RUTHFULLY YOURS

The U.S. strikes last week on suspected chemical weapons sites near Damascus and Homs exemplify how not to use military force. Their only consequence is to highlight the poverty of the foreign policy of which they are part: driven by questionable intelligence, the “CNN effect,” and an inability to come to grips with real problems.

The strikes did a little harm to Syrian leader Bashar al Assad, who is a dependent of Iran and Russia and who is nearly helpless vis à vis our newest enemy, Turkey. Iran is extending its reach to the Mediterranean and threatening war on Israel. Russia is solidifying hegemony over the Middle East. Turkey is making war on the Kurds, the only real allies the United States has had in the region in a generation. Instead of braking any of these ominous developments, the U.S. government, reverting to type, destroyed a few buildings and hyped its own virtues in garbled neo-Wilsonian lingo.

The U.S. government’s claim that the Assad regime used chlorine gas and sarin together (that would be a first) against civilians separately from movement of ground troops (military nonsense) may or may not be correct. The government presented no evidence except videos. When it does have evidence, it usually crows. “Tin foil hats” are not necessary for skepticism, given U.S. intelligence’s historic and unbroken allergy to checking information that comes over the transom, its reflexive reaction to cable news reports of reported atrocities, and its own penchant for grandstanding.

No Geopolitical Significance
But the provenance of those chemical attacks, if any, is irrelevant to policy.

U.S. intelligence does not know what was in those buildings. But their destruction has little to do with the production of simple chemical weapons. Tokyo terrorists cooked up sarin in garages. Strikes at 3 a.m. did nothing to degrade the Assad regime’s human expertise in this field. Moreover, if Russia and Iran were complicit, as claimed, they can easily make up what was destroyed.

In short, the strikes’ military significance is tiny, and the geopolitical significance is nil.

Russia is said to have poisoned a defector with a nerve agent that has Moscow’s fingerprints all over it. Why so careless? In Syria, one chemical incident among many prompts a massive air blitz. Again, why now? Only one truth shall can set free the questing, restless mind

“The world ain’t what it seems, and the moment you think you got it figured out, you’re wrong.”
– Levon Helm as Mr Rate in the movie Shooter

I often find it hard to be sure that the putative perp did the dirty deed. In the early 1980s I was foreman of a jury in a trial of a young man charged with receiving stolen property. He had plead guilty to a number of other receiving charges, for which he had been given a non-custodial sentence. If he were found guilty this time around he would almost certainly go to jail. It was touch and go in the jury room. But I thought that there was reasonable doubt. He was acquitted.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe that exactly the right decision was made. But I know that I would have wrestled much more with a decision to find him guilty rather than ‘innocent’. It comes, I think, from being a sceptic across the whole gamut of life. I look for proof. Sometimes I find it hard to believe anything with that deep and abiding certainty that I see in some others.

Funny, I believe in God, for which physical evidence is unobtainable, but have my suspicions about the completeness of evolutionary theory, for which there is an amount of physical evidence. The latest announced cancer cure, cures for aging, quantum computing, driverless cars, the triumph of artificial intelligence over humankind, all are lapped up by some people as being part of a brave new future world. Not by me. I am consistently cynical. I’ll believe it when I see it, which I won’t because I’ll be dead before it likely doesn’t happen.

I am sceptical about both the fact of and the seriousness of manmade global warming, though I do not entirely dismiss the possibility that the alarmists are right. A lot of the people I know seem absolutely sure one way or the other. I have come under fire from both sides.

This brings me to the Russians and to also to Bashar Al-Assad. First to Russians and Mr Putin. Apparently, the Russian government, Putin himself perhaps, employed a Soviet-made nerve agent Novichok to try to knock off ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in London in March of this year. Thankfully both have recovered. The British foreign secretary Boris Johnson was reported as saying that it was “overwhelmingly likely” that Russia did it. “There can be no doubt what was used and there remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible…Only Russia has the means, motive and record.”

This is what is called circumstantial evidence. Would the Russians have been silly enough to use a nerve agent which could be easily traced back to them? Perhaps they would as a signal to others who would turn against the motherland. I don’t know, but I do know that I have a problem with describing something of this kind as “overwhelming likely.”

