RUTHFULLY YOURS

Conservatives have enemies to their right.

‘Democracy is in crisis,” begins the 2018 annual report from Freedom House. “For the 12th consecutive year, . . . countries that suffered democratic setbacks outnumbered those that registered gains.” Indeed, the downward trend may be accelerating. This year for the first time, the number of countries registering losses of freedom — a whopping 71 in all — is more than double the number in which freedom grew.

Alarm at this trajectory, together with some other global events and trends, inspired the issuance of the Prague Appeal for Democratic Renewal, officially launched at the October 2017 conference, in Prague, of the Forum 2000 Foundation, an organization founded by former Czech president Václav Havel and maintained by members of his family and close political associates. The Prague Appeal is intended as a “moral and intellectual catalyst for the revitalization of the democratic idea” and as the charter for the Coalition for Democratic Renewal, consisting of intellectuals and activists, from scores of countries, who aim to “go on the offensive against the authoritarian opponents of democracy.”

That such an initiative might draw return fire from its targets is to be expected. More surprising, however, was the broadside against it in these pages by National Review editor-at-large John O’Sullivan, speaking mostly through the voice of Ryszard Legutko. O’Sullivan merely glossed a polemic that Legutko had contributed to the Australian magazine Quadrant. Lengthy quotes from it made up most of O’Sullivan’s piece.

O’Sullivan introduces Legutko as a “distinguished Polish philosopher,” but one could not tell from the method of his diatribe. In the compass of a thousand words, Legutko accuses the Prague Appeal of being “bizarre,” “outrageous,” “intellectual[ly] dishonest,” “an insult to decency,” “vile,” “shameful,” and “a lie.” He attributes to the signers, many of whom have published a great deal, views in manifest contradiction to what they have written. Oddly, he elsewhere recently put his name to an appeal for “linguistic decency,” noting that “language is a delicate instrument, . . . debased when used as a bludgeon,” and that “recourse to denunciation is a sign of . . . decadence.”

What is going on here? The fuse igniting Legutko’s (and, by proxy, O’Sullivan’s) explosion is the inclusion, in the Prague Appeal, of a reference to Hungary alongside references to Venezuela, Turkey, and the Philippines. All are cited as examples of “backsliding democracies” where “illiberalism is on the rise.” Legutko, who angrily decried this as “attributing guilt by scurrilous association,” and O’Sullivan, who directs a think tank in Budapest, are evidently partial to Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. More broadly, they appear to sympathize with “populist” movements that have arisen recently in Europe and the U.S.

Tuesday, February 20. It’s our first time in Prague, and – except for a couple of visits to Berlin – K.’s first time on territory that was once part of the Warsaw Pact. Today, as we’re wont to do on arrival in a new city, we passed on museums and other cultural attractions, preferring instead to walk and walk and walk – to get a sense of the place and the people and start finding our way around.

After several hours of wandering along the winding streets and across cobbled squares dominated by churches, we came back to our hotel and had a drink at the bar. After two gin and tonics, I saw that K. had tears in his eyes. I looked at him quizzically. He could hardly get the words out.

“I’m so angry at my country’s government!” he finally exploded.

The country in question being Norway.

K. explained. We had just seen a good deal of Prague, and had passed heaven knows how many thousands of people. Not once had we seen a hijab. Let alone a niqab or burka.

“In this whole big city, not one!” he cried. “And yet in that little town where we live – in the middle of nowhere! – you can’t look out of the window for a minute without seeing one.”

For us, the Islamization of Western Europe had been a constant topic of conversation for almost twenty years. We’d voiced anger, frustration, despondency, cynicism. But I’d never seen him get teary-eyed about it.

After Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent diplomatic visit to India, a farcical event in which Trudeau earned the unstinted mockery of the international press, we are left rubbing our eyes in disbelief — or, for those who know the man, total belief. This is our political version of Mr. Dressup, a man who imagines that trade talks and inter-governmental relations can be conducted with fancy dress and hip-thrusting dance. Who invites a convicted terrorist, Jaspal Atwal, a Sikh extremist who once tried to assassinate an Indian diplomat on a visit to Canada, to sit at the high table with his Indian counterparts — before blaming someone else for the blunder. A man who brings his own Indo-Canadian chef to the culinary ceremony, a snub to his hosts — before blaming some else for the gaffe. It’s no surprise that intelligent people have wondered what could ever have provoked a nation to favor such a person with a majority government.

