from Morocco to Mesopotamia felt the heat of popular anger. Many couldn’t withstand it.

Yet today the Middle East is less stable, and less hopeful, than it was before the Arab Spring. Five years ago, the denim-clad, smartphone-wielding Arab liberal became the region’s avatar. Now the knife-wielding jihadist and the refugee have risen to prominence instead.

Each Arab Spring country is unhappy in its own way. Tunisia is the only success story among the bunch, having adopted a secular constitution and completed several peaceful power transfers. As Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia’s moderate Islamic Ennahda party, recently told me, “We’ve remained on the bridge of democratic transition while others have fallen off.” True, but the birthplace of the Arab Spring is also the world’s top exporter of fighters for Islamic State, or ISIS.

Richard Prasquier is President of Keren Hayesod France and Honorary Chairman of the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France). This article first appeared in a slightly different form in French. Gatestone thanks the author for his kind permission to publish it in English.

Our reaction should be directed not against the terrorists, but against those who indoctrinate, train and finance them — and on working to eradicate this virus of the mind.

Where are the demands to boycott those who fund ISIS? Their names are well-known.

The “Crusaders” now seem exhausted. They simply do not want enemies.

These attacks — like those before them — were simply meant to sow terror: go kill as many people as you can.

The Pope can insist all he likes that we have entered a Third World War; it is so much more comforting to repeat that the main problem is “Israel’s occupation” is the problem.

After the November 13 attacks in Paris, there were concerns in the media that Europe did not fully understand the gravity of the threats posed by radical Islam. Frances’s Minister of the Interior, Bernard Cazeneuve, however, certainly did not hide his prediction that, this year, a large scale attack would take place in France. It was not a matter of “if,” but “when” and “where.”

Thoughts first were for the victims, for those who will suffer all their lives — young people who went out just to enjoy some music or eat with friends.

Next came the questions: about the claim of responsibility by ISIS, and how the coordinated attacks would nullify the “lone wolf” theory — a hypothesis largely refuted anyway. These were commandos trained to kill, and to kill themselves too.

Israel’s Channel 10 broke a story Thursday night that is the kind of scoop journalists celebrate. Unfortunately, however, this one is very bad news.

According to sources in the Prime Minister’s Office, Israel and Turkey are on the verge of restoring full diplomatic relations. Translated into plain English, this means that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is about to make a deal with the devil.

The demon in question, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had already hinted on Monday that he was sniffing around his Jewish nemesis when he said that renewed ties between the two countries would have “a lot to offer to us, to Israel, to Palestine and also to the region.”

So it probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise to learn that a secret meeting was held on Wednesday in Switzerland between Turkish Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioglu and newly appointed Mossad chief Yossi Cohen, accompanied by Netanyahu’s long-time special envoy to Turkey, Yossi Ciechanover, for the purpose of reaching an agreement.

Nor is Erdogan’s timing due to a gradual change of heart. Rather, it is because the Ankara Islamist with hegemonic fantasies has become a pariah in the Muslim world he dreamed of ruling, while Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready, willing and able to pummel him into oblivion.

Iran is already in flagrant violation of its obligations under United Nations Security Council resolutions referenced in the nuclear agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed on July 14, 2015, by Iran, the five permanent members of the Security Council and Germany. Nevertheless, the Obama administration is making excuses for Iran. It is still on track to reward Iran soon with the freeing up of over $100 billion in frozen assets and the lifting of economic sanctions.

First, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was not able to complete the full investigation of Iran’s suspected past work on a nuclear explosive device, which was supposed to be a precondition for moving forward with implementation of the JCPOA’s terms. Even with the limited information it was provided, including samplings and photographs taken as a result of Iran’s own self-inspection, the agency concluded that, at least through 2009, Iran had conducted such activities. The agency also stated in its report that Iran had appeared to cover its tracks at its Parchin military site:

“Since the Agency’s first request to Iran for access to the particular location of interest to it at the Parchin site in February 2012, extensive activities have taken place at this location. These activities, observed through commercial satellite imagery, appeared to show, inter alia, shrouding of the main building, the removal/replacement or refurbishment of its external wall structures, removal and replacement of part of the roof, and large amounts of liquid run-off emanating from the building…The Agency assesses that the extensive activities undertaken by Iran since February 2012 at the particular location of interest to the Agency seriously undermined the Agency’s ability to conduct effective verification.”

America has much to learn from Europe’s current condition. In Europe, the decline in religious faith has led to a universal weakening of society and a loss of confidence in the value of its civilization. And the effects of this have been grave: throngs of unassimilated immigrants, unchecked military threats from abroad, and confusion about national identity threaten Europe’s future. America, by contrast, still shows many signs of strength. Nonetheless, should we lose our sense of shared identity, Europe’s path likely awaits.
The threats confronting Europe also confront America: mass immigration of people whose loyalty cannot be guaranteed, the purging of religious assumptions from the public square, and the state’s growth which squeezes out civil society.

In a gloomy but strangely enthralling book published at the end of the First World War, the historian and polymath Oswald Spengler wrote of the decline of the West, arguing that Europe was moving inevitably to its end according to a pattern that can be observed among civilizations from the beginning of recorded history. Each historical superorganism, he argued, displays its distinctive and defining spirit through its culture. That of the West is “Faustian”—involving an outgoing and conquering attitude to the world displayed in the science, art, and institutions that came to fruition at the Reformation, spread themselves far and wide through the Enlightenment, and then reached a crisis at the French Revolution.

After that great period, things began to ossify into rigid legal and bureaucratic forms. Thus was born the period of “civilization,” typified by Napoleon’s new rationalization of the old spirit of France. Culture leads to civilization, which in turn leads to decay and then death. The culture of the West, Spengler argued, will dwindle to a purely mechanical simulacrum of its former greatness before disappearing entirely.