It is overwhelming likely that he is guilty, M’lud. Is that the same as guilty beyond reasonable doubt, which though also imprecise has a long legal history to sustain it? Would we send someone to the gallows who is overwhelmingly likely to have committed the murder? What the heck does it mean? I would like those in positions of power to use more precise language before deciding to expel Russian diplomats and to enjoin other countries to do the same. Precision of language leads to precision of thought which, in turn, lays groundwork for better decision-making. As George Orwell puts it in his essay Politics and the English Language: “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

As the echoes from President Trump’s second Syrian missile strike died away, many observers criticized the administration for lacking a coherent strategy. There is more than a little truth to the charge. The drama and disarray of this often-dysfunctional White House does not suggest a Richelieu at work. The presidential Twitter feed has not always been consistent or levelheaded on the topic of the Syrian war, and it is hard to reconcile Mr. Trump’s denunciations of Bashar al-Assad and his warnings about Iranian aggression with his apparent determination to remove U.S. troops from Syria as quickly as possible.

The tangled politics of last week’s missile strikes illustrate the contradictions in Mr. Trump’s approach. The president is a realist who believes that international relations are both highly competitive and zero-sum. If Iran and Russia threaten the balance of power in the Middle East, it is necessary to work with any country in the region that will counter them, irrespective of its human-rights record. The question is not whether there are political prisoners in Egypt; the question is whether Egypt shares U.S. interests when it comes to opposing Iran.

Yet the rationale for the missile strikes was not realist but humanitarian and legalistic: Syria’s illegal use of chemical weapons against its own people demanded or at least justified the Western attacks. For any kind of activist Middle East policy, Mr. Trump needs allies—including neoconservatives and liberal internationalists at home and foreign allies like Britain and France abroad—and the realpolitik approach he wishes to pursue would alienate them.

If defending Tariq Ramadan is regrettable, Western silence is worse.

There are also those who blame Ramadan’s alleged victims. According to The New Yorker, “[Ayeri] is something of a heroine in the extreme-right circles of the fachosphère, where Islamophobia is a ticket of admission”. So, the “real” problem is “Islamophobia,” not the Muslim subjugation of women.

The three women who accused Ramadan of rape have been the subjects of intimidation, violence and threats.

“The blindness of the Anglo-Saxons on political Islam is frightening”. — Pascal Bruckner, French philosopher.

“If you thought it was challenging for women to come forward and accuse Harvey Weinstein of rape, consider accusing the Islamic theologian Tariq Ramadan”, wrote Sylvie Kauffman, the former editor of Le Monde.

Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Bana, is a Swiss lecturer on Islam with millions of followers and one of Time Magazine’s “men of the year”. Accused of rape by three women, however, Ramadan is now in custody of the French police. In denying the allegations of sexual violence, his #MeToo case has turned into a political and religious affair.

The Algerian writer Kamel Daoud summarized the response of the Arab-Islamic world to the Ramadan affair: “Silence, discomfort, embarrassment and theories of mass conspiracy”.

The Muslim communities likely know what is at stake in the case of Ramadan, which the Muslim sociologist Omero Marongiu-Perria has called a “crumbling myth”. But if the Muslims’ silence and defense of Tariq Ramadan is something regrettable, Western silence is worse.

Ramadan’s ethnic and religious identity — as is becoming increasingly common (for instance, here, here and here) — has been evoked as part of his defense. After the first sexual accusations came out against Ramadan, Professor Eugene Rogan, Director of Oxford’s Middle East Centre, where Ramadan also teaches, defended his colleague. Ramadan, Rogan said, is a “prominent Muslim”.

According to the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner, “the blindness of the Anglo-Saxons on political Islam is frightening. In the United States, as in the UK, attacking Tariq Ramadan earn you a charge of racism”.

Despite losing control of Raqqa and other major strongholds in Syria and Iraq, ISIS continues to keep many of the women it kidnapped during its rise in 2014. The world seems to have forgotten about them.

Habib, traded four times during her captivity, witnessed many cases of Christian and Yazidi girls — some as young as 9 years old — sold, raped and tortured by ISIS members.

Currently, there are an estimated 1,500 Christian and Yazidi girls and women still in captivity, while 1,000 others are missing in Iraq and Syria. Others are believed to have been sold to sex traffickers in Turkey. It is an issue that the international community cannot ignore.

After more than three years, Rita Habib, a 30-year-old Christian woman from the Iraqi city of Mosul, was recently reunited with her blind father in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan Region. She and her father are the sole survivors of a family whose members, like thousands of Christians and other non-Muslims, was murdered by ISIS in mid-2014. Habib was among hundreds of Christian and Yazidi women and girls abducted at the time and sold into the sex trade. She was one of the lucky ones to be rescued by the Christian advocacy group, the Shlomo Organization for Documentation, which paid ISIS $30,000 for her release.

