RUTHFULLY YOURS

Middle Eastern crime clans now control large swathes of German cities and towns — areas that are effectively lawless and which German police increasingly fear to approach. The crime families, which have thousands of members, have for decades been allowed operate with virtual impunity: German judges and prosecutors were unable or unwilling to stop them, apparently out of fear of retribution.

“The police cannot win a war with the Lebanese because we outnumber them.” — Criminal clan members to Gelsenkirchen Police Chief Ralf Feldmann.

Peter Biesenbach, now Justice Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, had repeatedly called for an official inquiry to determine the scope of clan activity. Those pleas had been rejected by his predecessor, because such a study would be politically incorrect.

German authorities have launched a crackdown on Middle Eastern crime families in Essen, a city in North Rhine-Westphalia where some 70 Turkish, Kurdish and Arab-born clan members regularly engage in racketeering, extortion, money laundering, pimping and trafficking in humans, weapons and drugs.

Middle Eastern crime clans now control large swathes of German cities and towns — areas that are effectively lawless and which German police increasingly fear to approach.

The crime families, which have thousands of members, have for decades been allowed operate with virtual impunity: German judges and prosecutors were unable or unwilling to stop them, apparently out of fear of retribution.

Donald Trump’s order last Friday to launch missile strikes against Syria’s chemical weapons infrastructure has exposed the divisions among Americans over foreign policy. Some Trump supporters think the President has walked back from his America-first nationalism. Globalists of both parties agree that Bashar al Assad needed to be punished for brutally violating international conventions against chemical weapons. And the rabid anti-Trump left views the attack as a “wag-the-dog” diversion from Trump’s legal troubles.

So is there a legitimate reason for bombing Syria and possibly provoking Russian retaliation that risks dragging us deeper into the Middle East quagmire?

Many Americans, sick of a decade-and-a-half of American military presence in the region believe that “we don’t have a dog in that fight,” as the first Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker said of the brutal conflicts in the disintegrating Yugoslavia of the early nineties. Some may remember George W. Bush’s willingness to be the “world’s policeman” ––after he campaigned against “foreign policy as social work” ––when he launched two wars in the region. They voted for Donald Trump in part because he was a critic of the endless war in Iraq and the still active war in Afghanistan and their delusional nation-building aims, and vowed to put “America first.”

The problem with this understandable “pox on both their houses” attitude to foreign conflicts is that American security and interests have long been intimately bound up in a world that for more than century has been growing closer and more interdependent. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were the gruesome illustration of that reality. The attackers easily travelled by air thousands of miles from their homes, and lived freely in this country as they prepared the attacks. Armed only with box-cutters, they turned commercial airliners into the smartest of smart bombs simply by navigating them into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, killing in a few hours about the same number of Americans who died in the British invasion between 1812 and 1815. At the cost of half a million dollars––less than half the cost of one cruise missile–– they struck devastating blows against history’s greatest military and economic power, onw they knew intimately from globally distributed news and entertainment, and had grown to hate because its very existence challenged orthodox premodern Islamic doctrine.

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.