RUTHFULLY YOURS

Italian officials declined to comment after being ridiculed this week for covering up the ancient nude statues in Rome’s Capitoline Museums, so as not to offend the sensibilities of a visiting foreign dignitary.

The delicate world leader in question was Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who took a four-day trip to Italy and France to seal some business deals in the wake of the lifting of nuclear sanctions.

But being shielded from naked marble wasn’t the funniest, or even most pathetic, part of Rouhani’s trip to the City of Seven Hills. Far worse was his reception at the Vatican, where Pope Francis fawned all over the puppet head of the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei-led regime, directly and indirectly responsible for the slaughter of Christians across the world.

The father of the Catholic Church nevertheless greeted “His Excellency Hassan Rouhani, president of the Islamic Republic of Iran” as though he were a fellow pacifist, ready, willing and able not only to spread a global message of brotherly love, but to carry it out. According to a statement from the Vatican after the meeting, the two held “cordial discussions” in which “common spiritual values emerged.”

“When in Rome, do as the Romans do” evidently does not apply to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. During his visit to Rome this week, Rouhani was spared an encounter with ancient nude Roman statues. Nude statues at Rome’s Capitoline Museums, including a centuries-old Venus, were covered up in deference to Rouhani’s Islamic faith, as the Iranian president proceeded to meet with Italian government officials and sign 17 agreements with Italy. This was but the latest exercise in ongoing European submission to Muslim cultural norms in the name of multiculturalism.

Responding to backlash, Italian government officials tried to cover up whom had actually decided on the statues’ covering. Italy’s culture minister even took it upon himself – belatedly – to criticize the decision as “incomprehensible.” For his part, Rouhani denied that his government had requested such statuary modesty, but he was appreciative of the gesture nevertheless. “I thank you for this,” he said when asked about the temporary accommodation.

Submission to Iran’s Islamic cultural norms not only does a disservice to Italy’s own rich history and culture. It sends the wrong signal to Iranian citizens living in Iran, who are trying to seek more individual freedoms.

An Iranian women’s group, My Stealthy Freedom, posted a scathing criticism of the statue covering in a Facebook page addressed to Italian news outlets and female politicians:

“As you know, your country has just censored some of your highly celebrated artwork in a bid to welcome the delegation from the Islamic Republic of Iran. This censorship reminds us the way that the Iranian regime has been forcing millions of women in Iran to cover up. The politicians of our country, regardless of whether a woman is Muslim or not, force women in Iran to cover up and their justification is, ‘You, as a woman, should be shrouded in front of my eyes in order not to provoke me’. This way of thinking is completely unacceptable.”

“Italy, for the sake of pleasing the Islamic Republic, has not hesitated to conceal some of the masterpieces of its own history, which gives the impression that for them respecting the requirements of the Islamic Republic and its unpopular laws take precedence over their own history and cultural heritage. One has to bear in mind that these same laws are being challenged by millions of Iranian women who have been risking all kinds of dangers in Iran to be themselves.”

“Why should we children have to grow up in such fear?”

That is the very reasonable question 16-year-old German teenager Bibi Wilhailm asks, in her 20-minute YouTube video, garnering her some much-needed recognition in cyberspace. Her video had first appeared on Facebook, but was taken down for reasons that still remain unclear.

But Wilhailm doesn’t seem to care too much for fame. In her first ever YouTube appearance, she says she only wants her old life back. It is a life that she describes as “toll” (fantastic), before Chancellor Angela Merkel allowed one million, mostly male and Muslim, refugees into Germany last fall. Since then, Wilhailm says, “life has become very unsafe on the streets for young women like me and my friends.”

“This is the truth. We are no longer allowed to walk outside,” said Wilhailm. “We are no longer allowed to wear our clothes. We are no longer allowed to live the German life. This is the sad truth.”

Wilhaim’s fears are neither unfounded nor exaggerated. A security official as prominent as the police chief of Vienna, Gerhard Purstl, confirmed Wilhailm’s claim when he warned women not to venture out at night alone and to “avoid suspicious-looking areas.” Purstl’s warning came after several sex attacks in Austria by migrants.