Abu Shujaa, a Yazidi activist who has been involved in rescuing hundreds of Yazidi women from ISIS, helps secure their release in various ways, but said that all require money, which is hard to come by.

When Raqqa, the former de facto capital of ISIS, was liberated by U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, many captured women were freed. Despite losing control of Raqqa and other major strongholds in Syria and Iraq, however, ISIS continues to enslave many of the women and girls it kidnapped during its rise in 2014. The world seems to have forgotten about them.

STOCKHOLM—The Swedish Academy, the body responsible for awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature, is in crisis over its handling of a sexual-assault scandal.

The academy said late Thursday that two of its members— Sara Danius, its permanent secretary, and poet Katarina Frostenson, whose husband has been accused of sexual assault—had retired, the latest episode in a blame game that has consumed the prestigious institution for months.

The scandal broke in November when Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter published the testimonies of 18 women accusing a 71-year-old Franco-Swedish photographer, Jean-Claude Arnault, of sexual assault and sexual harassment between 1996 and 2017.

The accusations, which Mr. Arnault denies, have ricocheted onto the institution because the photographer, a prominent figure in Sweden’s cultural life, is married to Ms. Frostenson, and because the academy has provided financial support to some of his cultural projects.

President Trump announced “mission accomplished” after Friday night’s missile attack on Syria, and he’s right if his goal was merely to punish Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons. But if Mr. Trump also wants to deter Russian and Iranian imperialism, reduce the chances of another Mideast war and keep Syria from producing global terrorists, he needs a more ambitious strategy.

Even narrowly defined, the military strike was valuable in enforcing the longtime taboo against chemical weapons—all the more so after Barack Obama drew his famous “red line” in 2013 and failed to enforce it. Criticism of the strike from the Obama gallery that failed so utterly in Syria can’t be taken seriously.

The 105 Tomahawk and standoff air missiles, launched from three directions into Syria, did tangible damage to Syria’s chemical-weapons R&D and storage facilities. Lt. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie told reporters, “no Syrian weapon had any effect on anything we did,” including Russian-supplied missile defenses.

The damage might have a deterrent effect on Assad’s use of chemicals, given that Mr. Trump said Friday he is prepared to enforce the ban again. Mr. Trump lost credibility on that score in the last year after his Administration concluded several times that Assad had used chlorine gas but took no action. Next time the attack should be even more punishing.

The military contribution from Britain and France was useful in demonstrating a larger willingness to prevent the normalization of WMD. And the strike could have a demonstration effect on North Korea as Mr. Trump heads into his perilous summit with Kim Jong Un.

Apparently, turning in fellow Swedes to the authorities for alleged “hate speech” is now viewed in Sweden as “heroic”.

“One can criticize fascism or Nazism, but why not Islam? Why should Islam have any protection status?” — Denny, a 71-year-old pensioner, on trial for “incitement to hatred”.

Instead of using its limited resources to protect its citizens against the violent onslaught against them, Sweden is waging a legal war on its pensioners for daring to speak out against the same violent onslaught from which the state is failing to protect them.

According to the Swedish mainstream media, the country has experienced a significant rise in prosecutions for “hate speech” on social media

last year. The organization believed to be largely responsible for this rise is “Näthatsgranskaren” (“The Web Hate Investigator”), a private organization founded in January 2017 by a former police officer, Tomas Åberg, who has taken it upon himself to identify and report to the authorities Swedish individuals whom he and his organization decide are committing thought crimes and “inciting hatred” against foreigners.

Åberg’s organization reported no fewer than 750 Swedish citizens in 2017 to the authorities for “web hate”. According to Aftonbladet, 14% of the reported cases went on to prosecution of which about 7% — 77 cases — led to actual convictions. Most of the people identified and reported by the organization were middle aged and elderly ladies. “The average age is around 55 years”, said Åberg, “Young women almost do not appear at all”.

U.S., U.K. and French forces launched airstrikes targeting sites associated with Syria’s chemical-weapons capabilities, a reprisal for an attack last week that killed at least 43 civilians and injured hundreds more.

