RUTHFULLY YOURS

One day, when I was nine years old, my father and I were on our way to Church. As we neared the entrance, I spat on the ground. Reflexively, my dad’s arm shot out across my chest like a railway barrier, blocking my motion forward. We stood there, frozen in time, for some three seconds until my father uttered, in a very serious but patient way: “It is ok to spit outside of KGB headquarters, but never in front of a place such as this.” I registered the message and indicated my understanding — and we proceeded on our way.

That was my dad’s moral clarity and sharp, quick-witted way with words; and the sacred values that spawned those words made a profound impression on me from the moment of my birth. I was born into a family of Russian dissidents who put their clenched fists up and went toe-to-toe with the Evil Empire.

Throughout my youth, my dad shared many stories with me, which included how he had always been aware, even in his youth, that he existed in a slave camp masquerading as a country and that he perpetually dreamed of escaping it. He spent his young years studying maps, trying to decipher which body of water he could swim across to escape the communist paradise he languished in. But his life ended up going a different way: he confronted the slave masters, rather than escaping the prison they had built.

My father was a scholar at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and a professor at Moscow State University. His main field of study concerned Oriental languages and cultures, with a specialty in the Chinese, Sanskrit and Tamil areas. Despite his rewarding career, my dad put everything on the line and began to attend human rights demonstrations in Moscow on behalf of political prisoners. He also started to sign letters of protest against the political repressions that were heightening in the country in the 1960s, connected as they were to the re-Stalinization of the Soviet Union after the Khrushchev thaw. The activities my dad engaged in could land a Soviet citizen in the gulag or a psychiatric hospital for decades.

On February 24, 1968, my father signed the Letter of Twelve, a letter written and signed by twelve Soviet dissidents to the Supreme Congress of Communist Parties in Budapest denouncing Soviet human rights abuses. He was immediately fired from his work for being “unprofessional” in his scholarly studies (even though he previously had received high praise for his academic studies).

The picture of my dad, shown above, was taken by a friend who had come to visit him the evening of the day he was expelled from the Academy. My father had been at a meeting at the closed section of the Supreme Soviet of Scholars. Before the committee announced his expulsion, he had delivered a strong speech about political repressions in the country and finished by talking about his hope that the days of freedom would one day come to his beloved Russia.

They are now admitting what is visible to the eyes of ordinary Europeans may be an admission that things have got so bad — and are so well known — that even Chancellor Merkel and the New York Times are no longer able to ignore them.

If so, one thought must surely follow: imagine what might have been solved if the denials had never even begun?

Is it possible that mainstream politicians and the mainstream media are finally recognising what the European public can see with their own eyes? Two recent occurrences suggest that this might be so.

The first is a concession by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who almost half a year after her party’s embarrassment in national elections has finally managed to put together a coalition government. Last September saw not only Merkel’s party and her erstwhile coalition partners suffer a historic dent in their vote-share, but also saw the entry to Parliament of the five-year old anti-immigration AfD (Alternative for Germany) party, which is now so large that it constitutes the country’s official opposition. If German voters meant to send a message, it could hardly have been clearer.

Perhaps it was even listened to. On Monday February 26, Merkel gave an interview to the German broadcaster N-TV. In it she finally admitted that there are “no-go areas” in her country: “that is, areas where nobody dares to go.” She continued: “There are such areas and one has to call them by their name and do something about them.” The Chancellor claimed that she favoured a “zero tolerance” attitude towards such places but did not identify where they were. Two days later, her spokesman, Steffen Seibert stressed that “the Chancellor’s words speak for themselves.”

Although the Chancellor chose to use few words, that she said these things at all is significant. For years, German officials, like their political counterparts across the continent, have furiously denied that there are any areas of their countries to which the rule of law does not extend. Denials have also issued forth from officials in, among other countries, Sweden and France. In January 2015, Paris’s Mayor Anne Hidalgo threatened to sue Fox News after the station said there were no-go zones in her city. Hidalgo claimed at the time in an interview on CNN that “the honour of Paris” and the “image of Paris” had been harmed. It was a typically extraordinary claim, which ignored that if the “image of Paris” had taken any battering around that time, it might have been due to the massacre of 12 journalists, cartoonists and policemen at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and the slaughter of four people in a kosher supermarket two days later. So concessions like Merkel’s — as opposed to cover-ups like Hidalgo’s — are to be applauded, slightly, when they occur.

The case of Mourad T. highlights a crucial concern: the ability of jihadists to pose as refugees, operating freely around Europe to bring about its downfall.

New information has emerged about a Moroccan national arrested in Poland two years ago for ties to the ISIS terrorist, Abdelhamid Abbaoud. Abbaoud was responsible for the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, which left 130 people dead and another 300 wounded.

