RUTHFULLY YOURS

Leon Aron is the director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
As Russia deepens its involvement in Syria, it risks more than a military quagmire. Its intervention exacerbates a growing domestic threat, one that could destabilize the whole country. A new brand of radical Islam is rising in Russia, fueled by Russian fighters eager to perpetrate acts of terror at home.

Even a decade ago, the scope and depth of this emerging terrorist network would have seemed inconceivable. While Russia has suffered its share of domestic terrorism, those crimes were largely perpetrated by Chechen fighters based in the North Caucasus region. When Moscow declared victory in Chechnya in 2009, it suggested that the threat of radical violence had been largely contained.

But militant Islam didn’t disappear. In fact, the fundamentalist teachings have spread from Chechnya throughout central Russia. They’re propagated by Russian imams trained in the Middle East and are finding new audiences among the country’s native Muslims, as well as Central Asian migrants in Moscow. Even some younger and seemingly long-assimilated believers are becoming radicalized. Like their counterparts across Europe, they’re turning to Internet videos and social-media messages aimed at arousing anger at Western “crusaders.”

This is a real danger for Russia. The country has become a new front in the war against militant Islam, a battle that Europe’s largest Muslim country is largely unprepared to fight.

Russia is no stranger to Muslim radicalism. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Chechen independence movement became more militant, propelled by a growing belief in Islamic fundamentalism.

Moscow responded harshly. In 1999, newly appointed Prime Minister Vladi­mir Putin launched a scorched-earth campaign that made the Chechen capital, Grozny, look like the ruins of Stalingrad. Chechen fighters struck back, often with spectacularly gruesome terrorist attacks, such as the 2002 seizure of a Moscow theater and the 2004 attack on an elementary school in North Ossetia. But this didn’t derail Moscow. After a decade of brutal fighting (accompanied, often, by massive human rights violations), the Kremlin ended the antiterrorist operation in 2009.

Islamic fanatics struck another blow for cynicism last Friday night in Paris — wholesale and gratuitous slaughter in the name of their sanguinary Muslim god. History teaches few lessons these days.

We say “Muslim god” because most other religions forsook ritual religious slaughter centuries ago. Indeed, the nearest historical comparison is actually political. Before contemporary jihad, the Nazis were the last imperial movement to use industrial scale pogroms to underwrite an ideological message. Ironically, the EU now opens its borders to religious fascism more virulent than the political strain that led to the Holocaust and associated carnage of WWII. Angela Merkel does the ironic walk of shame here.

Alas, any distinction between politics and religion in a Muslim context is now moot. Politics are mostly religious in the Ummah and dystopic religion seems to be the only relevant politics permissible in much of the Muslim world.

Iranian military commanders, security chiefs and conservative media outlets are coming close to questioning the competence and loyalty of those in the Iranian regime who favor the JCPOA.

The surreal irony, of course, is that President Obama keeps assuring the world — as recently as last week again, when he met with Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu — that he is “preventing” Iran from getting nuclear weapons, while the truth is that his “deal” — if the Iranians ever sign it — not only green-lights Iran’s nuclear program, but in fact finances it.

Iran’s hardliners are pressing their attack on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which has not yet been approved by Iran. Iran’s opponents of the JCPOA have succeeded in halting any steps toward implementation of Tehran’s responsibilities under the July14 settlement reached in Vienna by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — the US, the UK, France, China and Russia, plus Germany (the so-called P5+1). But who appointed them?

While some reports indicated that Iran was beginning to take off the production line some of the uranium-enrichment centrifuges in the Natanz and Fordow facilities, contradictory reports suggested that any such action was halted due to pressure from Iran’s hardliners, and that dismantling the centrifuges had not been authorized by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and was therefore premature. Another report suggested that only a small number of outdated centrifuges had been decommissioned.

The United Nations, in 2000, advocated the “replacement” of Europe’s population by Muslim migrants.

There seems to be an economic premise underlying this view: that importing the Muslim world en masse into Europe is mutually beneficial. For decades, the mass immigration of Muslims into Europe has been labelled “enrichment.” Shouting “Islamophobia” does not negate how it is virtually impossible to think of a country actually made richer by it.

Even in a country with an established Islamic population such as Britain, Muslim unemployment languishes at 50% for men, and 75% for women.

Those using an economic rationale to implement Europe’s demographic transformation fail to recognize the complexities of Islam: they ignore the fundamentalist revival that has been ongoing for over a century. One feature of this growing embrace of literalism is a belief — validated by scripture — that Muslims are entitled to idly profit from the productivity of infidels.

The idea that with time, Islam’s religious tenets will somehow moderate and dissolve, merely by being lodged in Europe, is wishful thinking, especially in communities where Muslim migrants already outnumber indigenous Europeans.

When Islamist leaders condemned Friday night’s Paris attacks, which left more than 132 people dead and hundreds of others critically wounded, you just had to laugh through your tears.