Anyone with a modicum of common sense and a hint of political acumen knows that Justin Trudeau is an empty sherwani. Nonetheless, he enjoys considerable support among Canadians. Some are bedazzled by his dynastic star quality as the son of Canada’s most eccentric and charismatic Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau (whose socialist, fiscal and immigration agenda set Canada on the downward spiral gathering momentum today). Others ignore Justin’s disastrous economic policies, which are plunging the country into generational debt, imposing a needless carbon tax, and raising taxes on farmers, doctors and small businesses — Trudeau claims that a “large percentage of small businesses are actually ways for wealthier Canadians to save on their taxes.” As they say, go figure. This is a man who desires to further restrict the speech of ordinary Canadians, whether by criminalizing “discriminatory” speech against transgenderism or by introducing anti-Islamophobia legislation, pandering to the least democratic elements in our country. It is no accident that he wanted to regulate Facebook conversations unfavorable to his party. His approval of the Chinese Communist regime, his push for gender equalization in his cabinet regardless of merit and his pro-Islamic sympathies have endeared him to “social justice” advocates, as has his egregious comment that Canada has no core identity, though he is doing all he can to empty Canada of whatever identity it can still be said to possess. As my wife Janice Fiamengo states in the Act!forCanada newsletter, “When you elect as national leader a photogenic substitute drama teacher with a soft voice and penchant for progressive slogans, this is what you get.”

As also reported by the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, in the past month there has been a significant increase in Chinese and Indian military deployments around the Doklam area, on the border between China and Bhutan, where last summer there was a two-month confrontation between Indian and Chinese troops. In that case, the Indians intervened because the Chinese were building a road in a disputed area between China and Bhutan, a country that has no diplomatic relations with Beijing but has a defense agreement with New Delhi.

At the same time as the article, the news appeared that the head of Indian diplomacy, Shri Vijay Gokhale, former ambassador to Beijing and fluent in Chinese, arrived in Beijing. The purpose of the mission, according to a dispatch from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, was «to build on the convergences between India and China and address differences on the basis of mutual respect and sensitivity to each other’s concerns, interests and aspirations».

On the one hand, the visit indicates a positive step forward in the midst of tensions. On the other hand, this meeting demonstrates that the level of tensions has risen to the point that there are frictions over «concerns, interests, and aspirations» of both countries.

Since the Doklam crisis, there have been significant developments in South Asia, around India. China has cemented relations with Nepal and expanded its ties with the Maldives so much as to push the archipelago, traditionally part of the Indian area of influence, to host bases for supplies for Chinese ships as part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Finally, the Rohingya crisis in Burma is exacerbating social situation strains in Bangladesh, a burden also felt in neighboring India. Meanwhile, Bangladesh is increasingly attracted by the economic offers of Chinese investments.

The downfall of Jacob Zuma as president of South Africa suggests that there might be a limit to tolerable corruption even in the most corrupt of polities; or perhaps it is merely the indiscretion of the corruption that makes it intolerable. The rule should be “steal what you like, but do not flaunt it.”

I’m not surprised by the extremity of Zuma’s corruption: it is, rather, what I had expected more than 20 years ago. It was a pair of shoes that gave me a clue to the future.

I had gone to South Africa in 1990, shortly after the unbanning of the African National Congress and the release of Nelson Mandela, to interview Joe Slovo, one of the ANC leaders and a hard-line, pro-Soviet Communist. He had spent much of his life in various states of exile, surveillance, and imprisonment, but he was now free, and I interviewed him in his office in the Shell Building (than which nothing could have been more emblematically capitalist) in Johannesburg.

He was an amiable man, and I could not but feel sympathy for someone whose wife had been murdered by the South African Secret Service by means of parcel bomb sent to Mozambique, where she had taken refuge. He was a true believer in the Soviet route to heaven, but on his many visits to Moscow, he had failed to notice the lack of freedom and of consumer goods there (he admitted this). Either he wasn’t very clever, or he found the absence of freedom and consumer goods attractive. There is nothing like a shortage of sugar or lavatory paper, after all, for increasing the powers of political patronage—which he assumed, not totally erroneously, would shortly be his. It was his reward: he had been in the wilderness long enough.

I was briefly optimistic about South Africa’s future. Until the Soviet Union’s downfall, an event much underestimated in the peaceful evolution of South Africa, I had assumed that political violence there was inevitable; but a few experiences changed my view.

North Korea wins the gold medal for evil regimes. Its people are starved. There is almost no electricity outside the capital. There reportedly are concentration camps. Its leader threatens the world with nuclear weapons.

But who cares? Too many in the media went gaga over Dear Leader’s wicked sister — after all, at least she’s not Pence! — and they cheered on the cult-victim North Korean cheerleaders as if they had something to cheer about.