Polish prosecutors recently revealed that Mourad T. attended a meeting with Abbaoud and other high-profile terrorists in 2014 in Edirne, Turkey. Polish security officials maintain that Mourad was assigned the role of “scout,” to identify venues for attacks in Europe. Photos of potential targets and an improvised explosive device (IED) were found in his apartment, in the town of Rybnik. Investigators claim that Poland was not among his targets; he was heading for Germany.

Mourad was apprehended through a cooperative effort on the part of Poland’s domestic counterintelligence agency ABW, the CIA and other Western security agencies.

This is not what makes the case particularly worthy of note, however. What does is that Mourad entered Europe with the refugee influx in 2014 by pretending to be a Syrian asylum-seeker, falsifying his date of birth — portraying himself as much younger, to increase his chances to be granted asylum — and travelling through Greece, the Balkan states, Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, and finally to Poland. In 2015, he received a residence permit in Vienna from the Federal Office for Foreigners and Asylum, who were fooled by his false identity and registered him as a Syrian refugee.

By receiving official European documents, Mourad was able to enter Poland, one of the countries that has refused to accept more than a few thousand of the migrants that the European Commission demands they take in, under the EU’s mandatory quota system.

One hundred years ago this month, all hell broke loose in France. On March 21, 1918, the German army on the Western Front unleashed a series of massive attacks on the exhausted British and French armies.

German General Erich Ludendorff thought he could win World War I with one final blow. He planned to punch holes between the French and British armies. Then he would drive through their trenches to the English Channel, isolating and destroying the British army.

The Germans thought they had no choice but to gamble.

The British naval blockade of Germany after three years had reduced Germany to near famine. More than 200,000 American reinforcement troops were arriving each month in France. (Nearly 2 million would land altogether.) American farms and factories were sending over huge shipments of food and munitions to the Allies.

Yet for a brief moment, the war had suddenly swung in Germany’s favor by March 1918. The German army had just knocked Russia and its new Bolshevik government out of the war. The victory on the Eastern Front freed up nearly 1 million German and Austrian soldiers, who were transferred west.

Germany had refined new rolling artillery barrages. Its dreaded “Stormtroopers” had mastered dispersed advances. The result was a brief window of advantage before the American juggernaut changed the war’s arithmetic.

The Spring Offensive almost worked. Within days, the British army had suffered some 50,000 casualties. Altogether, about a half-million French, British and American troops were killed or wounded during the entire offensive.

But within a month, the Germans were sputtering. They could get neither supplies nor reinforcements to the English Channel. Germany had greedily left 1 million soldiers behind in the east to occupy and annex huge sections of conquered Eastern Europe and western Russia.

The British and French had learned new ways of strategic retreat. By summer of 1918, the Germans were exhausted. In August, the Allies began their own (even bigger) offensive and finally crushed the retreating Germans, ending the war in November 1918.

What were the lessons of the failed German offensive?

A German employment court ruled that the automobile giant Volkswagen would have to reinstate an employee they fired in 2016 for allegedly recruiting people to fight for the Islamic State (ISIS) and threatening coworkers. The employee was also connected to ISIS fighters, according to police.

The Hanover State Employment Court ruled that Samir B., a German-Algerian tire fitter who worked for Volkswagen for 8 years, was unlawfully fired. The court ordered that Volkswagen reinstate Samir B. in one month’s time.

Two of Samir B.’s known associates had travelled to Syria in 2014 to join ISIS and were later killed fighting for the Islamist terror group. In December 2014, the employee was stopped at Hanover Airport before boarding a flight to Istanbul, Turkey, carrying €9,350 and a drone.

Authorities were convinced Samir B. had been planning to travel to Syria to fight for ISIS, and they confiscated his passport, Britain’s Daily Mail reported.

Samir B. also reportedly threatened colleagues, telling them they would “all die.”

Volkswagen’s lawyers and the administrative Court of Braunschweig argued that it was proven Samir B. “was involved in the recruitment and support of Islamic fighters from Wolfsburg.”

Even so, the Hanover judge ruled that the employee’s firing was illegal. Volkswagen had been unable to state that the “operational peace” of the plant had been “specifically disturbed,” the Express reported. CONTINUE AT SITE

U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley declared Wednesday that the credibility of the UN Security Council “will not survive if we fail to hold Russia accountable” for the use of a deadly nerve agent on UK soil against a former double agent.

Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy who fed intelligence to the Brits from 1995 to 2004 and was sent to the UK in a spy exchange in 2010, and his daughter Yulia collapsed March 4 at a shopping center in Salisbury. Both are in critical yet stable condition. The first police officer on scene, Nick Bailey, is still hospitalized in serious condition. A restaurant and a pub in the center tested positive for traces of the nerve agent as military personnel clean up the crime scene and surrounding area.