If anyone possessed any doubts about Muslim migrant attitudes toward the ‘infidel’ women of their host countries, these doubts should have been painfully and publicly dispelled last New Year’s Eve at Cologne’s central train station. A thousand of the new arrivals, mostly young Arab men, gathered there that evening and, like packs of hyenas, molested hundreds of women, raping several.

“We are so scared,” said Wilhailm, expressing the fear young women are now forced to face. “We don’t want to be scared to go to the grocery store alone after sunset.”

Twelve years ago, I wrote a small book, The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God, in which I argued that Europe’s fecklessness in the face of both its own domestic problems and the jihadist threat was the logical, if deeply disturbing, result of what I styled a “crisis of civilizational morale.” This indictment did not go down well on the banks of the Charles River, where the Harvard eminento Stanley Hoffmann cleared his Gallic throat, harrumphed, and informed the readers of Foreign Affairs that my book was a “rambling attack on contemporary European secularism [written] with a condescension exceeding that of Robert Kagan.” I hope Professor Hoffmann, prior to his death last September, never learned that Bob Kagan used to play third base on a softball team that had Scooter Libby at shortstop and me at second base; who knows what nightmares of conspiracy would have plagued his latter years?

In any event, I do wonder what Professor Hoffmann, from his present position on the Other Side, thinks of recent events in Italy, where the government of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi covered the nude sculptures in Rome’s Capitoline Museum, and then denied his dinner guests wine, in order not to offend the sensibilities of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani and thereby not inhibit Italy’s entrepreneurs from getting their share of the post-Iranian-nuclear-“deal” swag. For if those gestures of cravenness were not evidence of a crisis of civilizational morale in its terminal, or hospice-care, stage, I’m not sure what would be.

The tender-minded will, I suppose, suggest that Renzi’s surrender to the aesthetic and culinary mores of the seventh-century Arabian peninsula were gestures of respect for difference and, coupled with the fulsome reception President Rouhani received in the Vatican, signs of a new opening to interreligious dialogue with the dominant Iranian form of Shia Islam. Two incidents from the life of Pope St. John Paul II, who knew something about both civilizational morale and interreligious dialogue, ought to put paid to such self-demeaning rubbish.

Among ISIS’s exploits, satellite photos now show, was the destruction in 2014 of St. Elijah, Iraq’s oldest Christian monastery.

The Guardian reports that it was 1,400 years old and had “26 distinctive rooms including a sanctuary and chapel.” The photos reveal that its “walls have been literally pulverized.”

“St. Elijah’s,” The Guardian notes, “joins a growing list of more than 100 religious and historic sites looted and destroyed [by ISIS], including mosques, tombs, shrines and churches. Ancient monuments in the cities of Nineveh, Palmyra and Hatra lie in ruins. Museums and libraries have been pillaged, books burned, artwork crushed or trafficked.”

Second only to the terror group’s horrific crimes against living human beings are these erasures of treasures of history and faith, evoking universal shock and outrage.

There is one part of the Middle East, though, where a people’s attachment to treasures of history and faith does not seem to count. When it comes to the West Bank (or Judea and Samaria) and the Golan Heights, the U.S. administration and the European Union have been upping the pressure on Israel to regard these areas—rich in biblical and historical sites—as something it has no rights to at all.

The EU had already announced in November that it would be labeling Israeli products from these areas as “made in settlements” instead of “made in Israel.” Israel and supporters have objected that, out of 200 territorial disputes in the world, this is the only one for which the EU resorts to labeling, evoking anti-Semitic practices. It falls on deaf ears.

The response from the Church of Sweden to the Kairos Palestine document contained no criticism at all against the massive lies, racism and distortions it contains. More sadly, there seems not to have been the slightest attempt to verify if any of the allegations in it were even true.

A church that genuinely believes in love and understanding would long ago have renounced the Kairos Palestine document, which has been pointed out by serious organizations out as anti-Semitic and racist.

The country’s largest religious institution is therefore helping and encouraging people to study a rawly anti-Semitic, racist document.

Attacks against Jews in Sweden have partly originated through such normalization. When the Church of Jesus Christ in Sweden supports an anti-Semitic document, the Jews in Sweden become fair game.

The Church of Sweden[1] has a problem. Its deep involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian issue — and especially its support for the Kairos Palestine document [full English text and annotations in Appendix below] — is something that should be noted and held up for criticism by other churches, and all those who oppose anti-Semitism and all forms of racism.