In 2003, Samantha Power won the Pulitzer Prize for A Problem from Hell, her searing critique of American responses to genocides from Bosnia to Iraq. More than a decade later, the unrestrained brutality in Syria has turned the administration that appointed Power as UN Ambassador into the deadliest case study of our time.
It’s hard to imagine a greater foreign policy failure than the American response to the conflict in Syria, which has mushroomed into one of the worst humanitarian crises since the Second World War.

What started as a series of peaceful demonstrations for democratic and civil society reform in 2011 has since degenerated into a brutal multi-front conflict involving the Assad regime in Damascus, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Iranian-backed Hezbollah, a smorgasbord of mostly Islamist rebel groups including al-Qaeda, secular left-wing Kurdish militias, and, of course, ISIS—the most psychopathic army of killers on the planet.

Rather than live up to his earlier and undeserved reputation as a “reformer,” President Bashar al-Assad has proven himself the most violent dictator in the Middle East since Saddam Hussein.

ISIS, meanwhile, rather than living up to U.S. President Barack Obama’s description as al-Qaeda’s “JV team,” has evolved from a ragtag terrorist organization to a full-blown genocidal army massacring its way through Syria, Iraq and beyond.

The American response so far is only a tad more robust than the sound of chirping crickets.

Erdogan came to office in 2003 with a policy of “zero problems with neighbors,” but has since led Turkey to problems with most, if not all, of them.

Turkey’s foreign policy choices and current crises have combined to make Erdogan reach out to Israel for help.

Israel has weighed the price and found it acceptable: Israel will pay Turkey $20 million; Turkey will expel the Hamas leadership from Istanbul and will buy Israeli gas.

The restoration of relations with Israel is less a political reconciliation than an admission of the utter bankruptcy of Turkey’s last five years of diplomatic endeavor.

The announcement of the restoration of Israel-Turkish relations should be seen in the context of Turkey having nowhere else to go.

Turkey’s relations with Israel have been strained, to put it mildly, since 2010 when, through a non-profit organization, Turkey funded the 2010 Gaza Flotilla aimed at breaking the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

After a bloody confrontation, which ended in the deaths of nine Turks, Turkey demanded that Israel be tried in the International Criminal Court (ICC) and subjected to UN sanction. The ICC ruled that Israel’s actions did not constitute war crimes. In addition, the UN’s Palmer Commission concluded that the blockade of Gaza was legal, and that the IDF commandos who boarded the Mavi Marmara ship had faced “organized and violent resistance from a group of passengers,” and were therefore required to use force for their own protection. The commission, however, did label the commandos’ force “excessive and unreasonable.”

For my male readers, can I ask you a question? Have you ever, purely by accident, fallen inside a woman? I ask because this is what seemed to have happened to Saudi millionaire Ehsan Abdulaziz, who was accused of raping a woman. He was cleared of all charges when he made it clear that he accidently fell inside of her.

A Saudi millionaire has been cleared of raping a teenager after claiming he might have accidentally penetrated the 18-year-old when he tripped and fell.

Property developer Ehsan Abdulaziz, 46, was accused of forcing himself on the young woman as she slept off a night of drinking on the sofa in his plush flat in Maida Vale, west London.

He had already had sex with her 24-year-old friend and said he might have fallen on top of the teenager while his penis was poking out the top of his underwear.

Married father-of-one Mr Abdulaziz was cleared of one count of rape following a trial at Southwark Crown Court. …

“What was once unthinkable is now unstoppable,” boasted U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. More ominous words were never spoken.

Ban was congratulating himself and nearly two hundred of his global elite cohorts on their achievement in signing the Paris Agreement on climate change. In classic progressive style, however, his pep rally sloganeering was also a none-too-subtle threat, à la “Forward.” For as the Agreement makes perfectly clear, the “what” that was once unthinkable, but is now seemingly unstoppable, is the world’s drunken march into international neo-Marxism, aka global tyranny.

The great revolution of political progressivism was its creation of an intermediary mechanism, the administrative state, to filter the relation between the oppressors and the oppressed. The regulatory bureaucracy depersonalizes tyranny, diluting its real meaning with legalistic paperwork and soporific incrementalism. The bureaucratic labyrinth, with its officious, abstract, uncommunicative language, is the perfect guardian for the craven greed and power lust that occupy the offices on the top floor but dare not show their true faces in a “democratic” society.

With the exception of Namibia and Botswana, post colonial Africa, once hailed as the “emerging Continent” is now submerged in tyranny, poverty, human rights abuses, and spreading Islamic jihad… ….rsk

NAIROBI, Kenya—Rwandan voters are expected on Friday to approve a constitutional amendment that would allow President Paul Kagame to stay in office for nearly two more decades, the latest bid by an African leader to push beyond established term limits.

Mr. Kagame has effectively ruled Rwanda since his rebel force ended the country’s 1994 genocide. The current constitution says his presidential tenure that began in 2000 must end in 2017. Though he hasn’t said outright that he will run again, he has said that the country should follow the will of the people. State media routinely trumpet his popularity.

He is far from alone. Across Africa, constitutions are being revised and elections delayed as a number of heads of state decide they aren’t quite done yet.

“This is the biggest challenge that we have across the continent: the challenge of saying, ‘Yes it’s time for this one to move on,’” said Yolande Bouka, a researcher with South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies whose coverage includes Rwanda, Burundi and Congo.

After Nigerian elections in April that saw an incumbent accept defeat for the first time in the country’s history, many activists hoped that Africa’s largest economy would usher in a new era of democracy on a continent infamous for rigged elections and lifetime presidents.