Prime Minister Theresa May said Monday that the two were poisoned with part of a group of nerve agents known as “Novichok,” and the UK has determined that Russia either attempted an assassination on UK soil or let WMD nerve agents on the loose. May called for a “full range of measures… in response” if Russia ignores UK requests to explain the attempted murder, and called upon NATO allies to back that response.

“The Russians complained recently that we criticize them too much,” Haley said. “If the Russian government stopped using chemical weapons to assassinate its enemies; and if the Russian government stopped helping its Syrian ally to use chemical weapons to kill Syrian children; and if Russia cooperated with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons by turning over all information related to this nerve agent, we would stop talking about them. We take no pleasure in having to constantly criticize Russia, but we need Russia to stop giving us so many reasons to do so.”

“Russia must fully cooperate with the UK’s investigation and come clean about its own chemical weapons program,” she added. “Russia is a permanent member of the Security Council. It is entrusted in the United Nations Charter with upholding international peace and security. It must account for its actions.”

Haley warned that “if we don’t take immediate, concrete measures to address this now, Salisbury will not be the last place we see chemical weapons used.”

“They could be used here in New York or in cities of any country that sits on this council,” she added. “This is a defining moment. Time and time again, member states say they oppose the use of chemical weapons under any circumstance. Now, one member stands accused of using chemical weapons on the sovereign soil of another member.”

Russian envoy Vissaly Nebenzia claimed that the British may have staged a false-flag attack to make Russia look bad ahead of the World Cup. “No scientific research or development under the title Novichok were carried out,” he said. “…Most probable source of this agent are the countries who have carried out research on these weapons, including Britain.” CONTINUE AT SITE

There appears to be a huge disconnect here between the EU’s professed concern for keeping Europeans safe — as expressed in the one-hour rule — and the EU’s actual refusal to keep Europeans safe in the offline world. The result is that Europeans, manipulated by an untransparent, unaccountable body, will not be kept safe either online or off. And what if the content in question, as has already occurred, may be trying to warn the public about terrorism?

Regardless of these facts, including that women can no longer exercise their freedom to walk in safety in many neighborhoods of European cities, the EU has staunchly refused to stop the influx of migrants. It is, therefore, difficult to take seriously in any way the European Commission’s claim that the security, offline and online, of EU citizens is a “top priority”. If that were true, why does not Europe simply close the borders? Instead, the EU actually sues EU countries — Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic — who refuse to endanger their citizens by admitting the quota of migrants that the EU assigns for them.

These EU ultimatums also fail to take into account what a recent study showed: that the second most important factor in the radicalization of Muslims, after Islam itself, is the environment, namely the mosques and imams to which Muslims go and on which they rely. Although the internet evidently does play a role in the radicalization process, the study showed that face-to-face encounters were more important, and that dawa, proselytizing Islam, plays a central role in this process.

On March 1, The European Commission — the unelected executive branch of the European Union — told social media companies to remove illegal online terrorist content within an hour, or risk facing EU-wide legislation on the topic. The ultimatum was part of a new set of recommendations that will apply to all forms of “illegal content” online, “from terrorist content, incitement to hatred and violence, child sexual abuse material, counterfeit products and copyright infringement.”

The European Commission said, “Considering that terrorist content is most harmful in the first hours of its appearance online, all companies should remove such content within one hour from its referral as a general rule”.

Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim mayor of London, will be speaking at a conference of technology executives in Austin, Texas. The gist of his remarks has been announced. It is a speech advocating a troika of control, condemnation, and confiscation. The control he requests is that the masters of the internet bar anti-Islamic comments and threats. His condemnation is of President Donald Trump for his tweets (especially those in support of Britain First), which have proven to be an encouragement to those with an anti-Islamic agenda. And he suggests that the big technology firms be taxed not on the basis of profits, but on the basis of revenue if the anti-Islamic messages continue on the internet, thus threatening confiscation if his “advice” is not taken. He has expressed delight at Germany’s hate speech laws, advocated and advanced by Angela Merkel.

Mr. Khan comes out of a cultural mindset that does not understand the idea of the marketplace of ideas, independent thought, individualism, and the Anglo-American tradition of liberty within the context of law. You see, there are hundreds of millions, if not billions of people who want to be told what to say and even what to think. Thinking is a burden for them. It’s not just a matter of wanting to “go along to get along.” No. The exercise of thinking for themselves, and having fewer pressures and controls on their speech, behavior, and especially mentality, is too much pressure for them. It’s a level of responsibility they cannot cope with. Why can’t they cope? Here is where metaphysics hits practical day-by-day exigencies.