The Kairos Palestine document can be found in Swedish on the Church of Sweden’s website and is described by the Church of Sweden as follows:

“The Kairos document has been produced by Palestinian Christians and is about their vulnerability under occupation. Since it was published in December 2009, it has spread throughout the world and in some areas has become a movement that believes and fights for peace and justice in Palestine and Israel.”

The Kairos Palestine document, from 2009, is a letter that describes itself as “the Christian Palestinians’ word to the world about what is happening in Palestine.” Israel’s presence in what the document refers to as “Palestinian land” — even though this Biblical region has continuously been home to the Jews for nearly four thousand years — is bizarrely described as “a sin against God and humanity.”

BRUSSELS—Russia’s will to “change borders in the east” has helped reduce defense-spending cuts among the European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, according to the group’s general secretary.

Jens Stoltenberg made the comments Thursday, while noting that the U.S. had requested the assistance of NATO planes in the battle against Islamic State.

NATO published its annual report Thursday, which showed that military spending and cuts to the size of European armed forces have begun to plateau. NATO heralded the trend as a sign that years of austerity-driven spending reductions have slowed or ended.

Mr. Stoltenberg said the alliance will step up its military exercises this year, noting that Russian operations near the alliance’s borders have increased dramatically. “We see a more assertive Russia to the east…that has shown a will to change borders in Europe,” he said.

Mr. Stoltenberg also said the U.S. had requested NATO deploy some of its Awacs surveillance planes to help fight Islamic State. Awacs are used to monitor airspace—a mission that has become more important with Russia’s intervention in Syria.
Regarding armed forces spending, Mr. Stoltenberg said 2015 saw a “dramatic slowing of cuts,” adding “we have started to move in the right direction. The cuts have now practically stopped among European allies and Canada.”

Military spending last year by the European members of NATO fell about 0.4%, the smallest reduction since at least 2008, NATO officials said.

GANCEY, Cameroon—Just before dawn prayers earlier this month, a young man wearing a belt of 12 explosive canisters walked into the squat, ochre-colored building that serves as the mosque of this Cameroonian village.

As he recited the prayers in the dissipating darkness, the young man accidentally stepped on the foot of Abba Ali, a 70-year-old villager.

“I looked up at him and suddenly realized that this was a stranger,” Mr. Ali said. “That scared me.”

Moments later, the intruder detonated his device in one of some 40 suicide bombings that Boko Haram, a militant group that has become the West African “province” of Islamic State, unleashed on Cameroon’s Far North region since July.
Luckily for the faithful of Gancey, the explosives belt malfunctioned and nobody except the attacker died in the blast. But that doesn’t mean the villagers are feeling secure.

“Everyone is afraid that we will have another suicide bomber here soon,” said the Gancey mosque’s imam, Moustapha Goni. “They have tried it once, and they will likely try it again.”

Boko Haram, the deadliest of Islamic State’s many affiliates world-wide, expanded its long-running conflict with Nigeria into the neighboring Cameroon, Chad and Niger over the past year and a half. Some of these offensives involved attacks by formations as big as a thousand men, aided by columns of armor pilfered from Nigeria’s military bases.

It is one year since the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris, and one year since much of the free world proclaimed itself to “be Charlie.” It is also a year since it became obvious that almost no one really was Charlie and that, if people had been, then the people shot for being Charlie might still be alive to publish Charlie. As it was, after the 2005 Danish cartoons controversy the staff of one small-circulation secularist French magazine were just about the only people in the world willing to treat Islam in the same way satirists and cartoonists across the world treat every other religion. Left out so far in front of a culture which prides itself on fearlessness and bravery, while being rife with fear and self-censorship, it made what happened in Paris a year ago seem almost inevitable.

Perhaps it is for that reason that the first reaction to the killings seemed not only over-compensating but slightly guilt-tinged in its posthumous solidarity. In any case, it wasn’t long before a backlash to this occurred. At first it came only from Islamist pundits who insisted that although the cartoonists might not have deserved death, they did in some sense “have it coming to them.” Naturally the smarter Islamists sensed that excusing murder for the crime of “blasphemy” is still not presently the fastest way to the Western heart. So they lobbed an even more untrue and toxic claim into the mix: Charlie Hebdo, they said, was “racist.”