The decision to strike was aimed at cutting off the production and use of chemical weapons in the country, President Donald Trump said at the White House on Friday night.
Strikes on Syria
Beginning at 9 p.m ET, U.S., British and French forces struck three targets associated with chemical weapons in Syria:

Mr. Trump blamed “Russia’s failure” for the suspected chemical attack in Syria, saying Moscow had vowed to stop the use of such weapons in the country. He said Russia needs to decide whether it will continue down a “dark path” in Syria or become a force for “stability and peace.”

“Hopefully, someday, we’ll get along with Russia, and maybe even Iran—but maybe not,” Mr. Trump said.

The strikes were a culmination of a weeklong international push to punish the regime of President Bashar al-Assad after images and videos emerged last Saturday from the Syrian city of Douma suggesting civilians—including children—had suffered in the attack.

Syria and its chief patron, Russia, have denied that chemical weapons were used in Douma.

Mr. Trump said the operation would be “sustained” until the Syrian regime stopped using chemical weapons. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joe Dunford, said at a Pentagon briefing it was a single wave of strikes that is complete, for now.

“This is a one-time shot,” Mr. Mattis said. “Right now, we have no additional strikes planned.”

Gen. Dunford said manned aircraft were used in the attack on targets including a Damascus scientific research center and a storage facility for chemical weapons. He said the strikes would set back Syria’s chemical-weapons program for years.

President Donald Trump said the recent suspected chemical attack in Syria was the crime of a ‘monster’ and the airstrikes aim to deter the production and use of chemical weapons. Photo: AP

The U.S. didn’t give advance notice to Russia, which has forces in Syria, Gen. Dunford said. He said the only communication with the Russians leading up to the strike campaign was via a phone line designed for the two nations to communicate during the war against Islamic State, but those communications weren’t intended as formal notification.

U.S. and U.K. submarines armed with missiles moved within strike range of Syria. A U.S. destroyer, the USS Donald Cook, and the French frigate Aquitaine were in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, while three more American cruisers and destroyers are currently deployed in the Middle East.

The U.S. took pains to avoid civilian casualties and any targets with foreign personnel, Mr. Mattis said. He has expressed concerns that any airstrike operation not escalate the conflict in Syria with Russia or Iran.

The coalition used twice the number of weapons in the attack than were used last year in Mr. Trump’s first airstrike against a Syrian air base, Mr. Mattis said. CONTINUE AT SITE

When the same Home Office that forbade Sister Ban even to enter the country discovered that the young male Iraqi was in Britain, he explained clearly that he had been trained by ISIS. He told the Home Office officials that the group had trained him to kill. The Home Office promptly found him a place to live and study, and treated him as the minor he said he was but most likely was not. He subsequently told a teacher that he had “a duty to hate Britain”.

Last year the Institute of St Anselm (a Catholic training institute for priests and nuns, based in Kent) closed its doors because of problems it had getting the Home Office to grant visa applications for foreign students. One nun last year was apparently denied entry to the UK because she did not have a personal bank account.

So, those who flee ISIS are turned away, while those who are trained by ISIS are welcome.

The behaviour of government departments in charge of immigration and asylum across Europe repeatedly demonstrate the truth of the late Robert Conquest’s maxim — his “third law of politics” — that the simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation “is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies”.

Last week it was reported in the Catholic Herald that a nun who was driven out of the town of Qaraqosh, on the Nineveh plains in Iraq, has been forbidden to visit her ill sister in the United Kingdom. Sister Ban Madleen was among those Christians who were forced to flee the largest Christian town in the area when ISIS entered it in 2014. She was among the thousands of Christians who fled the approaching jihadists and found refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan. There, she set up kindergartens to look after the children of other refugees who had also sought sanctuary in the Kurdish areas. A letter, seen by the Catholic Herald, from the UK Visa and Immigration division at the UK Home Office, stated that Sister Ban had not given evidence of her earnings as a kindergarten principal or shown enough evidence that her order of nuns would fund her visit.

The UK Home Office noted that Sister Ban had previously travelled to the UK and had on those occasions always complied with the terms of her visa. However, the Home Office pointed out that her visa was issued seven years ago, in 2011, and noted her lack of recent travel to the UK. It shows no understanding of why her recent travel might have been limited. Such as the possibility that events such as the rise of ISIS, the attempted annihilation of Iraq’s Christian community and that community’s quasi-Biblical flight to safety in the Kurdish regions might explain the nun’s otherwise inexplicable absence from the UK?