Now, it turns out, those cheerleaders are forced to have sex with party leaders. From the New York Post story:

Members of the North Korean national cheerleading squad — who have been featured gleefully rooting at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics — are systematically forced to have sex with high-ranking members of Kim Jong Un’s twisted regime, according to a disturbing report.

Behind the scenes, the troupe — dubbed the “Pleasure Squad” by insiders — are forced to perform sex acts on party leaders during their trip to the Olympics, a defector with knowledge of the sexual slavery told Bloomberg News.
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“[The] troupe came here and performed with dances and songs, and it might seem like a fancy show on the outside [but] they also have to go to parties and provide sexual services,” said defector Lee So Yeon, a military musician who fled the country in 2008, during Kim Jong Un’s regime.

“They go to the central Politburo party’s events, and have to sleep with the people there, even if they don’t want it,” said Yeon, 42.

Those poor young women. Imagine the agony and fear they hide behind their rigidly choreographed smiles.

Maj. General Mohsen Rezai founded Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in the early days of the revolution, upon the personal orders of Ayatollah Khomeini.

While he relinquished control of the IRGC in 1997, he remains one of the regime’s most influential leaders. A “principalist,” who is considered a revolutionary purist, Rezai has occasionally shown a more pragmatic bent.

He regularly boasts of the Iranian regime’s military power, and issues threats to all who would challenge the regime that seem to get dismissed in the Western media.

Last week, when he vowed to “level Tel Aviv to the ground,” was no exception.

He was speaking in response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who warned at the Munich Security Conference last week that Israel would “act against Iran itself” if Iran continued to invade Israeli air space, as they did when they sent a drone into Israel from an air base in Syria.

And yet, outside of the Israeli media, only the Daily Mail paid much attention to Rezai’s threats.

But make no mistake about it: General Rezai understands the cold calculus of nuclear deterrence, and he was not making an idle threat.

His message was crystal clear: Iran considers itself to be a nuclear weapons-capable state. And he speaks from direct, personal knowledge since he was himself in charge of Iran’s nuclear weapons program for over a decade.

I know this because his son defected to the United States at the age of 23 in 1999, and wound up staying with me for several months, learning English in my basement by watching Jackie Chan movies. Many of the stories he told me about his father I related in a 2005 book, Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran.

Here is just one of them, which explains why I am confident that General Rezai was not making an idle threat to Israel last week. It involves a January 1993 trip Rezai made to China and North Korea with a 50-man military delegation, as well as his then teenage son.

DAPCHI, Nigeria— Garba Sule was preparing for evening prayers when heavily armed Boko Haram jihadists rode into town last week in pickup trucks, firing hundreds of rounds into the air and demanding directions to the local girls’ school.

The camouflage-clad militants loaded up dozens of students from the Dapchi Government Girls Science and Technical College and drove them into the surrounding scrubland, according to eyewitnesses, schoolteachers and local officials. Among them: Mr. Sule’s 13-year-old daughter, Zara.

A week after the Feb. 19 attack, 110 schoolgirls from this remote town in northeastern Nigeria remain unaccounted for, stunning Africa’s most populous nation and rekindling memories of Boko Haram’s seizure of 276 girls from Chibok Government Secondary School in 2014.

That earlier attack, initially ignored by Nigeria’s government, ultimately prompted a global activist movement—#BringBackOurGirls. About half of the kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls either escaped or were ransomed; 112 remain missing. At least 13 are presumed dead. Boko Haram continues to hold thousands of abducted boys and girls.

The latest episode has sparked outrage across Nigeria, where public anger has focused on authorities who initially refused to acknowledge the incident and then incorrectly claimed to have rescued the girls.

“We are in deep pain. We’ve hardly eaten,” said Mr. Sule, a 45-year-old researcher at the local hospital. “The government has lied to us, like they did with the Chibok girls.”

Over the weekend, President Muhammadu Buhari said in a tweet that the kidnapping was a “national disaster” and pledged to mobilize all the government’s resources to locate the girls. On Sunday, Nigeria’s air force confirmed it was assisting in the manhunt. CONTINUE AT SITE

“They get paid for every Coptic Christian girl they bring in. In some cases, police provide the kidnappers with drugs they seize. The drugs are then given to the girls to weaken their resistance… I even know of cases in which police offered helped to beat up the girls to make them recite the Islamic creed.” — World Watch Monitor, Egypt; September 14, 2017.