Terror masters in Iran, Turkey, Syria and the Palestinian Authority actually had the gall to talk as if they themselves are not responsible for the ongoing murder of innocent people.

But hypocrisy, mendacity and lying as a matter of course are not the only reasons for their public expressions of solidarity with France during this frightful hour. In fact, what really bothers them is the fear that a rival group may be beating them at their own game. And hell hath no fury like a scorned, power-hungry radical Muslim with hegemonic aims and weapons with which to achieve them.

Such monsters, some in suits and ties to throw you off, are able to get away with playing the West for fools — particularly when the so-called leader of the free world keeps kowtowing to them, while espousing denial as a policy. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the bloodbath in Paris, U.S. President Barack Obama made a statement that put a smug smile on the faces of jihadists everywhere.

In the first place, he called the carnage “an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share.” This is an amazing assertion, since I don’t even share Obama’s values, let alone those of a great portion of “humanity” inside and out of Washington, D.C. You know, like the multimillions of anti-Semites, Christian-killers, women-subjugators and child-abusers who are trying to win the war over the world’s character and soul.

U.S. President Barack Obama had everyone’s attention with the major world leaders and international journalists attending the G-20 Summit in Antalya, Turkey on Monday, Nov. 16.

In the wake of Friday’s Paris massacres carried out by ISIS and its supporters which led to hundreds dead and wounded civilians, it is not an exaggeration to say that people were anticipating a statement of strength and resolve from a man in the position which has long been considered the leader of the free world.

That is not the message they heard from Obama.

Instead, Obama appeared to be digging in his heels, refusing to consider that he may have misjudged ISIS and may have pursued the wrong strategy thus far with the growing barbaric and now global threat to civilization, ISIS.

A day after the slaughter in Paris, Fusion.net blogger Manu Saadia lamented that the Isis murderers had added insult to injury by concentrating their attacks on neighborhoods where “young and hip Parisians gather to drink and socialize.” Struggling to understand the politics of the massacre, Saadia deployed every buzzword in the liberal handbook. He was indignant that neither “tolerant, progressive” views nor the amulet of political correctness had protected these “hipster socialists” against the violence. As if to chastise Isis for its gory faux pas, Saadia pointed to the “ethnically mixed” neighborhoods themselves, which had retained the “authenticity” of their “proletarian” origins.

No progress on peace will be possible until and unless “Palestine” becomes a pragmatic political project rather than a religious-ideological cause célèbre.

No surprises here: that’s the conclusion a reader might draw after making his way through “What Do Palestinians Want?,” Daniel Polisar’s comprehensive essay in Mosaic on Palestinian public opinion. Based on hundreds of polls conducted by different organizations over the years, Polisar’s study confirms, or rather reconfirms, that a large majority of Palestinians think the worst of Israel on all issues related to it.

One question worth asking at the outset is to what extent it is possible to know what Palestinians really think about Israel. Is the survey method, initially designed for marketing purposes and later applied to electoral politics in Western democracies, the most productive means of obtaining an accurate picture in a context removed from both commercial considerations and political trends in pluralist societies?

Is the Obama administration aware that it is trusting and dealing with a country that has just broken the world record in executions? Of course the President is aware of that, and it seems that he has decided to turn a blind eye to Iran’s increasing aggression and oppression inside and outside of its own country.

According to the recent and fifth report by the special United Nations investigator of human rights, human rights violations in Iran are rising even since the nuclear agreement was reached. Accordingly, execution rates have been increasing at “an exponential rate” in Iran. In 2014, 753 were executed and at least 694 people (including women and juveniles) were executed from January 2015 till mid-September. This is reported to be the highest rate of execution the Islamic Republic has had in 25 years.

If we take the ratio of the population into consideration, the Islamic Republic breaks the world record in number of executions per capita. As Ahmed Shaheed, the U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in Iran, pointed out, “The Islamic Republic of Iran continues to execute more individuals per capita than any other country in the world. Executions have been rising at an exponential rate since 2005 and peaked in 2014, at a shocking 753 executions[.]” According to the UN analyst, Iran is on track to execute more than 1000 people by the end of this year. Of course, these are only the official numbers being reported by the Iranian regime, the unreported number of executions by the government is likely much higher.

Jihadis do not mysteriously emerge from a culture free zone, only ‘accidentally’ parroting their religious credentials. They promote a violent, fascistic ideology which draws its energy from a reading of the verses and concepts of Islamic texts:

Francois Hollande described Friday’s massacre in Paris as an ‘act of war’. He was right to do so. But this is not a new war declared upon us by our enemies. For these atrocities are merely the latest in a long line of mass casualty Islamist onslaughts against civilians.

The terror in Paris was preceded by the 9/11 attacks, the Bali bloodbath of 2002, the Madrid train bombings, the Beslan school killings, 7/7, the massacres of Al Shabaab and many thousands of smaller scale strikes across the world.

France alone has suffered several attacks in the last year, with satirists, atheists, Jews and revellers being targeted with venom. Israel is being attacked every day.