On September 14, a court sentenced a Christian man to death for “blasphemy” against the prophet of Islam. Nadeem James, a 27-year-old father of two, was originally arrested in July 2016, after a Muslim angry with him for personal reasons falsely accused James, who is illiterate, of texting a poem deemed “blasphemous” of Muhammad. — Pakistan.

School textbooks taught her that “it was the Christians who wanted to plunder the lands and the riches of the Muslim world” and Turks merely responded by “defend[ing] what was rightfully theirs.” (In reality, modern day Turkey consists of territory that was Christian for more than a thousand years before it was conquered by Turks in the name of jihad.) “Everything is used to make the Christians look like villains,” she said, adding, “It’s the same all through Muslim countries.” — Turkey.

Muslim Slaughter of Christians

Pakistan: Sharoon, a Christian boy who achieved academic excellence despite years of entrenched discrimination and bullying—and whose poverty-stricken parents had worked hard to put him in MC Model Boys Government High School—was beaten to death by Muslim pupils. On his first day at the school, the teacher slapped him across the face while blurting an anti-Christian slur. Having set a precedent, the rest of the classroom of Muslim boys continued harassing him throughout the same first day: they hurled out derogatory terms against Christians, denied him access to drinking water, and told him, “You’re a Christian don’t dare sit with us if you want to live.” According to one report: “His academic prowess … only added to the disdain for him felt by other pupils.” Another report said, “there were repeated attempts to convert him to Islam. Sharoon however, never quit his faith to the chagrin of the Muslim children around him, exacerbating his pariah status.” Then, on August 27—his fourth day at the prestigious Model school—Muslim students attacked him in the classroom (the teacher supposedly did not notice; he was reading his paper). “The violence,” continues the report, “was of such sickening ferocity that poor Sharoon died where he was in the classroom.” A cacophony of insults accompanied the beating; he was called a “filthy Christian” and a “demon.” According to the murdered teen’s mother:

“My son was a kind-hearted, hard-working and affable boy. He has always been loved by teachers and pupils alike and shared great sorrow that he was being targeted by students at his new school because of his faith. Sharoon and I cried every night as he described the daily torture he was subjected to…. The evil boys that hated my child are now refusing to reveal who else was involved in his murder. Nevertheless one day God will have His judgement.”

“National Security officials are prohibited from developing a factual understanding of Islamic threat doctrines, preferring instead to depend upon 5th column Muslim Brotherhood cultural advisors.” — Richard Higgins, NSC official.

At the heart of the problem lies the fantasy that Islam must be very similar to other religions, particularly Judaism and Christianity, out of which it was, in fact derived.

The use of force, mainly through jihad, is a basic doctrine in the Qur’an, the Prophetic sayings (ahadith), and in all manuals of Islamic law. It is on these sources that fighters from Islamic State, al-Qa’ida, al-Shabaab, and hundreds of other groupings base their preaching and their actions. To say that such people have “nothing to do with Islam” could not be more wrong.

Recently, US National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster once again downplayed the significance of faith by claiming that Islamic ideology is “irreligious”; meanwhile, up to 1.5 billion Muslims continue claiming, as they have done for 1400 years, that it is.

As Stephen Coughlin, an expert on Islam, told Gatestone, “It is the believers who define their religion, not the non-believers. If someone says his religion is that the moon is made of green cheese, that has to be your starting point.”

On February 20, 2017, President Trump appointed McMaster, a serving Lieutenant General of the US Army, to the important position of National Security Advisor, after the forced resignation of Michael T. Flynn. McMaster came to the post with a reputation for stability, battlefield experience, and intelligence. According to the Los Angeles Times:

“It is not an overstatement to say that Americans and the world should feel a little safer today,” tweeted Andrew Exum, an author and academic who saw combat in Afghanistan and writes widely about military affairs.”

After the controversies surrounding McMaster’s predecessor in office, McMaster came as a safe hand.

It was not long before divisions opened up within the NSC, however, with quarrels, firings, and appeals to the president. Many controversies remain today. By July, it was reported that Trump was planning to fire McMaster and replace him with CIA Director Mike Pompeo. By August, however, McMaster’s position seemed secure.

It is not the purpose of this article to discuss issues McMaster’s spell at the NSC has brought to light, except for one: McMaster’s position on Islam and terrorism. It became a cause for contention early in McMaster’s incumbency and continues to engender divisions, not just among NSC staff, but also with the president. The general’s viewpoint, which he has often expressed, is that international terrorism has nothing to do with the religion of Islam, a notion he seems to believe to the point where he has banned the use of the term “radical Islamic terrorism” — a term that Trump uses often.